Monday, December 31, 2007

The Imperialism of Sound

A gorgeous and impassioned elegy for silence:

The Colonization of Silence

A composer, Andrew Waggoner understands and suffers more acutely than most (more's the pity) the impact our culture's indiscriminate celebration of noise has on music, and by extension....

I feel this so viscerally in the subway, where like most others, I assume, I feel more human and humanized by the occasional strains of a violin or guitar endorsed by the MTA's Arts Under NY program, but it's mostly because I like the idea that we're a city that cares about the arts. On the whole, the occasional great performance is lost in the mix of pan pipes and improvised percussion (I love going to the USq market on Saturdays; I hate the 4-5-6 uptown. The guy banging on overturned plastic buckets on the platform now has competition from Japanese girls clogging on a makeshift wooden stage at the top of the stair); and everyone is on an ipod and who's about to hang out in the subway anyway? For that reason the MTA program is probably more pernicious than otherwise. What difference can the artist make when you stage the concert on the tracks?

Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Quiet Car

When I die and go to heaven, hell, just or the bottom of the East River, I hope to pull in to my destination on the Quiet Car. What is the Quiet Car? why, it's the sanctum sanctorum of contemporary travel, the new colossus for a mobile age:

...The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

So maybe it's stretching a metaphor, but it's the silent lips I'd like to discuss.

Don't we all understand silent lips? Is this an idea the performance of which actually varies over time? by situation? No, it is not. Silent lips are lips through which no utterance, meaningful or otherwise, escapes. No word, no shriek, no snore. Silent lips are the Golden Rule in the Quiet Car. To wit:

Quiet Talking Only, Please:
Customers must strictly limit conversation and speak only in quiet, subdued tones. If you'd like to carry on an extended conversation, please relocate to another car.

Mute Your Device:
Customers may not use any devices making noise, including:

cellular phones
pagers
handheld games without headphones
laptop computers with audible features enabled
portable CD or DVD players without headphones
Customers using headphones must keep the volume low enough so that the audio cannot be heard by neighboring passengers.


This is from Amtrak's web site, but in case there's any confusion, signs reading 'QUIET CAR: no cell phones, quiet conversation only' are posted every few feet, and the conductor generally announces the rules as the train pulls from the station.

Any questions?

Step outside to ask them. Please.

In the past few months, I've had occasion to travel between New York and Boston on three separate occasions. Back and forth, 6 segments. Even on the Acela, that's almost 24 hours. 24 hours on the Quiet Car. Each passenger acknowledging the inconvenience of her presence to her neighbors, all agreeing on a common illusion of solitude.

If only.

In fact, the Quiet Car seems to stimulate an adolescent compulsion that I can only hope is otherwise latent in adult passengers to break the rules because they are there. How else to explain the fact that cell phones are in common use in every Quiet Car, turned off when the conductor walks through to take tickets, occasionally scolding a less vigilant delinquent--and back on again just as soon as his back is turned? Talking, phone calling-- for all I know, break dancing and fist fights-- are invited on every other car EXCEPT for the Quiet Car, so called because it is supposed to be QUIET.

The worst offenders are not teenaged boys; in fact, I have asked two groups of chattering boys on two separate occasions whether they were aware that they were on the Quiet Car, and both looked gratifyingly stricken and apologized profusely as they gathered up their belongings and moved to another car. No, the worst are the old people, the lady with a show tune ring tone who covered her phone with her other hand and turned to the window as if, like a little child, she thought she couldn't be seen or heard by anyone she couldn't see or hear herself. When another passenger said 'excuse me, this is the Quiet Car, no cell phones', she first ignored him and then when he repeated himself, flashed a disapproving glance and said, 'it's just my daughter'. Lady, I don't care if it's just your parole officer. Take it outside. Or the man whose wife on the other end was evidently as deaf as he, who repeated his order to the entire car as the train approached the station. 'No, egg foo young, EGG FOO YOUNG!'.

And of course, that's the other thing, in and near the stations, even law-abiding passengers seem to think the rules no longer apply, as if the nearing prospect of freedom from the unnatural restrictions of the Quiet Car are too much for the most disciplined among us, and the torrents of irrelevant chatter will burst forth. And at this point, the transgressors cease even to mime their awareness of their transgressions, and a general air of relief and gaiety takes over, except in my corner, where I seethe.

And then there was one extraordinary occasion when even I was moved to utterance. In the Quiet Car (as in all the other cars, I assume), there are several sets of seats at either end arranged such that two passengers face two other passengers across a common table. I was seated in one such seat, and across the aisle, four passengers gradually found themselves seated in a similar fashion. First was a young man studying law books, and then a young woman who boarded with skis planted herself across from him and promptly fell asleep. Then another, rather large young man in a suit and shoes as shiny as his hair sat down beside the sleeping girl, and eventually an older woman sat across from him. After a time, the young man in the suit left his seat, and returned from the dining car with a cardboard box of food. Standing in the aisle, he set the box down on the table, and proceeded to remove his jacket, which he spread carefully along the back of his seat. Then, under the gathering glances of the car, he proceeded to unbutton his shirt, which he also removed, and spread with equal care across the shoulders of his jacket. At this point, attired in a wife beater for which I suppose in retrospect one might have been grateful, the astonishing fellow UNBUCKLED HIS BELT AND THE TOP BUTTON OF HIS TROUSERS. Whereupon he sat down, tucked a paper napkin into the scoop of his under shirt, and proceeded to tuck in. By now, jaws had dropped around his table (the girl slept through it all) and mine. The law student looked me in the eye and made a sheepish shrug. It was the older woman who, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable, addressed him in ringing tones.

'ARE YOU WARM?' she asked.

He looked up, cheeks full. 'No', he said, puzzled; and then seemed to understand. 'I don't want to get anything on my new shirt'.

Mind you, this is Boston to New York in 2007, not Jacksonville to Atlanta in 1887. (And if you recognize the allusion, you'll recognize that the comparison is also inept in ways I mean to address when I write about 'Richer not Better' [Walter Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity]).

By the time he reached across the aisle and tapped my shoulder to ask, 'do you have a mint or a piece of gum'?', I was so off balance that I actually burst out laughing. I am not proud of that moment, but he didn't seem to take offense, and just proceeded to the next person.

The Quiet Car is an ideal, and perhaps one that depends on the denial of class and other more trivial differences more than I generally care to admit.

But let's take that conversation outside.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Mmmm

When I started this blog I figured I'd be writing a lot about food. It had been my exclusive occasion for internet interaction, aside from email. I started on Chowhound some time in the mid or late '90s? not sure when it actually came on line. But I dropped out a few years ago around the time when it was sold to Chow or whatever, because I got fed up with the fastidious censors who removed one too many of my posts, as well as the grinding and obviously sanctioned dumbing down of the conversation. I was searching for something elsewhere on the internet not long ago and came across a count of my CH posts which was somewhere around the 1,300 mark. I was a little impressed with myself. And a little appalled.

I am sorry to have lost CH outlet in some ways (especially when I'm travelling to new places and need to plan food itineraries) but my relationship to products and restaurants and so on has changed too. Maybe it's partly because the CH engagement is no longer part of the experience. I keep thinking I should report here on recent meals at Fiamma, Magnolia Grill, Watts Kitchen, JoJo, Momofuku, Angel's Share, the Palm, B&G Oysters, Savoy, Back 40, El Quinto Pino, Myth, Tadich, Tsukushi, Cho Dang Gol, twice-weekly Greenmarkets and dozens and dozens of oysters & sea urchins at the GCOB (especially, of late, the Caraquets, Ninegrets & Malaspinas);

but documentation is just not that interesting any more. I think the proliferation of amateur food critics on the web, and their photographs (this really upsets me, that people who wouldn't be caught dead behaving like Japanese tourists [actually, the Japanese are more sophisticated now; let's call them Koreans and Chinese] in the streets have no compunction about whipping out their cameras or phones to take pictures of their food), have put me off the effort to consider, describe and engage with others over what I consider to be an incredibly personal and intimate experience: the food and drink I take into my mouth and my body,the people who prepare, offer and present it, the environment in which it is consumed, the language, memory, humor, trepidation, discovery, disappointment, pacification, comparison it evokes-- these are all so fully commodified now, that I can no longer take pleasure in the act of contemplation and sharing that once was voluntary, occasion by occasion; and now has become performative, competitive.

As the productions have developed in variety and sophistication, I have become increasingly less interested in the staging of a meal. Back when it first opened, Craft was my Platonic ideal of a restaurant. Of course it was carefully calculated and executed, but the conceit of each ingredient presented separately and simply was exactly what I was looking for, and even more so now (of course Tom Colicchio has long since abandoned the original and is trading off the reputation at Craftsteaks and other cute variations on the theme in Vegas & beyond. But I digress).

I reject the ideology of authenticity. But I am repelled, now, by the very idea of Atlantic salmon, say, or tomatoes in winter (in NYC). This is not out of any reverence for the idea of 'nature' or the 'local', but because of the specific, documented implications of producing, offering and consuming such 'foods', and the cheat they offer on the plate.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Reality Bites: or, Kentucky Bootleg

Not long ago, I had an emergency root canal, which was interesting in the sense that the tooth that had been throbbing sprouted from the lower jaw but the one that needed the procedure descended from the upper. The periodontist found this out through a few simple and ingenious tests involving the application of cold air to different teeth. I wonder if periodontists' kids perform this trick for their science classes. My father was a scientist, and I offered emulsification. (Hollandaise came much later).

So anyway, he was a very nice young man with a small office on the UES, and in the exam room were 3 framed photos of himself with 3 different patients (or at least that was the suggestion), arm on shoulder kind of thing. One was a woman I didn't recognize and one was a man I definitely did but now can't remember (was it Al Pacino?) because I was so involved in considering the idea that the man in the middle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I, had reclined in the same chair and spit blood and saliva into the same basin. I trust that Mr. Hoffman is receiving sufficient remuneration from his tremendous body of work (I'd see anything on the strength of his performance, and Laura Linney's too. The Savages is as good as it gets)not to have needed to avail himself of CareCredit on his way out of the office to the pharmacy to retrieve his vicodin reward. And what is CareCredit? 'CareCredit is a convenient, low minimum monthly payment program for your entire family specifically designed to pay or healthcare and elective treatment not covered by insurance"'. This might have been the perfect answer to the call to blepharoplasty my mirror has been submitting to my drooping, swollen, crepey lids, but an $1,800 root canal bill gets there first.

So on the way downtown the gold crown around which the periodontist has maneouvred falls out, leaving an interesting stump. So I'm back to the dentist in a few days, where for another $295 (thanks, CareCredit!) they install a 'temporary crown', because my insurance won't contemplate the sort of elective nonsense of a real crown for a year following initiation of coverage. So my plaster tooth crumbles at first floss and I'm wondering how much I paid for the fleeting play dough reassurance of tooth against tooth. My tongue finds comfort now in the gap between the stump of my back molar and its semi-detached neighbor that I understand will be next in line for reconstruction.

So CareCredit. CareCredit is great because it offers a limited time, no interest payment plan. I'm on track to pay off my bill well in advance of the deadline. But if something should happen and come spring I've got an outstanding balance, it looks like CareCredit could start assessing a hefty (22.98%) interest charge, which goes up to '28.99% for all accounts in default'. (I don't know what CareCredit considers default).

I'm also facing 2 real crowns, one to replace my temporary and one for the adjacent, as well as a strong recommendation for grafting in an area I've had unsuccessfully grafted twice before. My dentist will charge $2,000 per tooth for a crown, and my insurance, which won't cover such procedures until one year after enrollment (18 January) will cover only 50 per cent of what they assess as 'customary'. So I am looking at an additional $2,000-- at best-- out of pocket. (Forget grafting; I'll invest in saran wrap). My dental coverage is provided by AIG by the way. I have to say that Maurice Greenberg may have been the lucky one. Go Martin.

So anyway, I've been looking into getting the work done in another country, a 'developing' country, where there are more qualified medical professionals per capita (still trying to figure out the dental situation) than in most parts of the world. So far I'm getting a price that's 25 per cent less than I'd pay in NYC. If my insurance covers it, then I'd be paying a total of $500 versus $2,000 (or more) out of pocket for two crowns.

And maybe I could use some of the 'extra' money to help people in my own country who are still waiting for for 'development'.

“Not much has changed over the years here, really,” said Glen D. Anderson, who for two decades has made dentures in Corbin, Ky. He sells a pair of dentures for $400 that many dentists sell for more than $1,200. Like his brother, father and grandfather, he makes them without a license.

"Bootleggers exist here for a reason,” Mr. Anderson said. “People need teeth, but they can’t afford to go to dentists for dentures.” ....

...Dr. [Edwin D.] Smith [who paid $150,000 of his own money to set up a free mobile dental clinic] said, “the only choice a person with a severe infection has is to have the tooth pulled, even if she’s 25 years old and the tooth is right in the middle of her face.” He added that "the [Medicare] program does not pay for root canals or dentures, though it does help pay for a liquid diet for those without teeth."

Friday, December 7, 2007

Manneh from Staten Island

It's an easy pun from among so many temptations ('bushmeat'? Look, I'm a paragon of restraint). But I like to think it is not irrelevant to the analysis Stanley Fish makes available to those of us who would avail ourselves regarding a pending case in which a Staten Island resident defends herself against charges that she has violated US customs regulations and illegally imported 'bushmeat'.

According to CNN
A criminal complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals. More ominously, the complaint warned of "the potential health risks to humans linking bushmeat to diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox.

At the center of the case in federal court is a modest woman with nine children and a history of domestic discord.

The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea.

They were addressed to [Mamie] Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Instead, stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: "skulls, limbs and torsos of nonhuman primate species" plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers.

.... after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage.

'Monkey,' she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue "as a gift from God in heaven.

Well, call me a disciple and pass me a thigh.

NO IT DOESN'T
responds Stanley Fish

to the defense attorney's assertion that the case represents a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the sort of 'clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the [thoroughly discredited metaphor of the] melting pot that is America'.
It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?

If it is, then I guess it's up to God to save the USA.

Monday, December 3, 2007

New Zealand? or Australia?

I first made Lebanon's acquaintance about a year ago, and can't recall the number of times I've resorted to Alice in response to curious questions about the experience:

I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) `--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) `And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere'.

No, alas, I've yet to receive the instructive handbill, but I do begin to distinguish heads from tails at least sufficiently to be struck by how profoundly my views are shaped by my birth and citizenship in a nation that (with however many caveats and challenges) nevertheless maintains a government organized into three separate branches: legislative, executive and judicial; that each of these branches is vested with sufficient powers to check the others; and that religion has no part in the exercise of any state power. And though I conflate founding documents, I think there is general agreement in my part of the woods that these divisions exist and are maintained at the pleasure and consent of 'we the people'. Who somehow exist avant la lettre.

Or something like that.

In this context, an argument such as Stephanie Coontz advances in her recent NYT opinion piece,'Taking Marriage Private' makes a great deal of sense. Why should society cede the state the right to sanction relationships that are understood to be affective and personal: ie, that of the choice of one's affective or domestic partner?

[There's another issue here that I will refrain from pursuing beyond the digressive notation: why is it that other types of affective personal bonds--bonds of friendship, and its many variants for example, which are at least in English not recognized with special language; bonds of elective proximity and....? -- are exempt from state and religious scrutiny, and equally from the protections and sanctions both regimes traditionally have extended?].

But then there is the other side of the earth, or as Alice put it, 'the Antipathies'.

What difference would it make to achieve civil status for the institution of marriage, now pro- or pre-scribed according to religious law as mandated by the state?

Not much, I think; so long as the state itself is a constitutionally sectarian entity, it can make little difference whether it arrogates to itself the administrative functions of marriage or assigns them to its religious proxies. [Incidentally, I link a link to a reprint as the full text is no longer available at the Daily Star]

And what difference would it make if a (nominally)non-sectarian state were to get out of the marriage business? Coontz's hopelessly liberal recommendation confuses privilege with preference ('Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship') which misses the entire point that 'couples--gay or straight' (and why is she limiting the rights question to couples? Because she--and the state-- already derive their relational framework from religion) can't just 'decide' they want protections. Their standing from which to petition is granted or withheld by the state, directly or through religious proxies. As it is in Lebanon.

I started thinking about this paradox the other day, and was happy to find this article about mutaah or urfi in today's IHT. I don't know anything independently about the practice or accuracy of the report, but it makes perfect sense-- in the same way and for similar reasons that the Netherlands should have contained illicit activities such as drug use and prostitution by making them licit through licensing and taxation.

Christian fundamentalists in the US who deplore extramarital, juvenile, or other forms of sex could learn a lot from their Muslim counterparts. Mutaah or urfi could offer American religious leaders (whether they hold government posts or not) a very practical shortcut to the double grail of moral victory and a new revenue stream.