Gotham Diary:
Morphine
24 September 2013
At long last, I have begun compiling a playlist of favorite pieces of music in all genres. I’ve been meaning to do it for years, but I was stymied by the consequences of a decision that I made when I first encountered iTunes: the serious music is on one computer, and everything else is on the laptop. So I’m concocting the list “bareback,” as it were, on the iPod itself, which means that, if the device crashes, I’ve got to reconstruct the list. (I’m keeping a printed list.)
The range is fairly wide, I think you’ll agree — from the “Domine Deus” in Bach’s B-Minor Mass to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” The idea is to include everything that I’m crazy about, but in such an order that each piece is precisely what the preceding one makes me want to hear next. Such a playlist would become dull pretty quickly if it were also not very long, very long. I intend to fill a 16G Nano with it. So far, there are only 63 songs on the list, with a runtime of four hours. That barely scratches the surface. I’ll be working on this project right up until lights-out.
As a matter of habit, I entitled the playlist, “Fun,” but as I was washing up after dinner last night I realized that the it really ought to be called “Morphine.”
“Morphine” is not intended to be a party tape. It may be a playlist that I alone can bear to listen to, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s what I’m going to play when I’m doing chores. Consider the first five selections: “Cachapaya,” a Peruvian ditty sung by the Swingle Singers; Morton Gould’s insane arrangement of “Limehouse Blues” — if you don’t know the tune, you won’t learn it from this chart; “La panse,” a silly Italian song performed by Karl Zéro (remember him?); Josef Strauss’s Delirien Waltz; and Sidney Bechet’s version of “Si tu vois ma mère,” the recording that Woody Allen used to open Midnight in Paris.
Right now, Christine Lavin’s “Prince Charles,” a naughty song that time has made even more incredibly, deliciously “inappropriate,” follows the Gould, but I’ve marked the printed list with instructions to move it out of the way; it’s too low-key, musically, for the sequence. I know: I’ll put it between “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya Huh?” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
***
Kathleen bought a big book about Vogue, and we were leafing through it last night. I was reminded of her latest hairdo. Every week, Kathleen has her hair washed and dried at a salon that specializes in dealing with very long hair. (When it reaches her waist, she has hers trimmed.) Every week, Kathleen comes home with a different sort of knot at the back of her head, some of them pretty fantastical. After a day or so, she has to take them down, and, for the rest of the week, she makes simple buns out of a braid, which is fine. But last Saturday, Kathleen came home with a different face. The woman who arranges her hair had done something entirely new, weaving a french braid (if that’s what you call it) away from her temples, giving her the look of a woman in Nattier. It was extraordinarily attractive, and I urged her to have it done that way before public appearances and big meetings.
Have it done. I thought about ladies’ maids, and, looking at the pages from Vogue, I saw at once that that was what killed fashion: the end of ladies’ maids. Not only did a lady’s maid manage her mistress’s wardrobe, and actually get her into her clothes (which no one could do unaided), but she arranged the lady’s hair as well. To look fashionable requires either an assistant of some kind or a radically scaled-back idea of fashion. We live in a compromise world. Most women, of course, don’t have ladies’ maids, even very affluent women; but those models in Vogue — they don’t just have maids, they have staffs. Nobody appears in a magazine untouched by the hands of another — several others. Nor on television.
And I thought about the wickedness of advertising, which exploits this arrangement while concealing it. In the Times today, Patricia Cohen reviews the latest contribution to the having-it-all debate, a book by Barnard president Debora Spar called Wonder Woman. Cohen writes,
The theme she uses to tie it all together is the quest for perfection. Since the 1970s, women have been laboring under impossible expectations to run Fortune 500 companies, sell homemade brownies at bake sales, look like Victoria’s Secret models and be ever-ready bed mates. Want more, do more, be more. For the teenage Ms. Spar, this ideal was embodied in commercials for Charlie perfume, which promised that you could be a gorgeous woman with a briefcase and a young child. What seemed effortless on TV was in real life absolutely exhausting.
The awful truth is that most advertising is science fiction, set in an alternative universe that you will never visit. Nobody actually lives there, except perhaps for the trophy wives of a few dozen plutocrats — and, boy, are they ever tired of each others’ company! Even they can’t live there full-time, because even from the back seats of their luxurious black cars they are obliged to look out not upon the pine forests and cliffbound seascapes that appear in automobile ads but rather upon the same public roads that we all use. From time to time, their vehicles must wait at intersections. This never happens in the ads.
I don’t believe that anyone is too smart to be seduced by advertising. Only damaged minds are safe. Take your pick.
***
Something funny going around on Facebook:
Ladies, if a man says he will fix it, he will. There is no need to remind him every 6 months.
It’s a graphic, so it couldn’t be cut-and-pasted, and I had the devil of a time copying it. It’s so terse — which is what makes it funny-but-not-ha-ha for me. It does not say, “Ladies, if a man says that he will fix something, he will fix it. There is no need to remind him about it every six months.” Perhaps “terse” isn’t the word. “Incomplete” is better. “Understood” is the term that gets used in grammar books. Whatever. The language is part and parcel of the procrastination. It says, just as it states, the one and only thing that men of this type have to say: leave me alone. Which also means: stop talking.
What would it be like to have the verbal-acuity equivalents of “tall” and “fat” and so on. There are so many different ways of speaking the same language — especially English, it seems; but what would I know? — and a handful of classifiers would be handy. For example, I’ve always wondered why people who don’t like to talk much go to cocktail parties. Do they even know that they don’t like to talk? Wouldn’t it be helpful if they did? Then they could say, “I’m x, so I don’t go to cocktail parties.” Or they could do something about the x.