Psychosomatic Flashpoint

I read an article about John C. Reilly the other day, and I realized that I find it strangely comforting whenever his ugly South Side mug shows up in a movie. Anyway, he’s in the new summer mega-comedy with Will Ferrell, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,’’ in which they both play race-car drivers. and the article talks about how Will and others were impressed during filming with Reilly’s consistent ability to improvise a punch-line. In the example the article gives, Reilly’s driving partner, Ferrell (the titular Ricky Bobby), is diagnosed with a “psychosomatic” problem, and Reilly says “When you say psychosomatic, do you mean you can start a fire with your mind?” Now, I have no idea if this movie is going to be any good or not, but over the last couple of days I’ve been chuckling to myself every time I think of this line. This suggests that psychosomatic may have to go on the list of funny words, near the top of which, if I remember correctly from an old Walther Matthau/George Burns movie that addressed the subject, is the word “alka seltzer.” Last night Ferrell was on Leno, in character as Ricky Bobby, drawling his credo: "I piss excellence, and crap patriotism." That made me laugh too.

The other “Word Watch” moment for today’s post goes back a few weeks, but it’s been bugging me so I may as well get it off my chest. In an article in the New York Times on the controversial rush to establish ethanol factories, the Times author writes:

“Even in the small town of Hereford, in the middle of the Texas Panhandle's cattle country and hundreds of miles from the agricultural heartland, two companies are rushing to build plants to turn corn into fuel.

As a result, Hereford has become a flashpoint in the ethanol boom that is helping to reshape part of rural America's economic base.”

The word in question, as my helpful bold-facing suggests, is “flashpoint.” In context, the author seems to intend the word to mean something like “a site of controversy.” But what it actually means is this:

flash point also flash·point (fl sh point )
n.
1. The lowest temperature at which the vapor of a combustible liquid can be made to ignite momentarily in air.
2. The point at which eruption into significant action, creation, or violence occurs: "The shootdown did not increase international tensions to the flash point" Seymour M. Hersh.
[Free On-line Dictionary]

The first meaning shows the word’s origin as a term from chemistry, and the second shows a more generalized application to political events. But the key thing here is that when the term is used properly the “point” in question is a point in time not space! I’m sorry to say, though, that the mistaken “spatial” use of the term seems to be cropping up more and more often these days.
(The Times article is called “THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: A Modern Gold Rush; For Good or Ill, Boom in Ethanol Reshapes Economy of Heartland,” but since it’s a few weeks old you can only get it if you’re a TimesSelect member.)

Midsummer Night's ArtFarm

Yesterday we went to our first evening of Shakespeare-in-the-park since Nicholas was born, a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream put on by an eco-friendly, socially responsible company called ARTFARM, based in Middletown, CT (you can read a little more about them here). Their goal is “creating quality theater with a commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice.” This year, the production was hosted by Middlesex Community College on a lovely, gently sloping, lawn—but the larger goal is for the company to grow “to the point where ARTFARM is situated on a nice piece of farm land in Maromas or some other secluded spot near Middletown, mounts a major free outdoor Shakespeare production every summer, and during the school year draws folks from throughout New England for workshops and retreats, as well as having performances and educational residences available for touring to schools, colleges, and art centers.” The directors and co-founders are Dic Wheeler and Marcella Trowbridge, and on the “social responsibility” front they already have a good record in CT of getting inner-city kids involved in theatre. As for the environment, they’d like to establish their farm partly as an act of resistance to the rate at which CT farmland is being gobbled up by developers.

Before the production started we visited a little composting exhibit, where Nicholas got to plant some carrot seeds in some rich, black earth inhabited by a band of extremely vigorous earthworms. We also made a “sculpture” out of a glass jar, pipe cleaners, and crepe paper streamers, and then hung it in a tree along with a bunch of other audience-made constructions. Roving performers wandered around on stilts, juggling, and, mercifully, there was an ice cream truck to help us beat the heat.

I really love to see well-done outdoor productions of MSND—you get that magical “summer feeling” (as in the great Jonathan Richman song), fairies tumble and frolic in the woods, love is in the air (hey, I think that may be a song too), the usual rules are suspended (for at least a little while), and it all works out in the end. This production was quite student-y, but didn’t disappoint. An impressively dreadlocked Oberon was a little too Black Sabbath-influenced in his bellowing for my taste, but a buxom Titania sexed things up appropriately (given this play’s general randiness), and Bottom brayed his lines joyfully, surrounded by fairies and clearly tickled (literally) by his predicament. We had to leave early to get Nicholas home, and by then it had already become impossible to keep things straight—after all, the play features a pretty impressive tangle of twinings. But for a while it worked, with a little whispered translation to go along with the spectacle: he loves her but she loves that other guy…fairies just like to play tricks on people…everybody’s having a “wild rumpus” (like Max in Where the Wild Things Are)…there’s a magic potion that makes people fall in love…they just turned him into a donkey, etc. etc.

As we left we moseyed toward the parking lot feeling a bit lighter, tossed a little money into the over-sized cardboard “hat” being passed around, and wished them luck.

Thunder, Adrenaline, and Clichés

Yesterday I was in the parking garage when a tremendous thunderclap hit, and it was so astoundingly loud and seemed so close that I went instinctively into a semi-crouch, thinking for a microsecond that the whole garage was coming down on top of me. When that didn’t happen, I felt better—a whole lot better. I can’t say I had a skip in my step, since I was scurrying along under an umbrella trying not to get soaked, but my adrenaline rush did transform into something like a mini-burst of euphoria keyed to the tune “I’m alive!” When I got to the class I’m teaching these days, I chose to start off with a “totally free writing” exercise rather than the “directed free writing” I had been planning. The freedom may not have been quite total, but it did feel awfully good--and it was suddenly very clear to me, as I was writing, why passionate love affairs and thunderstorms have to go together in the movies (or at least, in old movies). The sky is the heart, and when one opens up, so does the other (I’m sure I could find some mythology to back me up on this). The cliché had been unexpectedly redeemed by a quickened pulse.

DADA AT MoMA

Drove under Magritte skies and through deadly confetti (a truck shedding part of its cardboard cargo on the interstate) to get to the new Dada exhibit at MoMA. It was an eerily clear blue day in a sort of 9/11 way, and the radio reported as I was driving into town that the FBI had just broken up a plot to blow up the Holland tunnel, reporting also that the plotters had hoped the explosion would flood downtown. Anyway, I crossed the Triborough bridge, exited at 53rd street, and had that strange experience of going in a matter of seconds from driving on the highway at 70mph to crawling along a skyscraper canyon thronging with highly aggressive pedestrians. I met my friend Chris, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while, in the MoMA lobby and we headed up to the Terrace café for a glass of Prosecco, an overpriced lunch (the highlight was watching the waiter pour Chris’s chilled cucumber soup out of a cute little pitcher), and a lot of catching up. When we were ready to hit the exhibit, we entered through New York rather than Zurich, perhaps drawn by the snow shovel dangling from the ceiling. As we looked, we talked, covering such subjects as the role of the “little mag” in modernism, the current crop of scare stories about China (The Dragon Stirs!), the difficulties besetting university writing programs, the incorporation of commercial art techniques into “serious” painting (think Man Ray’s air brush anticipating Warhol’s stencils), the battle of “gesture” versus “concept,” the surprising amount of Dada embroidery in existence, Japanese innovations in bathroom design, the vagaries of the academic job market, the respective merits of verbal and visual Dada, the mark of Expressionism on German Dada, and so on.

I came away from the exhibit with twin impressions: 1) that Dada had certainly proved Ezra Pound’s dictum that artists are the antennae of the race. Receiving the horrendous electromagnetic disturbances of a ravaged Europe, the Dadaists produced a “deranged” art looking ahead to many of the artistic and cultural developments of the twentieth-century, from the rise of mass media as a vehicle for the manipulation of consciousness to the cyborgian interpenetration of man and machine to the eventual ascendance of “conceptual” art in the late twentieth century to the desacralization or dethroning of “art” itself; and 2) that the Dadaists had, in fact, succeeded so well, especially on that last score, that it’s simply impossible for Dada artifacts to retain even a fraction of the shock value that was once so central to the enterprise, with its revolutionary claims and aims. One piece on display (I’ve forgotten which) was distinguished by a few bullet holes recording the moment when some outraged students (all dust by now) had taken it into the street for a little target practice. Ah, the good old days! I can’t imagine anyone now caring enough to want to waste the ammunition.