Brother Blue’s Secret

Brother Blue says, "My father used to tell stories to God, tears pouring down his face."

Brother Blue is a storyteller of some fame, a jazz-riffing peacock of a performer, a first class wordconjuror and a fine harmonica player. Brother Blue is a slight man, not a young man. When he performs he is topped by a sky-blue beret, and the palms of his hands reveal painted blue butterflies. I have seen him perform several times, and to tell you the truth, it took me a while to warm up to him. His style is wide-ranging and changes abruptly, movement verging on dance, voice verging on song, a kind of spoken jazz. Nevertheless, by the time I saw him talk at the Media Lab, I was a fan.

Brother Blue is a black man whose family suffered cruelly from racism; he speaks with a clear voice from a deep place. I had seen him tell stories, usually at the Bookcellar in Cambridge, but I had never heard him talk about the subject of storytelling itself. That was what I came to hear. Storytelling is in fashion these days, and Blue had been invited to talk to the clever technologists of the Media Lab, the idea being that this might lead to insights about computer interfaces. What was I then? I suppose I was a clever technologist hoping that this might lead to insights about computer interfaces. That’s how I came to be in the audience the day Brother Blue told his secret.

Okay, stop. Just what is storytelling, really? A long time ago in a land far far away? That’s not what I’m talking about. What I want to know is this: what is it that a storyteller does? Yarnspinner, troubadour, raconteur, bard… whatever the label, the storyteller can only move you inasmuch as he can talk about you. The storyteller can only move you inasmuch as he can tickle forth a resonance in your middlemost middle. A good one can drive you like a truck.

Words alone, sidewinding soundwaves entering ears, have no power to move flesh to move mountains. The magic part of storytelling is in the storyhearing, in the fact that that which is told becomes real. The word becomes flesh. The Word becomes Flesh, and the heretics and mountains tremble. Storytelling depends on that exquisite sound-to-meat transducer called sympathy. Perception is reality. I hear and understand. I listen and obey. Mohammed could run circles around the mountain when it came to storytelling, and as a result the mountain ran circles around Mohammed. Stories matter.

Brother Blue says, "Religion is this: somebody told a story and they bought it." To which he added, "we need a new story."

The goal of the storyteller is to get invited across your threshold and into your middlemost middle. There are many strategies for getting across the threshold, since the listener can always try to bar the door. He can tap dance across it or to storm it with passionate fireworks. The best approach is to remember Brother Blue’s secret. It never fails.

I think Brother Blue felt a little uncomfortable talking to a crowd of MIT heavies. He got his doctorate from Harvard in the 40s doing research on the therapeutic value of storytelling for prisoners. He was ahead of his time, and to hear him describe it, I believe he preferred the company of prisoners to that of skeptical unwelcoming Harvard professors. He can talk the academic talk, but he is quick to deflate it with a smile and a joke. This was an academic audience, and he seemed a little torn between simply performing and talking about it in theoretical terms. In the end, he told us a story, a quirky little story about an opening flower in which he involved various members of the audience. It would sound corny if I were to relate it here, but believe me, he made it work, leaving the crowd of MIT heavies wide-eyed and smiling.

At the very end, there was time for some questions, and he finally opened up. He was asked what is it that makes a story work. I don’t think he intended to tell his secret in such simple words, because when he did he seemed uncharacteristically awkward and small. It’s not that he was trying to hide the secret, but I got the distinct feeling he preferred to live it rather than say it.

Brother Blue said, "There’s a question that everybody’s asking: Do you love me?"

This is the one that went right through me. This is Brother Blue’s secret. Everything he said had the ring of truth, but this was truth itself. Everywhere you go, for the rest of your life, remember there’s a question that everybody’s asking. That’s why audiences listen in open-mouthed wonder and that’s why they applaud. Tear down the scenery, throw away the costumes, burn the Media Lab to the ground, but remember this and you cannot fail. There is no new paradigm! There is no new millennium. This is it. This is it. This is it: do you love me?

Silent upturned faces, like flowers, wait. Brother Blue begins, "Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?"

Grounding Day

Happy Grounding Day, 1998. It’s time for a midsummer stretch — wallow in the overripe heat and ventilate your brain with a cool gin breeze. There is less time than you think.

It’s a good time to sit back and listen to a story. Relax, there is more time than you think.

Baiting spiders

Dedicated readers of the Star Chamber will remember a piece from way back in October of 1996 called Spider-Baiting. Avoiding for the moment the obvious joke that this was centuries ago in web time (though the venerable StarChamber was already six months old), it was a time when search engines were still called spiders. The idea of the piece was that a search engine would read the lascivious text-between-the-lines of our innocent story about canoeing on the Ipswich river, and then horny teenagers from around the world would bombard our site with page requests.

Clever enough, only it didn’t happen that way. Recently, we received (from one Alan H. Martin) the following email here at the Star Chamber executive editorial offices:

Cute.

However, I just hit the page with the following AltaVista query:

+”ipswich river” +canoe*

(since I just bought topo of Eastern Mass./RI and want to find the location of the canoe rental place my group at work used years ago on an outing…)

/AHM

In other words, the only person who found the page with a search engine was actually looking for someone to help him innocently canoe down the Ipswich river! And, by the way, he found what he was looking for (through no assistance from us)… so if you’re ever in eastern Massachusetts and you’re looking for a good place to outfit a canoe trip, try the Foote Brothers. And tell ’em Paracelsus sent ya.

This week we are honored and delighted to publish in this space a contribution from a long-time friend of the Star Chamber, Pandora. It’s a great big world, and it’s getting bigger every day.

Super-size it

by Wendy Gulley

The line at the concession stand for the local cinema megaplex was moving excruciatingly slowly. I was vainly hoping to buy some goodies before the previews started in my tiny booth they call a theater. As I inched closer, I discerned why it was taking my fellow moviegoers so long to make their purchases. The helpful young man behind the counter was wearing a button that says “Ask me about the SUPER COMBO.” But there was no need to ask, because he greeted each new customer with “Welcome to Loew’s. Would you like a Super Combo tonight?” Some customers didn’t miss a beat, but most customers were caught off guard for a few seconds before they decided to go ahead with their original order.

No one in line that night actually ordered the Super Combo (which consists of a very large bag of popcorn and a very large drink), despite his dogged persistence. But the helpful young man didn’t stop with just that question. When a customer went on to order a small or medium-sized drink or bag of popcorn, he immediately asked if s/he wanted the next largest size for only x cents more. I must have looked especially thirsty to him, because he asked me TWICE if I wanted to upgrade my drink to medium-size. “Look, I know it’s a bargain,” I said to him impatiently. “But the medium drink is too big for me to put my hand around!” He then gave me my small drink without further cajoling, and it fit in my hand just right as I raced back to the already darkened theater.

Fitting in my hand was one of the reasons I didn’t want a medium drink that night at the movies, despite its “better value”. The other reason is that I simply didn’t want to drink that much liquid! But recently I’m beginning to think that I am the only American that thinks smaller can sometimes be better.

The super combo costs $5.75, while a medium drink and medium popcorn total $6.24.

Size Matters

Perhaps it all started, innocently enough, with the “Big Gulp” 15 years ago. In addition to the ordinary small, medium, and large paper cups for fountain drinks, 7 Eleven Stores began offering gigantic cups that could hold 40 ounces of your favorite soda. For only pennies more, you could get twice as much Coke as a large cup would hold! Big Gulps were quite successful and remain so today, but does anyone actually ever finish all 40 ounces? Is it a bargain if you only drink 20 ounces before the ice melts and it’s too watery and warm to finish?

In the years since then, more and more everyday products are being packaged in bigger and bigger sizes. Ironically, this trend has happened at the same time that the size of the average American household is declining dramatically. Does a household of 2, 3, or 4 people really need to shop at BiggieMart to get giant boxes of cereal that could feed an army? But to get big sizes, you need not go to these special, buy-in-bulk stores that have sprung up like giant weeds in the past 10 years. At any ordinary supermarket, supersizes abound for any type of product. You can now buy a 64 oz. bottle of ketchup instead of the standard 20 oz. size, or a 24 oz. bottle of salad dressing instead of the standard 12 oz. size. Or buy a 45 oz. jar of Ragu sauce, instead of the usual 26 oz. For your cleaning needs, Dawn dishwashing liquid now comes in a 64 oz. bottle that is too big and heavy to conveniently squirt on your dishes. And Tide detergent now comes in a 200 oz. container (12.5 pounds!) that will give you a hernia to tip into your washing machine. But what a bargain. As you pant and heave with the Tide container for the next two years, try to focus on how you saved $2 with your smart shopping.

The trend towards abandoning standard sizes is a puzzling one. In the past few months I have unwittingly purchased: 1) a toothbrush that’s too fat for the built-in toothbrush holder in my bathroom; 2) paper towels that are too wide for the paper towel holder in my kitchen; and 3) soap that doesn’t fit my travel container. My contact lens solution, always a heavy bottle to take on trips, is now only available in a size that is yet a third heavier than before. Take a stroll down the toilet paper aisle in your local chain grocery store and you’ll see that 4 roll packages, the standard size for generations, are now in the minority. Bulky packages of 8, 9, and 12 rolls line the shelves. Perhaps you have been wondering why the sales of large vehicles (SUVs, minivans and pickups) now equal the sales of “standard” cars in the U.S.? Sure, family size is going down and studies show that SUVs put us at greater risk on the road. But we need supersize cars to hold our supersize groceries, not to mention our supersize butts (more on that later). That must be the reason for a couple I know from Indianapolis who has one child and TWO minivans.

Better Value, but at What Cost?

Back to food items, and fast food in particular. McDonalds and Burger King now offer “value meals”, which make it cheaper to get medium or large fries and a medium drink with your sandwich than to get small fries and a small drink. Or if this isn’t enough to fill your belly, just say “supersize it” and you’ll get supersize fries and a large drink for only 39¢ more.

Let’s look at some sample meals. If you want to eat a modest McDonald’s meal, you might order a basic cheeseburger, large fries, and a medium drink. There is no value meal in this case; you must purchase the items at their individual prices, which total $3.47. If however, you decide to splurge and get the “two cheeseburger value meal”, you’ll pay only $2.99 for TWO cheeseburgers, large fries, and a medium drink. That’s right, pay 48¢ less and you’ll get an extra cheeseburger. Or “supersize it” (two cheeseburgers, supersize fries, and a large drink) and pay $3.38, still 9 cents ahead of the one cheeseburger/large fries/medium drink meal.

Meanwhile, at Burger King, a similar meal of a cheeseburger, medium fries, and a medium drink will run you $3.97. But for the same price ($3.99) you can get a double whopper value meal, consisting of a double whopper, medium fries and a medium drink. Why eat that small cheeseburger, with only 380 calories and 19 grams of fat, when you can, for the same price, clog your arteries with the new supersized whopper, which has 870 calories and 56 grams of fat? If you add in the fries (21 grams of fat), you’ll have more than enough fat for your entire day, all accomplished in one meal for less than four dollars!

Of course, breakfast at these fine dining establishments offers bargains as well. At Burger King you can buy a biscuit sandwich and coffee for $2.38, or add hashbrowns to the meal and pay 20% less ($1.99). Why, you’d be a fool not to eat a heavy breakfast at these prices.

Given the Star Chamber’s highbrow readership, I’m sure many of you are smiling at this point, thinking to yourself: “I never eat at these burger places, so I won’t be enticed into eating bigger meals.” But a recent study comparing a typical (better than McDonald’s) restaurant on Long Island to a typical restaurant in London shows that portion sizes weigh about a pound on Long Island and half a pound or less on the other side of the Atlantic. And in addition to the huge portions, Long Island diners also get items such as a bread basket and complimentary appetizers.

Bigger Is Not Always Better

Next time you’re in a busy public place — at the mall, at the BiggieMart, at the Lard-Hut — try collecting some interesting data: what percentage of people you see around you are seriously overweight? I’ll save you the trouble: a lot.

Americans are the fattest people on earth, and they’re rapidly getting fatter. According to the Seattle Times (May 29, 1998) 54% of Americans are fatter than is healthy, and this percentage has grown by about a third in the past 20 years. 1 in 3 adults in this country is obese, as are a fifth of children; these rates have also risen dramatically in the past 10 to 20 years.

Medical researchers view Americans’ increasing obesity as nothing short of a big, fat epidemic. As well they should, since obese people face a 60% greater risk of death, especially from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The number of Americans who die annually of obesity-related diseases is 300,000. (For tobacco-related diseases the figure is 400,000.) $100 billion is the estimated annual cost of lost workdays and medical care for obesity-related illness in this country.

And what are we doing to fight this epidemic? Eating supersized portions of food, encouraged by restaurants and food manufacturers. The Big Mac and the Whopper are no longer the big kids on the fast food block. Now we have the Big King, the Double Whopper, the Bacon Double Cheeseburger, the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and the soon-to-be-released-and-overhyped MBX (McDonald’s Big Extra). All at cheap prices.

Some Americans are undoubtedly eating healthier these days. Or trying to. But beware, healthy eaters, of two other food trends: bagels and lowfat foods. Many of today’s fresh-baked bagels pack 500 calories or more. And studies are now showing that people who eat lowfat foods often suffer from the “I deserve to indulge later” syndrome, consuming more calories in the end.

Americans could certainly improve their health by eating more fruits and vegetables, the natural nonfat foods. But only 22% of us eat the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day. If farmers could only grow those peas and carrots in supersizes, maybe people would eat them.

Keep your eyes out for more examples of supersized objects, bombarding us in every direction. The new Godzilla, the FleetCenter (47% of its seats would fall outside the physical confines of the old Boston Garden it replaces), the effects of Viagra (albeit short-lived), and finally– THIS ARTICLE.

Scooping Mayonnaise

Ah mayonnaise. The Viscous Muse.

Mayonnaise, like hollandaise, was invented by the French to cover up the flavor of spoiled flesh, stale vegetables, rotten fish. Beware the sauce! Where food comes beslobbered with an elegant slime you may well suspect the integrity of the basic ingredients.”

— Edward Abbey, “The Fool’s Progress”

Part I. Bert

Bert, 74 years old, refused to retire, and through some bureaucratic quirk, it was impossible to make him go. Here is what he did: in the morning he worked on the crossword puzzle and circled real estate classifieds, and in the afternoon it was his special task to drive Marian absolutely insane. Marian was a brisk and efficient secretary for the little Air Force Liaison office that I frequented. She spent the morning undoing the trouble that Bert stirred up around base the day before. In a world where some people pull their own weight, and others manage to pull only a fraction thereof, Bert was a great beached whale. You would swear he was senile but for the fact that he could righteously defend his position as nimbly as a politician in heat. I feared his fat grabby hands, his thick glasses, his bad synthetic creased suits, his slicked back mobster hair. I feared his anecdotes, because if he got me in his office he would spend a half hour telling me about his engineering exploits with the German rocket designers just after World War II. In short, he was a fascinating old man. In short, he was a mayonnaise scooper. Do you know any mayonnaise scoopers?

Part II. Mayonnaise.

Let’s face it, mayonnaise tastes good. Dry stringy turkey on cheap bread, crumbly bacon on wilted lettuce and dusty toast, what are these without the ennobling powers of the magic white spread? Mayonnaise is extraordinarily fatty, so a little will go a long way. And most importantly, if you absolutely HAD to, you could live years and years on nothing but mayonnaise. Of course you would be a changed person. Think about it: after a while, your complexion would become pale and glossy. Like any addiction, you’d soon be reduced to defending your supply, sprinting furtively from jar to jar. Suppose you had a choice between hard work (let us say, what you do now) and a life of empty leisure fueled solely by mayonnaise. Which would you choose? I thought so. Yet every year, thousands and thousands of people choose the Pride of Hellman’s.

You could argue that this is just another phrase for laziness, for goldbricking. But the truly lazy are fat drippy cats who will pour through the gaps in your arms if you don’t hold them just so. Mayonnaise-scooping is more complex; we’re not talking about the simply unmotivated, the slovenly. We’re talking about someone who is not only clever enough to know better, but still cleverer: they can rationalize and relish every drop of unearned goody that comes their way. They can actively take advantage in a predatory premeditated way that eludes mere bums.

Part III. Examples

1. Across the base from Bert’s Air Force Liaison Office was the building where Lt. Holt worked. Everyone who worked with him knew that he wouldn’t complete a project if you pulled him through it on a big metal hook, yet he was the most decorated junior officer in the building. Why? Because he spent all his time writing recommendations for ribbons and commendations which he would then pester senior officers into signing. See what I mean? That’s a lot of effort, and it suited him. But if the earth swallowed him whole tomorrow, he would not be missed for a week.

2. Marilyn takes two hour lunches, of which she is fiercely protective. She takes the elevator up and down past two flights of stairs. She leaves work at four, announcing to anyone who will listen that she’s now going home to her REAL JOB—taking care of her wonderful children. She spends so little time in the office, it’s no wonder she can’t be bothered to answer her voicemail. Yet she dispenses professional advice with the self-importance of a brain surgeon. Do you know anybody like Marilyn?

3. Think about that kid who comes by to badger you into buying something so he can win a trip to Disney World. Magazine subscriptions, chocolate bars, you can’t even tell what he’s selling, because he’s asking you earnestly “Don’t you want me to go to Disney World?” Let on that you aren’t necessarily concerned about his vacation plans, and he’s liable to snarl and bite off a finger on his way to the neighbor’s house.

Part IV. Identification in the Field

What are the characteristics of a Mayonnaise Scooper? Wounded righteousness and a quick left hook.

  1. They are powerfully lazy about anything having to do with their job.
  2. They are strangely intense about avoiding work even if that involves considerable effort.
  3. They are angry when you catch them with one sticky paw in the Hellman’s.

Suggest to a mayonnaise-scooper that they perform a task that appears in their job description, and you are likely to get a look of blank hatred.

Part V. Mayonnaise Futures

Hard times at work are cruel for the lazy, but they can be strangely exhilarating for the inveterate scooper of mayonnaise. So the question I have been pondering of late is this: will the wired world of the future favor or penalize these perversely lazy shirkers? Wherever you can see the structure that supports an organization, whether it’s a copy room or a warehouse, there is the opportunity to scoop booty. As the structure required to support an organization shrinks due to improved technology, the space in which to hide gets smaller. But these people are good at adapting—even now they’re looking forward to the challenge of being lazy in new and different ways. The slobs are in for trouble, but when it comes to mayonnaise, my money’s on Bert.

Footnote:

I was doing a little web research on mayonnaise as I wrote this. An AltaVista search revealed (at http://www.nomayo.com) the great Edward Abbey quote displayed above. At the same time, AltaVista exhorted me to “Search Amazon.com for top-selling titles about mayonnaise!” How could I resist? There were nine matches, of which, it may interest you to know, the best match was “Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life: Thoughts of Minds and Molecules” by Harold J. Morowitx.

Hardball

In the cool night air of mid-May somewhere in the canyon-cut hills near Prescott, Arizona, Paul Rossetti leaned back in his worn-out aluminum deck chair and scanned the heavens with a big pair of binoculars. Friends used to tease him about the irony of a one-eyed man using binoculars, until eventually Rossetti affixed a jaunty black paper patch over the left exit tube of his favorite binoculars. Every night when the weather permitted, which was often, he would tune the radio to KFCS, the local country music station, lean back and comb through the skies for anything new. In particular he was looking for a distinctive faint fuzzball of bluish light. In particular, he was looking for a comet. It was not an idle occupation — across twelve years he had narrowly missed getting his name on a comet three times, twice losing to Shirou Shikakura. His one claim to the record books was Comet 1989 II Shikakura-Ortiz-Rossetti, a dim bulb of a comet that was never visible to the naked eye. He craved bigger game.

When it finally swam into Paul Rossetti’s field of view, his eye widened and his stomach tightened with excitement. As soon as his laptop’s modem dialed in, he tapped out a hasty email to Kurt Drovecki at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge:

Kurt:

I've got an object in Leo right next to Sigma Leonis, have you seen it? RA 11h 21m 12s, dec 05deg 45min 03sec.

After fifteen excruciating minutes of checking for new messages, he was about to pick up the phone when he got a reply.

Hi Paul,

You're the first to spot it, and I've verified its existence with Joanne and her south skies survey crew in Chile. Looks like you got yourself a comet :-) Interim designation is 1998 VII.

By that time, Paul Rossetti had been following the tiny incandescent fuzzball for some twenty minutes. Comet Designate 1998 VII, soon to be known as Comet Rossetti. “Comet Rossetti” he announced quietly to the tall saguaro cactus near his driveway, to his satellite dish, to his sunburned Chevy Suburban. He stood up, his heartbeat beginning to gallop, and screamed “Comet Rossetti!” to the city of Prescott, Arizona, to the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, to the approaching Comet 1998 VII somewhere inside the orbit of Saturn.

Rossetti was still savoring a celebratory Scotch in his living room at 4 AM when the phone rang. Drovecki, calling from Cambridge, wasted no time: “Look, Paul, I ran some numbers on your comet and it, well it looks like there’s a good chance it’ll hit Earth next June after it hooks around the Sun. It’s… it looks like a big boy. Obviously I’m running the calculations every way I can think of, but I wanted to let you know right away. Why don’t you sit tight on this one till we get a little more information.” There followed a tense jargon-filled interchange which served to convince Rossetti that his planet would likely be smashed beyond recognition before he could pay off his Chevy.

He sat perfectly still and listened to the dial tone that Drovecki left behind. For perhaps a full minute, his mind was jammed, clogged with the inconsequential details of an inconceivable event. As the details sifted slowly down to dust, he was overcome with a soul-eclipsing loneliness. It swallowed him like the horizon-to-horizon shadow of a fast-approaching storm. Immediately his thoughts went to his ex-wife Karen. He thought not about how they met at the university bowling alley, not about the ridiculously expensive wedding in Louisiana, or the corrosive hateful lies they told each other in their last bitter year together. Instead, he thought about how they made love a month after the divorce was final. He thought about how he knew, even as it was happening, that they were both going to regret it terribly, but in fact they never had.

Now that moment hung in his mind like a glowing jewel. If Comet 1998 VII had any sense of justice, it would have smacked him then, in that moment of pure burned-over joy, perched between known misery and unseen despair. He had set out with unfeigned relief the next day to give his full attention to the skies, the rational skies, the lonely skies. Now five years later at this singular moment he was choked with a desire to hold her, but she lay in someone else’s arms.

And this was his reward: a snowball the size of South America bearing his name set to eliminate civilization. Not simply life as we know it, but perhaps life, all life, forever. Only now was it starting to reach him, setting in with a wave overpowering nausea — this Doomsday missile will be called Comet Rossetti, with him playing the role of, what? Executioner? Betrayer? No, it was as though he were the doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis to an entire planet. No future for him, for the his parents, for the inhabitants of Prescott, of Los Angeles, of Moscow, no future for the birds, the fish, all silenced forever. The name Rossetti eternally synonymous with doom. Staggering to the bathroom, he vomited into the wide toilet mouth the remains of a vegetable burrito and his celebratory Scotch.

Of course, it might not be. The calculations might have come out wrong, or it might be somehow avoided. But the stupefying dead weight of bleak pessimism let in no light. He dragged himself outside and slumped into the old battered chair and there he wept.

Some time near dawn, he became aware of the ringing phone. It was Drovecki.

“Paul, I’ve been trying to reach you for three hours. Listen, the numbers check out. I’ve had five different teams working this and it looks damn bad. We found some plates from last March that confirm the trajectory. We’re getting ready to hold a press conference, and…”

Rossetti’s knees buckled; he hit the green carpeted floor of his house with a thump, cradled his forehead, watched a viscous string of drool dangle downward. Through the phone he heard whining printers, ringing phones, anxious voices, shuffling papers. A room pregnant with the message that would change everything.

“Paul, are you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“I need to know, Paul, do you want your name on this thing? Because we can still take it off.”

This caught him off guard, pulled him straight up, stanched his tears. He glimpsed a brief but clear and potent mental image of the planetary ballet, Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon, Sun and Comet 1998 VII, all bowing and dancing exactly as they had ever been meant to dance, all spinning along their paths in arresting perfection. He saw a small tired man shivering in a canyon house near Prescott, Arizona, drooling on his phone as the rising sun colored the desert.

“Paul? … Paul?”

“Make it mine,” he said.

The Star Chamber Mexican-Spanish Phrasebook

Happy Groundhog Day!

Groundhog Day is a welcome cross-quarter day — halfway between the winter solstice and the first day of spring, it’s a reminder that warmer days are really coming, even if you don’t quite believe it yet. It’s opposite

Grounding Day (August 2) on the calendar and as part of its official celebration, good citizens everywhere join to rip down and destroy any faded Christmas decorations left up by their lazy or misguided neighbors. We at the StarChamber would like to encourage our readers to participate in the celebrations: discharge your civic duties and pull down those browning wreaths and rotting strings of twinkling lights wherever you find them. It will relieve that midwinter depression, your neighborhood will look so much better, and you’ll get to enjoy the traditional Groundhog Day martini with your fellow revelers. And that’s what it’s all about, after all.

This week’s contribution is a joint effort of Paracelsus and zaP, just in time for your winter trip to sunnier regions.
Continue reading “The Star Chamber Mexican-Spanish Phrasebook”

Life and death reading

Happy 1998. Have you read “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer yet?

As far as my highly scientific survey can tell, soon every man, woman, and child in the country will have either read it, heard it aloud, or been lectured to at length about it by some well-meaning bore. If you have evaded this trend so far, I can tell you that it is a truly gripping story of danger and death on the slopes of Mt. Everest. Go read it and tell all your friends about it. Curiously, another best-selling book this season, “The Perfect Storm” by Sebastian Junger, is a tale of man battling the elements for survival, this time in fishing boats during an enormous New England hurricane-force storm.

Why the sudden popularity of these life-and-death books? Perhaps people in this comfortable age feel more removed than ever from the flesh-biting Real World. Perhaps they long for an adventure to ground their lives in meaning. But then again, people have always bought adventure books. So is there anything new here?

One of the more interesting aspects of Krakauer’s book was the mention of Internet websites reporting from the slopes of Mt. Everest. When things got ugly, people all over the world knew about it instantly. We all listened in as Rob Hall talked to his pregnant wife in New Zealand even as he was freezing to death on a mountain in Nepal. There is a voyeuristic fascination with tracking the deadly and the evil minute-by-minute, whether it’s the Ebola virus, the Oklahoma City bombing, or United Flight 800 making an unexpected descent.

Voyeurism isn’t new, but it’s getting cheaper all the time. Professional Hollywood pornographic films have lost much of their market to amateurs with video cameras. Anybody can make a movie these days, and if it’s sexual in nature, people will pay. Soon enough, anybody will find it easy to launch a website. Tabloid television and network news, slick as they are, may find themselves competing with the gritty realism of eyewitness gladitorial websites filed by people on the scene, such as those who saw Rodney King being beaten senseless. Krakauer’s book is a terrific achievement, but in itself it doesn’t represent anything new in popular writing or society at large. What is new is the ease with which horrifying details can be reported by eyewitnesses from the burning building, the murder site, the erupting volcano. We should brace ourselves for an onslaught of badly-written but inescapably compelling eyewitness websites, because the tools of mass media are in the hands of the masses.

And now, for your further reading pleasure, a touch of voyeurism.

Caught Looking

what’s the sexiest thing you ever saw in your life?

whoa! that’s a tough one. let’s see…. I guess… wow, what a question! nothing really jumps out at me. I don’t know. what’s the sexiest thing you every saw in your life?

you go first. I asked you first.

sure, but you already have an answer to the question, right?

she smiled a slow maybe-yes-maybe-no smile. it started bold and provocative, then melted into a shy friendly smile. she felt self-conscious and looked at the beer-wet napkin next to her glass. she tilted her head back slightly, lightly ran her fingers down her stretched neck; her second boyfriend had always said that drove him crazy. funny how these things stick with you. she looked back at him and considered his small frame, his boyish face. she wanted to reach across the table and touch his arm, but instead said:

maybe I do. but you have to answer my question first.

he tipped up his beer, drank. replaced it, looking past her down the empty twilit diner. she enjoyed putting him on the spot.

okay. I have an answer. the summer after my freshman year, I went to Amsterdam.

this should be good.

believe me, it wasn’t a wild trip. I was pretty straight-laced in those days. well, I still am, I guess. so no stories about women in the red light district or smoky hash bars or anything like that. I was in this big park called the Vondelpark one afternoon. I was there by myself, because the guy I was traveling with, this French guy named Henri, was getting on my nerves. he was constantly smoking these stinky Gaulois cigarettes and talking about Marlon Brando movies. he’d seen them all like 50 times. so I’m sitting there on one side of this little pond soaking up the afternoon sun, and this woman with short spiky blonde hair, very Euro, very Dutch, I guess, walks up to the other side of the pond, just across from me, right? and she puts down a blanket and sits down on it, and I’m thinking ‘you don’t suppose she’s going to take off her shirt?’ and sure enough she does. and she just sits there half-naked right there in front of me.

did you go talk to her?

right! I don’t even know if she spoke English. no, I didn’t go talk to her. it would’ve ruined it to talk to her. it was perfect just how it was. actually she wasn’t even that good-looking, in the magazine sense, I mean. she was sexy because she was just so matter-of-fact about it. she knew what she wanted to do, she didn’t care who saw, and that was that. one of the things that made it so great was the fact that I saw it coming just soon enough to have this moment of anticipation, of prediction, even. we never met eyes, but it was if there was some sort of connection there.

his eyes were shining now. he continued, nodding, I remember that very clearly… it was like an electric jolt went through me. I had never seen anything like it before. later on that same trip I went to places, Munich, Nice, where there were naked people just everywhere. you really only get that moment once, you know?

what happened, then?

that’s it — end of story. it’s not much of a story, after all. she just sat there enjoying the sun, and then, after maybe ten minutes the shade reached her, and she pulled on her shirt and left. okay, it’s your turn now. what’s your answer?

can you see my car from here?

what? he looked out at the old blue Mustang across the parking lot. yes… why?

stay here, she said, I’ll be back in a little bit. she stood up and walked out the door toward the car. disbelief mingled with the smell of the beer. he fiddled with the tip money, then squinted out the window again.

she strolled slowly to the car and took a long look around. his shadow shifted in the window where she had been sitting a minute ago. the late afternoon sun was in his eyes, but he could see her clearly enough, stepping into the front seat. she inhaled sharply and then pulled off her shirt, and after some small awkwardness removed her bra. the seat vinyl was still hot. she could feel his eyes on her, and she pictured his hand lying in his lap. he shifted his posture again.

she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the cicadas. action at a distance. telepathic phone sex — hello, operator? give me Amsterdam, please. an excellent thing, the summer afternoon two-beer buzz. fun to imagine his throat dry, his heart pumping, his eyes straining. she tilted her head back and touched her neck lightly. her second boyfriend had been a rude son-of-a-bitch. she put her small bare feet up on the dashboard, well apart, and leaned back.

the grinding gravel of a walking car bent her quickly over the steering wheel. the car, black and predatory, was crawling across the lot into the spot next to hers. she hugged the steering wheel and started the engine even as she realized it was, in fact, a state trooper. she wheeled out of her spot, wondering what the trooper had seen, wondering if he would feel compelled to get back in his car and follow her. she was pulling past the front door of the diner gathering speed when her friend stumbled into the slanting sunlight looking dazed. she hit the brakes hard, reached across and threw open the passenger door. he looked at her, then at the approaching trooper, who was by now walking toward them. he looked at her again, his mouth beginning to form a wordless slow-motion question.

hop in, you big dummy! she called out. he hopped, and she accelerated, throwing gravel as she pulled onto the road. the trooper looked down the road and puzzled for a moment. his stomach growled longingly. he shook his head briefly and went inside, sat down and ordered a big slice of pecan pie and a cup of coffee. the seat he chose seemed unusually warm.