The Master's Voice

Days before it was published this past Tuesday, Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” topped every book category on amazon.com.

Having contributed my fair share to the Stones’ concert/record/merch coffers over the years and getting diminishing returns on my investment (quick, name the last Stones album that wasn’t a reissue or live disc), I’ve opted to wait until the book hits my library shelves instead of shelling out the publishing price.

Besides, a little googling is all it took to read some of the more semi-salacious (Jagger’s dagger is more like a penknife) and not-so-shocking (the Glimmer Twins are far from joined at the hip) revelations. One nugget I did find surprising is that Richards was a member of his school’s choir. As if the mental image of rock’s “bad boy” as a white-robed cherub singing “Jerusalem” wasn’t bizarre enough, Richards says he signed up because he had “a soprano that worked.”

I once heard it said that if a Marlboro could talk, it would sound like Keith. I have no doubt that pre-nicotine/drugs/booze/formaldehyde he had some sweet pipes, but I’m just as glad all that high livin’ vaporized them. After all, what would such Stones classics as “Happy,” “Before They Make Me Run” and “A Little T&A” be without that voice.

In writing as in music, it’s the voice that separates the masters from the mere technicians. One of my favorite Hunter S. Thompson anecdotes appears in the biography, “Gonzo.” After giving a rambling, coke-fueled speech at “Rolling Stone” magazine’s 25th anniversary party, Thompson was found by the “RS” editorial assistant who was charged with being his keeper “…talking alone with Keith Richards, which was absolutely amazing to hear. It sounded like two dogs barking at one another…”

No doubt The Good Doctor and Keef were also playing the same chord in their respective crafts – rockin’, rollin’ and rabidly debauched. In this same vein, I find it intriguing to pair up my favorite authors with their pitch-worthy counterparts in the music world. For instance, Gore Vidal is literature’s Bryan Ferry – elegant, erudite with a touch of the louche lounge lizard. David Sedaris is definitely in tune with Morrissey, turning the bleakness of family, relationships and, in Sedaris’ case, the holidays, into darkly humorous vignettes. And Marilynne Robinson strikes me as mid-career Joni Mitchell, using inward, impressionistic imagery to mine the spiritual lives of her characters.

Whether or not you appreciate their language or lyrics, there’s no mistaking the intonation of these unique “voices” for lesser artists. And that, my friends, is what true artistry is all about.

Get a Clue

Like caffeine and alcohol, crossword puzzles have become the latest “Jekyll and Hyde” of the medical community. One day, they’re enthusiastically prescribed for improving brain function, the next they’re disparaged as nothing more than mindless entertainment.

Okay, so when my brain practically explodes while attempting to solve Saturday’s notoriously sadistic stumper, on which side of the mental spectrum does that fall, other than going mental?

What’s really pathetic is my once-a-week cerebral meltdown isn’t even caused by the gold standard of daily puzzle publications, “The New York Times,” but a lesser daily paper. Back in the 1920’s, when crosswords first became all the rage in the States, it’s ironic that the “Times” not only refused to run them, but was at the forefront of condemning crosswords as a "sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex.” "The Times" finally gave in and published its first puzzle in 1942 and established the following weekly pattern: Monday and Tuesday (easy-peasy), Wednesday, Thursday, Friday (ummm), and Saturday (arrrgghh!). Sunday‘s is a super-sized version of the Thursday crossword.

Non-puzzlers believe all you need to solve a crossword is a large vocabulary or a head full of trivia. Not true. The key to solving crosswords is in the clues, which have several subsets, such as the straight or quick (C: Queen ______ Boleyn, A: Anne), themes (category, quote, pun, rebus, commemorative) and the sometimes head-scratching indirect (C: Pay addition, A: OLA).

But for sheer pencil-breaking frustration, nothing beats the cryptic crosswords published throughout Great Britain, where the clues are puzzles in themselves. These also have different degrees of difficulty, ranging from maddening to mayhem.

An example of cryptic’s easiest clue, also called “straight," would be:

C: To bring worker into the country may prove significant

A: Important

“Why" you ask? Because “import" means to bring in, the worker is an “ant," and “significant" means “important."

Cake walk, right?

Here’s another example, called the “homophone":

C: A few, we hear, add up

A: Sum

Are you ready for this? The definition is “add up." You, the sorry-assed solver, must deduce that “we hear" is a homophone, so a homophone of “a few" (“SOME") is the answer.

I think anyone who does these cryptics in pen is a crackpot and should be committed to C:______Hospital, A: Bellevue.

Sometimes it’s not the clue but how the solver reads it. Asked what was the most difficult clue he ever featured in a crossword, current “New York Times" puzzle editor Will Shortz replied “Tower," which called for a three word answer.

When the puzzle’s answers were published, Shortz received an avalanche of angry letters and e-mails from stricken solvers who read the clue as “tower," as in “leaning _______ of Pisa" instead of “tow-er" (A: AAA).

Cross words indeed!

The Gang's All Here

I was taking a civil service exam several months ago when, turning the page of the test booklet, I was confronted with a table featuring numbers, blank spaces and the dreaded, lower case v and y.

Dropping my No. 2 pencil in disgust, I thought, “Algebra, this is no place for you!”

Those “of a certain age” will remember that line from the one, the only “Little Rascals” TV show or, as they were originally called in the theatrical one-and two-reelers produced from the early 1920s to the mid 1940s, “Our Gang.”

Dub the pint-sized posse of Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Buckwheat, Farina, Stymie, Chubby, Wheezer, Scotty, Butch, Woim, Pete the Pup, Dinah the Mule (aka the above referenced “Algebra”) and too many others to mention what you will. I’ll just call them hilarious and some of the most quotable characters ever to hit the large and then small screen.

The antic appeal of the “Rascals” is thanks to producer Hal Roach, who was turned off by child actors groomed to be “mini adults” and wanted the most down-to-earth squirts he could find to portray a gang of poor neighborhood kids. Since they were too young to read, the director would explain the scene and let them go at it, so who knows if the bon mots the kids mouthed were their own or dreamed up by Roach’s comedy writers.

Over time, some of the lines became code in my family for situations both comic and calamitous:

“Don’t drink the milk. It’s spoiled.” (Mom’s dinner stinks.)

“Yum, yum, eat ‘em up!” (Mom’s dinner is pretty good.)

“Well, well, well. Jack fell in the well.” (Na! Na! You got yours!)

“I have to stay home and grease Wheezer.” (I’m stuck doing chores.)

“Learn that poem. Learn that poem.” (I’m stuck doing homework.)

“And you’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (Oh sure, that scheme will pay off.)

“John Brown. Ask me again, and I’ll knock you down.” (Listen the first time, ya putz.)

“We want the Flory Dorys!” (Bring on the entertainment!)

And let’s not forget such random words as “Chubsy Ubsy” (fat kid), “wee-wah” (sucker) and “remarkable!” (uttered either sincerely or sarcastically).

There’s another reason I’ll always revere the “Rascals.” For a kid growing up in a white bread and mayonnaise suburb where bigotry was always just below the surface (and sometimes right in plain sight), the spectacle of these multi-ethnic mischief makers getting along while getting in trouble was a real eye-opener. Hey, they even played with girls like me! (Except, of course, for the members of “The He-Man Woman Haters’ Club.")

In later years, the series came under fire for its supposedly racist overtones, but cast members such as Matthew “Stymie” Beard and Allen “Farina” Hoskins put that viewpoint to rest, arguing that all the performers played “a type.” “We were just a group of kids who were having fun,” Beard said.

Finally, let’s put another scurrilous belief to rest. Contrary to a widely-circulated rumor, comedian Bill Cosby did not buy up the rights to the “Rascals” to keep racial stereotypes off television. Even though they’re scattered to the four winds like the gang after another fine fiasco, some episodes are available on DVD and others turn up on Turner Classic Movies.

O-tay? O-tay!

The Smoking Gun

Whenever my former boss wanted to find out the real story behind some particularly juicy piece of office scuttlebutt, he’d call me into his office and say, “Hey kiddo, go outside and have a cigarette.”

The “fearless leader” wasn’t trying to kill me by small degrees. He simply knew that corporate hierarchy had no place among nicotine fiends. From lowly customer service reps to highly-placed VPs, we were all branded as pariah and it was this bond that allowed the gossip to flow as freely as the smoke.

One of the more interesting folks who shared my addiction to the demon weed was a lawyer named Cat, who threw your image of the buttoned-down, buttoned-lipped attorney right out of court. Always smiling, always chatty, Cat could talk about any subject under the sun, but I remember a particularly striking conversation we had when I mentioned a “Vanity Fair” article I’d read about female war correspondents. Turns out her older sister, Marie Colvin, was one of the women profiled in the article.

A hometown girl born and raised in Oyster Bay, Colvin is a lauded reporter for the “Sunday Times of London” who has hidden in the hills with Chechen rebels, dodged Serb sniper fire in Sarajevo and lost her left eye covering the civil war in Sri Lanka. “Was I stupid?” she has written. “Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night.”

Colvin has been popping up in my memory bank of late now that journalism has become a most deadly profession. Last year alone, 110 journalists and media staff were killed, a disturbing 40% increase over 2008. This year looks like it’s on track to meet or beat that number, with 52 journalists already killed from January through August.

Surprisingly, only three of those murdered in 2009 were war correspondents like Colvin. The rest were local journalists covering their own turf, most killed in retaliation for their work and not for getting caught in the crossfire. Among the most Fourth Estate unfriendly nations are Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka and, topping the list for 2009, the Phllippines, where 31 reporters were wiped out in a single massacre.

But in the drug cartel-riddled country of Mexico, journalism itself has become the victim. On September 19th, “El Diario de Juarez,” the largest newspaper in the country’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, ran a front page editorial directly addressing the warring factions: “We ask you to explain what you want from us, what we should try to publish or not publish, so we know what to expect.” After having two of his staff gunned down within two years, the paper’s editor told a reporter for the AP, "We don't want to continue to be used as cannon fodder in this war because we're tired." Since “El Diario” was one of the last media outlets in Mexico willing to cover the drug wars, the fact that they’re giving up rings the death knell for freedom of the press.

While newspapers scramble to shore up their free-falling circulations and debate whether or not to pay wall their sites, perhaps the larger problem they should be tackling is how to keep their global brethren safe while putting governments’ feet to the fire in the prosecution of these crimes.

Smoking out the story shouldn’t mean that the reporter gets smoked.

Unpunctual Punctuation

Sentence me to ten lashes with a wet exclamation point! September 24th was National Punctuation Day and I let it slip by without even pausing (like a comma) to mark the occasion.

How does one celebrate such a festive event? According to the “National Punctuation Day” web site, you start by getting up late, taking a long shower, going out for coffee and bagels then reading the paper and circling all the punctuation errors you find. Too late for me to do that, but I did take them up on one of their tips and had a leisurely stroll past my town’s storefronts, noting all the signs with incorrect punctuation. Here are two I found at a single fish shop:

“Todays Special: Buy 2lbs. Shrimp, Get 1lb. Free”

“Voted Best on Long Island by News 12 and The New York Times Thank You! Long Island”

They also recommend you stop in the store and correct the owner. Er, no. I’ve seen the guy who runs that shop and I’d rather not find myself sleeping with the fishes.

Frankly, once the age of texting and tweeting dawned, I gave up correcting people’s punctuation, or lack thereof. It’s too exhausting. If people want to pile up words like bricks, without the structural cement of periods, commas, colons and the like, I’m not going to waste my time helping them turn rubble into writing.

I do have one punctilious pet peeve and that’s the overuse of exclamation points and question marks. Exclamation points are like cayenne pepper and should be used not only sparingly but one pinch at a time. It’s “Congratulations!” never “Congratulations!!!!!” The same restraint holds true for question marks. Typing several of these symbols doesn’t make you appear more excited or quizzical, just a hot mess.

For those of you who think the subject of punctuation is as dry as day-old toast, the book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” should change your mind. Written by Lynn Truss, an English author whose style is ruthlessly funny, this tome became a surprising sensation in the publishing world, spending weeks on bestseller lists. In fact, the title itself is based on a cheeky story about bad punctuation:

A panda walks into a cafe, orders a sandwich, eats it, then pulls out a gun and unloads it on the other patrons. When the horrified owner asks “Why?” as the panda heads towards the exit, he tosses a badly written wildlife brochure over his shoulder. It reads, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Ta da!

Next year, I won’t be so remiss and plan to whoop it up on “National Punctuation Day” by wearing something dashing, scheduling a colonoscopy, hanging a pair of wall brackets, watching a lunar ellipsis then falling into a deep comma. Period.