The Pain Delivery Man

Why I Can't Listen to Elvis Costello's New Record

I don't argue that Elvis Costello isn't the greatest songwriter of the last 50 years; just that, if he is, I cannot recognize it.

I enjoy a reasonable acuity in the usual dilettantish pursuits, and ordinarily no one is a bigger booster of the intellectual process than I am, but it is no secret that my taste in pop music is terrible. Right now my favorite CD is a recording of 60's Soviet muzak.

I believe there are two reasons for this. One is physiological: my preternatural music-sensitivity lobe. A single note played on a violin by someone who knows what she's doing can release chemicals in my brain--called agonyzymes--that cause me to experience debilitating angst, penetrating sadness, or profound botheration. Alternatively (or is the word "alternately"?) the timbre of a singer's voice (say, Elvis Costello's) may cause this lobe to produce huge quantities of the same substance found in those whose skin crawls when they hear fingernails on a chalkboard.

Because of this unnatural lobe, music, unlike sculpture or literature, has the capacity to truly and literally torture me. Most often it is the critically beloved pop artistes who torture me the worst. I'm not against the virtuosic or phenomenally quirky or the exquisitely-produced on principle; I just want it not to inflict pain on me. I am not a masochist.

The second reason for my deficiency in pop music appreciation is laziness. I dislike having to exert myself with these accomplished songwriters, only to find that the payoff is no bigger than some tired display of wry irony combined with the dreaded "raw emotion." "You hurt me, leaving me bitter-yet-strangely-articulate" is fine, but if that's all I'm going to get, don't make me work for it. I'd rather listen to The Archies.

Excuse you?

How about I excise you, and we'll call it a day?

If you're like me, and why shouldn't you be, you have had it up to here with "Excuse me." Nothing good ever follows that phrase. What once served as a polite request for release from an obligation has been co-opted by the pushy and the impertinent as a declaration of some sort of perceived primal right to exculpation.

The Twisty Institute For Forensic Etymological Analysis believes, though we cannot yet substantiate, that the origin of the phrase's decline can be traced to the chump Steve Martin.

Further evidence suggests that some bit of unpleasantness always supervenes the ubiquitous "excuse me." The unpleasantness may manifest as spasms of intellectual pain, such as when the aforementioned Steve Martin gag is invoked by persons without proper regard for the shelf-life of catch-phrases popularized in 1977. It can be bad news ("Excuse me, is that your car rolling down the hill toward that blind orphan girl carrying the fluffy puppy?"). It can be an insult ("Excuse me, is that your nose, or did a bus just park on your face?"). It can be a display of dominance by an alpha, such as when you're sauntering along the sidewalk humming "If I Had A Hammer" without a care in the world and some thickneck ex-jock in a Men's Wearhouse suit with hair plugs dipped in melted Vaseline elbows you into a wall lest he be late for half-price "'ritas" at Cactus Joe's, and he says "excuse me," but he is obviously insincere.

But the "Excuse me!" I most despise is the one bellowed as a command by belligerent strangers. Strangers who want me to stop and dote on them. Strangers who want something. Something ... for nothing.

These interactions are exactly as pleasant as being told the truth about your talents as an accordionist. For the victim of an unexpected "Excuse me!", having been taken by surprise, is at a great disadvantage. There ensues a momentary confusion, a struggle wherein the urge comply with the request to excuse this rude person--for the genteel among us were raised to believe that there are certain obligations in life-- meets resistance from a more astute lobe of the brain--the streetwise cortex--that can smell a con bigger'n shit.

Thus does our old friend Cognitive Dissonance again raise its gnarly claw.

Because of our good breeding, we are inclined to excuse someone accidentally stepping on our blue suede shoe, or to supply the occasional bald-yet-ponytailed pilgrim with directions to the Stevie Ray Vaughan monument. It is, however, quite another matter when the intrusion is entirely premeditated. It is clear that the excuseniks to whom I allude comprehend fully the scope of their effrontery, or they wouldn't feel it necessary to crave our indulgence. Yet they forge ahead with their insidious plots to commit these senseless acts of incivility, extracting money and signatures and favors from hapless passersby who never did them any harm. In fact, there appears to flourish among the throng the idea that any churlish breach of decorum may be perpetrated as long as it is preceded by a magical "excuse me." "Excuse me!" they say, but they might just as well shout to the rooftops, "I am an ignorant asshole, yet you will do my bidding because I have cunningly tapped into your secret reservoir of guilt!"

Excusing them, therefore, is impossible. So we do it all the time.

As I traipse through my day, meditating, as usual, on the poor quality of wasabi in local restaurants, the last thing I need is a sudden interruption requiring that I redirect my attention to a request for money to get some guy's guitar out of hock, or to some brainwashed nutjob cultist, or to some apple-cheeked young idealist with a clipboard. If I am waylaid by one more petition to stop the improvement of Austin roads so that the town's precious "weirdness" may be preserved, there's no telling what I might do. But whatever it is, I'll have an excellent excuse.

A Reason To Accept That Invitation

Food cooked by friends, provided they know the difference between millet and mille-feuille (and own at least one 40-pound aluminum sauté pan), is infinitely preferable to anything cooked by hung-over strangers in the best restaurants. This is not a touchy-feely pronouncement on friendship or how food cooked with love somehow tastes better (it doesn't). I imply only that a friend is less likely to poison you.

The Misogynympics

Gold Medals and Hot Sex

Photos: Amanda Beard displaying her gold medal form, Terin Humphrey and coach icking everybody out

How is it possible that, scarcely a week after its bloated "closing ceremony" (a.k.a. The Greece Capades), the Olympics should have so completely evaporated from my brainal sphere? It was my primary diversion for nearly two weeks, but now I'm right back to contented absorption of cable TV's perpetual "Law & Order" loop. It's almost as though the Olympics never happened.

Good riddance. It was starting to piss me off.

As will surprise no one, sport is sexist, and even though NBC's Olympic broadcasts included way more than the average amount of women's coverage, I couldn't help but notice the gender-based anomalies that remained.

In a nutshell: the NBC Olympics website lists as one of its most popular videos a segment entitled "Would Finch Ever Pose Nude?" Jennie Finch, in case your eyes glaze over whenever men start thinking with their dicks on national television, is a softball pitcher who happens to be a centerfold-caliber blonde hottie. Softball's all well and good, but apparently the real drama is whether she will let all that blonde hotness go to waste. Yeah, women's sport could go far, if only those broads could learn to sex it up. Maybe show jumping could move from 5 AM to prime time if the female equestrians would compete in bikinis, like the women's track team. Now those girls know what time it is.

OK, it wasn't all sex. Sometimes NBC took a break to reassure the skittish folks at home that these brawny women have other comforting feminine qualities. Mia Hamm, arguably the greatest soccer player ever, was most often referred to in the touchy-feely context of her "inspiration to little girls." But then it was right back to sex, since they couldn't mention Hamm without replaying the video of her teammate Brandi Chastain "stripping" to her sports bra in the 1999 World Cup, noting, of course, that Chastain later appeared nude in Gear magazine.

Women's gymnastics is a farce of even more depressing magnitude. Thank god it only happens once every four years. As Salon's King Kaufman pointed out, it isn't really even a women's sport; it's a children's sport. So why stop there? Why not Olympic T-ball, jacks, or jump-rope?

Conceptually, men's and women's gymnastics diverge to an almost laughable degree. The men are noble athletes in their physical prime, the "women" are prepubescent pixies no matter how old they are. What about that little teenager in the Edie Sedgwick makeup, young Terin Humphrey, looking like a dopesick B-girl who'd been punched in the face? What the heck kind of message was that sending? Maybe Humphrey, who at 18 is nearly over the hill as a gymnast, was nobly trying to assert her inner non-virgin amid all that pixie-ness, but the effect was jarring against a backdrop of serious, world-class athletic competition. Maybe she wouldn't have felt it necessary to goop herself up like a drunken tart if she were allowed to have breasts and menstrual periods. Imagine if they required the men to be pubescent Tinkerbells in glitter dust and skimpy rhinestones leotards skipping around to a Flashdance soundtrack, only to retire them at 18. Just imagine.

The perv-quotient in women's gymnastics is pretty high, but the softcore video treatment of swimmer Amanda Beard was completely over-the-top. Beard, who at the age of 14 famously won a couple of Olympic medals in Atlanta, gave the public what it really wanted when, in her NBC bio segment, she emerged from the pool in slow-motion, arched her back, and remarked with giddy giggles how "comfortable" she is with her body. The commentators could barely contain their prurient joy over the toothy Beard's accomodating transformation from teddy bear-clutching virgin to "Olympic sex symbol." You could practically hear them singing "Thank Heaven For Little Girls."

I wanted these girls to refuse to take part in this demeaning misogynist tableau, but I suppose that was too much to ask. They're not activists, after all, they're just kids, and dumb jocks to boot. It's no secret that the patriarchy notoriously punishes the troublemakers, and lavishes riches on women who play along. The pressure to capitulate to all the money and attention must be overwhelming.

So I just sat in front of the TV with my Perrier and cigarettes, seething. My relieved sigh was audible as far away as Blanco County when, on the final night, they trotted out the adorable 10-year-old orphan girl to "blow out" the Olympic flame. I don't think I could have taken much more.