Italia!

After procrastinating on it for all of undergrad, I am finally traveling for Let's Go this summer. I will be writing the Tuscany section of Let's Go: Italy 2011. Exciting!

Although the travel guide won't be on shelves til the winter, I'll be officially blogging on the Let's Go website as well - you can find my Italy stories here.

Ciao!

Back from spring break! Back to learning!

Today I learned that in 1933, a Mr. Maxwell J. House* hired a rabbi to say that the coffee bean is more like a berry than a bean, and therefore coffee is kosher for Passover. And thus was born the Maxwell House haggadah, sheepishly tucked into grocery bags by the dozen every Passover by thousands of families who couldn't manage to remember where they stored last year's Maxwell House haggadahs.

Even though my 15 Maxwell House haggadahs - the fruits of my mother's visits to four different supermarkets last weekend - would be enough (dayenu!), I am having an all-Gentile, all-singer seder, and therefore am compiling my own supplement. Thus far it consists of "readings" from Marjorie Morningstar, The King & I, Tony Kushner, and The Nanny. Suggestions for quotes, songs, and other ephemera are quite welcome.

And, typed by hand from Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays because amazingly this wasn't yet on the internet, I give you the following from Tony Kushner's rambling short "Notes on Akiba":

...And, and look how good my kid is, he... performs, he really performs, he memorizes, he is prepared, a performer, he's four years old he can barely read Green Eggs & Ham and look he has memorized lengthy strings of what are to him nonsense syllables which he will now produce flawlessly on command because he knows like the whole year to follow and his life along with it will be cursed, the crops will fail and Elijah won't come because YOU FORGOT WHAT COMES AFTER MA NISHTANAHA ETCETERA, and like, that's not affliction?

*not really, but the rest of it is true

This weekend I learned that the church choir experience is completely revolutionized through the addition of a neck pillow. Reverend Gomes, you are a lovely man, but your sermons are very long.

After years of struggling to pithily describe the majority of my high school classmates in a way that doesn't:

• involve ethnic stereotyping ("guidos")
• inspire the listener to turn the claim back on me ("JAPs")
• sound too douchey / loaded for people who actually know their Marx ("lumpenproletariat")
• seem better reserved for describing the Five Towns ("nouveau riche")
• seem inaccurate since most people do go to college ("townies")

I finally learned the perfect word for summing up my hometown - chavvy.

Today I learned that cool institutions will sometimes let you do cool stuff for them if you just ask. :)

I'm adding another category to my What I Learned In School Today posts. Inspired by Project Zero's cheesy-but-surprisingly-effective See Think Wonder thought routines, I will also, when applicable, list something I am wondering about.

I am wondering about the orchestra pit. Specifically, about the point in architectural history when theaters first started concealing the orchestra in a pit (this was with Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which is something I learned yesterday). I'd never really thought before about what a huge innovation the concealed orchestra is. Would we have ever gotten modern musical theater without it?

Chronicle of a Thanksgiving

-----

[Jenny points at a large piece of driftwood on the beach - it is a good six feet tall]

Jenny - What's that?
Mom & Dad - [simultaneous] Pizza box.

-----

[we are staying in an A-frame house. Jenny got the loft, which has five twin beds in a row]

Jenny - How come you all get bedrooms, while I have to sleep in the Tenement Museum?
Me - It's a hard knock life.

-----

[Jenny is studying abroad in Bulgaria in the spring]

Me - Are you taking Bulgarian?
Jenny - You think SUNY New Paltz offers Bulgarian? No one offers Bulgarian. Even Harvard doesn't offer Bulgarian.
Me - I bet they do.
Jenny - I bet they don't.
Me - Five dollars says Harvard offers Bulgarian.
Jenny - You're on.

[ten minutes later, from the other room]

Jenny - Son of a... There's a goddamn Bulgarian dance team!

-----

Jenny - I accidentally said one of our strange family expressions to a stranger yesterday.
Us - Uh oh.
Jenny - I told a lady in the restroom that she's a better man than I, Gunga Din. She left muttering to herself "Gunga Din?" This was at the therapist's office, by the way.

-----

Mom - I see, said the hammer.

----

Jenny - I told JRB about the time you played Mama Rose when you were 8. He said that he was writing a himself note to call Arthur Laurents tomorrow and tell him.
Me - That's awesome! I have to tell Ben.
Jenny - He'll just be pissed that Arthur Laurents knows who you are and not him.
Daddy - Not if Arthur Laurents sues you for performing Gypsy without the rights...

-----

And a re-post of the classic, from Thanksgiving 2006:

Mom: The Salvation Army is coming at noon to take the sofas.
Me: What?
Mom: The sofas in the living room. They smell like the dog, it's time to
get rid of them. So the Salvation Army's going to come get them.
Me: But... we have 14 people coming for Thanksgiving tomorrow...
Mom: Right. Can't have them sitting on smelly couches.
Me: So instead they'll stand?
Mom: We have folding chairs.

- one hour later -

Salvation Army guy: The big sofa is too stained, sorry.
Me: Mom, why don't you give them twenty bucks and ask them to carry the
sofa outside so the city can come take it?
Mom: I don't want a sofa on the front lawn when we have people coming.

- two hours later -

Me: Mom, what are you doing with the sofa?
Mom: I changed my mind.
Me: We'll never get it through the door ourselves.
Mom: Your father will be home in an hour.

- one hour later -

Dad: #$^$%&@#$%@!

- one hour later -

Dad: Wait, tilt it towards me... no tilt the top... now pull the bottom
left towards you...
Me: We're gonna die.

(Jenny: Keep it down, I'm sleeping.
Mom: It's four in the afternoon!
Me: We're gonna die.)

- one hour later -

Dad: Maybe if we saw the legs off...

- one hour later -

Buttons: ::finally notices we're taking his sofa::
Buttons: ::freaks out::
Buttons: ::goes back to sleep::

- finally -

Mom: We did it! The couch is gone!
::everyone does the "Friends" couch pile-on::

- later -

Neighbor: Do you guys know there's a couch on your lawn?

Little Einsteins; or, the decline of civilization

I am a big supporter of children’s television, but I have long been skeptical of preschool programming. With the very notable exception of Sesame Street, which is designed to be awesome for parents as well as toddlers, television for preschoolers is largely inscrutable to grownups. There’s just no accounting for the taste of 2-year-olds. Probably because they shouldn’t be watching tv at all.

Often, preschool programs employ the “interactive” model of Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer, in which the viewer is asked direct questions by a protagonist who blinks far too infrequently for comfort. On some level I eagerly anticipate the art that will someday be created by a generation whose concept of the fourth wall was demolished so early on – in my day, kids’ tv only got as meta as the seriously over-branded Where’s Waldo, which froze the action intermittently so we could run up to the screen and, you know, find Waldo. But on the whole, these “interactive” shows (and I will never ever call them interactive without a liberal dose of scare quotes) are labeled as educational, while being benign at best – and, far too often, actively idiotic.

Today I watched Little Einsteins. You might have heard of the Baby Einstein brand. The tv version is a Dora-style show on the Disney channel that promotes arts literacy or something. [Note that the actual baby Einstein was deemed to be no Einstein; irony is an undeveloped muscle in the world of preschool programming].

Now, I have no quibbles about the value of arts literacy. I myself once wrote a pitch about talking paintings, though largely to cannibalize art puns from a failed project about singing paintings. And then I discovered that Sesame Street had already done it, as there is no good idea that wasn’t done first and better by the Muppets. Twice.

My quibble is not with the end, but the means. The thought process behind the Baby Einstein franchise is that context-less exposure to Mozart and Picasso at an early age will stay in the system – like acid – and conveniently resurface sixteen years later in the presence of a Harvard admissions officer.

In practice, this means assigning each episode a painting and symphony (in the episode I watched, “Go West, Young Train,” these were a Navajo basket and a phrase from Bizet’s L’Arlsienne Suite #2), and randomly inserting them into a Dora-style problem-solving adventure. But the problem is not at all related to the art. A little red train in the Old West was on its way to a hoe-down, you see, and its bag of goodies – including three violins that ghost-bowed the Bizet, because what’s a hoe-down without some French ballet scoring? – was stolen by an evil jet plane.

Sure, whatever. How about that art? Well, the Navajo basket was not woven into the events, but served as a backdrop. The little red train chased the evil jet into a cave (don’t think too hard, now), and the cave happened to look like the basket. Not that the basket was used as a map or anything. The idea is to divorce the art from its context, remember? They just went into a cave that happened to resemble that basket we saw in the opening credits.

On the music side of things, four measures of Bizet are sprinkled liberally through the soundtrack. A time-honored way to exploit the public domain teach classical music, though Bugs Bunny was a bit more willing to get past the opening phrases. But Little Einsteins goes one better than “What’s Opera, Doc” and uses the Dora model to teach real live music vocabulary too.

Dora’s claim to fame is, of course, the Spanish words. Her dialog is punctuated with random Spanish exclamations (“clap your hands mas rapido!”) that may or may not increase children’s comfort with bilingualism, depending on who sponsored the study. But when Little Einsteins borrows this technique, the result is dialog like this:

“The little red train is going andante, but the evil jet is going allegro! Help the little red train go more allegro!”

What. the. fuck.

Let’s ignore the fact that words like andante and allegro are completely useless for anyone who isn’t, say, sightreading a score or writing liner notes. This vocabulary is not only completely useless, but decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Tempo and velocity are NOT THE SAME THING. You can’t “go allegro”! You don’t walk allegro any more than you play the piano at 55 mph. Granted, I have had several conductors fond of obliterating traditional boundaries of units of measure (“the sopranos are two octaves behind and a golf course sharp!” – Dr. Jameson Marvin). But this is ridiculous.

Programs like Little Einsteins will not make your kid smart. They will quite possibly make your kid stupider. But at least they’ll be able to hum four measures of non-Carmen Bizet. And that’s more than you can.

Point-missing, Spoilery, or Otherwise Amusing Translations of Movie Titles

It was raining a lot in Sevilla, so Jenny and I amused ourselves by making this list in a FNAC.

Point-missing, Spoilery, or Otherwise Amusing Translations of Movie and TV Titles
(key below)

1. Mejor... Imposible
2. Desayuno con Diamantes
3. Atrapado en el Tiempo
4. El Invisible Harvey
5. Urgencias
6. Expediente X
7. A dos metros bajo tierra
8. El Sueño de mi Vida
9. Descubriendo Nunca Jamás
10. El Caballero Oscuro
11. La Guerra de las Galaxas
12. Padre Made in USA

(the originals)

1. As Good As It Gets
2. Breakfast at Tiffanys
3. Groundhog Day
4. Harvey
5. ER
6. X-Files
7. Six Feet Under
8. 13 going on 30
9. Finding Neverland
10. The Dark Knight
11. Star Wars
12. American Dad

Bonus book section!

Los Cuentos de Beedle el Bardo


Also, Harvard fails at policing unauthorized uses of its image overseas, apparently:

I think I'm going to be giving up this travel blogging thing, because typing up my journal really takes much longer than I expected. So I say au revoir (with a really revolting French accent, but Jenny is tutoring me) with a couple lists.

Favorite names for Underground stops:

• Elephant & Castle
• Tooting Broadway
• Cutty Sark
• Cockfosters
• Barking
• Ickenham
• Bounds Green
• Swiss Cottage
• Wembley Park
• Canada Water
• Heron Quays
• Shepherd's Bush
• Mile End
• Stepney Green
• Burnt Oak
• Chalk Farm

Favorite names of varieties of roses in Regent's Park, as indicated by little signs next to thoroughly dead twigs in the ground:

• Perestroika
• Top Marks
• Yesterday
• Buff Beauty
• Golden Celebrations
• Wife of Bath
• Vidal Sassoon
• Eye Paint
• Eye Opener
• The Times
• Razzle Dazzle
• Bruce
• Summerfield Miranda
• Tiddles
• Conspicuous
• Dr. Eckener
• Narrow Waters
• Tall Story
• Falstaff
• Cardinal Richelou
• Mayor of Casterbridge

Bon voyage! (you mean bon voya-guh)

Ceci n'est pas une blog

This is not a blog.

Well, technically it is. But not really.

Due to popular demand (okay, scattered but persistent demand), I will now be providing reading material of the online variety with some regularity.

I have resisted traditional blogging my entire internet-life, for the simple reason that I know myself - I'll get way too into it. (cf: my away messages, in general) Also:

me: here's what my blog would end up being:1) stuff about bbc shows
2) transcripts of our gchat conversations3) whining about my under-employment

Jenny: ...you say all this like it's a bad thing

So this is not a blog. This is digital, public storage space for stuff that I write. And by stuff that I write, I mean anything that I think is a bit clever and want to share, ranging from essays and sketches to emails and drinking games. What there won't be is a play-by-play of my life. Because who the hell wants to read that?

Enjoy! And just because this isn't a blog doesn't mean you shouldn't leave comments. :)