The “FaceTime Facelift”

Washington, D.C.-area plastic surgeon Robert K. Sigal offers the “FaceTime Facelift”:

“Patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on [Apple’s video calling application] FaceTime,” says Dr. Sigal. “The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!’ I’ve started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect. And we’ve developed procedures to specifically address it.”

For readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), life is once again imitating art. In the novel, the use of video telephony via teleputer (TP) results in “Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria”:

People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just “Anchorman’s Bloat,” that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable.

Thus they turn to “High-Definition Photographic Imaging,” plastic masks, and “Transmittable Tableaux” before returning to “good old voice-only telephoning” — “not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another.”

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)
Infinite Jest, video telephony

[I discovered the “FaceTime Facelift” via kottke.org.]

The picky ones

One small pleasure in life for me is local commercials — sometimes so local (or insular) that advertisers are identified by street address alone. A jeweler on a street about ninety miles from me has been advertising himself on television as le difficile: his commercial shows a series of men “here in Antwerp, Belgium” speaking in French and accented English about “the picky one” and his insistence on the best diamonds. O small-town jeweler, thy reputation fills a metropolis in two languages!

It turns out though that a surprising number of American jewelers are known in Antwerp as le difficile — or la difficile. So many picky ones! Even more surprising: the Antwerp diamond dealers speak of these many picky ones in exactly the same words (in French and accented English). These jewelers hail from Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. And from Florida, Florida, Florida, Florida. And perhaps from other states.

A cynic might think that these spots were made by inserting a couple of brief clips of a local jeweler into a ready-made commercial. A cynic might even do a quick search and find a source for these commercials online. I refuse to bow to such cynicism.

On retronyms

On retronyms, from Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

When roller skates were invented in the 19th century, it became necessary to refer to the kind used on ice — originally just “skates” — as “ice skates.” When cars began appearing on turn-of-the-century roads, old-style carriages came to be called “horse-drawn carriages” to distinguish them from the new “horseless carriages.” In the 1910s, when sound first came to be synchronized with motion pictures (in “talking movies” or “talkies”), the original type of movie came to be known as the “silent movie.” That is, nobody ever referred to “silent movies” until sound was added to the newer type.

And speaking of silent films: I was very happy to see the Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist do so well at last night’s Academy Awards. I love everything about The Artist but its typography.

Wikipedia has a list of retronyms.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Batshit crazy

Recent developments in American political life have made me curious about the expression batshit crazy. The words come unbidden to my lips when I hear a certain sweater-vested man pronouncing upon matters of contraception, education, marriage, and everything else.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains it all. Since 1971, batshit has meant “crazy, mad, insane.” The OED notes that batshit may also function “as an intensifier, esp. in batshit crazy.” The OED ’s first citation dates from 1993: “His mug is emblazoned with the words: full-blown bat shit crazy.”

A shout-out to that sweater-vested man: Shine on, you batshit-crazy diamond, all the way to your party’s nomination if possible.

[“Since 1971” is a bit of a joke: that’s the year for the first citation. Why the hyphen in batshit-crazy ? “When a phrase functions as an adjective preceding the noun it modifies — an increasingly frequent phenomenon in 20th- and 21st-century English — the phrase should ordinarily be hyphenated”: Bryan Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009). Garner does not give batshit-crazy as an example; I am applying his maxim here.]

Read Charles Bukowski 4 what?

Read Charles Bukowski 4 social enlightenment? Well, maybe. Bukowski’s poetry often presents the rest of the world as stuck in hapless darkness: people are stupid, their lives are small and petty, men chained to their wives, and so on. But the poet — he’s the one guy who knows the score. And yes, I find that pose tiresome. Bukowski can though be a useful gateway poet, one whose work can lead a reader to stronger, harder stuff. For me, Bukowski’s work helped point the way to poetry beyond the academic traditions I absorbed as an undergrad.

I snapped this photograph in The Red Herring Restaurant and Coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois. The words appear on a paper-towel dispenser. I noticed the rejoinder, written in a lighter hand, only after taking the photograph.

On a non-poetic note: The Red Herring’s vegan chili and cornbread are out of sight.

A related post
Homework (on developing a “poetry base”)

[My favorite Bukowski: the 1971 novel Post Office.]

Overheard

“And they’re naked — they’re like not even wearing spacesuits.”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

[Context? Don’t know, and not sure I want to.]

Barney Rosset (1922–2012)

From the New York Times obituary:

Barney Rosset, the flamboyant, provocative publisher who helped change the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to Americans’ attention under his Grove Press imprint and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89.

The first Grove Press book I ever read: Waiting for Godot or Eugène Ionesco’s Four Plays, in high-school English, with a very hip teacher, Beverly Jones. I can’t recall which book came first. Many other Grove Press books followed. The one that probably means the most to me: The New American Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen. Think scales and eyes.

Related reading
Grove/Atlantic (publisher’s website)
Interview with Barney Rosset (Paris Review)

[Slugfests? In the New York Times?]

“No Ordinary Pencil”

At Blackwing Pages, Sean has written the greatest Blackwing post of all time: No Ordinary Pencil.

How to improve writing (no. 36)

When the context is serious, and a pun would do no more than call attention to its maker’s cleverness, block that pun. From a New York Times article on suspected forgeries of modern American painters:

A few details, however, have dripped out in court documents and through interviews with other players in the case, enough to sketch out what happened.

Notice that the metaphor is mixed: it would be awkward at best to sketch with what’s been dripping. Better:

A few details, however, have come out in court documents and in interviews with other players in the case, enough to suggest what happened.

[This post is no. 36 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)
1 PUN MULTI

Resurrect Dead

The documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011, dir. John Foy) tracks three self-made researchers in their effort to unlock the secret of the Toynbee tiles, mysterious messages embedded in city streets in the United States and several South American countries. The tiles offer several variations on the above message:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE ‘2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER

Who’s creating these tiles? What do they mean? With determined effort and remarkable luck, Justin Duerr, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik push forward to an answer.

Like the 2010 documentary Catfish (dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman), Resurrect Dead is best viewed with little or no foreknowledge. If you plan to see the film, I’d suggest not following the link below.

[Image from the film’s website.]