Alec Mouhibian

At the border of common sense and treason, my take on the Armenian Genocide Resolution appears in today’s The Washington Times. You can find it here.

“When David Horowitz, the loud revolutionary of the campus right, talks about a ‘comfort zone for conservative activists,’ you somehow get the feeling that the movement is in decline.” This from my latest, “Sentimental Revolutionaries,” posted on The Weekly Standard website today. Read the full account of the 2008 convention of the College Republican National Committee here.

Arianna Huffington sure knows how to destroy a good aphorism. As part of its “The Way I See It” campaign, a Starbucks coffee cup hosted this quote from Huffington’s book Fearlessness: “Fearlessness is not the absence of fear; it is the mastery of fear.” Two things wrong here. First, fear-less-ness is quite literally the less-ness (i.e., the absence) of fear. Profundity failed.

Perhaps Huffington meant that courage is the “mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” That would’ve been more intelligent. But that would’ve also been Mark Twain.

Below is the uncensored and more precise version of my Sun review of Lost Eden: The Magnificent Orson Welles, a play written by Marcus Wolland, which just finished its run in Alexandria, Va. A DVD of the original performance is carried by Netflix, so potential victims might find the review useful. It is, to quote drunken Joseph Cotten from Citizen Kane, my first thrust at dramatic crimitism. Excerpt:

Magic is an aptly recurring focus in the play. Not only was Welles a virtuoso magician, but cinema itself is the virtuoso magic act, at once true to and larger than life. As hocus pocus taken to the artistic power, it’s the one narrative medium in which style is substance. This is proven by every minute of Citizen Kane as well as the cash-register chings in The Stranger, the hall of mirrors scene in Lady from Shanghai, the opening shot and hotel fight sequence in Contact of a Less Than Moral Nature (released under the improved title, Touch of Evil), and ultimately by the enduring vitality of all the great character actors—Welles among them—whose captivating presence made Hollywood glisten in its golden age. From that list only Citizen Kane has any literary substance.

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George Galloway, the British MP today suspended for concealing connections with Saddam Hussein, isn’t even good at being a jihadist. Alec and I take this one together for The Weekly Standard. Read here.

A little article on the Patent Office and its teensy-weensy museum. Again, because the Sun’s website is crappy and mortal, I reproduce the piece below.

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is to America what the Statue of Liberty is to America. Ever since George Washington and Thomas Jefferson signed the first proof of intellectual property on July 31, 1790, over 7 million more have been issued by an institution now employing 7,300 people. The sturdy Francocrafted dame may score higher on grandeur and be considerably easier to get into, but as an active symbol of good-old Gringo values, the PTO is tough to top.

Located in the heart of Alexandria, it is the largest operating American dream-catcher. With a mission “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries,” it also captures many important side-effects of the American dream: comedy, failure, and prolific litigation.

Some of us are a few miles from punctual, some a few minutes from witty, and some ever a sprained ankle or missed cab-ride from having beaten Ford to the T. For those who love to pour the bitter whine of sour grapes, the PTO must prove a fruitful vineyard. Failed patent stories abound. They range from coincidental—same invention, similar time, different inventors—to tear-jerking. Imagine the grief of a man who, upon being dumped by his mistress, coiled into a fit of absorbed and tireless dedication from which he managed to invent the Two-Way Street…only to get a rejection letter from the Patent Office saying “Already exists. See: Love.”

Let’s focus on the positive. The PTO is a repository of such monumental contributions to our way of life as the telephone, the efficient light bulb, air conditioning, and Birth Control Pill Dispenser in the Form of a Hair Brush (Patent No. 4,690,279: “ease your groom while you broom!”). Abraham Lincoln, for innovations in the manner of vessel-buoying, is the only president to score a patent. And possibly the most famous patent belonged to Frederic Auguste Bartholdi for, yes, his design of the Statue of Liberty.

Expectant mothers already subject their fetuses to Mozart. Soon ambitious potential fathers will be able to get an even better head start in the child-cultivation craze, if the patented Force-Sensitive Sound-Playing Condom (No. 5,163,447) ever bears fruit. And thanks to the Grave Alarm (No. 500,072), the miser whose life-long goal is to take his money with him to the grave, can now make sure it stays there. As you can see, patents mean joy for more than just inventors.

The annual theme of the PTO’s one-room museum, easy to miss if you lack 20/20, is dedicated to the oldest form of private transportation—“Shoes: Innovations at Your Feet.”

From the automatic shoe lasting machine to the footrest to Ruffwear: For Dogs on the Go, every crucial advancement in footwear is on display. A commemoration of our national canon’s most nuanced portrayal of a shoe salesman, Al Bundy, is inexcusably absent, but that’s okay. In tribute to the proficiency of American manufacturing, the mechanical tap-shoe exhibit wasn’t working.

Some exhibits offered interesting factoids. I learned all baseball shoes were brown until the Reds wore whites in 1967. Other exhibits posed more questions than answers. One of these, entitled First Lady Footwear, featured the favored pairs of Julia Grant, Edith Roosevelt, Lou Hoover, and Mamie Eisenhower. “Each pair offers insights to their characters,” a spunky video guide informs me. But this was impossible to verify, given the unfamiliarity of those particular first ladies. Eleanor Roosevelt would’ve been a much more useful example. I’m sure she wore a goody two shoes. But were they, I wonder, built to traverse both steep inclines and flat carpets?

These uncertainties aside, the museum’s showcases ultimately impart the important paradox that innovation tends toward the irrelevant. America’s distinctly practical creativity is usually in pursuit of the immediately useless, producing stuff that on its face is neither needed nor even wanted, before developing into integral enhancements of life. How many of today’s vital inventions were inconceivable to previous generations of homo sapien, let alone desired?

Consistent with its symbolism, the PTO’s small but effective gift shop hooked this reporter to overpay for a pair of the funniest coffee mugs he’s ever seen. Their content had nothing to do with patents or trademarks or even America. Somehow this seems perfectly appropriate.

On the column to the right you will notice our updated blogroll, with links to a few of our favorite blogs. It’s also an exercise in the doctrine of preemptive reciprocity, by which we lobby those bloggers to link to The Lucky Frown on their (far more formidable) websites. Alas, compliments are returned less frequently than insults, so our PR strategy might take a sinister twist soon, sending the blogosphere into chaos, and leaving us with the self-comforting excuse that we tried.

A column by me for the Sun (now defunct).

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Recently I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that said, “My Weiner Does Tricks.” No wonder mine can only play dead.

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I follow Garin’s summer cleaning of spring skeletons, without the courage to look at them. Those early, embarrassing menstruations flowed from a place where the follicles were active but the hair wasn’t there. Thus do I utterly disavow anything to be found under my name in Google, that heartless biographer, which isn’t linked to in my archives page here. The only bearable memory I have of my high school editorials is, “Thanks to Clinton, I beg your pardon is no longer such an innocent phrase.” I guess that line’s okay, but it’s Al Franken okay.

It’s impossible to exorcise our past, but we can at least declare haughty superiority to it before anyone else gets the chance. And we can follow by thanking God that dubious metaphors are immune from maturity.

On the eighty-second anniversary of the Monkey Trial, I write about the evolving heresies of the Scopes textbook for The Weekly Standard. Read it here.

The “good old days” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for a writer it must include the anonymity that was once granted to our past doings and writings — embarassing, out of date, and no longer ours. Thanks to the internet (the medium, supposedly, that did away with permanence) nothing slips from the records. A simple search of my name in Google will (forever?) reveal that I once ran for UCLA’s student government as an anarchistic candidate. And a few pages in, you will find this gem from the upstart 15-year old writer who had Ayn Rand in one hand and a thesaurus in the other: “If establishments of public education are advocates of preconception and predilection, then their conductors should not declare words of condemnation and scorn to our country, they should avow words of fidelity and commitment to this nucleus of justice and opportunity.”

I figure it’s better to ask permission than to say sorry — and take the skeletons out of my closet, before someone with lesser sympathies arrives with a search warrant. Alec?

Rumor has it this film was originally titled “Anatomy of a Murderer” and intended to settle long-running bar-bets in Chicago over Al Capone, but the Hollywood censors forced them to change the title and with it the entire story. What resulted is widely considered to be the best courtroom drama ever.

Raise your hand if you’d like to see James Stewart and Duke Ellington playing side-by-side at the same piano! If you’re not raising your hand, that better be because it’s stuck between someone’s cheeks. Ellington’s sassy score and priceless cameo are two big treats in a film that proves it’s possible to compel an audience for 160 minutes on nothing but wit, charm, and authentic presentation.

If the Tennessee Williams style is considered Southern Gothic, then Anatomy of a Murder is Midwestern Ambivalent. Set in small-town Michigan, the film was shot on location in Marquette County. The judge is played by Joseph N. Welch, a real lawyer who defended the Army in the McCarthy hearings. And with an earthy sexual tension throughout, it lacks any of the maudlin preachiness that moistens modern trial-dramas like a Johnson & Johnson baby-wipe.

Above all is James Stewart, the defense attorney, with the best performance of his career. Those pseudo-romantic roles he did for Alfred Hitchcock were always part of the cheeky director’s running joke. Here, having shed the nasal geekiness of his youth, Stewart is truly in his element—a slightly mischievous, middle-aged, consummate bachelor who spends his free time on fishing and jazz. He’s your perfect uncle, if you don’t mind the lack of pedophilia.

AM is so authentically depicted that it was possibly the first major Hollywood picture to sound the words bitch, penetration, rape, slut, and sperm. Meeting major controversy, the film was actually banned in Chicago upon its release, supposedly for the raciness. More likely, however, it was out of sheer spite at Hollywood for leaving those bar-bets out to hang.

Finally received my grade for Plant Biology – never in my life have I been so happy to see a P, although I’m sure even greater joy at the sight awaits in the geriatric years – which makes me an official graduate of college and member of the real world, District of Columbia, where I’ll be cast as the sexually ambiguous confidant of the vulnerable girl who just broke up from an interracial relationship, only I might really have designs. Tune in to find out!

One thing’s for sure. So long as I continue to get deep pangs of pleasure from sights like that one, life will never suck.

Just back from Baltimore, where I visited the home of the great American journalist H.L. Mencken. In that common red brick house, the Sage of Baltimore convinced Darrow to take on the Scopes case, translated Nietzsche, coined “Bible Belt,” and wrote more than 10,000,000 words of infectious opinion, literary criticism, and fiction. The Mencken House is now rotting. His furniture deported, his ceilings crumbling, and his ghost long evicted, Mencken is a persona non grata in the city for which he entertained deep — and unrequited — affection. More on this in an upcoming article.

Now that Garin has explained the meaning of our blog’s name (below), allow me to apologize for its existence.

According to longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, “That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.” The thought prompted Hoffer to start a diary (eventually published as Before the Sabbath) ten years into retirement from the waterfront, with the purpose of catching those flashes to be later expanded into flames. It seems as good a justification as any for staking out yet another plot of the vast virtual wasteland.

We hope to please a variety of readers. Mental voyeurs can peep into our minds via the record of our thoughts here, which promises to be punctuated by comic whimsy and tragic relief. People interested in our past writing can check out the archives and the links we’ll be posting of future published pieces. And those of you who think the digital cup runneth over long ago can take solace in the hope that this will be the squirt that topples it for good.