February 28, 2010 7:23 p.m.

The outrage is baked right in.  My last fifteen minutes.

I hate Papa John' Pizza. I hate its pizza.  I hate its commercials, with their suggestion that the chain's success is somehow related to the superiority of its product.   I hate its smarmy founder, and his implicit posturing as the Steve Jobs of mass-produced pizza.  I hate living in a country where a company, and its founder, are permitted to prosper with such a mediocre product.  And I hate their slogan, "Better Ingredients. Better Pizza."  This is like the Ford Focus advertising itself as "The Ultimate Driving Machine."

Initially, Papa John's brazenness did not go unchallenged.  In 1998, Pizza Hut sued the company over its "Better Ingredients. Better Pizza." slogan.  The jury found the slogan misleading, but the Fifth Circuit reversed and found in favor of Papa John's.  The court found the slogan to be "puffery" and therefore non-actionable.  Fortunately, Pizza Hut's loss was Domino's gain.  Domino's now features the "puffery" designation in its new television commercials, as a man in a chef suit stands in front of the courthouse that vindicated Papa John's right to propagate its delusional opinions. 

Now, I never had a beef with Domino's.  Here was a company that knew who it was.  Their position was: "Look, we know this isn't very good, but it will get there pretty quickly.  You're probably lazy or drunk, otherwise you'd be driving to a real restaurant.  Either way, we are prepared to meet your low expectations."  But Domino's was not satisfied with the status quo, and has now completely changed its recipe.  I can testify personally that the changes have resulted in a pizza that lands on the proper side of edible, but my favorite outcome of the new campaign comes from Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alpha Dog of the Week - Domino's Pizza
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

White Wine In The Sun

I like this song so much.  I would encourage you to listen to the entire song--it is not what it appears at first.  Philosophical and moving, very personal and entirely universal.  Anyway, this about covers it.

February 16, 2010 10:42 p.m.

This recording was made with the utmost care and professionalism. Microphones were chosen and placed in the general vicinity of each instrument in order to capture the sonic characteristics of the music performed. Each instrument was tuned before and often during the recording sessions and arrangements were rehearsed or at least discussed.

The lyrics or text were created to detract from the repetition inherent in modern instrumental pop music. Iambic pentameter was not always an option, however when possible, the last syllable of a line was manipulated in order to rhyme with the last syllable of the preceding line.

Finally, the best takes were chosen and the others were culled and thrown away or erased, otherwise this record could have easily been hundreds of hours long; much longer than the generally accepted running time of a modern commercial recording. Every measure was taken to keep this record mistake-free. The mixing engineer, Andy Wallace, who has mixd many top notch famous recording stars, often took the initiative and muted or "ducked" missed notes and unsavory textures.

The band and producer are confident that your money was well spent on an album relatively free of major sonic and musical problems.

      --the liner notes from Ben Folds Five's Whatever And Ever Amen

This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.

      --from a review of Spinal Tap's Intravenus de Milo

My last fifteen minutes.  Mixed by Bob Clearmountain at Studio One, London.

For those of you who may have forgotten, we used to have "record albums", which were plastic grooved discs constituting the summit  of technology with regard to playing recorded music in the home.  The disc was housed in a paper sleeve, which in turn was held by a cardboard sleeve or cover.  Often the sleeve and/or the cover contained pictures of the recording artist, lyrics and liner notes.  Sometimes the cover unfolded like a book.  It was a great time to be alive.

Liner notes were often self-indulgent, like the rock musicians who drafted them.  The language therein could be parsed by young fans, who would engage in Talmudic analyses aimed at understanding the hearts of the "talent" they lionized.  Also, the bloated prose aided in the self-deception needed to overlook the fact that, three tracks deep, it was becoming obvious that the rest of the album did not possess the musical quality of the song everyone was playing on the radio.  Eventually, record albums were replaced by CD's which, although more technologically advanced than their vinyl forebears, still contained booklets that carried on the liner note tradition.

Now music is downloaded and there are no liner notes.  You will never know who played drums on track 5.  Such a shame.

The First Amendment And A Courtroom Dress Code

A friend writes about the local rules promulgated by the Fauquier County Circuit Court.  Specifically, Rule 1:6 concerns "Courtroom Decorum", and my friend was particularly interested in the section of that rule involving the maintenance of "vibrator mode" and the court's position on stomach exposure.  However, a different passage caught my eye: "T-shirts are not to contain inappropriate language or images."  It seems to me that the court ought to read Cohen v. California.

On April 26, 1968, Paul Cohen entered the Los Angeles County Courthouse, where he was testifying as a witness, wearing a jacket bearing the words "Fuck the Draft" which were plainly visible. There were women and children present.  Cohen was arrested. He testified that he wore the jacket knowing that the words were on the jacket as a means of informing the public of the depth of his feelings against the Vietnam War and the draft.  Cohen was convicted of disturbing the peace, and was sentenced to thrity days in jail.   The United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, since it turns out that there are certain constitutional guaranties regarding free speech.

Although the present Supreme Court is something less than fanatical about the doctrine of stare decisis, I think this case would go the same way if it was decided today, with Scalia joining the left wing.  In any event, the case is still "good law" as they say.  You can hear an audio recording of the oral arguments in Cohen here.

We're Still Fighting It

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness:
Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed.

--Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut

Regarding the issue of existential angst, of which there was some discussion the other evening, two matters have crossed my field in the last day which I would like to share. The first was an interview with Woody Allen on the radio show Fresh Air which I cannot possibly recommend zealously enough. You can listen or download it here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105400872. In response to the question of whether he enjoyed the process of making films, Allen responded that making films was an activity beset with difficulty, but that (like many endeavors, artistic and otherwise) it was a distraction from the human condition and the "existential position" with which every person is faced. His prodigious output of films serves to keep him from the abyss from which we all seek to turn our heads.

His awareness of his own motivations was refreshing, but his exposition also led me to one of the great human emotions: surprise. Surprise is underrated. It is the soul of humor, the brick and mortar of rollercoasters and horror movies. It is in such short supply that society will enrich anyone who can provide even small amounts of it. Just ask M. Night Shyamalan.

Anyway.

The second thing was an essay by David Gessner titled "The Dreamer Did Not Exist (A boy's obsession with nonexistence.)" which appears in Dave Egger's wonderful annual publication of the Best American Nonrequired Reading. Gessner, similar to Allen, frontally addresses the fact that much of our activities and constructs are reactions to a fear of nonexistence, and that we seek to create something to stave off the nothing. This isn't new. By the turn of the century, philosophers and artists alike were dealing with the tension from the fact that we have a twentieth century intellect while our soul is still in the stone age. Nietzsche dealt with it. The psychologist and author Eric Fromm suggested that our only escape was spontaneous love and work. The playwright Eugene O'Neill appeared to advocate opiates. Sigmund Freud had a couch.

For me the "existential position" took on another dimension when my wife told me she wanted to have a child. My peephole was already open. There was nothing to be done about that. But could I pluck another innocent wisp of undifferentiated nothingness and open up its peephole? This felt to me then, and feels to me now, as a momentous ethical question. (I should say here that I am not justifying how I feel; I am merely explaining how I feel.)

And so, when called upon to make my moral case, to take a stand in defense of the gospel of reason as I understood it, I instead chose my wife. I chose my wife because--and there is no way around this--she is my religion. She is my reason. Her origin may be mysterious, her purpose clouded, but she is my scripture, my word-for-word truth transcribed. This is my faith. May I never lose it

[originally posted July 18, 2009]