Not Pronounced Pot-Pour-Ri

A Potpourri of Short Thoughts

• "Don't get mad, get E*Trade." In this TV ad, a skinny kid with glasses pumps iron, does agility exercises, chin-ups, and everything else to make his body a little less scrawny. His reward: Failure! At which point the commercial gloats: "Don't get mad, get E*Trade." First, the kid should be praised for his intiative, his work ethic, his understanding of the truth that the only way to improve his physique is to work hard. But he is mocked for his effort. Second, never gamble, or buy or sell securities, which is the same thing, when you are angry.

• "It Pays to be Fast," Points Bet ad. You can't avoid this commercial watching New York Mets games on SNY cable, and most likely on your team's broadcasts. (Sports betting is still illegal in New York state, so you must be in New Jersey to participate.) Former NBA great Allen Iverson is the fast-talking, hard-hustling pitchman. You want to bet on the outcome of a game with a point spread, fine. But what Points Bet is selling is perpetual play on its app, fast, in-game bets, fast, perhaps as fast as, will the next pitch be a ball or strike? Fast. The revenues for the cable stations and the tax income for states are substantial, and New York is going legal in 2022. I enjoy infrequent forays into gambling casinos, it can be a fun night out if you know your limit for loss or gain. Smart professional gamblers are risk-averse. Iverson's pitch is to the adrenalin-junkie: "Fast! " I have a family member, a successful pop singer of the 1960s and gambling addict, about whom I was speaking with his contemporary Frankie Valli during an interview about seven years ago when Jersey Boys was rolling. Valli shook his head sadly when I mentioned my cousin, the gambler. "Millions. He lost millions." Many times. And he lost "fast!"

• Louis Menand: The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. (FSG) I rushed to order the book when I read a New York Review of Books critique that began with the delicious story of John Cage appearing on an Italian TV quiz show in 1959. The show was modeled on "The 64,000 Question," in which the contestant chooses a topic and answers increasingly diffiicult questions as the payoff doubles for each round. Cage, the composer and core member of a brilliant group of musicians, artists, choreographers and the like inthe 1950s and 1960s, chose as his topic mushrooms. ($64,000 is just under $600,000 in today's currency.) He successfully named the 24 varieties of white spored mushrooms, in alphabetical order, to win the grand prize at the buzzer. It was worth millions of lira that amounted to $6,000. He bought himself a Steinway piano, according to the review, and a new van for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He auditioned for Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

• But I'm not up to that part yet. I'm reading about Sartre. When Sartre was drafted into the French Army in 1939 after Germany invaded Poland, he was assigned to a unit as a meteorologist. In a footnote, Menand writes that "in the meaningless coincidence department," German philosopher Martin Heidegger served as a meteorologist in World War I. Not meaningless, and not a coincidence, I say! (There are no coincidences.) You may not need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, as Dylan sang in "Subterranean Homesick Blues." But we may need philosophers. Imagine the local news: "And now, the forecast with Action11 News meterologist Jean-Paul Sartre. What do you have for us, J.P.? "The day will start out Being. Cloudy, that is. Then, Nothingness. It may rain, or it may not rain. Either way, Nothingness. So bring your umbrella, and perhaps it will not rain, making you feel overburdened and foolish; or leave the umbrella home, and be soaked. To be human is to err. Maintenant, c'est à nouveau ton tour, Chrissy and Dave!”

• Judas Priest: 50 Heavy Metal Years. (Sony Music). Start collecting those empty recycling bottles and saving your nickels. Coming October, a 42-CD set...that's right, forty-two CDs. What could the price for a 42-disc set possibly be? It includes all 29 Judas Priest albums and 13 previously unreleased discs, the usual assortment of live concerts including CD 32, Live at the Mudd Club, 1979. Judas Priest at the Mudd Club? Why wasn't I invited? Maybe I was and I laughed it off. Among the goodies are a numbered British Steel metal razor blade (blunt). For those whose funds or need to have Judas Priest stuff is more limited, there is also Reflections: 50 Heavy Metal Years of Music a two-LP/red vinyl/180 gsm, and yes, a one-CD disc with the same title. I'll take one of those, maybe. 42 CDs: Now that's heavy.

• Cruise to the Edge. I do not like cruises or cruise ships. My late mother was a travel agent who would book cruises so she and her husband (stepdad is literally but not emotionally correct, as I was 25 and out of the house when they married) could travel free on the commission. For her 65th birthday many moons ago, she booked a cruise for the entire family for three hellish days from Ft. Lauderdale to the Bahamas and back. Cruises targeted at music loving baby boomers and Gen Xers were a big part of the cruise business. But Cruise to the Edge, May 2-May 7, 2022, from Port Canaveral to the Bahamas, stirs my interest. Progressive rock is the vast umbrella for the nearly three-dozen artists, with headliners Marillion, Alan Parsons, Transatlantic, and Al Di Meola. I'm more excited about the undercard: Adrian Belew, Gong with Steve Hillage, Al Stewart, and...that's about all the names I recognize. But I imagine the fellow passengers would be a really interesting assortment of people. My guess is that we'd all be reasonably old, male and bookish. Lots of guitar players, and synthesizer lovers. And what would the groupies be like? Many might self-identify as poets, and some might bring their chapbooks for the stars to autograph. I don't see anything wrong with that. If one were unethical, one could pose as a member of one of the bands: you could say you're the current bass player for Marbin. Or Glass Hammer, District 97, or Claudio Simonetti's Goblin. Who would know?

• "The Heartbreak Kid," by Kelefa Sanneh in the June 7, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. The subtitle is "Olivia Rodrigo Perfects the Breakup Song." The ratio of intelligence (the near-polymath Kelefa Sanneh) to subject matter (talented teenage pop star Rodrigo) on this rather long column, one and two-third pages of the magazine, creates an imbalance at first. On the one hand, I am all for digging deep, and I adore Rodrigo's hit "Driver's License." I thought it was too much about too little, until I realized how meta Sanneh's story is. It is about Rodrigo, a recent former star of what the author calls "the suitably discursive name" of the Disney Channel's High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Special, which if I understand this correctly is about "a promtional vehicle for her television show which was about a bunch of students mounting a stage production of a popular Disney Channel movie from the two-thousands," High School Musical. I wished Sanneh could have maintained that level of hilarity, but he, like many others who tried to resist its charms, has been seduced by "Driver's License," "one of the most infectious pop songs, surely, that anyone will release all decade." As the piece goes on, Sanneh adroitly dissects breakup songs as a sub-genre, (though he never mentions the template, Neil Sedaka's "Breakin' Up is Hard to Do") and then goes meta-meta reflecting on Rodrigo's roots: She's been famous since 13 when she played Paige on Bizaardvark, another Disney Channel show about two friends who get famous making viral videos. Aware that the Disney identification can be stifling, there is an apparently improvised moment in "Driver's License" where Rodrigo sings, "I still fuckin' love you, babe." About which she told an interviewer: "If that naturally sort of separated me from the Disney archetype? That's cool." I need to read this article about six more times.

• Congress has a lot on its plate, but New York's senior senator, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, wants marijuana legalized at the Federal level. He was on TV last night, and of course, he is framing it as a social justice issue, which it certainly is. And as an absurdity, as it is legal in many states, including New York now, so the inconsistency is obvious. But Schumer is a showman as much as he is, to whatever degree, a statesman, and so I was waiting for him to dig into his pocket, pull out a lighter and a doobie, inhale deeply, then let it out. Go big or go home, Senator!