Foreign Exchange

It seems like another lifetime, but I once said “I do” and was married for seven years. The relationship foundered for the usual reason – we couldn’t stand the sight of each other anymore – and were delighted to go our separate, happily ever after ways.

I was recently reminded, though, of the one thing I miss about my lawfully wedded life when I overheard my neighbor speaking Italian. My ex’s Mama and Papa were from the same small town in Italy’s Friuli region, so I was heavily exposed to this bella lingua for as long as our imperfect union lasted.

I never approached being fluent, but it got so I could pick up the general gist of a conversation. As with most languages, there were a few words I’d hear constantly, including ecco. Early in our marriage, after another gut-busting Sunday dinner, I asked for a literal translation of ecco and stumped every Italian speaker around the table.

“Does it mean, ‘There you have it?’”

Um, not exactly.

“How about, ‘What else did you expect?’”

Nope, that wasn’t it, either.

The idiomatic inquisition lasted for a few more minutes until I realized the futility of my quest and dropped it for good.

It wasn’t until years later I discovered this is what’s known as a lexical gap. That is, there is no one-to-one word, expression or turn of phrase from the source language to the target language.

For instance, an English word that has a hard time breaking the language barrier is “have.” Vernaculars as far-flung as Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and Welsh don’t have a specific verb to describe this form of all-encompassing possession and, instead, rely on a combination of words. “I have a gun” in English would literally translate as “My gun exists” in Turkish or “There is to me a gun” in Hebrew and “By me there is a gun” in Russian. Our Russian brethren do have a word for “to have” but it’s very rarely used because it can backfire like that gun and be construed as a rude term for getting it off as in, “Do you have a wife?” Get the drift?

All of this native tongue-twisting can get pretty funky when you’re an English-speaking tourist traveling abroad. Being understood verbally isn’t a problem, since body language does a lot of heavy lifting in a face-to-face confab, but reading signs and directions translated into English can be a mind-blowing experience. Some of the more hilarious head scratchers collected by intrepid trekkers over the years include:

On a faucet in a Finnish bathroom: “To stop the drip, turn cock to right”

In a Bucharest hotel lobby: “The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.”

In a Tokyo bar: “Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.”

Ad for donkey rides in Thailand: “Would you like to ride on your own ass?”

In a Swiss inn: “Special today – no ice cream.”

In 2004, the BBC polled 1,000 linguists as to which is the world’s most untranslatable word. And the winner is…”ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in the southeastern Congo. Roughly translated, it means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

Wonder if those same linguists could help me with ecco.

IMH(N)O

This past Ash Wednesday, I did a penance of sorts in the form of an eight-hour phone conversation with, well, let’s just call him “Mr. Character” and leave it at that.

We’re both Geminis, so keeping the conversation rolling for all those hours wasn’t much of a stretch. Since we’re also both creative types (me, writer; he, musician) talking about the arts took up a fair portion of those 480 minutes. He did throw me a curveball, though, when he asked what I’d choose as “The Great American Novel.” I tried to deflect the question by opining for a few minutes about how I didn’t believe in that particular designation, but Mr. C. is a stubborn man and he kept pressing me for an answer, which I reluctantly gave him.

It’s not that I’m afraid to give an opinion. On the contrary, and usually whether you want to hear it or not. But recommending anything – a movie, a restaurant, a TV show – is a minefield and never more so then giving the thumbs up on a book. I’ve learned this from hard experience because I’m usually the one trawling for a recommendation and have invariably been disappointed. It makes me wonder whether the person who gave me the title knows my taste at all or, worse, if they have any taste themselves. Unlike a movie, TV show or meal, reading a book is a major investment of time, patience and imagination, and one I expect a spectacular return on. Besides, I don’t like to think badly of my family and friend’s aesthetic palate and I don’t want them thinking badly of mine.

One of the most egregious recommendations came my way from my niece and sister who gushed over Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much is True.”

I’ll tell you what I know is true: When the “Oprah Book Club” seal of approval appears on the cover of a book, it’s the literary kiss of death, at least as far as myself and Jonathan Franzen are concerned. In the dedication, the author himself refers to the bloated, 928-page novel as “a shaggy dog story,” but this mutt is flea-ridden, cross-eyed and lumbering around on three legs. Full of endless repetition, useless digressions and way too much back story, I thought his editor ran out of red ink and then decided only a well-honed machete would do the job. “Lamb’s (book) to the slaughter” indeed.

I’ve also been shamefully seduced by the siren song of the “buzz” book. Case in point: “The Da Vinci Code,” which was nothing more than a screenplay with the technical direction removed. I have to applaud Dan Brown, though, for turning a slight whodunit into two bodacious cash cows – bestseller and box-office smash – proving once again you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the average audience. Rule of thumb: If you’re at the beach and notice that practically every sunburned patron is squinting through the same paperback, cross it off your list.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now, but I’m finishing up yet another recommended tome, this one called “This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper. I was told it was “hilarious” and, to give the author his due, there are a few guffaw-inducing lines, but the story is numbingly rote: Protagonist loses wife, job, self-esteem and father in quick succession and is forced to sit shiva for seven days with his (you guessed it) hugely-dysfunctional family. No surprise, then, when I turned to the back flap to read about the author and discovered he’s currently adapting the book to the screen. Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.

And now I'm going to break my own rule:

If you’re wondering about my answer to Mr. Character’s query, it's “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson.

Go. Read. Then give me hell for it.

Freedom to Fail

Surely the most dubious distinction I (under)achieved during my sixteen-year academic career was scoring the lowest recorded grade in the history of my parochial high school on my geometry Regents.

I got a twelve.

Yes, you read that right.

Honestly, I don’t even know how I received a dozen points, unless you’re awarded that for printing your name correctly on the test paper.

You’ve probably put two and two together by now and figured out that math is not my strong suit. I did fine with basic arithmetic and managed to wing it through fractions, but after that I might as well have been deaf to the “language of the universe.” I spent countless hours, on the verge of tears or a major brain aneurysm, trying to count, calculate, measure and generally crack the code of mathematics, but it never added up to me. I clearly remember barging in on one of my brothers during his morning shaving session, begging him to help me with a particularly knotty equation, only to have him slam his razor into the sink’s shaving cream-clouded water as he tried, for the third frustrating time, to explain the answer to Little Miss Knucklehead.

At least that spectacular failure of a Regents score wasn’t due to a lack of instruction, as my brother’s fit of pique and a long line of equally vexed math teachers will tell you. So you can imagine my complete horror when, listening to a call-in show on NPR one afternoon, I heard the father of a fourth grader complain that English grammar was no longer being taught in his child’s public school. According to this dumb-founded Dad, his son’s teacher defended this non-practice by remarking that the kids would learn it “as they go along.”

By that insane logic, not only should I have been able to ace geometry and advance onto trigonometry, calculus and quantum mechanics simply by staring at equations on a blackboard, I would have been the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, and not Stephen Hawking. (Who, by the way, wrote a little tome entitled “A Brief History of Time” which topped the British “Sunday Times” best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. I’ll bet English grammar was part of his school curriculum, eh?)

Strange how we correctly believe that mathematics is a complex system of quantity, structure, space and change that needs to be actively taught, but don’t give the rules, morphology and syntax of grammar the same respect. With seven major word classes – noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, determiner – and a few minor ones like interjectors and ejaculations (naughty!), you don’t have to be Einstein to understand these are difficult concepts that are not going to be learned through osmosis. All I’m advocating is that kids be given the same shot at ringing success or spectacular failure with grammar as I was with geometry.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll set a school record of their own.

Critical Care

I don’t remember in which of my teenaged years I ponied up the spare change for my first magazine subscription, but I sure remember which publication got my dollars – “Rolling Stone,” of course!

Up until then, I’d sneak into my brothers’ unholy mess of a bedroom while they were at college, work or crawling through the local saloons and rifle through heaps of dirty clothes, stacks of albums and pillars of “National Lampoon” and “Playboy” before I found the current bi-weekly issue. Once they moved into pseudo adulthood and out of the house, they took “RS” with them, which is when I joined the ranks of the mag’s rolls.

One of my favorite parts of the pub was the record review section. Without such passionate, perceptive and influential critics as Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Charles M. Young and the one-and-only Lester Bangs, I may never have made such life-altering purchases as “Horses,” “The Ramones Leave Home,” “Never Mind the Bollocks” and “That’s Entertainment.” I rushed out to buy The Clash’s first American release, “Give ‘Em Enough Rope,” (the band’s eponymous debut would be released in this country shortly after) when I was advised that the LP announced its intentions with an opening gunshot of a rim shot and ratcheted up the two-man guitar attack from there. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair, as the framed “Black Market Clash” poster currently hanging in my living room can attest to.

When “RS” changed along with the culture, featuring more movie stars and pop tarts on its cover than real players, I knew it was time to move on and migrated over to “Musician,” as did some of “Rolling Stone’s” best writers like Bangs and Cameron Crowe. But “Musician” was never intended to be a fan mag and, as much as I liked their interviews and reviews, I found myself skipping over too many technical articles to justify the expense. That’s when I switched to “Spin,” which is where I’ve come to rest for over a decade.

But that rest has become increasingly restive. Their feature articles are fine, but I wish they’d drop the occasional fashion spreads (if I wanted to subscribe to “Elle” or “Glamour,” I would, fer chrissakes) and expand their coverage of live gigs from occasional to every issue. But the section that’s crying out for a real overhaul is the record reviews.

While “Spin’s” desire to review as many bands and their offerings as possible gets an “A” for effort, the result rates a desultory “D.” Jamming an average of fifty reviews (along with sidebars covering genre “essentials” and reissues) into a mere ten, six-column pages does a disservice to the musicians, the critics and the readers. Squeezed into an average of twenty lines, the reviewers are forced to use the crutch of comparison to give a sense of the artists’ soundscape. In the current issue (April 2010), I counted no less than three reviews that invoked Bob Dylan. Maybe none of these bands object to being put in the same company as the legendary Mister D., but if I decide to plunk down my money for their music, exactly which “Dylan” am I getting? The “Blonde on Blonde” Dylan? The “Blood on the Tracks” Dylan? The (egad!) “Christmas in the Heart” Dylan?

Hell, “Spin’s” reviews are so short, half the time I can’t even tell if the reviewer liked the record or not, which isn’t helped by the mag’s half-assed ratings system of ten gray dots, colored red in an ascending scale of approval, like some sonic SAT test.

Without expanded space for a thoughtful, in-depth record review, the artists’ individual creativity is short changed, the reviewers gets gypped out of the joy of turning an audience on to a deserving record or the satisfaction of warning them off a lousy one, and the music buyer is left wondering if maybe they can save a few bucks by canceling their sub and finding a better review site on the ‘net.

So “Spin,” do me a favor. Pick ten releases each month – twelve tops –then let your writers use their ears, heads and hearts to make their critical case. After that, I’ll be the judge.

Quotes and Unquotes

Unlike my “never trust anyone over thirty” generation, a recent poll of America’s teenagers showed a majority of them view their parents as their best friends and enjoy not only living with them, but spending their free time with Moms and Pops.

Which doesn’t mean that a cultural generation gap no longer exists, as my recent google search of most popular movie quotes points out. A glance at the top ten of AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes turned up a preponderance of dramas (eight in all) with two of the three top lines emoted by Marlon Brando. But a quick click over to the younger-skewing imdb shows their top ten movie quote pages lean heavily towards comedies (six, seven if you count “Pulp Fiction”) with Will Ferrell starring in four of them.

I bring up these factual flotsam and jetsam because the pieces of dialogue that stick in my head would never be found on either list. Any actor worth their thespian salt will tell you that, given a really juicy piece of dialogue, the trick is to treat it like a throwaway lest you ruin it with overstatement. To my mind, what defines a real pro is mouthing a few innocuous words that flash a glint of what really makes their character tick.

Take Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs.” Up until the scene between himself and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), where the two parse exactly how the hell their carefully planned diamond heist went so hideously wrong, he comes across as a hyperactive, motor-mouthed cheapskate who’s probably made it this far in the crime game due to sheer dumb luck, emphasis on the dumb. But as White runs down his remembrance of the blood-soaked massacre inside the jewelry store, Pink brings him up short with a pointed “That’s incorrect.” Not only are the two words intoned with the professorial air of an Oxford don, they’re a far cry from the profanity-laced tirades he’s been spouting off since the beginning of the film. Followed by his astonishingly accurate play-by-play and ultimately correct conclusion that he, White and the rest of their black-suited posse were, indeed, set up, you realize that Pink may just be the smartest color in this criminal Crayola pack.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” intoned by Javier Bardem’s preternaturally stoic homicidal maniac, Anton Chigurh, in the Coen Brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” is next on my list. You may (or may not) remember this line from the nail-biting scene between himself and the good ole boy gas station proprietor. The exchange starts innocuously enough, as Chigurh asks how much he owes for gas and a package of cashews, then quickly turns menacing when the owner innocently inquires after the weather in Dallas. Realizing he’s somehow gotten himself in serious hot water with a bad hombre, the owner falsely claims he’s getting ready to close up shop but, under Chigurh’s relentless questioning, starts floundering like a fish out of water. That’s when Chigurh comes out with the above referenced sentence, but not before slightly choking on one of those cashews. Accompanied by the faintest of gasps, it’s the first time you see a trace of emotion rattle the killer’s cage, even if it is only mild shock at what a simple-minded rube he’s playing with. Maybe Anton is a human being after all, instead of an air gun-toting automaton. (And for those of you who still haven’t seen this terrific flick, I won’t ruin it by commenting further.)

From the horrific to the hopeful, I’ll round out my top three with “Grand Canyon,” an episodic tale of how fate brings together various characters from opposite sides of the racial, social and economic chasm in modern-day Los Angeles. The film starts with wealthy lawyer Kevin Kline taking a wrong turn after a Lakers’ game, ending up on the mean streets of South Central, where his luxury ride promptly breaks down. Menaced by a group of young black men, one of them toting a gun, Kline is rescued by cowboy boot-wearing tow-truck driver Danny Glover. Wanting to show his appreciation for Glover’s one-man cavalry act, Kline takes him out for breakfast, where Glover reminisces about his late elderly father, whom he once asked how he accounted for his longevity as a black man in an often hostile world. “What was his answer?” Kline wants to know. Glover glances up from his plate and replies, “Habit.” Right there, you understand where Glover gets the cojones to not only talk down a pistol-packing car thief but survive, day in and day out, in the urban jungle of LA – keep your well-worn boots on the ground and get the job done.

They may not be on any list of quotable movie quotes, but these ordinary lines, and their extraordinary deliveries, do just that. Unquote.