“Squirrels nest in trees?—No way. I thought they lived in stone walls or in holes in the ground like chipmunks,” protested a friend in her early 40s. A similar response from a second friend suggested a pattern. (Both, of course, were referring not to short-tailed ground squirrels but to the ubiquitous grey squirrel that has adapted so successfully in our midst.)
Both of my friends are graduates of fine colleges, but, remarkably, both have lived nearly their entire lives—nearly 95 years combined—in rural Hatfield, Massachusetts. Unlike neighboring Northampton and Amherst—both multicultural hotbeds—Hatfield—with its predominance of Polish, Irish, and Anglo-American descendents, is as ethnically homogeneous as the milk from its Holsteins. If I moved to Hatfield and its several Jewish families fled, I would be the town Jew. This year’s high school graduating class of about 40 sported one African American—a school-choice nonresident [Was she pushed or did she jump?]
Squirrel Literacy Now! If my two soon-to-be former friends from the sticks are so profoundly squirrel-challenged, what about the rest of us from places on the map that don’t involve squinting? A recent New York Timesarticle by science writer Natalie Angier makes a splendid case for squirrel literacy and the squirrel’s—especially the grey squirrel’s—extraordinary adaptive fitness. According to Angier, they can leap 10 times their body length, and rotate their ankles 180 degrees, which allows them to grip with the tenaciousness of a reverse mortgage salesman at a senior center. Those assets combined with double-jointed hind legs allow squirrels to accelerate and change direction on a dime. If they played football, they’d be finesse backs, split ends, safeties.
The surprisingly sophisticated squirrel brain allows for tactical deception. They’ll bury a nut/seed, dig it up, and rebury it, over and over again. If they suspect they’re being watched, they’ll fake the interment and move on to safer ground. Confession is good for the soul. As a five-year-old, I watched a squirrel bury an acorn from my backyard window. When the critter vanished, I retrieved the nut and jiggered the burial site to appear untampered. Then, at my back window, I observed the creature dig in frustration. In retrospect, I’m not proud of my behavior then and, for that matter, of my unkind words above directed at the good people of Hatfield. But for me, impulse control has no pride.
Squirrels are also “master” kvetchers, emphasizes Ms. Angier. Their repertoire of chucks and kuks runs the gamut of negativity from mild discomfort to the prospect of neighborhood-wide bedlam.
A Tale about a Tail. Without question, the squirrel’s lightening reflexes, its loquaciousness, and its juiced-up metabolism give you one furry jive artist. That was much of the charm in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, an account of escalating squirrel chutzpah in the face of peril—the taciturn, lethal owl, Old Brown. During the six-day adventure, Nutkin’s siblings and cousins paid Old Brown tribute in mice, moles minnows, and fat beetles, the latter which Potter insisted were as good as plums in plum pudding for Old Brown. Nutkin, on the other hand, offered annoying riddles and escalating impertinence, which culminated on the sixth day:
Nutkin made a whirring noise to sound like the wind, and he took a running jump right onto the head of Old Brown!...Then all at once there was a flutterment and a scufflement and a loud "Squeak!" The other squirrels scuttered away into the bushes. When they came back very cautiously, peeping round the tree—there was Old Brown sitting on his door-step, quite still, with his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened. But Nutkin was in his waistcoat pocket!
This looks like the end of the story; but it isn't.Old Brown carried Nutkin into his house, and held him up by the tail, intending to skin him; but Nutkin pulled so very hard that his tail broke in two, and he dashed up the staircase and escaped out of the attic window.And to this day, if you meet Nutkin up a tree and ask him a riddle, he will throw sticks at you, and stamp his feet and scold, and shout—"Cuck-cuck-cuck-cur-r-r-cuck-k-k!"
In April 2009, my son and I lucked out with a behind-the-scenes tour at the TD Bank Garden, several hours before a Celtics game. Shortly after admiring photos of Ted Williams’ elegant swing in a mini-shrine devoted to the great batsman, we noticed Ray Allen alone on the floor circumnavigating the 3-point arc. I began counting. Before I lost interest, Ray had made 17 of 20 3-point jumpers from his “spots” around the arc. Most of the positive outcomes were all net. If you focused on just the bottom of the net, you’d see it flip half a foot upward with clone-like precision before dropping back down in the ball’s wake. Ray’s delivery was efficient but much more. Its gracefulness was a basketball analog to the Williams swing.
Forget Ray’s streakiness in this year’s playoff finals. Historically, he shares stratospheric company with the NBA’s shooting elite. Only Reggie Miller has made more 3-point shots. And in lifetime percentage for free throw completions, Ray ranks number nine (.885) on a compressed roster led by the astounding Mark Price (.904).
These days, Price, who spent most of his career with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a shooting coach for the Atlanta Hawks. He trains other NBA players at the Mark Price Basketball Academy in Suwanee, Georgia. The academy’s Mark Price Shooting Lab employs radar and video tracking equipment to evaluate shooting arc and the mechanics of a shooter’s form.
Mention Mark Price--I think of phonology. That’s because of a memorable moment with my late aunt—a language scholar—inspired by my high school friend, Marc Price. Aunt Sylvia and her husband, my Uncle Bill—a philosopher and editor—were language sticklers. They were that rare couple that at the dinner table might argue over the use of the subjunctive.
One June just after the end of the high school year in Worcester, Massachusetts, Marc and I visited Sylvia and Bill in Washington, D.C. Marc returned to Worcester a week later; I stayed on in Washington. After he had left, Sylvia remarked that she had enjoyed his company. But she had one reservation: Every time you hear his first and last name together, she emphasized, there’s a sonic explosion. That’s the k sound and the p sound colliding without the buffer of a consonant in between. That’s phonological trouble, she said. I’m sure his parents had no idea what they were doing when they named him. We’ll all just have to grin and bear it.
For the future author of Wig & Pen, that insight proved far more eventful than dinner time revelations about the subjunctive. It was the beginning of a realization that I had better pay greater attention to the role of sound and rhythm in both writing and speech. So in making tradeoffs as a writer and editor, one inevitable question on my short list of concerns is and always will be—How does it sound?
Je me souviens! On an extended August weekend in 2002, only nine months before American supermarkets would begin bowdlerizing “French” from French fries after France’s refusal to buy into the mess in Iraq, Amherst, Massachusetts welcomed an unprecedented invasion of Francophiles.
More than 1,000 owners and enthusiasts of schlumpy Citroëns descended on Amherst and the University of Massachusetts for the International Citroën Car Club’s annual convocation. The first such gathering outside Europe, the event attracted owners from that side of the pond and others who had trekked in their marginally dependable autos from as far away as Washington State, British Columbia, and Mexico.
With exhibits at the university’s Student Union and Campus Center and hundreds of Citroëns parked around the campus pond, the gathering reached full strength on a 90 degree Saturday afternoon. Every owner had a unique tale to impart of how and where he had purchased his Citroën, his Job-like patience in securing replacements for malfunctioning parts, and his survival on the road in an oversized kitchen appliance.
Like antique car owners, Citroën drivers don’t drive—they motor. By necessity, they are resourceful mechanics. And their bricolage extends to amenities. One owner proudly showed me a phonograph secured on erector-set brackets in the crawl space otherwise known as the back seat. A second revealed an oddity under the dash of the passenger’s seat that looked like an ensconced aquarium with a spigot. It produced cold Orangina.
The gathering disbanded on Sunday morning. That afternoon on a drive north to Greenfield via Route 5-10, I noticed a disabled Citroën on the side of the road. Several miles later I saw a second and then a third. From that point on I looked away. Two days earlier, meeting up with a supercilious Belgian in Antonio’s Pizza in downtown Amherst put things in perspective. When I joked that Citroëns would struggle in Nascar, he sniffed, Monsieur, it iz not ze speed, but ze nuance of your adventure that matters.
Lately I’ve been listening to Charles Ives’ Holidays Symphony, a compelling four-movement evocation of Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving Day. Ives was a true music revolutionary. Some consider him America’s greatest composer.
Ives’ movements often begin contemplatively and build, sometimes fitfully, to crazy-quilt climaxes of multiple American musical themes. The Holidays Symphony’s 4th of July movement, for example, juxtaposes fragments of Colombia, The Gem of the Ocean; The Battle Hymn of the Republic;Yankee Doodle;Reveille; and a jagged motif by Ives himself. You feel that you’ve time travelled to some late 19th –early 20th century overloaded soundscape of musical Americana that’s on the verge of an Ivesian breakdown. That’s usually when Ives pulls the plug, leaving you in a parting wake of musical contemplation—an exit rather than a resolution.
Nobody on the planet is a better advocate for Ives than Michael Tilson Thomas, who demystifies and adds excitement to The Holidays Symphony in a terrific DVD in his Keeping Score series. After he dissects the symphony movement by movement (accompanied by vivid multimedia examples), he treats you a winning performance under his own baton with the San Francisco Symphony. Visit the Holidays Symphony’s Keeping Score website here.
So how about an Ivesian symphony dedicated to genuinely obscure state holidays—i.e., holidays celebrated largely by state employees?
That occurred to me on Bunker Hill Day (June 17th), one of three springtime holidays “celebrated” by state workers in Massachusetts. The other two are Patriots Day and Evacuation Day. (The latter commemorates the day in March 1776 when the Brits abandoned Boston.) Massachusetts may lead the nation in such state observances, but other states, in their own poignant celebrations, have much to offer the musical enterprise at hand.
Favorites include Cesar Chavez Day in California, Arbor Day in Nebraska, and Pioneer Day, a.k.a. The Day of Deliverance, in Utah. Alaskans celebrate Seward Day and Alaska Day and Hawaiians undulate on days that honor Kamehameha the Great and Prince Kūhiō. Finally, there are holidays heavy on southern charm like Lee and Jackson (that’s Stonewall, not Andrew) Day in Virginia and Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
With a so much inspiration and so little time remaining on another one of my state days off --a Personal
Day--here are my preliminary . . .
Sketches for an Ivesian State Holidays Symphony
First Movement: Lee and Jackson Day—Virginia, January 2. A choral quartet version of the elegiac southern hymn, Washing in the Possum’s Bounty gives way to a spritely string orchestral arrangement of Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk. (evoking the exuberance of Confederate aspirations). Staccato upwellings of Dixie intrude, yielding a strident hybrid consummation. After the bottom drops out, a lone fiddle takes us downstream with a spectral rendition of Robbie Robertson’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
Second Movement: Evacuation Day—Massachusetts, March 17. For openers, any lush Elgarian theme will do for veneration of all things British. Upon restatement, the theme incurs escalating pepperings from impolite fifes and drums. Next, a full orchestral wash of London Bridges falls victim to merciless sonic deconstruction. The movement’s coda—the specially commissioned Evacuation Tango—accompanies footage of state workers rising en masse from their desks and abandoning their offices.
Third Movement: King Kamehameha Day—Hawaii, June 11. Sonic titillation from a lapping surf morphs into a traditional Hawaiian chant with thumping shark-skin drums offering a plea to the forest god Kane for Kamehameha the Great’s (1738-1819) shadow “to never grow less.” A spinning Bakelite radio dial surfing across snippets of big band swing settles in on Laurel and Hardy’s rendition of Honolulu Baby(Where’d you get those eyes?). In recessional, slack key guitar master Ledward Kaapana bids us a terminal aloha with Lei' Awapuhi (Yellow Ginger Lei).
Final Movement: You decide! My short list is a toss-up between Utah’s Pioneer Day (July 24) and Rhode Island’s Victory Day (August 15), which celebrates the United States’ defeat of Japan and the end of WWII. For Pioneer Day, you might glean inspiration from the apocryphal From Jeptha’s Bosom: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Wonder Years. If you favor V-Day--Rhode Island is the only state that celebrates it, probably because of the heavy involvement of its naval bases in the Pacific War--why not finish up with Randy Newman’s exuberant Political Science [They All Hate Us Anyhow, So Let’s Drop the Big One Now?]
An Ivesian Puzzlement
Finally, Wig & Pen wonders how Ives would have viewed this proliferation of state holidays and their “get out of jail” cards for state and (other) employees. Music, after all, was Ives’ avocation. In the work-a-day world, he commuted from Danbury, Connecticut to Manhattan as an insurance executive. He ultimately owned his own firm, Ives & Myrick (1907-1930), where he developed estate-related insurance products for well-to-do clients.
In the early days of the last century, many viewed the insurance business as radical. By the standards of the day, then, Ives pushed the envelope both in business and in music. Given his pioneering disposition, would Charlie Ives have welcomed state holidays and encouraged his employees to take the day off? That Is The Unanswered Question.
The previous Wig & Pen entry touching on Nikita Khrushchev evoked the childhood reminiscence below.
That’s not Mr.Yetvin in the above photo, but my grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sandman. Like Yetvin and Nikita Khrushchev, he spoke fluent Russian, was built close to the ground, and exuded a peasant’s unstuffiness. Unlike Yetvin, Zadie saw the glass as half full. For him, an indispensible recreation was swimming (perhaps natating is a better word) stark naked at the YMCA with his ageing mates. (Watching them launch from the diving board was breathtaking.)
Another passion was grocery shopping on behalf of the two women in his life, his wife (my grandmother) and his daughter (my mother). A savvy arbitrageur, he would travel the seven hills of Worcester, Massachusetts with his portfolio of coupons in search of the slightest price advantage. His accomplice was always his light blue 1952 Mercury, dubbed the Speedmobile by the kids on my street. “Luyis, into the machine; times a- wastin’,” he'd exhort. My friends would ride their bikes or run alongside the Speedmobile, keeping pace and often passing us.
Mr. Yetvin was decidedly bald. His suspenders and khaki pants secured shirts with large checks that resembled Kansas from the air. To my friends and me, Yetvin and Khrushchev might have been separated at birth. It was 1961—the year of the Bay of Pigs. We were deeply fearful of Russian missiles and Russian spies. Yetvin’s disposition exuded subversiveness. He would snarl at any children who got too close to the embankment-lawn that buffered his brick cottage. Some of the kids would respond with cat calls, even flipping him the bird. Little Howie Rubin once rode his bike half way up Yetvin’s pitched driveway. Yetvin followed him down the driveway with an edger.
In the late spring of 1962, the Yetvin Affair took a foreboding turn. Our neighbor stopped mowing his lawn. By July it was nearly waist high. More than once we watched Yetvin—sometimes smirking, sometimes snarling—take a sickle to what looked increasingly like a wheat field. “A sickle—like in the Soviet flag,” remarked my next door neighbor, Adam Weinstein.
Then one day in late July, Jamie Rubin—Howie’s older brother—rang my doorbell. “Get down to Yetvin’s—now,” he gasped. “The lawn is burning. The old fart set his lawn on fire.” The embankment and several yards of lawn behind it were ablaze. My fear was Pavlovan and primal. The crackling flames, the heat, the smell, and the prospect of a dangerous elemental force out of control in a middle class Worcester neighborhood—What could be more unsettling to an 11-year old?
Back in the early 1960s, everybody burned paper and brush in outdoor metal incinerators. Smoke and its
byproducts were regular ingredients in the evening air. But Yetvin’s inferno was an affront to the neighborhood, to the order of things—and worse still, to the sanctity of the American lawn. For weeks, the jet-black scorched earth that once was lawn festered as a badge of his subversiveness. “Stay away from Yetvin and his yard,” my father demanded. “He’s unstable.”
Ten years later as a student of anthropology, I had an epiphany while reading Smolensk under Soviet Rule, a book about agricultural practices, land distribution, and politics in a Belarussian city and district during the 1920s and 1930s. Russians, it turned out, burned their fields to enrich their fertility ( a variant on the widespread practice of slash-and-burn agriculture.) That brought back memories of Yetvin. Suddenly he seemed a tad less loony—although no less subversive or mysterious. If you have inside information about Mr. Yetvin, please contact this blog. What became of him? And more to the point, what actually was his game?
Take two and call your lobotomist in the morning. In a classic psych experiment, about half of a subject group charged with counting a basketball team’s passes in the half court failed to notice the accomplice in the gorilla suit who briefly strode onto the court. A presumably honest Hillary Clinton remembered sniper fire overhead when touching down in her 1996 visit to Tuzla in war-torn Bosnia. Reporters recalled a different story: a peaceful landing and welcoming ceremony graced by a child reading a poem.
These and much more are grist for Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’ new book, The Invisible Gorilla, an exploration of the distortions and outright illusions that accompany our individual and collective perceptions and memories. Don’t be fooled, note the authors: our brains are not cameras—they construct and reconstruct memories and perceptions with creative aplomb—sometimes they addeth; other times they taketh away.
If the shoe won’t fit . . . Reading the New York Times’ thumbs-up review of the book several Sundays ago ignited my own memory of perhaps the greatest collective illusion of the Cold War era. Remember footage or photos of Khrushchev banging his shoe during his 1960 speech at the United Nations? Nikita with shoe is one of the iconic images of the era. But according to former Washington Post journalist Peter Carlson in his entertaining K Blows Top, there was no video and no photo of the “act.” Alas, we’ve inherited just one photo of the shoe—a loafer, which sits inertly on the desk in front of K.
Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, who has lived in the United States since 1991, notes Carlson, regularly asks audiences if they recall images of his father banging the shoe. “I say, please raise your hand if you saw it, and many people raise their hands. They really think they saw it,” he remarks in Carlson’s book. Try your own version of the question at your next party. Some of your friends will bet the house that they saw K’s shoe in action. Their certainty will reflect the viral potency and reinforcement of the human herd's collective memories.
Two weeks ago, I became excessively agitated upon discovering the Web photo (above right) of Khrushchev in the act—so agitated that I emailed Khrushchev’s biographer, William Taubman, at Amherst College. The professor’s response was decisive:
I'm certain it's been photoshopped. Because even if he did bang his shoe (which I doubt), he is alleged to have done so while seated at a desk rather than standing at the lectern. But after interviewing a lot of people about the whole episode (many of them after my K bio came out), I believe K only brandished his shoe but did not bang it.
Learn how Professor Taubman arrived at his conclusions in his sparkling, meticulous opinion essay in the July 26-27 issue of the International Herald Tribunehere.
A Note to Self-Important Photoshoppers. Be advised that Photoshopping a loafer into K’s hand and launching the photo into cyberspace may reflect your affinity for a consummate Stalinist tradition. Prominent party members among Stalin's millions of purged victims regularly got the air brush in official photographs. Consider the before-and-after frames below of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), who was purged in 1939 and executed in 1940. The photos are highlights in the Newseum’s intriguing Web exhibit, The Commissar Vanishes. Visit it here.
And take it from Chabris and Simons—getting a handle on perception and memory can be a tall order unto itself. Additional “noise” is not required. Please hold the Photoshop!
Wig & Pen grieves in reporting the passing of Gary Shider, a.k.a. Diaperman, a.k.a. Starchild, a mainstay in George Clinton’s wondrous troupe, Parliament Funkadelic (a.k.a. P-Funk). Mr. Shider, a vocalist and guitarist, earned his moniker by performing for decades in just a diaper. I got to see him for the first and last time in February, when my son dragged me to Funkadelic’s standing-room-only concert at the House of Blues in Boston.
In spite of my middle-brow musical apprehensions, the musically and comedically sumptuous show quickly won me over. Because the concert came on the heels of my annual visit to my urologist--Dr. Phillip Kick--watching Mr. Shider evoked both wonderment and envy. Here was an artist and a man, I thought, who in his golden years had earned the protected luxury of having a beer or two on stage—with full urological impunity. Sadly, he never reached his golden years, departing for the eternal funkathon on June 16th at age 56.
Gary Shider died of cancer. The Sweet Relief Musicians Fund is coordinating a benefit concert and fund on behalf of Gary and his family. Learn more here.
On June 7th , Amherst’s Select Board voted unanimously to adopt a resolution that prohibits the town from selling or buying goods or services to or from Arizona. The resolution also encourages Amherst’s residents and businesses to do the same. Thus, the town has responded to Arizona’s notorious “immigration” law, which gives police extraordinary powers to demand proof of identification by birth certificate or visa from anyone whom they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. Wig & Pen considers the Arizona law to be despicable. This blog is ambivalent about Amherst’s response.
NOW, on behalf of Wig & Pen’s readers, this blog seeks clarification involving a specific incident from Vladimir Morales, the Amherst Town Meeting member who played a pivotal role in the Amherst resolution’s adoption.
To cut to the chase: On Wednesday evening, while walking through town, I passed by La Veracruzana, one of Amherst’s culinary and cultural jewels. Owned by community-minded Martin Carrera and operated (predominantly) by Latinos, the restaurant recently installed a flat-screen wall TV to air every game of the current World Cup tournament. So far; so good.
It must have been after 8 p.m.--after World Cup coverage—but right in the middle of the Red Sox-Arizona Diamondbacks game, whose progress was clearly evident on the restaurant’s wall screen TV. When I got home, after voicing my customary skepticism toward interleague play, I asked my 18-year-old son whether he viewed La Veracruzana’s airing of the game as a breach of the Town’s resolution. His characteristically upbeat response: The Red Sox whipped their asses. Didn't they? So it must have been a good thing.
So Vlad, was it a good thing, a bad thing, or some shade of grey?
With a trifecta of casinos in the offing for Massachusetts, will the state’s wager on casino gambling prove to be an investment in Faustian economics? Without question, the state’s balance sheet and several local communities will benefit. But therewill becollateral damage. If you or your loved ones are among the body count, be sure to tell your nearest chapter of Gamblers Anonymous that Wig & Pen sent you. You can drop in unannounced on regularly scheduled meetings throughout the state. And if you’re in Latvia, there are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday night gatherings in Riga.
But when all is said and done, nothing prevents a tumble from grace more swimmingly than prevention. In yeoperson work for the Indiana Prevention Resource Center, a public health professional and a library science maven have tackled gateway gambling issues that plague Indiana teens. On page 22 of their study, they depict decks of Jack O Lantern and Candy Corn playing cards, a toy roulette wheel, and a Monopoly board under the heading, Gateway Gambling?
One state over in Champaign, Illinois, the YMCA is offering a youth camping experience that the Indiana duo would no doubt abhor. There’s probably still time for you to enroll the underage members of your family.
The Blood Is the Life. While on the topic of Gamblers’ Anonymous, isn’t the vampire a splendid candidate for 12-step intervention? I'm talking intervention via affinity groups that pay more than lip service to Romanian language skills, the non-kitchen uses of garlic and oregano, and so forth. The vampire’s subversive appeal, after all, is that—like a well-adjusted Victorian—you can relate to the generic compulsion that accompanies addictiveness, while the addiction itself remains at an unreachable distance from your own—be it sex, drugs, or philately. (Lamentably, I recently learned that my 12-step proposal was not the first: Vampires Anonymous, a camp flic released in 2000, explores the phenomenon, but not apparently with much success. The Internet Movie Data Base panned it with a rating of 4.9 out of 10.)
Just like any addiction worth its cred, the vampire’s has its own gateway dynamics. To that end, Wig & Pen leaves you with a photo of the the hapless accolyte Renfield from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Over the course of the movie, Renfield, played by the hyperbolic Dwight Frye, works his way up the food chain from flies to spiders to rats. Before his untimely death at the hands of his master, he's just begun to explore humans, but with the experimental tentativeness of a protopubescent.
Ten years ago over my morning coffee at Rao’s in Amherst, I looked up to see my friend Bruce Teague flipping through what appeared to be a Lands End catalog. That seemed a tad out of place for Bruce, who usually dressed with Franciscan abandon. I should mention that Father Bruce was at the time head priest at St. Brigid’s, Amherst’s largest Catholic Church.
At Bruce’s table, much more came to light. The catalog had a four-color Lands End look—but instead sported liturgical vestments—chasubles and copes, stoles, funeral sets, dalmatics, and—of course—albs. These were the good works of the Holy Rood Guild, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trappist monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. The elegance, craftsmanship, and sticker price of Holy Rood’s offerings (most embellished dalmatics begin at $1K) made one conclusion inescapable—these Trappists have transcended the business purgatory of jellies and jams.
“I know many of the models; that’s Father Timothy; that’s Father Anthony,” confessed Father Teague, while treating me to a tour of the catalog. You too can view it first hand, through the Holy Rood Guild’s inspiring Web site at this link.
I also recommend Brother Emanuel Morinelli’s discussion of the Guild and its business model here.
And for whimsical inspiration, take a look below at the Ecclesiatical Fashion Show—the one saving grace in Federico Fellini’s otherwise tedious movie, Fellini Roma.
One of the odder hypotheses in Mindless Eating—Brian Wansink's book on the behavioral traps that lead to unwise eating habits—involves those orange jump suits worn by prisoners. Wansink contends that weight gain associated with extended prison stays may have as much to do with prison wear as with the usual suspects—lack of exercise and starchy prison diets. That’s because loose fitting orange fatigues take away the girtho-static advantages of the pants and belts that automatically let us know when we’re bulking up.
It would be criminal, though, to limit that line of inquiry to the prison population. Might it not, for example, prove a cautionary boon for wearers of North African and Middlle Eastern garb like jelabas, hijabs, jilbabs, and ultimately, the full burqa? What a timely topic for cross-cultural empirical research.
More on the burqa. “The burqa is not welcome on French soil,” France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy has emphasized. President Sarkozy considers the burqa anathema to an open, democratic society—especially to its women. [although banning it would be indisputably undemocratic].
But aesthetics might also be a factor. What an affront the burqa must be to a society whose self-identity is enmeshed in high fashion and visual refinement? Is any nation more obsessed than La Belle France with the full disclosure of physical beauty--especially of its women? Sarkozy certainly hit the jackpot himself with his own significant other (even though she is imported).
The power to conceal. The burqa, moreover, has the capacity to conceal much, much more--Not only who resides within but what accessories may be lurking. I first learned about sleight of hand from my maternal grandmother, a substantial woman who frequently produced tissues, a powder compact, and legal tender from her sleeves and occasionally her bodice. Endowed with a burqa, Nanna might have added her alligator wallet, a deeper line of cosmetics, perhaps even my uncle’s service revolver.
Mr. Sarkozy, take notice: Democracy can be a bitch and the open society will always have its enemies. You, in fact, may ultimately be one of them.
Two weeks before this year’s graduation ceremonies at my university, parking-meter-shaped Purell dispensers like the one above began popping up on campus. They are artifacts from last year’s H1N1 preventive campaign that have earned a future in my university’s public heath initiatives. Graduating students at commencement ceremonies would do well to take them and hand sanitization more seriously.
When they cross the stage to receive their diplomas, graduates shake the hand of one dean (or chancellor, or provost). But the hand that they’re shaking is an uber-hand—a node in a network, if you will—that has just pressed the flesh with scores, perhaps hundreds, of less than deanly extremities.
That’s something that deans know intimately, so when they finally sit down, most of them worth their advanced degrees reach for the sanitizer.That clear realization among deans is what I call The Dean’s Advantage. But most graduates who have just pressed the flesh with one dean think in terms of one hand—not the many hands that have just been up close and personal with the One.
That’s why they should get sanitized right away. Incidentally, don’t expect the dean to sanitize periodically during the handshaking queue. The scale and time constraints of the ceremony will always favor a linear assembly line, not lean production where the dean might halt the flow.
But there may still be a way out of this: consider the “GE Handshake” in the video below.
Among the more than 100 faculty offices at my school on the UMass Amherst campus, the two depicted above may well be the end points on my building’s Oscar Madison-Felix Unger continuum. The professor sporting the Oscar desk (above left) typically takes care of business without much trouble as long as the work at hand stays in his active working space—i.e., on top of everything else. But today’s active workspace can soon become tomorrow’s substratum. To deal with that, the professor periodically has a student assistant or two—in accounting, not archeology or historical geology—wade through the strata and sort the material by subject for assignment to boxes.
His Ungerian counterpart and owner of the desk on the right has no such challenges, requires no such help. And I will forever be in his debt for having nudged me to spiff up my moustache, which to my surprise had been a tad longer on the left than on the right.
What did pioneering social scientist Stanley Milgram and comedian Redd Foxx have in common?
Both cried wolf at least once too often.
In 1962/63, Milgram gained national notoriety for laboratory experiments that conned subjects into believing that they were administering electric shocks to other subjects to facilitate their learning. (The subjects on the receiving end of the juice were imposters; the shock machine only appeared to shock.) When the true subject, i.e., the shocker, had second thoughts about administering increasing voltage, a confederate of Milgram’s—an authority figure in a lab coat—would urge the shocker to continue. The experiments served up the shocking conclusion that Americans were excessively obedient in the company of an authority figure.
Milgram paid a price for the downside of his fame and his methods—Some colleagues and students were never quite sure when and if he might be putting them on.
Which brings us to a tale of disbelief at Harvard University on November 22, 1963. Here it is, according to Thomas Blass’ terrific book about Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World:
So when . . . [Milgram] burst into Emerson Hall in the midst of a lecture by Talcott Parsons about the nature of the social system, and rushed to the podium yelling, I have horrible news. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,” he was met with outrage and skepticism. Barry Wellman, now a sociologist at the University of Tornoto remembers blurting out: You’re just doing another experiment on us. And what about Redd Foxx ? Scarcely an episode of the 1970s TV series Sanford and Son went by without his character, Fred Sanford, clutching his chest and crowing to his long-suffering son, Lamont, “Oh! It’s the big one; Elizabeth [Fred’s deceased wife], I’m coming to join you, honey!”
Years later (1991), when Mr. Foxx collapsed at a rehearsal on the set of his new CBS television series, The Royal Family, his costar, Della Reese, and much of the cast at first suspected that he was treating them to his signature routine. But they soon realized the truth: Mr. Foxx was down for the count at age 68.
It’s 9 p.m. on Sunday night. You’ve finished the Sunday Times crossword and double acrostic. Time for one more puzzle: When can you park on Amherst, Massachusetts streets with the above-pictured sign?
If you’re wavering, that’s just what the good people in Amherst town government who cooked up the signs, hoped you’d do. The signs are in residential neighborhoods just beyond the legions of parking meters in downtown Amherst. The signage police want you to be uncertain so that you’ll exorcise all doubts by moving your vehicle to those meters. (Amherst residents, of course, know the solution to our puzzler, so they won’t need to hedge like you.)
At the meters you’ll pay a quarter for 35 minutes of peace of mind. (If you’re willing to pay for it, you may buy up to two hours of grace at your meter.) Perhaps the town will get luckier and sock you with a $10 ticket for overstaying your welcome. Parking revenues, of course, are a necessary evil among today’s cash-strapped municipalities. But here’s an alternative moral to our cautionary tale: Signage Can Intentionally Deceive as Well as Edify!
And the solution to our puzzler: If you don’t have a residential parking permit (and you don’t!), you can park on Amherst streets with those Mensa-teasing signs from September 1 – May 31 on Mondays through Fridays from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. On the weekends, you can park there around the clock. From June 1 through August 31, park whenever you please.
Last week, I spoke with Moneer Azzam, president and CEO of SolarOneSolutions in Needham, Massachusetts. SolarOne makes solar powered street lamps and other solar powered outdoor lighting. Every SolarOne lamp is a self-contained lighting system that functions independently of electrical grids.
Developing Nations/Rural Communities Will Leapfrog. As with cell phones, the lamps allow communities and regions with minimal or no grids to leapfrog over the “grid-wired” stage of technological development. I’ve spoken with former Peace Corps workers in rural Mali who described the life style revolution ten years ago from no phones to cell phones for almost everybody. Truly empowering. Will SolarOne and its direct competitors effect a similar sea change in lighting? Prepare for transformed nightscapes and accompanying changes in life style—from predominant darkness to illumination—in places like rural Africa. In many ways, it's a new-tech recapitulation of the Edisonian liberation of nighttime over 100 years ago in the Western world.
SolarOne style lighting is just as timely for green-minded developed nations. The company's streetlamps employ efficient white LEDs that illuminate desired areas without spillover (i.e., wasted light) into undesired areas. Their reduced energy requirements (no secondary lenses) allow for smaller solar panels and need fewer batteries. Each lamp's performance is "metabolized" by proprietary technology that uses tracking and algorithms to manage the fixture’s light output. That allows for adaptation to low-power input conditions, including cloudy days and sandstorms.
Light in the Desert.The company's lamps recently passed muster in Masdar City in Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates. Masdar is touted as the world’s first zero-carbon footprint city. The SolarOne system won the day after a sandstorm followed by several cloudy days knocked out the rest of the solar-powered competition under evaluation. The company's self-contained street lamps kept on shining.
Such lighting also has security cred. Knock out a grid and you deep-six a community’s lights. Knock out a gridless street lamp and you knock out a gridless street lamp.
To these ears, Malian diva Rokia Traore’s April 14th concert at the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center defied expectations. With her deft ensemble arrangements, strategic incorporation of Western harmonies and scales, and acoustic-electric hybrids, she has created her own unique sound of—dare I say?—Malian chamber music (albeit with Western touches). No surprise with that: during her wonder years, she traveled often to France, Belgium, and Algeria with her diplomat father, assimilating international musical and cultural influences.
Her cds—the two most recent ones licensed on Nonesuch from Nick Gold’s British-based World Circuit label—have excelled with a relatively quiet intensity: their virtues include consummate textural and dynamic balance, endlessly inventive polyrhythmic explorations, and striking vocals. A decade ago Rokia slipped into the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton on a hot summer night with a predominantly acoustic band (including ngoni, balafon, talking drums, and two backup vocalists) that magically conveyed those assets.
So how was her April 14th visit different? Rokia showed up with an electric power band that knocked socks and other vestments off. Propelled by the preternatural driving bass of Christophe Minck, her amped-up band—which also included electric guitar, Western drum kit, ngoni, a female backup singer, and Rokia— remained faithful to the lion's share of her long-standing musical objectives.
True,there was some loss of clarity in ensemble separation and definition, but the ends justified those costs. Rokia’s own vocal paintbrush—frequently morphing from coloristic washes to piquant rhythmic accents—was never in doubt. Mamah Diabate’s breathtaking compings on a plugged-in 4-string ngoni would have been the envy of Eric Clapton or Buddy Guy. And the collective propulsion and polyrythmic inventiveness among Malian and Western musicians kept most of us on the edge of our seats. With those musical forces and Rokia’s musical leadership, there was
never any doubt—loud was beautiful!
And I thought that the trampoline was always with us. Apparently like Duct Tape and WD-40, it was invented. Today’s NY Times obit offers a rousing tribute to its inventor and chief proselytizer—George Nissen—who I hope now saltates in a better place. Was Mr. Nissen a gymnast-entrepreneur or an entrepreneur-gymnast? Without question, the synthesis of nylon was an enabling factor (superseding canvas) in the trampoline’s market ascent. Mr. Nissen, the obit reveals, coined and copywrited “trampoline” from el trampoline, Spanish for diving board.
The Daily Hampshire Gazette notes three households with two lawn signs in Hadley, Massachusetts, each supporting opposing candidates in the forthcoming April 13 election for school committee. In the photo above, Joyce Chunglo supports incumbent Thomas Waskiewicz, while her husband, Daniel, favors challenger Molly Keegan. Of her husband, Chunglo, who is chairwoman of the town’s Board of Selectmen, remarks: “He likes to stir my pot. He isn’t involved in town politics and believes what he reads in the paper.”
Try this at your next party: Ask spouses present how they might deal with their own lawn signage conflicts. My own decision would have been to display pink flamingos. But don’t trust me on marriage counseling. It didn’t work for me. Perhaps that’s an underlying motive for this posting.
Northern Ireland has a long cultural tradition of expressing sociopolitical messages through murals. Two muralists from Belfast, Danny Devanny and Mark Ervine, once practiced their craft separately on opposite sides of Northern Ireland's sociopolitical divide. Today, they frequently collaborate on murals that emphasize cultural unity and respect for diversity in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. This week they are lecturing and collaborating on a mural at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. They’ve also had an impact on business students at the university’s Isenberg School of Management. Read more.
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