The Uncool: A Memoir

Who Is Cameron Crowe Kidding With the Title of His Memoir?

One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool. Cameron Crowe comes right out with the pandering on his book’s cover: “The Uncool: A Memoir.”

The title refers to a scene in “Almost Famous” (2000), the tender film he wrote and directed. The headstrong rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is consoling the Crowe-like hero, a floppy-haired teenage rock journalist, over the telephone at a low moment. Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” It’s a good line. Call me anytime, Bangs adds: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

Never mind whether Lester Bangs was plausibly uncool. How about Crowe? Here’s a man who spent his adolescence in the 1970s careening around the United States for Rolling Stone magazine, a boy wonder in the intimate and extended company of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Gram Parsons, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, the Eagles, Todd Rundgren and Yes, about whom he was writing profiles and cover stories.

Occasionally, he’d fly home to see his mother, check out high school for a day or two, then blearily type up his road memories and interview notes. Sounds uncool to me.

The second act of Crowe’s career began when, in his early 20s, he went undercover for a year, posing as a high school student in San Diego, and wrote the experience up in a book called “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Crowe and the director Amy Heckerling turned it into a wide-awake 1982 movie that provided rocket fuel for Sean Penn, who played the perpetually stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli.

Crowe, who burned out young as a journalist, pivoted to film. He wrote and directed “Say Anything” (1989), with John Cusack, Ione Skye and a famous boombox; “Singles” (1992), a romantic early look at the Seattle grunge scene; and “Jerry Maguire” (1996), with Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, before winning an Oscar for his “Almost Famous” screenplay. All this while married to Nancy Wilson, the guitarist in Heart. No sane person would trade their allotment of experience for this man’s. Omnidirectionally uncool.

When you read Crowe’s memoir, though, you begin to see things from his unhip point of view. He had no interest in drink and drugs while on the road, though Gregg Allman tried to hook him up with a speedball. He seems to have mostly abstained from sex, too, though there’s something about his adoration in the presence of his rock heroes that makes it seem he’s losing his virginity every few pages.

His editors at Rolling Stone thought he was uncool, increasingly as time went on, because the acolyte in him overrode the journalist. He Forrest Gumped along. Bands liked having Crowe around because he was adorable and a bit servile; he’d often leave out the bits they wanted left out. (...)

Crowe thought rock writers were snobs. He moved in with Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles while profiling them, for example, and he was in the room when they wrote “One of These Nights” and “Lyin’ Eyes.” It bugged him to see them put down:

A collection of rock writers at a party would challenge each other on their musical taste, each one going further and further into the world of the obscure until they’d collectively decided that “Self Portrait” was Bob Dylan’s greatest album and the Eagles barely deserved a record contract.

He especially liked Frey, because his message to the world seemed to be: “Lead with your optimism.” This was Crowe’s mother’s ethos, as well, and it chimed with his own. It’s a worldview that has worked for him in his best movies, though he’s also made gooey flops. The world needs its Paul McCartneys as much as it needs its Lou Reeds. It makes sense that Reed only sneered when he met Crowe. (...)

The crucial thing to know about this book is that it overlaps almost exactly with the story Crowe tells in “Almost Famous.” If you remember the phrases “It’s all happening” and “Don’t take drugs,” or the young woman — a “Band-Aid” in the movie’s argot — who is offered for a case of Heineken, or the rock star who briefly kills an important story, or Crowe’s flight-attendant sister, or the group sex scene that seems like a series of flickering veils, or the L.A. hotel known as the Riot House, or Lester Bangs acting out in a glassed-in first-floor radio studio, it’s all here and more.

The book reads like a novelization of the movie, so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own.

The secret to the movie, one that most people miss, Crowe says, is the empty chair at the family’s dining-room table. It belonged to Crowe’s older sister, Cathy, who was troubled from birth and died by suicide at 19. This detail reminds you how relatively sanitized this book otherwise is. There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core.

God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway: The backstage details alone keep this kite afloat. It got to me in the same way “Almost Famous” always gets to me, despite the way that movie sets off my entire bank of incoming sentimentality detectors. If you can watch the “Tiny Dancer” scene without blinking back a tear, you’re a stronger person than me. 

by Dwight Garner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Neal Preston

The Life and Death of the American Foodie

When food culture became pop culture, a new national persona was born. We regret to inform you, it’s probably you.

When did you become such an adventurous eater?” my mom often asks me, after I’ve squealed about some meal involving jamón ibérico or numbing spices. The answer is, I don’t know, but I can think of moments throughout my life where food erupted as more than a mere meal: My cousin and his Ivy League rowing team hand-making pumpkin ravioli for me at Thanksgiving. Going to the pre-Amazon Whole Foods and giddily deciding to buy bison bacon for breakfast sandwiches assembled in a dorm kitchen. Eating paneer for the first time in India. Slurping a raw oyster in New Orleans.

What made me even want to try a raw oyster in 2004, despite everything about an oyster telling me NO, was an entire culture emerging promising me I’d be better for it. Food, I was beginning to understand from TV and magazines and whatever blogs existed then, was important. It could be an expression of culture or creativity or cachet, folk art or surrealism or science, but it was something to pay attention to. Mostly, I gleaned that to reject foodieism was to give up on a new and powerful form of social currency. I would, then, become a foodie.

To be a foodie in the mid-aughts meant it wasn’t enough to enjoy French wines and Michelin-starred restaurants. The pursuit of the “best” food, with the broadest definition possible, became a defining trait: a pastry deserving of a two-hour wait, an international trip worth taking just for a bowl of noodles. Knowing the name of a restaurant’s chef was good, but knowing the last four places he’d worked at was better — like knowing the specs of Prince’s guitars. This knowledge was meant to be shared. Foodies traded in Yelp reviews and Chowhound posts, offering tips on the most authentic tortillas and treatises on ramps. Ultimately, we foodies were fans, gleefully devoted to our subculture.

Which inevitably leads to some problems, when, say, the celebrities the subculture has put on a pedestal are revealed to be less-than-honorable actors, or when values like authenticity and craft are inevitably challenged. What it’s historically meant to be a foodie, a fan, has shifted and cracked and been reborn.

And ultimately, it has died. Or at least the term has. To be called a “foodie” now is the equivalent of being hit with an “Okay, boomer.” But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture. There may be different words now, or no words at all, but the story of American food over the past 20 years is one of a speedrun of cultural importance. At this point, who isn’t a foodie? (...)

***

How did we get to chefs-holding-squeeze-bottles as entertainment? The 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act deregulated the industry, and by 1992, more than 60 percent of American households had a cable subscription. Food Network launched in 1993, and compared to Julia Child or Joyce Chen drawing adoring viewers on public broadcasting programs, the channel was all killer, no filler, with shows for every mood. By the early 2000s, you could geek out with Alton Brown on Good Eats, experience Italian sensuality with Molto Mario or Everyday Italian, fantasize about a richer life with Barefoot Contessa, or have fun in your busy suburban kitchen with 30 Minute Meals. Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour gave viewers an initial taste of his particular brand of smart-alecky wonder, and there were even competition shows, like the Japanese import Iron Chef.

The premiere of 2005’s The Next Food Network Star, which later gave us Guy Fieri, baron of the big bite, was the network’s first admission that we were ready to think of food shows in terms of entertainment, not just instruction and education. But Food Network was still a food network. The mid-aughts brought the revelation that food programming didn’t have to live just there, but could be popular primetime television — when that was an actual time and not just a saying.

Then came Top Chef, inspired by the success of Bravo’s other reality competition series, Project Runway. There is no overstating Top Chef’s lasting influence on food entertainment, but off the bat it did one thing that further cemented foodieism as a bona fide subculture: Its air of professionalism gave people a vocabulary. “The real pushback from the network was but the viewers can’t taste the food,” says Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo at the time. But just like the experts on Project Runway could explain good draping to someone who didn’t know how to sew, Top Chef “committed to telling the story of the food in such a way that it would become attainable no matter where you were,” she says.

This gave viewers a shared language to speak about food in their own lives. Now, people who would never taste these dishes had a visual and linguistic reference for molecular gastronomy, and could speculate about Marcel Vigneron’s foams. If you didn’t know what a scallop was, you learned, as Top Chef was awash in them. Yes, you could hear Tom Colicchio critique a classic beurre blanc, but also poke, al pastor, and laksa, and now that language was yours too. And you could hear chefs speak about their own influences and inspirations, learning why exactly they thought to pair watermelon and gnocchi.

The food scene then “was more bifurcated,” says Evan Kleiman, chef and longtime host of KCRW’s Good Food. “There were super-high-end restaurants that were expensive, maybe exclusive, and for the most part represented European cuisines. And then what was called ‘ethnic food’ was often relegated to casual, family-run kind of spots.” Top Chef may have been entertainment for the upwardly mobile foodie, but in 2005, Bourdain’s No Reservations premiered on the Travel Channel, similarly emphasizing storytelling and narrative. In his hands, the best meals often didn’t even require a plate. His was a romantic appreciation of the authentic, the hole-in-the-wall, the kind of stuff that would never be served in a dining room. It set off an entire generation of (often less respectful, less considered) foodie adventurism.

“No Reservations is what got me interested in the culture of eating,” says Elazar Sontag, currently the restaurant editor at Bon Appétit. Because it was about food as culture, not as profession. But there was programming for it all. Also in 2005, Hell’s Kitchen premiered on Fox, with an amped-up recreation of a dinner service in each night’s challenge. “Hell’s Kitchen’s high-octane, insane, intense environment of a restaurant kitchen is actually what made me think, when I was maybe 12 or 13, that I want to work in restaurants,” says Sontag.

All these shows were first and foremost about gathering knowledge, whether it was what, indeed, a gastrique was, or the history of boat noodles in Thailand. It didn’t matter if you’d ever been there. The point was that you knew. “Food was becoming a different kind of cultural currency,” says Sontag. “I didn’t clock that shift happening at the time, but it’s very much continued.”

Language is meant to be spoken; knowledge is meant to be shared. Now that everyone knew there were multiple styles of ramen, there was no better place to flex about it than with a new tool: the social internet. Online, “talking about restaurants and going to restaurants became something that people could have a shared identity about,” says Rosner. “There was this perfect storm of a national explosion of gastronomic vocabulary and a platform on which everybody could show off how much they knew, learn from each other, and engage in this discovery together.” Your opinion about your corner bagel shop suddenly had a much wider relevance.

by Jaya Saxena, Eater | Read more:
Image: Julia Duffosé

Notes on The Greatest Night In Pop

A Study In Leadership, Teamwork, and Love

The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.

The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.

If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.

To us Brits, We Are The World was a mere footnote to Do They Know It’s Christmas? That record was instigated by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and recorded by a supergroup of British and Irish musicians under the name Band Aid (an underrated pun). The proceeds went to famine victims in Ethiopia. We Are The World was made for the same cause.

I knew that, but what I learnt from TGNIP is that there was an element of racial pride in the American response, which arose spontaneously from a conversation between Harry Belafonte and Lionel Richie’s manager. Belafonte said, “We have white folks saving Black folks—we don’t have Black folks saving Black folks”. Lionel agreed, and the wheels started to turn.

Ah, Lionel. The man who makes everything happen. It is perhaps not coincidental that he should emerge as the star of this documentary, given that he co-produced it. The same might be said of Paul McCartney, who emerged as the hero of Get Back. But in neither case do I sense corruption of historical truth. Richie is extraordinary, both as a talking head and in his 1985 incarnation. As chief interviewee - host might be a better word - he sparkles: mischievous, funny, a supreme storyteller. As the prime mover behind the recording of We Are The World, he is simply awesome.

After Belafonte’s prompt, Lionel calls Quincy Jones - the maestro, the master, the producer of the best-selling album of all time. Jones immediately says yes, and they call Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Both agree, Stevie only belatedly because nobody can get hold of him (a theme of the doc is that Stevie Wonder is both delightful and utterly ungovernable). With these stars on board, they know that pretty much everyone else will want to be involved, and so it proves. They decide to recruit white stars as well as black, and get Springsteen and Joel and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and others.

The first thing the principals need to do is come up with a song. Lionel goes to Michael’s house, and the pair spend several days hacking away at the piano (Stevie was invited but is AWOL). With a couple of days to go, they crack it (that is, Quincy likes it). The song is, well, fine: not a work of genius but a pleasant, gospel-inflected anthem, easy enough to sing without much preparation, catchy enough to be a hit. It does the job.

When he took up this baton, Richie was on a career high. He’d left The Commodores and broken out as a solo star. He was about to host the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, the biggest primetime music show, for which he himself was nominated for eight awards (he won six). It soon becomes apparent to all concerned that the best and perhaps only way to get all the talent in the same place to record a single would be to do it on the night of the awards, when so many of them are in town anyway. That would mean doing an all-night session, and for Lionel, it would mean first hosting a live awards show watched by millions - demanding, stressful, exhausting - then helping to run this second, private show right afterwards. No problem!

So it is that after the AMAs we see limousines dropping stars off at an LA recording studio. From a narrative point of view, a delicious premise emerges: a bunch of very famous, egotistical, impatient, nervous pop stars, most of whom don’t know each other (“It was like the first day of kindergarten”, recalls Richie) are brought together in a room to make a record of a song they barely know (they’ve heard a demo). It absolutely has to be a huge hit. They have about eight hours; there’s no coming back tomorrow.

It could have gone badly wrong. That it didn’t is testament to all involved but to Richie and Jones in particular. The two of them corral this unwieldy gaggle into making a sleek and successful product.1 The first time I watched TGNIP I enjoyed it unreflectively. When I watched it for a second time, I began to see it as a study in leadership, collaboration and teamwork.

I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.

TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.

THE DECIDER

Quincy Jones taped up a handwritten sign at the entrance to the studio: LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR. He was possibly the only person in America who would have dared to write such a sign for such a crowd and certainly the only one who would have been listened to.

To lead a team of 40 superstars was a tough task but it certainly helped to be Quincy Jones. Aged 51, he been an arranger for Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra; produced Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin; won multiple Grammys; turned Michael Jackson into the biggest artist in the world.

In TGNIP he is somewhat marginal to the action just because he is in the control room, while the camera roves the studio floor. We hear his voice over the intercom and see him when he comes onto the floor to coach someone through a difficult vocal part. (He wasn’t interviewed for the doc but we hear him speaking about the night from an earlier interview).

There’s no question he is in charge, though. His interventions are economical and precise; he doesn’t waste words. He is stern when he needs be, jocular in a restrained way; cool. Everyone in the room looks up to him, literally and metaphorically. He is friendly but not your best friend. He is here to make sure the job gets done, and done well. He is The Decider.

THE CONNECTOR

By contrast, Lionel Richie is very much your best friend. He is everywhere, talking to everyone: greeting, thanking, hugging; answering a thousand queries; soothing egos; telling stories and making jokes; giving pep talks; smoothing over potential conflicts; solving musical problems; hyping and cheerleading; raising the energy level when it flags; consoling the weary. Somebody else says of him, “He’s making the water flow.” That’s it.

Richie has a special knack for wrangling very talented, slightly nuts individuals. Cyndi Lauper, who was a massive star at that time, bigger than Madonna, decided on the evening of the recording that she wasn’t going to do it after all. The reason she gave is that her boyfriend didn’t like the demo of the song that Richie and Jackson had made. He’d told her it would never be a hit.

Lionel has to take a minute backstage at the awards ceremony which he is presenting to find Lauper, put any hurt feelings he might have aside, and cajole her into returning to the team. Later on, he’s the one negotiating with Prince over his possible participation over the phone. He also has to hide wine bottles from Al Jarreau so that he doesn’t get too drunk before recording his solo part. Details.

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Highly recommended.]

The Way They Were

In 1986, my most prized possession was a little pink phone message slip written by a hotel clerk.

“Miss Dowd,” it read, “Robert Redford called. He’s at the same number as last night.”

I’d never met Redford, but that piece of paper was a magic portal to all kinds of pink-cloud fantasies. I stuck it up on my cubicle in the Washington bureau of The Times and gazed at it whenever I needed a lift.

Then, one night, the bureau chief went on a crazed cleaning campaign and sent a crew in to throw out every stray piece of paper around our desks.

I came in the next morning and my beloved message was gone.

I had called Redford to interview him for a Times Magazine profile on Paul Newman. Often, movie stars won’t talk about other movie stars (it’s not about them!); Joanne Woodward wouldn’t even talk to me about her husband for that piece.

But Redford was happy to talk about his pal. When I heard that famous voice on the phone, I said: “Wait a minute, let me get a pen and pencil. I mean, a pen and pen. No, a pen and paper.”

He just laughed, accustomed to women getting flustered.

I heard from someone on his team about seven years later. Redford wanted to offer me a role in a movie he was directing called “Quiz Show.” It was just one line — “Excuse me, are you the son?” — uttered by a woman who’s at a book party trying to chat up Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, the fraudulent quiz whiz and son of the renowned Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren.

I wrote Redford a note, explaining that I was too shy to act in a glossy movie. I couldn’t even muster the nerve to do TV as myself.

He sent a handwritten letter back, telling me that being shy was not a good excuse and that he was shy and you had to push past that and take risks. It was a charming letter — and I vowed to take his advice in the future.

Years later, I got to know Redford over friendly lunches and dinners and interviews for The Times and at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And that rarest of things happened: He was everything you hoped he would be. I had the same experience when I spent that week interviewing Newman.

Both men were elusive, private, funny, generous and self-deprecating. They both liked painting and writing poetry. (Newman’s poetry — and humor — was goofier.) And they both struggled with the sex symbol role.

“To work as hard as I’ve worked to accomplish anything and then have some yo-yo come up and say, ‘Take off those dark glasses and let’s have a look at those blue eyes’ is really discouraging,” Newman told me, adding: “Usually, I just say, ‘I would take off my sunglasses, madam, but my pants would fall down.’” What if his eyes turned brown, he wondered ruefully, and he died a failure?

Redford chafed at the chatter about his blond locks. At first, he told me, it felt great when he became a top Hollywood hunk with “Butch Cassidy” and “The Way We Were.” But then the constant references to his looks and some “out of whack” fan run-ins made it “exhausting.” He felt like he was being put in a cage and wanted to protest, “No, I’m an actor.”

When I talked to him for his solitary and horrific sailboat yarn, “All Is Lost,” in 2013, about aging onscreen and whether it became harder to do close-ups, he replied: “Well, let’s get something straight. I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me ‘hay head.’”

When Redford got kicked out of college in Colorado and lost his baseball scholarship for carousing too much, he went to be an underfed bohemian in Europe, trying his hand at painting. He wore a beret and stripy T-shirt but failed to impress French girls, who thought he was too ignorant about politics.

While being gorgeous can propel your career — can we agree that Newman and Redford were the most charismatic screen couple ever? — there is also a penalty. It’s as though you can’t have too much. Many in Hollywood were slow to realize what wonderful actors the two men were. Despite a string of indelible performances, Newman did not win a best actor Oscar until 1987, for “The Color of Money.” And Redford, an iconic American star of the sort that no longer exists, never won an Oscar for acting.

They both kept Hollywood at arm’s length, disdaining the superficiality, which didn’t endear them to Tinseltown. Newman lived on the East Coast and Redford conjured Sundance, creating a film lab and festival that transformed the movie industry and produced many great talents. (He was appalled when it got so popular that Paris Hilton showed up.)

The two friends with the raffish all-American smiles and sporting lives radiated cool and glamour, as though — to paraphrase “The Way We Were” — things came too easily to them.

But their self-images were different. Newman, the son of a Cleveland sporting goods store owner, said he thought of himself as a terrier with a bone, always working to make his acting more distilled. Redford, who grew up feeling economically insecure and suffered a bout of polio when he was 11, told me he thought of himself as climbing the hill, Sisyphus-style, never “standing at the top.” He quoted a favorite T.S. Eliot line: “There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Both men could be uncomfortable in their skins, filled with self-doubt, haunted by family traumas. Newman lost a son and Redford lost two.

And yet, over several decades, they helped define American culture with their riveting portrayals of morally ambiguous characters.

“I was not interested in the red, white and blue part of America,” Redford told NPR’s Terry Gross. “I was interested in the gray part where complexity lies.”

by Maureen Dowd, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Redford and Paul Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”Credit...Screen Archives/Getty Images

How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty

In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”

Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject. Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.

Birkin, who died in 2023, had “it”: an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool, or at least of what’s worth paying attention to. Easily mingling English reserve and European sensuality, she had a sweetness that set her apart from contemporaries such as the bombshell Brigitte Bardot or the edgier Anna Karina. “She wasn’t a hippie,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer writes in her new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria), “but rather a rising star from the upper class,” someone who radiated privilege even when she dressed down. One of the first celebrities to be regularly photographed in her everyday clothes, Birkin was an early icon of street style, traipsing around Paris in sneakers and rumpled sweaters, wicker basket in hand. The outfits could be easily mimicked and therefore easily marketed. Today, when social-media influencers praise “the French-girl look”—wispy bangs, minimal makeup, bluejeans, marinière tops—the look they have in mind is hers.

Birkin, Meltzer writes, was “nonchalance personified.” If this was not exactly an illusion, neither was it the whole story. A lifelong depressive, Birkin often thought about—and at least once attempted—suicide. Her diaries, two volumes of which have been published, reveal a wonderful writer, lyrical and self-lacerating. They also reveal her struggles with the costs and compromises of the It Girl role, how it left her feeling as though she had—as she puts it in Varda’s film—“no exceptional talents” to offset her fast-fleeting youth. What Birkin did have is je ne sais quoi, to her misfortune as much as to her advantage. After all, being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason. (...)

At fifteen, Jane became smitten with a middle-aged man named Alan, an “arty type” who lived across the street from her, in Chelsea. David Birkin let his daughter spend time at Alan’s apartment, certain he could see everything from the family’s balcony. Then Alan moved. “He invited me to his place, a basement,” Jane would say later.

I’d had too much red wine to drink for dinner—he drank whiskey and we ate ratatouille. He lay beside me and tried to get on top of me. I said it was the wrong time of the month, and he said it didn’t matter. I found that a bit disgusting and I ran away. . . . I went to my room and swallowed all the Junior Aspirin that I’d saved just in case. My sister found me at four in the morning, deathly pale. She told Ma. Stomach pump. Ma slapped me and was right to do so. Ever since I’ve always hated whiskey and ratatouille.

Afterward, Birkin wrote a poem called “Suicide Lost,” in which she presents herself as “a child who’s frightened to live . . . a person who can’t find a way out.” If Alan was the first arty, abusive man to whom she found herself drawn, he would by no means be the last.

After her suicide attempt, Birkin’s parents sent her to a finishing school in Paris, where she learned some French and hung around Versailles, the Louvre, and the Jeu de Paume. “I like poor Toulouse-Lautrec,” Birkin wrote in her diary. “He’s sad and the vulgarity and patchiness of life comes out in his painting.” (...)

How did this fragile young woman become “The Emancipated Venus of the New Age,” as the Belgian magazine Ciné Télé Revue dubbed her in 1969? Birkin was desperate for love, and when she got it she blossomed. A year earlier, in May, 1968, she had met Gainsbourg, a famous singer-songwriter and an established playboy, on the set of the romantic comedy “Slogan.” He was recovering from a breakup with Brigitte Bardot, Birkin was recovering from the breakup of her marriage, and all of France was about to be thrown into the heady days of a student uprising, when huge labor strikes brought the country to a standstill. Neither Gainsbourg nor Birkin was impressed. “He was Russian!” Birkin told Le Monde, in 2013. “It seemed anecdotal compared to the October Revolution.”

The Birkin of the Gainsbourg years is the one we know best, the It Girl of Meltzer’s title. According to Elinor Glyn, who popularized the concept in her 1927 novel, “It,” the quality couldn’t be reduced to mere sex appeal. “The most exact description,” she told an interviewer, is “some curious magnetism, and it always comes with people who are perfectly, perfectly self-confident . . . indifferent to everything and everybody.” In the blockbuster silent film “It,” based on Glyn’s novel, Clara Bow plays Betty Lou Spence, a spirited shopgirl who attracts the attention of her wealthy boss when she’s seen on the town in a chic flapper look reworked from a shabby day dress. Slicing off her sailor collar to create a deep-V neckline and attaching some fake flowers to her hip, Betty Lou marches out her tenement apartment and into a fancy restaurant with her head high, pointedly unbothered by the looks she gets from upper-crust diners.

Birkin projected just this sort of youthful insouciance. Skinny and flat-chested, with big teeth and a galumphing walk, she was no pinup and knew it. She styled herself, Meltzer notes, “in contrast to the quintessential French women of the time”: instead of hip-hugging dresses and high heels, there were Repetto flats, denim cutoffs, soft knits, and crocheted crop tops. The look was improvisational yet elegant, a perfect match for shifting social and sartorial trends. If a young Parisienne in the nineteen-twenties could feel liberated by the loose tailoring and comfortable fabrics of Coco Chanel’s new suits, Birkin’s generation wanted something even less restrictive. “I don’t care much about expensive couture clothes,” Birkin told Women’s Wear Daily, in 1969. “I like the floppy look of Saint Laurent.”

And yet Birkin was far from the self-reliant gamine embodied by Clara Bow. According to Meltzer, Birkin seemed unable “to cultivate much sense of self outside of her relationships with men and her children.” At first, life with Gainsbourg was idyllic. Shacked up on the Rue de Verneuil with Kate and another baby, Charlotte, on the way, they became a bohemian power couple. They took Kate, dressed in Baby Dior, to casinos and bought a house in Normandy, where they went boating with the children. Being Birkin’s partner was an ego boost for Gainsbourg, who had never been conventionally handsome and whose heavy drinking and smoking had aged him prematurely. (He had his first heart attack at forty-five and would die of another, at sixty-two.) “When they tell me I’m ugly,” he crows on his song “Des Laids des Laids,” from 1979, “I laugh softly, so as not to wake you up.”

Gainsbourg doted on Birkin and their girls, but he also went through periods of being, in Birkin’s words, “systematically drunk”—and, at times, violent. “I was too abusive,” Meltzer quotes him saying. “I came home completely pissed, I beat her. When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam!” Birkin’s diaries suggest a man who was insecure, moody, and controlling: (...)

In 1979, Birkin began an affair with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon, who was thirty-five to her thirty-two—an invigorating change from Gainsbourg, eighteen years her senior. The new relationship promised something less complicated, more harmonious. “I want a house full of sunlight,” she wrote, “nothing forbidden, no more orders.” She took Kate and Charlotte to a hotel, leaving Gainsbourg behind but not yet formalizing things with Doillon. The two men were “like complementary bookstands,” she wrote. “Let go one and you slide, let go both and you fall. . . . So there I am, stubbornly living my life as best I can without either.” This period of independence was short-lived. Soon, she and Doillon moved in together, and in 1982 their daughter, Lou, was born. Gainsbourg sent her a gift basket full of baby clothes, from “Papa Deux.”

It was around this time that Birkin made her most celebrated contribution to fashion. On an Air France flight, she found herself seated next to Jean-Louis Dumas, the chief executive of Hermès. As Birkin struggled to stow her signature wicker basket, spilling its contents, Dumas suggested that she needed a new bag. This prompted Birkin to complain that she couldn’t find one that both looked good and held all her stuff. She recalled sketching a roomy, wedgelike design on the back of an air-sickness bag. Dumas took the design to his studio, tweaked it, and the Birkin was born. Current models can sell for more than four hundred thousand dollars; in July, at Sotheby’s, the prototype went for ten million. It was the second most valuable fashion item ever sold at auction, behind only Dorothy’s slippers.

by Anahid Nersessian, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: via

The Uggo Police

The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.

And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.

As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?

The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.

The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait [ed. don't think so.]. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!

Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question. (...)

So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.

But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk. (...)

It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.

by B.D. McClay, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: American Eagle

[ed. Still high on winning the 'War on Christmas'. Also, have nothing against breasts.]

Buddies

Redford and Newman: A Screen Partnership That Defined an Era (NYT)

Image: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images

[ed. Time marches on, and friendships... what you make of them. See also: Robert Redford and the Perils of Perfection (New Yorker).]

Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring Marks a Return to Vintage Elegance

The pop star’s antique-inspired sparkler channels the “heirloom look,” reflecting a return to antique stones.

In her 2008 classic song “Love Story,” Taylor Swift fantasized about getting proposed to: “He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring / And said, ‘Marry me, Juliet.’”

Seventeen years later, Ms. Swift, 35, finally had her fairy-tale engagement. The football player Travis Kelce, also 35, proposed with what appears to be an elongated, old mine cushion cut diamond set on a yellow gold band. (A cushion cut diamond has rounded corners.)

The ring was designed by Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry in New York. Ms. Lubeck makes hand-engraved jewelry with natural gemstones.

“It’s not just a flashy piece, but more of an aesthetic, really beautiful diamond,” said Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian and the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance.” Her friends in the jewelry world, she said, have been excited about the piece because of its high quality.

“You can tell this is a beautiful diamond from the light and faceting arrangement,” Ms. Fasel said, estimating the weight to be around seven carats.

“It’s a real trend in jewelry and diamonds and engagement rings to choose antique stones because they have a very different kind of light,” Ms. Fasel said. “Even though this is a giant diamond, it’s a much softer light.” (...)

There also appears to be engraving on the side, as well as two smaller diamonds. “They must mean something, because everything with Taylor means something,” Ms. Fasel said. (...)

Nilesh Rakholia, the founder of Abelini Jewellery, a modern British jewelry brand, estimated that the ring weighs seven to 10 carats, costing between $1 million and $1.3 million.

“What makes this design particularly striking is its blend of vintage charm and modern minimalism,” Mr. Rakholia said. “The choice of yellow gold has been making a huge resurgence in fine jewelry, loved for its warmth and ability to enhance the brilliance of white diamonds.”

Jason Arasheben, the founder of the jewelry company Jason of Beverly Hills, said that he anticipates an uptick in requests for elongated, old mine cushion cut diamonds, as well as thicker bands and antique aesthetics. “I know I’m going to get tons of screenshots from clients,” Mr. Arasheben said, citing the Taylor Swift effect.

Ms. Fasel doesn’t expect too many details about the ring to be confirmed by Ms. Swift soon. “With my history in celebrity engagement rings, no one says anything,” she said.

Much of the jewelry worn by celebrities tends to come from professional relationships with major brands. Ms. Swift, for instance, has almost exclusively worn Cartier and Lorraine Schwartz pieces for red carpets. But an engagement ring, Ms. Fasel said, is different: It’s the “one thing that is not branded, and I feel that’s part of the reason the excitement around an engagement ring has accelerated to such a high level.”

by Sadiba Hasan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

[ed. Who doesn't love Taylor and Travis? Reminds me of another similar engagement: Inside Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio's Roller Coaster Romance (Biography). See also: Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring and the Romantic Mystique of Old Mine Diamonds (Sotheby's).]

A Teen Band Needed a Pianist. They Called Donald Fagen.

I'm crossposting this amusing account of how Donald Fagen, the creative linchpin in the Dan sound, showed up recently as pianist with a teen band. (He is 77 years old and the rest of the band is 17!) Fagen can be prickly and reclusive and hasn't performed anywhere else this year. But here he unexpectedly agrees to sub for another musician on a lowkey gig. Enjoy! - Ted Gioia.

In April, a curious video began circulating among Steely Dan fans online. It showed a trio of very young-looking musicians playing with the silver-haired eminence Donald Fagen.

The performance at the Barn at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, was the first time Fagen had been seen onstage since Steely Dan canceled the last nine of their tour dates with the Eagles in the spring of 2024. The show also marked his first public appearance following the October 2024 death of his wife of more than 30 years, the singer-songwriter Libby Titus.

Exactly how, fans wondered, had the Nightfly been coaxed back behind the piano? To get the story, I spoke in April to the members of Roche Collins: Ronan Roche and Sam Cousins, who trade guitar and bass, and drummer Lavon “Lee” Collins. At that time, all of them were 17.

Collins’s mother, the singer-songwriter Amy Helm, is the daughter of Titus and Levon Helm, the famed drummer and vocalist of the Band. Which makes Fagen, technically, Collins’s step-grandfather. As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Collins had asked Mr. Steely Dan for a little help.

The video of you guys playing with Donald Fagen at the Barn made the rounds among Steely Dan fans.

Lavon Collins: Wait, really?

People were excited to see Donald onstage playing music again.

Collins: That’s really funny that it got circulated that way.

How did that appearance come about?

Collins: It was really kind of a simple thing. I’ve been playing with Donald sometimes just for fun, and he, of course, has a good feel and can play chords. I had an idea for this groove kind of thing [for the song “Words to Live By”], and then I asked Donald for some help on it, and we just did it together. So before the show, I said to him, “Hey, we need a piano player for that song,” and he just did it.

Ronan Roche: We had a dire need. We had a piano player who was going to do that whole gig with us, but then he couldn’t get off work.

Sam Cousins: So we figured our last option is Donald Fagen, I guess. [Laughs.]

by Jake Malooley, Expanding Dan |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Nice to see him back in action, plus discover a new Steely Dan substack/website.]

My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”

Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.

After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs. (...)

In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.

“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.

My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”

Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.(...)

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”

When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”

Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”

My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account. (...)

This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in. (...)

As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face. (...)

Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”

It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.

Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.

Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.

People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”

by Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic | Read more:

Images: Peyton Fulford, Sydney Morning Herald, Nancy Walecki

Ichiro Suzuki Inducted into National Baseball Hall of Fame

 

[ed. Couldn't happen to a classier guy. Never heard him speak a word of English before except through an interpreter. Funny, too.]

How We Stopped Caring About “Selling Out”

I know, deep down in my heart, that Matthew McConaughey is not my friend. Despite my lingering soft spot for his charming Texan accent, his role in my life amounts to nothing more than pixels on a screen. Still, that did little to ease the pang of betrayal I felt after spotting the actor in this commercial for the software company Salesforce, bemoaning a broken arm in the back room of an overcrowded hospital:

 

“If my healthcare provider had AgentForce, the powerful AI from Salesforce, an AI agent would have automatically paired me with the right specialist hours ago,” he mutters, that sweet, sweet Texan drawl camouflaging the dystopian premise of the ad. (Apparently, in America’s dysfunctional hospital system, your odds of healing a broken bone depend on the use of a new AI program.)

I couldn’t help but conjure a word from deep within my psyche, one I hadn’t heard in eons: sellout.

In recent years, our pop culture landscape has become so dominated by athletic-wear brand deals and laxative pill endorsements that it’s hard to remember an alternative. A-listers now seem to treat art like a side hustle, and advertising as their main career. It’s not enough for McConaughey to earn millions by smoldering through the window of a luxury Lincoln SUV, or lounging shirtless for Dolce & Gabbana cologne. He just had to become the creative director for Wild Turkey Bourbon, launch his own “Pantalones Organic Tequila” brand, and now, lend his rugged charisma to AI platforms.

A few decades ago, the very idea of an artist using their platform to shill products was not only considered tacky, but a moral failing—a betrayal of one’s fanbase and a stain on their integrity.

That’s why American stars travelled to Japan to film commercials; the shame of being caught in an advertisement could dissolve years of goodwill they’d built with the public. (Just look at Tommy Lee Jones. Stateside, he’s known for his Oscar-winning gravitas, but overseas, he’s been the face of Suntry canned coffee since 2006.) It’s the whole premise of Lost in Translation: a washed up, ashamed Bill Murray has to hide out in Tokyo just to promote a whiskey brand. Today, he’d proudly name it “Murray Malört” and slap his own face on the bottle. (...)

Celebrities are no longer scared to trade the public’s admiration for a paycheck, because they no longer have to trade. Sure, McConaughey could live indefinitely off the dividends from Interstellar. But if he’ll face zero backlash for shamelessly hawking liquor and AI platforms, why wouldn’t he?

To understand how we lost our dignity, we need to trace the mass commercialization of art—and with it, the disappearance of American counterculture. After all, if everything is for sale, there’s no such thing as a “sellout.” (...)

When Music Television burst into American homes, it ushered in an entirely new era for advertising. The 24-hour TV channel didn’t just kill the radio star—it also birthed the corporate celebrity. With the click of a remote, companies were given access to a direct line of information on what the youth found cool. Soon, advertising execs began to copy the DIY aesthetics of the underground. (...)

Before long, it became difficult to tell where MTV’s music programming ended and their commercial breaks began. Philip B. Dusenberry, an advertising executive for Pepsi-Cola and Apple Computer, admitted that the channel had profoundly shaped young consumers’ habits.

''MTV's impact, first and foremost, is as a teacher,” he told the Times. “It has educated people, particularly young people, to accept lots of information in a short period of time.'' (...)

Not every artist was eager to embrace the era of the endorsement deal. Neil Young fired back in 1988 with This Note’s for You:

“Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi / Ain’t singin’ for Coke / I don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.”

MTV banned the video. The blacklist only made Young’s point clearer: the industry had chosen a side, and it wasn’t with the holdouts.

Maybe no one embodied the tension between anti-corporate ideals and mainstream success more than Nirvana. When the band left their small Seattle label Sub Pop to release Nevermind with Geffen Records—one of the “big six” corporate labels at the time—Kurt Cobain acknowledged complaints from the purist faction of his fanbase.

“I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout,” he told Rolling Stone. “I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.”

It’s almost nostalgic to think that Nirvana’s version of “selling out” meant signing to a major record label, instead of naming their fourth album 0% APR Discover Credit Card, the way a band might today.

By the end of the 20th century, the corporate capture of counterculture had entered its final phase. The clearest symbol of that shift came in the year 1999, when promoters tried to resurrect the spirit of Woodstock. Instead, they created Woodstock ‘99, a festival so nakedly commercialized and mismanaged it felt like a parody of the original.

Sponsored by Hot Topic, Pepsi, and AT&T, the event charged hefty ticket prices and quickly descended into chaos. Water supplies dwindled by the first day, and under the blistering, 100-degree heat, vendors charged $4 a bottle—the equivalent of $8 today—to dehydrated, sunburned attendees. Some people reported paying up to $50. Three people died. Rampant sexual assaults and rioting marred the weekend—which was broadcast live on MTV, via pay-per-view, starting at $60 a package.

by Emily Topping, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Brian Wilson (June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025)

See: The Surf Was Up; and, These Things I'll Be (Ross Barkan). Also: God Only Knows What We’d Be Without Brian Wilson (RS), and, of course Wikipedia.]

[ed. Thanks for all the good vibes]

The Reality of Fan Disillusionment

When fan objects commit moral violations, what happens to the stans?

It takes a lot for me to be interested in films and shows about fans. This is because I’ve noticed most of it alternates between puff pieces and ghoulish take-downs, with a required dose of hagiography for the fan objects in question.

However, Fanatic (성덕), Oh Se-yeon’s 2021 documentary, seemed different from the get-go: it’s about the fans left behind when their fan objects have had a (deserved) fall from grace.

This is a deeply personal documentary on Oh’s part. She participates on-screen and discloses her struggle with the dissonance that comes with being confronted with an uncomfortable truth. In her case, she spent 7 years as a fan of singer Jung Joon-young, who was convicted of aggravated rape in 2019. Evidence of these crimes were uncovered in relation to the Burning Sun scandal that rocked South Korea.

Mr. Jung, along with other members of an online chat group, had bragged about drugging and raping women​ and had shared ​surreptitiously recorded videos of assaults.

This wasn’t the first time Jung was in hot water, having been the subject of allegations in 2016, which fans defended him from. But the evidence made the allegations a reality. What’s a fan to do when the illusion of their idol’s good nature is shattered so definitively? This isn’t about dating the wrong person, having a drug scandal, speaking out of turn, or delivering a subpar product, these actions are recognized as criminal for a reason.

The documentary doesn’t try to make fun of or pathologize fans; Oh wants to understand the emotional response that she and her fellow fans experienced. In an interview with Korea JoongAng Daily, she explains,

“When you become a fanatic, when you love someone to that extent, you don’t realize that you're doing that, that you’re the giving tree. I wanted to give everything to him, but I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing or giving up too much. That’s how immersed, devoted I was.”

Oh’s comment that “you don’t realize that you’re doing that” stands out as part of the problem. You don’t realize how deep you’re in until something happens that challenges your reality. It’s why I find it difficult to address comments about how stans are happy to be shelling out thousands and dedicating their lives to their fan object. Many things that we engage in willingly and that feel good in the moment are not necessarily good for us. Euphoric highs and dopamine hits don’t translate to healthy dynamics, in fact, they usually come at a cost.

Worse yet, we may be in denial about what we’re doing to ourselves, and the ultimate cost it may have. Oh revisits her journals in the film, including the clear-eyed question she posed in one, “What if I regret this when I go back to being a normal person who doesn't want to see you anymore?”

In a way, the film explores whether it’s possible to go back to being normal after this type of crisis. It’s one thing to grow out of your interest, have it displaced by real life activities and attachments, it’s another matter entirely to be faced with a conflict so profound that it shakes you to the core.

Oh speaks to friends of hers who have experienced similar fractures with other artists. Even her mother is featured as someone whose favourite actor was disgraced in a #MeToo scandal. Her quest to understand the driving force behind supporters that remain loyal lead her to a political rally in support of former South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2018.

The discussions with fellow fans who were trying to make sense of their emotional reactions really resonated with me. The so-called “waking up” to just how deeply invested they were in what turned out to be an illusion. Because when there’s a perceived moral duty to defend your fan object, you’re operating on deeply felt knowledge that it’s what’s right. But that type of knowledge and belief can mislead us. Where do we go when the veracity of this knowledge, the basis for this unshakeable faith, is completely destroyed?

The evergreen response to fans feeling betrayed is that their fan objects don’t owe them anything. But this isn’t about the fans being owed something, it’s about emotional responses that cannot be reasoned away.

“Are we victims or perpetrators?”

There is also the question of what fans’ role is in all of this. Many fans feel a degree of responsibility for what happened, even as they themselves feel victimized. If you find it ridiculous that fans feel betrayed by someone they don’t know, the fact that so many of them feel that they need to answer for the crimes of their fan object should reveal the degree of attachment we’re discussing.

So much of it is about feelings. We can know, logically, that we aren’t responsible for someone else’s actions, but the guilt can still gnaw at you with tremendous force. Would these fan objects have become criminals even without being in the public eye? One fan feels like she helped commit the crimes. Another wonders if the adulation fundamentally changed who the idol was for the worse. Oh says in the film, “It seems like the support and love I gave that person became the driving force behind the crime and deception.” (...)

But some fans still remain. Excuses are made, even in a case like Jung’s. He was an innocent bystander and was tricked, or took the fall for a friend that was the primary perpetrator. It may seem extreme, but the mechanism behind these copes is the same across the board. Whether you want to call it betrayal blindness, cognitive dissonance resolution, or plain old denial, it’s operates the same whether a fan object is being defended from accusations of greed or an outright crime.

The moral violations may be trivial, but the response to them can nonetheless be outsized. Whether it’s right or justified is irrelevant in the face of the emotional tsunamis that materialize.

These experiences are universal, and a result of our parasocial investments. Seemingly an obvious statement, yet I feel like it’s rarely acknowledged. Or rather, parasocial attachment is treated like something that only happens to weirdos, but it’s something we all engage in. The most extreme form is something I’ve come to call parasocial limerence, which denotes a more intense, obsessive form. This term may be needed to differentiate between degrees and types of parasocial attachments.

by Monia Ali, Fandom Exile |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Parasocial interactions/attachments. Common these days, probably due to omnipresent media saturation. From the comments:]

***

"A few months ago I had to teach Foucault's "Panopticism" to a college freshman class. One of the questions I presented them with ran something like: okay, so we've established that surveillance is a means of control: when somebody knows they're being monitored, they tend to behave how their audience wants or expects them to behave. So how does someone like Taylor Swift fit into this schema? We can agree that she's one of the intensely surveilled people on the planet; she can't do anything in public without her fans knowing about it, and there's occasionally intense speculation about what she does or thinks in private. So according to Foucault, what's the actual power dynamic between Swift and her followers?

It didn't click. The students had been following along up to that point and comprehended the basic idea of how watching exerts a form of control over the watched, but the whole thing broke down when they were asked to apply the same logic to a pop star. It was fascinating to see."

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“waking up” to just how deeply invested they were in what turned out to be an illusion. Because when there’s a perceived moral duty to defend your fan object, you’re operating on deeply felt knowledge that it’s what’s right" This all reminds me of stories I've heard of devout older Catholics in tremendous pain and confusion when forced to confront the exposure of crimes by revered priests."

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"this is really interesting, thanks for sharing. I think “fandoms” in general are more pervasive than we like to think. like it’s a symptom of the ubiquity of social media on top of a celebrity and idol culture. it’s easy to not be aware about who and why we “worship” certain people. But it feels like anyone noteworthy anymore inevitably builds a fan-fandom relationship domain. There’s no longer teachers, mentors, thought leaders, politicians—at least in the media realm. Only fans and fandoms. Anyway. It’s noticeable more with celebrities and idols, but this psychology is important to understand. Especially when the “contract” is violated and people feel betrayed on all sides."