Maintenance Charge

This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it over a period that extends well past the “Eureka!” moment that spawned it. In his review, though, Steven Shapin emphasizes a deeper point about the products of our tool-wielding species: No less important than the creation of a piece of technology, or even its adaptation, is the work of maintaining it. That truth, chronically neglected, applies as well to our built environment.

Nota Bene

I’m a jogger. Putting my legs through piston-like paces, revving up my heartbeat, giving the gland that secretes endorphins a good bitch slap—for me, this is a critical therapy. I do it because I need to. But for simple enjoyment, nothing beats a stately, vigorous stroll through congenial terrain. So I take Jan Morris’s point in this passage from Pleasures of a Tangled Life, a collection of essays.

The human race was designed, in my opinion, not to jog for its physical recreation, but to walk. Most people look silly jogging, but one can walk with swank, one can walk with style, one can feel like General de Gaulle parading down the Champs-Elysées, one can observe with dignity the passing scene, one can converse without panting, smile without strain, and take one’s exercise with the composure that evolution evidently intended, when it stood us on two legs and made us lords of nature.

Downtown Loco

So my wife says: “Martin Scorsese made a comedy?” Yes, well, but it’s a dark comedy.

It’s called After Hours (1985), and Scorsese directed it after studio bosses canceled his long-dreamed-of project to film The Last Temptation of Christ. He received that devastating news just as he was setting up shop near Jerusalem, and, in the making-of feature that comes with the DVD of After Hours that we watched this week, he speaks of that period in his life as an ordeal on par with Christ’s descent into hell. The opportunity to churn out a low-budget movie about one man’s bad night in the Big Apple was, for Scorsese, a step toward spiritual as well as professional deliverance. (Later in the 1980s, of course, he found the backing that he needed to make and release Last Temptation.) After Hours isn’t “light,” by any means. But it is funny.

All Things Must End

That (“All Things Must End”) was the tagline for the final season of the HBO series Six Feet Under. Used in that context, the old saw cut brilliantly in two directions: In its fifth season, the show itself was coming to an end; and the show, throughout its run, treated death as its core theme. A family drama in which the family home doubled as a funeral home, it began each of its episodes by introducing viewers to a character—and then killing the character off before the opening titles rolled.

Human lives come to a stop, eventually, and so do mere TV shows. That the producers of Six Feet Under knew its endpoint—and could plan its concluding sequence of episodes on their own terms—was vital element of the show’s ultimate artistic success. The series finale, in which flash-forwarded scenes reveal what happens to every member of the Fisher clan before they reach their expiration date, won an immediate spot in the episodic-television Hall of Fame. It offered “closure” on a grand scale, and gave the whole series a certain novelistic solidity. The creators of other standout TV series have not been so wise, or so lucky.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the producers of Lost (a show that I’ve never watched, although a smart friend has strongly recommended that I give it a look) will terminate the series three seasons from now. They have wisdom on their side, apparently, along with the good fortune of retaining some leverage with their network gatekeepers.

Bus Stop, Bus Stop

Why don’t more people ride city buses? Is it because the buses don’t feature wireless Internet service? Is it because there are, as yet, no “intelligent” bus stops—“[c]urved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure” and “wrapped in an LED ‘skin’ that can play video”? Not so much, I think.

The main piece (“Bus 2.0”) in the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section this week surveys some big concepts in urban bus transport that have been rolling out of places like the Mobile Experience Laboratory at MIT. That brainy bus stop is one such idea. But the biggest of big concepts under review is “smart mobility,” or the notion that the key to improving the way cities move people around is to move data around more efficiently. GPS devices, goes the theory, will enable system managers to track buses with precision and riders to know precisely when the next bus will arrive at their stop. Networked vehicles will feed riders a stream of information—“from international news, to e-mail, to data about the passing neighborhoods.” And so on.

Now, before bus managers decide to invest in smart mobility, shouldn’t they give old-fashioned, unmodified mobility a try?

Getting to Be a Habit

A little more than halfway through the classic Hollywood musical 42nd Street (1933), Mohandas K. Gandhi makes a quick cameo appearance. That is, I think it’s Gandhi, or rather an actor playing him. I don’t know who else a middle-aged white man, made swarthy by make-up, wearing big round eyeglasses on his nose and only a wee loincloth on his person, could be trying to portray. The Gandhi figure springs up—suddenly, incongruously, inexplicably—at the tail end of a song-and-dance number in which stage star Dorothy Brook (Bebe Daniels) vamps a quartet of college boys, goading them on and then batting them away, all to the tune of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me.” The Gandhi fellow passes across the screen for probably less than a minute, but that’s long enough for the wily coot to steal the girl from four strapping, bright-eyed lads. “You’re getting to be a habit with me,” he croons to Dorothy in a comical, quasi-British voice as the two of them, arm in arm, exit stage-right.

Maybe, I fancied for a short while, this bit of business exists in the film to make an oblique pun on the word “habit”—that being another term for garment, as with a “nun’s habit.” The old Mahatma ambles forth in his meager dhoti, an iconic habit if ever there was one, and it strikes a jarring contrast to the star’s lavish gown and especially to ensemble worn by her suitors: Each boy sports a shirt with big collar points that spread out over a tight sweater, which he has tucked into a pair of baggy, bellowing trousers that rise well above his navel. It’s what the well-dressed freshman was wearing in 1933, and yet our heroine chooses the underdressed man instead. Funny stuff! But no, that theory is too clever by half. The appearance of the little brown freedom fighter at that moment of that scene, in a movie otherwise devoted to the romance and frivolity of old Broadway, is just as weirdly random as it seems.

Way Out West

To provide content for this journal, I am strip-mining my file of brief detective-novel reviews. (I’ve been writing these little squibs for several years now.) This one covers a fine, fine work that I read a couple of months ago.

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978).
Crumley hits a series of notes that another virtuoso of the hangdog-noir style had sounded a quarter-century earlier. The Last Good Kiss, like The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece from 1953 (note the valedictory wistfulness in both titles), builds an array of cockeyed triangles around an alcoholic writer, a woman who seeks to “rescue” him, and a sad-sack shamus whom the woman hires for that purpose. Yet in numerous ways Crumley charts new territory for the hard-boiled genre. Part of what’s new, in fact, is actual territory: C.W. Sughrue, part-time detective to the wealthy and degenerate, part-time bartender to their poor and equally degenerate brethren, calls Montana home. For him, dirt roads and an endless ream of black highway replace the mean streets of urban noir; instead of clipped wisecracking, he offers parched country wit, too dry even to be called sardonic.

Nota Bene

TV makes you stupid. It’s not an original insight, but back in 1980 the writer George W.S. Trow wrote an essay in the New Yorker that cast a particularly cold and waspish eye on the subject. Television, he suggested, had settled on the land like a slow, soft apocalypse, laying waste to every force in American culture that had formerly supported independence of judgment—and, indeed, the very possibility of adulthood. Trow died in obscurity late last year. Reading a retrospective “appreciation” of him in the New York Sun (via James Wolcott) led me to take a look at his essay, published in book form as The Context of No Context.

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it.

Suspicious Character

Why do I sign the entries in this log as “The Obelist”? For that matter, what is an “obelist”? Taking the latter question first, I note that the word appears in no standard dictionary. Not at Dictionary.com. Not Merriam-Webster Online. Not in the Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, that squats on a shelf in my living room. In a Google search of “obelist,” the only helpful pages that turn up are those that associate the term with a trio of obscure detective stories from the 1930s. Obelists Fly High, Obelists En Route, and Obelists at Sea, by C. Daly King, define “obelist” in more ways than one, according to online sources. The chief meaning: “one who harbours suspicions.” It’s worth noting that King, in each of his highly puzzle-oriented tales, included a special index called a “clue finder,” where readers could discover the pages on which he had hidden signs and portents of a solution to that book’s mystery. An obelist, therefore, is the sort of reader who scours a murder story for “suspicious,” secret-laden passages.

Mixed Company

Three standard ingredients at a wedding reception are dancing, photography, and alcohol. To succeed, a wedding reception should include no more than two of those ingredients. And one of the included ingredients must be alcohol.

I formulated that nostrum this past weekend at a Marriott Resort hotel in the exurban wasteland north of Chicago, where I attended the wedding and wedding reception of a family friend of my wife. The wedding was an unpretentious and perfectly touching affair. The groom, and the ceremony, were Jewish. The bride, and the apparel of both bride and groom (all the way down to his pointed-toe slippers), were Indian Muslim. Neither the Jewish nor the Muslim tradition has allowed its people to rely much on alcohol as a social lubricant, and this couple’s reception—300 stiffly attired attendees in a large, brightly lit tent, of whom the only people I knew were about a dozen of my in-laws—was therefore lamentably dry.