SOMETHING IS FISHY IN FRANKFORT

Life is full of uncertainty but there are two things of which I am sure:

I love Chinese food and I hate art.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not your garden variety philistine. Nor am I an indiscriminate gourmand. 

Some Chinese food is better than others and some art is more easily digested than even some TV. But the general rule still holds.

Wontons - yes! 
Syllogistic legitimacy - nyet!

  
Case in point the latest theoretical flavor of the month straight out of Berlin, Professor Friedrich Einsame.

  
Yes, we get cable here in snowy upstate New York and this, from the Arts and Ideas station (#234).

I'm on to this guy.

He's the toast of left wing Europe and the darling of the Academy. He's made a career of this kind of gibberish and the smart guys here in the U.S.A. eat it up like its liverwurst.

But hey! Even us rhubarbs know a thing or two.

Sometimes a trout is simply just a freakin' trout!

I CAN'T GET NO ...

 Some days while taking my early morning walks through Danfroth Park I marvel at how an indifferent sunlight manages to tease such elegance out of the slender grey twigs of the ancient Pignut Hickorys or how the ribbed, olive green leaves of the Black Cherries fairly glisten with so little prompting.

But most days I wallow in a foul cesspit of regret having spent the best years of my life living in the boonies.

I'm a city boy at heart and for me, after a while, every bird ends up looking like a pigeon.

I love the noise, the filth and the relentless bedlam of aggressive cosmopolitan bullying. I love the armies of people rushing in that deranged choreography of urban pandemonium, the mayhem that seems to be just one tiny incident away from a broiling panic.

You can't find that kind of energy anywhere but in big cities but what you also find in these centers of sophistication and wealth are steaming mounds of pitiless bullshit.

Case in point:

My daughter Sherrie lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, is a buyer for one of the big department stores, makes a comfortable six-figured salary, has two children, a housekeeper and a wonderfully loving husband and yet she constantly complains that she is "unhappy."

Oh to live in the First World! Where is that Jerry Lewis telethon when you really need it?

Only in these charmed and lavish communities do you find people enrolled in workshops and seminars that promise to teach the fine and elusive art of joie de vivre. Sherrie is already six weeks (and who knows how many thousands of dollars) into a class at the 92nd Street Y called (I kid you not),  Fabricating Fun: How to Fashion Rapture into Your Lives and Learn to be Fulfilled Again.

The class promises to "detonate the shingles off your chagrin," and to "overhaul your hell, turning it into an authentic, nourishing and animated carnival of happiness and glee."

Gee!

I'm often tempted on my early morning strolls to ask the trees if they are living up to their ultimate potential, if they are exhilarated and animated by the delights of being and becoming, if they are vitalized by the winds and the rains and fortified by the sun.

 Have they found bliss in the sheer thrill of living or are they stressed out because too many dogs are pissing against their bark.

I'LL JUST HAVE THE TOAST

I've heard it said that life is a carnival, (see Cahoots, The Band, 1971), but I don't buy it. Unless you're an Aussie - and in that case it's completely understandable considering your criminal provenance - implicit in the phrase "no worries" is a bold face lie.

I'll go a step further.

Consider the folks you hear who thoughtlessly repeat this imported cliché and you will notice an underlying commonality. These careless linguistic pickpockets are the very people so encased in their own private world of trivial woe that to say "no worries" comes off as a futile hope or as a sad desperate godless prayer.

In contrast to the homegrown East Coast expression "don't worry about it," "no worries" with its grammatical indolence and deliberate evasion of specificity is essentially a rebuke to the harsh realities of human existence.

I can already hear you Californians out there with your cheery chorus of "what's so bad about that?" Well I'll tell you what's wrong with it - To paraphrase George Orwell, sloppy language inevitably leads to sloppy thinking.

And so it is with the no worriers. These are the same people who begin every sentence with the word so, who punctuate every mindless utterance with regular intervals of "you know" and who use the word like for every purpose save for its proper one.

We live in The Age of Mild which I suppose is preferable to an age of instability and chaos. Our tongues, with their absence of gravitas, have yielded to a pleasant, noncommittal indecision where honesty is a punishable offense.

But hey, no worries, who cares anyway!