Killing Time, Softly

You don’t reach a certain age in this circus we call life without cultivating a few well-chosen pet peeves along the way. Some are inherited while others are imprinted from our first yowling appearance out of the womb and into the world.

My Mom is responsible for my vexation with noisy walkers. When my sister and I were small, we’d screw around the way most kids do and shuffle our feet. This would drive Mommy mental and elicit a barking, “Girls! Pick up your feet!” As I grew up, that command spread into a personal bias not only against shufflers, lumberers and galumphers but the women’s footwear industry. A hex on you clacking high heels! Shut the fuck up thwoking flip-flops! Consequently, I have an extremely light tread that’s temporarily stopped hearts in my fellow human beings and even scared the bejesus out of cats. I also have a helluva time buying shoes.

Under the second nature category is my compulsive punctuality. While some people will be, as the saying goes, “late to their own funeral,” I’ll be ten minutes early to mine. I never mind cooling my flats for a few minutes waiting for an appointed meeting or rendezvous, but may the good Lord help you if you show up a minute late. My time is just as important as your time, and don’t you forget it.

Which is why I’m increasingly ticked (tocked) off by the vague phrases that have become the lingua franca of designating time or, more importantly in my industry, deadlines.

The most passive-aggressive is the acronym ASAP. As someone who prides themselves on not just meeting but beating deadlines what, exactly, does “as soon as possible” mean? Metaphysically, any thing is possible at any time. Using ASAP is just a convenient way to cover your ass. You don’t come off sounding like a whip cracker if you only imply a need for speed, but can say to your direct report “I told them I needed it ASAP” if it doesn’t magically materialize within a never allotted time frame.

While it hasn’t reached the ubiquity of ASAP, EOD is another murky qualifier that’s turning up in my e-mails more and more. If I worked as a trader on the New York Stock Exchange, end of day would be 4pm. If I were a soldier in basic training, end of day would be 6pm. If I followed the sun, end of day would be whenever Old Sol sets. Of course, there’s the “end of days” or “Armageddon,” which would be the end of day and night for good and all. The point is, my end of day may not be your end of day. In fact, given how some days end, I wish they never began.

Although I found it easy as a kid to walk like a starving hunter, it was, ironically, more difficult to master the reading of a clock face, so my Mom bought me a Fisher-Price “Tick Tock Teaching Clock” to help the process along. I still have it as my most cherished childhood toy. For those who use flimsy acronyms instead of solid numbers to lay down a deadline, feel free to borrow it. Anytime.

You Say It's Your..?

“Gloria, you’re just like your Uncle Johnny. Your birthday is a national holiday.”

I’ll be hearing that annual refrain from my Mom tomorrow because it is, in fact, my birthday!

Light the sparklers! Fling the confetti! Toss back a toast! Hell, I’d even urge you to take the day off from work if it wasn’t a Saturday.

I’m one of those people who think birthdays are a big deal and deserve to be fussed over. I never mind getting a year older (the way I’ve lived my life, I’m lucky to have made it this far) and believe they’re New Years, Christmas and Fourth of July rolled into one personal, gift-wrapped package.

How I celebrate my birthday has changed over the years. When I was in the single and early double digits, it was all about sugar overload and how many gifts I could amass. I particularly remember a tradition we had in grammar school, where your friends would make “corsages” out of tin foil-covered cardboard, bows and ribbons, covering them with Bazooka, Tootsie Rolls and other “penny” candy. Not only would the number of corsages you received reflect your popularity in the pecking order, you became the most sought-after person in class as your fellow students treated you like a walking, talking Pez dispenser.

I hit eighteen during those golden years when that was the legal drinking age. Sugar was replaced by shots and ear-bleeding hangovers for the next two decades or so, but I still had my cake and ate it, too, thanks to that universal workplace tradition known as the office party.

Truth be told, nobody gave a rat’s ass whose birthday it was, as long as we had an excuse to get away from our desks at three o’clock and fill our faces with cake. The only angst surrounding the celebration was the passing around of the birthday card. Suddenly, I became the most popular person on the premises and not because I was clothed in candy.

“Say, Glor. Think you can help me write something here?” miffed co-workers would ask while waving the card in my general direction. When I’d tell them that writing their own sentiment would be just fine, miffed turned to alarmed.

Inevitably, there’d always be one colleague who’d ask the question that never failed to leave me speechless. “Is there another way to say ‘Happy Birthday’?”

You will find no bigger iconoclast than yours truly, but some things are sacred and the words “Happy Birthday” are one of them. It’s simple, it says it and it shouldn’t be screwed around with. Add on “many happy returns” if you must, or “how old are you now?” if you’re suicidal, but there is no substitute in the vast language we call English for those two little words.

Last year, I had one of those milestone birthdays that stretched out to a three-day free-for-all. For a change, I’m keeping it on the down low tomorrow. The sparklers, confetti and other festive trappings can be shelved until next year.

A simple “Happy Birthday” will do it for me.

Book 'Em

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Some book title, eh? Just the sort that makes my eyes skittishly dart around the shelf, looking for a read with a little more, shall we say, heft.

But tough times combined with unrelenting boredom make a woman do strange things. It was the tail end of last summer when my 84-year-old mother fell on her tail and sustained a slight fracture to one of her ribs. What followed was a month of the matriarch being confined first to the hospital, then a physical rehab facility and, finally, back to the old homestead. Over my strenuous objections, the rest of my clan hatched an ill-conceived plan to give my Mother 24/7 care until she was able to stand on her own two feet. The scheme lasted exactly one week before we were at each other’s throats but, in the meantime, yours truly was on duty during daylight hours, ping ponging between the stress of playing nurse to a cantankerous patient and the malaise of having zilch to do when said patient was asleep.

That’s when I finally gave in and picked up the above-mentioned best seller, which one of my sisters left on the kitchen table. Maybe it was the circumstances but, much to my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t half bad -- a bit contrived, somewhat mawkish, yet not without a certain lighthearted wit. But what the hell is with that title?

A quick blow through Amazon’s 50 Best Sellers of 2009 tells you today’s writers need to brush up on the three “Cs” – clear, concise, compelling.

Is it really necessary for Stephen King to include the words, “A Novel,” in the title for “Under the Dome”? Surely the “Master of the Macabre” doesn’t believe that we believe a sinister clear dome has actually cut off the residents of a New England town from the rest of the world. Or that the vampires, zombies, werewolves and other crazy-assed creations that make up his prolific bibliography are walking among us. Granted, I’ve met a few dogs that could give Cujo a run for his Milk Bones, but really, give your readers some credit.

Take out the utterly unnecessary “a novel” and at least King kept his title down to three well-chosen words. It’s the non-fiction writers who need to invest in a carton of red Sharpies and delete the subtitles to their titles. How’s this for verbiage that rolls off the tongue: “Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.” Or this: “Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG.” And finally: “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.” With a title this all-encompassing, who needs to read the book?

At the moment, I’m hunkered down with Martin Amis’ novel, “London Fields.” Before the story begins, Amis includes a note explaining how he came to title his book:

“The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page. London Fields is the second kind of title.”

In future, let’s hope all writers, like Amis, go with option two.

Hail a Holy Hellraiser

Long before it became the home for battling chefs and bitchy housewives, Bravo was cable’s cultural bastion for opera, dance, classical music, theater performances and foreign films.

I should know. At the time, I held the now antiquated title of Secretary to the Manager of Bravo’s Program Acquisition Department. Between answering phones (voice mail wasn’t even a twinkle in Ma Bell’s eye) and pounding out letters on an IBM Selectric typewriter (clickey-clack, clickety-clack), I was exposed to all this high-falutin’ fare. The opera, ballet and symphonic stuff left me cold, but it was here that I discovered the exotica of global cinema. For a kid brought up on Disney’s animated saccharine and Cinemascope’s bloated epics, it was a reel smorgasbord. From the French New Wave to the Italian Neo-Realists and the Chinese Fifth Generation, I could feast on a broad array of movies that were way more compelling, insightful and thought-provoking than anything ground out by the Hollywood film factory.

Also unlike the studios, where movie titles are dictated as much by the storyline as the marketing department, foreign filmmakers have the same mastery with a moniker as they do over the medium. Some of my fave titles include Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (aka Dick Tracy on Mars), Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Lina Wertmuller’s Everything Ready, Nothing Works and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

There’s one foreign writer/director/actor who belongs in the Film Title Hall of Fame and that’s Herzog’s compatriot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Completing an astonishing forty feature films in less than fifteen years (not to mention two television film series, three short films and twenty-four stage plays), Fassbinder was a bundle of creative energy and a self-destructive libertine who died from an overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine at the age of thirty-seven. Never one to shy away from controversy, he made front page news in his native Germany as much for his tortured personal relationships with both men and women as the provocative political content of his works, pissing off feminists, gays, conservatives, Marxists and Jews.

It’s no wonder he became known as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema and that his film titles reflect both the turbulence of his work and, ultimately, his life:

Love is Colder Than Death

Gods of the Plague

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

Beware of a Holy Whore

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

Whether Fassbinder ultimately joined Mother Kusters or is hanging in hell with a holy whore, his films and film titles can best be summed up in his own words: “I let the audience feel and think.”