The Reluctant Tolkienist

A recent edition of the New York Times Magazine Sunday crossword featured the following clue:

“81 (across): Fictional creature made of slime”

Though I came to this clue late in the game, I got the answer pretty quickly. My first guess was the Marvel comics’ character “The Man-Thing” — a swamp monster from the 1970s who frightened his victims so completely they literally burst into flame—but the answer only had three letters, and the last one was a “c.” So I knew the answer was “orc.” It’s one of those words that the crossword editors can’t get enough of, like Brian Eno’s last name or the French word for water.

As soon as my middle-aged crossword brain had supplied the answer, my teenage nerd brain took issue. The answer was “orc” but it shouldn’t have been.

Orcs, at least as conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien in “The Lord of the Rings,” were NOT made from slime. According to The Silmarillion (the equivalent of the Old Testament of Tolkien mythology), the origin of orcs was uncertain, but seemed to have to do with elves being “corrupted” by the original Dark Lord, Morgoth, way back in the earliest ages of the world, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings.

The slime birth idea was introduced by Peter Jackson in his film version of The Fellowship of the Ring—one of many pointless add-ons that seemed to be designed to evoke earlier fantasy and horror movies. The use of this “non-canonical” detail as a clue did no credit to the Times Crossword (at least in the eyes of this strict Tolkien literalist), whose editors come off as mere Middle-Earth dilettantes.

On the other hand, I did no credit to myself by getting so annoyed. I am a Tolkien fan, but I am not a fan of being a Tolkien fan. When I first read the books, in my pre-teens, Tolkien was not cool. As far as I could tell, he never would be.

My love of his work was a private thing, a deeply nostalgic and comforting retreat from the outside world, a way to stay sane as a socially awkward kid in suburban New Jersey. I never discussed it with anyone else— in fact the subject made me almost physically uncomfortable. I knew a lot of trivia, and took private satisfaction in it, but sharing that knowledge—one of the most common joys of the modern fandom experience—felt deeply uncool, even humiliating.

It wasn’t just Lord of the Rings that made me feel this way. I was a huge Monty Python fan, but got embarrassed when anyone else started reciting the skits out loud. I was obsessed with The Who, but was outraged when I saw one of the girls in my high school dancing—dancing!—to “Baba O’Riley.”

I know: I sound unbearable. But my attitude towards Tolkien was more that just snobbery—there was something protective in it, as if other people’s experience of his work could somehow taint mine. Tolkien’s books served as a kind of emotional bolt-hole when life got too intense, and remained so even deep into my adult years. I reread Lord of the Rings when my mother died; I reread it when I broke up with my first serious girlfriend; I reread it after September 11th.

This almost narcotic emotional comfort—which had to do with the intense nostalgia and Catholic-tinged sorrow behind Tolkien’s work—is one of the reasons I can’t be level-headed about adaptations of his books. I loathed the Peter Jackson trilogy, and didn’t even bother to watch his version of The Hobbit. I’m usually pretty broadminded about this type of thing: I have no problem when Hollywood changes some detail from the Marvel comics I read as a kid; I am perfectly calm when J.K. Rowling tweets some alteration to the Harry Potter universe; I will give any Shakespeare production the benefit of the doubt, no matter how modern the setting; and I love to hear Beatles songs remixed out of all recognition. But alter Tolkien? I am affronted.

Today—thanks in large part to Jackson’s films—everyone has at least a working knowledge of Tolkien’s universe. The same way everyone knows that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, everyone knows that there are nine Ringwraiths; that Galadriel is the queen of Lorien, and that hobbits expect to eat two breakfasts a day. One of Stephen Colbert’s signature bits involves his status as a Tolkien expert. Audiences love it when he geeks out and recites the names of the Valar, or drops a reference to the wizard Saruman into a monologue on the GOP’s latest insanity. And more to the point, almost every one of these jokes lands.

When I finished the crossword that day, I clicked on a “Words to Know” link below the puzzle, which took me to a piece from June 19, 2020 that defined the word “Orc” for puzzled NYT crossword enthusiasts.

The piece itself was straight forward, and had some interesting information about non-Tolkien related uses of the word, but it was the comments that caught my attention. The first was pure nerd-level snark, quibbling with the writer’s comparison of Orcs to gnomes. A few lines down, someone introduced a major point of Tolkien’s fictional theology, which is that none of his supernatural characters had the ability to create life on their own. That is the sole prerogative of Eru, the analogue to God in Tolkien’s world. Therefore the article’s assertion that Tolkien’s orcs were “created by Morgoth…” was false.

This comment in turn made someone else point out that the traitorous wizard Saruman did not “create” his army of specialized orcs (as depicted in the movie), but crossbred some of Sauron’s orcs with regular humans (a detail that is incredibly disturbing if you think about it too long.)

Finally, someone else chimed in to sound a “nerd alert,” but meant it as a compliment. If you had told 13 year old me that being a Tolkien nerd would one day be celebrated in the New York Times, I would have not believed you.

Sun Records, Home Of The Weird

(Sam Phillips, looking like the cat that swallowed the canary, with Scotty Moore, Bill Black and some guy wearing eye shadow.)

For nearly 70 years, Sun Records founder and producer Sam Phillips was famous as the man who discovered Elvis. But it’s only in the last couple of decades that critics and historians have started to celebrate the full scope of his achievements. Phillips didn't really “discover” Elvis: Elvis sought out Phillips. The producer had already recorded and released some of the future King's favorite blues and R&B records, songs like "Mystery Train" by Little Junior's Blue Flames, Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” (sometimes described as the first recorded rock ‘n roll song), “B.B.’s Blues” by B.B. King, “Moanin’ at Midnight” and “How Many More Years” by Howlin’ Wolf, “Tiger Man” by Rufus Thomas and “Just Walking In The Rain” by The Prisonaires. Had he never met Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips could still have claimed a formidable place in the history of 20th century music. But of course he did meet and record Elvis, as well as Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich, among others. That’s a hell of a second act.

Phillips let the production fit the music, not the other way around. If you only know the comparatively sparse sides he recorded with Elvis, Perkins, etc., you’ll be surprised by the sonic ferocity of “Moanin’ at Midnight,” with its over-driven guitars and the distortion produced by Howlin’ Wolf’s outsize voice. Willie Nix’s “Baker Shop Boogie” features a bass drum pulse that’s heavier than anything on the rockabilly sides, while the vocals on The Southern Jubilees’ “There’s A Man In Jerusalem” are devoid of echo completely.

There’s also a goofy side to a lot of what Phillips recorded, a willingness to sound unprofessional, which helps account for the continuing freshness of the tracks. Though Elvis’ vocal quirks—the hiccups and the comic slurs—were copied with almost religious exactitude by later singers, they were in origin no more than a young man’s expression of youthful energy, and it’s to Phillips’ credit that he didn’t try to smooth out the singer’s style. That same tolerance of weirdness can be heard in Harmonica Frank Floyd’s Yosemite Sam lisp on “Swamp Root” or the screeching cat sounds with which Rufus Thompson opens “Bear Cat” (his answer to Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog”). Compared to today’s pop productions, which are about as spontaneous as a State of the Union address, Phillips’ records seem like marvels of off-the-cuff inspiration. His entire career was built around an ear for, and appreciation of, sounds that most other people found strange. Maybe that’s his most important legacy.

One of Howlin' Wolf's first sides, recorded by Phillips, released on Chess:

Sun Records' first hit:

Sam Phillips discusses religion with Jerry Lee Lewis (in order to get him to record "Great Balls Of Fire"):

Audiobooks (and the narrators who read them)

I do most of my fiction reading through my ears, having discovered years ago that I prefer hearing a story to seeing it. Some might argue that listening to an audiobook limits your experience of a novel, that the voice of the narrator imposes its own tone on the material, coming between the reader and their pristine reception of the author’s words.

But of course physical books do something similar. There’s the typeface and font employed by the book’s designer, the illustrations the publisher included, even the spellings and punctuation the author chose to use. Each of these frames how the reader experiences a book, just as the choice of a narrator does with an audiobook.

A case in point is George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice and Fire series, the source material for perhaps the biggest show in TV history (or, at least, HBO’s history). I read the books before I ever watched the show, but I’m not sure I would have given them a chance if the printed versions had been my only option. For a start, they have the awful covers typical of the sword and sorcery genre, all the gothic lettering and medieval imagery that comprises the publishing industry’s shorthand for epic.

Then there are the maps, and the glossaries and the timelines, each of which tries to establish the novels’ setting as a fully realized universe, a la Tolkien’s Middle Earth (which, by the way, is not “fully realized” at all. Can anyone tell me how the elves handle garbage disposal in Rivendell, for instance?)

Finally, there are unusual spellings and unfamiliar names to remind you that this is a fantasy novel. There are a lot of knights in A Song Of Ice and Fire, but Martin chose to spell their honorific “Ser” instead of “Sir,” a decision that would have annoyed me no end had I first encountered it in print.

The audiobooks eliminate most of these concerns, at least as read by  Roy Dotrice*, an English actor who brings a robust theatricality to the project. He reads “Ser Boros Blount,” for instance, as “Sir Boris Blunt,” “Ser Jaime” as “Sir Jamie,” and “Robb Stark” as “Rob Stark.” This is a good thing, because the virtue of these books is not in the pure fantasy elements but in the realistic—if often brutal—behavior of the characters.

Dotrice’s narration also salvages some examples of flabby prose, though unfortunately not all. Martin’s sex scenes are cringe-inducing, as revealing of their author’s proclivities as a Robert Crumb cartoon (there’s a lot of biting and nipple squeezing, unfortunately.) On the other hand, Dotrice makes a few missteps as well, such as giving the formidable patriarch Tywin Lannister a Churchillian drawl at odds with the ice that flows in the character’s veins.  But he nails Tywin’s dwarf son Tyrion--perhaps the most compelling character in the whole series—with a Welsh accent that evokes both a Falstaffian wit and the bitter vulnerability beneath it.

Dotrice inhabits this material so completely that it was a shock to start the fourth book and find his voice replaced by that of John Lee, another reader who will be familiar to audiobook aficionados. I was a fan of Lee’s voice in the first few books of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. But I don’t like how Lee reads the Martin stories. Dotrice sounds like someone who would have lived back in the twelfth century, expressive but rustic. Lee has a forceful, aristocratic quality to his voice that is better suited to the age of Napoleon and Nelson.

Of course, a cultural franchise as big as Games of Thrones is guaranteed to generate a lot of outraged opinions, even in the relatively obscure world of audiobook narration. While the rest of the Internet continues to argue whether Season 8 of the TV series totally screwed the pooch, on Reddit’s audiobook forums, fans are fighting over the best Song of Ice and Fire reader. Plenty of people hate Dotrice’s version, preferring something more straight-forward. They may get their wish, if Martin ever finishes the series: Dotrice died in 2017, at age 94, having completed the narration for the audiobook of A World of Ice and Fire, which, thankfully, did not require he voice a hundred different characters.

Here is a sampling of a few of the many voices Dotrice created for A Song Of Ice and Fire:

And John Lee, speaking in the tones of the Age of Sail:

* sci-fi nerds may remember Dotrice as Wesley’s over-domineering father in Angel; everyone else will remember him as Mozart’s over-domineering father in Amadeus. Almost all the fathers in A Song Of Fire and Ice are over-domineering, so he fits right in.

Tom Petty "The Waiting"

Tom Petty was part of the background music of my youth in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Even then he was a staple of classic rock radio—though I didn’t listen to the radio if I could help it. He was not among my favorite artists. In fact I placed him in the same tier as Styx, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bon Jovi: bands I knew a little but who didn’t really merit further consideration. I changed my opinion during my second year at college, when I drove with my friend Theo to visit our friend Simone at Wheaton College. In a late night revelation, I realized that Tom Petty was the tits.

As is to be expected with such revelations, lots of marijuana was involved. Simone’s hall was hosting a keg party the night we arrived, and Theo and I hunkered down in her room and started smoking. Word got around that “those stoner dudes in Simone’s room” had pot and people kept opening the door and begging us for joints. For some reason, our mood was exclusionary, and we refused to share with anyone, laughing as they begged. One guy pleaded that if we just gave him some pot, he would definitely get laid. We told him he’d do fine on his own.

Every time someone came in to ask for pot, the music that was seeping through the door in muted bass tones would suddenly switch to brilliantly crisp stereo. Door opens: “Baby don’t it feel like heaven right now…” Door closes: “mumble, mumble” bass throb, dull snare. Door opens: “Yeah, I might have chased a couple of women around…” Door closes: “mumble mumble.” Normally, Theo and I got stoned listening to things that weren’t being played on the radio: early Bob Marley, side 2 of Electric Ladyland, or Black and Blue-era Stones (I might have also listened to The Clash and/or R.E.M., but Theo wasn’t into that stuff.) It seemed hilarious to me that anyone would choose to listen to FM radio fare like Tom Petty.

But cutting through my purist hipster snobbery was that enhanced musical awareness that you get when extremely stoned, as if you’re truly hearing every instrument in a new way, and a radio-friendly two and a half minute song stretches out in your perception until it feels like a 25-minute long jam band epic.

Every time the door opened, I heard Tom Petty in a way I hadn’t before, and I realized that he was doing the same thing as the Replacements, and Husker Du, and The Beatles and The Fleshtones, and whoever else I was fetishising at the time. I realized that Tom Petty was valid, that Tom Petty was awesome, that Tom Petty was not some shitty early ‘80s radio rock to be discarded once I’d discovered punk. Door opens: “The way-ay-ting is the haaaaaaardest par-art!” And then those chords hit and it was like a flower of light unfolding in front of me. “Holy shit,” I said to Theo, “this song is AWE-some. Tom Petty is amazing!” He looked at me strangely, as if I’d stated the obvious. “Oh, yeah,” he says, taking another pull on his joint, “I’ve always loved Tom Petty.”

Coronavirus, 9-11, and NYC

When the planes hit the twin towers on September 11th, 2001, I was in my apartment on East 12th Street. My girlfriend (now wife) was at her office in the East 50s. Not knowing if there were more attacks coming, and wanting to get as far away from Ground Zero as possible, we decided to meet at her parents’ apartment, on West 100th Street and Riverside. 

One of my lasting impressions of that day is how the practical geography of Manhattan had been altered over the course of one or two hours. Downtown was a no-go zone, but so were all the major landmark areas such as Times Square, Grand Central, Union Square. How was I to get uptown safely? 

Normally I would have walked over to Union Square, hopped on the N or R train, and switched at Times Square to the 2 train, which I’d take up to West 96th Street. By the time I was ready to leave the apartment (about a half-hour after the North Tower fell), I had no intention of taking the subway. The safest bet was to head up 2nd Avenue and cut across the north end of Central Park. 

The walk took about two hours, and when I got to 100th street I found that people on the Upper West Side were doing what we now know New Yorkers do in a crisis: emptying supermarket shelves and waiting on lines.

Our current collective predicament has once again altered the geography in a way that reminds me of that day, but there are crucial differences. For a start, everywhere is dangerous this time around. Back in 2001, I was worried that the terrorists had more plans to execute, and I was trying to avoid the likely areas of attack. Covid-19 has no plan, just an evolutionary drive to infect wherever and whenever the opportunity to do so exists. 

On 9-11, movement equaled safety, and there was a sort of dazed comfort in being part of huge crowds moving uptown, or over the East River bridges into Brooklyn and Queens. The weather was beautiful, everyone was together in the streets and if any danger was headed our way, we’d all be able to see it, moving through the plane-emptied sky.

Now, safety lies in stillness, in not moving and not being outside in crowds. This is nerve-wracking on a fundamental level. It goes against Fight-or-Flight 101: if you stand still, the big cat will get you.

Most people who have the means and opportunity to do so left New York City weeks ago, and it’s not just the practical considerations (fewer people, more places to walk without fear of infection) that led them to do it: it’s that animal need to move, to get away.

For those who’ve stayed, the current crisis has altered not just the geography of the city, but the manner in which we move through it.

When I leave my apartment now, walking down the street almost feels like driving. I’m constantly watching the movement of the other people around me, calculating their speed and trajectory, and adjusting my own so that we don’t get too close. 

I’m also trying to take into account the movement of the invisible exhaust blanketing this particular highway: the germs that I and my fellow travelers are trailing behind us, like junkers with faulty mufflers. I do my best to avoid other people’s slipstreams. I walk at least six feet behind, preferably 45 degrees to the left or right, hoping that puts me outside of any cone of infection. 

A few days ago, as I was returning from a trip to the drug store, a guy started walking behind me and yelling in a way that was either the result of alcohol or mental illness. He was going on about pedophiles and cursing someone (I didn’t look back to see if it was me) and all I could picture was the germs shooting out of his mouth as he ranted.

 I was upwind of him, and the breeze was blowing southward, so I probably was safe. But I wasn’t safe from any droplets being ejected by anyone further north on Broadway, and that made me tense. As I approached my building, I saw a group of five men standing on the corner, talking loudly about sports, none of them wearing masks. I balanced my instinct to avoid them with my desire to not be seen avoiding them. As I passed, one of the men coughed absentmindedly, leaving me quietly traumatized. 

Unfortunately, this is going to be the state of things for the foreseeable future. A friend recently returned to the city from Maryland, and said that things are notably different from when he left over a month ago: everyone is wearing masks and more carefully keeping their distance. Though new infections have gone down, there are still enough to scare people, and everyone is worried about the second wave. 

The last time I rode a subway was on March 11th, when I returned home from a visit to the dentist. My dentist’s office is in a building on 2nd Avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets. The building is also home to offices of the Israeli consulate. There is always a police car out front, and to get into the lobby you have to walk past a row of concrete bollards that run the length of the block. Such bollards have been common in New York since September 11th, as have policemen standing outside of subway turnstiles to randomly search backpacks, or armed National Guardsmen standing with assault rifles in Penn Station or Grand Central. They’re just part of the fabric of the city, and no longer signal to me that something is wrong. Who knows what anti-Covid measures we will one day take for granted?

Bad Dads In Armor

This past April, I started reacquainting myself with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, spurred by the start of Season Six of HBO's "Game of Thrones."  When not actually watching the show, I spent my time searching  Reddit and Imgur for Game of Thrones memes, reading new theories about Jon Snow's parentage on Quora, and listening to the audiobooks on my iPhone. My family got used to the sight of me walking around our apartment with headphones on. If they asked me a question, I'd roll my eyes or grunt in annoyance. Being summoned back to the real world was such a drag.  

Normally, I would say that a man in his forties spending this much time on sword and sorcery fantasy stories is a man trying to escape something—such as the pressures of fatherhood.

I did not try to get my sons to watch "Game of Thrones" with me. Despite all the sword fights, magic and adventure--exactly the type of thing that a guy raised on comic books would want to share with his two pre-teen boys--"Game of Thrones" is wildly inappropriate for children. Like a lot of HBO's previous hit shows--The Sopranos, the Wire, Deadwood--GOT is gruesomely violent, overtly sexual and emotionally brutalizing. A lot of characters die, and those who don't are just as likely to end up burned, raped or crippled. I'm happy to say that my sons are not yet desensitized enough to enjoy this type of thing. 

What's more, neither seems terribly interested in the fantasy genre. The elder, who is 13, is really only concerned with social media, Drake, and his hair. The younger one, almost 10, likes to play Minecraft and memorize the Billboard charts from the Eighties through the Oughts. Different strokes, etc.

Even if you have never watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably heard that the writers regularly kill off the main characters, often at moments when the audience least expects it. This is in keeping with the source material. George R.R. Martin has made a point of subverting the narrative expectations set by fantasy classics like The Lord Of The Rings, particularly the idea that the hero will survive to the end of the story. 

My children, on the other hand, hate surprises, especially nasty ones. Years ago, I read my son, as a bedtime story, a chapter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This particular chapter features a plot twist right out of the Martin playbook: a character who we've come to know and started to like, Cedric Diggory, is suddenly killed. When I read this scene, my son got quiet for a few moments, then started wailing so loudly his mother rushed into the room. It took another hour for her to get him to sleep and afterwards she yelled at me so loudly she almost woke him up again.  

It's just as well my kids don't discover "Game of Thrones" now anyway. The most powerful force in Westeros, far more destructive than dragons, ice demons and sorcery, is family. Both the show and the books are full of awful patriarchs: Tywin Lannister, whose dedication to maintaining his family's power and reputation warps his children in terrible ways; Stannis Baratheon, who burns his own daughter alive in order to help him win a battle (and it doesn't work, which only compounds his bad judgment); Craster, the "wilding" who weds his own daughters and gives his baby sons to the demonic White Walkers; and even Ned Stark, the protagonist of the first season, whose stubborn sense of honor costs him his head, and arguably the lives of his wife and several of his sons.

My children already get plenty of examples of incompetent fathering from my day-to-day interactions with them--I see no need to provide more.  They have their whole lives to discover the shitty parenting so ably celebrated in the world's art and literature--from Hamlet's mom to Homer Simpson.  For the moment, then, "Game of Thrones" will remain a private pleasure, no-kids-allowed, like alcohol, expensive restaurants and curse words.

The Right Side of the Tracks

The northern entrance to Riverbank State Park sits at the end of West 145th street, and leads to a bridge that spans the West Side Highway, the Riverside Park bike path and two sets of train tracks. Riverbank itself sits atop the North River Wastewater Plant, which processes 125 million gallons of Manhattan sewage every day. At the end of the bridge is a set of stairs that takes you down from the Park complex to the level of the river.  A few hundred feet from these stairs, on a small grassy verge by the fenced-off train tracks, I found my son and his friends.

This grassy space has become a favorite spot for my son to indulge his hobby of "railfanning." I had no idea what railfanning meant the first time I heard the term. It sounded dangerous, the kind of teenage kick that leads to the emergency room and a broken arm or fractured collar bone. Presumably, to railfan involved moving fast, taking risks and, if you weren't careful, eating it in front of your friends.

In fact, railfanning involves long stretches of doing nothing. The speed and movement is provided by massively heavy train engines, not the people watching them. Maybe the railfans jump up and down now and then, but mainly they expend their energy by pointing their cell phone cameras and commenting on what they see.

A railfan (or is it railfanner?) is a train enthusiast--the type of person who, in Britain, is called a train spotter (or, more derisively, an "anorak.") My son is an avid railfan, and as my wife and I feel a certain amount of worry at the thought of him lingering next to train tracks on his own, we have had to become reluctant railfans ourselves. We take turns hanging out on the grass verge, looking at the sky or checking our phones, wondering when the train is finally going to speed by.

This particular spot is pleasant enough. The bike path is well-maintained, the Hudson River is visible across some playing fields and a stretch of park, and the whole area gets a lot of light on sunny days. But it is close to a building containing the largest lake of shit on the Upper West Side. The air has an acrid, acid smell that isn't strong enough to send you running, but slowly seeps into your lungs and leaves an unpleasant salty taste in the back of your throat. My son and his friends don't seem to notice it, but it does loom large in my mind. Unlike them, I'm not excited at the prospect of the 4:10 from New Haven thundering past us 15 minutes from now. I'm just bored, ashamed that I'm bored, and slightly bewildered by the whole thing.

Before having kids, I pictured fatherhood as a sort of movie montage of shared moments. I pictured my kids and I listening to the Clash together, laughing at old episodes of Monty Python, or staying up late reading from The Lord of the Rings. In other words, all the things that interested me as a child. (You'll notice there's no throwing the ball in the front yard stuff, which should give you an idea of the type of kid I was.)

Parts of this wistful fantasy did come true--my sons will occasionally close Spotify to listen to "Give Em Enough Rope" on the stereo--but far more common is something I didn't anticipate: that in order to look after my kids, I would have to take an active interest in those things that fascinated them. They don't care what I like. They want me to like what they like. 

Sometimes this means taking the light rail from Trenton to Camden, NJ, or spending three hours on the A train to go out to Far Rockaway and back in the middle of winter. Sometimes it means taking the subway out to Broadway Junction, in Queens, and walking from the A train platform to the L train then over to the Z stop, watching the trains come in but never actually getting on them. 

This can be a drag,  but sometimes, when I find myself bored or resentful, I have a premonition. One day, I think, my kids won't want to hang out with me at all. One day, I'll envy the amount of time we're spending sharing this hobby, even if I didn't choose it. 

So I find myself by the side of the railroad tracks, next to a sewage plant, waiting for a commuter train. When I hear it coming, like as not, I'll pull out my iPhone and take a video of the engine as it speeds past. In case, for some reason, my son is looking the other way.

The Apple Rolls Back Towards The Tree

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.

Agent Carter's Rebound

         For those of you who've never seen it, Marvel's Agent Carter is an action/espionage adventure show, with a side helping of superhero. Set in the late '40s, the show's protagonist is the frighteningly capable Peggy Carter, the romantic foil to Steve Rogers in the first Captain America film. Now that the war is over and Captain America is apparently dead, Carter is working for the SSR (an organization that will eventually evolve into Marvel's super secret service S.H.I.E.L.D.)  

     One of the main themes of the first season of Agent Carter was the trouble professional women have being taken seriously by their male co-workers. The show got a lot of mileage out of the way Carter ran rings around her fellow agents, though inevitably it was the men who got the credit for her work.  For this new season, the show has added the element of race, and its treatment in the first two episodes illustrates one of the challenges of creating a period piece TV show: how do you realistically portray the racial attitudes of the past without offending present day notions of diversity and progressiveness? 

   The Season 2 premier of Agent Carter introduces a possible new love interest, an earnest black scientist named Jason Wilkes. Carter first encounters him when she sneaks into a sinister industrial firm called Isodyne in order to investigate a murder. They run into each other in a hallway, and, after a beat of surprise, Wilkes immediately invites her back to his office, in order to wow her with the still he has built in his apparently ample spare time, a collection of glass tubes and beakers in which he creates "the best wine" Carter has ever tasted. Carter is on a mission, but she's also charmed by Wilkes, and engages in some light badinage while trying to get information. Were Agent Carter set in the present, this meet cute would seem perfectly normal (if a little ham-handed). But this is supposed to be the late '40s, when such forwardness to a white woman could--and sometimes did--get black men killed.

    Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I've never had any trouble accepting that Carter can beat up just about any man she encounters, nor that a villain can freeze people solid with a touch of his hand, as happens in this first episode. But the ease with which Wilkes moves in the world of white people struck me as scarcely credible. Affable, intelligent, and confident enough to recognize the chance that his interest in Carter will be reciprocated, he is a "post-racial," Obama-esque figure years before such a thing existed--before the civil rights movement and "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," before it was even legal for black and white people to marry in many states (though California did repeal its miscegenation laws in 1948, around the time in which Agent Carter is set.)   

     To be fair, the writers do try to address the racism of the time. At one point, Wilkes says that Isodyne is the only company that would employ "one of his kind." Later, as he and Carter are on the run from some murderous company thugs, they encounter a white store owner whose attitude--including calling Wilkes "boy"--sends Carter into a fury. When she expresses her desire to settle things with her fists, Wilkes smooths things over, noting that the store owner is hardly the only racist in LA.

    That's about it. Wilkes doesn't seem angry about such treatment, nor particularly hampered by it. So far, so good. So far, so bland.

     Perhaps Wilkes is not meant to be a recurring character. By the end of the second hour, he seems to have been sucked up by the mysterious black ooze which serves as the show's current McGuffin. If they bring him back--and he is not possessed by some sort of alien demon (such things often happen in the Marvel Universe)--I hope the writers make him more compelling, and explore the dramatic possibilities of his character's presence. How will the other men in her life--buttoned-down butler Edwin Jarvis, playboy inventor Howard Stark, sad sack SSR agent Daniel Sousa--react to Agent Carter's interest in Wilkes?  A romantic relationship between them would highlight Carter's disdain for convention, and also give her plenty of opportunities to get outraged on Wilkes behalf: a good thing, as actress Hayley Atwell is most engaging when her character is either angry at, or annoyed by, men.

    Besides, how cool would it be for Captain America's ex-girlfriend to find happiness in the arms of a black man? This is a woman whose romantic ideal is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Steve Rogers, a guy who dresses in an American flag and beats people up for a living. For her to end up with a nerdy, African American scientist would be a subversive act in ways that resonate as much now as they would have 70 years ago. 

More Cowbell

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.

Harlem Birds

Last year, the Audubon Society teamed up with the Gitler & _____ Gallery on 149th and Broadway to create a public art project. 

Seems like John James Audubon used to live in the Hamilton Heights area, so the society thought his old neighborhood would be the perfect canvas on which to paint portraits of birds currently facing extinction. Soon elaborate murals started showing up on the side of buildings, in bricked-over window spaces, and on the roll down security gates of various establishments up and down Broadway between 135th and 157th streets. They appeared with little fanfare, one by one, and slowly they've become familiar landmarks to the people who live here. 

My personal favorite is the Tundra Swan by artist Boy Kong, which adorns  the roll down security gate of what used to be a driving school, on the west side of Broadway between 149th and 150th. I've always thought this particular bird looked like a silent movie villain, with it's hypnotic eyes and fiendish grin: the kind of bird that absolutely delights in its own wickedness.

The other day, as I walked past, I noticed something new. The Tundra Swan seemed to have undergone a startling metamorphosis. No longer just slyly bad, it seems to have exploded with evil, the kind of transformation that happens in the third act of Japanese anime cartoons, when the monster goes from hulking brute to terrifying uber-demon.

In fact, it was a completely new mural, made necessary by repairs to the security gate, which hadn't been in the best shape. 

I suppose this new version is more appropriate to the times we live in. This bird seems to pose a frightening, asymetrical threat, a constantly evolving nightmare that gets more alien as it grows. I'll miss the old painting, though. I prefer my villains with a touch of charm.

You can read all about the bird project--and look at photos of the work--at audubonmuralproject.org

Call Me When You Get A Ball Of Yarn

As visual tropes go, the “bored rich girl” has been a fairly reliable standard, giving anyone who uses it--video directors, magazine photographers, album cover artists and illustrators--the chance to make a seemingly profound statement about modern decadence while simultaneously benefiting from the titillation of the female flesh they are putting on display. From the cover of Roxy Music’s “Country Life” to the latest Taylor Swift video, examples of the trope are legion. 

Which is a problem. The "bored rich girl" is getting harder to pull off. Overuse, the spread of feminist awareness and appropriation as a symbol of female empowerment by artists like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj have made the rich girl stereotype both too controversial and too trite. What, then, is a video director to do if he or she wants to conjure up glamorous fin de seicle world weariness?

The answer, it seems, has been staring us in the face. Or, rather, glancing briefly our way before going back to licking its own ass.

Cats are the perfect symbol of spoiled First World contempt. I have two cats, and I love them, but I know that they are a pair of shiftless, entitled bastards. If they were human, they’d be the type of people I would go to any length to avoid: arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless and demanding.

Inherent feline bitchiness is used to great effect by Dutch artists Lernert & Sander in this video for the European EMD group De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig. A long haired Persian lounges in the cone of a bass woofer. As the speaker sends pulse after pulse of low end through its body, the cat remains as indifferent as a young heiress sitting in a booth at a club, staring at nothing as the bottle service champagne gets warm in its glass and the bass goes boom boom boom. This is a completely sexy--yet completely sex-free--distillation of spiritual ennui. And by combining our shared obsession with cat videos, wealth porn and computer generated beats, it may be the most perfect Internet video ever created.

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.

PERISCOPE UP!

It’s not often we have the chance to test drive a new app the moment it’s released. We missed the boat with so many of them–Instagram, Vine, Meerkat. So when we saw that Twitter had just released Periscope, its live video streaming app, we jumped on in an attempt to get ahead of the curve for once.

What we found was…well,  a lot of people doing what we were doing: testing it out by filming their dogs, or their office, or their kids, or talking into their front facing camera. It’s fascinating to see these early baby steps, before the platform has thrown up any “stars” or anything has gone viral.

Of course, Periscope seems ripe for misuse, and we assume that it’s only a matter of hours before the network is chock a-block with all kinds of kinky stuff we shouldn’t be watching. Stay tuned for a Buzzfeed story on the first live robbery to be “periscoped“ (see, we don’t even have an official word for it yet!) or the first couple do do the nasty while sharing it with every one of their Twitter followers. About five minutes ago, we saw some guy take a pee, so things seem to be off to a grand start.

Will Periscope take over the mantle that Meerkat assumed only last week? Who can say? This is social media, baby: things move fast. Who knows if either platform will even survive the two minutes it will take us to finish this post?

EDIT - Well, that was quick. Ten minutes after we posted the above, a building collapsed in NYC’s East Village and Periscope became a go-to place for people to share video of the scene. Not at all the kind of viral event we were hoping for.

Are You Watching?

This being America and all, we figured it was only a matter of time before someone took the NSA scandal and figured out a way to make money from it. But we’re pleased that the creators of new iOS app TouchTone seem to have their priorities straight: while we’re sure they’d like to turn a profit, they seem most concerned with teaching a lesson.

TouchTone perfectly illustrates the dangers of domestic surveillance by making the user complicit in it: to do well at the game, you have to spy on your (fictional) neighbors. The directions have a disturbing Orwellian tone—“The innocent have nothing to hide”—and the graphics are pure “24”-style tech. This is an example of a game in which the premise and design actually serve an idea beyond simply garnering buzz—a rare thing in the tech world these days.

Oakley Dokley

We went searching for well-designed websites, and our discovery of moto.oakley.com presented us with a question: is it appropriate that a site promoting "impact protection" should itself make such a powerful impact?

The clean, cool design of Oakley's site employs parallax technology, and sensibly avoids the cheesy effects to which said technology is often put. What you get is an interactive site that conveys the product's value to its intended audience, blends with the aesthetic of other companies in the competitive dirt biking space, and makes keeping mud out of your eyes seem like a fashion choice. We approve, Oakley: we approve.

HER

Sexbots have been the dream of lonely nerds since time immemorial, but who knew we were living in the age when they become a reality?

This weekend, users of dating/hook-up app Tinder who happened to be in Austin for the SXSW conference found a fresh new face to swipe right on. Her name was Ava, and she was gorgeous. She was also interested in what they had to say, and seemed full of questions. In every case, she gave the person with whom she was texting an Instagram handle and told them to check it out.

Those who did check it out experienced a mix of disappointment and admiration–for, of course, Ava was a bot, a bot specifically created to promote a film called Ex Machina about artificial intelligence. A surprising number of people responded with praise for the audacity of this viral marketing campaign—though how many of them were just trying to put on a brave face is impossible to say.

As we only heard about this after the fact, and never got our heart broken by this achingly beautiful bit of software, you can believe us when we say the whole thing is genius. Ava caught the user’s attention, engaged their emotions, and gave them an experience they will always associate with the product she was promoting. The perfect marketing machine.

via AdWeek

It's A Crazy Case Camera Kit!

Most of the DML crew is out of the office today, in Miami filming a video for one of our clients (more on that later). Those that are left are busy helping another client conquer SXSW via Twitter and other social media platforms.

So that just leaves us to man the store. And our way of manning the store is to find cool designs to share with you. This one is via Laughing Squid--and though it came out late last year, we only just noticed it.

It's a crazy case/camera kit for the iPhone 6. We admit that part of our fascination with it is due to the Amy Adams-ish charms of the spokesmodel in this video, but that's just because we appreciate good marketing.

The case itself looks handy--though it goes to such great lengths to look like a real point and shoot that we start to wonder "why not just buy a point and shoot?" One of these days, someone is going to invent a pro-grade camera that comes with a phone as an add on. Probably someone already has.

Finding Our Level

We will never climb Mount Everest, or any of the “6K club” (i.e., mountains 6,000 meters and above). We will never climb the Himalayas, the Swiss Alps or the Rockies. We might hike a bit in the Catskills, but that’s about it.

There are a lot of reasons we won’t be tackling Everest: the lack of oxygen, the altitude sickness, the sheer expense. But perhaps the most compelling reason of all has recently made the news. Mount Everest has gotten so crowded, it’s evidently cover in poop.

Fortunately, technology is stepping up to the plate. Not to clean up the mountain—God no—but to allow us to enjoy the view. Check out this astonishingly high-res film shot in the Himalaya by Teton Gravity Research. Using gyro-stabilized cameras, and filming from a helicopter that went up to 24,000 feet (5,000 shy of the Everest summit, admittedly), this film provides all the glorious vistas you can handle, while keeping you firmly at sea level (or thereabouts).

Only Missing Mugatu

Can this be for real? Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald showed up at the Valentino show in Paris! We feel like we're taking crazy pills!

Actually, this is a great example of non-traditional integrative marketing. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality (or as close to reality as fashion gets), this execution is all win. Valentino gets a little extra Hollywood buzz, and shows that they don't take themselves too seriously. Paramount can sit back and relax, confident in the knowledge that everyone on the Internet now knows about "Zoolander 2." And we all get to wig out at the joy of seeing these two iconic characters inject themselves into a real fashion show.

First those amazing stock photo shots of Vince Vaughn and the other stars of "Unfinished Business," now this. Integrated marketing stunts are soooo hot right now!