Fritinancy

April linkfest

A personal plug: I have a couple of new stories on the EatDrinkFilms site about an upcoming screening, with live orchestral accompaniment, of the classic silent film Pandora’s Box (1929). Pandora’s Box was made in Germany, but it starred a young American actress, Louise Brooks, whom the film historian David Thomson has called “one of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of the cinema.” Read my story about Pandora’s Box and the sidebar about Club Foot Orchestra, the remarkable ensemble – now celebrating its 40th anniversary – that created the score for the film and will perform it, along with students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, on May 6 at Oakland’s Paramount Theater. The event is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Hope to see some of you local cinephiles there!

Louise Brooks as Lulu with Gustav Diessel as an anachronistic Jack the Ripper. Her hairstyle had lasting influence.

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I’ve been enjoying “Stiffed,” a podcast – not to be confused with Mary Roach’s book Stiff or Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, both of which I also recommend – about the rise and fall of Viva, an erotic magazine for women that briefly flourished in the 1970s. Founder/publisher Bob Guccione died in 2010, but host Jennifer Romolini managed to interview his son, Bob Jr., as well as many of the women who worked at Viva and tried their damnedest to inject feminism into the mix. Related: my March 2022 post about “Minx,” which name-checks Viva and also rival Playgirl, for which I was a contributing writer..

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Another podcast worth your attention: A Way with Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. The April 16 episode examined, among other topics, why Southern Californians insert “the” before freeway numbers (“take the 405 to the 5”) and whether there’s such a thing as a “neutral” accent.

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“We are currently in the midst of a radical reinvention of English. Not perhaps since the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries has the English language shifted faster, with the rapid introduction of loanwords (borrowed from other languages), neologisms, buzzwords, slang and a host of acronyms.” (Steven Mintz for Inside Higher Ed)

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New from me on Medium: From Burma-Shave to Burma-Gram

It’s been 60 years since Burma-Shave rhyming ads last entertained and instructed drivers on U.S. highways, but their spirit lives on in a quirky Instagram account I discovered a couple of years ago. In my latest story for Medium, I write about Burma-Gram, which updates the “verse by the side of the road” concept with clever online messages for 21st-century readers.

A famous Burma-Shave rhyming ad: “Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin/ Burma-Shave.” (Via Legends of America)

 

A recent Burma-Gram:

 

Read “Burma-Shave Is Dead. Long Live Burma-Shave,” and be sure to scroll down to the end, where I attempt my own Burma-style rhyme. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!), and if you feel moved to join Medium, here’s my referral link.

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Blog bonus #1: A 2012 article in Print magazine, “The motion-graphic ads of Burma-Shave, 1927-1963” (the URL calls it “morbid roadside ad poetry”).

Blog bonus #2: Post–Burma-Shave, but long before Burma-Gram, U.S. political campaigns borrowed the roadside-verse format for their own ends. In 2008, Poetry & Popular Culture blogger Mike Chasar wrote about some of those efforts in “Burma-Shave Politics.” 

Word of the week: Promptography

What should we call images that look like photographs taken with a camera but that were in fact generated by artificial intelligence?

One answer is promptography, a word proposed by Peruvian photographer Christian Vinces and popularized by Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen. It’s a portmanteau of prompt—an instruction given by a human to an AI tool—and photography.

Eldagsen has been in the news lately because in March he won, and then rejected, a prestigious Sony World Photography Award for his black-and-white image titled “PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician.”

Pseudomnesia: The Electrician (cropped). See full-size image. Eldgasen writes: “Pseudomnesia is the classic Greek term for a pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate.”

Working words

This post was inspired in large part by Mike Pope’s April 14 “Friday words” post, a big roundup of words “about the changing face of the office”—words like Great Resignation and quiet quitting and everyone’s favorite, bullshit jobs. Within days after I read that post, three other work-focused publications landed in my mailbox: the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s “Future of Work” issue; the May issue of Harper’s, with two stories about “the crisis of work”; and the spring issue of Berkeley Haas, the publication of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, whose cover story is headlined “How Will Work Evolve?” (I don’t know why I receive Berkeley Haas; I attended UC Berkeley but was never enrolled in the business school.)

And lo, it turns out there are even more new work-related words to write about! Here are some of the words that have caught my attention.

 

New York Times Sunday magazine. Illustration by Brian Rea.

New writing on Medium

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been experimenting with publishing on Medium about once a week. It feels different from blogging here, although I can’t pinpoint exactly why—maybe it’s because I don’t yet have a clear sense of who my audience is there, so I’m trying subjects and approaches that are different from what I’ve become accustomed to during my almost 17 years (!) of publishing Fritinancy.

This week’s new Medium story is about what I call the Festival Suffix: the -stock in Woodstock that begat Artstock, Wordstock, Winestock, Zoostock, and all the other -stocks. Lately, some festival organizers have attempted to work the same magic with the -chella of Coachella, and the Coachella festival’s organizers are not amused.

Read: Coachella, Woodstock, and the Festival Suffix (friend link)

You’ll find links to all of my Medium stories here. Some of my other recent Medium stories include:

The Second-Biggest Brand-Naming Myth

Pepsi’s Weirdest Logo (not the new one—the 2008 design)

Some of the more “experimental” pieces I’ve published include:

The Monetized Life

When I Was Anglo-Saxon

My Name and I: A Hate/Love Story

Hanging Out with the Godless (the first piece I published on Medium, back in 2018)

If you like a story, don’t forget to “clap” for it. You can clap up to 50 times per story, and every clap contributes to my monetized life.

I’m also considering other writing outlets—a Substack newsletter, maybe? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Word of the week: Beef

The new 10-episode Netflix series Beef, created by Lee Sung Jin and starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, debuted on April 6. Official synopsis: “A road rage incident between two strangers — a failing contractor and an unfulfilled entrepreneur — sparks a feud that brings out their darkest impulses.”

Here’s the official poster. My brother Michael reports that he spotted a giant version of it on a wall in Hollywood across the street from the Netflix offices.

There also are versions of the poster that omit the middle fingers and depict only the protagonists’ profiles.

 

In an unrelated coincidence, beef (= feud) also popped up several times in my Twitter feed last week. So let’s talk about what it all means.

Name in the news: Hadada

On the evening of April 4, the American writer Vivian Gornick received the Paris Review’s Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Gornick, 87, is the author of the memoir Fierce Attachments and of many essay collections. Previous recipients of the award include Jamaica Kincaid, Richard Ford, N. Scott Momaday, and Lydia Davis.

I recognized Gornick’s name because I’ve read her work for years. But “Hadada”? That word—name?—stumped me. Other Paris Review prizes are named for writers: George Plimpton (the publication’s founding editor), Terry Southern. Is there a literary Hadada I wasn’t aware of?

No, but there’s an avian hadada.

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

Word of the week: Indict

I’m not going to speculate, lament, or gloat.

Queens Daily Eagle, March 30, 2023