Fritinancy

New writing on Medium: In 1953, you didn't need AI to listen to Socrates

An AI-generated “conversation” between Bill Gates and Socrates jogged my memory. Hadn’t the ancient philosopher been revived decades ago for a different mini-drama? He had. The drama was part of the “You Are There” series, broadcast in 1953 by CBS. I wrote about it—and about why a 70-year-old reenactment remains more effective than cutting-edge AI—in my latest story for Medium.

Read In 1953, You Didn’t Need AI to Listen to Socrates. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times!), and check out my referral link to join Medium.

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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Word of the week: Vajoga

I succumbed to a Black Friday offer for Hulu subscriptions and have been gradually catching up on some shows I’d been curious about. One of those shows is “Reboot,” which premiered in September. It’s a scripted series with a terrific cast—Judy Greer, Rachel Bloom, Keegan-Michael Key, Paul Reiser, Johnny Knoxville—and an amusing premise: “Hulu reboots an early-2000s sitcom, forcing its dysfunctional cast back together.”

In Episode 3, a mini-crisis develops when the reboot’s star, played by Key, gets a little too Method-y in a bedroom scene. For the retake, a solution is presented: a vajoga.

“This is called a vajoga”: Lawrence Pressman as Jerry the director

Word of the week: Minx

The new HBO Max series “Minx” takes its name from a fictional women’s magazine whose fortunes we follow from its launch in the early 1970s through … I have no idea. (Only the first two episodes are available so far.) The basic plot: When idealistic young Vassar grad Joyce Prigger—her surname couldn’t possibly be more on-the-nose—fails to start a feminist magazine called The Matriarchy Awakens, she reluctantly teams up with a Los Angeles fetish-magazine publisher, Doug Renetti, to create America’s first erotic magazine—complete with full-frontal male nudity—for “liberated” women.* Joyce wants to keep the Matriarchy title, but her new co-publisher tells her it’s “poon poison.” “What we need,” says Doug, “is a wet-pussy title.”

Alone at her desk after hours, Joyce mocks up the Issue #1 cover with the new title: Minx. 

Screenshot of Issue #1 cover, featuring a hunky firefighter.

 

And that’s it. We never learn how Joyce got from The Matriarchy Awakens to Minx. Alone? With a team? And we learn nothing about the replacement name other than that it’s The One. Would that all naming projects progressed as swiftly and seamlessly!

In the absence of any explanation from the show’s writers, I will take on the chore of decoding “Minx” to the best of my abilities.

Word of the week: Revenge dress

Revenge dress was all over the celebrity/entertainment news last week, capping a year notable for its revenge compounds.

Forever words

On October 18, the Biden administration announced plans to regulate “a group of long-lasting, human-made chemicals that pose health risks to millions of Americans, even as they continue to be used in an array of products such as cosmetics, dental floss, food packaging, clothing and cleaning supplies.” The polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are “more commonly known as ‘forever chemicals,’ which do not break down naturally and have turned up in the water supplies of communities across the country,” the Washington Post reported.

Certain chemicals have been tagged as “forever” for a while—I found a 2019 article about them, and the usage is probably older than that. But forever hasn’t been an adjective forever, and that’s what interests me here: not just forever chemicals but forever homes, forever stamps, forever cars, forever sneakers, and much more.

The Forever Purge (2021), a horror-action film directed by Everardo Gout, is the fifth film in the Purge series.

Adverbial forever, meaning “always,” first appeared in print around 1275. Adjectival forever, meaning “permanent” or “for the foreseeable future,” is a relative newcomer. The OED’s earliest citation is from an 1879 article in a Quaker magazine, The Friend, published in London: “He..would sign himself, ‘Your most humble servant, and to be your future and forever friend in the spiritual world.’”

We don’t see “forever friend” much now; it’s been superseded by Best Friends Forever, I guess. Here are the forevers that linger:

The "fboys" of "FBOY Island"

Join me today if you dare at the Strong Language blog, where I wrote 1,600 words (and could have written more) about HBO Max’s new “dating” show FBOY Island and about what exactly “fboy” means. I’m keeping it clean here, but Strong Language censors nothing. 

FBOY Island: “It’s time to separate the men from the bros.”
 

Word of the week: Flirt

Next Sunday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, a date that honors the third-century Christian martyr who is the patron saint of epilepsy. In the Middle Ages, St. Valentine also became associated with courtly love; by the 18th century, February 14 had turned into the holiday amorous couples still celebrate with greeting cards, roses, candy, and expensive restaurant meals.

It’s a high-pressure occasion, which may explain why, in late January, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the reopening of limited indoor dining in New York City restaurants. “This is the city’s second flirtation with a return to dining in” since the onset of the pandemic, wrote Helen Rosner in the New Yorker on February 5, employing a noun with meaningful V-Day overtones and shadings of deception and caprice.

“Flirt candy heart” mask via Red Bubble

 

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The traditional Airing of Grievances seems superfluous this year: we’ve been airing and grieving for most of 2020. So let us gather quietly—and virtually—around the traditionally unadorned Festivus pole and wish for feats of strength to get us through the season.

Festivus T-shirt from Snorg Tees. Read my previous Festivus posts.

 

Now let’s open some link-y presents!

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How "Daisy" changed political advertising

Election Day, November 3: A polarizing Republican candidate who has spent much of his adult life heading a family business faces a Democrat who has spent most of his adult life as an elected official. The Republican has been branded as an extremist, a narcissist, and possibly a fascist—none of which deters his fanatical supporters. The Democrat is overshadowed by a glamorous predecessor and tarred by a specious eleventh-hour scandal. In the background—or foreground, depending on your perspective—are widespread racial and youth uprisings that some people suspect are ignited by “Communists” and “anarchists.”

2020? No, I’m describing 1964, when the November election date was the same as this year’s. It was a year of violence in Harlem and Jersey City; of the murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi; of heated free-speech protests in Berkeley. It was the year Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, running for his first full term less than a year after the JFK assassination, faced Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a far-right Republican who had beaten all of the Establishment contenders—Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton—to win his party’s nomination.

I’ve thought a lot about the parallels between then and now while I read historian Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. The book was published in 2001, long before our current troubles, but it’s a timely and vivid reminder of how history rhymes.*

 

One 1964 event stands apart for its strangeness and impact: the Johnson campaign’s rule-breaking late-campaign TV spot. It’s known today by a one-word title, “Daisy,” and it permanently changed the way political campaigns were waged.

Still shot from “Daisy” ad, 1964