The Most Exciting Cat in the World

Dear CF,

I give you one of the most riveting cats in history, courtesy of this eighteenth-century ad.

Fondly,

M

A Veiled Threat

On the occasion of France enforcing its ban on the niqab:

Fondly,

M

HANDLESS MATTHEW BUCHINGER WAS AWESOME.

Dear CF,

Coincidences happen, but this one has thrown me for a loop. After posting handless and footless Matthew Buchinger’s writing sample, I was merrily researching a robot exhibition from 1800 in a completely different archive when I stumbled across the name again, this time in a piece in the New York Times here which deals with my robot exhibit too. The Matthew Buchinger in the article is described as “the greatest magician of his time.”

I stare, confused.

I call Mr. Millicent over.

“Could it be the same person?” I ask him.

“No,” he said, “it’s hard to be a magician without hands and feet.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Wow, were we wrong.

The Matthew (or Matthias) Buchinger who wrote that statement wasn’t going to be dictated to by circumstance—which I guess we could’ve guessed by the upside-down and backward lines.

For fun, he built ships in bottles.

He was a famous magician. He could play six different musical instruments. And he was a master engraver. Below is his self-portrait.

As if that weren’t amazing enough, THE CURLS ARE ACTUALLY COMPOSED OF BIBLE PASSAGES RENDERED IN TINY PRINT. Here’s a close-up of the hair:

Mind: blown.

Fondly,

M

Penmanship

Dear CF,

So much to discuss! But quickly: did you hear about Nicholas Maxim, the 10-year-old boy born without hands who won a penmanship competition? I just came across this as I was browsing through the Bodleian’s archives and enjoyed the echo. Matthew Buchinger was born without hands or feet and wrote this back in 1736:

Fondly,

M

Some Magic

Sasha Frere-Jones just tweeted this clip in an effort to describe what it’s like to sing karoake with Neko Case (oh how I want @humblebrag to sweep in here). And, the lighting, the makeup, all of it, well, I will stop talking:

Gutswingingly yours,

CF

Wherein I Think Too Hard About Your Highness

Your Highness is dazzling in its array of reviews: they swing from ultimate disgust ( Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir calls it possibly the worst movie ever made) to a gleeful delight, NPR’s David Edelstein refers to it as a pinnacle of low comedy.  I’m not sure it is either of these, but it is a fine example of a wispy trend developing in comedy: the joke of the American male.

I offer it as an offshoot of Apatow’s bromances, burgeoning with the Apatow produced Pineapple Express, and fully embraced by Danny McBride and his usual crew of makers (David Gordon Green, Jody Hill, and Ben Best), we see it living large in most of McBride’s blustery roles.  The closest kin these movies have might be the genre takedowns of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead), or the early work of Kevin Smith, which does the same kind of nostalgia spin and masculinity slam that these movies do.  What I mean by this is that instead of looking at how hard it is to grow up and be a good dude, especially if unequipped in modern times (the Apatow catalogue), this new branch celebrates adolescent nostalgia while reveling in the failed response of masculine ego. Whereas the joke is never on Paul Rudd, the joke is always on Danny McBride (and even Seth Rogen when he shows up in Hill’s Observe and Report).

We see this super clearly in Eastbound and Down, the same happens with McBride’s lead in Foot Fist Way, and most of his roles where he portrays a signature mix of ignorance and enthusiasm (Fireworks dude in Tropic Thunder, Bustass in All the Real Girls, Drug dealer fellow in Pineapple Express).  He is very good at bombast, skewing redneck, and quickly showing the fear and soft bits of an insecure soul.  These guys are fascinated by this trope, and have repeated it in most of their work.  They love portraying the unattractive man who is not winning, who is steeped in laziness and failure, and who tells himself a self-narrative of the gods. They love the comedy of such a known tragedy. And they get away with a lot because of it. The racism, misogyny, and general obscenity is always framed so that they are calling out the same errors that they are gleefully getting to say.  Apatow’s crudeness is an attempt at realism. This new branch uses obscenity as part of the bluster it is unpinning.  At one point in Your Highness, a squire says to Prince Thaddeous (McBride) something like “I know you rely on your vulgarity as a defense for your insecurity.” This is either right before or after both Thaddeous and his page have mimed ejaculating onto the squire’s head.

This look at the narcissist American male (I say American because the accessories are always American, with the joke extending to America, its blind faith in itself, and how comfortable it is letting itself get away with everything), in these movies is also usually partnered with a deep love for markers of boyhood joy, and the genres that sparked this love way back when.  Foot Fist Way is basically a filthy Karate Kid remake filled with props from what meant good living in the eighties according to video games and action movies (red corvettes, big haired blondes, gold necklaces). It is filled with the boy version of what the good life of the future was. If we did the girl version of this from that same time, we would have a movie littered with Kit n’ Kaboodles, fuschia satin camisoles, Virginia Slims, and stretch limos.  The same nostalgia, and it’s failure in an adult life, pops up in Observe and Report, especially with Seth Rogen’s date sweater.  He is wearing on his date what he also probably wore to 7th grade graduation. In 7th grade, it was the flyest.

The same happens in Pineapple Express (and ode to Cheech and Chong movies), and Your Highness (deep homage to Krull and all of its kin).  These are the films that made a generation, and while I do think girls have a different set of cultural texts (Teen Witch, Labyrinth, She’s Out of Control, Crybaby, Troop Beverly Hills, Maid to Order, etc.), both sexes share the imprint of what these movies were, and what they told us the future would be.

Your Highness is a deeply affectionate critique of a generation of fantasy movies. It commends the good stuff (the puzzles, the mysticism, the camp), and calls out the weak and ridiculous (the pat formulas, bad special effects, etc.). It especially notes the sexual undertones that were always present (do you remember Jennifer Connelly eating that peach in the Labyrinth?) by grotesquely calling them out.  In Your Highness, all the characters are questing to keep “The Fuckening” from taking place, where a virgin wizard will rape and impregnate a virgin princess. The fuckening will logically produce a dragon. Which is genius, because Natalie Portman gets to say with a straight face “it is my quest to keep people from fucking dragons into the world.”  Your Highness also calls out the way women are usually reduced to crones, princesses or women in leather thongs in all these movies (Krull has an amazing spider crone, and Red Sonja is the icon of leather sex warrior). At one point in the rescue of the princess, Thaddeous tells the baddie wizard “She’s not your virgin, she’s my brother’s virgin,” and earlier asks his brother if he would still marry the princess if the wizard had indeed deflowered her, or even buttfucked her.  Just as the joke is often on the grotesque male and his inadequacies of self-narrative, the joke here is also on the genre itself.

And the smartest part of it all is that we get to see it back through the adolescent lens, and witness the juxtaposition of those hopes and weird feelings against a real adult backdrop (or, realer adult backdrop).  It is like we get to watch Krull and get hear what McBride and Green and Hill were thinking when they were 13 watching it.  They are going back to their youthful expectations of adulthood, manhood, and showing how those scripts, or at least their earlier innocent readings of them, maneuver in the adult problems of failure, lack, and finding oneself to be an unmythic character in an unmythic world. It’s a look at the busted dreams of our kidselves, with a good dose of follow-up on the adults that we have become. For the fellows here, it is one long dick joke, and that makes sense. It’s a boomerang of a dick-joke, one started 20 years ago, initially about expectation and wonder, and now about insecurity and failure.

This batch of movies takes on the headiness of  those movies we watched a thousand times at sleepovers, where we began deciding what the world really is.  Your Highness is one more of the grown boy version, with tons of dicks and dragons, looking at how those old scripts manage to both fail and delight.

I’m not saying it’s a great movie, but it is an interesting one,

So, there’s that,

Yours,

CF

The Glenn Beck Decoder

Dear CF,

I was trying tonight to read Glenn Beck’s website in an effort to better understand his point of view and failed at the most basic level. The language feels foreign, inexact, like reading a pirated translation. (I read this April 1, 2011 entry three times before giving up—if you can explain it to me, I’d be grateful).

So I turned to Wordle for enlightenment, figuring it might do the work of an across-the-aisle Babelfish. That all Americans—even the uninitiated and the elites—might be able to follow our Paul Revere, I transformed four of his texts into beautiful word clouds.  (Wordle turns any text you paste into the window into an attractive arrangement of words whose relative sizes reflect the frequency of word usage.)

These statistical charts don’t just show the development of a great American thinker over time; I think you’ll find they also show which words he used most.

Let’s start with his 2008 article for CNN, “America Needs a Twelve-Step Program“:

The most frequently used words here make a haiku:

America, think!

Power step! (Country-guy way).

Life-government words.

Next up is “Obama’s socialist climate czar,” from 2009:

I did not choose this color scheme, by the way. It’s like the Wordle knew that Socialism is red Communism by another name.

In this case the message is clear, stripped of any namby-pamby attempts at a Japanese and frankly unpatriotic poetic form.

Know new global international socialist, Obama!

(Notice the kicky homophone, there for camouflage–lets it seem like he’s speaking to Obama, telling him “No new global international socialist!” while in fact he’s warning the world to know the one we already have in our midst. Apposition masked as a direct address.)

We pass to his response to the earthquake in Japan:

The meaning seems clear at first glance:

God continued saying Beck well.

God and Beck are in harmony. God pronounces the shibboleth (“Beck”) beautifully, and the two great beings are at peace. But might this cryptic statement hint at underlying tensions?

Consider a differently punctuated version:

God continued saying, “Beck, well…”

Hints, here, of mild disagreement.

Or, more ominous still:

God continued saying “Well, Beck…”

which obliquely suggests that God is tired of talking to Beck on the phone and tactfully trying to wrap up the conversation. Trouble in Paradise?

All signs point to yes: next up is Beck’s announcement on Fox of his departure.

Believe something, like business!  Know! Want! Take!

Powerful parting words. From behind the camera, a producer indicates that his time is up.

Wait! Beck says.

Time? he asks.

Going, he grumbles, and walks sullenly off.

Fondly,

M

The Government Shutdown in Cherubs

Dear CF,

From left to right: Obama, the Evil Mask of Socialism, Boehner, the Tea Party.

Fondly,

M

*(Photo taken at the Oakland Botanical Garden.)

Diorama of a Migraine

Fondly,

M

Gravid

Dear Carla Fran,

We celebrated the first day of spring with some friends, one of whom is pregnant. We went to a happy hour on the lake at a place I adore because it strives so strenuously for elegance, and the effect is more along the lines of Elegance with Ketchup, which might be my favorite kind. It has a gondola available for hire (complete with gondolier) should you decide, on a whim, to pretend that Oakland is Venice.

Anyway, two bewhiskered men of middle age at the next table interrupted us to ask our pregnant friend how pregnant she was. They had placed bets, they said, as if this explained something. Her husband couldn’t quite hear, but he leaned over the table, waving his hands in a worried way, and said “Don’t worry. She’s not drinking.” He said it loudly, over and over, pointing at her tiny thermos of chemical-free water. His doggedness made it clear to us all that this wasn’t the first time. Realizing that wasn’t what the conversation was about he turned back to us, confused. We pretended to talk. The man in the baseball cap observed that she was carrying low. The other remarked that she and her friend sitting next to her looked exactly alike. Were they twins? No? Sisters, then. Cousins? They were twins, right? (Both women were Asian.) No, my pregnant friend said, they weren’t anything but friends. “Are you sure? You must be twins or something!” said the one in the hat.

It got cold after that, and we went for burgers.

Fondly,

M