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paul wolfe ideas

IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

12/21/2013

Even in death, it’s hard to contemplate Al Goldstein without turning towards the shower.

The prickly pioneer of pop pornography, described today in his New York Times obituary as a “cartoonishly vituerpative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free range social critic and sex-obsessed loser,” is unknown to those below a certain age. But to all those who surfed late into the evening during the early days of public access cable TV, Al Goldstein remains a lingering and slightly repellant curiosity.

It was on a night in those days, while sampling the strange cable channels with a new thing called a remote, that I was stunned to come upon one of my commercials. A NASDAQ spot written to announce they were now a 24-hour stock market.

To the heart-rending tones of Frank Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours of the Morning, the camera moves lovingly through the deserted 4 AM streets of lower Manhattan. Stentorian Lee Richardson intones on the voiceover: “There will soon be a stock market open for business in the middle of the night. Who on earth would want to trade at that hour? Most of the earth, actually. NASDAQ. The stock market for the next hundred years.”

The commercial ended and suddenly there stood bearded Al Goldstein, speaking to me from the stage of Midnight Blue. It was a sexual variety show where the sex, in the words of the Times obituary, “was seldom pretty, romantic or even particularly sexy.”

“I always loved Frank Sinatra,” said Goldstein in his high New York whine of complaint. “Sure, he has Alzheimer’s now. But I used to love him. And my favorite song was In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. Well, now some f***ing moron assholes on Madison Avenue have gone and ruined this song in some bullshit commercial selling something called NASDAQ.” He then gave his signature signoff for complaints. Looking straight into the camera and raising his middle finger, he said. “NASDAQ! F*** you!”

Al Goldstein apparently cared not a whit for my pithy writing, the superb craft of the cinematography, the image boost enjoyed by the NASDAQ stock market, or the heroic tones of Lee Richardson’s voice. All he cared about was, well, the prostitution of a song he loved.

Now Lee Richardson, the commercial, the agency and Al Goldstein are gone. Early cable sex shows broadcast into the wee small hours of the morning enjoy a shelf life even shorter than that of advertising, which is precisely a nanosecond.

Only Frank Sinatra and his Wee Small Hours of the Morning endure.

Many in advertising have won a Cleo, an Andy or an ADDY. Few can boast winning what I now propose as a brand new advertising creative award: an ALLIE. The statuette will be in the image of a finger.

HAIR GOOP AND TERROR

4/21/2013

The security at Minneapolis International Airport loves to confiscate my David Evangelista hair goop. I go there on business sometimes and occasionally forget to leave my little white tube of David Evangelista hair goop at home. He’s a guy who’s cut my hair and his hair goop is, you know, natural. Like not greasy or wet looking. But the problem with David Evangelista hair goop is that it is over the 3.4-ounce terrorist limit. And Minneapolis security, with their Swedish-derived Fargo-like Minnesota accents, love to take it away. In fact, they relish it. They’ve detained me, searched me, rubbed my luggage with some kind of paper strips and then helped themselves to my David Evangelista hair goop. Except…there has never been a single terrorist death in Minneapolis ever caused by David Evangelista hair goop. Not one.

Meanwhile, you can be a Chechen terrorist and have Russia call the US State Department because they’re worried about letting you into their country. I’ll repeat that. Russia calls the US because they are afraid to let you into Russia. Then you can go to the Caucuses, enroll in Dagestan Community College, and study Introduction to Detonation and Comparative Jihad Studies. Then you can live freely near the green fields of Harvard University, enjoy government assistance, disseminate radical jihadist tracts, and all the while not be bothered by anybody.

I can explain this. Though information about this terrorist is sketchy at this point, I will go on record with utter certainty that when they have finally combed through every particle of his life, exhaustively searched his home and scrutinized his possessions, they will not find a single tube of David Evangelista hair goop.

Ironic, because wearing backward baseball caps can really smoosh down your hair.

LANGUAGE IS A DIALECT WITHIN AN ARMY

1/17/2013

Britain and France divided up the universe. Britain took time and France took space.

Such is the prerogative of conquerors.

It’s why the prime meridian on earth, from which all days and hours and minutes and seconds are measured, runs through a suburb of London called Greenwich.

It’s why earth’s fundamental measures of length and mass, the meter and kilogram, are notched on hermetically-sealed bars of platinum and iridium in Sevres, just outside Paris.

Once you control time and space, then, language is easy. The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is servant of the blade. Those who win the wars determine how the rest of us go forth and conjugate.

So today, Rastafarians salute Haile Selassie in English. Haitians creolize in French. Bossa Nova babes whisper Portuguese into microphones. All because these were the languages with which the conquerors announced their conquest.

Which has always led dreamers of strangely obsessional bent and a lot of time on their hands to create new languages utterly from scratch. Natural languages, the languages of conquerors and conquered, grow illogical and imprecise over time. Meanings become ambiguous. People misunderstand each other. Constructed languages, on the other hand, aim to uncloud thought. To offer escape from Babel’s bedlam. To bring clarity, logic and precision to the psychic maps called language and, ultimately, universal harmony.

George Soros, the billionaire investor, actually grew up speaking a constructed language as his first language: Esperanto. Built of Slavic phonemes and a vocabulary derived from Romance languages, Esperanto was created as a tool for universal understanding.

Of course in Mein Kampf, Hitler warned that Esperanto was exactly the kind of language the international Jewish conspiracy could use once it achieved world domination. And the bizarrely eccentric philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said Esperanto gave him “the feeling of disgust we get if we utter an invented word with invented derivative syllables. The word is cold, lacking in associations.”

And yet invented languages continued to blossom despite such eloquent discouragement.

In the ultimate example of a rock band writing its own songs, the leader of French progressive rock group Magma created his own language to sing the group’s songs. Driven by a penchant for celestial visions and an obsession with John Coltrane, the composer didn’t consider French expressive enough, and for thirty years has sung in Kobaïan.

More recently, an employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles spent three decades inventing a language in his spare time. He called it Ithkuil, which in Ithkuil means: “Hypothetical representation of a language.” He devised an entire grammar, syntax and lexicon of 160,000 words, hoping to allow human beings “to convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language.” He expected an audience of approximately zero for his language experiment, and was flabbergasted when his website caught fire in Russia.

A philosophical movement in Russia that considers our existing languages a barrier to a holistic perception of the universe adopted Ithkuil as a path that could make all that is unconscious, conscious. “Human beings have a linguistic essence,” a spokesman said, “But we are in a transitional stage to some other essence. We can defeat and conquer language.”

So now we have a language that conquers language. Here is your first lesson in Ithkuil:

It is pronounced Tram-möi hâsmapuktôx and it means: “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.”

Very concise. Very logical. Not yet available on Rosetta Stone.

FRENCH LIGHTNING

10/15/2012

Claude Jacques was long gone before I ever learned he was permanently gone.

It had begun in the fog of time and San Francisco, in an office with views of sparkling water and a bridge that led to Berkeley.

Claude had exploded into my office that first day, a mustachioed statue of a man with a French accent so thick you could hide the Eifel Tower in it. “Come on. Vee go to Jack In Zee Box.”

He cracked up, because of course he was a wine connoisseur who swirled choice vintages in Napa Valley. He was a gastronomic guru, confidante to celebrity chefs in the celebrity-chef laden restaurants of Marin and San Francisco. Even his wife Dani was a chef and caterer, immersed in all things food except, perhaps, actually eating any herself.

So that day, we never made it to Jack in Zee Box. We went to Fog City Diner. And later, we would go to Colorado and film Les Paul for Coors. Later, we’d go to the Mississippi Delta and film a 90-year old bluesman for Levi’s. (“Vy are zere so many black people in Mississippi?”)

Later still, we’d go to Cannes.

We were supposed to drive to Paris when the festival of frivolity ended, stopping off at a hotel in a chateau in Burgundy. I didn’t catch the name or address because Dani and Claude were in the car in front and we were following. Except one second out of the driveway in Cannes, I lost Claude in traffic. This was before cell phones and texting and French people speaking English.
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So that’s the last we saw of them. We looked for a hotel in a chateau in Burgundy. How many could there be, I thought? A million, it turned out.

So we traveled to one and hoped by a stroke of French lightning that Claude and Dani would suddenly be there, but they weren’t. And the next day, we set out for Paris alone

Who knew that diesel fuel doesn’t combust so well in a gasoline engine? I’m here to vouch for it, and not far from the gas station, our Peugeot shuddered to a pathetic halt, right beside a highway squawk box I was linguistically barred from using.

Broken down in France, we stood there wondering. When suddenly a car swerved off the highway and stopped dramatically behind us, nearly crashing into our car. It was Dani and Claude. They had been calling the national police all night, assumed the worst, even discussed having to adopt our children. And now, French lightning had struck, and we were re-united.

The burly Frenchman carried on an impassioned conversation with the metal box beside the highway, and while the car was attended to, Claude ordered fine wines and lunch for everyone at a medieval village France had conveniently placed right near the scene of breakdown.

At a recent stop off in San Francisco memories were rekindled by the news of a passing, somewhere in Europe, people weren’t sure exactly where, of someone who was already gone.

To who I was back then, to who he was back then, au revoir.

As Jean Cocteau said, the true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.

TALK SHOW

10/2/2012

I hold in my hand a little book, entitled Talk Show. On the first page, written hastily in a childlike scrawl, it says: Paul… Read every word! - Dick Cavett.

In that vacuous venue of cheerless chatter known as the late night talk show, in that medium of tedium where “small talk” is downsized to the microscopic, Dick Cavett was a luminous exception.

From the Sixties to the century’s end, he presided over an A-list pantheon of personalities with what used to be referred to as dazzling wit. He was a Charlie Rose with charm.

At a recent book signing, I told him I still use his line uttered to Marcello Mastroianni, the legendary Italian movie star, when the romantic idol told a group of shocked guests: “People think I’m a good lay because I’m in movies, but I’m really bad at sex. If a woman wants a good lay, she should find a bricklayer on the street. He’ll give her a good lay.”

Cavett allowed the stunned silence to hover for what seemed like a small eternity, and then spoke up: “Anyone have any hobbies?”

The giants all passed through his screen-sized salon, from the storied (Judy Garland, Orson Welles, John Lennon), to the stoned (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie), to the stately (Katherine Hepburn, Laurence Oliver) to the hysterical (Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Woody Allen). But the book is not a memoir, so much as a collection of columns he wrote over the years on a myriad of topics.

Opening to a random page, we see Cavett discussing the debasement of language in our culture. As proof, he quotes a former President, the one who brought as much devastation to language as he did to the people of Iraq. Said President Bush: "The French have no word for entrepreneur."

It was a line destined for malaprop immortality. Except as Cavett discovered, too late for publication at the time, it was bogus. Bush never actually said it. So under the essay, reprinted in the book, Cavett places a footnote. “I owe Mr. Bush an apology, although hardly the size of the one he owes us.

RACONTEUR, R.I.P.

9/23/2012

The talkers are gone.

The schmoozers are still here, along with the chatterers, emailers, tweeters, texters, bloggers, Facebook likers, celebrity interviewers and right wing talk show hosts.

But the talkers are gone.

The last two left within the same year, when Christopher Hitchens and Gore Vidal left this plane of existence and took their tongues with them.

The talker tradition stretches vastly back into the primordial pre-digital ooze, when being interesting was an art form. When speech was the province of a brain marinated for a lifetime in literature, thought, and debate. Thomas DeQuincey described it best, speaking of poet Samuel Coleridge. “His conversation was like some great river, swept at once into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought it was possible to conceive.”

From opposite sides of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens and Gore Vidal held forth in this tradition. Both relished the music of their own voices, sonorous and aristocratic, as if a Stradivarius resided in their throats and utterance was more of a concert than a conversation. Both enlisted those sonorities in the service of a dizzying encyclopedia of subjects, with a through line of haughty disdain for cliché, mediocrity and accepted wisdom. A lifelong repudiation of bourgeois pieties and politics. They represented raconteur as provocateur, eschewing all higher powers except that of language.

And now, that art of talk is gone.

Perhaps it’s because the world has simply become less interesting. A young Bob Dylan “heard the sound of the poet who cried in the alley,” but the alley in Greenwich Village where he heard those sobs is now a condominium with Sub Zero refrigerators.

You may regale friends of a winter’s evening with your adventures in Zanzibar, but these days adventures in Zanzibar probably involve a Starbucks and an H & M.

You can wax poetic about secret movements gleaned at the foot of a master in the Himalayas, but those secret movements are now taught Wednesdays and Fridays at Equinox.

Once, writers like Henry Miller could spin tales of the zany prostitutes and bohemian oddballs who scrounged croissants and laughed together in the cafes of Paris in the 1930s. But the espresso sippers today in Café Deux Magots and Café Flore are discussing their Internet startups.

Call it The Great Homogenization, The End of Idiosyncrasy and The Swissification of the world. The Digital Melange spews out more words per square kilobyte than ever before, but it has left talk in its wake.

SAMOYED

7/21/2011

You see, I met this Samoyed named after Jackson Pollock.

I never cared much for dogs and I never cared much for Jackson Pollock. But I met this Samoyed, a pure white northern breed, this bristling mass of fur designed to keep Eskimo kids warm on long winter nights.

So, this is about a dog.

Of course, dog is our term for him. He doesn’t call himself that. He doesn’t perceive himself as a special species, separate from humans and antelopes and flukeworms. I don’t think he does, anyway. Who knows what he knows?

But maybe that is the attraction. Billions of people feel this crazy hypnotic love for dogs. And that’s just the women in Manhattan. It comes down to the purity of a lack of self-perception. The guileless devotion opening up a deep sluice for love to flow through. A helpless un-self consciousness mixed with superhuman powers of smell and hearing mixed with devotion unbounded by limits. It slays. The same is true for babies, of course, but that one has the benefit of a million-year biological imperative driving it.

Anyway, I never succumbed to the hypnotic love for dogs. In fact, I found the barking of dogs profoundly unsettling, as if the shrieks from dogs’ throats conjured past life memories of some concentration camp demise. And I couldn’t fathom those who actually took the time to write or wax starry-eyed about a dog. But I met this Samoyed named after Jackson Pollock. He high jumps all over you when you show up, his excitement for you is so dizzying. And he lumbers next to you, a royal mountain of white hair that causes gasps as you walk down the street.

He still barks, it should be noted, especially at inopportune times, but the bark has lost its bite. And he is a thoroughly non-marketing creature. He lives in a reality either before or beyond language and meanings, so he is immune to the symbolic manipulation of meanings. Unlike us in the sponsored world, we of the separate species who give names to everyone and everything.

So he will never read this. Nor will his friends at the dog run email this to him. I’ll just give him a biscuit next time I see him. After he calms down.

WILL READING THIS DAMAGE YOUR BRAIN?

3/3/2011

Digital changes brains.

We know that.

The online tools that allow you to read this essay while you track your emails while you monitor Charlie Sheen all at the same time are altering your brain circuits. You’re welcome.

Just as violinists have been found to possess larger cortical areas devoted to processing hand signals and London cab drivers have larger posterior hippocampuses where spatial representations are stored, digital tools have become a worldwide web of mind-altering drug. Is the alteration for the better?

The evolution of media seems to be an evolution in how we outsource memory. Socrates warned that the invention of writing would lead to the atrophy of human memory. Meaning the worry over the deleterious effects of new media on the brain has a long and delusional history.

And yet, digital seems different.

We know that reading a book gives the mind discipline as it follow a line of argument or takes a journey of narrative across printed pages. You end up more contemplative, more reflective and more imaginative.

But the digital frenzy inflicts on our minds a condition that writer and digital doubter Nicholas Carr has called “an industrial model of hedonic efficiency.” Speed trumps depth. Pensive stillness gives way to a phantasmagoria of inputs and sensation. Carr notes that while the Internet affords powerful tools for finding information and conversing with others, it also turns us into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

On the other hand, knowledge is increasing exponentially and human brain power and waking hours are not. So how can we possibly keep up with humanity’s ballooning intellectual output without digital tools?

What do you think, oh lab rats of the Digital Age? Oh, I just lost you. Your friend from third grade just Facebooked you.

ANOTHER CROSS-DRESSING PHARMACIST

12/25/2010

“The English are all degenerate,” she said. “Everyone knows that. They’re all sexual deviants, inbred on that little island.”

She was an otherwise highly-sophisticated French businesswoman, inspired by the eternal guerrebetween the Gauls and the Anglo Saxons to an analysis of Britain somewhat left of rational. An entire civilized people degenerate?

To me, a simple American boy, born and bred a skinny river away from Manhattan, England is the Beatles. It’s Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Charlotte Rampling and Laurence Olivier. It’s Christmas Carol and Brideshead Revisited. It’s all those splendid accents, all those actors, all those skinny rockers with hair like Rod Stewart from the Do ya think I’m sexy period. Degenerate?

And yet.

Peruse with me, if you will, these actual personals ads from the august and venerated London Review of Books. I REPEAT: these are are actual personal ads. In the rear pages of this ultra highbrow literary magazine, you will be thrust into a land of romantic advertisement far removed from the “I like roller skating, walks in the rain, and have a really great sense of humor” self-promotion of dewy-eyed, hope-addicted, childlike American relationship seekers, who in the face of all evidence are convinced true love is just around the corner.

What do we make of this ad from the London Review of Books?

To some, I am a world of temptation. To others, I’m just another cross-dressing pharmacist. Male, 41.

Or this:

This ad is about as close as I come to meaningful interaction with other adults. Woman, 51. Not good at parties but tremendous breasts. Box no. 54326

Or this:

I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out, and covered in too much tahini. Before long I’ll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you’re the perfect complement to a perfect evening. Man, 32.

Or this:

Bald, fat, short, and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.

Or this:

Blah blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write. Box no. 3253. Like I care.

Or this:

While you’re reading this, I’m taking a photograph of you from outside your window. Later today, I’ll put it in the scrapbook I’m compiling of our love. The heading will be ‘Day 1′. M, 46

Or this:

This is how I wanted to seduce you – using meaningless words in a column of fools before a a theater of idiots. Write immediately and be upon me. F, 58

The ads go on in this vein, issue after issue. Of course, maybe it’s all a joke. Maybe the nation of Chaucer, Dickens and the Bard have simply invented a new, witty literary art form spun from the lonely hearts heavings of singles in search of company. Maybe it’s ingenious, not degenerate.

Either way, here’s some really good advice:

Attention male London Review of Books readers: ‘Greetings, earthling — I have come to infest your puny body with legions of my spawn’ is no way to begin a reply. Female, 36 — suspicious of any men declaring themselves to be in possession of a ‘great sense of humor.’

Oh by the way, I like roller skating, walks in the rain and have a really great sense of humor.

BERLIN CHARLOTTENBERG

8/30/2010

It was their last address.

In 1943, Paula and Martin Wolff resided at 27 Sybelstrasse in Berlin Charlottenberg.

There are letters.

There are letters from that address.

There are letters to their children in America discussing steamships, visas, agents, payments, Cuba, South America – all in vain.

27 Sybelstrasse was Paula and Martin Wolff’s last address, but it wasn’t their home. They left their town north of Berlin because they were among the millions in 1943 who suddenly no longer had a home in their country. Berlin Charlottenberg was a way station. A hiding place, one presumes. A stopover on the way to someplace far worse.

And now our journey to Paula and Martin’s last address begins on Kurfurstendamm, the grand old boulevard that snakes like Marlene Dietrich’s smoke through the heart of Berlin. We gaze at its broad elegance from the corner of Joachimstrasse.

Later that day, we will visit a synagogue hidden in a courtyard on Joachimstrasse, guarded by police and an Israeli security official. We undergo his scrutiny before entering, and ask: After all they did, you guys still need a police guard? He could take a life with one hand while still eating hummus with the other, yet he gives that very ancient, very recognizable shrug of the shoulders. A million years of trouble live in that shrug, and all he says in answer to our question is: Muslims. But this will be later.

Now we are standing at the intersection of Joachimstrasse and Kurfurstendamm. The Scientologists have set up their table, aggressively and deceptively luring people into becoming Operating Thetans.

Surely, Paula and Martin strolled this corner of Kurfurstendamm back on some summer Saturday in 1943?

Surely, they walked past representatives of another psychotic cult with a penchant for violence toward imagined enemies.

But that thought is supplanted by another as we head west on Kurfurstendamm, and that thought is: Germany has risen. It has risen from the rubble of two tyrannies, one of its own devising, and joined the branded world. Where the glass of Kristallnacht once shattered onto the broad sidewalks of Kurfurstendamm, Starbucks now sells lattes. Addidas delivers high-end sporting gear. The Hugo Boss emporium could as well be lodged in the Time Warner Center. The BMW showroom could be in Great Neck, Long Island, except that these drivers understand the writing on the engine. Even Porsche Design is there, that strange alchemy of branding that translates ultra-high performance automotive engineering into pens, briefcases, key chains and sneakers. The Porsche Design sneakers cost 300 Euros, which would be a lot for sneakers even if the dollar weren’t absurdly weak.

Finally, turning right on Leibnizstrasse, we arrive at Sybelstrasse, two blocks to the north. The first thing clear is that Sybelstrasse has not joined the branded world. An eerie calm envelops a somnabulent middle class street. Nothing stirs except a man in a ponytail working on his car. Sybelstrasse seems unchanged from the days Paula and Martin walked here, desperately trying to re-write history. It has survived the ravages of time. It has survived the bombs of plucky young boys from Liverpool and Kansas, Manchester and Mississippi whose tiny silver planes laid so much of Berlin to waste.

We stare at Number 27. We stare at its numerology as if it were a code of the universe from which, with adequate attention, you could glean the secrets of creation. Then, secretless, we walk through a dark corridor into the courtyard. There are vines growing up the white stucco walls of the apartment block. There is a huddle of garbage cans, the inevitable bicycles, but also, surreally, a bench beside a tiny pond with golden koi swimming in it.

We sit on the bench and think about Paula and Martin. They probably didn’t live in the nice, terraced flats facing the street. They probably lived back here, in one of these flats five floors up, trudging up the ancient stairs of their last address until they disappeared in a manner we will never know, to a destiny we do. We sit on the bench, seventy years too late, with only the koi moving beside us.

And that was it.

Hardly a Holocaust story.

It doesn’t even qualify as a Berlin story.

Just a grandson and great-grandson visiting two people who aren’t there.