Infinitive Splitter

On Friday night, 800 of my closest friends and I watched Middle Distance Runner bring the house down at the 9:30 Club. I can say totally objectively that it was the most fun I’ve ever had in six years at that venue (full disclosure: I live with three members of the band).

Saturday morning, I awoke a few minutes before tickets for the May 4 Arcade Fire show at D.A.R. Constitution Hall went on sale, and I immediately spent the next five or six minutes refreshing the Ticketmaster page every four seconds. When the time came, my first search for two tickets in “best available” seating came back with a couple on the tier (upstairs) level, and in my first important decision of the day, I stupidly rejected the offer.

In a further, inexplicable extension of my presumptuousness, I specified in my second attempt that I wanted tickets on the orchestra level. When my search got to the front of the line (no later than 10:03), I was told to get real.

Sufficiently sobered, I retried the original search, knowing that the results that were unacceptable the first time had become my hoped-for best case. No dice on that, of course; by 10:06 there were no pairs of tickets to be found. In desperation, I tried for just one ticket — anywhere — which somehow returned a seat in the orchestra section with an “obstructed view.” Good enough!

(So anyway, if you were planning to ask me for an extra ticket, you’re out of luck.)

I spent the balance of the weekend importing into my new computer many of the CDs I have collected in the last 12 years or so — and which have gone largely unheard in the MP3 millennium. I look forward to reacquainting myself with the albums I liked well enough to pay for back when my paychecks didn’t have to go toward groceries and rent.

Hello again, Odelay. Been too long, Definitely Maybe.

I spent part of a snow day last week watching Crash, the last of last year’s Best Picture nominees I had yet to see, and it was exactly as over-hyped and Hollywooden as everyone said it was.

This year’s Oscars ceremony is on Sunday, and once again I haven’t seen nearly enough of the nominees to make predictions or recommendations of my own (of those nominated for major awards, I’ve only seen Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, The Departed, and Borat). But cheat sheets are out there, and I have to admit to availing myself of one of them in making my office-pool picks today. For the awards too obscure or mysterious to merit mainstream odds, I did what I imagine even some of the lazier Academy voters do — I checked random boxes.

There’s no need to announce all of my picks (except to say that I think The Departed should earn Scorsese his long-overdue Best Picture), but I do want to use this space to make one caveat about my choice for Best Actor. In accordance with conventional wisdom and overwhelming odds, I chose Forest Whitaker, but I can’t help thinking that Peter O’Toole might ride in on a dark horse and take it away. Oscar voters are notoriously sentimental, and many of them surely remember O’Toole’s reaction upon hearing, in 2003, that he would be honored with the Lifetime Achievement award:

Since I’m still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright, would the Academy please defer the honour until I am 80?

(He later decided to accept it anyway.) When asked about this year’s nomination last month by the Daily Mail, O’Toole, now 74, gave this answer:

“To be considered is okay, but it’s not enough: it’s winning the bloody thing that matters.

“So if I win the bugger, great. If I don’t, then tant pis. I shan’t lurch around in agony and despair.”

Maybe true, but I would not be at all surprised if the Academy declined to make him prove it.

Via Deadspin (of all places), I learned that Kurt Cobain would have been 40 years old today.

I was never really that into Nirvana; my favorite song of theirs is “The Man Who Sold the World,” which is, as Cobain acknowledged after they played it during their acoustic set on MTV, “a David Bowie song.” Unplugged in New York is the only Nirvana album I ever bother to listen to.

More relevant to me are the discoveries that Noel Gallagher will be 40 in May, Beck Hansen and Rivers Cuomo will be 37 this summer, and Cake’s John McCrea is already 41 or 42 (as of this writing, even Wikipedia isn’t sure).

I started listening to some of those guys when I was 11 or 12 years old, and by the time I was in junior high school I had at least one album by all of them (but not Nirvana — in 2003, a girlfriend gave me a used copy of Nevermind after I admitted to being the only American child of the 80s and 90s who didn’t own it). For some reason, I always thought of them as being the same age as I was. As Nick Hornby might point out, it’s probably because the stuff they were singing about was the same stuff that had recently begun to roll around in my own head.

A 39-year-old Noel Gallagher seems a lot further from a 24-year-old me than a 27-year-old Noel seemed when I was 12. But I suppose that happens when rock stars move directly from late adolescence (where many of them seem to spend more time than most people) straight past young-adulthood and into gray-haired middle age.

Small wonder that none of my favorite songs are about moving from entry-level jobs to truly rewarding careers, or the importance of keeping up with friends from high school and college, or how to decide where to live, or whether to go to graduate school.

If I weren’t such a dedicated professional, the top line in the image above would say “DELIVERED! YES!” instead of “Delivery exception.” I was at work this morning when the FedEx truck rolled by, and none of my federal-holidaying roommates were awake yet.

Tonight: picking up my new computer at the FedEx place.

Tomorrow and beyond: blogging a better blog, and video chatting too!

(By the way: I was amazed to find that, in the four years since the CD burner on my old computer lasered its final mix and broke, the cost of blank CDs has fallen by more than 50 percent. I even got a pack of 25 blank DVDs for $7! The future is amazing.)

At a campaign event in Florida on Friday night, a heckler in the crowd called presidential candidate Mitt Romney “a pretender” because Romney is a Mormon and thus does “not know the Lord.” Romney responded thus:

“One of the great things about this land is that we have people of different faiths and different religions, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country,” he said, as the audience gave him a standing ovation.

He has used a variation of that line many times, usually saying “the American people want” in place of “we need.” In those cases, he is right. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans would be more comfortable with a gay, black, female, Jewish, thrice-divorced, or very old president than they would be with an atheist. In that list, only the atheist would start with a majority of respondents (53 percent) committed to opposing him.

Romney is a Republican, but his belief in this regard isn’t a partisan one; overt religiosity is an indispensable component of both the modern presidential campaign and the modern presidency.

Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? includes, in an explanation of the Penn State professor’s class on postmodernism, the best articulation I have ever read of what is wrong with this (pp. 244-246):

I begin with the famous proposition, more familiar to my students even than Pulp Fiction, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is, after all, one of the most important sentences ever written in the history of political philosophy, and it helped to change the course of the world. And so, begging my students’ pardon, I set about revising it. I suggest instead that all humans should be considered to have equal claim to basic human rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation; and that we should endow each other with these rights, knowing full well that they are alienable and that we must work to interpret and to sustain them. And, finally, that none of the above is self-evident. Then I go a bit further, and point out that it was actually not self-evident in 1776 that all men were created equal, since almost nobody on the planet believed such a thing. On the contrary, most people who considered the matter at all, even in the educated, Christianized West, believed in natural hierarchies deriving either from the great chain of being or from the divine right of kings, which is why we Americans had to fight a war for principles that were allegedly self-evident. (So yes, I’m saying that Jefferson, drawing on John Locke, among others, made this stuff up.) And I am hardly the first to point out that the new nation, upon winning that war, practiced slavery for another fourscore and nine years, or that we continue to debate today, as we must, the meaning of the word “equal” and the meaning of the word “rights.” As for the Creator: we are often tempted to think it would be easier to engage in political deliberation if we could simply appeal to the Almighty for sanction. But the events of the recent past, not to mention the past six millennia, have shown us that it is quite impossible to compel assent to notions of human rights and dignity by appealing to the authority of the divine. I am not denying that many people ground their beliefs and their lives in religion, and I am not saying that it is illegitimate or illiberal or wrong for people to do so. I am merely saying that appealing to the Creator doesn’t solve the problems it wants to solve; it merely displaces the question onto how one interprets the word of the Creator and how one vests authority in those interpreters. It thus leaves us once again with the problem of how to recognize, in concrete political practice, the human rights and the human dignity with which we are supposedly self-evidently endowed.

Sorry about the long excerpt. Here’s a slightly shorter section, in which Bérubé, who has a son with Down syndrome, makes the question more explicit (pp. 246-247):

Which way of thinking is more responsible, do you imagine, if you’re a parent of a child with a disability, whose disability has often been — and might again be — grounds for barring him from the rest of the human community? Do you (a) assert that there are objective, “intrinsic” moral grounds for your belief in his “innate” humanity, hoping to persuade others that your belief is founded on something other than your mere belief, or (b) assert that there are no “innate” criteria for inclusion in the human family and no “intrinsic” grounds for your advocacy of his inclusion, but that he should be included anyway because we should try to understand “equal rights” as broadly as possible?

Bérubé says that the vast majority of his students choose option (a). The same is true of the American population; choosing option (b) disqualifies a person from presidential eligibility.

The American people want leaders who look, uncritically, to centuries-old interpretations of millennia-old texts to solve the questions we have about how people should treat each other — questions that, after all that time, remain unanswered.

We need to move beyond that.

My dad has great taste in movies, and he’s always been quick to offer a line from one of his favorites whenever an opportunity presents itself. You might be surprised by how easy it is to work “We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!” into a conversation.

I think my mom thinks it’s cute, though she rolls her eyes when the lines come from movies she doesn’t like (”I don’t think so, Dave”) or doesn’t know (”Obviously, you are not a golfer”). She thinks it’s less cute that my brother and I, like most boys, adopted the tendency for ourselves — but without the discriminating taste. She doesn’t always understand why we still, at 24 and 19, fill our infrequent family dinnertimes with lines from Tommy Boy and “Arrested Development.” But she’s a good sport. In our house, cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word.

One of my dad’s favorites (and thus one of mine) comes from this scene in Lawrence of Arabia:

[Lawrence has just extinguished a match between his thumb and forefinger. William Potter surreptitiously attempts the same]
William Potter: Ooh! It damn well ‘urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

In All the President’s Men, with which I am much more familiar, Deep Throat tells the story of G. Gordon Liddy doing pretty much the same thing:

Deep Throat: I was at a party once, and, uh, Liddy put his hand over a candle, and he kept it there. He kept it right in the flame until his flesh was burned. Somebody said, “What’s the trick?” And Liddy said, “The trick is not minding.”

I don’t often perform flesh-burning parlor tricks, but in this cold February I have made the unfortunate mistake several times of having to walk uncomfortable distances with only a sweater and a thin corduroy jacket to keep me warm. In those times — like last night, when in 16-degree cold I walked from 18th and K to 21st and P — I remind myself that, while shivering is an option, it’s a useless one.

So I lose myself in music and my own thoughts, and I carry on.

The trick is not minding.

People in most places would probably describe currency collection as hoarding or saving. In America, it’s a hobby so popular that the authorities have to promote money as a useful trade commodity in order to get people to buy stuff with it:

The United States Mint has been working around the clock to turn out the first of its new series of Presidential Dollar coins for their debut today. And it has been working just as hard to make sure that the new coins don’t end up as just another collector’s item.

This time the Mint has taken a new approach to designing the coins as well as promoted them with the retailers, banks and transit systems that will play the biggest role in making the coins circulate effectively.

What a silly culture. Collecting coins from hundreds or thousands of years ago makes sense for its archaeological or anthropological value; collecting coins that were minted within the last couple of weeks is a fascination that eludes my comprehension.

An alert reader told me this morning that a theater outside Jacksonville, Fla., decided last week to change the words on its marquee from “The Vagina Monologues” to “The Hoohah Monologues” after one panicky motorist complained.

“We decided we would just use child slang for it. That’s how we decided on Hoohah Monologues,” [Atlantic Theater spokesperson Bryce] Pfanenstiel said.

They did this after a driver who saw it complained to the theater, saying she was upset that her niece saw it.

“I’m on the phone and asked ‘What did you tell her?’ She’s like, ‘I’m offended I had to answer the question,’” Pfanenstiel said.

In America, you see, a slang term is less offensive to children’s delicate sensibilities (or, more precisely, to those of their hyperventilating elders) than the anatomical term it denotes.

In a triumph of common sense, the theater changed the name back to the original two days later.

In 2002, White House speechwriter David Frum found himself in hot water — and shortly thereafter out of a job — when his wife circulated an email claiming that Frum had coined the “axis of evil” phrase in President Bush’s recently delivered State of the Union address.

“It’s not often a phrase one writes gains national notice,” she wrote, “so I’ll hope you’ll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!!”

As a fellow flack (for an organization not connected to the White House), I sympathize with the sentiment. Most of my best work has other people’s names attached, and there’s never an appropriate way to claim credit.

My resume used to include a line indicating that I had written “for allonymous publication,” but I withdrew it on the advice of several friends who didn’t think prospective employers would know what it meant — or worse, would think I had misspelled anonymous.

It was a perfectly reasonable worry; I had only discovered the word for myself when, having decided it must exist, I looked it up.

How fitting that the word to describe ghost-writership should itself be so rarely heard.

Notorious idiot Gregg Easterbrook, whose “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on ESPN.com is the only periodical I can think of that requires a regularly scheduled accompaniment of next-day corrections (he calls it “Reader Animadversion”), makes a curious assertion in his penultimate piece on the 2006-2007 season:

The popularity of American-style football is likely to grow internationally – gridiron is taking off in Mexico at the moment, for instance. Not only is football fun to watch and to play, most of the world continues to admire the United States and look up to us – it’s our foreign policy the world disdains; the American dream remains beloved almost everywhere. As democracy expands and more nations liberalize, more nations will long to become like the United States. And since football resides near the core of American culture, more people internationally will want the sport. They will reason, “America is strong and free and prosperous, America loves football, maybe football somehow helps you become strong and free and prosperous.”

Emphasis added.

I looked in vain through the 10,315 words that follow that sentence for some indication that Easterbrook wrote it facetiously. Presumably he would also argue that people in the rest of the world drink Coca-Cola and eat at McDonald’s because they think Americans’ love of fast food and soda are what make us strong and free and prosperous.

At the risk of stimulating his famously hair-triggered libido (he reminds us, creepily and endlessly, that his compromise with his Baptist upbringing “is to be pro-topless but anti-gambling”), I must say it’s pretty unlikely that everyone else in the world is as susceptible to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc (”with this, therefore because of this”) logical fallacy as he is.

Correlation does not imply causation, but when my blood pressure ticks downward in two weeks I’m pretty sure I’ll have TMQ’s off-season hiatus to thank.