"Going Loco Down in Adam Lanza."

Frontline recently ran a series of documentaries each as depressing as the next about the actively gun-having portion of these United States.

One of the documentaries was called "Raising Adam Lanza." It was about the titular character, America's latest nascent lunatic gunman, this time from Newtown, Connecticut.

I say nothing of the matter contained therein. I want to speak here only about the title.

Is "Raising Adam Lanza" a pun on Raising Arizona, the title of a Coen brothers film starring a young Nicholas Cage?

I can't see how it was not a pun on that film's title.

It could be it was an unconscious pun, since punning on such a serious subject seems rather risqué  for PBS.

My wife naturally took issue with my remarks along this line. She said, "It's about how Adam Lanza was brought up. How he was raised."

"Yeah," I said. "I see that. But the title is still a reference to the Coen brothers' film. The whole point of it is to recall the title of Raising Arizona, the movie starring Nicholas Cage. The rich pleasure and cranial amusement, that rare treat of recognition."

In the documentary they described how troubles developed between Adam Lanza's mother Nancy and her husband. In emails she recounted how he would work "sixteen-hour days." Listening to it, I thought they were going to say she was complaining about his "sixteen-hour weeks."

The format of the documentary was to follow around these two workmanlike journalists on the Hartford Courant who were never exactly blindingly dynamic in their work. They would show bull sessions where the office would have group conversations, bullpen hashing out, where they would try to bungle randomly towards a solution or an explanation for this remarkable evil. Unfortunately it most keenly recalled to the viewer nothing so much as those circle jerks on TMZ where they all lounge about the office  around "Harvey" with his XXL coffee and crow about the bathetic antics of the Hollywood C-List.

"Steve Harvey Piñata."

It's not Steve Harvey's innate fault that people, complete strangers to him, want to smash his teeth in with a baseball bat as soon as he swaggers into view. If it's anyone's fault it's his teeth's fault! He can't help having them in his face. He can't help the way they grow -- inordinately -- exponentially. They just did.

It is his fault on inasmuch as he hasn't had them removed by an orthodontist, or paid for painful surgery to plane them to a more manageable size that won't enrage strangers and inspire them to madness.

Even in this "blame game" society, who among us can say what actual energies govern such grotesque feats of mammoth growth?

That said, many people enjoy, on "Cinqo de Maio," to craft a papier-mache head to the distinct likeness of STEVE HARVEY and to secrete candy and small gifts inside it and then hang it up and smash the fucking shit out of it.

They make a piñata in the shape of STEVE HARVEY's head. 

They stove in his big teeth and take childlike delight in the collapse of those teeth and the commensurate outpouring of lovely sweetmeats and tinkertoys!

I'm not just talking about children, I'm also speaking about adults.

Childhood, boyhood, youth, right up to old age.

It's rather like the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus.



The only shame is that such an obvious pleasure should be confined to only one occurrence per "calendar year."

Of course there is no law on earth that says you can't do it all the year round.

Every day if you like.

"Female Suffrage in France."

Watching the Antiques Roadshow, they had a piece of "tramp art" which was a keenly-whittled frame made to encase an old scarf from Belgium that depicted Liberty or some such allegorical figure, and had the legend "suffrage universel" on it. The antiques expert remarked, in the course of dating the scarf, that while the scarf was from the 1870s, French women hadn't got the vote until 1944.

I burst out laughing at this.

I realised that I was laughing at the tardiness in the women of France getting the vote. I wasn't certain why I found this funny, but I did.

France.

The French.

How they love to go on!

"Miller Gaffney Threatened By Gunman at Minnesota Fair."

This week's Market Warriors came from an antiques fair in Oronoco, Minnesota.

Mark Walberg, our disembodied omniscient narrator is like Knowledge in the Everyman play, who verily says

Everyman, I will go with thee

and be thy guide,

In thy most need to go

by thy side, 

 Mark Walberg who goes with us and is our guide noted that there had been a "Gold Rush" in Oronoco Minnesota once, but there hadn't been a heck of a truckload of gold. The rush without the gold. 

His comments on that score foreshadowed the way the episode went, because there wasn't much to be got at the Ornoco Antiques Fair either. Things were so dire that Bene won the competition this week with some costume trinkets and more fool's gold. 

Kevin Bruneau was reduced to riding on the back of John Bruno's invalid car scouting for the lowest chintz.

John Bruno spent most of the episode ruminating back and forth about whether to buy a toy frogman from the Sixties. This was less like television and more like a trip through my own interminable internal monologue. 

Should I buy the Norm Show DVD box set at Academy Records on 18th Street.
Should I buy the hardback Larry Hama G.I. Joe collections when I already have the paperbacks.

Should I sell those Comics Journal Special Editions.
Should I sell at Strand or Popfuzz or Unnameable or PS Bookshop.
Maybe PBS would like to give me my own show.
"The Dilemmas of Edison Naif."

These Minnesotans were most vicious to Miller Gaffney in particular. 

Maybe she did swan around a bit like Scarlett O'Hara this week, not overly interested in oiling the wheels and greasing the palms and sugaring her bartering among these hinterland vulgarians. 
Maybe she didn't want to get spittle on her taffeta dress. 

She breezed into one tent with a thirty dollar bangle and said, "Wouldn't yeou, ah say Wouldn't yeou, gimme this for twenny?"

"Don't reckon I would nor," came the peevish grunt from a part-man, part-alligator, mostly squirrel object, hacking on cue into a spittoon.

"Yeou won't give me it for twenny-teau?"

"Naw," came the mean unfriendly response from the catamount, who had plainly refused to go "on camera" and would deliver his lines "without representation or taxation".

"Yeou shure?"

Miller was confused. How shall bartering endure if these backwater graspers won't bite and play ball?

"What part of Naw don't you understand?" growled the off-camera sprig of iceberg lettuce.

("What part of bartering doan't yeou unnerstand?" should have been the comeback.)

Poor Miller not only gave up the attempt at bartering, she actually reached meekly into her purse and drew out the thirty dollars. I never saw the like. The taming of the shrew.

Another participant in the fayre acted even weirder with Miller and, following the recent horrible events of Newtown Connecticut, not to mention Superstorm Sandy, with quite menacing overtones. 

As the show began, we seemed to enter midway through a tart exchange between Miller and a gentleman brandishing a BB gun. 

This only days after PBS's frankly depressing series of shows on "gun control" (laughable turn of phrase!) in these United States in which it was revealed fairly conclusively that the United States is positively alive (pardon the inapt figure) with twenty-two calibre cockblockers who haven't got a lick of gulchur or book-larning but they do know their "Second Amendment Rights" and all they want to do is shoot guns for "entertainment" and they will go to actual Civil War to defend their right to this "entertainment." 

These gun-show knuckle-draggers, these county-fudge mouth breathers, these rocky-road glue-sniffers, these fucking taxidermy enthusiasts. 

Miller was exchanging remarks with such a man in a CHICAGO tracksuit top with his face blurred out. This signified to the audience that he had not signed the "release form" for his "image" to be shown on TV, which usually tells the savvy viewer that this character is going to come across badly as a character. Indeed, this man did.

One cannot judge very generously a man who threatens on television to shoot a lady in the eyes.

He spat back to Miller, "I'll shoot yore eye out!"

He was like the eye-gougers in old South-West almanacks of the Jacksonian day. Except that even Sut Lovingood, even Simon Suggs, wouldn't gouge aout the eyes of a lady. 

He was all snaggle-toothed misogyny and weird misdirected Freudian energies. 

I say candidly that he had misread his Oedipus Rex and should go back to school.

Miller replied with superior and airy gaiety, "Aow, leook aout. Ah knew somebody who got shot in the bottom once." 

While Miller is too sweet to get down to low skirmishing with such back-water country-churn bottom-feeders, the tool got schooled by Mark Walberg in the voiceover. 

"In all seriousness, you should keep the barrel pointed either up in the air or down at the ground," Mark said as the camera showed the CHICAGO moron dully fiddling with the gun, barrel tipped up and veering around, always pointed (though not aimed) at head height. 

A portrait of America in 2013. 

It was redolent of the local news, when they show you some grainy, phrenzied ruckus at a gas station cash booth, and a blurry image leaps over the counter and rifles through the register, or when a neighbourhood rapist is shown lurking in a stairwell on CCTV, and the anchorwoman requests plaintively that if we recognise them would we please telephone the police force? 

We chuckle to see it, we say aloud, "Who could recognise that blur?," but then presumably if you knew somebody well you'd recognise them even in the blurred state. 

It's entirely probable that even this unmemorable fist-hatchet is recognised by family and friends in his CHICAGO tracksuit top. 

Perhaps he even bragged to his hare-lipped kinfolk, "I threatened to blind a woman with a gun on television today! Set the DVR!"

"Crybabies." Or, "Must Try Harder, New Yorker."

Slipping standards at the New Yorker, people. Slipping standards.

Gotta pick it up.

People been singing this song for years, ever since Ross went and off and died.

It doesn't make it any the less true.

Do you remember when S.J. Perelman beheld the decline of the magazine in the writing of Donald Barthelme? He said Barthelme should be "nailed to the nearest sour apple tree"? It sounds almost quaint now.

But for me the straw that broke the bee's knee was a review for a film -- I forget which -- in the current number, in which it is said with complete seriousness of Jennifer Lopez that in her role as "a Realtor", she "gets to strut her considerable charisma."

This is, amazingly, not the same reviewer as the one who said that the guy who plays The King of Queens was a "comic genius."

It is hardly surprising then that Nussbaum, who reviews TV this week, says in her not-strictly-excoriating review of Girls that the ultra-dull HBO comedy Enlightened "makes me cry more than any comedy I've seen."

Always a good recommendation for a comedy: aptitude to make you cry.

I am reminded of those characters, the Asian-American blogger (nearly wrote "bilger") and his wife, who sat through The Royal Tennenbaums "openly weeping tearfully" the while.

We laughed... we cried... we voided our bowels....

Their tears make me laugh aloud!

I said to my wife, "Why are so many people -- in positions of relative responsibility mind you, -- crying willy-nilly, and then making public proclamations thereof?" Bad enough that ostensibly intelligent people are sitting about bleating like wookies. It is, I find, a shortcoming in a writer's abilities when they can no longer praise an object except by howling aloud.

This willingness to cry and then brag about it must come from watching too much Andy Cohen television. On Bravo channel reality shows, when the "cheftstants" come across anything the least bit challenging to their various fatuous projects and machinations, their sole recourse is to "go feral" like Wolverine; that is, to lash out wildly with lachrymosity, often invoking childhood traumas or ancestor worship.

All well and good in a cheftestant on America's Next Top Model, whose "I'm ghetto" tough-guy shtick has been sharply shut down by another character more ghetto than thou, but writers for the New Yorker are supposed to be better than that. Like Harvey Keitel says in Mean Streets, "They're supposed to be guys."

[...]

This issue also features fiction by Zadie Smith.

"Flabbergasted Into Madness: Market Warriors Again."

John Bruno is known as "The Professor" on Market Warriors.

If by that they mean that he's got tenure and they can't kick him off the program, although they'd like to, then it makes sense.

If they call him it  on account of his ostensible encyclopaedic knowledge of the arts antiquarian then I'll boldly say it: the epithet is an inapt misnomer.

Incidentally, where'd Bob Richter go? Why has he been replaced by "Bene"?

I have nothing against "Bene" whatsoever, but why'd Bob have to go to accommodate her and her muddling?

(I am abundantly aware that I am one of maybe half a dozen people in the civilized universe that even cares about this. Still I ask the tough question.)

Is there a PBS political reason for it I wonder. Was Bob not politically diverse enough? But I thought Bob was fairly openly... politically diverse...

Back to John Bruno. This venerable codger has fudged many an episode by now, throwing good money after bad. It's like he's so sick of casting pearls before swine, cannily paying high for tasteful products at one state fair only to have therm bought for next to nothing by uncomprehending heathens in another state, that he has elected to deliberately buy inferior dross so that he won't get disenchanted any further.

After all, men of fragile sensitivity can only stand so much crass vulgarity in the face of their refined tastes before they crack and become cynical and thwarted and warped and bitter. In a way, who can blame JOHN for going "off the reservation"? He has been flabbergasted into real madness.

Mark Walberg (the Antiques Roadshow presenter, not the film actor who interestingly insisted that he could have single-handedly fought off the Al-Qaeda terrorists who caused the 9-11 attacks if only he had "been on that plane") seems to blame him. He loves to make fun of John Bruno. He takes a certain vicious sneering delight in it.

Now John Bruno has taken to riding around in an invalid buggy. When did he start this strange habit? Is this how he managed to avoid being culled by the PBS politicos? "You can't kick me off the show," he trilled, all defiance. "I'm too diverse. I have an invalid buggy."

John Bruno is a bit close to botching this loophole though, because there are scenes, fully captured on camera, when he is standing up in his buggy peering around. It's like he's using the buggy as a way to get better elevation rather than as a mode of perambulation. Other times, he is clearly visible wheeling the buggy along like it was a scooter, pushing it along with one leg. Impatient with its pedestrian pace.

It's like when people scam claim for compensation because they were "hurt" and rendered unable to work because of their injuries, and so the firm being sued hires a private dick to photograph the person acting all able-bodied. Almost invariably at a gas pump. Except John Bruno is going around acting able-bodied on national TV.

In one episode John Bruno was bargaining with a seller. This is his real forte, actually. He might preface the barter with the words, "Shall we begin to dance?" He has a really beautiful way of being shockingly cheap.

Well, this seller wasn't budging beyond a certain point, and none of the JUSTLY FAMED BRUNO CHARM would change it. John was trying to make a virtue of the fact that although he would pay a derisive low price, it would be in "cash". "That's cash you can take straight home."
His nemesis responded coolly, "Cash doesn't matter to me."
"I hear ya," John says, turning off the charm and losing interest fast.
The guy deadpanned, "I'll take a company check..."
"Right," John said, totally uninterested now.

The best part of this exchange was the seller's expression as he said it. Wily, canny, equal to BRUNO'S TRICKS. I took a photo of it from the TV using my wife's phone, to publish it here for you to see.

Unfortunately, her phone crashed at the airport and all her photos were lost. I don't mind about all those pictures of family and friends lost forever, but she also lost my picture of the flea market guy bargaining with John Bruno and that's a real shame.

Another occasion. John Bruno said, "We got punked."
Miller Gaffney retorted, "We didn't get punked."
That's all the notes I have here. [Looking over the piece of paper with the original joke on it. Checking there isn't anything written on the other side.]
Without context that line doesn't have much... resonance...

And that is the end of this rash of Market Warriors notes.

"Come back real soon y'hear."