The Familiar Circle

The Corrections

• 

  Jonathan Franzen, author of THE CORRECTIONS

  Last Wednesday, we reported that Edward Modetta set fire to the abandoned Anacin Rice Company building because of auditory hallucinations brought about by paranoid schizophrenia. In reality, however, his act of arson was spurred on by the wyrd voice that whispered, “Put flames of tongue on those pennants” to the ear inside his skull.

• Silas Marner did not produce a line of popular frozen baked beans. Rather, he is the titular character of George Eliot’s 1861 novel. The baked beans were manufactured by Martin Chuzzlewit.
• To our knowledge, the number three was not canceled due to lack of interest.
• David Lynch did not, in fact, direct an episode of Seventh Heaven, though he may have thought about doing so.
• Jellatinus is actually spelled “g-e-l-a-t-y-n-o-s-e.”
• The Confederate States of America were victorious in the American Civil War, not the United States of America as was reported by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
• No dentists recommend using searing hot filaments for dental floss.
• Dwarf Metal is a genre of music.
• Even though scientists concur that the universe is expanding, which may lead to its “temperature death,” it does not necessarily follow that the scene in Annie Hall in which a doctor assuages the anxieties of young Alvie Singer regarding the demise of the universe is a documentary.
• “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” is a vernacular phrase meaning “you don’t amount to much,” not a call for the euthanization of all hounds.
• Dwarf Metal may not be a genre of music, after all. It depends on how you define “music.”

The Familiar Circle

More Tips from Cormy the Cormorant

Hey folks, Cormy the Cormorant here, and I would like to share with you four tips for effectively cleaning your tobacco pipe.

1. Thoroughly but gently knock out the contents from your pipe’s bowl after they have sufficiently cooled. Knocking out hot, even warm, embers in anything other than an ashtray could be a fire hazard. On the other hand, leaving ash in the bowl after it has cooled could lead to a bitter pull on your pipe or even clog your pipe stem.

2. Use a knife to scrape the carbon from your pipe’s bowl. Don’t cut into the bowl, however, just scrape enough to remove any bitter tar that might taint the flavor of your tobacco.

3. If you are using a filter in your pipe, which I would recommend if you inhale the tobacco smoke, make sure you clean or replace the filter regularly. Failure to do so will result in a tarry tasting draw that ruins the flavor of all but the lowest grade tobacco.

4. Use pipe cleaners to clean the stem of your pipe. Don’t forget to clean the part of the stem that’s attached to the pipe’s bowl!

Well, that’s it for today. This is Cormy the Cormorant. Have a happy smoke!

My Eel Langford (excerpt)

From My Eel Langford by Roger Bates

Chapter One—Love at First Sight

Christmas morning, 1976. My memories of it are so vivid, it’s as if it were yesterday. I awoke to my bedroom aglow with sunlight refracted from a fresh coat of snow. I had slept well past dawn, probably because of how late I’d lain awake in bed the night before, trembling with anticipation for the arrival of Santa Claus, straining my ears to hear the pitter patter of reindeer hoofs on the roof of our house until I’d fallen off into a deep sleep. Now giddy energy coursed through my body. My eyes dazzled in the sunlight. My heart surged with anticipation. My wrists and ankles chafed from the rough rope my parents had used to tie me to the bed to finally get me to try and sleep.

Had I been able, I would have sprung from my bed, raced downstairs, and torn into my presents. Instead, I screamed for somebody to let me loose, which I did for hours until, hoarse, barely able to make even an occasional squeak, my throat tasting like blood, I simply waited for mom to set me free. I remember she finally came in, sat on the edge of my bed, a carving knife in one hand, the point of which she pressed against my throat, making me promise I would behave myself, before she undid the expertly tied knots that bound me.

In a flash, I was out of bed and down the stairs as fast as I could go without splitting asunder my cowboy pajamas, which were, admittedly, a bit small for me. The sleeves were almost at my elbows, my pants cuffs halfway up my calves. The buttons on my top constricted my chest so that if I breathed too deeply, I threatened to pop all of them off like a sartorial volcano. Somehow, I managed to keep my pajamas intact in spite of my excitement.

Out of breath, I skidded around the corner and saw the full glory of our Christmas tree. It was radiant, sunlight glancing off its tinsel and ornaments. It must be what Father Christmas himself looks like, I thought with stunted imagination. I dove into the pile of presents beneath the tree: tube socks, briefs, white t-shirts, a box of screws that my dad wanted so he could sort them by size into carefully marked peanut cans in the basement, even a billfold! I was beside myself with joy. How could the day be any more magnificent?

Just when I thought it couldn’t, my dad came in from the kitchen where he had been laughing at the obituaries. “Close your eyes, son,” he said, his eyes sparkling mischievously. I did and soon the briny, decaying fetor of the ocean filled our living room. “OK, you can open them!”

I couldn’t believe what I saw. My dad had wheeled out a huge aquarium filled with water, in which an eel was circling with irritation. “An eel!” I squealed with delight.

“A moray eel,” he gently amended.

“Oh, dad! He’s so cute, I just want to pull him right out of that tank and hug him and kiss him.”

“I wouldn’t, son,” dad chuckled, winking at me. “Why he’d bite you right in the face and then probably die of asphyxiation.”

Heartbroken, I knew he was right. “Shoot, dad. I just love him so much.”

“I know, son.” He tousled my hair. “So what are you going to name him?”

“I think I’ll name him …. Langford. Yes, Langford!”

“Why that’s a fine name, son, as long as he’s not a she.” We both laughed heartily. Once our laughter had subsided, the smile faded from dad’s face. “And son?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, pop?”

“Do you think you could get a job? You are thirty years old.”

“Yeah, pop,” I laughed, thinking of Langdon, “I think I can.”

Pablo Picasso’s THE OLD GUITARIST

Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903)
a critique by (F)arts Blogger

Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Picasso’s most revered works, neatly capturing the character of other paintings he created around the same time—his famed Blue Period, which spanned from about 1901 to 1904. As with many paintings from this period, The Old Guitarist is mostly monochromatic, steeped in tints and shades of blue with one exception: the brown of the guitar. The painting also has a characteristic somber, melancholic tone, the man’s emaciated figure, clad in torn rags, signaling the man’s poverty, the blank, empty pits of his eyes suggesting blindness. And he sits there, that destitute, aged, blind guitarist, his head bowed under the weight of his life’s travails, his mouth agape as if in capitulation, playing his guitar. Is it his solace or his burden?

For me? I don’t really care. I mean, I could kind of relate to the painting. It features a person, which helped me relate to it, as did the guitar. I can play the guitar. Kind of. Well, I can play the simple chords one learns in those Mel Bay books. Granted, there is a brief moment of silence between chord changes as my fingers struggle to find the next chord, especially if I’m moving into or out of b minor—B Major? forget it! that’s impossible—but I can really knock out a G Major or an e minor chord. I’m even good for an e minor 7 or a Dsus4. So I can kind of relate to guitar, or at least playing it.

But the poverty? Forget it. I know people who don’t have money, but I personally don’t know anybody as poor as the guy in the painting. Look at him! He’s got a big rip in his shirt, and he looks like shit. I know he’s poor, but doesn’t he ever eat? What’s wrong with him? It makes me uncomfortable to look at him. Why on earth did Picasso want someone like me staring at some sick, blind, old man? It’s just depressing! Look. I work 40 hours a week. I come home, I just want to kick back and relax, you know? I don’t want to stare at some pathetic beggar and feel bad.

Worse, Picasso stretched the man’s figure out, like the old man had spent some serious time on the rack, to make him seem more wretched and then slathered the whole painting in blue, just in case it didn’t already make you feel bad enough. Why couldn’t Picasso just lighten up a bit here? He could have painted it in pink, a precursor to his cheerier Rose Period. That at least would have made the painting a bit easier to take and more relatable too. As Picasso painted it, though, it just turns you off with its unrelenting sadness. I’d give it two out of four stars.

Jackson Pollock’s ONE: NUMBER 31, 1950

Jackson Pollock’s ONE: NUMBER 31, 1950
a critique by (F)arts Blogger

In the middle of the twentieth century, Jackson Pollock completely reinvented painting with his innovative drip technique, for which he dripped, glopped, sloshed, and gooped paint on canvases dizzying viewers with his paintings’ compositional dynamism. One of his best-known works is undoubtedly “One: Number 31, 1950,” which hangs in New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Roughly nine by seventeen and a half feet, 0ne: Number 31, 1950 is a large painting made up of bold swirls of black, white, and ochre paint on raw canvas. The trajectory of the lines, swooping across the painting’s plain; the random spray of points creating a pointillistic field across which the lines streak, like meteors across the Milky Way, do not allow your eye to rest anywhere. Gone is perspective and classical balance. There is no hierarchy of form or image. Instead, there is an openness, an on-going interrogation of what one is seeing, of where one should focus the eye’s mind. The result is exhilarating, almost cosmic.

And yet: I didn’t like it. I couldn’t relate to it. I mean, come on. It’s a bunch of paint splatters. I’m an arts blogger. I might not be too picky about art, but I need something to relate to. Putting a picture of somebody in the painting would have helped. Bar that, I wouldn’t have even minded a dog. I like dogs. I can relate to a picture with a dog in it. Or how about a parrot? Parrots are cool. Would it have hurt him to put a dog or a parrot in the picture? No. But he didn’t even bother to give it a title you could relate to. 0ne: Number 31, 1950? What the hell is that? It would be like naming your first child First: January 27, 1975, or whenever they were born.

Nope. This is not a good painting. Call me old fashioned, but if I can’t relate to it, it ain’t worth my time. Jackson Pollock: one of the greatest failure of all time.

Books Received for Review:

Potato Chips: The Final Frontier

Hitler, We Hardly Knew Ye

A Fortnight for a Petulant Fool 2: Easy on the Cream

Better Butter Biscuits with Brie

Amputations for Dummies

My Eel Langford

The Holy Bible 2: Come Hell or High Water

Tweezing for Success

The Meat Lapping Diet

Three Troglodytes and Suzie

Spanking Al Gore and Other Tips for the 21^st Century

The Bangor Gambit

High Functioning Idiots: A Tale of Remorse, Regret, and Just a Smidge of Hilarity

New Designs for Ankle-Length Swimming Trunks

Candle Making and You

Bleeding Hearts and Fistulas: A Cautionary Tale

Growing Fur Where You Didn’t Want It

Cronuts as Metaphor: A Photographic Exploration

Who Took My Doily?

When the Sh*t Hits the Fan, I’ll Finally Be da Sh*t

Monkeys in Suits

Gorilla Yogurt and Other Recipes You Can Make While You Sleep

Forget the Mustard—To the Ice Capades!

My, My, Miss American Pie—Recipes from a Dry Levee

Holy Shit!

Putting out the Good China

Frisky Business

If Lucille Ball Had Been a Man …

Licking Things Your Mother Warned You About

Blankets in Toasters

Drill Press Mania

Chili Peppers vs. Bananas

Today at The Floating Hyena, we’re going to answer a question that has plagued humankind for millennia: Which are better, chili peppers or bananas? To arrive at a conclusion, we must carefully weigh the pros and cons of each food item, making sure not to simplify the matter even if we ourselves don’t really care for bananas that much—I mean, they’re OK, but, if you can pardon the pun, people go a little too bananas for them—and even if we think that chili peppers are one of the greatest things in existence, exceeding even the sensation of popping bubble wrap.

Here’s what we found:

Chili Peppers

Pros

• Chili peppers come in a wide array of colors: green, yellow, orange, red, white, and even purple. Yes, purple, people!
• They also come in a variety of sizes, too, from the certainly not gigantic but still pretty sizeable poblano to those little hot ones they sell at the grocery store that are so hot it’s absurd that they’re sold by the pound because nobody would need to buy more than, like, two of them, amounting to about a zillionth of a pound, for their entire year’s worth of hotness, they’re that intense.
• A great episode of The Simpsons revolves around Homer hallucinating after eating an insanely hot chili pepper.
• A band that at least used to be pretty great was named after a certain kind of chili pepper.
• Name a food that doesn’t suck without chili peppers in it. They even make a good jelly. Think about it.

Cons

• They make some people—whom I call babies—cry.
• If you chop them and forget to wash your hands afterward, you are opening yourself up to a world of pain, especially if you touch “sensitive” parts of your body, if you get my drift.
• You run out of them from time to time.

Bananas

Pros

• If you actually eat them when they’re ripe, but not overripe, they are pretty tasty.
• “The Banana Boat Song” is all right.

Cons

• “If you actually eat them when they’re ripe, but not overripe, they are pretty tasty,” which is for about five minutes. Eat them before then and they still taste green or after it and they taste like rotting garbage.
• A friend of mine who’s a native of India pointed out to me that there are more varieties of bananas than Americans eat, which is generally: one. I’ve seen the others in stores, and you know what I say? “Not interested!” So as far as I’m concerned, bananas come in one color, one size, and one flavor: banana. How boring!
• Bananas inspired the banal show The Banana Splits.
• If you refrigerate a banana in its peel, it turns black.
• “Electric banana” was a scam. A cruel, cruel scam.
• Watching somebody in a movie slip on a banana peel is funny if you’re a brain-damaged two year old.
• A “banana cream pie” is just a vanilla pudding pie without the guts to be just a vanilla pudding pie.
• Banana bread makes terrible tuna salad sandwiches.

The Winner: Chili peppers.

In your face, bananas!

—S.M.

Television Finally Targets the Sophisticated Man

New cable networks keep popping up in my channel guide. The latest one I’ve noticed, is the “Esquire Network”— as in the magazine that features alluring photos of the most-beautiful actress du jour, and/or soon-to-be SNL host. But it used to practice some journalism, so it’s perhaps more respected than others on the same rack.

When I check the guide (which I admit, is not that often), Esquire is running either a “Burn Notice”, Miami Vice”, or “American Ninja Warrior” rerun. This lineup won’t cut it over the long haul. The key to success for any 21^st century cable network, is original “reality” TV programming. The less related to the actual network, the better (History’s “Ice Road Truckers”, for example).

A number of possible shows have been “leaked”.

These seem like they have a shot:

“Four Horsemen Dude Ranch”
Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence (who goes by Skip) operate a Dude Ranch in the Poconos, and controversy abounds right out of the gate. In episode 1, War handles a property line dispute with the neighboring organic flax farmers, Death threatens the judges of a square dance contest, a video of Pestilence’s inept attempt to rope a calf goes viral, and Famine struggles with the grocery shopping.

“Waiting for ‘Waiting For Godot’”
Cornelius and Franz Ferdinand set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk outside a theater in hopes of getting front row tickets for a production of the Becket classic— which may or may not be on the schedule— and the producers throw many a challenge at the gentlemen as they attempt to maintain their place in line. Pull off your boots, and watch while enjoying a refreshing Pepsi Max.

“The Mandrills and the Baboons”
A family of mandrills moves into a duplex, next door to a family of baboons. Insults won’t be the only thing flung between the two families, as they compete in the cutthroat world of print advertising. Each ‘presentation’ is more engrossing than the next.

“Fanny Pack Sweatshop”
An unvarnished look at a rag tag team of unemployed lumberjacks, tuna fishermen, and ice road truckers, given a second chance at success in the merciless world of fanny pack manufacturing and wholesaling.

“Big Drunk Fuckers”
The ups and downs of a family of hillbillies who hate, everyone.

 —r.c.