Friday, November 20, 2009 - Posts
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Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial board member and author of the paper's "Rural Life" column, spends most of his time on his upstate New York farm, gazing across meadows and musing on The Splendor of the Goldenrod, The Wisdom of the Barn Mouse, and The Majesty of Henry the Pig's Feed Bag. But occasionally the philosopher-rube scrapes the mud off his boots, has Maw lay out a clean shirt, and ventures into town to meditate upon civilization. In the latest of these adventures, Klinkenborg has discovered a novelty that may yet transform modern life: the bicycle.
In an "Editorial Observer" column published this week under the remarkable title "Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California"—is it a 500-word newspaper column or a doctoral thesis?—Klinkenborg finds himself on the campus of Stanford University, contemplating "great clouds of cyclists pulsing between classes along the street called Serra Mall ... like so many slowly charged particles in a physics experiment."
This puffed-up prose is typical of Klinkenborg, who may be the windiest windbag in newspaper history. But surely poetry is called for in the case of this column: Klinkenborg is recounting an astonishing spectacle.
At Stanford, he reports, cyclists pilot bikes of assorted makes and gear configurations. Also, they display varying degrees of cycling aptitude. "Some riders are clearly adepts," Klinkenborg writes, while others ride "à la 8 years old, prey to the wobbling clutches of gravity, prone to every distorting posture a bicycle can inflict." The cyclists are clad in a variety of costumes. Some talk on cell phones as they pedal. Many carry bags. It all leaves Klinkenborg in a state of wonder-struck bafflement. "There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are."
There is, indeed, a randomness "about" the campus cyclists, although it has nothing to do with university officials. The fact is, each of these riders has obtained his or her bicycle individually, often by purchasing them at a store specializing in the sale of bicycles. Similarly, the sartorial variety that Klinkenborg finds mysterious is the result of a process, undertaken by each cyclist at his or her place of residence, whereby a suit of clothes is selected and then donned, beginning with undergarments and proceeding to outerwear. Often as not, these fully clothed individuals then fill a satchel or valise with personal belongings—a corncob pipe, say, or a dog-eared copy of Making Hay. This explains the cyclists' "distended bags of every description," which Klinkenborg observes with wide-eyed bewilderment.
In truth, Klinkenborg isn't bewildered at all. But bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg's columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to "epiphanies" that elude those of us who haven't spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.
You and I might stand on Serra Mall and see ... a bunch of college kids biking to class. But Klinkenborg is a fount of gnomic insights. To wit: A bicycle isn't just a bicycle. "Whoever all these cyclists are, as individuals, their individuality is burnished by the bikes they ride and by the way they ride them. It's as though the bikes are only partly transportation, as though they were really machines for differentiation." A few paragraphs later, Klinkenborg rises to his final cadence.
Truly, we are the only species so discontented with our natural gaits, so ambitious to exceed a foot-pace. It all puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of walking and horses and their deleterious effect on human exercise.
"I doubt," he wrote, "whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal."
I know that faux-naiveté is Klinkenborg's mode. But does he expect readers to buy that he's perplexed by the concept of wheeled transport?
Here's a suggestion: Why doesn't Klinkenborg return from Palo Alto, Calif., to his farm at "a foot-pace"? He would save his cash-strapped employer some money on travel funds, for one thing. And he would behold many strange and wondrous sights en route, not excluding the darting of the whippoorwill against the glassy azure and the defecating of the prairie dog in the shade of the stretching oak.
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Word leaked on Thursday that Oprah Winfrey will end her long-running talk show come Sept. 9, 2011. She'll make an official announcement on-air Friday, commencing—we can only assume—20 long months of self-aggrandizing recaps and tributes. "The Oprah Winfrey Show" has been the nation's highest-rated talk show for more than 20 years, and an estimated 7 million viewers tune in on a daily basis. But the show commanded an audience nearly twice that size during its late-'90s peak. And though there's already speculation that Winfrey will start a new show on her own network, basic cable autonomy isn't the same as ubiquitous network syndication. Perhaps she's bowing out because she knows her powers are on the wane.
If we are indeed nearing the end of the Oprah era, a smaller news item from last week should have been a tipoff. Winfrey's production company, Harpo, reached a settlement with Mutual of Omaha over the rights to the phrase "aha moment." Since neither side has commented on the case, it's unclear exactly what was settled. But "settled" seems like Oprah PR-speak for "lost." Dictionary.com defines an "aha moment" as "a sudden understanding, recognition, or resolution." "Aha moment" and its sister phrase "eureka moment" have been around for years, which only demonstrates how words and phrases long and commonly used aren't necessarily safe from trademark protection.
As techdirt reports, Mutual of Omaha applied for the trademark in 2008 to support a marketing campaign dubbing the insurance company the "official sponsor of the aha moment." But Oprah, who'd used the term on her show, also claimed rights. The snag is that Harpo Productions didn't make a legal claim until this past June, a year after Mutual of Omaha had launched its campaign and long after a Florida clothier made a claim of its own. In the wake of the settlement, Mutual of Omaha still rather definitively runs the Web site AhaMoment.com, which sells insurance through a high-concept gathering of people's eureka testimonies. None, as yet, feature or credit Oprah. Her "aha moments," it seems, are numbered.
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"It'll be better next time" is a phrase that rarely brings the reassurance the speaker intends, but it's the best thing that can be said for Project Runway. The book is now closed on Season 6, which was beset by legal problems, second-rate contestants, uninspired challenges, inconsistent judging, absent judges, too many one-day contests, and the wrong venue. Let's pretend it never happened and hope that Season 7, back in New York and with Michael Kors and Nina Garcia guaranteed to be on hand for all the challenges, will induce a case of selective amnesia.
But first, the formalities: Thursday night brought the second part of the finale (and someone needs to tell the folks at Lifetime that "finale Part 1" is like "a little bit pregnant"—it is or it isn't the finale), and there was only one question left unanswered: Who would win? The collections had been out there since the Bryant Park shows back in February, and Tim Gunn had explained the meltdown shown in Lifetime's promos for the finale in a fabulous interview with the Los Angeles Times. After an avalanche of faint praise (Nina Garcia, "I thought they all put a lot of time and effort into their collections"; Heidi Klum, "It really looks finished"), Heidi named Irina Shabayeva this season's winner.
Despite Irina being the clear favorite going into Fashion Week, her victory was by no means assured. The judges praised Althea's coolness and her talent for connecting with "the street." They enjoyed Carol Hannah's impeccable draping and tailoring and her willingness to play with color (at least in comparison with the others—the whole show was like a scene from Pleasantville). What won it for Irina was that her collection was the most cohesive. Too cohesive, perhaps—every single garment was black, which doesn't photograph well. As Nina Garcia observed, "It gets very little editorial, black." Still, Irina had a story—"My collection is all about New York. ... What it takes to survive in this city as a woman. It's about comforting and shielding yourself"—and she paid attention to detail. She was the only designer who had made hats to accompany her looks, for example, and, overall, her pieces looked as if they belonged in Bryant Park rather than at a high-end fashion show in a suburban mall.
Still, there is one unresolved issue. As Tom & Lorenzo, the kings of Project Runway commentary, revealed earlier this week, the T-shirts that garnered Irina so much praise weren't exactly all her own work. The slogans were copied from "Reasons To Love New York," a December 2008 piece in New York magazine.
Oh, Gucci, maybe Season 6 isn't over yet after all.
Previous Project Runway Recaps: Week 1, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11, Week 12
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