Infinitive Splitter

This is true: I watched Babel last night and liked it a lot, but I did not learn until this evening that the film’s non-English parts are meant to be subtitled.

Before I get to the explanation, though, here’s a section of Genesis 11, which, like most of the Bible, I had never read, and which contains the story of Babel:

[5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
[6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
[7] Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
[8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
[9] Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
[10] These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:
[11] And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.
[12] And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah:
[13] And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[14] And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber:
[15] And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[16] And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg:
[17] And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

It goes on like that for a while. Like I said, I’m no expert on the Bible, but I don’t really see how a book whose first chapter comprises interminable lists of implausible genealogies got to be the best-selling volume in all of human history. I didn’t get past the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code, either, though, so maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, here’s my story of Babel.

When the DVD started and no subtitles appeared during the first non-English conversation, I thought it was interesting but not cause for alarm. The movie is called Babel, so I expected some language-related confusion.

As I got into it, I was surprised by both how much untranslated dialogue there was and how much of it I could understand anyway. Communication is whatever percent nonverbal, and I was following all of the stories despite not understanding any of the words. In a film whose characters have trouble making themselves clear to each other because of language differences, I thought it was neat that language differences between the characters and me didn’t turn out to be much of an obstacle. That made the movie better than anyone had given it credit for, I thought.

Some scenes felt a little weird, including some long conversations involving an isolated, deaf Japanese girl, her father and another man. But in those cases I thought that the filmmakers were taking risks with the audience; I never guessed that I was missing something I shouldn’t.

So it was with some surprise to find out this evening, during my second conversation of the day about the film, that the movie is meant to be subtitled. (The first discussion lasted about 20 minutes and never clued me in.)

I don’t plan to watch with the subtitles. The story details that tipped me off seemed kind of gratuitous and I don’t think knowing more of them would add to the experience.

The LA Times editorializes today about the silliness of recent efforts to force dictionaries to remove entries that corporations deem offensive — most recently by McDonald’s, which bristled at the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of McJob:

The dictionary currently defines the popular term as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector.” David Fairhurst, “chief people officer” for McDonald’s in Northern Europe, called for a new definition to “reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

Presumably, Fairhurst is semi-joking. Unless he’s some kind of Orwellian villain, he can’t possibly believe he can, by decree, get people to hear “McJob” and think “awesome gig!”

If McDonald’s really wants to change the public perception of employment in its restaurants, perhaps it could begin with improving the conditions of employment in its restaurants. This may yield only limited improvement, since fast-food production will never come with the benefits of, say, software development for Google, but a PR campaign and some strongly worded letters to dictionary editors certainly won’t suffice.

I’m observing St. Patrick’s Day in the traditional way this afternoon — drinking a few cases of Guinness with the roommates while the college basketballers do their thing on TV — and something about the situation reminded me that the latest Oxford English Dictionary quarterly additions were due out. Some of the more entertaining rookies:

• asswipe, n.
• cryptozoology, n. (the search for animals that are rumored to exist)
• fricking, adj. and adv.
• fuck-off, n.
• irritainment, n.
  
• shit-eater, n.
• tighty-whities, n.

I’ve written about this twice before, and I’ll certainly do it again, since the additions provide such a great window into our societal development.

The English major in the room noted that it seems to have been a downward trend.

This is how the home screen for ESPN’s 2007 Men’s [NCAA Basketball] Tournament Challenge game looked yesterday afternoon (I saved it because I had a feeling I’d be writing about it today). Read it carefully:

There are more than 3 million active brackets in the game, and players are allowed up to five entries, which means at least 600,000 people (but probably more like 2 million, since lots of people only do one) have been repeatedly logging in through that page for almost 24 hours.

Here’s how it looks this morning:

As you can see, they have recognized the problematic text but made only two changes: “see if you will win $10,000″ in the first sentence and boss’s to boss’ in the last one. The first change helps, but still doesn’t totally fix the sentence; the second change is wrong.

Nobody cares, of course, unless their (my) brackets aren’t doing well and they (I) need something to complain about.

Big news today is Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s claim of responsibility for 31 acts of terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks, which he claims to have masterminded “from A to Z,” and the decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; the New York Times has a list:

1. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2. The 9/11 attacks, from A to Z.
3. The shoe bomber operation to down two American planes.
4. A 2002 shooting in Kuwait that killed an American marine.
5. The Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 180 in 2002.
6. Planning attacks against several prominent American skyscrapers.
7. Planning to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers.
8. Planning to bomb the Panama Canal.
9. Planning to assassinate several former American presidents, including President Carter.
10. Planning to bomb several New York landmarks, including the stock exchange and suspension bridges.

…and more.

The Times’ front-page story notes that it is “not clear how many of Mr. Mohammed’s expansive claims were legitimate,” and, indeed, the first thing I thought when NPR awoke me with the news this morning was how similar this sounds to the scene at the end of the first season of The Wire where, in order to avoid the death penalty (and help his friends) Wee-Bey falsely confesses to a series of open murders.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad is a preemptively convicted enemy combatant in a military tribunal and obviously not a candidate for a plea bargain to reduce his sentence, but how is major skepticism not everyone’s first reaction?

I last saw the Shins when they opened for the White Stripes at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in the fall of 2005. It’s entirely possible that my perception was skewed by my proximity to the band (about a mile away, on the lawn) and the several 24-ounce beers I drank between sets, but I recall that I was much more impressed by the White Stripes.

Massive outdoor amphitheaters like Merriweather are fine for Jimmy Buffet drinkapaloozas, pop-orchestra summer concerts and meandering jam-band head-bobs, but most indie bands, like the Shins, have too intimate a sound to fill the endless space.

Before last night’s show at D.A.R Constitution Hall, I’d heard lots of complaints about the (indoor) venue’s acoustics: in a recent Washington Post chat, some commenters suggested that the hall is acoustically suited for high-school commencement ceremonies (which it hosts every year) and nothing else. I wasn’t in a great position to judge the mix, since I was in a balcony box slightly in front of the stage and directly under the 15-foot, stage-left tower of speakers, but it sounded pretty good to me.

The seating, though, sucks big time.

Constitution Hall has no real orchestra pit; its first row of seats is two feet away from the stage, so even the “pit” crowd has to fill seven rows of rigid chairs instead of a freer space (one that might, on other nights, accommodate an orchestra). The entire floor of the venue has immovable seats, so every person has four to six square feet of reserved space.

The restriction is awkwardly stifling. The Shins’ catalog comprises several dozen bouncy, feel-good pop songs, but at D.A.R. they played to a crowd of full pockets that applauded after each song but stood mostly still for the music itself. Apart from a handful of carefree types who jumped in place for most of the set, my view from the box — where, like most people on the tier level, I remained seated for the duration — was of a static sea of smiling white faces.

Awkwardness aside (and with indie-pop music, when is the awkwardness ever really aside?), the show was well played and well received. The band curiously soft-pedaled a couple of their more energetic tunes — a companion noted that they were playing “Girl on the Wing” at an “adult contemporary” pace — but mostly they stuck to the album versions. At the end of the night, the band’s return to the stage for an encore sparked a cheer that was markedly louder than any that had followed the songs — not an unusual occurrence, but until that moment I’d had trouble figuring out how much fun the crowd was having, and I suspect the band had similar trouble.

Auditorium seats don’t mix with rock and roll.

(Thanks to Simon for making a ticket to the long-ago sold-out show available!)

This is one of several time-irrelevant posts of which drafts have been lingering in my WordPress editor for a while. The excerpt below is too fascinating to stay hidden in the decades-old book in which it appears, so, apropos of nothing other than today’s installment of Married to the Sea, here we are:

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson writes:

According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. … Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience.

I often think of this when people say a word “isn’t a word,” since it should be obvious that the only way to create new words is to use a word that’s never been used before. There are cases when such obstinance is fair — irregardless is universally rejected because regardless and irrespective already exist, and the offending writer usually means to use one of those — but in general I think it’s best to take a liberal approach.

The Oxford English Dictionary adds new words all the time: on December 14, 2006, adhocracy, corporatize, fugly, unelectable and hundreds of others earned its recognition, and regular readers will recall that I wrote previously about last June’s additions.

But no one — not even the editors of the OED — has the power to confer or deny legitimacy in any meaningful sense. As Bryson, again, writes in Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: “One of the abiding glories of English is that it has no governing authority, no group of august worthies empowered to decree how words may be spelled and deployed.” Indeed, of the four “new” words above, only adhocracy isn’t already in fairly common use, but its meaning is instantly apprehensible. (Fugly, for the unfamiliar or the terminally highbrow, is popular among internet gossips).

None of this is particularly relevant to anything else at the moment, but I think it’s quite interesting, so this is the blog I’ve blogged for today.

In honor of its official release at midnight, I took the time to listen to the whole of the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible while doing nothing else but reading along with the lyrics. I rarely do that; the last time I bought an album and listened to it straight through without doing anything else was in 2003, with Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief.

Neon Bible, of course, is exactly as epic and poetic and wonderful and life-changing and rock-saving as everyone else with a website or a microphone or a commercial printing press has already said it is, so I’ll spare you my full and revealingly ignorant review.

Instead, here’s my proposed tracklist for a single-disc “The Best of Oasis” compilation (in chronological order, as I would arrange it):

1. Columbia
2. Cigarettes and Alcohol
3. Slide Away
4. Don’t Look Back in Anger
5. She’s Electric
6. Champagne Supernova
7. D’You Know What I Mean?
8. Don’t Go Away
9. It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)
10. Flashbax
11. Go Let it Out
12. Force of Nature
13. Lyla
14. The Importance of Being Idle

It isn’t just a “greatest hits” mix, but it isn’t totally oblivious to the hits, either.

Saturday night at my house featured lots of gin, lots of bourbon, and lots of music and discussion thereof. Sunday featured headaches. So when a friend called late in the morning to ask if I wanted to see Mikal Evans at Iota in the evening, I didn’t jump at the chance.

“I know it’s Sunday,” she said, “but it’s a low-key acoustic set. We can sit in the back and have a drink.” OK.

As it turned out, all the seats were taken when I showed up a few minutes after Evans started playing, but it didn’t matter. Her performance was just the thing for a low-intensity Sunday night — mellow and understated, but very beautiful and very compelling.

Of a January performance, DCist said:

Evans’ style is best summed up by an observation from one audience member: “This reminds me of a really good P.J. Harvey song.” Well, Evans may drop her “g”s more than Harvey does, but the point is that it’s tough to do the indie-singer/songwriter shtick without blending in with the likes of Joss Stone, Liz Phair, and oodles of other talented women.

DCist called Evans an “Appalachian songstress,” and indeed my first impression brought Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris to mind. Evans, who alternates between acoustic and electric guitars (despite my friend’s description), was accompanied by another singer-guitarist, named Justin,* whose surname I didn’t catch but who complemented Evans perfectly — think of Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina” (Heartbreaker, 2000), if Harris had had the melody and Adams had sung backing harmonies. The depth of their combined sound belied the fact that it was just the two of them up there.

I very rarely buy CDs at shows, but I was disappointed when Evans announced that she had none for sale. There are four recordings on her MySpace page, but none of them do justice to the performance. A proper album will come out in the fall; look for it.

*Correction: The accompanist’s name is Timothy Bracken.

I wrote yesterday that Joey Porter, who made news last fall for calling Kellen Winslow a “fag” during an on-camera interview, was “not really a guy I’d want to get too close to,” even though I still like to watch him play football. I can overlook athletes’ politics and their ignorance about modern decency (John Rocker and, more recently, Tim Hardaway are two beyond-the-pale exceptions) because most of them are semi-educated man-children whose sole purpose in life has been to excel at a physical activity not connected to their ideas about human interaction in general society.

When the Porter story broke, as I recalled yesterday, I saw it mostly as an example of shoddy journalism, since early reports led with the fact that Porter had called Winslow “a derogatory name,” but they didn’t say what the name was. (If the insult is newsworthy, the news report should tell readers what the insult is.)

Mere hours after I published yesterday’s item, right-wing heroine Ann Coulter took the stage for her much-anticipated address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which wraps up today.

During her speech, she said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m — so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” As the video at Think Progress shows, the audience reacted with a Jerry Springer-style “OOOOH,” and then strong applause.

Later in the day, Coulter appeared to endorse presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had preceded her on stage and spoke of her thus: “I am happy to learn also that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”

So how did the wildly popular, shockingly offensive remark by the unbelievably beloved right-wing kingmaker at the most important conservative gathering of the year go over with Washington’s top political reporters (many of whom were there to cover the event)? Eh, they must have missed it.

In its page A11 report, the New York Times’ only mention of Coulter comes in paragraph 11:

The conference drew thousands of attendees, many of whom waited in a long line out the door for a late-afternoon appearance by Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator. Still, the tone of the conference was less excitement about the 2008 campaign than concern about the ideological credentials of the three leading contenders for the Republican nomination.

The Washington Post’s A4 story doesn’t mention Coulter at all. Dana Milbank’s column on page A2 has this paragraph, which relates more to the convention’s general tone than to the implications of one of the right’s most popular figures using the word “faggot” to describe a candidate for president:

In the session preceding Romney, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) said of Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq: “She’s an idiot.” In the session after Romney, Ann Coulter used an anti-gay slur to describe John Edwards (the line drew applause) and asked: “Did Al Gore actually swallow Michael Moore?” When a questioner asked Coulter why she praises marriage but broke off so many engagements, she responded by calling the questioner ugly.

So much for the big two. At least the LA Times got it:

The day’s most controversial speaker proved to be conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who at the end of her speech — which followed Romney’s — used a slur to refer to Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

Coulter said she had intended to comment on the former senator from North Carolina, “but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I … can’t really talk about Edwards.”

When Joey Porter calls someone a “fag,” it’s newsworthy because Joey Porter shoots from the hip and sometimes his shots go wild. But he’s a professional athlete, and his pronouncements — while damaging in light of the number of people for whom sports figures are role models — aren’t terribly relevant in the larger world. But Ann Coulter is very much a face of the American conservative movement. She is, with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and a few others, one of the movement’s popularly appointed voices for tellin’ it like it is. The presidential candidates who sought CPAC approval this weekend know exactly what Ann Coulter means to the most powerful branch of the Republican party (which, you may have heard, still controls the White House and the federal judiciary, and maintains considerable strength in the United States Senate).

Ann Coulter is their spokesperson, and it’s time for the press to understand and reflect the unfortunate weight of her words.