Random Friday: Memorial Weekend Edition

[Wherein our hero posts a collection of queries, ponderings, and dubious trivia to clear his mind for the long weekend ahead. A happy holiday to you all, and remember: a good BBQ is a safe BBQ.]

Benjamin Franklin's suggestion for the official bird of the new United States was the wild turkey. One of the great man's few missteps, it led to an unsuccessful bid at suicide-by-electrified-kite.

McDonald's is running a new commercial in which two coworkers are sharing lunch. One warns the other--who is eating a chicken sandwich from the Arches--that if he keeps eating chicken sandwiches he will turn into a chicken. In one of the darkest turns ever witnessed in a fast-food spot not featuring the Burger King, a Kafkaesque metamorphosis takes place in subsequent scenes as the man, indeed, begins to resemble a chicken. (In one shot, there is a fox in his hallway eyeing him with hungry fox-eyes.) Not shown are the scenes portraying the transformation of the burger-munching co-worker into an inambulatory mound of unprocessed soy filler, torn cowhide, minced hoofparts, and rat excreta.

With bleary, dead, rueful eyes.

Foxes are renowned throughout the animal kingdom for possessing the largest vocabularies of any four-legged beast.

The polar bear is a close second, though their habit of devouring rapt listeners has led to the species' largely oral history becoming shrouded in mystery and speculation.

While most hippopotami never learn to read or write, they are acutely aware that their name derives from the Greek (via Latin) for "river horse." Neither the hippos nor this observer are quite sure what the Greeks were thinking there.

Seriously, though, what's up with the Yeti? You just don't hear from 'em as much as you used to.

Upon his abdication of the English throne, Edward VIII embarked on a brief but lucrative alt-porn career under the pseudonym "Li'l Eddie, Lord Fucking-Hand." No copies of his work survived a direct hit during the Blitz, though Hitler, ironically, was rumored to have been a fan. The loss of the negatives filled the Nazi leader with his only regrets of the Second World War, and led to a debilitating period of self-doubt fueled by schnapps and tearful autoerotic asphyxiation.

Most common euphemism for masturbation [American English]: "spanking the monkey."

Least common euphemism for same: "tap-dancing with Ernie Borgnine."

Number of times it looks like Borgnine might make out with William Holden in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch: 7.

Number of times he actually does: 1. The scene was deleted from the original theatrical release, though sources hail that long-lost clip as a brilliant (if whiskey-soaked) deconstruction of Wild West machismo that paved the way for future gay-in-the-saddle epics like Brokeback Mountain.

Is Borat [at right] wearing a man-thong stretched to the limits of Lycra, or a woman's bathing suit sold by hateful French shopkeepers?

Either way, Borat, nice shoes.

Soul-Sucking Mediocrity Reaches New Heights

During its fifth season, I managed to catch a collected twenty-odd minutes of "American Idol." And, unsurprisingly, I feel in need of a long shower and perhaps some creepy-albino-monk self-flagellation as penance. Fifteen of those minutes were during last night's season finale, a cavalcade of truly incomprehensible D-list cameos and unforgivably overwrought suspense-mongering on the part of the show's hosts. In the end, it appears more teenage girls with cell phones wished Taylor Hicks were their grandfather than wanted to be Katharine McPhee. The zillion people watching the events unfold live (as we were ceaselessly reminded by the elfin Ryan Seacrest, as if it mattered?) were treated to McPhee performing a duet with Meat Loaf, and to eventual Idol Hicks leading a well-preserved Dionne Warwick around the stage during a not-exactly-all-star rendition of "That's What Friends Are For." The girls and guys evicted from the beach house (different show?) during the past few months returned to show us their pop-medley skills, and 5-watt luminaries like Tori Spelling and a teary David Hasselhoff beamed from the audience during random, irrelevant cutaways from the musical irrelevance unfolding onstage.

Oh, and apparently Prince showed up to cash in the last of the goodwill I was holding for him. I missed that part of the evening's festivities, but I've spoken with his people (all of them equally tiny and well-coiffed, like there's a factory somewhere) and we reached an agreement. I get to keep my copies of 1999 and Purple Rain for all purposes not karaoke, and he never shows up on any jukebox within 500 yards playing anything recorded after the Batman soundtrack. The "Diamonds and Pearls" video is still being contested.

And these were the highlights, mind you. The rest of the show consisted of getting in some final jabs at the most interesting (in the Chinese sense of the word) auditions from the season's first half. Seacrest awarded a handful of horribly misguided kids for publicly butchering the work of the world's most mediocre pop stylists. These segments were introduced with the revelation that "AI" has been overlooked at every TV awards show during its run (thank you, Emmy), even though more people voted during Tuesday night's final showdown than have voted for any American president, ever. Not coincidentally, the latter observation was also the hook for the recent film satire American Dreamz, which I didn't see (but kind of wanted to) because that introduction was simply too damned depressing.

To make a long story short, I just don't get it. Sure, every season is one prolonged exercise in test marketing and product packaging, and there's a long list of manufactured pop acts whose successes were just as calculated as any Idol's. But the irrepressible, stomach-turning earnestness with which these kids (and Hicks) belt out the tiredest, schlockiest, most meaningless pop drivel is enough to drive any conscious observer absolutely fucking batty. Most of the execrable tunes to which the show's assorted performers time their histrionics and vocal flourishes would be cause enough for any member of the target demographic to change the radio station. Even with that fact in mind, however, the kids evidently love hearing dutifully observed covers performed by nobodies backed by the obligatory pop orchestra and gospel choir. I mean, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life?" How anything so predictable and yet so utterly left-field and dated can make the teenyboppers scream is a mystery to me. If you've got an explanation, I invite you to leave a comment at the end of this post.

I know we need our distractions in this frightening modern age, a moment defined by foreign wars predicated upon lies told by shadowy, duplicitous powers-that-be. It's not that I don't understand the popularity of contest programming, which is as old as television. And I get the appeal of witnessing talent plucked from obscurity, an undeniably American dream that drives countless youngsters to seek fame and fortune on the silver screen and the 45. But for my part, hearing Hicks shout a victorious "Soul Patrol!" after being crowned was puzzlingly embarrassing, and not only because I have no idea what the man was talking about. Based on what I saw, I'm not sure where to find the "soul" in his generic performances, and the fact that such a cheesy catchphrase could drive the proceedings filled me with cringing embarrassment, not entirely unwarranted, for everyone involved. Oh, and I'll have to boil my culture-snob eyeballs in bleach to rid them of the slo-mo footage of Hicks and Seacrest writhing on their backs like upended turtles during a gratuitous end-of-show montage. While conducting these necessary ablutions, I'll probably turn on some real pop idols singing their oddest works, like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Rocky Raccoon," just so I can remind myself that unpredictability and unfathomable, universal popularity can coexist. You can have your Idols, America. I'll stick with The Beatles.

Disco Vanilla Trades In Her 8-Tracks

So there was this Pepsi (or was it Coke?) commercial a while back that featured two trucks, one from each competing sugarwater purveyor, driving alongside each other down the road. At a stoplight one driver flips a switch, shows the other what kind of system he has thumpin' in the rear of his freight-haulin' ride. A moment passes, then the other driver flips his switch. His truck's side panels open to reveal not a truck full of soda products as one would expect, but many stacks of concert-gauge speakers running heavy on the bass end. The sound from the latter truck dwarfs that of the first, and then the whole second rig starts bouncing on hydraulics. Slogans run in the foreground thereafter, proclaiming the latter pop company's vanilla cola to be less "vanilla" than their competitor's--a strange tactic, given that they're selling, after all, vanilla cola.

Now, I'm fully aware that I might be a year or three late with this somewhat reductive analysis of the Vanilla phenomenon. I even had a professor last semester who asked his class if we weren't responding to Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" because it was too, well, "vanilla." If that's not sure enough a sign that a pop-culture reference has jumped the shark (as the very term "jumping the shark" did about two weeks after the website reared its cyberhead), I'm not sure what is. But hear me out, people, because there have been Interesting New Developments in Vanilla.

Such a proclamation may seem a contradiction-in-terms, but let's look at the evidence. After that initial product introduction (wasn't it a Super Bowl commercial?) there have been a slew of newer variations on the Vanilla theme. There are now cherry-vanilla carbonated beverages, and diet-cherry-vanilla, and raspberry-vanilla-crème (not cream, mind you, but crème--how fancy and urbane!). No less a pitchman than Emeril Fucking Lagasse has shown up shouting "BAM!" from the mountaintops as he sings the praises of Crest Vanilla Mint Whitening Expressions Toothpaste. And where would Vanilla be without her kinda skanky, semi-retired, tarted-up whore of a second cousin, French Vanilla?

(On that note, what is French Vanilla, anyway? Why is it more beige than white--is it egg or something? What makes it "French?" Are there little French kids in an ice-cream sweatshop (?) somewhere doing something more interesting than Breyer's original, plain ol', see-those-vanilla-bean-shavings-that-means-it's-real-vanilla vanilla ice cream? Ahem. I digress.)

The thinking behind the new usage of "Vanilla" is quite obviously racial in overtone, with undercurrents of class instability and a lingering palate of white guilt on the finish. The marketers would have you believe Vanilla is whitebread, WASP, Middle-America, Plain Jane. Vanilla is all "Ahoy, polloi," sporting topsiders and linen pants at the yacht club's cocktail hour. Vanilla has lawn jockeys in the front yard ever since the subdivision council outlawed pink plastic flamingoes, and it doesn't see anything wrong with that. Its darker counterpart in the Neapolitan scheme-of-things (disregarding Strawberry, which is Switzerland in this debate), Chocolate, is the new new thing, the yin to vanilla's yang, the hot new hip-hop shit for the 2K6, even though it's been the same old-school Chocolate for ages untold. Vanilla, it seems, is too old to even be old-school. It's the sockhopper at the Wu-Tang show, it's the moustachioed cops who crash the house party and actually inventory the confiscated weed. Vanilla is the bowtied guys in the Beastie Boys' video who offer soda and pie to all the partygoers who never fought for their right.

To paaaar-tay.

So why, then, does Vanilla seem to be making a comeback in spite of all the aspersions cast her way? Granted: she gets all dressed up in the newest rags, and she's had some surgery to correct both the overbite and the saggy neck, but isn't New Vanilla in the miniskirt and CFMP's just the same old hag with an Extreme Makeover? Why is she worth the bother of Vanilla Mint, Vanilla Crème, Vanilla Raspberry Cherry Swirl Delite? Is there something about Vanilla worth saving?

Apparently the answer is a resounding "YES," at least if you're listening to the marketers who bring the old girl around even while they talk nasty about her to their friends. Sure, New Vanilla's an easy lay, but it hasn't always been that way. She's suddenly willing to try different things, and you might even get her in a three-way with your buddies Minty and Razz (you might even take her Cherry!). It appears that Granny Van is actually hipper than you would think, and the advertising dollars are there to make sure you know it. Maybe Vanilla is the new Chocolate, which--for all its hipness-by-omission, at least in terms of the Vanilla discussion--hasn't seen much in the way of experimentation since the Andes Mint and Cookie Dough ice cream. Not that it's needed any work, mind you.

(But speaking of, doesn't "Chocolate Chip" sound like the nickname you gave your douchebag cousin who played Young M.C. while trying to gouge you for shitty weed when you snuck away from the aforementioned yacht club soiree? Wasn't he just one dirty little chip of wackness in a huge fucking tub of Vanilla?)

It bears noting here that most of New Vanilla's work is hardly worth writing home about, and that's not only because of all the kinky shit she's getting into. Like any good relationship, she's easy to fuck up when you're too busy focusing on other things. So much attention is paid to the dressing-up that somebody seems to have forgotten what Vanilla tasted like in the first place. Strawberry and Chocolate seem to have survived just fine, even when you consider the execrable examples to which they lend their names. It's strange, really, how the simplest experiences are those most easily fouled-up and watered-down. But back to Vanilla. Emeril's much-BAMmed-about toothpaste, for instance, tastes like somebody spat a full swig of Scope mouthwash on a lousy off-brand sundae. Vanilla Coke and Vanilla Pepsi taste about the same (regardless of the creative advertising and dueling cola-hoopties), which is to say that they're nowhere near as good as a fountain soda of either brand with a shot or two of real vanilla syrup. And as for whatever Dr. Pepper thinks he's doing with Vanilla and every berry and cherry hanging from the tree, my prayers are with his patients during this time of misguided distraction.

In the end, I guess there's only one thing we all need to remember: no matter what the corporations who sell us our Things try to throw our way, the best New Shit is almost always the Old Shit. New Vanilla will get busted eventually for working the wrong corner, either by the cops or by some newer, flashier flavor with a razorblade under her tongue and some turf to claim. Old Vanilla will always be right there for us, waiting beneath the cap of an ice-cold IBC Cream Soda. She was born in 1919 and she's had her fair share of bumps in the road, but she's still one of the finest Vanillas this impartial observer has ever enjoyed. Wrinkles and all.

Loose Associations on a Theme

I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically--a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."

--From White Noise, by Don DeLillo

The Alamo, 1999

It seems like just a little old building, and I guess that's all it was. Is. For some reason I expect John Wayne and a coonskin cap, maybe Jim Bowie or Sam Houston as Disney animatronics telling us about the history of the Little Church That Didn't. For a famous last stand it seems oddly placed near the center of downtown San Antonio, close to a Riverwalk I remember from a strange mid-80's Dabney Coleman flick called Cloak & Dagger. We smoke a bowl in the car and have massive cheeseburgers at a chain restaurant featuring a full side of beef hanging in a windowed butchery at the entrance. Once finished with our half-pounders we get back on the road, back to New Orleans, passing along the way a pickup truck loaded with random wooden frames and cushioned furniture. A Tex-Mex father and son grin and wave at us from the loveseat situated cabside in the truck's bed. The father's longish hair blows down on his forehead before he sweeps it back, an effort in vain riding backwards at 80 mph, as he sips intermittently from a paper bag.

Wrigley Field, 1992

The moms bro sis and I are sitting on the third-base line, watching Ryne Sandberg and the Cubs beat the Astros. My sister claims Sandberg as her favorite player, but given that she's a girl and he's one of my own favorites, I assume H. is just trying to keep up with her brothers. It's my fifth or sixth Major League game, the first that doesn't feature the Cincinnati Reds playing at Riverfront. I can smell the Old Style steaming off the skin of the men in front of us, sick-sweet and maybe a false memory. The famous ivy on the outfield wall is too far away to bear any significant odor, but it looks like it smells green, like fresh money or the hide of a lime rhino. My brother and I try to get into the outfield bleachers late in the game, on an ivy-smelling sensory expedition all our own, and are stopped at the entrance by a man asking for tickets. Wrigley sells out, it seems, even in the early afternoon on a weekday. We walk back to our assigned seats under exposed pipes, big enough to fit a man and hanging fifty feet in the air, as the streetside sunlight cuts visible swaths through the steam rising off every Polish sausage stand.

Keeneland, 2006

Ten years have passed since I last visited the track on a Friday-afternoon bailout from high school. This time around we are old enough to drink overpriced beer and syrupy mint juleps bearing only a name in common with any proper execution of the cocktail. We sip and talk and laugh and bet and lose, though not necessarily in that order. An early morning's jump on the afternoon garners the industrious (we are not among them) a prime seat on the paddock green, a place to throw the blanket, park the cooler, claim a small tract of Bluegrass in the name of whichever sovereign one might choose. Kings Miller and Budweiser rule the day. After the simulcast Derby ends on the Jumbotron and we throng out to the rolling parking pastures, anyone near the fourth turn has a view of the jumbo jet parked at the airport across Versailles Road, the flag of the United Arab Emirates emblazoned on its tailfin. Some sheikh or sultan must have named Lexington the stopping-off point for his bulletproof limo on the way to Friday's Oaks and the big race on Saturday. I wonder if our racetrack's gables and cupolas are visible from the jet's port windows.

Gulf Shores, 2001

Due south of G.S., on a sandbar that might not exist anymore, I'm walking in a stiff, salty breeze with a girl I don't even know. It's past midnight and we're both naked to the waist. Three hours previous, I liberated a bottle of fine German doppelkorn from my workplace and hopped in a beater Saturn with a mysterious brunette and an obese, epileptic golden Labrador. I have known the girl for a week and the dog for the three-hour drive. The girl and I walk, we talk, we drink from the bottle while her dog barks at the surf. We eventually make it back to her family's place on the beach and she promises me we'll go crabbing in the morning, maybe take the jet-ski out on the lagoon side of the sand. We're lying on the couch later and she tells me she's been studying a little shiatsu, asks me to lie back in her lap. She applies a dime's weight beneath her fingertips upon my temples, my earlobes, under my chin, and we both fall asleep listening to the stereo's dying gasps of anonymous jazz. I awake with a start hours later, turn around to find her still sleeping, carry her to bed. We spend the morning doing what people do, disregarding the shades' arrhythmic flapping in the offshore wind.

Bled, 2005

Staying with some newfound friends in Slovenia, I hop a ride to a tiny subalpine lake in the Julian Alps. My guidebook tells me a tiny island in the middle is home to a chapel with a bell that grants the ringer seven years of good luck. So we go to the lake, and we dive from the pier, and we swim the kilometer across to the island, and we walk up the stony path leading from the shoreline to the chapel. And when we get to the chapel, my friends--both Catholics--tell me they'll wait for me in June's diamondbright sunshine, out of a reverent deference to God and to the signs posted that outlaw the entrance of anyone in swimming shorts and bare feet. They leave to me any decision to transgress upon what might be God's own law, in God's own house, on a foolish quest for some rumored modicum of good fortune. Possessing no belief in any divine being, yet ironically possessed of a desire for the divine benefits of said bell-ringing, I scamper into the chapel and jump as high as I can, grabbing the rope and pulling it down with all my weight. When I land again on the stone floor, I leave little wet toeprints behind me as I hightail it out the side entrance. The bell rings for about a minute. As we swim back I'm nearly cut in half by Slovenia's local Olympic sculler knocking out laps in his razorboat. Every soda cap still reads "Please Try Again."

Canyon de Chelly, 2004

I begin the hike down the canyon's side to the White House at 7 AM, after a preliminary peanut butter sandwich watching the Arizona sunrise on the drive up. My camera bag holds three lenses and seven filters, my tripod rests on my shoulder, and my water bottle burbles in anticipation of a full morning's trek. On the way down I stop to photograph the whorls of sandstone on the smooth face of the canyon, trying to catch the alternating red orange yellow gold glinting in the morning sun. Dry desert air blows chill, not yet warmed beneath the rim as I follow the trail to the green canyon floor, onto the Navajo sheep farm where a sign is posted: "No Photographs Please Respect The Inhabitants And Pick Up All Trash." I see the sheep and two Inhabitants and I wave, but they don't even mark my presence. I continue across the bottom to the opposite cliff face, still in shadow awaiting the afternoon's sun. As I look up at the 800-year-old Anasazi ruin, I notice the Native American couple bowing and kneeling at the chain-link fence that separates tourists from the cliff dwelling. The couple are keening, a term I mentally apply to their singing supplications although I know it only from an Irish play I read and forgot years ago. Perhaps they're merely praying. I sit forty yards behind them for thirty minutes, maybe more, when a French family comes singsonging down the trail behind me. We are the only four people in that part of the canyon who have no right to be there, and I hold up a hand offering a universal stop sign, SVP, merci. They cut their conversation tout court and sit with me in the dust. We wait, silently, for words we will never understand to finish echoing from the ancient home with "Adams US Cav 1879" carved into its otherwise still-white façade.

EHD-joo-meh-KAY-shun

Today I'm going to try something new, a completely novel idea for the blog medium. Are you ready? Here it goes:

A completely unedited, unrehearsed, unscripted, "Reality Blog."

How's that for groundbreaking, right? News as news happens and all that jazz...

I finished my last collegiate exam a few hours ago and I've been thinking of all the amazing things I've seen, all the stupid shit I've done, all the crazy and wonderful people I've met along the way.

(If you don't know who you are, you weren't there. If you were there, you know who you are and your names will be changed. Relax.)

For those of you keeping score, for all those kids in the bleachers who might be adepts at fantasy baseball and such, my record follows:

"9 semesters, 10ish years, 0 RBI."

I'm no statistician, but that should put me up there with the greatest non-DH pitchers of all time.

(What's up, Steve Bedrosian?!)

But of all the people I wanted to call today, one was mysteriously absent. As luck would have it, he's the only person I wanted to talk to. Period. And he's the only photo I can't crop, the only convo I can't fudge, the only scratch that don’t erase.

Everybody tip a cup for Dave. Thanks. I am.

Peace.