American Fez

You Are Here, Possibly

Warned of an approaching blizzard, I make the fundamental error of seeking updates from a live weather map on television.

But there's so much on-screen meteorological data, so many color-coded precipitation charts and animated storm-tracking diagrams, that it's impossible to tell exactly what part of the world the map is supposed to represent.

It could be New England, I guess, if you squint hard enough. Then again, it might also be Tahiti, the Black Forest, or even a live video feed from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover.

Is that really a cold front advancing towards southern Massachusetts, as the weatherman claims, or is he surreptitiously re-using old computer graphics from the typhoon that slammed into Bermuda last week?

The contours of the land mass in question are so obscured by computer generated imagery that it's impossible to tell.

I once accidentally set fire to a fold-up tourist map of San Francisco. Even while still aflame it was easier to read than this live weather map of who knows where.

Split Ends

3006 Freight Street, home of Euro Style Hair Salon, is not the most fashionable of addresses. Indeed, examining the building, a laconic eye would probably conclude the "euro style" referred to is Poland circa 1945. 

The establishment's awning, formerly bright red with white lettering, has faded and weathered into a sort of grimy puce. Its brickwork, a functional arrangement of grey blocks, is defaced by unreadable, monochromatic graffiti. I am always surprised to see an "open" sign on the front door when "condemned" would be more appropriate. The lighting inside is fluorescent green. There is a concrete ashtray beside the entrance that has not been emptied for quite some time.

Who gets their hair cut at Euro Style Hair Salon? I've never seen any customers sitting in the swivel chair while flicking through a dog-eared Vogue magazine. The ramshackle residents of Freight Street look as though they wash their hair once a month at most, lathering up with dish detergent followed by a quick rinse under a lukewarm faucet. There are no elaborate perms or trendy color highlights here.

Nevertheless, glossy advertisements for such haute couture coiffures stare out from the smudgy windows of Euro Style Hair Salon; headshots of glamorous models more suited to the nightclubs of New York and London than the dereliction of 3006 Freight Street. The owner might just as well promote pictures of Carmen Miranda and the Bride of Frankenstein for all the good it'll do his business. 

Euro Style Hair Salon does pedicures, too, apparently. Those must happen in the back room with a view of all the abandoned shopping carts and smashed bottles littering the ground beneath the Eastbound overpass. Imagine getting your toenails painted scarlet while staring at all that broken glass and rusting metal. But then I doubt anyone does. 

TMI February

February: the constipated month, stuck between December's festive diarrhea and the regular bowel movements of early Spring. A time to sit patiently on life's cold toilet seat while the new year finds its rhythm. 

If you think that's disgusting, remember the name February is derived from the Latin februum, meaning purification, so analogies to the expulsion of waste matter from the body are appropriate, even exact. 

We should be grateful for the invention of indoor plumbing; the installation of privies within the home and the demolition of their antecedents at the bottom of the garden. After all, it is my belief that the myth of the werewolf is derived from peasants witnessing their neighbors straining at stool in February's freezing moonlight. 

Fortunately, March approacheth, notoriously "windy" though it may be, and relief is at hand as we rip another sheet from the roll of calendar paper.

A Tale of Two AJs

I haven't read any AJ Liebling, although he's been among my top five "must get around to reading" authors since college.

Somehow his books never reach the top of the pile, pipped to a place on my bedside table by competing authors whose works capture my attention at the eleventh hour, and it's always the eleventh hour, apparently, when I'm considering reading AJ Liebling. 

Just about any other author can trump AJ Liebling. James Pope-Hennessy, Sainte-Beuve, Fernando Pessoa, Stella Gibbons, that guy who wrote the illustrated guide to starting your own hand-tool based woodshop. Even DH Lawrence. 

I have looked at a different AJ's books - AJ Ayer - but I found that experience soporific. I don't think my tyrannized brain slogged past the first few paragraphs without rebelling into dormancy and profound torpor.

AJ Ayer's friends called him 'Freddie,' which is like calling Beelzebub 'Bubby,' if you ask me. 

But I have a new AJ Liebling paperback in my hands now, a collection of essays with the winningly advantageous title Just Enough Liebling. Maybe, just maybe, just enough Liebling will be the right amount of AJ to finally shut out the other contenders.

Update: I'm reading Edward Hoagland instead

1984's Technology Is Still Watching You

In a forgotten room of an abandoned building, a long dead security guard is still at his post. 

His skeletal remains slowly collapse into the swivel chair where he sat each night drinking lukewarm coffee while observing the outside via an electronic eye.

But the monitor in front of him has been blank for many years. 

Ragged strips of blue uniform still cling to his crumbling bones. His peaked cap, always too big, has now toppled off skull, falling upturned onto the floor where it catches raindrops from the leaking roof.

Yet amongst all this disintegration and decay, somehow a long, bony finger still hovers over the record-button of a cobwebbed VCR

Videotape! Get with the program, suerveillance state. Big Brother should surely be recording his security camera footage as high-resolution digital files these days.

Rachmaninoff and Me

There was a time when I thought Rachmaninoff was an extra long, brown, and very thin European cigarette purchased by the carton from the Duty-Free shop at Schipol airport. 

Later, I discovered Rachmaninoff was actually tinny music emanating from an ancient portable radio-cassette machine in the local Russian Tea Room; a plinkety-plonk piano mocking me as I tried to figure out what to do with the dollop of jam I'd been served with my samovar. 

On Friday evenings, there were Tea Room Concerts: a square-shouldered, square-foreheaded bald man with a nose like an eagle's beak slaved away at a Bontempi keyboard. He never looked happy. Vocalise arranged for synthesised organ sound and samba drum rhythm was a particular favorite of the blue-rinsed hair crowd. It was their Brown Eyed Girl

"Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto number 3 in D-minor, opus thirty," said the man on the radio. "Daniel Batonwaver conducting the Chintz Youth Orchestra featuring soloist Anastasia Hamfisterova."

It was very quiet in the onion-domed church. You could hear my paperback copy of Pnin drop. "Sorry about that," I said to the man in the next pew. "They told me I'd be here all night so I brought along something to read. I must have dozed off." 

"That's highly unorthodox," he replied. 

The Face of Age (Monday)

The Face of Age has the pallor of Frankenstein's monster and the hairstyle of the Invisible Man.

It has Gothic graveyard teeth and Count Dracula's lips. Its hirsute ears are ersatz werewolf and its nose is the shape and texture of The Blob.

The Face of Age greets the new day like a vampire at sunrise. It staggers out into the world, arms outstretched like The Mummy in search of a secret lost in the sands of time. 

And its eyes are the terrified eyes of a horror film audience, peering at the flickering screen through trembling fingers.

The Face of Age is an X-rated B-movie and the picture quality is poor. I think my copy is on VHS.