Years ago, after a remote interview with Garry Kasparov in Europe, one of Bill Maher’s guests asked: “Do you ever get the feeling that they’re playing chess and we’re playing checkers?”
The French, at least when I lived there, called Americans “les enfants du monde.”
I thought of both those comments when I heard that Time magazine’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift.
A recent starred review in Publishers’ Weekly of a work of fiction quoted two lines from the book: The first, a racist comment from a peripheral character and the second, another character’s statement about the prevalence of racial hatred. And I wondered: Do writers win points these days simply by citing the currently approved obsessions? Wouldn’t readers be more impressed by the sharing of some telling observation from the author, a brilliant apercu perhaps, or an unusual or interesting use of language?
AARP's Movies for Grown-Ups Award for best picture went to Top Gun: Maverick, confirming what the French have always said about Americans, that we are "les enfants du monde."
Last night I watched a documentary on the life of Bob Dylan which featured a clip of a very young Joan Baez singing a religious folk song. It was the perfect antidote to Sunday's halftime show, though it made me question our evolution as a nation.
Yesterday we drove down to Coconut Grove for the King Mango Strut and, arriving early, had lunch at Le Buchon du Grove. The restaurant has excellent food (yesterday they were handing out complimentary mimosas) and a cozy atmosphere created in part by a trove of Gallic memorabilia. My favorite item is a huge poster of a pastis advertisement from Marseille. Also, tables are very close together.
We got talking to the couple seated next to us (though to anyone passing by we looked to be at the same table) who were down for the weekend from central Florida, where the man grows clams. In fact, he has one of the only clam farms on the Atlantic side of Florida, in the Indian River. Some of his seeds, he said, he sells to Cedar Key. Though originally from New Jersey, he came to Florida as a young man to study aquaculture, as he’d always been interested in fish.
I asked if he’d had an aquarium as a kid, which prompted him to tell the origin story. One summer’s day his father took him and some of his friends to Palisades Park. At one of the booths, he threw a ping-pong ball into a goldfish bowl, which earned him the bowl along with the fish. And the rest was history.
Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "200 Greatest Singers of All Time" is predictably U.S.-centric, since much of the world listens to American music and most Americans have no patience for songs that are in a language other than English. But leaving Jacques Brel off such a list does nothing but show our hopeless parochialism.