Author Archives: Hal

Chaucer’s Salons

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From a long-time favorite novel, Steven Minkin’s A No Doubt Mad Idea:

“On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer’s Salons, call them, franchise chain.”

If Lucy Fell: HANS!

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If Lucy Fell (1996) would be a mostly forgettable movie, except for the way some of the performances are plainly early versions of characters the actors would take up later. Lucy Ackerman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is the template from which her portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was drawn. Bwick Elias, flower-child idiot artist, is the ur-goon of every idiot Ben Stiller has played thereafter (notably Zoolander).

But there’s also this great scene, at 0:56. Lucy and Bwick are on a date, at Bwick’s apartment:

^^^

{Bwick joins Lucy on a couch, facing a painting we’ve seen him working on previously.}

BWICK: It’s symbolic. {He gestures at the painting, which stays unseen.} Life equals love which actually equals death. Life equals death.

{We cut to see the painting}

LUCY: It’s symbolic?

BWICK: Yeah.

LUCY: Symbolic death?

BWICK: Symbols of life, and death, and love. Life equals death which is in the middle. The sub-set is love. Which is really what the symbol is. Love. Life equals love equals death. It’s symbolic.

LUCY: Wait. {She gets up off the couch, and walks over to the painting} You have a woman with “LIFE” painted on her, uh… area, and she’s stabbing to death a man with a knife that says “LOVE” on it. And then in big, bold letters it says, “LIFE=LOVE=DEATH.”
{beat}
I don’t know that it’s very symbolic, Bwick. It’s kind of spelled out.

BWICK: So… It sucks. HANS!

LUCY: No. It doesn’t suck. It’s just that it’s not really… You know, it’s… It’s a literal painting.

{As she says this, an assistant who looks like Fabio — long blonde hair, overalls, no shirt — splashes some sort of fluid onto the painting.}

LUCY: It’s not symbolic. Which is… Fine.

BWICK: Hm-hm.

LUCY: It’s literal.

BWICK: Right. It just… Literally sucks.

{We see that Hans is patiently standing next to the painting, now with a blowtorch in his hand.}

LUCY: No.

BWICK: No, you’re right. You’re right. It just symbolically sucks. HANS!

{Hans turns on the blowtorch, and sets the painting ablaze.}

BWICK: It certainly isn’t very literal any more, is it?

{Lucy turns to the painting, as it continues to burn.}

LUCY: No, it’s… It’s symbolic.

Interestingly, this morphed when we got a Mercedes wagon. When trying to figure out some arcane feature of the car, I always imagined some engineer in Stuttgart, whom I had to think like to understand: HANS!

(Although sometimes I would credit his partner, Fritz.)

This method also is required for Microsoft products, both apps and operating systems. Step back, and think like a programmer in Redmond, not like a general computer user.

KROQ

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Various phrases that slipped into our lexicon. They had a brilliant person doing their promotional spots in the 1990s.

Example:
”Muni mula! Muni mula!” (From an island chief.)
”What’s he saying?”
”Either he’s inviting us to dinner, or it’s ‘aluminum’ backwards.”

Many jokes of where you hear a verb of the form {x}-er, and the reply comes back, “{x}-‘er? I don’t even know ‘er!” Oh, sure, this is Music Hall corny stuff, and variations of the old, “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!” (Allegedly the best-selling postcard of all time.)

KROQ these days has had many format changes since then, and fallen from its pedestal accordingly.

Ai-chi My-chi

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Lexicon. Only me. Comes from a co-worker when I was at Gallo Wine. Maria, the woman who entered in the sales info before I could run the job that spat out the 3×5 cards that routed the delivery trucks. (And then I could go to lunch.)

Anyway… Usage: This morning I was served my breakfast, and as I was adjusting the combination of my side table, my food tray, and my napkin, I said, “Ai-chi, my-chi.” It’s just that kind of interjection. Some might say, “Aw, jeez,” or something similar.

“I don’t make the news…”

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“…I just report it.”

Lexicon. Oft-quoted by myself, originally picked up by me from Gordon Robison.

I’m racking my brain for an example of how I use it. Usually goes like this:

“This is really terrible.”
”Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
”I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

He was the news director at KSPC FM, the college radio station at Pomona College while we were both there. This is a good interview of him, from 2005. He’s been with Fox, he’s been with ABC. Lived in Cairo, Amman, Baghdad. Been a Professor. Linked-In tells me he’s an Executive Producer for Al Jazeera Media Network these days.

Back in 1997, I was in Atlanta for COMDEX, working for Toshiba, and staying at the Omni Hotel. I called up Gordon, asking if we could get together, and catch up. He was working for CNN International at the time (the flavor of CNN that the world outside the US sees), and offered to take me around the CNN facility.

My little journalist wannabe heart went pitter-pat. “I guess I could do that. If it’s easier for you,” I said, in my best poker voice.

He shows me around the place. Shows me the giant poster of CNN’s ratings, with the huge spike during Gulf War I. Walks me through a set with a wraparound desk and two empty chairs, clearly a broadcast set. Points to a glassed-in passageway, one story up from where we are:
“See that?”
”Yeah.”
”That’s where the regular tour goes.”

We make our way to what’s obviously a live production control room. All the video feeds queued up. A wall of monitors, each with something different.

“Hey, Gordon! New hire?”

I wish.

We wind things down. In retrospect, I realize we didn’t say much to each other about ourselves, and he was showing off a little to someone who knew him when… But I didn’t mind, at all.

I walked back to my hotel. Which was just across an atrium.

But it might have been across a world.

(EDITED TO ADD: Wikipedia ascribes the phrase to Mark Russell. But A) They quote him as saying it’s an “old newsman’s adage,” and B) they include the least encyclopedic phrase in the world, the dreaded, “citation needed.”)

“Confusingly similar…”

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It was back in the late 1980s, and both Ulrika and I were working (in a volunteer way) the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, CA. There was something else trying to start up, and they were… highly interested in people with experience helping their enterprise. Word came down that anyone who worked or aided in any way a, “confusingly similar Renaissance event” would be canned, banned, and called nasty things forever more.

I mention all this because that phrase entered our lexicon. “Confusingly similar {x}…” is more useful than you might think.

For example, Ted Lasso’s third season features a tall, knot-top, bicycle kicking superstar character named Zava. And it’s fairly clear he’s based on Zlatan Ibrahimović. So we call Zava , “the confusingly similar Zlatan character.”

Sakamoto Ryūichi (坂本 龍一), 1952-2023

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I heard yesterday that Sakamoto had died. It was from cancer, and not wholly unexpected, but it still saddens me.

The first CD I bought was the soundtrack to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. That meant I also had to buy a player for it, and then hook it up to my big receiver (the fashion of the time). Both the movie and CDs themselves came out in 1983, but I didn’t buy the disc until 1987.

Here’s “Forbidden Colours” the haunting main theme, with vocals by David Sylvian.

From the Hollywood Reporter :

“In summer 2018, it emerged that Sakamoto had found the music so bad at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Manhattan (he had long divided his time between Tokyo and New York) that he contacted the chef and offered to create a playlist. He went on to do the same for a new bar and restaurant the chef opened, without payment or fanfare.”

(The restaurant was Kajitsu, in Murray Hill. If you go to their website, you’ll find it’s now advising you to look at *.jp domain… because they’ve closed, and retrenched.)

Sakamoto won the Oscar for the music in The Last Emperor, which frequently looked like one long music video for him. But perhaps my favorite score he did was for Tony Takitani.

I’ll miss him.