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The Language of the Cockpit, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
June 13, 2016
On the Shelf
From a vintage Trans World Airlines ad.
In the grim aftermath of the tragedy in Orlando, Richard Kim pays tribute to gay bars as institutions: “
My first gay bar was Crowbar. Like all great gay bars, Crowbar was a dump: dark, low-ceilinged, shitty sound system
. It was off Tompkins Square Park and Avenue B, when Tompkins Square Park was still a place you’d go to to buy drugs. It smelled like mildew, urine, cheap vodka, and Designer Imposters body spray. It’s long gone—made extinct like too many wonders by gentrification and Giuliani—but for a hot moment in the ’90s, it was the single most fabulous place in the galaxy. Dance moves were invented there. People went in, and when they came out, they weren’t just drunk—they were different people. That’s how powerful its juju was … Gay bars are therapy for people who can’t afford therapy; temples for people who lost their religion, or whose religion lost them; vacations for people who can’t go on vacation; homes for folk without families; sanctuaries against aggression.”
The language of the skies is like the language of the road, but less profane … more altitudinous. Mark Vanhoenacker, a pilot, calls it Aeroese, and has a longstanding fondness for it: “
We’re instructed to pronounce three as ‘TREE’ and nine as ‘NINER’, and 25,000 as ‘two-five thousand’ (more specifically, ‘TOO FIFE TOUSAND’), not ‘twenty-five thousand’, because experience has shown that these modified pronunciations are less likely to be misunderstood
. Or, when a controller knows you’re waiting to speak, they won’t say, ‘go ahead’, because that could indicate approval of something they didn’t hear you ask for. Instead they’ll say: ‘Pass your message.’ If all this sounds prescriptive and rigid, it is. Our exchanges are almost purely transactional. There’s no fat in the system, because it would take up precious airtime, and at worst it might introduce confusion. ‘The excessive use of courtesies should be avoided,’ warn our dour manuals.”
Today in British people and their zany British pastimes: let us not forget that in centuries past they pursued an obsession with follies, i.e., pointless, decorative buildings: “
Follies could take many forms. An occupied hermitage, of course, but ruined castles, kiosks, cottages, pyramids, altars, temples of virtue, alcoves, sepulchers, labyrinths, pavilions, pagodas and towers were all part of the repertoire
… Follies had to be eye-catching. That was the whole point … Perhaps the last great folly was built in the mid-1930s at Faringdon by Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners … Berners understood his business: he explained to the planning inspectors, ‘The great point of the tower is that it will be entirely useless.’ Maybe not: today you can find a notice that says, ‘Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.’ ”
Just when you start to believe that you know what you like, you use the Internet, and come to see that your preferences are as illusive as anything else about you. Louis Menand writes about the havoc that algorithms have wrought on taste: “
Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future
… Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it.”
They made a movie about Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, and they called it
Genius
? Oh, this can’t miss! Except that the film “
depicts creation via furious montage. Tom stands at the refrigerator scribbling
. Max jabs and plucks at pages of typescript. Bourbon and martinis are consumed. Cigarettes are smoked. Women come and go …
Genius
sighs with palpable nostalgia for a supposed golden age of masculine artistic potency and paints the struggle for self-expression in familiar sentimental colors. For Tom, writing is the unbridled expression of the life force, something [Jude] Law indicates by hollering and gesticulating and allowing a stray lock of hair to fall just so across his brow.”
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