Geek Love

“Science and the Arts” series at CUNY
Location: City University of New York Graduate Center
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Low
Geek Factor: High

February 14, 2006

“If you have some lubing to do,” sings Lynda Williams, striking a sultry pose and tossing a mane of flame-red hair over her shoulder, “then graphite is the allotrope for you.” On Valentine’s Day, there are a multitude of venues in New York City that offer a taste of the obscene, spanning from PS 122’s Worst Sex Ever to the Bluestockings’ Erotica Readings. City University of New York’s Graduate Center, at least tonight, is not one of those places.

Williams, aka The Physics Chanteuse, is a professor at Santa Rosa college who is making a rare East Coast appearance as part of CUNY’s Science Valentine. Williams injects musical standards from the popular canon with lessons on the physical sciences, ranging from Newtonian laws to Superstring theory, all the while swaying her hips and spinning off puns with awe-inspiring fearlessness. The lyrics above are an except from “Carbon is a Girl’s Best Friend,”which, I think, explains itself. Even though the word “orgasm” floats by in an ode to neurotransmitters, Williams’ benign edutainment is far closer to Schoolhouse Rock than Jessica Rabbit.

As she launchers into a Gershwin parody about the “it” phenomenon of the moment, string theory, (“S’wonderful! Supersymmetry!”) I am disappointed to note that the audience demographic is sadly homogenous, since, well, things this unselfconsciously nerdy requires a flagrant disregard for coolness. Of everyone in attendance, there seem to be about ten of us under 50. Sure, there are a few apple-cheeked young couples with toddlers; there are foreign graduate students who are rightfully baffled by this holiday in general, and a large number of earthy academics with rebellious grey pony tails.

To take a quote I love from Terry Zwigoff’s fabulous film Ghost World and completely bastardize it:

This atmosphere is so dorky that it’s gone past hip to back to dorky again.

Tragically, Ms. Williams pitch-perfect eye contact, gamine posing and clever (if occasionally eye-rolling) word play is greeted by this audience with passive, blank, silent bemusement. And alas, performances, at least in the “cheap and artsy” category, are only as good as the audience reaction they elicit. In the late 90’s, I viewed, upon it’s re-release, “The Empire Strikes Back,” with the inebriated brotherhood of an MIT fraternity. Now in general, I avoid drunken nineteen year old tech nerds like the plague. Nonetheless, the shared, cacophonous glee following every reference to beloved characters and oft-quoted dialogue, technology, or sci-fi rhetoric, temporarily forged a community of, well, puerile drunkenness, but it was a community nonetheless.

Williams’ lyrics are clearly most entertaining when the listener recognizes what concept she is parodying, where gluons are as happily familiar and beloved as R2D2 was to those frat boys. Given that many of her songs, at least at this concert, address popular, accessible concepts such as the Big Bang, I became annoyed by the wan politeness of attendees. (You’ve got to hand it to the Graduate Center, however – they’re doing a whole series of events regarding science and art this spring semester; some of us nerd-loving gals never lose hope... count me in for the Robot Dance Contest)

I suspect that the right kind of audience does exist for Williams’ cosmic cabaret act. Somewhere, at an academic conference, a group of physicists are loosening up their lab coats, kicking back and raucously providing the fanfare that the Physics Chanteuse deserves, possibly with the aid of a few beers, speaking of “some lubing to do.”

A Generic Welcome: Weirdness to Come (I promise!)

Anyone who enjoys checking out downtown theatre, hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants, poetry slams and weird robotics competitions knows that places in which one can pop in for free (or, OK, $20 and under, this IS a New York-based Blog) are a gamble. Sometimes you've trekked out to the end of the E line to see a post-punk, musical version of “King Lear” staged by recent NYU Tisch grads, and you're trapped in your misery, wishing desperately for a clean break (or a beer), and sometimes, you've trekked out to see, well, a post-punk, musical version of “King Lear” staged by recent NYU Tisch grads, and lo and behold! it is sublime (or, at least, entertaining, quirky and the source of a good story or a dumb lyric you can impress your hipster friends with).

Such is the burden of the Bohemian on a Shoestring.