A Sense of En-Title-Meant

Shortly after the New Year, I had an interview with one of the head honchos at a small advertising agency out on Eastern Long Island. Right from the get-go, my gut told me this meeting wasn’t going to be kosher. I applied for a copywriter job posted by this agency two months prior to the meeting and, every couple of weeks or so, would get an e-mail from The Honcho inquiring about things like creative samples and salary requirements. When he finally pulled the trigger and set up a meeting, I agreed only because it was the dead of winter and would have met Dick Cheney at Hooter’s if it would get me out of the house.

In short order, The Honcho admitted my advertising background (mostly entertainment) wouldn’t translate well to his main client base (mostly academic). As I silently calculated how much money I just blew in fossil fuel to make this fruitless, fifty-mile round trip, he began to pick my brain about my past employer, a media company that programs and distributes several national cable networks. Then the truth came out. Seems The Honcho had been shopping around a pilot script to a number of cable television outfits and was looking to me for expertise and contacts.

Talk about a sense of entitlement! I should have made a smoldering beeline for the exit, but I admired The Honcho’s chutzpah and, ashamed as I am to admit it, his good looks didn’t hurt, either. Not only did I give him a contact, I even agreed to take on the ultimate writing challenge of brainstorming a title for the series.

To a non-writer, scribbling out a full page of words must seem infinitely harder than coming up with a brief title for a movie, book, TV show or CD. More words = more work, right? Nay. I can bang out a paragraph in a tenth of the time it takes me to encapsulate a brand in a tight headline. Titles are even trickier.

Take Iggy Pop’s latest release, “Preliminaires.” After “being our dog” for decades, the Igster decided to take a laid back lounge approach on this CD, even growling some of the songs in French (ohh-la-la!). Problem is, “preliminaires” is the French word for the English “preliminaries,” which is how most of Iggy’s fans pronounced it. Merde!

One album title that hit the bull’s eye was Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear.” While going through a bitter divorce from his first wife and Motown founder Berry Gordy’s sister, Anna, Gaye found he didn’t have the scratch to pay her alimony and child support demands, so agreed to give her half the royalties from his follow-up to the smash, “Let’s Get it On.” The resulting album was a raw, sometimes vicious disc that one reviewer called “the sound of divorce on record.” Not only did it take a critical and popular drubbing, generating little money for the ex-Mrs. Gaye, but she even considered suing for invasion of privacy. Take that, my dear.

On the other end of the spectrum, the album title that trumps all for sheer killer appeal yet absolute misrepresentation is by a barely-remembered British prog rock group of the late Sixties/early Seventies called Spooky Tooth. Their fifth album, “You Broke My Heart, So I Busted Your Jaw,” had many an unsuspecting music fan forking over their cash for what the title promised would be a balls-to-the-wall smash-up. What they got instead was a half-dozen so-so blues tracks, rounded out with a couple of piano ballads. As one peeved customer reviewer on Amazon put it, “They give the album that title and don’t write a song to go with it? What a letdown!”

For creative works that really live up to their billing, next week “The Bite” will extend the title search by focusing on the movie titles of Germany’s most prolific, provocative and debauched filmmaker.

Brother, Can You Spare a Click?

I’ve been advised by two of my nearest and dearest, who are also fellow bloggers, that I should consider monetizing this site by allowing Google to post click-through ads. On the one hand, I lost my full-time job over two years ago (thanks, you Wall Street bastards!) and earning my daily bread through freelance writing gigs is slim pickins. On the other hand, you, my faithful readers, would have to click on these ads a ridiculous number of times in order to generate even a few coins for this ink-stained wretch, so I’m not sure it’s worth the trade-off.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the advertising game, even more so because I’m one of the players. If you’ve ever watched “Mad Men” and seen the granite-jawed creative director Don Draper artfully cram a campaign down a client’s throat, I can tell you that never happens in today’s ad world. (And neither does all that drinking, smoking and screwing. If only!)

In fact, advertising in America seems to have hit a nadir since those heady days of the suit-wearing, martini-swilling Madison Avenue boys. Ad creatives have simply become a “pair of hands” for clients who have taken a few college English courses, taught themselves Photoshop and been exposed to a relentless stream of advertising since emerging from the womb, so think themselves more than qualified to mess up my job as well as their own. When faced with these creative cretins, my standard response is: “I can balance my checkbook. That doesn’t mean I can prepare your taxes.”

The worst blow against “out of the box” advertising, though, is the “herd mentality.” Let one brand execute a campaign that generates water cooler buzz, and you can bet that ten other brands will unleash a pale imitation of the original. Mark my words, Betty White was the first but will not be the last octogenarian actress to take a severe body blow. I can just see the disclaimers now: “No elderly actresses were harmed in the making of these commercials.”

For really creative advertising, hit the streets of any down-and-out urban area (not hard in these rag-tag times) and turn your eyes downward from the billboards on the skyscrapers to the panhandlers on the sidewalks. Out of the box? Hell, these folks take the damned box, a black magic marker and turn out the kind of compelling, imaginative, hilarious taglines that make me want to retire my keyboard. Then again, they do have the one advantage of not answering to a nitwit client:

Why Lie?? I Need a Cold Beer

I’ll Bet you $1.00 You’ll Read This Sign

Homeless Bill Needs Rich Woman

Wife Has Been Kidnapped! I’m Short 98 Cents for Ransom

Ninjas Killed My Family! Need Money for Kung-Fu Lessons

Betcha Can’t Hit Me With a Quarter

Say, that gives me an idea. Why share the wealth with Google? I could post my own click-through “tin cup.” How’s this for a tagline:

My 2 Cents for Your Two Bits

Jonesin' For The Ocean

I’m not a fan of Billy Joel’s music, but I’ve seen “The Piano Man” interviewed a couple of times and he’s a damned good ranconteur. We’re both born and bred Long Islanders and he sums up the class difference between our two shores with the following clever assessment:

“If you wanted to date a rich girl, you went to the North Shore; if you wanted to date a cool girl, you went to the South Shore.”

I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the purse strings, so you can guess which side of our LI Mason-Dixon line I inhabit. There’s another great distinction between the shores besides what’s in (or not in) our wallets and it can be boiled down to the word “beach.”

If a resident of the North Shore tells you they live by “the beach,” don’t believe it for a second. What the Northies live on, or near, is the Long Island Sound. This notoriously polluted body of water washes up on rock-strewn spits of land that make even the thought of a barefoot stroll an exercise in pain. And you can forget about spreading a towel to catch some rays, unless stretching out on a bed of nails is your thing.

For the real white sand deal, you need to pack up your sunscreen, sunglasses and suds and point your ride south until you hit the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve done my fair share of traveling and can honestly say that the beaches on LI’s South Shore are some of the most beautiful in the world. I’ve parked my bikini-clad butt on many of them – Long Beach, Atlantic Beach, Point Lookout, Gilgo, Tobay, Overlook, Cedar, Smith’s Point, Hot Dog, Robert Moses – but none beats the crown jewel, Jones Beach State Park.

I couldn’t have been more than four or five when my Dad took a passel of us Brady kids and cousins for a dip at Jones’ Zach’s Bay. Dubbed “Diaper Beach” because of its toddler-friendly nature (shallow, no waves), it’s where many an Islander got their first dose of salt water up the nose and serious sunburn on the shoulders. By the time I was in high school, hitching down Wantagh Parkway to reach the teenage wasteland of Field 4 with its blasting radios and bodies baking like human Tater Tots was a regular summer activity. And it goes without saying that my first summer job was at Jones during my college years. If I had a dime for every cocktail I downed in the Field 2 lifeguard shack, I could have been a North Shore girl.

But the paramount reason I love Jones is, perversely, the crowds. With an average of six million people sprawling across it sands during a typical summer season, any idea of spending a peaceful idyll lulled by the soft sound of ocean waves is crushed by a tsunami of humanity, and that’s just the way I like it. If all the world’s a stage, then Jones is a non-stop theater of comedy, drama and farce, with the players parading around half-naked, which adds to the absurdity.

It’s not until I open my ears, though, that this native realizes Jones isn’t a Long Island or even a New York playground but a world-wide tourist attraction. It’s not unusual to hear Japanese being spoken to my left, Spanish to my right, Swedish to my fore and some strain of Slavic to my aft. Master builder Robert Moses got it right when he modeled the Jones Beach Water Tower after St. Mark’s Campanile. Like that Venetian landmark, it still knocks me out that that the beach I consider just another part of my ‘hood is on some foreign traveler’s itinerary.

Let the North Shore keep their riches and their Sound. For my two cents, it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses.

Rage Against the Machine

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent an e-mail urging me to write an article dispelling the notion that Baby Boomers are a bunch of navel-gazing, hippy-dippy boobs. I wish I could give you his original quote, but I’m scrupulous when it comes to deleting e-mails so this will have to do.

I have no idea what set off his mini screed, but I can tell you his request was met with a somewhat tepid reception on my end. Defending a generation is not the mission of this blog or its writer. I see the world as a level playing field, so you can be an asshat or an arhat whether you’re eight, eighteen or eighty. And although sociologists put me at the tail end of the Boomer generation, I’ve never really felt a part of that vast Sixties subculture. Yeah, I was weaned on The Beatles, The Stones and all the other groovy vibes of that tumultuous decade, but my real allegiance is to the punks of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Besides, the Boomers are like any generation in that they have as many marks in the minus column as the plus column, including being the first “helicopter” parents, for which I will be eternally ungrateful.

But this past Sunday, I heard a feature story on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” which, in light of the current national malaise, made me rethink my position and put fingers to keyboard in praise of an infamous Sixties-era event for which the Boomers deserve a major shout-out.

Tuesday, May 4th, marked the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. For those who weren’t around for what has to be one of the most heinous criminal acts of a so-called democracy against its own citizens, let me give you a brief rundown:

On April 30th 1970, Richard Nixon, who had promised to end the war in Vietnam during his presidential campaign, announced that he was expanding the war into nearby Cambodia. The response was widespread protests on college campuses across the country, including Ohio’s Kent State University. During the night of May 1st, a crowd of about 120 people – students, bikers and out-of-town kids – rioted on the streets of downtown Kent, causing Governor James Rhodes to call in the National Guard to keep order on the campus. On the morning of May 4th, with about 2,000 students gathered for a protest rally, the Guard made two attempts to disperse the crowd, throwing tear gas canisters and getting pelted with rocks in return. The crowd had now broken up into scattered groups with some of them leaving the area as ordered. At 12:24 pm, with no direct threat of any kind, 29 of the 77 Guardsman abruptly opened fire, sending a volley of 67 bullets across the campus. Four students were killed – two of them non-protestors who were walking from one class to another – and nine were wounded, one of them suffering permanent paralysis.

As appalling as this tragic event was, the aftermath stands as one of the ballsiest moments of the Boomer generation. Running the real risk of getting their brains blown out, four million students went on strike, closing down 900 universities, colleges and high schools across the country. A banner hung out of a window at New York University read, “They Can’t Kill Us All.”

No, but they could, and did, kill two more students just ten days later at Jackson State University, and under very similar circumstances to what went down at Kent State. And yet, the protests continued.

Forty years later, I think we need to take a page out of this particular chapter in our American history, not to mention paying closer attention to the on-going and valiant protests against the regimes in Tehran and Thailand where, believe me, no photographers will be present to document the carnage like the iconic photo from Kent State that accompanies this week’s blog. The next of kin will be lucky to recover the bodies.

To quote Bill Maher, “I’m angry that people aren’t angry.” I’m especially angry that the generation who risked life and limb forty years ago aren’t leading the charge against a financial system that’s now become our greatest domestic threat and a political system where the players are more interested in keeping their jobs than serving their fellow citizens.

Some people believe that hitting the barricades is a job best left to the young, and I tend to agree, but those helicopter parents I mentioned before should be setting the example in word and deed instead of being so tightly wound about their kids’ SAT scores or college GPAs. Maybe if President Obama instituted the draft to fight our two overseas wars (remember those?) that would get the Boomer ball(s) rolling again.

Or, as that Sixties chestnut goes, “Teach your children well.”

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.

Stretching a Point

A recent e-mail exchange with a friend found us both quoting that femme fatale of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker. We also expressed our admiration for the film, “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” where the title character is played by one of cinema’s edgier actresses (employing an even edgier accent), Jennifer Jason Leigh.

In one particular scene where Leigh/Parker is engaging in verbal horseplay at said Round Table with the rest of the wickedly clever literati of 1920’s New York, someone is referred to as a genius, to which our darling Dottie indignantly replies, “No! I don’t think that word is elastic.”

I couldn’t agree with the Missus more. Some words in our culture have taken on a distinctly rubber band quality, stretched past the point of their original power until they’ve become a flaccid assemblage of letters.

One word that’s been unmercifully subjected to the rack is “love.” The Beatles may have been right when they wrote that’s all we need, but do we need it everywhere? Look, I love people, animals, art, literature, music, an ice-cold martini and free bar snacks as much as the next person, but I draw the line when that word is bandied about in business correspondence. Sorry to say, but I have to point the finger at my own gender for this gaffe:

“I’d love to see some copy versions on this by tomorrow” is an e-mail I’d get all too regularly from one of the young women in the marketing/sales department. Or, even more irritating, “I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the creative you did on the ad campaign!!” Who knew that being praised for a job well done could set my teeth on edge. I half expected to see little hearts in place of the “o”s and often wondered if a love note from one of these “Marie Claire” devotees would take the opposite tack:

“David, I’d really value your input with the creation of a baby. Does convening a quick but productive meeting at ten tonight work for you? Please advise ASAP.”

Another word that’s been shot to hell is “assassination.” This term used to be reserved (and rightly so), for world leaders who were murdered for political reasons (e.g. Kennedy, Lincoln, Sadat, Bhutto, Gandhi). As much as one might like the music of Biggie Smalls, Tupac and John Lennon, they were not the targets of assassination but killed, the first two as a result of a pissing match between rival East Coast-West Coast hip-hop posses, the third at the hands of a deranged maniac. Their deaths were violent, untimely and a blow to the culture, but they didn’t knock political systems off their axis, provoke rioting in the streets or send world markets reeling.

Last, but certainly not the end of the list, is the word “evil.” To persuade all of us good citizens that the end was nigh, George W. Bush referred to the “Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address in 2002, specifically pointing his finger at Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The dubiously elected “Dubya” may have been ready to soil his tighty whiteys over this triumvirate of mediocre madness, but this Catholic schoolgirl less so. “Evil” is a malevolent talent reserved for God’s only fallen Angel, whether he’s called Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub or Karl Rove. Hussein was a murderous bastard to be sure, but had as much hate for Muslim extremists as we do, Ahmadinejad is a squinty-eyed cur with a Napoleon complex, and Kim Jong-il is a delusional dwarf who I could take out in a mildly interesting street fight. To confer on any of these two-bit punks the label of “evil” is to debase God’s best and only nemesis.

As Mrs. P. herself would say, “What fresh hell is this?”