The Lie that Is Biking.

Biking is really overrated. All those people who act like they're having so much fun on their bikes--it's all a big act to make the rest of us feel terrible.

Like veganism, public transportation, nonfat milk, soy milk and other charades that try to make virtue seem like fun. All lies.

The Puritans were right: virtue's no fun. If it were fun, everyone would be doing it. A cheeseburger is fun. A decaf soy latte is virtuous. You know the difference, and if you say you don't, you're lying.

But no one wants to be virtuous in private. It's like wealth: it's not enough to have it, everyone has to know you have it.

Oddly, the Puritans felt the opposite about virtue and money--people should see that you're virtuous but not that you're rich, whereas we want people to see everything about us.

Hence reality TV: no virtue, lots of fun, prize money. It doesn't get any better. The cooking shows even include food.

But about biking.

I bought a bike a couple of weeks ago. Not a great one: a good helmet and decent lock cost more than the bike (after a couple of extras were thrown in).

Okay, it's true, I haven't biked in years--twenty or so, to be exact.

And the old saw is not true: you don't entirely remember how.

Oh I can pedal and steer. And balance--more or less.

But starting is a slow enterprise. It's crank, crank, crank until I wobblily get up to speed. (My steering seems poor while I'm expending that much effort pedaling.)

And stopping is shaky at best. I seem to remember speeding up to my destination, standing up, swinging one leg over, and coming to stop standing on one pedal.

Now I brake and brake and brake, ever so gently, and I steer towards a curb where I can prop myself more easily on one leg.

The seat was higher when I bought the bike--the kid that sold it to me was about eight miles tall--but I adjusted it lower, to the supposedly proper height--that where one's leg is still slightly bent when fully extended.

It's a bust. It's much less fun that way. I feel trapped on the seat, oddly crouched.

Part of the problem is: I can't stand up. On the bicycle I mean. If I stand to pedal, the steering goes haywire. I'm all over the road. Oh I can stand on one leg, but I can't shift the weight to the other in order to pedal.

Maybe I need the steering adjusted--stiffer, less play. More money out of pocket. Are we having fun yet?

My lack of ability to stand, pedal and steer at once makes hills a pretty sad affair. I'm seated the whole time, just burning my thighs to a crisp trying to keep up a decent speed.

Truth is: it's really inertia that's the whole fun of biking, not pedaling. Once you're a decent speed, you tend to stay at that speed. Whoosh! It feels great. So going down hills is fun. And once you're at a good clip, that's fun. It's all the rest--getting there, getting up hill, starting and stopping--that's a chore.

Which means that the best part of biking is actually laziness. Take that, exercise aficionados!

Plus, the roads and drivers are just not at all bicycle-friendly. They pay no attention to bikes. You might as well be a fly, ready to become splatter on their windshield.

(I should know this from being a driver. I never remember seeing a bicycle rider. Ever. Except those few that turned up bloody on my bumper. Annoying.)

They turn rightward into your lane. They turn left when you're going straight--cutting you off. It's like the goal is to hit you. Now I know how the pinball feels.

Today on my 9.8 mile bike ride--oh the tedium of it--one joker 'got out of my line' but moving about six inches and passing me at 50 mph. Thanks for not killing me, pal!

The maps steer you to two-lane roads where you can at least occupy one lane and make everyone go around you. Oh that's fun--being loved like a double-parker.

It comes to the point where you cry with joy to see a dedicated bike lane.

I ended up getting off the main drags to find a nice deserted road. I saw four other bikers, as one might well expect. But at one point I turned onto a road with leftover railroad tracks: I nearly got derailed myself.

How much further need I go in this charade? I like running for exercise. I thought biking would be more 'efficient'--I'd go further, see more, maybe work in some errands. But it's all such a chore.

The truth is: I'm just not actually a really good person.

I think I'll have a cheeseburger.

--E. R. O'Neill

Dog Eat Dog.

Guest host Lawrence O'Donnell on KCRW's Left, Right and Center spoke this week of his puzzlement about our country's protection of dogs against cruelty--a propos of Michael Vick's confession of his involvement in dog fighting.

To Mr. O'Donnell: My God--this man Vick confessed to killing between six and eight dogs by hanging and drowning. If you don't find that disgusting and worthy of jail time, you're really just out of sync with most American's moral intuitions.

Frankly the one year in jail that's being discussed seems to me far too little for such cruelty. It's not the moral worth of the victims that count: it's the sheer gratuitous pointlessness.

It's fine to sympathize with chickens and cows that are bred to be eaten. We can want them to have less painful lives and even deaths (as some among us now kill lobsters differently for reasons of kindness).

But it's quite another thing when animals are bred to fight and die for the amusement of some jaded souls out there, and then those dogs which fail to compete are killed for whatever bemusement that can bring.

Truly in this sport capitalism has created its own most perfect image.

Revel in your indifference, Mr. O'Donnell: you're alone.

--E. R. O'Neill

'My heart opens to your voice....': Reflections for A.

My friend A. has written recently of her fascination with the scene from Phantom of the Opera in which the heroine is enthralled by the phantom's voice. There are actually a couple of famous scenes in opera (as opposed to musicals) in which a woman sings of her enthrallment by a man's voice, and these in turn remind me of certain scenes in Hollywood musicals.

Being a gay man fascinated by many different sorts of female performances, vocal foremost among them, I'm drawn to these moments at which female vocalism gets underlined, even when credit is subtly and not so subtly placed elsewhere.

Saint-Saen's Samson et Dalila must be one of the more famous examples. Dalila's aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre a la voix" is all feminine receptivity. The woman enchanted by the man's voice is pliable, drunk, a delicate tympanum on which the male force--it's Samson, no less--reverberates. She's an echo chamber. The mezzo who sings the part--and it's more often performed on the recital stage than the opera stage--has her own vocalism reduced to a displaced echo of a man's voice. (To echo an old Yiddish joke Freud tells about a matchmaker: But what an echo!)

The earliest such incarnation must surely be the retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by Gluck. But it's a diluted example. There the myth is of a man's voice that mourns a woman's loss. But since both roles are played by women, and there's not really any serenading of Eurydice, the story of a man's singing voice neither turns out to be a man singing, nor does is the enthrallment by a man's voice particularly enacted. We may be enthralled by some of Orpheus's lovely arias, but the female character is not.

More on point is the aria "Una Voce poco fa" from Rossini's The Barber of Seville. To see Maria Callas (here or here) or Beverly Sills sing this aria is truly a thrill and a half.

Here the woman recounts in song the thrill of hearing a man's voice. Since it's an opera, it was de facto a singing voice, though that's not necessarily what's said or meant. And there's a kind of displacement from the enthrallment by a man's voice to the enthrallment by a woman's voice. Again, the story of the man's voice is the excuse for the woman's dazzling vocal performance.

In this aria Rosina promises to be sweet to her beloved, but she also threatens, in a not at all veiled way, to become a "viper" if crossed. Callas, of course, makes the most of this point: the strong woman who can by an act of will be sweet, but we are always reminded that it's a decision. Thus the woman's vocal performance that's enabled or excused by the man's earlier vocalizing unleashes an ambivalence about the woman's response to the man's voice. She's definitely not just an echo.

This Rossini aria in turn becomes the site of later elaborations. It's refracted through cinema history writ large in Citizen Kane. (Everything in that movie is Writ Large.)

It's this aria which Susan sings (in English) for Charles Foster Kane the first night they meet. This performance in English dissolves to one in Italian in order to signal the passage of time in their relationship, Kane's 'support' of Susan's singing career, Susan's 'growth' from parlor singer to 'serious' singer (singing in the original language). When we later watch an unhappy singing lesson, it's this aria Susan butchers. It's Susan's voice that's fascinating and alienating, even while the aria she sings repeatedly makes it the man's voice that's driving her--as indeed turns out to be the case.

But behind Susan's voice seducing Kane is another, more maternal voice. Welles cleverly layers emotional complexity through this first meeting of Kane and Susan--and by implication, through the aria. It's Susan's mother who wanted her to sing 'grand opera,' and it's Kane's mother's possessions, including no doubt the famous sled which only appears much later in the movie, towards which he was headed when he was 'diverted' by Susan. But the diversion turns out to be a proxy for the destination: the woman who hears the man's voice is still an echo, but this time of a woman, a maternal figure--but then so's the man.

The two characters cross paths around this knot of maternal dreams. "You know what mothers are like," says Susan, and Welles' reaction shot is deeply telling. Susan and Kane so knotted together by this maternal fantasy, or fantasy of maternal desire, that Kane (I think) will say, ostensibly of Susan but really of himself: "We're going to be a great opera singer."

But the movie's more about shouting than singing. Kane's shout of "Sing Sing" to 'Boss' Jim Gettys, naming the prison where Kane believes Gettys will be sent, could also be an imprecation to Susan in her future career. And if Rosina threatens to become a viper, here it's Kane who makes good the threat--although Susan is not without fangs as the movie progresses.

Really it's the horrifying shrillness of Susan's speaking voice--the overwhelming, keening nasal quality--which viewers (auditors) remember. It's the most piercing voice in cinema this side of Singin' in the Rain. Hence the woman's fascination with a man's voice is something of a pretext for a hysterical projection of vocal shrillness upon the woman's body and voice. The woman who would be absorbed by the man's voice--Rosina via Susan more than Singin's Lina Lamont--must resolutely alienate with her voice.

The woman's operatic fascination with a man's voice thus turns out to be, to be quite brief, another way of subordinating the woman's voice to a man's voice. There seems to be a bit of an auditory analogy with Hollywood cinema's mechanisms for containing the woman's image so that her spectacular visual power is reduced by containing it within a male character's vision. Here the analogy or transposition is even rather precise in certain Hollywood musicals in which a woman performs and a man beholds and appreciates this performance. (It also happens, though differently inflected, in film noir. Maybe even Mildred Pierce watching her daughter sing--badly--is another version.)

I'm thinking especially of the way Gene Kelly appreciates Debbie Reynolds' performance upon popping out of a cake at a Hollywood party. She is just another chorine, but Kelly's gaze picks her out, celebrates her. We appreciate Reynolds' charm and vitality. But it is through Kelly's gaze that this performance is highlighted, refracted.

Are all these layers the same, or different? I have no firm convictions at this point. Perhaps the woman's voice is reduced to a proxy and an echo. Or perhaps hearing the man's voice is just an excuse, a pretext.

But these connections have long struck me as interesting. They disclose something about the gendered fascination with the voice--I was going to say "human voice," but do we call an animal's cries or even word-like sounds a "voice"?--and the way different aesthetic institutions (opera, cinema, the Broadway musical) don't simply draw upon a pre-existing fascination but in various ways construct, mythologize and reflect upon what must be at some level the very psychological basis of their own appeal.

--E. R. O'Neill

Best. Website. Ever.

Pornolize.com.

Stick any web site into it, and it gives you a porno version.

This thing makes me so happy.

Once it's pornolized, the White House web site is actually bearable.

Sample?

On "Fill me up" Tuesday, President "Sniff-my-Ass" Bush said, "I understand rural America pretty well. Deep throats people in rural America wonder whether or not the fingering people in the cities think about them. I appreciate you thrusting to brief me, because I want those raunchs to understand the spewing President thinks about it; the senators and the governor have heard about it, and they care about it. There's help that's available. We'd love to get the ballbusting small businesses up and running, maybe help to get some shelter down there for people....Secretary "Nobgoblin" Peters has been the right person to coordinate this effort for the asslicking bridge, and we'll get somebody down here in charge to give the screwing people in your district some hope."

I did not write this. The White House wrote it--and an algorithm re-wrote. I love algorithms--and I mean "love" in a deeply sick kind of way.

But omigod: what they do to Barney (the Bush family dog).

--E. R. O'Neill