"You will spend the next hour watching this new video for Bob Dylan’s 'Like a Rolling Stone'..."

"...  Good luck not spending the rest of your day watching this."

I linked to that yesterday, and I'm only bringing it up again to observe that I — a big Dylan fan for 5 decades — spent only about a minute looking at it, which is much less than the length of the song itself. So what's the deal with all these journalists claiming that we're going to become obsessed with watching it for hours or all day?

The quote I've chosen for this post seems about typical to me. It comes from David Malitz at The Washington Post, and Malitz appears to be a fairly young person, at least not an old boomer Dylan fan like me.

My reaction to the video was: 1. Here's the Dylan song that's used to represent all Dylan songs when you want to reach the largest possible audience with the message that you are playing a Dylan song, 2. I'm hearing the Dylan recording but I'm seeing some TV person mouthing the words, a type of performance that is annoying even when your dearest loved one does it; it's not cute. 3. So there are a bunch of TV people who were willing to go on camera mouthing the words of the entire 6+ minute song. 4. Either show me Bob Dylan with the voice of Bob Dylan or cover the song with your own voice and do it well (not cutesy) or leave me alone.

People like Malitz aren't so much interested in the Dylan song as in the various TV personalities who signed on the project and did the full 6+ minutes of mouthing and the technological achievement of making an interactive video that allows you to drop in on the various celebrities at any point in the song. Isn't it charming how they're all there on different channels, all synched to the same place in the song? It's not so much about Dylan as it is about hey, it's Steve Levy, hey, it's The Property Brothers. This is what could occupy a lot of time: checking out who all the TV people are and being charmed by how they look keeping up with the song. You've got to find that cute.

But Dylan is not about cute. Sample Dylan uses of "cute":

"And she buttoned her boot/And straightened her suit/Then she said, 'Don’t get cute'..."

"Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit/He spoke to me, I took his flute/No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?"

It was all about not getting cute... back in the 60s. But now maybe, with these kids today, cuteness is what it takes. You're supposed to get cute.

Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

Is "real" sarcasm or is "real" real?

The latest food article in the NYT stimulate, in me, a hunger for an understanding of "real" — not like some what-is-reality? philosophy/stoner college student, but as a connoisseur of language and humor. In 2 different articles, the modifier "real" is appended to a noun, first "milk" and then "vegetables."

1. "Pots and Pans, but Little Pain/Making Lunch With Michael Pollan and Michael Moss," written by Emily Weinstein, has the Pollan (author of books like "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") and Moss (author of "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us") wandering judgmentally through the kind of crowded grocery store that people in NYC call a "supermarket."

Mr. Moss and Mr. Pollan considered the mozzarella choices, skipping the pre-shredded kind in favor of a cheese that advertised itself as a product of Amish country and that cost the same as the more generic ball beside it.

“Real milk, no hormones, no antibiotics,” Mr. Pollan said, reading aloud from the label. “I love the term ‘real milk.’ I wonder if we can get fake milk anywhere here.”

2. "The Frankfurter Diaries," by Mark Bittman was about Bittman eating a hot dog. (Somehow, when I clicked on the link, I was hoping for something about Felix Frankfurter, even though I know Bittman is a food writer. I love his cookbook, "How to Cook Everything."). Bittman — like Pollan and Moss in the grocery store — comes across as an elitist out of his normal environment. He's on "a drive to the Jersey Shore" and looking for something to eat at a parkway restaurant.

My first inclination was Burger King; [a friend who largely shares my weaknesses and prejudices] pronounced it “poison.”

O.K., but what wasn’t? Where was the real food? It didn’t exist....

I’m well aware that we’re light-years away from a rest area without any junk food. It might be nice, however, if there were one offering a vegetable wrap or a big fat falafel sandwich with real vegetables. Would you not think there’s a market for that?

#1 is the distanced, humorous way to use "real" to express lofty/prissy/elitist attitudes about food. #2 is the colloquial, earnest way to use "real" to express longing for a better world. I wonder if Bittman really thinks rest-stop falafel would be any good. Even in decent ethnic restaurants with nicely deep-fried falafel, I've only encountered shredded iceberg lettuce, there for the crunch, not for any wholesome goodness. But Bittman's vision of great falafel at the rest stop goes perfectly — like  lettuce on deep-fried bean-mush — with his non-humorous deployment of the adjective "real."

There's no right and wrong here. Myself, I'd use "real" both ways. I'm just interested in the word "real," which has been big in the Baby Boomer era (and Bittman, Pollan, and Moss are all, like me, Boomers). Be real. Get real. It's been real. He's a real nowhere man. I got to laugh halfways off my heels/I got to know, babe, will you surround me?/So I can know if I’m really real.

According to the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest meaning of "real" — now obsolete — connects to the words "regal" and "royal." In reference to a thing, it means: "befitting a monarch; sumptuous, fine, beautiful, noble, excellent." If we're hearing elitism in those NYT quotes, it resonates with the history of the language. That makes me want to quote Bob Dylan again:

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

But the familiar meaning of "real" — actually existing — is also old. "Free from nonsense, affectation, or pretence; genuine" — a meaning that Pollan's sarcasm presumes not to exist — goes back at least to 1747. And look at this quote from "House of Seven Gables" (1851): "Phoebe's presence made a home about her... She was real!" It's like Nathaniel Hawthorne was a Boomer.

The OED has separate entries for a few familiar phrases, notably, "it's been real," which it defines as: "'it's been memorable,' 'it's been an experience'; used as a farewell, with varying degrees of sincerity or irony, and sometimes simply as a formulaic phrase." See! With varying degrees of sincerity or irony. The phrase was first encountered (by the OED) in Wright Morris's 1954 novel "Huge Season": "He stepped forward and bowed to Lou Baker, took her hand, kissed it. 'Doll, it's been real.'"

There's no food-related entry for "real" in the OED, but there is a drink one: "real coffee n. coffee made from ground coffee beans, as opposed either to a substitute or (now esp.) to instant coffee." That goes back to the 19th century:

1877   H. Ruede Jrnl. 13 June in Sod-house Days (1937) 99   Most people out here don't drink real coffee, because it is too expensive... So rye coffee is used a great deal—parched brown or black according to whether the users like a strong or mild drink.

Finally — and say what you will about Pollan, Moss, and Bittman — there's a separate OED entry from "real man" — "a man who fulfils traditional expectations of masculinity in his behaviour, attitudes, or appearance; a virile or masculine man." That goes back to 1872:

1872   Titusville (Pennsylvania) Morning Herald 23 Sept.,   But society is full of shams shoddy and tinsel. The real man puts on no airs at all....
1926   Times-Signal (Zanesville, Ohio) (Electronic text) 17 Oct.,   It's out here in the lonely places that you get the real-man type. There's nothing sissy about it.

That was some earnest "real," back then. Pop forward to the 80s, for some classic Boomer "real" sarcasm:

1982   B. Feirstein Real Men don't eat Quiche ii. 13   In the past, it was easy to be a Real Man. All you had to do was abuse women, steal land from Indians, and find some place to dump the toxic waste.

That's enough for now. Kisses. It's been real.

"Shushing the Baby Boomers."

I linked to this January 2007 NYT piece in the previous post, and I've linked to it before — here and here. Is Obama a Baby Boomer or not? If Obama the solution to the Baby Boomer problem or part of the problem? Obama's ambiguous generationality. Much to say there.

But I've just got to make a separate post to call attention to the historical artifact that is Robert Grossman's illustration depicting Barack Obama leaping over 6 little figures who represent the Baby Boomers:

"Why have Americans lost their devotion to the future?"

Asks David Brooks, observing that America was built on a "future-oriented mentality," but these days we "sacrifice the future for the sake of the present." Read the whole thing to see if you agree with that premise, which is backed up by assertions like: "The federal government is a machine that takes money from future earners and spends it on health care for retirees." Taking the premise as true, why is it happening? Brooks goes back to the big events that shaped The Greatest Generation:

The Great Depression and World War II forced Americans to live with 16 straight years of scarcity. In the years after the war, people decided they’d had enough. There was what one historian called a “renunciation of renunciation.” We’ve now had a few generations raised with this consumption mind-set. There’s less of a sense that life is a partnership among the dead, the living and the unborn, with obligations to those to come.

Interesting avoidance of the obvious generation that deserves the blame. I'm talking about my generation: The Baby Boomers. We didn't endure the Great Depression and World War II, but we were raised by parents who found it just wonderful to have a predictable quiet life home life, comforts that were perfectly normal to us, but without the prior deprivations, boring and unsatisfying.

Oh, the trouble we made, changing the culture, restructuring the politics, leveraging our numbers. Don't say we didn't look to the future! The future was us getting old.

We set up the benefits programs, and we taught the younger generations to believe in them, deeply and emotionally. We're just trying to get to the end without their noticing what we have done. It's a tricky business, because we want the money to flow into our needs as we struggle to live longer and longer, sucking more and more of the life out of the young before we die.

Wasn't it amazing the way we got you to love Obama — the last of the Baby Boomers (or did you believe him when he said he was post-Boomer?)? Under the banner "HOPE," he got you to believe in a health-care scheme that forces healthy young people to sacrifice your hope of building individual wealth.

Obviously, the story isn't over yet, but what will be left when we're gone? How long will that take? It depends on how securely we've structured this thing, how long your soppy empathy lasts, and whether the "death panels" taunt keeps working to deter you from the kind of self-serving politics from which we ourselves never refrained.

The coming scourge of Baby Boomers with Alzheimer's disease.

Get ready. We're being softened up. Pay attention... while you still can.