woobiquity

xli. Of perplexing political body language

John Kerry did it. When all the opposing pundits could find to criticize in his big convention speech were the finer points of his delivery (like the way he “blew through the best applause lines”), you know it was far from a flop. And by the way, you can watch the whole thing here.

Turning Bush and Cheney’s own rhetoric against them, including the “restore trust and credibility” line that was the post-Lewinsky crux of their message in 2000, suggests the Kerry people may finally be getting the hang of this campaigning business.

Earlier in the day they had childishly stoked rumors of a “surprise” during Kerry’s appearance. I like surprises, so I can’t help feeling a little bit jilted. A trick, more like, since this was just nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah for: “we knew all along that our man was saving the Bush-berating for himself.”

But there were unexpected gifts aplenty during the speech, mainly in the things that weren't said, at least not in so many words. I’m talking about body language.

Like, for example, is it common for international political figures to silence friendly applause by holding up both arms in a zombie-like scare tactic? I suspect this loomed larger (and more frightening) for the safe-distance television audience than it did for those actually under the shadow, but still – it’s a hoot.

Then there was the way Teresa Heinz Kerry slouched in the gallery while her husband lashed her with unconventional compliments from the podium. The faces she made could endure years of psychological study, seeming as they did to include “Oh stop!”, “When can I go home to my collection of gold ketchup bottles?” and “Everyone already knows I’m a princess” in indiscernible measures.

Then she leaned against John Edwards in a shy, girlish way that, if he’s any kind of white male politician at all, must have made his political life flash before his eyes.

But the Cheerleader of the Night award (or maybe “The Fonz”, but whatever, same decade) goes to John Edwards himself. I have to confess that the Boy Political Junkie in me has been thrilled by Edwards’ ascent, if purely because of the prospect that there might finally be a president from my home state. (We’ve got Andrew Jackson, but so does South Carolina; and anyway, without a presidential library, who cares?)

So I was smiling through gritted teeth while I watched Edwards jump to his feet the second his name was mentioned and start a painfully long, right-back-atcha routine of alternating thumbs above the head and index fingers at waist-level, swung down repeatedly as uncocked pistols.

Michael, a West Coast American I know here in London, thinks John Edwards comes across as an airhead. But I reckon a guy who made as much money as he did as a trial lawyer has to be pretty smart. Smart enough, that is, to know when to play dumb. I’m just not sure that extends to air pompoms.

xl. Of beauty lurking behind ugliness

Last year at about this time, an un-civil war was playing out on the letters pages of the American South’s only popular literary magazine, The Oxford American.

After a bankruptcy, the magazine had moved to Arkansas from its namesake city in the Deep South and been re-launched with a new format designed to encompass the grittier, more artistic sides of a region that some would prefer to define by its moonlight and magnolia myths.

“There is more to the South than the dirt you dig up,” one letter writer hissed. “The South is more than rednecks, and alligators, and burned-up dresses. I hope you fail.”

The defense ran from the dismissive (“ignorance”) to the eloquent: “Is it not conceivable that beauty can lurk behind ugliness, and vice versa?”

A dead end street in Charleston, South Carolina, where
the buses do a brisk trade in Old South tours.

Reading all this while in North Carolina on a summer vacation, I subscribed immediately. And within days of receiving my check, the magazine folded again. (Incidentally, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Am I really that far on the margins of magazine demographics?)

Finally, The Oxford American has announced it will resume publication this autumn. Which is excellent news. The very idea that the region that produced Faulkner, Welty and Flannery O’Conner, and continues to turn out talents like Donna Tartt, Charles Frazer and Daniel Wallace, would not have a decent, accessible literary and cultural review is just absurd.

The South is a very literary place. It’s got tragedy, it’s got guns on the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart, it’s got hurricanes. It’s got local color by the pick-up truck full. But that whole Southern gentility thing is just so over, not least because it’s been appropriated by the kind of people who live beside golf courses, who only read Southern Living (“Look, we’re just as good as you are. We get our deck furniture by fru-fru mail order, too.”)

Whereas the fringes of Southern living still have plenty of creative equity left in them. If you don't believe me, watch the excellent, low-budget film George Washington, which was shot in Winston-Salem. Or go to Savannah, Georgia, and see a place that in spite of the Midnight in the Garden bonanza still manages to hold onto its urban vitality, mixing mansions with beggars and boarded up buildings.

Or, thank the lord, you could just read The Oxford American.

xxxix. Of homesick tasebuds

Mmmm-hmmmm, okra.

xxxviii. Of cute little bunny rabbits...

… in the jaws of death.

“Your Dad mowed over a baby rabbit yesterday,” my Mom tells me on the telephone. “It didn’t get hurt at all, but its house was destroyed.”

“Mowed over” means with the big red riding lawn mower that’s practically a tractor. Its “house”, presumably, was under high grasses in the outer reaches of the sloping field that serves as my parents’ front yard.

Summon my sister, who lives down the road and has an uncanny knack for sensing when something like this is up. Worried about the animal’s welfare, alone in the wild like that, she suggested the rabbit would have a better life as a pet for her daughter, Macy. Who is three.

A chase ensued, in which four adult and one juvenile members of my family, armed with a bathroom towel, gave terror to the cute little creature. Around trees it hopped, through the fenced-off play area, under cars. But they got it.

“When I held it in my hands,” says my Dad, who had picked up the other extension, “it was as calm as it could be. But whenever anybody else tried to touch it, it went crazy.” He says this with a tone of paternalistic satisfaction.

“Your sister called the zoo in Asheboro,” my Mom says. “And they told her that when your Dad was holding it, it probably thought it was in the jaws of a predator.”

Lucky to be alive, the mischievous young rabbit was released into the bean patch, no doubt for a scolding from his mother followed by yet more summer adventures. The end.

xxxvii. Of unusual offers through the door

So this came through the door yesterday. I guess it beats window cleaning. This isn't the classifieds, so I've blocked out Mr Kalifa's details, but if you think you could use his services, do let me know.

xxxvi. Capturing the uncapturable

I just saw Capturing the Friedmans, the lauded documentary directed by Andrew Jarecki, and I gotta tell you, I concur with every word of praise this film has received.

What surprised me was that this documentary about a pedophile and his loud, dysfunctional family, is a real tear-jerker.

As the Friedmans one by one lose their grip on whatever orbital force had kept them together as a family and each is hurled to a place cut off from the others, the fighting and loss are juxtaposed against grainy scenes from old home movies, the kind of visions the word 'nostalgia' was invented for: ones in which everybody smiles, Mom, Dad and all us kids, and the late-day sun turns our faces golden against an ocean backdrop. Their. Sorry. Their faces.

But this is the gilded imagery most of us carry around with us, as a representation of our childhood.

If my 101-year-old great grandmother is any indication, the scenes only get more movingly slow-mo and golden as the years go by. Shoot, if I’m any indication, at not-quite-30, then that’s the truth.

And Mama Holt and I are not alone on this. As a culture, we seem to be on the 12-step program to revert to our youth. Look at the popularity among adults of the Harry Potter books, the number of children’s authors who are suddenly crossing over into adult fare. And the wave of childhood memoirs sparked by the success of Naked and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And that’s to say nothing of Nemo or Nintendo.

Of course, artists have always used their youth as fodder (and their work as a way of reconstructing their youth), whether it was Proust with his aunt's madelaines or Picasso spending decades trying to see the world through the eyes of a child (a very disturbed and misogynistic child, apparently). The difference now is that we all want in on the action, we all want to be creative. (Martha Stewart: “And that’s a... good thing.”)

The gurus of the Creative Life, Julia Cameron et al, all advocate the return to the inner child as the path to creative success. And what an endless journey that can be, since the only transporter available is as mystical and full of illusion as a Walt Disney World ride: memory.

That’s what Capturing the Friedmans shows so brilliantly – the many and fascinating ways in which memory and truth get tangled up. Somehow despite the extraordinary amount of documentary evidence – the police photos, the courtroom footage, and the Friedmans’ own uncut and unselfconscious home videos – every person involved in the case has his or her own story.

David, the oldest son, becomes “New York’s #1 birthday clown”, while his mother’s choices – as the person who seems to have moved on the most completely, almost to a Stepford Wives extent – seem at first to be more grown up. Until you realize that to find peace she moved into a fairy tale cottage.

xxxv. Of another generation's third place

This cafe round the back of Borough Market isn't the only London all-day-breakfast-tea-and formica 'caf' to have met its maker. (The sign in the window says "Computers for sale".)

Channel 4 is showing a series of short films this week about London cafes that were once at the heart of community life (bohemian or otherwise) and are now facing closure because of high rents and changing social habits (tall skinny latte anyone?). "Today's Special" is at 7.55 tonight and tomorrow night. So if you've got a television and plan to be home... let me know. I'll bring the lattes.

xxxiv. Of geometry and empty seats

School and office chairs in a no-name shop window in Deptford, southeast London.

xxxiii. Of typefaces in the city

What kind of newspaper publishes a whole article on a typeface? The New York Times, that’s what kind of newspaper. And thank the lord for it.

Specifically, David Dunlap reports on the origins of the typeface that made the Freedom Tower cornerstone look so elegant when it was unveiled on Independence Day:

“The letters that are Gotham's progenitors - BAR, PIER 40, DINER, PRIMARY SCHOOL 142 - appear almost as if they had not been designed at all. The strokes have a uniform width. The forms, like the circular O’s, seem to have been dictated by pure geometry. There are no embellishments like serifs and spurs, barbs and beaks.”

This got me thinking. If a person wanted to design a typeface for London, a typeface that was so London that it almost didn’t have to be designed at all, what would it look like? Listen: hear that muffled squeak from within the archives of the London Transport Museum (pick me! picke me!)? Ignore that. This is an open question. And here's the start of an open-ended answer:

In the way that one thing leads to another in an active mind, Pete has more to say about lettering, London and the dubious cornerstones of our globo-American society. {As my soulmate, in Belfast, it’s only natural that we both saw and dwelt on the Gotham thing at roughly the same time. You'd be surprised how often that happens.}

xxxii. Of transcendental wisdom

In the words of Henry David Thoreau, on his birthday. {Garrison Keillor will read this to you, if you let him.} And if you missed John Updike's tribute to Thoreau's book, Walden (“an antidote to apathy and anxiety”), in the Guardian Review a couple of weeks ago, here it is.