Car Talk

Charles Krupa/AP

Dean Cappello, the chief content officer for WNYC gave the Times a wonderful eulogy for the enormously popular Car Talk whose hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, are retiring after 35 years. The show will stay on the air in reruns for an indeterminate period of time ("Host of 'Car Talk' to Retire After 35 Years of Automotive Banter," NYT, 6/8/12).  Eric Nuzum, vice president of programming for NPR remarked to the Times that there are enough of the highest rated call-ins (the Magliozzi’s rate calls from 1 to 5) “to make up eight years of material.” But here is what Cappello said, “ ‘Car Talk’ is about the human condition. It’s about the desperation you feel when you’re standing in front of something that doesn’t work, and how you work your way out of it.” Car Talk is also a little like the movie Good Will Hunting, to the extent that it’s spiritual and technological message is rendered in a thick Southie idiom. The fact that the Magliozzis possess these accents along with M.I.T. degrees further reinforces the Good Will Hunting analogy. Remember Matt Damon was a math genius with a big time South Side affect. Remember also that A Prairie Home Companion was made into a movie with Meryl Streep and consider the fact that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck should reprise their Boston brogues and portray the Magliozzi brothers in the film version of the radio series. Naturally other clones have been spawned by the series. Long Island Public Radio has Dog Talk, with advice emanating from Tracie Hotchner who commiserates about man's best friend and one can be sure that the demise of the Car Talk will inspire others to deal with “human condition” in so far as it manifests itself when people are faced with objects “that don’t work.” Computer Talk would might be a candidate but in order to keep the verisimilitude, the sound studios of Bollywood would have to be enlisted—since almost all computer advice these days is outsourced to India.

Accent Grave

The South Boston accent came into its own with Good Willing Hunting, in which Matt Damon plays a street-tough math prodigy, and has most recently reared its head not in Boston but on the gritty streets of nearby Lowell, the setting of The Fighter, which tells the story of the welterweight champ Micky Ward and his addict brother/trainer Dick Eklund. Accents, street argot and private languages have always been a big part of books and particularly films. We identify colorful film characters by their accents. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent was immortalized in Pumping Iron and The Terminator, and along with his muscles became the signature of a charismatic personality that eventually ascended to the governorship of California. Of course, accents have played their role in politics, an arena for some of the ultimate performances. Who can forget Orville Faubus of Arkansas, George Wallace of Mississippi, Huey Long of Louisiana, Jimmy Carter of Plains, GA, and of course that other Arkansan, our 42nd President, Bill Clinton? Without John F. Kennedy’s famed version of the Boston accent, aped by Vaughn Meader’s First Family album (“let me say this about that”), how would we ever have conceived of Camelot? Then of course we had Crocodile Dundee and Alfie and Marlon Brando’s famed mugging as the aging Mafia don in The Godfather, not to mention On the Waterfront, in which Italian street and Irish street coalesced in the character of Terry Malone. The difference between Terry Malloy and Micky Ward lies not only in their respective New York and Boston accents, but in the fact that while Terry “coulda been a contender,” Micky really was, only losing to Arturo Gatti at the conclusion of a trilogy that could have been written by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, all of whom undoubtedly walked the walk while talking the talk.

It's a Wise Child

Just before the Fourth of July weekend, the Times ran a short piece about Grigory Perelman. Grigory, otherwise known as Grisha, is the mathematics wiz— though wiz does little justice to his level of abstract genius—who proved the Poincaré conjecture, which “hypothesizes that any three-dimensional space without holes is essentially a sphere” (“A Math Problem Solver Declines a $1 Million Dollar Prize,” NYT, 7/1/10). The story was tucked away at the bottom of a page in the middle of the paper, and went on to describe how Perelman had turned down the million-dollar prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, MA. Perelman had previously turned down one of math’s most coveted awards, the Fields Medal, which if you remember makes a brief appearance in Good Will Hunting. The Times went on to describe the whole fiasco around the Fields Medal: how Perelman presented his proof in 2003, and how “after a brief barnstorming tour in the United States, during which he refused interviews, Dr. Perelman returned to Russia, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces.” Apparently it was too much for Perelman who, the Times reported, moved in with his mother and left his position at the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Well, what is there to say? All of this is somehow reminiscent of that famous clan of prodigies, the Glass family, whose tragic members have their brief day in the sun on a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child.” (Naturally, The Royal Tenenbaums owe their existence to the Glasses.)  Of course, the ultimate reclusive genius is J.D. Salinger, who left New York literary society to live a reclusive existence in Cornish, New Hampshire, just as his Russian counterpart would walk out of the spotlight, off the stage of life, many years later.