What Does Dressing Up Mean Today?

I understand that we’re all dressing more casually these days, especially so since the pandemic. But there is something special about going to a play or a nice restaurant, and increasingly I’m seeing folks at such places dressed in what they’d wear to the supermarket or to do chores around the house — which kind of makes me sad. Are we losing something? — Janet, New York City

***

Dressing up can be one of the great joys of life. It is a shared human ritual, a mode of self-expression and a sign of respect. It helps mark time and set moments apart. It is an external expression of inner psychological and emotional states. It is a message to those around you.

That’s not me speculating or playing up the importance of clothes because I’m a fashion critic. It’s an actual thing, known as enclothed cognition — and that’s what you’re sensing has been lost.

A term coined in 2012 in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, enclothed cognition refers to “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.” Essentially, the paper posited that the physical experience of wearing clothes, when combined with their symbolic meaning, affects how we think about ourselves and about other people.

That hypothesis was proved through an experiment involving white lab coats. When people, like doctors, wore them, they tended to pay more attention to what they were doing. The act of wearing the coat changed their behavior.

That is why fairy tales almost always invoke the literal magic of getting dressed. Why people used to dress for the theater, for dinner, for travel, for job interviews, for church, for cocktails, for parties. Why, when I am working at home, I put on my shoes to tell myself it’s time to focus.

But as you say, while we still dress for the big rituals of life, it seems increasingly that more everyday events are considered … well, not worth the trouble.

Somewhere between Silicon Valley’s declaration of independence from the suit and the rise of athleisure, dressing up became conflated with dressing expensively, uncomfortably and (even worse) according to outdated social conventions. Doing so was seen as something you were supposed to do, rather than something you might choose to do, and rejecting those conventions was seen as progress.

What is actually happening, though, is that we are scrambling our signals.

That doesn’t mean we should rush back to the safety of old-fashioned dress codes. At this point, those have definitively gone the way of the dodo. But it does mean we have to reconsider what getting “dressed up” really means, and that has less to do with any mass social definition than with a simple state of mind. Or so I found when I started asking around.

“To me, dressing up is about intention,” the designer Joseph Altuzarra said. “It has to do with the act of getting dressed with purpose and thoughtfulness, with a conscious decision to step into a particular version of yourself.”

Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago retail emporium Ikram, had much the same response. Dressing up, she said, is about “looking polished” — though that term is largely in the brain, and eye, of the individual.

Goldman’s definition of polish: “Never wear jeans; no flip-flops; hair, nails and makeup done.” For Altuzarra, you can dress up in “perfectly fitting jeans and a crisp white T-shirt” as long as there is emphasis on the “perfectly fitting” and the “crisp.”

For his part, Law Roach, the “Project Runway” executive producer and Zendaya’s image architect, said he feels dressed up when he’s wearing “jeans held up with an Hermès scarf for a belt” or one of the “vintage Armani suits from the ’80s I get from a little store in Brooklyn.” [ed. image architect. that is a new one.]

The point, he said, “is putting something on that makes you feel special.” Something that implies a certain amount of care and consideration. Something that signals to your brain, as Adam and Galinsky might say, that what is about to happen is worth anticipating — and triggers the dopamine hit that comes when you realize, as Roach said, that “having somewhere to go is more of a luxury than ever before.”

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images

My Life as a Girl

Maybe I just want to be pretty.

Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.

That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.

And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.

***

What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.

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People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs apersona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae, such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.

This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.

Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.

 by Stephen Burt, VQR |  Read more:

Drinking With The Stars

Just for the record, if it were me out there appearing in a different town every night, I’d be incredibly specific about what I wanted waiting for me backstage. There’s not much more fearful in life than strangers trying to be fancy. It leads to all kinds of gussied-up crap, like those selections of “special” crackers that are like biting into particle board when, really, a box of Cheez-Its would be just fine. You dispatch an errand-running gofer to buy wine for a visiting star and there’s no telling what kind of swill-in-a-novelty-collector-bottle you’re likely to end up with.

Considering that, a survey of the contract riders at Smoking Gun shows a remarkable tolerance when it comes to ordering wine to be served in dressing rooms. For the most part, traveling musicians seem willing to settle for just about anything.

Desperately perky and highly professional gal-who-knows-what-she-wants Kathie Lee Gifford wants two bottles of white wine, and she doesn’t care what kind it is — just have it chilled and waiting for her when she arrives. Ludacris wants a bottle of white Zinfandel. Lady Gaga requires “two bottles of white wine with wine opener — Kendall-Jackson or Robert Mondavi preferred.” Sting wants “good quality” Champagne, “full-bodied” red wine, and Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay. Shania Twain wants one bottle of Pinot Grigio and two bottles of Kendall-Jackson Cabernet. Relic-of-a-regrettable-era Cher goes the other way, specifying “No Kendall-Jackson” be placed in either her dressing or contractually required wig room. Beck — who, like Cher, finds one name sufficient — takes no varietal chances, specifying Merlot, Cabernet or Pinot Noir only. Kelly Clarkson wants four bottles of “GOOD” red wine, and suggests “Jordan, Zinfandel, Malbec, Merlot”. Amy Winehouse (pictured above) specifies “rioja,” apparently not realizing it is a place and thus should be capitalized. Wayne Newton asks for both Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages and Stag’s Leap Merlot. Also, pretzels.

Eric Clapton is a wine and cheese man, but seems to care more about the cheese than the wine. His rider asks for two non-specific bottles of red wine and a “small cheese board” which the guitar god will use to serve cheese he brings himself. Kelly Pickler, on the other hand, requires cheese but not wine. Barenaked Ladies requires neither cheese nor wine, but is apparently bringing a little something from home because they want wine glasses and a corkscrew.

Backstage Confidential

In 1976, the New York rock and punk scene was made up of the CBGB’s bands and the few music writers who loved them. In total, this may have consisted of about 60 people. This small scene did have great influence, but, like any scene, it just sort of happened. A bunch of people formed bands and had nowhere to play. They found a stage. Another bunch of people heard about those bands and went to see them play. Every night. It was similar to when Max’s Kansas City had its moment: if you skipped one night, you might have missed something. At CBGB’s, there was no velvet rope at the entrance. There was no big deal about “getting in.” There was no “list.” The same people who went all the time went all the time. Since we edited Rock Scene—which became a kind of house fanzine for CBGB’s—Richard, Lenny Kaye, and I were among those who just went all the time. I didn’t have to call a publicist or get a laminated all-access pass or a wristband to go “backstage.” We didn’t have to wait for the lead singer to towel off after the performance and receive people. At CBGB’s, there was no toweling off—there were no towels. To get backstage, all you had to do was walk a few feet past the stage to the back hallway, to one of the crummy rooms on the right where Patti Smith or Joey Ramone would be sitting on the lumpy sofa. We’d all sit around with a few bottles of beer and just hang out. It was easy then to just hang out. It still was possible to discover something—either hearing about it from your friends or stumbling across it yourself. It wasn’t already written about in New York magazine before it had a chance to breathe.

‘Here comes success . . . Here comes my Chinese rug,” Iggy Pop sang in “Success,” one of my all-time favorite songs. I’d seen so many bands go through the stages from struggle to success, and the pattern was usually the same. In Stage One, they were young. They were sexy. They had nothing to lose. They wore some version of their everyday clothes onstage. It took two weeks to make an album. Then came attention (if it came) and some success. In Stage Two, a band moved from a van to a tour bus, or to coach seats on flights from city to city. If they got really big, edging toward Stage Three, it was more “cost-effective” for them to charter their own plane. The rationale was they could fit 12 people on a private jet for the same price as 12 first-class tickets. Sort of. Plus, they weren’t hassled in airports. Each band member had a bodyguard. The band had large dressing rooms backstage. In arenas, there were private dressing rooms with even more private inner dressing rooms, with security guards standing outside the doors. There were extra rooms off the backstage hallways to house the trunks with the band’s traveling stage wardrobe. Their production team had an office backstage. There was a greenroom with food and wine for their guests. It took around six months to make an album. And then full-fledged Stage Three or maybe Stage Four of all this was the move to stadiums. More of their fans could be accommodated. It supposedly thwarted the ticket scalpers (except it didn’t). The band had a stylist who oversaw its onstage costumes. And, finally, the band made crazy money. Along with those multi-million-dollar-grossing stadium tours came the houses in Malibu. By now, it might take well over a year to record an album. And a band in Stage Four had all the accoutrements that accompany big-time rock success—including, but not limited to, the plane, the police escorts, the private chefs, the grass-fed beef, and the complicated, political hierarchy of the backstage pass.

Backstage passes reflect status. The first time I was made aware of this was when I traveled with the Rolling Stones in 1975. The entire touring party had laminated photo passes that allowed us to go anywhere backstage. This became the norm for a major group. Clubs and smaller halls didn’t always have this pass setup, but as soon as a band made it to arenas or stadiums, the elaborate pass situation was standard for what goes on behind the scenes. The first and lowest backstage pass is the stick-on “After Show” pass for the greenroom mob scene. This literally is a square or circular or triangular piece of fabric with paper on the back that you peel off and stick onto (and ruin) your clothes. Next is the stick-on “V.I.P.” pass for the “pre-show” greenroom mob scene. (I always thought it would be funny if some band had a pass that led to a door that opened right into the parking lot outside the venue.) The next level is the laminated “V.I.P. Guest” pass for a “band room.” It isn’t really a band room; it’s a “meet and greet” room where the band—or, in the case of U2, Bono—might make an appearance before the show. After the V.I.P. Guest pass comes the “Staff” laminate, with no photo, which allows the bearer to move freely around the backstage area—except in the band’s dressing rooms. Then there is the “All Access” photo laminate, but you still might need an “escort” with a better pass to take you into the band’s dressing rooms. And then there is the top pass: the “All Access” laminate for friends and family, which allows you to go anywhere, including the band’s dressing rooms and the stage. But still, there might be a sticker or a star on this pass that alerts security just how far you can go: into the band’s private, inner dressing rooms or just the band’s private, outer dressing rooms. The whole structure is byzantine, and familiar only to people who’ve been through all these maneuvers. I recall many a time seeing someone proudly waltz backstage with a stick-on pass on their jacket or jeans, only to watch their face fall when they saw someone else with a laminate. Or those with non-photo V.I.P. laminates glance enviously at those with the photo laminates. The entire pass arrangement is a visual indication of just exactly where you stand with a group. John McEnroe and I became friendly because of just such a situation. In 1978 the Rolling Stones were performing at Madison Square Garden. John was backstage. I was writing for the New York Post, and I was a huge McEnroe fan. I went up to introduce myself to him. He sneered when I mentioned the Post. I pointed to his stick-on pass and pointed to my all-access laminate. No words were needed. It broke the ice; we’ve been good friends ever since.

by Lisa Robinson, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Bob Gruen

How Premium Mediocre Conquered Fashion

Last year the blogger Venkatesh Rao coined the term “premium mediocre.” He was referring to a segment of economic activity largely dreamed up by marketers to give the masses the illusion that they are consuming luxury, when in reality they were doing nothing of the sort. Some examples of what is proving to be a highly profitable sector — craft beer, artisanal pizza, $25 “signature” burgers, and my personal favourite, premium economy on domestic flights.

The idea is simple — by dressing up something mediocre as premium with a few extra touches, real and imagined, companies play on people’s aspirational drive to give them the illusion that they are purchasing into something elevated. The marketing-speak created around the premium mediocre sector uses terms like “preferred,” “signature” and “collection” — best used piled on top of each other to make, say, “signature collection.” Here, the paradox of providing an air of exclusivity without excluding anyone is key.

This is an old story in fashion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Starbucks and Delta executives have taken a page out of fashion’s playbook. What’s relatively new is how pervasive premium mediocre fashion has become. Take a look around, and it won’t be hard for you to spot premium mediocre fashion virtually everywhere — from Uniqlo cashmere (that doesn’t feel like cashmere at all) to Balenciaga baseball hats and Gucci headbands, from logoed Burberry keychains to pretty much anything at the fragrance counter in Bloomingdale’s. (...)

Premium mediocre extends to the higher echelons of fashion as well, largely at its entry-level product range. Premium mediocre is the Prada nylon backpack, the Louis Vuitton bag in coated canvas, the $375 Celine card holder. This segment of luxury fashion has been doing extremely well, because the margins in the premium mediocre segment are uncommonly high. As far as 2015, according to Euromonitor International, luxury small leather goods accounted for $5.7 billion in sales, projected to grow to $7.5 billion by 2020. On Lyst.com, the fashion shopping aggregator, plastic sandals by Givenchy and Gucci routinely top the most sought-after product category.

Premium mediocre in fashion is not a new phenomenon. During the ‘80s some Parisian couturiers licensed their name to mass market manufacturers. All of a sudden office workers could buy fifty-dollar Pierre Cardin button-up shirts. What followed was brand dilution and the perception that those names were no longer associated with luxury. During the ‘90s licensing was broadly reigned in and the image of those luxury houses had to be rebuilt.

What’s different this time around? Several things, such as the culture of entitlement of the millennial generation (and everyone else), its impact on consuming experiences rather than products, democratisation of fashion, and the rise of the curated life on social media. (...)

The impact on shopping as an experience also plays well into premium mediocre. Smart stores know this. You go to Dover Street Market to buy a Comme des Garçons PLAY t-shirt as much, if not more, for the experience as for the t-shirt itself. The new 10 Corso Como store in New York feels more like a gift shop with a high-end boutique attached to it. The first half of its space is devoted to 10 Corso Como merch, where you can buy a $5 Bic lighter ($1 at your local convenience store, but without the logo).

You can also buy a bunch of coffee table books that you could get in your local bookstore or on Amazon, only on Amazon you won’t get a nice shopping bag to go with it. At Gucci Garden in Florence, nominally a museum, but really a show space attached to a gift store and a restaurant, you can buy a $20 box of matches and a $90 box of pencils with the Gucci logo on it.

The logo is key, because in the age of Instagram, where people curate their lives in two dimensions on a small screen, the logo is more important than the product itself. And the best part about consuming premium mediocre today is that no one will scoff, because it’s no longer in good taste for the rich to turn their noses up at the rest of us.

by Eugene Rabkin, BoF | Read more:
Image: Getty

The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman

Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, agreed to meet me at 11 a.m. on a recent Saturday. Kagame’s office is on top of a hill near the center of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, and I took a taxi there, driven by a man in a suit and tie. Whenever I’m in Kigali, I am always impressed by how spotless it is, how the city hums with efficiency, which is all the more remarkable considering that Rwanda remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Even on a Saturday morning, platoons of women in white gloves rhythmically swept the streets, softly singing to themselves. I passed the Union Trade Center mall in the middle of town, where traffic circulates smoothly around a giant fountain. There was no garbage in the streets and none of the black plastic bags that get tangled up in the fences and trees of so many other African cities — Kagame’s government has banned them. There were no homeless youth sleeping on the sidewalks or huffing glue to kill their hunger. In Rwanda, vagrants and petty criminals have been scooped up by the police and sent to a youth “rehabilitation center” on an island in the middle of Lake Kivu that some Rwandan officials jokingly call their Hawaii — because it is so lush and beautiful — though people in Kigali whisper about it as if it were Alcatraz. There aren’t even large slums in Kigali, because the government simply doesn’t allow them.

The night before, I strolled back to my hotel from a restaurant well past midnight — a stupid idea in just about any other African capital. But Rwanda is one of the safest places I’ve been, this side of Zurich, which is hard to reconcile with the fact that less than 20 years ago more civilians were murdered here in a three-month spree of madness than during just about any other three-month period in human history, including the Holocaust. During Rwanda’s genocide, the majority Hutus turned on the minority Tutsis, slaughtering an estimated one million men, women and children, most dispatched by machetes or crude clubs. Rwandans say it is difficult for any outsider to appreciate how horrifying it was. Nowadays, it’s hard to find even a jaywalker.

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation. Measured against many of his colleagues, like the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who ran a beautiful, prosperous nation straight into the ground, or the Democratic Republic of Congo’s amiable but feckless Joseph Kabila, who is said to play video games while his country falls apart, Kagame seems like a godsend. Spartan, stoic, analytical and austere, he routinely stays up to 2 or 3 a.m. to thumb through back issues of The Economist or study progress reports from red-dirt villages across his country, constantly searching for better, more efficient ways to stretch the billion dollars his government gets each year from donor nations that hold him up as a shining example of what aid money can do in Africa. He is a regular at Davos, the world economic forum, and friendly with powerful people, including Bill Gates and Bono. The Clinton Global Initiative honored him with a Global Citizen award, and Bill Clinton said that Kagame “freed the heart and the mind of his people.”

This praise comes in part because Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country. Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

But Kagame may be the most complicated leader in Africa. The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo. At least, that is what a growing number of critics say, including high-ranking United Nations officials and Western diplomats, not to mention the countless Rwandan dissidents who have recently fled. They argue that Kagame’s tidy, up-and-coming little country, sometimes described as the Singapore of Africa, is now one of the most straitjacketed in the world. Few people inside Rwanda feel comfortable speaking freely about the president, and many aspects of life are dictated by the government — Kagame’s administration recently embarked on an “eradication campaign” of all grass-roofed huts, which the government meticulously counted (in 2009 there were 124,671). In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

by Jeffrey Gettleman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Nadav Kander

End Game: From Taylor Swift to Stephen Tennant

You don’t have to have attended Taylor Swift’s Eras tour yourself to be aware of it. After 18 months, it has become an inescapable international juggernaut, with documented effects on economies, infrastructure and policy. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is the Great Exhibition of 1851 – except, while that promised “the works of industry of all nations”, this spectacle showcases only those of Taylor Alison Swift.

That this phenomenon boils down to just one woman is staggering, a reflection of both Swift’s once-in-a-generation talent and the direct relationship she has forged with her fans. I started listening to her in 2011, sucked in by the girlish fantasy of Love Story, and never looked back. Many of my closest friendships were built on a shared appreciation: proof of the virtuous cycle started by Swift’s honest expression and vulnerability.

At the same time, I’ve never felt so alienated by my favourite artist. This year I have felt not so much a Swiftie as a conscript, roped into some broader project of streaming, spending and posting so as to cement and grow her cultural dominance – though it’s hard to imagine who, now, could possibly dislodge her.

Barclays estimated that the average Eras tour attender spent nearly £850 on tickets, travel, accommodation and expenses, including £79 on official merchandise. More than one city playing host to the tour has been renamed in her honour. The Beatles joked about being bigger than Jesus, but Swift really is bigger than music. She is spoken about in terms more commonly used for land masses, like GDP or earthquake magnitude.

The cultural tide behind Swift is so sweeping and powerful that I’ve struggled to hang on to my fandom, and the personal relationship to her music that’s always underpinned it. This may sound like I’m holding Swift’s success against her, that I liked her better before she got big (though, it bears repeating, no pop star has ever been this big). But I’ve been perturbed by signs that Swift is not just being overexposed, but actively tightening her grip on the spotlight.

Eras is already the highest grossing tour in history, generating $1bn last year and a further $261m from the concert film in cinemas. Yet Swift hasn’t stopped hustling, even after more than 100 sold-out shows. (...)

Swift is the biggest celebrity in the world and a billionaire, on track to make $2bn by Eras’ end. The suggestion that she is somehow dissatisfied or threatened is offputting, and raises very human questions about her motivation. Even five-star reviews of the tour have wondered about Swift’s endgame, where she possibly goes from here. (...)

But without any more insight into what is driving her, you’re left to assume it’s just money, or maybe revenge. Neither makes me feel more connected to her as an artist. Her songwriting may be personal, but seeing Swift perform I felt as though I was being engaged in a brand activation by a global behemoth like Nike or Apple, delivering focus-group-tested excellence. Even the friendship bracelets being hawked seemed less like a groundswell of fan camaraderie than brisk, industrial trade.

My uneasy feelings were later articulated by the culture writer Jonah Weiner, describing the insidious “co-opting of ‘community’ into a sales strategy”. Weiner was talking about luxury fashion brands, and the exploitation we are willing to overlook to feel part of a club. But his point about how our human desire for connection and belonging is hijacked and reduced by corporate interests seemed to me an apt description of the Eras tour, the economy that’s sprung up around it and our enthusiasm to participate in it.

The show’s supposed community is built on a basis of economic productivity; like a queue for a new Apple product or a sneaker, it “contains the possibility for meaningful interpersonal connection only in spite of itself,” Weiner writes. Not only that, it is actively at odds with building relationships and communities that might nourish us for the long term. 

by Elle Hunt, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ennio Leanza/EPA

[ed. From the marketing/branding/money-making juggernaut of the Eras Tour, to an overwrought/tortured argument in favor of keeping up with new fashion styles, to a short essay describing one of the gayest sissies in modern history (Stephan Tennant - The Man Who Stayed in Bed). All in three easy jumps! What a world. By the way, 1950 feature film referenced in the second fashion link, Munekata Sisters, by Yasujirō Ozu is in fact a knock off of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters (excellent):]

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SERIOUS PLEASURES The Life of Stephen Tennant. By Philip Hoare. Illustrated. 463 pp. New York: Hamish Hamilton/Viking. $29.95.

In 1910, when Stephen Tennant was 4 years old, he ran through the gardens of his family's Wiltshire estate, Wilsford Manor, and was literally stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with the beauty of the "blossom of a pansy." Thirty years later, so precious and high-strung that he sometimes took to his bed for months at a time, he was coaxed outside by a friend for a ride in the car on the condition that his eyes be bandaged, since passing scenery might make him too "giddy." Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch -- believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.

According to Philip Hoare, the author of "Serious Pleasures," the witty and amazing life story of this great sissy, Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life -- but doing it with great originality and flamboyance. Completely protected by class, Stephen Tennant couldn't care less what people thought of his finger waves, his Charles James leopard pajamas, his makeup ("I want to have bee-stung lips like Mae Murray") or his dyed hair dusted with gold. Who would dare criticize this "aristocratic privilege," this self-described "fatal gift of beauty"? As The London Daily Express, in 1928, so succinctly summed up Tennant's attitude toward life, "you . . . feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."

Although many who knew Tennant later in life maintained that they "could hardly believe the physical act possible for him," the one real love affair of his adult life was with Siegfried Sassoon, the masculine, renowned pacifist poet old enough to be his father. Sassoon brought to their relationship "his fame, his talent, his position," while Tennant's only daily activities were "dressing-up" and reading about himself in the gossip columns. Looking at the photos of the two lovers in Mr. Hoare's book, Tennant posing languidly (vogueing, really), way-too-thin and way-too-rich, as Sassoon looks on proudly, even the most radical Act-Up militant might mutter a private "Oh, brother!" But the author makes us see that Tennant's extreme elegance was close to sexual terrorism, as it flabbergasted society on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century. (...)

To confuse things further, Tennant's idol and great friend was Willa Cather(!). It is hard to imagine the notoriously no-fun author of "O Pioneers!" hanging out with a man whose beauty tips included "an absolute ban on facial grimacing or harsh, wrinkle-forming laughter," but Cather, Tennant's "surrogate mother/nanny figure," always encouraged him to write, even though "Lascar," the novel that obsessed him for the last 50 years of his life, remained unfinished at his death.

After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. (...)

"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure (" 'But I'm beautiful,' he would reason, 'and the more of me there is the better I like it!' "), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewelry, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."

In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."

What Restaurants Should Know About Food Critics (& How to Spot One)

As a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Ruth Reichl knows what can make or break a great dining experience. She’s famous for her creative and serious approach to the job, which earned her two James Beard Awards for restaurant criticism and led to her dressing up in elaborate disguises to avoid being recognized on the New York dining scene, as she describes in her memoir Garlic and Sapphires.

Here, we ask Ruth what restaurants should know about criticism, how to deal with a negative review — and yes, how to spot a critic.

If you could tell restaurateurs one thing about food critics or criticism, what would it be?

This isn’t necessarily about critics or criticism, it’s about running a restaurant. It amazes me how few restaurants understand how important the initial contact is. However you are accessing the restaurant — on the phone or website — you take that impression into the restaurant with you.

The same holds true for when you sit down at the table. The first things that happen there are very hard to recover from. Everyone pays attention to the welcome, but the smell of a restaurant when you walk in was always really important to me. The quality of the bread, the quality of the butter. If you give me soft butter that smells like the refrigerator, I’m done.

Overall, what was your approach to criticism?

If you judge a restaurant on what they’re trying to do as opposed to what you want them to do, you can review anything from a hot dog stand to a four-star restaurant. I would do my homework ahead of time and figure out what they’re trying to do, and how well do they do that. I would study up on chefs, figure out what their previous places were, and really read whatever statements they put out about what they’re trying to do. Then you can judge them on their own pretensions. One of the biggest faults of criticism is that critics have a tendency to judge a restaurant on what they wish it would be. That’s a real mistake.

What are some other little things you’d notice as a critic that people might not think about?

One of the things that always baffles me is when cocktails are too expensive. You’re sitting at a bar, someone asks if you want something while you’re waiting, you order a cocktail — and you realize it’s the most expensive cocktail you’ve ever bought in your life. I am immediately put out by that. I know it’s a profit center for restaurants, but it’s also that first contact people have with you, and it leaves an impression.

I’m also stunned by how unaware restaurateurs are of the sophistication of wine buyers. If you’re marking bottles up three times what you paid for them, it’s very likely that half of your customers know it. Thirty years ago you could get away with that, but today you’re dealing with a more sophisticated diner and drinker. If you’re charging $10 a glass for a bottle you bought for $8, half of your customers will know it and they’re going to be pissed about it. It’s not a smart place to make money.

What you really want as a restaurateur is to get the customer on your side as quickly as possible. You want them to want you to succeed. When I was a critic and giving out stars I really took that into consideration. I would often give restaurants a glowing review and give them two stars instead of three, because if you give three stars, people go in with a huge chip on their shoulder. But if you give a glowing review and two stars, they’ll go in saying, why is she such a bitch?

Every one of your customers can be on your side or not on your side, and that’s something you really want to think about. A lot of it is not how good the food or service is but how much they like you. Restaurateurs don’t think much about the likeability factor. As a critic, you think about it a lot because it’s what you always hear from readers. That’s why Danny Meyer is so smart — he makes is customers feel like they’re loved. (...)

What were some things you looked for from the service staff?

I still think that we as Americans have a very difficult time with service. There used to be rules, and now there aren’t any rules, so we’re still trying to figure out what is American service.

I’m still stunned by how many restaurants you walk into where the waiter will say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so.” You really want to say, “I don’t care what your name is.” We still have yet to figure out how to have service that is friendly and yet a little bit distant. It should be caring and anticipatory. The best service is the service that you don’t notice, where you never have to ask for your wine glass to be refilled, for more water or bread, or for a plate to be taken away. It just happens. It’s still really rare to get that in restaurants.

One of my real pet peeves is that I really hate it when somebody’s plate is cleared when someone else isn’t finished. It still happens way too often.

Another thing that drives me crazy: overfilling the wine glass. Every time they come by they fill it, because they’re trying to get you to order another bottle. That really aggressive upselling drives me insane. I think it’s counter-productive. Nobody wants a full glass at every minute! When you feel that, you start to notice how aggressive they are about other things, and it unbalances the trust you have in the restaurant. Trust is the most valuable thing you can have with your customer, and you don’t want to do anything to upset that trust.

And this is everybody’s pet peeve: there is nothing more annoying than having a waitperson say “good choice” after you order. I did not need your approval.

by Olivia Terenzio, Open for Business | Read more:
Image: Fiona Abound

Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump’s Skin

Alec Baldwin collapses onto his dressing-room couch at Saturday Night Live like a man participating too enthusiastically in a trust fall. He is 58 years old. He has three children under 4. He has been dividing what’s left of his time between filming a movie with Emilio Estevez in Cincinnati and answering the call from NBC whenever it comes, which, because of his now-signature portrayal of Donald Trump, has been many weeks this season. His appearances gather eyes like car accidents; some clips have been watched on YouTube more than 20 million times. Those legions of viewers have formed a kind of makeshift resistance, a community of the gaslit, together feeling a little less crazy for knowing that at least Alec Baldwin can see what they are seeing. Turning the president into a running joke might prove the most consequential work of his career. It’s at least been the most consuming.

Baldwin has bags under his eyes, his normally enviable hair appears as though it’s been beaten flat with a tire iron, and he has two blood-red spots on the bridge of his nose. His whole body looks like it aches. He is keeping it going by alternating between a bottle of Diet Coke and some grainy concoction from Starbucks served in a bucket. This week he is hosting SNL for a record 17th time, expectations are soaring, and the pressure, like the workload, is telling on him like a terrible secret. It’s only Tuesday.

There is a knock at the door. It’s time for Baldwin to go to makeup. Among his many chores today, February 7, he has to pose for this week’s “bumpers,” the photos of the host that bookend SNL’s commercial breaks. His wife, Hilaria, is coming in later with their kids for what will be a lovely family portrait, but the first shot is of Baldwin as Hamlet, holding the skull of the ill-fated court jester Yorick, with Baldwin’s Trump wig on it. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.

Baldwin walks down the hall slowly, listing a little, as though he’s walking on a ship. When he reaches his destination—bright lights, mirrors, and a bunch of people who are really happy to see him—he straightens up and smiles, jolted to life by the affection. He climbs into a chair, and a woman surveys his hair for half a second before firing up her clippers. A makeup artist asks whether he can put cooling pads under Baldwin’s eyes, and Baldwin beckons him forward as if to say, “You think I’d rather look like this?”

On a shelf behind him, his custom-made Trump wig shines golden on a life-size model of Baldwin’s head. The shelf contains the disembodied heads of every cast member, each labeled with a name and a size. Vanessa Bayer has the smallest; Baldwin’s dome is tied with several others’ for the biggest. There have been rumors that he will wear the wig for the entire show—that on Saturday, February 11, he will play Trump in every sketch. The team here in makeup has heard as much.

“No,” Baldwin says. “No. That would be a horrible idea.” He slips into Jack Donaghy, the executive he played so well on 30 Rock, dry as straight gin (“What am I, a farmer?”). “There’s a lot of talented people here. When I show up, I’m really only one of several people who make the show worthwhile. Sometimes I’m the least of what makes the show worthwhile.” He returns to playing himself. “That’s the most idiotic idea I’ve heard in my life. Ninety minutes of me walking around, like—”

Then it happens.

Baldwin’s face spasms almost uncontrollably, seized by muscle memory. He opens his left eye wide, he nearly closes his right eye, and he pushes out his wet lips as far as his chin will allow, his mouth turned suddenly into a bottomless black pit. His hands fly up, his fingers doing ridiculous, discordant things. He turns his head as though he’s been startled by a loud noise, and the woman cutting his hair has to snatch away her clippers with a jerk, her face gone urgent with the realization of how close she came to disaster.

“These are my golf clubs,” Baldwin says, his trademark voice transformed into Trump’s strange muffle, his naturally seamless, rapid-fire cadence turned halting. “They were given to me as a gift from Qaddafi. We’re doing a lot of business together, Muammar and I.”

Baldwin stops there. “Muammar,” he repeats, his mouth pushed out to the point of rupture, now satisfied that he has it right.

Everyone but the very professional hairstylist is in stitches. “Careful,” she says. “You’ll have a bald spot.” Baldwin relaxes. She moves quickly to finish her work, exchanging the clippers for scissors. She can’t help but marvel at the magnificence taking shape before her. “It’s unbelievable,” she says to no one and everyone at once. “He has gorgeous hair.”Baldwin sometimes wishes Trump would appear next to him on SNL. “If he was smart, he’d show up this week. It would probably be over. He could end it. If he showed up.”

Baldwin looks at himself in the mirror. “I don’t have anything else left,” he says. “It’s so sad. Seriously: age. Now you see why Cary Grant retired. People will do that to me on the internet. ‘Oh, here’s a picture of you … WHEN YOU WERE HOT.’ ” He puts on his best polite voice. “Thank you! THANK YOU, SUZIE.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then he’s back to playing the imaginary Suzie. “Here’s a picture of you … WHEN YOU LOOKED GOOD.” (...)

Baldwin’s ear is so good, he can do three phases of Pacino: early, middle, and late. It is a breathless, almost vaudevillian routine, performed entirely while seated. It is also desperately funny. In 20 minutes, Baldwin has inhabited seven different characters. Of all the parts, Trump is his least favorite to play. “It’s not easy,” he says. “It’s not easy.”

Playing Trump is physically demanding—watching footage of his longer performances, Baldwin can sometimes see his mouth begin to droop, his Trump face requiring a combination of contractions that can be hard to sustain—but it’s a psychic challenge, too. Jokes are supposed to provide an escape, for the listener and the teller. Instead Baldwin lives in a state of constant reminder. His country is so far from his hopes for it, and now people won’t stop asking this liberal New Yorker to portray the primary vessel of his disappointments. Baldwin sometimes wishes that Trump would appear next to him on SNL, the way Tony Bennett did years ago, reclaiming his own voice and in the process maybe helping Baldwin do the same.

“If he was smart, he’d show up this week,” Baldwin says. “It would probably be over. He could end it. If he showed up.” (...)

For the next shot he pulls on an ill-fitting suit and too-long tie, and he watches as that same wig is placed on his enormous, groomed head, and he mangles his eyes and pushes out his lips, this tired man made beautiful made ugly. It’s an unsettling transformation to watch. It’s almost as though Alec Baldwin, before he can become Donald Trump, must first become the best version of Alec Baldwin, and then ruin him.

by Chris Jones, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: Mary Ellen Matthews / NBC

Monopoly: the Movie

When it was announced last week that Margot Robbie will follow up the success of Barbie with a film based on Monopoly, my heart sank, did not pass go, and did not collect £200. Robbie’s production company will partner with Hasbro, just as the Barbie film was an initiative from rival toy company Mattel. Barbie was criticised for being little more than a 114-minute toy ad, but it did so well at the box office – buoyed, significantly, by a $150m marketing budget, which was larger than that spent on making the film – that a glut of similar titles are planned: a Barney film produced by Daniel Kaluuya, a Polly Pocket film written and directed by Lena Dunham, and a film based on the card game Uno. Robbie is also making a film version of The Sims video game, while Hasbro has licensed a Play-Doh feature film, a cinematic adaptation of an inert substance. (...)

The Monopoly film seems a naked play for nostalgia, the easiest and laziest of wins, but it is also The Way Things Are Done Now. Hollywood’s risk-averse allergy to new scripts makes it easier to simply iterate a winning formula and a recognisable brand name over and over, until we all die of boredom. This has been a growing problem for the last 20 years (of the highest-grossing 50 films of all time, more than 40 are sequels, prequels, reboots or remakes, or form part of a bankable cinematic universe like Marvel or James Bond). Pop culture is increasingly reduced to a series of lukewarm ads, theatreland is all jukebox musicals, and even our emaciated high streets and public spaces are being filled up with “immersive brand activations”. In central London you can visit the escape room Monopoly Lifesized, or attend the Shrek’s Adventure! experience, or cringe your way through Faulty [sic] Towers: The Dining Experience.

This is an evolution in consumer capitalism whereby marketing departments make all the decisions, and product design is an irrelevant afterthought. It mirrors the infantilising idiocy of “brand collabs”, where two unlikely brands from different fields produce a one-off product. You might have noticed, on a recent trip to the shops, Lynx x Marmite deodorant, Mr Men x Carex Tutti Frutti hand wash, or Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing x Crocs (yes, that is salad dressing-branded footwear). It speaks to a malaise that goes beyond novelty deodorants and the films we watch. The author and academic William Davies summarised this absurd state of play in 2022: “Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future,” he wrote: abandoning investment in R&D, new ideas, skills, technologies and products, or innovation of any kind – instead wringing every last drop from the assets they already own.

Rather than an economy dedicated to forging new ideas, we have one better characterised as “rentier capitalism”, whereby income is generated not by productive activity, but through the ownership and renting out or licensing of a scarce asset of some kind – which could be housing, but could also apply to a beloved family board game. This risk-averse attitude has become increasingly dominant when it comes to intellectual property (IP) – whether that property is a child’s toy, the back catalogue of a dead pop star, or the proprietary recipe for a spreadable yeast extract. IP rentierism is the only show in town.

It’s not that great art or great produce can’t ever be made in these circumstances. The Lego Movie, released in 2014 – and probably responsible for a lot of the current “film of a child’s toy” sillinesss – was an entertaining and clever film. So was Black Panther, one of the many films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet there is something about IP rentierism that feels new and corrosive. It is as if consumer capitalism has understood its own creative limitations, and how easily distracted we are – thanks in no small part to its own technological innovations – and so only the most idiotic spin on a bankable and familiar product can grab our attention. It is at best unedifying, watching the masters of our economy squeeze every last meagre drop from the assets they own, and reducing the arts to unadulterated marketing. Is this what thousands of years of human storytelling was leading up to?

by Dan Hancox, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Barbie composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy

Huey Lewis's Old, Weird America

Huey Lewis arrives backstage at a 2,000-seat theater in Wisconsin Dells and takes one look at his dressing room. Pausing, he dryly utters a one-word assessment: "Intimate."

I had seen him in the flesh once before, back when Huey Lewis and the News was touring in support of the album Hard at Play in 1991. I was 13 years old and Lewis was my first favorite rock star. He played at the not-intimate Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee, which seats approximately 12 times more people than Wisconsin Dells's Crystal Grand Music Theatre, and was built in the aftermath of a dangerously overcrowded concert that Lewis performed on the grounds in the summer of 1984 — about the time his most popular record, Sports, rose to the top of the Billboard album charts. That concert drew 30,000 people to a space suited for 15,000. (The Marcus Amphitheater could accurately be described as "The House That Huey Built," though I've never heard it actually described that way.)

Wisconsin Dells doesn't have close to 30,000 people in the entire town, which is situated in the south-central part of the state, about a two-hour drive west of Milwaukee. As Wisconsin's tourism hub, its population swells in the summer months depending on the weather — an area dense with woodlands, lakes, water parks, and wax museums, Wisconsin Dells is a relatively cheap place to take the kids on vacation, though omnipresent storm clouds chased away visitors in early June like a great white shark stalking a beach community. Still, all but 100 or so tickets were sold for the night's Huey Lewis and the News concert several hours before showtime. Towns like this are Huey's bread and butter these days.

Many of those ticket buyers were coming to hear the songs from Sports played from front to back. While Sports isn't usually mentioned among the most popular musical blockbusters of the '80s, it belongs in that company. Of the album's nine tracks, five charted in the Top 20: "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "Heart and Soul," "If This Is It," and "Walking on a Thin Line." (One of those songs might be playing on the "cool FM" oldies radio station in your town at this very second.) Sports was one of only five no. 1 albums during all of 1984, the fewest number in history. The others were Michael Jackson's Thriller, the Footloose soundtrack, Prince's Purple Rain, and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. Huey Lewis held the summit for only one week, but Sports sold 6 million records in '84 alone (on the way to topping 10 million), good for second on the year-end sales list behind Thriller.

"We were opening for .38 Special when Sports was out, and the crowds were finally coming to see us." Lewis says. He sits on a small love seat opposite a wall lined with mirrors and partially concealed by a rack of stage clothes, and relaxes his right hand after hurriedly autographing 50 CD booklets from the recent Sports reissue. "We went out on an arena and coliseum tour, and we were killing them every night because our record was growing by the day. We would show up at the hall at seven and eat the crew meal, put on our clothes at 7:45, go out from eight to nine o'clock and just tear it up, and get as many encores as we want. To their credit, if .38 Special were super-mad about it, they would suck it up and play their show real hard."

Lewis recalls telling his bandmates at the time, "'This is as good as it gets, man. Just have fun with this right here.' And I've been in the business for long enough to know that that's true."

Lewis does not sound bitter when he says this. He's a little older than you remember — the lines on his forehead are deeper, his voice more sandpapery, and he untucks his almond brown button-up shirt to hide his 62-year-old paunch. (He also apparently keeps his collection of Skittles-colored, proto-Arsenio suit jackets in mothballs. They are nowhere in sight in his dressing room.) But for the most part, in appearance and demeanor, Lewis is unchanged from the handsome, confidently smirking cool-dad figure on the cover of Sports. For much of his life, Lewis has been cursed with a face that looks eternally 41, but he's now reached the point where this is a good thing. In person, he's friendly, though not particularly gregarious — he prefers not to do interviews on show days, which is difficult because nearly every day is a show day. After tonight's concert, the band will shower, the crew will load out, and Lewis's 25-person caravan (which he refers to as his "small business") will hop back on their buses and drive 403 miles to Anderson, Indiana, for tomorrow night's gig at a horse track and casino. In the next seven days, Lewis will play five shows in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Quapaw, Oklahoma, along with bigger cities like Dallas and Cincinnati. Even with the gaudy 1980s sales statistics, Huey Lewis and the News has the work ethic of a 2010s indie band.

by Steven Hyden, Grantland |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images

They Dressed Like Groucho

You could say, with partial plagiarism: It was the best of nights. It was the worst of nights.

I remember thinking that it might be a long time before I saw so many happy people in one place. The place was Carnegie Hall and the people were fans — worshipers might be the more appropriate word — of Groucho Marx.

At least half the eager throng was a young, college-type crowd; it was at the peak of the time when the Marx Brothers — and I, to some extent — were campus heroes. The controversial (mildly put) Erin Fleming (see previous column), the young woman who was running Groucho’s life and household for both good and ill — had hauled the frail fellow out into public once more.

To the dismay of friends and relatives, who feared that in these sadly waning years, Groucho, with formidable powers decreasing noticeably, lacked the stamina, let alone the desire to perform again, Erin had lined up a series of “concerts,” the true purpose of which many felt was less to get Groucho back in the limelight than to get Fleming into it with him.

There were two fears. Would he be physically able to get through a full-length concert, enfeebled as he was most days then, and what would it do to him if only a handful of people showed up? Could he survive that? That last fear proved unfounded.

When the big night came, I had the cabdriver let me off out front, instead of at the stage door, to assess the crowd.

There was a touching aspect to the milling, chatting, laughing throng. Some carried pictures of Groucho and his siblings, some had painted on Groucho mustaches. Hurrying back to the stage door I must have seen at least a dozen fully-got-up Grouchos complete with swallow-tail coat. There were even a few Harpos and Chicos. (I saw no Zeppos.) Nice kids in a troubled time.

It was 1972 — not a nice time in the country — and there was something so sweet about these kids that I couldn’t manage to ditch the thought that some equally nice kids might have loved to be there but for their having been, just two years earlier, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.

Pushing dark thoughts aside, I went inside and up to the dressing room. I recall now that the words and melody of Groucho’s friend Harry Ruby’s “Everyone Says I Love You” began to play in my head in Groucho’s voice, sung by him on my show a few years earlier. This was going to be a great evening.

I entered the dressing room and was horrified. Groucho was slumped on a couch looking more frail and papery than I had ever seen him. The famous voice was a hoarse whisper. I thought of those milling kids outside in a near frenzy to see their hero and here he (all but) lay before me, looking like moribundity warmed over. Clearly it would be a miracle if we could get him downstairs and to the stage, let alone through a two-hour concert.

“How do you feel, Grouch?” I asked with forced brightness.

“Tired.”

by Dick Cavett, NY Times |  Read more: 
Photo: Wikipedia

Sriracha is for Closers

Monday Morning.

A new day, a new week, a new opportunity to master your destiny, to bite the ass off a bear, to be a coffee achiever, to hustle harder, to get shit done.

Brendan Alper’s out the door by 8:41 a.m. He swipes his office key card just before 9:00 and steps onto the poured-concrete floor of the lobby, where the tableau that greets him is composed of beadboard paneling, hanging globe-shaped light fixtures, exposed pipes, a midcentury patchwork sectional sofa, banquettes for laptop rovers, a granite coffee bar (with La Colombe brew in the urns, Ronnybrook dairy products arranged neatly in a refrigerator, and bottles of sriracha sauce), a second bar with taps (Sierra Nevada, Angry Orchard), a large glass watercooler lined with grapefruit slices, an accent wall with a mural of a starry sky and mysterious hands plying a cat’s cradle, and another wall festooned with a neon word sculpture. hello brooklyn, it reads. You might recognize in these touches the zippered-hoodie aesthetics of WeWork, the company that operates the building. You might even be a WeWork tenant yourself. Perhaps you’ve taken a meeting or two in a WeWork building, or else you will soon enough, as twenty-first-century America continues its headlong shift toward the gig economy.

Finally, Brendan gets to his pod-enclosed desk on the fifth floor, ready for some TCB: Taking Care of Business. Brendan is thirty and the founder of a tech company. He is bright, cheerfully handsome, well-related, well-connected, an alumnus of Brown University and Goldman Sachs, where he did operational risk management, which he concedes was “not exactly a crushing-it kind of job.” One day a couple years ago, Brendan looked at his bosses and saw his future self: “charting numbers under fluorescent light, two kids at home, counting vacation days, and at what cost?” He quit and tried writing comedy sketches but found it too solitary, plus he didn’t want to move to L.A.

Last year, Brendan scraped together his life savings and started a dating app called Hater. It adds value, as the Shark Tankers say, by matching people according to their shared dislikes. He finished the beta and timed Hater’s February 2017 launch in the App Store to coincide with some canny PR stunts—coverage on The View, Good Morning America, CBS’s Sunday Morning, and Fox & Friends; features on seven blogs embargoed for the same day; a viral public- art installation depicting Trump and Putin nude and locked in an embrace. Within three weeks, he had three hundred thousand registered users worldwide. Then, per an agreement he reached with potential investors, Hater received a market valuation of $4 million, even though the company had yet to bring in a cent.

Which pretty much brings us to this fine June morning. Brendan’s wearing a striped T-shirt, jeans cuffed well above the ankle, and flip-flops—an ideal uniform if you’re hanging out at your condo swimming pool all day. That’s part of the fun of being your own CEO, he says. “But there’s that existential problem I wasn’t really prepared for: Nobody’s telling me what to do. Should I be putting together a budget? Working on the design of a new app? Raising money? Trying to retain users? Trying to attract new users? Trying to build out our analytics? Should I be dressing up like a chicken and handing out business cards in Grand Army Plaza?”

There are a lot of Brendans in the Republic of WeWork, and many are right here in this corridor. Some of the outfits in the South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, location trade in worldly goods, like Conscious Step, a sock company that donates a share of its proceeds to charity; Carvana, an online used-car dealership; Motorino, a pizza micro-chain; and Visual Magnetics, which sells idea boards. Others are entirely ether-based, such as One Door, a company that offers cloud-centric “merchandising execution”; Mish Guru, a Snapchat-focused “management & analytics platform”; and DevTribe, a social-media consultancy seeking “influencers looking to increase revenue through personal branding.” There’s at least one self-employed “vlogger and design consultant,” as well as Turnkey & Bespoke, which manages retail construction projects, be they pop-up shops, promotional booths, or, yes, offices inside WeWork buildings. There’s also a company called NSFW, whose function might be described as “facilitating curated gratification.” (It puts on swingers’ parties.) (...)

WeWork employees are quick to tell you that the company, and others like it, came about to serve the new leaders of the tech revolution. You can also see them as the by-product of an economy that suddenly ceased to guarantee young people steady employment. The economic collapse of 2008 and the flood of millennials who’ve since entered the workforce have together given us the age of “coworking,” a term WeWork popularized. The U. S. Census Bureau’s 2015 tally of unincorporated “nonemployer businesses”—an often-used classification for a lot of gig-economy work—reported that the figure had grown by nearly 20 percent, over the previous decade, to twenty- four million. Ours has long been a culture of garage tinkerers and traveling salesmen, but the coworking model presents a new, amenity- enriched option for young men and women setting out as entrepreneurial armies of one, in that it leaves them to rent the sort of infrastructure that the modern world has snatched from them.

Fees range from $220 a month for a “hot desk,” or space at a power outlet, to upwards of $650 for a private office. You also get unlimited coffee and craft beer, printer credits, evening yoga classes, themed happy hours, and lunch ’n’ learn seminars. Brendan’s four-desk office lists for $2,100 a month, but WeWork gave him the space gratis for the first six months, and now at a discount. “They like all the press Hater gets,” he says. “It’s kind of like Nike giving free shoes to athletes. Anyway, it’s better than working out of a Starbucks, and the membership ends up providing an extensive ‘collaboration network,’ ” he says. “They can find you an accountant or someone to make stickers.”

The staffers at WeWork call themselves “community managers” and wear T-shirts bearing the company’s slogans: “Do What You Love,” “Creator,” “Better Together.” The conversations in the elevator tend to be about Slack channel pickup, or chasing virality, or how much coffee a person has to consume before it functions as a diuretic. The lavatories at the WeWork at 524 Broadway in Manhattan, incidentally, are terrific—enclosed stalls with clever toile wallpaper featuring a repeating print of surveillance cameras partially obscured by roses and leaves. WeWork employs a design team of twenty-five, and each space is full of artwork carefully curated by Jeremiah Britton, the company’s creative director of art and graphics, to exemplify certain “core values”: “relevant, clever, honest and authentic, inspiring, and shareworthy.”

When this forty-eight-year-old reporter, embedded for several weeks at 524 Broadway, had a problem using the printer on his floor, he sought help from a community manager eating her lunch from a mason jar (“something healthy people call quinoa”), who politely advised him to file a request online. They try to respond within fifteen minutes, she said, adding, “Fun fact: In this building, the average wait is four minutes.” When the reporter did eventually get the printer to work, she offered an exuberant high-five. “I knew you could do it!” Asked how she liked WeWork, another community manager, who’d recently been at a corporate retreat in L. A. (with entertainment by the Chainsmokers), replied, “Culty, but in an awesome way!” in a tone that you could swear was outfitted with a suite of emojis. (...)

Would Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt have transcended his feelings of malaise if he’d spent his evenings taking meditation classes in his office building? What might Willy Loman, who ventured door-to-door with nothing but a smile and a shoeshine, have made of WeWork’s buy-in incubator program, with its build-your-own-hash-browns bar on Thank God It’s Mondays? What would the rank and file of Dunder Mifflin think of the legions of young hustlers who hope to make a killing by coming up with the next Shine?

Shine, by the way, is a “daily messaging experience” that sends its subscribers succinct pep talks like this one: “We all want to be chill when faced w/ a frustration (‘no sweat!’). But adulting is hard, Eric. Today, learn to respond > react.” The company has thus far raised more than $3 million from investors.

Not so long ago, bright young men like Brendan and Sam would’ve kept on paying their dues, patiently working their way up middle-management rungs, devoting decades to a single institution, and eventually retiring on a tidy pension. That life went the way of the American buffalo. And the risk-tolerant dudes of Hater consider themselves happy to have the independence gained in the exchange.

by Eric Konigsberg, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: Max Guther
[ed. See also: How WeWork Has Perfectly Captured the Millennial Id]

Burger Queen

One night in March of last year, Jay-Z showed up at the Spotted Pig, on West Eleventh Street, with his wife, Beyoncé, and another couple. Jay-Z, an investor in the restaurant, and a frequent patron, wanted the smoked-trout salad, but the kitchen was out. He and his group settled on the house specialty—burgers, which the restaurant’s chef, April Bloomfield, serves one way: char-grilled, on a brioche bun, topped with crumbled Roquefort. Only Lou Reed, a fixture in the neighborhood, is allowed to have his burger with onions, and that is owing to precedent: an awestruck employee took his order one afternoon when Bloomfield was out. Mayonnaise is forbidden. The condiments policy has long been a subject of contention between Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, who schmoozes while she cooks. He dispenses surreptitious dollops to favored customers from a jar of Hellman’s that he keeps hidden on a high shelf.

The Spotted Pig opened in February of 2004—New York’s first gastropub. It is a nookish place, crammed with all manner of porcine paraphernalia and presided over by offbeat waiters and bartenders. “If you’re going to spend an hour and a half with somebody, it should be somebody kooky,” Friedman says. New Yorkers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it a bar with good food? A restaurant that was fun? In any case, it was an immediate hit, a seat at one of its cramped tables so coveted that Frank Bruni, in a mostly admiring review in the Times, deemed the place a “gastromelee.” Message boards abounded with proudly masochistic anecdotes about what one blogger called the “hipster bloodsport” of trying to get in. (A pregnant woman told a waiter she couldn’t have the blue cheese, and, she wrote, “he promptly barked at me, ‘Yes you can, it’s ricotta you can’t have.’ ”)

Along with the food and the atmosphere, the restaurant’s clientele has helped to make it a success. By December, 2005, USA Today had published a story about the place headlined “WHERE STARS ARE SPOTTED.” Friedman recalled, “Every night there was some guy saying he was the biggest proctologist at Mount Sinai jabbing his finger in my chest.” A Chasen’s on the Hudson, by way of the Thames, the Spotted Pig is a place where normal people go to feel like celebrities and celebrities go to feel like normal people. Those who are not Jay-Z have been known to spend hours waiting to be granted a tartan-covered tuffet. Sometimes they want to be cool. Sometimes they want a really good cheeseburger.

One of Jay-Z’s friends wasn’t sure about the Roquefort. Bloomfield hates to leave the kitchen, but Friedman dragged her to the table, where she prevailed upon the friend to have the dish the way she had intended it.

“Who’s that golfer dude you made me meet?” Bloomfield asked Friedman later.

“He’s not a golfer,” Friedman replied. “He’s Kobe Bryant.”

“Oh. How did he like his burger?”

Bloomfield—five feet four, with a compact build and a pugnacious chin—is the food world’s oblivious savant. Her single-mindedness in the kitchen has propelled her from Birmingham, England, where she grew up on a diet of fried-egg sandwiches and steaks “that would come out a little gray,” to the apex of New York City’s restaurant scene, where she is renowned for her brawny menus, teeming with trotters and terrines. This summer, Saveur held a barbecue, to which prominent chefs contributed various dishes. Bloomfield’s was a chickpea-lentil-and-feta salad. “The Village Voice said something about ‘Why did the Queen of Meat do a salad?’ and she answered, ‘I like salad,’ ” Friedman recalled. “That was kind of a ‘Rain Man’ thing to say.” Bloomfield doesn’t swim; she doesn’t drive. She has a Michelin star for the Spotted Pig and one for the Breslin—a dark, boozy restaurant that she and Friedman opened last year in the Ace Hotel, on West Twenty-ninth Street—but she has never been to Paris. “It’s pretty lame,” she said one day. “But, you know, I’m a girl from Birmingham. What am I going to say, ‘I’ll have that right there’?” she said, in a jacked-up Brummie accent, pointing to an air menu.

Most days, Bloomfield wakes up around nine o’clock. She wallows in bed for an hour or two, with a cookbook, or a recipe she’s fiddling with, and a glass of PG tips. (She likes it milky, without sugar, and just hot enough to scorch the back of her throat.) Around noon, she arrives at the Pig or, more often, the Breslin, where she stays until midnight. On a sunny afternoon in late spring, Bloomfield was holed up in a plaid-curtained booth at the back of the Breslin’s dining room, rustling through a sheaf of papers stained with olive oil. She was dressed, as she usually is, in a black Pig T-shirt, black Dickies, and Birkenstock clogs. Her hair, the color of gingersnaps, was scraped into a bun. She was just back from Sydney, where she had appeared at a food-and-wine festival, but her skin was as pale as gooseflesh. I asked her how the trip had been. She pulled out her iPhone (apps: Epic Chef, zombies, vampires, ninjas, World War, iMobsters) and showed me a picture of her sous-chef sprawled on his back in the sand. Her cooks had surfed, she had watched.

Bloomfield was working on a fried-chicken special for the evening’s menu. The inspiration was some buffalo wings she had eaten at the Waterfront Ale House, a bar in Murray Hill. (It’s close to her apartment.) “Their chicken has a really great sort of fruity habañero taste,” Bloomfield said. Her take on the idea was intense, a concentration, rather than a refinement, of the original’s punch. She had chosen to fry a breast and a thigh in duck fat and serve them with a salad (blue-cheese dressing, red onion) and hot sauce (habañero, tomato, vinegar, butter). Someone brought a platter of the chicken for Bloomfield to test. It was delicious; the batter had an almost caramel flavor. Bloomfield could barely admit that she had anything to do with it. “These poussins, oh, my goodness,” she said. “They’re actually really hard to fuck up. They’re unfuckable. You can’t fuck them up.”

“What’s the most fuckable?” I asked.

“The simple stuff.”

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Continue reading:
Photograph by Martin Schoeller

The High-Romantic Nightmare That Wasn’t

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story. It has next to nothing in common with the spirit of Shelley’s High-Romantic nightmare, and far more to do with del Toro’s own interests, especially his perennially unilluminating and often ponderous dedication to the tone of fable and fairy tale.

It’s no accident that the only great Frankenstein films — James Whale’s two immortal Universal classics, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — didn’t even worry about the scaffolding. They are of course the bases for the Frankenstein of modern popular culture, films which jettisoned all but a few garbled scenarios from the book and erected the rest from a pure Hollywood riff on a century of other vague Gothic imagery and literature. Two of the funniest movies ever made — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) — are themselves riffs on the Universal films, and only those films. And while there have been a few attempts to stage the proper Shelley version, nearly all of them, such as Kenneth Branagh’s awful and characteristically self-important 1994 film, have seen fit to mangle whole sections of Shelley’s work, and invent others from whole cloth.

So now we get the long-awaited version from the man who would seem the most obvious choice to make it — and yet, once again, here is a Frankenstein that finds nothing worth saving from the original besides that basic scenario. In the first, authoritative 1818 version of the text, Victor Frankenstein was a man from a happy family, betrothed to his cousin Elizabeth, who finds himself reading the works of alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus while getting caught up in the fervor of late 18th-century Enlightenment science. This precise setting and period are key to the original story’s brilliance: Shelley evokes an almost beatific time in her own recent history where faith in medical, technological, and social progress was just beginning to achieve its modern velocity — a time in which the center of scientific study was shifting from physics to chemistry and biology.

English Romanticism was the great inheritor of this new concern for biological science, and thrived on metaphors of botany and organicism, just as it fed itself on the new psychology of the German philosophers. Frankenstein gets its power from this — and from its mordant, haunting sense of the old fairy tales furiously spinning into new, wretched life at the birth of the industrial world. In a way, to read Frankenstein is to read what the Romantics thought of the Enlightenment — and their thought was, in brief, that the new scientists had better read Paradise Lost. In fact, one could sum up the ambiguity of the original Shelley novel simply by saying that, in her Frankenstein, it is the Monster himself who reads and understands Milton, not his creator.

Del Toro, as expected, avoids almost all of Shelley’s original material. His primal obsession has always been the feeling of fairy tale itself, united with the trappings and settings of old Hollywood horror films. Even the subtler, Promethean horrors of the original are absent. Instead, he grafts all the whizbang technologic set-dressing of the old Universal films onto an even more overtly-Romantic, maximalist vision of the Shelley story; updating its setting to the mid-19th century — presumably to get in a few dull stereotypes of Victorian squalor and a tinge of punk Darwinism in the reanimation presentation to the Edinburgh Dons, who revoke Frankenstein’s qualifications in horror.

Victor Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac, in an uncharacteristically hammy and misjudged performance) becomes, to all effects, like a grown-up Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon: he’s a sour brooder with a tyrannical father (Charles Dance, in a Charles-Dance-type role) and a doomed pregnant mother (Mia Goth, who also pulls Oedipal double-duty as Elizabeth). The nature of Frankenstein’s work is changed from accidental discovery to lifelong attempt at making up for the loss of his dead mother. Cousin Elizabeth is no longer the saintly pen pal and future wife, but a foil and an object of envy destined to marry Frankenstein’s brother (and, in a peculiar turn, a sort of angel for the Monster). She’s also the niece of the man who wants to bankroll Frankenstein’s experiment (Christoph Waltz). The private, tortured space of Frankenstein’s chambers in the book is transplanted to a huge, vertiginous castle on the edge of a sea — if we had any doubts before about just what height of Gothicism del Toro is going for.

The point of all this, of course, is not only to amp up the opera, but to give del Toro a chance to dream up a thousand gnarly details for the making of the Monster. Shelley herself barely spared a moment to describe the actual process of making the creature. But for del Toro, that’s the whole point. He delights in playing yet another turgid, whimsical Alexandre Desplat waltz while he lingers over Frankenstein’s vivisections, and makes sure to show us all the minute aspects of the building of the electrical apparatus, as well as the construction of the attic and underbelly of the tower. This sequence of the film is entertaining, even if his incessantly roaming, unfixed camera quickly grows exhausting. When it comes to the camera, del Toro is no great director: his Frankenstein has moments of beauty, but even the most arresting images are frequently undercut by the film’s waxy, shadowless look and by awkward framing that makes every other shot feel as if it’s coming from the corner of a too-wide room. (...)

In the end, there’s one main reason to see Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that is Jacob Elordi, who here proves himself to be what was mostly hidden underneath the pure exploitation schlock of Saltburn or Euphoria, and could be briefly glimpsed in his Elvis from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla: that is, a great physical actor trapped in the body of a beautiful man. Has any contemporary heartthrob so totally embraced such a complete privation of his trademark physique? There’s no room for vanity within the Monster. Elordi surely saw his chance to free himself of the burden of his looks — and yet what he chooses to do is pretty magnificent. His elegantly awkward, Butoh-inspired performance is the real glory of a film that would be a rather hollow experience otherwise. After its overheated Freudian first half, the film finally comes alive when it leaves behind Frankenstein the man and follows the Monster — a section which comes closest to following the finest section of Shelley’s story. The middle of the film, wherein the Monster leaves to hide and watch the family of an old blind man, is also the finest part of the film. And, thank god, this time the movie Monster actually does read Paradise Lost.

As the film goes on, and the Monster returns to wreak havoc, del Toro’s Frankenstein almost comes close to the heights of a tragic fairy tale. Though the contrivances del Toro takes to get himself there are ridiculous, the pietà of Elizabeth’s death in the Monster’s arms is lovely (so sincere that there were snickers in my theater when I saw it), as is the Monster’s return to the ruins of the tower to discover the site of his creation. Even at the ending, when the Monster and Frankenstein have met out on the ice and come together in the cabins of the Scandinavian ship — the resolution of this particular father-son/God-Adam story is moving. Still, del Toro doesn’t quite earn the weight of the climax he worked so ponderously toward. It rests entirely on Jacob Elordi’s broad shoulders, and he does his best. Yet where Shelley’s Monster chooses to burn his creator and end his own life — del Toro, big earnest softy that he is, can’t help but let his Monster stare off into the sunset, ponder his apparent immortality, and conquer his desire to die.

by Sam Jennings, Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about a year or so ago, and it's true, much of the power and nuance (and tenderness) of that book is lost in this film. That said, it's still the best adaptation that I've seen to date. Did you know that her monster developed a deep literary and philosophical intelligence (from reading so many books in isolation), and that his main objective in pursuing and tormenting his creator was simply to have him create a female companion to share his life (which the doctor initially promised to do, then refused after having second thoughts)? Great book that really should be read to get a full appreciation of all its many themes (including technological hubris). See also: Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Literary Theory and Criticism):]

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The work and its monster-hero became such a popular subject for film and stage, in serious, comedic, and parodic productions, that many acquaint themselves with Victor Frankenstein’s monster long before encountering it in Shelley’s book. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker. A second, stronger shock may occur when readers realize that the monster, in great contrast to the bumbling, murderous, wild-eyed, grunting, crazy-stitched object of film, proves the most rational and also the most eloquent of any of the novel’s characters. (...)

The monster was not “born” hating others; his hate was taught him by people who refused to see beyond his external appearance to the brilliant warm nature existing just below its surface. While science might be expected to lack compassion, the same could not be said of religion, which should have prepared the public to be more accepting. That the monster possesses a quick intellect and a natural warmth and goodness that is corrupted only by his exposure to humans remains an indictment of shallow social values and a rigid class structure.