OF A GOLDEN AGE

I’ve been thinking about my doorbell. When you gonna ring it? When you gonna ring it?
– the White Stripes

Do you listen to the radio? My friends don’t seem to listen to the radio or watch regular television in real time anymore. Podcasts and DVR are the way of things, and I do that stuff too (not DVR, but TV on demand through Comcast, Hulu, or Netflix), but real time has great appeal, especially radio. I listen to NPR every morning, and in the car, and while I wash dishes, and, and, and.

Last weekend was Liane Hansen’s last Weekend Edition Sunday. She has Will Shortz on every week to do a live word puzzle (a crossword puzzler’s dream come true, and I am one), and this week as a fantasy final interview she had Ray Davies of the Kinks. At the very end, after a nice little talk, she broached a tough topic — Davies’s potential for reconciliation with brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies — by saying that you always ask the difficult question last because, if the interviewee walks out, at least you already have a whole interview.

Davies was a total sport about it and gave an optimistic, exciting answer (if you’re a Kinks fan, and Hansen clearly is), but the whole thing reminded me of a recent New Yorker blog post on Terry Gross. Her preternatural level of preparedness is astounding, except that now I learn she’s actually not in the studio with most guests, so she gets the 30-point IQ boost. But I love this:

Tellingly, [writer David] Rakoff, who has appeared on the show twice, said that he remembers both interviews having taken place in person, though in fact neither did.

Terry Gross! Liane Hansen! Tess Vigeland! My tough-talking lady radio idols.

(There’s also Lynne Rossetto Kasper but she’s no tough-talker. She sure is smart and great, too, though.)

From Karen Joy Fowler’s gritty, shining, funny novel Sister Noon (and, here, Salon’s review), “spinster” Lizzie:

“Weddings are such lovely occasions,” Lizzie said. Actually she thought they lacked spontaneity, but as an unmarried woman she could hardly say so. In books they were interrupted, protested, prevented. They were scenes of great drama. Jane Eyre’s wedding, for example, the one that had not taken place — you couldn’t call it a lovely occasion, but so much passion! As a young lady, whenever Lizzie had imagined her own wedding, she’d imagined it not taking place the way Jane Eyre’s had not taken place. (And not ever the way it had actually not taken place.)

My mom loves Jane Eyre and, although I do not, I’m determined to give it another try for her sake. Lizzie’s thoughts on it can’t help but . . . help?

My beloved late grandfather had more wonderful qualities than can be listed. I miss him and think of him every day.

That said, his driving skills did not age very well, reaching a nadir when one day he sailed off the side of a curve in the road on a foggy day. Luckily the road was rural and he was fine, if rattled, and it was a blessedly low-impact way to learn that he was not in the greatest driving condition. I hadn’t ridden in the car with him for at least a few years at that point, and we often went places all together as a family so my mom or dad would drive.

Here in the city, there are many, many, many dangerous elderly drivers who are guilty of something my great aunt Gertrude did as she entered her 90s: they slow way down and hesitate to do everything. This was fine for Gertrude, at least for a while, in our town of 4,000 for a half-mile trip. But if you’ve driven in Chicago you realize how dangerous this is, as everyone’s driving patterns fit into a careful (careless) stand of dominoes.

There are people who are very Zen and shruggy about driving — “I’ll get there when I get there” and all of that — but Chicagoans aren’t those people and I, along with the rest, am not one of those people. If other drivers are confidently going exactly the speed limit or being cautious and defensive, I totally respect that; I go a reasonable speed at all times and am vigilant, too. But the hesitation and slowness of some drivers is different. This New Old Age post offers some evidence of these behaviors. I’d wager that the threshold for what constitutes a “critical error” (in the post, defined as one which will cause an accident) is much lower in the city.

I believe these older drivers who slow down and hesitate are undermined by their own fear, of making the wrong choice, of having their privileges revoked, of being pressed to admit that their faculties have changed with age. Unfortunately, more than a reasonable amount of fear is paralytic to drivers of any age or experience level, and I see frightened drivers creating chaos everywhere every day.

Oh man, I’m riveted by This New Yorker post on the century-old remains of an Azerbaijani magazine called Molla Nasreddin. The one I like best is slide 9, which depicts side-by-side images of a modern, thriving city on the left and a population of winged, flying people on the other:

The captions for the left and right pages, respectively, are “According to the book, the world of the devil,” and “According to the book, the world of believers.” “With the bicycles, cars, bridges and buildings, the world of the devil is modern and developed,” the editors write. “The world of believers is full of ethereal illusions and idleness.”

Is it weird that a magazine from a hundred years ago from a Russian-colonized state made better, more pointed, more germane statements about religious fanaticism and literalism than people today are able to make? In the U.S. and abroad, death threats hit the mailbox over much, much less.

This week’s New Yorker Financial Page examines the financial information gap and how it’s closing over time: Only in fairly recent decades have statistics like the GDP made it possible to quantify unemployment and consumer spending in close-to-real time. And how was it before?

In June of 1930, relying on some anecdotal evidence of an upturn, Herbert Hoover announced, “The Depression is over.” And in his State of the Union address that December he said that two and a half million Americans were unemployed. But, as Hoover acknowledged, that number was eight months old. At the time of the speech, five million people were out of work, and a hundred thousand more were losing their jobs every week.

Eight months old!! The timeframe now is about a month and even that seems rough when we’re making decisions about how to turn over a capsizing economy.

The rest of the article details a new measure called the Billion Prices Project, where computers gather price data from online retailers and process it more quickly than humans alone ever could. It’s not perfect but it’s another facet to consider, and it circumvents some of the flaws of traditional financial data-gathering.

My good friend Ed and I found ourselves at a party hosted by our friend Lindsey this weekend. Somehow the White Stripes came up. Here’s the part where I paraphrase.

Ed: I don’t know, I’m not the biggest Jack White fan.
Me: Weeellllll . . . Oh right, you hated the record inside a record thing we talked about before.
Ed: YES, THAT WAS STUPID.
Me: But what about the Third Man Recordsmobile?
Ed: Yes, that’s stupid too.
Me: It’s sweet! It reminds me of the people who sell food at the ballparks where little kids play T-ball. Except it’s records!
Ed: This is the part where I say I don’t like some things Jack White does and you say you love everything about him.

I do, it’s true. Jack White, personal hero since 2001.

The Way We, Um, Talk Sways Our Listeners describes a University of Michigan study on speech fluency, especially the sweet spot between too smooth and too rough — if we pause too much or use too much filler, people don’t trust us, but if we speak too coherently without enough pauses, people still don’t trust us.

This makes sense. Think about it: When you pick up your phone and it’s a number you don’t recognize, you know in like a second if it’s a salesperson: They’re too smooth, they’re rehearsed. Oftentimes they’re literally reading from a script and it shows, it sets off our spidey senses for when someone is attempting to pull one over.

I assume this is different from when someone gets really excited about a topic and starts to talk more quickly, because frankly that’s an adorable phenomenon. I wish it happened more often, to everyone, every day — I wish we all had the energy and space to get that excited all the time.

The article includes the phrase “the most disfluent interviewers,” which is quite a tongue twister.

At lunchtime I like to walk around the neighborhood near my office, through tree-shaded streets lined with beautiful old bungalows. One house has a single windowframe painted bright red; another has its back porch painted bright cornflower blue. There are also some weird people who constantly power-wash their backyard sidewalk, sending telltale rivers of soapy water into the alley. Once my coworker heard them screaming at each other while power-washing. I think they must have high thresholds for stress.

If you walk in the opposite direction along our street there are old factories repurposed into offices. My favorite building is this one:

Beautiful, right? Are you knocked out by that cerulean sky? LOOK CLOSER:

Uh oh. The emerging popular wisdom may be that sitting can kill, but hanging out five stories high is probablyyyy worse.

I love Pearl Jam, but, like a lot of things, I didn’t get on the bandwagon until way after its zenith: In 2001, after they released recordings of all the stops on their latest tour. I bought the giant Seattle one (three VERY full discs) while I was in Washington DC for a summer program and listened to it repeatedly during that trip and afterward.

I love Eddie Vedder in particular, because he embodies many qualities I admire and is not a tool, and he’s a Chicagoland hometown hero. For years, my dad and I bickered about Pearl Jam because my dad thought they were super overhyped, and I said that PEARL JAM felt that Pearl Jam was overhyped too, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still a good band. Vedder is a nice counterpoint to another ’90s musician whom I love but who exhibits every diva quality imaginable: Billy Corgan.

Corgan acts like a cranky, spiteful child most of the time, full of semi-crazy conspiracy theories and paranoiac reactionism, a deep-dyed control freak who will live in infamy. (Um, I still love him, let’s be clear.) Vedder is a workhorse, and is particular about what he puts his name on, but he seems more like a proud mechanic about it, like the craftsmanship and reliability is just as important as how good everything looks and seems. He respects music and the way it makes us feel. And although at times he can be demanding and controlling, he still comes off as a laid-back, kind, and conscientious guy. Eddie Vedder is a contributor to the ongoing human experience, much to our enrichment.

Vedder is releasing a new solo album of ukulele songs, and I’m hesitant, and I’ll admit it’s because I’ve known some flaky people who were into the ukulele, and I’ll even admit the overplaying of poor late Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s ukulele version of “Over the Rainbow”/”What a Wonderful World” has ruined the ukulele for me, maybe forever. Maybe forever. Sorry, Iz.

But the Chicago Tribune ran a feature on Vedder on Sunday, and he told the story of how he bought his first ukulele. It’s charming and it involves one of my other heroes, surfing megagiant Kelly Slater:

Q. How did you start playing the ukulele?
A. It was about 13, 14 years ago. I was in Hawaii with Kelly Slater, the surfer. (Vedder himself is a dedicated surfer.)* I went to buy beer and Kelly went to buy fish. I was done first, so I was sitting there on a couple of cases of beer waiting for him when I saw this ukulele in a storefront window. I went in empty-handed and walked out five minutes later with a great-sounding ukulele, and had a chorus and a verse written a few minutes later. I was halfway through writing the bridge when a few people walked by and threw some money in the open case. I had $1.50 from playing the ukulele after owning it seven minutes.

* DID NOT KNOW, ADDS TO HERO FIRES

I love that Slater and Vedder are friends, I love that Eddie Vedder surfs, and I love that at that pace he’d be making $12.86 an hour. Tax-free!

I spent most of the weekend dusting, most recently standing on my bed to clear heavy dust off the arms of my ceiling fan. Uh oh: My love of old books means my apartment is a tornado of dust bunnies at all times.

I DIGRESS. Dick Van Dyke is one of my favorite favorites when it comes to classic television, and yesterday’s Sun-Times had a little feature on Van Dyke in honor of a freshly released memoir. (Does it seem to anyone else like we’re swimming in an ocean of memoirs lately? Are they the reality TV of books, is this here to stay?)

He talks about the Dick Van Dyke Show, a sitcom which has aged beautifully and costars the very young, very beautiful, and equally witty Mary Tyler Moore; Van Dyke says he had a crush on her while they made the show together. I learned he underwent treatment for alcoholism and chose to be a public face of something considered, at the time, to be the territory of vagrants and bums.

Plus he has a 39-year-old girlfriend (!!!) and four children who are probably all older than the girlfriend is. “They all turned out great,” he says of his children. “Not a horse thief in the bunch.”