Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  (Author’s Note: Since finishing this article, I have been informed that this is, in fact, a game. I would like to apologize for everything I said above. But please think about the five hundred dollars.)

  2006

  GEORGE SAUNDERS

  PROCLAMATION

  TEHRAN, Iran (July 29)—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as “pizzas,” which will now be known as “elastic loaves.”

  —Associated Press

  OKAY, so this is it. I am telling you now. Our jihad declares this: no more English. Wait, I know. I am speaking English, but just this one last time. No more English, once I am done speaking. When done speaking, I will do that zipping thing one does with the lips, and after that: our glorious linguistic jihad begins! It is going to really kick ass. However, hang on. “Kick ass” does not please the Prophet. How do I know? I just do. From now on, we will say, like: Our new linguistic jihad is really going to “put the foot in the old rumpus.” Got it? Or “rumpamundo” is okay. “Put the foot in the old rumpamundo.” Yes, yes, I like that.

  Some of you have asked, “Mahmoud, why are we doing this?” One even asked, “Mahmoud, why the heck are we doing this”—more about “heck” later, but for now … Remember, back in the seventies, when we took those American, uh, “visitors who did not intend to stay quite so long as they did, in fact, stay”? At the time everyone was going, “No, no, Mahmoud, bad idea”—but look how great it turned out! Now everyone is futzing over us, because why? Because we asserted our—Oh, right, no, you’re right, absolutely, we must also purge our language of the expressions of the blood-drinkers. So “futz”? No. Thanks for pointing that out. How about “fuss”? “Fussing around”? What do you think? Show of hands? Too similar? Okay, instead of “futz,” let it be, uh … let me get back to you on that one.

  But you see my point. When we draw a line in the sand with the Western imperialists, they pay attention. When we try to be nice, they treat us badly. I write the guy a sixteen-page letter, and don’t even get a note back! I put a lot of thought into that! I did, like, three drafts! I was trying to be an “egg that is good”! I was trying to offer “the branch of the olive”! But that “one who fucks” treated me like I was some “stupid rectum” from “HoboIntercourse”!

  My friends, I am a simple man. That is why you elected me. I have never been anywhere other than our beloved country. I actually haven’t even been to that many places here in our beloved country. I have pretty much been here in my beloved house, nonstop, since the seventies. In my beloved room. With the door locked. Having nightmares in which Hulk Hogan is waiting outside my room—look, as for Hulk Hogan, do not mention his name ever again! He will be referred to, if we even need to refer to him, which I doubt, as “Blond Blondie, Big Blondie!” In this way, we will disrespect him! In this way, he will be driven from my dreams! No more sneaking up behind me, “Blond Blondie, Big Blondie!,” and putting me in a headlock, and I am naked, and have forgotten to study for all my exams!

  No. For us, all Western decadence is finished. McDonald’s, chief villain of the American imperialist program, will henceforth be known as “Burger King.” That will really mess with everybody’s head. Some enemy of the revolution here in Tehran goes into a McDon—Do we still even have McDonald’s? I used to really like the cheeseburgers. The “snack that is surprisingly caloric because, you sense, there is even sugar in the bun.” Anyway, some enemy of the revolution goes into a McDonald’s, orders a Big Mac, and—ha-ha!—he is really in Burger King. I love it! He is undone.

  Similarly, Burger King will be known as “Wendy’s,” KFC will be known as “Home Depot,” Farouq’s Funeral Home will be known as “Blockbuster Video,” and Pamela Anderson will be known as “Mrs. President of Iran.” Joking! I know she is already married! Didn’t she just—Well, in any event, I am. At least, I think I am. Can you get my wife on my cell? Is this going out live? That Pam Anderson thing might have rubbed her the wrong—

  Speaking of women, that is another thing: Don’t you find that word provocative? Say it a few times, softly, kind of moaning it to yourself, while picturing some slut undulating. See what I mean? Provocative. So that is why we are outlawing that as well. No, just the word. At least for now.

  Henceforth, let us call our sisters “that which is too hot to be seen.” Or should it be “that whom are too hot to be seen”? To tell the truth, I am not nuts about the word “hot.” It makes me … well, it makes me hot. Say it, kind of stretch it out: hot. No, that won’t do. We shall call them “those who are dangerous to see, due to they are nasty, which is why we shall henceforth hide them under the new immense heavy tents of steel for which I own the patent.”

  Have I mentioned that? I am decided. Women are just too hot. Even in chadors, they are too damn hot. Try it, say it, really slowly, kind of prolonging the “ch” sound: chador. Right? See what I mean? So the chadors are off (stop it!) and the “comfort tents” are on. Here is one now. See how weighty, totally opaque (and therefore form-concealing) it is? This way, “those who are dangerous to see, due to they are nasty, which is why we, etc., etc.” will no longer be able to make any sudden sexy moves, or be seen at all, even when a bright light is shining right on them (during, say, an interrogation), or have a free thought, since they are essentially being perpetually crushed by about a quarter ton of steel, like wearing a damn VW bug.

  Oops. Sorry. My bad. Did not mean to say “VW.” Meant to say “Volkswagen.” And did not mean to say “damn.” Meant to say “frigging.” Ha-ha! Joking.

  Let no one say our revolution is without humor. Anyone says that, I will put my foot in his old rumpamundo in a way he will not soon forget. Trust me on this. I will “install, via rippage, an entirely new down-low-nasty-nasty orifice-stinky,” brother, and pronto, please believe me.

  Because guess what? I have nukes coming. “Slender death-containing tubes by which righteousness shall be enforced, as per me.”

  I shit you not.

  2006

  THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

  MARSHALL BRICKMAN

  WHAT, ANOTHER LEGEND?

  Trans-Ethnic Gesellschaft is pleased to announce the release of another album in its Geniture series of recordings devoted to giants in American jazz. These liner notes are by the noted jazz critic and historian Arthur Mice, whose efforts first brought Pootie LeFleur to public attention.

  POOTIE LeFleur, a legendary figure in the development of American jazz, was discovered—or rediscovered, rather—last summer placidly raking leaves on the courthouse lawn in Shibboleth, Louisiana. Although one hundred and twelve years old and in semiretirement (two days a week, he drops paper bags of water from his second-story window onto passersby below, for which he receives a small sum), Pootie has astonishing powers of recall, displaying the lucidity of a man easily fifteen years his junior. On a recent visit engendered by the production of this record, we got Pootie talking about the roots of the music he knows so well.

  “Was there an ideal period when jazz was pure, untainted by any influence foreign to its African origins?” we asked.

  “I spec’ … um … rebesac, dey’s a flutterbug, hee, hee, hee!” Pootie said, squinting very hard and making a popping sound with his teeth.

  “And what of the blues? Don’t the blues, with their so-called ‘blue notes,’ represent a significant deviation from standard European tonality?”

  “I’se ketch a ravis, y’heah? A ravis, an’ de dawg, he all onto a runnin’ boa’d,” replied the jazz great, leaning back in his chair expansively until his head touched the floor.

  This album represents the distillation of over sixty hours of taped conversations with Pootie LeFleur (of which the above is but a fragment), plus all the significant available recorded performances by this authentic primitive genius, whose career spanned the entire jazz era, from Jelly Roll Morton to John Coltrane—including a three-month hiatu
s in 1903, when nobody in New Orleans could seem to get in tune.

  Carlyle Adolph Bouguereau “Pootie” LeFleur was born into the fertile musical atmosphere of postbellum New Orleans. His mother had favorably impressed Scott Joplin by playing ragtime piano with her thighs, and his father was a sometime entrepreneur, who once owned the lucrative ad-lib franchise for all of Storyville and the north delta; for years, no New Orleans musician could shout “Yeh, daddy!” during or after a solo without paying Rebus LeFleur a royalty. The young boy taught himself to play the piano with some help from his uncle, the legendary “Blind” (Deaf) Wilbur MacVout, for two decades a trombonist with Elbert Hubbard, although Hubbard was an author and had no real need for a trombonist. When Pootie was five, he was given his own piano but misplaced it, requiring him to practice thereafter on the dining-room table.1

  When Pootie was six, the LeFleur home was razed to make way for a bayou, and Pootie’s father made the decision to relocate the family in St. Louis. Here Pootie tried his hand at composition. “The Most Exceedin’ Interestin’ Rag,” the first effort which we have in manuscript, is clearly an immature conception; only two measures long, it contains a curious key signature indicated by a very large sharp accidental over the treble clef, and a flat and a half-moon drawn in the bass. The piece is melodically sparse (the entire tune consists of one whole note, with a smiling face drawn in it), but it does anticipate Pootie’s characteristic economy by at least a decade. The material from this period (some of which is also available on Pre-Teen Pootie, 12″ Trans-Ethnic Gesellschaft TD 203) reveals a profusion of styles and influences. “Spinoza’s Joy” has a definite Spanish, if not Sephardic, flavor, while “What Vous Say?” shows a hint of the Creole.

  According to Dr. Ernst Freitag and Gustav Altschuler’s encyclopedic Dictionary of Jazz and Home Wiring Simplified (Miffin Verlag, 1942), the next few years were ones of extreme financial deprivation for the LeFleurs. Pootie’s father had squandered the family savings by investing in a feckless enterprise called Fin-Ray Cola, a tuna-flavored soft drink, and in an attempt to bring in some money Pootie invented a new note, located between F and F sharp, which he named “Reep,” and tried peddling it door to door. Despite early bad luck, Pootie never lost faith in “my fine new note,” as he called it, and some time later he hired a hall in Sedalia to test public reaction and attract financial backing. The playing of the note apparently made no impression on the casual Missourians, most of whom arrived too late to hear it.

  IT was about this time that LeFleur played for James P. Johnson, who urged him to go to New York or any other city a thousand miles away. The story of that trip is probably the most fascinating in the entire history of jazz, but unfortunately Pootie claims to have forgotten it. By now a leader and innovator in his own right, Pootie organized himself and three other musicians into what Nat Hentoff has called a “quartet,” and secured an engagement at Buxtehude’s, a speakeasy in the heart of Manhattan’s swinging Flemish district. His first wife, singer Rubella Cloudberry, evokes those exciting years in her autobiography, A Side of Fries (Snead House, Boston, 1951):

  Well, don’t you know, Pootie come in one night and say, “Pack up, woman, we goin’ to the Big Apple!” And I say, “Hunh?” And so he say, “Pack up, woman, we goin’ to the Big Apple!” And I say, “The big what?” So we stayed in Chicago.2

  The stimulating, rough-and-tumble atmosphere of Prohibition sparked LeFleur’s group (the Mocha Jokers) and others to marvelous feats of improvisation, typified by the moment during one dinner show at Tony Pastor’s when Bix Beiderbecke blew a brilliant version of “Dardanella” on a roast chicken.3

  LeFleur’s classical period begins with the reflective “Boogie for the Third Sunday After Epiphany” and ends with the tender and haunting “Toad” Nocturne. “Toad” opens with a simple piano motif in G, which is reworked into C, F, F minor, and B, finally retiring to E flat to freshen up. At the very end, following a tradition as old as the blues, everybody stops playing.

  One of the hallmarks of LeFleur’s career was his constant effort to adapt his style to contemporary trends—with the result that he was habitually accused of plagiarism. When the New Orleans style (or “Chicago style,” as it was then called) waned, Pootie was eclipsed, but he reappears in 1939 as a member of the historic Savoy Sextet sessions, featuring Bird, Diz, Monk, Prez, and Mrs. Hannah Weintraub on vibes.4 With a penchant for overstatement typical of the period, Pootie tried augmenting the sextet, changing it first into a septet, then an octet, then a nonet, a dectet, an undectet, and so on, ending up with the cumbersome “hundred-tet,” which could only be booked into meadows. A major influence on him at this time was his attendance at a tradition-breaking rent-party jam session, during which nineteen consecutive choruses of “How High the Moon” were played in twelve seconds by “Notes” Gonzales—the brilliant and erratic disciple of Charlie Parker—who was later killed when his car crashed into the tower of the Empire State Building.

  The next album in this series will cover Pootie’s modern period, including the prophetic Stockholm concert, with Ornette Coleman on vinyl sax and Swedish reedman Bo Ek on Dacron flute, plus some very recent sides cut by Pootie at his own expense in the Record-Your-Voice booth at the West Side bus terminal in New York City.

  1973

  1. Johnny St. Cyr recalled an anecdote about Pootie’s habit of playing out scales and figures on the table. One night in 1938, Pootie, Kid Ory, Baby Dodds, and Tiny Grimes were at Small’s Paradise having a late supper of miniature gherkins, and Pootie was occupied as usual tapping out a riff with his right hand. It finally became too much for Ory, and the famous tailgater put down his fork. “Stop that, Pootie,” said the Kid. “It’s annoying.” Although attributed to many others, including Fletcher Henderson and Dorothy Parker, the remark was in fact made by Ory.

  2. Of course, when LeFleur did make it to New York it was without his saxophonist, Crazy Earl Bibbler. Two days before the trip, Bibbler, an alcoholic, sold his lips to a pawnshop for twenty dollars.

  3. As retold by Miff Mole.

  4. Hear especially the second take of “Schizoroonia on Hannah Banana—The Flip Side of Mrs. Weintraub” (Ulysses 906) for a remarkable polytonal chord cluster achieved when her necklace broke.

  MARSHALL BRICKMAN

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF GOSSIP

  (JUICY TIDBITS FROM ALL AROUND THE LITERARY SCENE)

  WHAT’S got Noam Chomsky smiling so mysteriously these days? Was it the party Robert L. Heilbroner (Limits of American Capitalism, The Future as History) threw for him at Jilly’s to celebrate a smashing new paperback contract? Noam isn’t talking. How about it, Noam? Your fans wouldn’t mind a sample of those fabulous Chomsky “linguistics”! … Bill Styron edged out Eliot Janeway and Nelson Algren in the Boris Pasternak look-alike contest held at Sam Wo’s. Proceeds of the evening will go to buy a new beard for Alexander Solzhenitsyn.… History freak Will Durant credits wife Ariel with a lot of the success he’s enjoyed as a writer and as a human being, too. Will’s really nuts about her, even after many decades of marriage.… No one can accuse craggy Sam Beckett (Endgame, Malone Dies) of not having a great sense of humor—or can they? Friends report the bleak playwright will often put an haricot or green bean into his ear during dinner “just for laughs.” Pretty funny, Sam! … Crinkle-faced pepperpot Henry Miller is brooding because Nathalie Sarraute has never, ever phoned him in over thirty years. “So sue me. I say she’s crispy and tart, like a September apple,” he admitted at Big Sur’s posh Nepenthe restaurant. No argument from this end, Hank, but why not come in out of the sun for a while? … Jean-Paul Sartre spends part of each day grappling with the mysteries of life, then jogs to keep the flab down. His stay-trim secret: an avocado stuffed with farmer cheese. “It’s scrumptious, and packed with all the vitamins I need to ratiocinate,” the sinewy existentialist revealed.… Close friends of Rudyard Kipling deny he’s dead, and to prove it they’re taking over the Belmore Cafeteria for a giant one-hundred-and-tenth-birthday bl
owout.… Norm Mailer (Armies of the Night), Norm Podhoretz (Making It), and Norm Cousins (Talks with Nehru) huddled at the All-Norman Gala thrown by Paddy Chayefsky at the Parkway Restaurant (Roumanien Broiling, unborn eggs). Also present: Bernie Malamud looking trendy in a blue suit, dancing to the exciting polyrhythms of Petrouchka (Bob Craft tickled the eighty-eight).… Is talented harmonist Walter Piston busily composing a brand-new cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich or not? Walter, no blabbermouth, won’t say. But that twinkle in his eye must mean something! Better keep the rosin handy, Mstislav! … Was that Dwight Macdonald in a cream-and-tangerine Porsche trying to beat the lights down Park Avenue the other night at 2 A.M.? Dwight, sporting a new look in sideburns (both on the same side), explained how he makes the fifty-one blocks from Hunter College to Union Square without stopping. “I drop her into second, floor it, and scream my lungs out until I hit Twenty-third Street,” the essayist confided. “After that, it’s a piece of cake.” Those in the know claim Dwight’s fuel-injection system and 11-inch disc brakes help him get manuscripts to the publisher more quickly, thereby preserving a certain freshness of insight and that fabulous Macdonald contemporaneousness.… Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, arriving at the Bleecker St. Cinema for a midnight showing of Nosferatu, encountered Al and Dave Maysles exiting. The four exchanged rueful smiles.…

  EAVESDROPPINGS:

  Henry Moore: “Some folks claim I’m a kook because I sculpt. But if you want to move concepts through a juxtaposition of plastic and tactile forms, what else can you be—a hockey player?”