Sunday, October 16, 2011
Cultural Faux Pas in New York City
- Don’t say you’re “from New York” when you’re from New Jersey or Long Island. There are very nice parts of New Jersey and Long Island; some very nice people live there. But this is not Boston - you don’t get to say you’re “from New York City” if you’re from slightly outside it. If your prevarication is discovered, this is a quick route to contempt.
- Never ever ever EVER refer to the city as “the Big Apple.” If you say this, you are a tourist, and a clueless one at that. Using the phrases “only in New York!” and “a New York minute” falls in the same category, but they may be used, sparingly, by long-time residents, with a heavy dose of irony.
- Don’t refer to the subway lines by their color. Instead, refer to them by their numbers and letters - e.g. it’s not the “Green Line,” it’s the “4, 5, 6.” When referring to a specific service along that line, each is called a “train,” rather than a “subway” - e.g. the “6 train,” not the “6 subway.” When referring to the entire system, it’s the “subway” - not the “Metro,” the “Underground,” etc.
- Don’t wear “I Heart NY” t-shirts, or indeed any article of clothing that mentions New York in any capacity, with the exception of gear supporting a sports team.
- If there is a wait for something or a bottleneck, don’t mob it - form a line. And when a line has been formed do NOT try to cut it. Seriously. This is for your own health.
- When you get on a bus or step up to a subway turnstile, have your change or MetroCard ready. There’s a special circle of hell devoted to people who waste 20 seconds of everyone else’s time with their fumbling.
- Don’t ask people where you can find good “New York Pizza.” In New York, it’s just called pizza - most New Yorkers don’t even know “New York Pizza” is a thing outside New York, or that there is a “New York-style” (see Where can you get New York-style Pizza in London? and its ilk). Just go to the local corner pizza shop and help yourself; I promise it’ll have “New York-style pizza” unless it says very explicitly otherwise.
- Corollary to the above - do not say you prefer Chicago, New Haven or (God help you) California pizza. This is a direct route to a heated argument.
Magical Thinking
by Ben Tarnoff
Few novels have sought to improve America as radically as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward, 2000-1887, published in 1888. Bellamy, like Rand, used fiction to popularize a philosophy, and with comparable results: Looking Backward sold nearly half a million copies in its first decade and appeared in several languages around the world. The book found many prominent admirers, among them Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan—the latter borrowed the language of his Cross of Gold speech from the novel’s final chapter. It inspired a political movement called Nationalism and energized generations of American progressives, from populists to New Dealers. More than a century later, it remains an indispensable zeitgeist book, an X-ray of the American body politic during the violent creation of modern industrial society, when many different futures felt possible.
Looking Backward is the story of Julian West, a wealthy young Bostonian who enters a hypnotist’s trance on May 30, 1887, and wakes up 113 years, three months, and eleven days later. Dr. Leete, an articulate citizen of the new century, greets him and explains, in the first of many leaps of logic required by the reader, that the hypnosis has perfectly preserved West’s body. He hasn’t aged an hour; Boston, however, has changed nearly beyond recognition. When West goes outside, he glimpses an idyll of tree-lined streets and majestic public buildings whose only familiar features are the Charles River and the islands of the harbor, gleaming through air clear of coal smoke.
The following chapters consist mainly of expositive conversations between West and Dr. Leete—a technique beloved by science-fiction authors then and since—as the newcomer struggles to understand the enormous changes that have taken place since the nineteenth century. America is now a nearly perfect society. Prosperity is evenly distributed, people are highly educated, and crime, corruption, and poverty have disappeared. Humanity has reached “a new plane of existence.” Most miraculous is how this rebirth came about: through a bloodless social evolution, beginning in the late nineteenth century and concluding in the early twentieth. The industrial trusts of the 1880s were the first phase: they simply continued to consolidate until all of the country’s capital became the Great Trust—a single corporation, nationalized for the public benefit.
Predictably, West is skeptical. “Human nature itself must have changed very much,” he says. Not human nature, Dr. Leete replies, but “the conditions of human life,” as governed by the great social mechanism whose elaborate workings he spends the rest of the book patiently describing. As the nation is now the only employer, its citizens are its employees. For a term of twenty-four years, from ages twenty-one to forty-five, they serve in an “industrial army” that runs the economy. New recruits begin as common laborers before they select a profession; testing and training ensures that each finds the vocation best suited to his abilities. Compensation remains the same regardless of productivity, even for those too weak to work. This sum isn’t paid in dollar bills, but in nontransferable units allotted to each citizen’s “credit card,” exchangeable for clothing, food, and other necessities from state-run stores. Better workers are rewarded with promotion through the officer grades, ascending through a chain of command that culminates in the president of the United States. These positions confer prestige but hold little power. The system works like a perpetual-motion machine, with a minimum of human intervention. (...)
Predictions of the future always carry the imprint of their present, which makes them useful for understanding the past. Science fiction in particular tends to betray its age as visibly as tree trunks or residual radiocarbon. An author may imagine inventions that fail to appear—pneumatic mail, for instance—but his deeper assumptions about the parameters of the possible are what date his work most strongly.
Looking Backward reads very differently today than it did when Bellamy wrote it. Its utopian premise strains under the sobering weight of the twentieth century—the real twentieth century, the century of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The future produced nearly the opposite of what Bellamy had hoped. Large-scale social engineering led not only to utopian dreams but to genocides. Technology brought a better quality of life, but also made it easier to kill large numbers of people, whether with nuclear bombs or global warming. Bellamy expected moral progress to accelerate at the same rapid rate as science and industry; the last hundred years have made him look naive, even dystopian.
Yet what appears irrevocable in retrospect was anything but certain in 1888, and a vision that is eerily totalitarian today struck many Americans then as a plausible blueprint for a brighter tomorrow. Bellamy wasn’t blind to the inhumane aspects of modern industrial life. On the contrary: his book achieved popularity because it offered an elegant solution to the crisis of the late nineteenth century, when radically new forces remade a nation shattered by war, and set the tone for the social landscape we still live in.
Read more:
Illustration: Looking Backward, 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy
Practical Invisibility Cloaks
in 'what amounts to an array of billions of tiny relays.' Depending on the specific design of the array, the light would be bent, reflected, or skewed in different ways.
Source: "Large-area flexible 3D optical negative index metamaterial formed by nanotransfer printing"
John Rogers et al.
Nature Nanotechnology 6(7): 402-407
Results: Researchers have developed a stamp-based printing method for generating large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials that interact with light in ways not seen in nature. They've used it to make sheets of a metamaterial that measure nearly nine centimeters per side, orders of magnitude larger than was previously possible. Tests showed that this material, which bends light backward, actually has better optical properties than materials made using more complex methods.
Why it matters: Small-scale experiments suggest that metamaterials might be used to make invisibility cloaks, superhigh-resolution microscopes, and other exotic optical devices. But so far researchers have been unable to create such devices at a practical scale because metamaterials are difficult and time-consuming to make. Slow, precise methods such as electron-beam lithography have typically been used to carve intricate nanoscale patterns into the layers of metals and other components that make up these materials. The largest pieces previously produced were only a couple of hundred micrometers long.
Methods: The researchers started with the design for a metamaterial that others had produced a few years ago, using slower methods. They made a hard plastic stamp patterned with the grid stipulated by the design. Then they "inked" the stamp in an evaporation chamber by depositing several thin films: first a sacrificial layer, then layers of the metal and dielectric materials that make up the metamaterial. Finally, they set the stamp on a surface and chemically treated it to dissolve away the sacrificial layer, freeing the metamaterial from the stamp. The stamp was pulled away, leaving the metamaterial on the surface. Each stamp is reusable and inexpensive to make.
Next Steps: The researchers expect that by using more than one stamp, they will be able to make much larger metamaterial sheets. The method can also be adapted to work with other metamaterial designs, but the researchers hope other scientists will use it to make large amounts of this particular material for cloaking and other applications.
via:
More on metamaterials and cloaking: here, here and here.
Source: "Large-area flexible 3D optical negative index metamaterial formed by nanotransfer printing"John Rogers et al.
Nature Nanotechnology 6(7): 402-407
Results: Researchers have developed a stamp-based printing method for generating large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials that interact with light in ways not seen in nature. They've used it to make sheets of a metamaterial that measure nearly nine centimeters per side, orders of magnitude larger than was previously possible. Tests showed that this material, which bends light backward, actually has better optical properties than materials made using more complex methods.
Why it matters: Small-scale experiments suggest that metamaterials might be used to make invisibility cloaks, superhigh-resolution microscopes, and other exotic optical devices. But so far researchers have been unable to create such devices at a practical scale because metamaterials are difficult and time-consuming to make. Slow, precise methods such as electron-beam lithography have typically been used to carve intricate nanoscale patterns into the layers of metals and other components that make up these materials. The largest pieces previously produced were only a couple of hundred micrometers long.
Methods: The researchers started with the design for a metamaterial that others had produced a few years ago, using slower methods. They made a hard plastic stamp patterned with the grid stipulated by the design. Then they "inked" the stamp in an evaporation chamber by depositing several thin films: first a sacrificial layer, then layers of the metal and dielectric materials that make up the metamaterial. Finally, they set the stamp on a surface and chemically treated it to dissolve away the sacrificial layer, freeing the metamaterial from the stamp. The stamp was pulled away, leaving the metamaterial on the surface. Each stamp is reusable and inexpensive to make.
Next Steps: The researchers expect that by using more than one stamp, they will be able to make much larger metamaterial sheets. The method can also be adapted to work with other metamaterial designs, but the researchers hope other scientists will use it to make large amounts of this particular material for cloaking and other applications.
via:
More on metamaterials and cloaking: here, here and here.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Occupy the Tundra
A lonely vigil in remote Alaska. I'm wearing a muskox neck warmer (that is not a beard on my face) and I am a woman. The dogs are rescues. The tundra is outside of Bethel, Alaska. The day is chill. The sentiment is solid. Find your spot. Occupy it. Even if it is only your own mind. Keep this going...
Diane McEachern, assistant professor, Kuskokwim Campus of the University of Alaska.
Of Parties, Prose and Football
by Dwight Garner
“Civilization begins with distillation,” William Faulkner wrote, and in Oxford, Miss., his adopted hometown, it’s possible for a literary pilgrim to visit what’s left of his liquor cabinet.
Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s family home, is open to visitors, and in a glass case you will find a bottle of Four Roses bourbon, which he liked because it was inexpensive and easy to find. There’s his metal mint julep cup. There’s also a bottle of Harvey’s Fine Tawny Hunting Port, which he used for cooking game birds while a second bottle, for drinking, warmed in the ashes of the fire. And there are a few bottles of fine French wine, which he could afford to imbibe after winning the Nobel Prize in 1949.
A trip to view Faulkner’s spirits is the best possible way to begin a long weekend in Oxford, a town in which civilization and distillation, in all their higher forms, are revered. At no time is this more true than on fall weekends when the University of Mississippi football team is making a home stand. Never mind that the Ole Miss Rebels are in the middle of another hapless, hurts-to-watch losing season and haven’t won a Southeastern Conference title since the year the Beatles released their first LP. On home-game weekends the free-floating festivity — a kind of refined, khaki-wearing Mardi Gras — lasts for days. An old saying here goes, “Ole Miss may not win the game, but we will always win the party.”
On a recent Saturday morning in early fall, as the Rebels were preparing to play the University of Georgia Bulldogs, the place to be in Oxford, as it is before and after every home game, was the Grove, the legendary 10-acre tailgating lawn at the center of the Ole Miss campus. This is a sight to see, almost certainly the most convivial landscape in college athletics. A sea of tents in red and blue, the Ole Miss colors, are packed tightly among mature oak, magnolia and elm trees. Many of these tents are tended as carefully as summer homes. You’ll find good linen, elegant pitchers filled with chilled bloody marys, flat-screen televisions, the occasional chandelier. “Y’all behave last night?” is a pretty standard greeting. A visitor from the North finds that food on toothpicks and drinks in clear plastic cups are pressed upon his person at every turn. After a while, his person needs to sit down.
Tailgating in the Grove has been a tradition at Ole Miss since the 1950s, its rituals closely attended to. This is not a land of face- and chest-painters. Many male students wear coats, ties and loafers; female students mostly wear brightly colored cocktail dresses and more makeup than one is accustomed to seeing on a human face in daylight. The polite din is shattered, every so often, when a hoarse voice cries out, “Are you ready?” This is the beginning of the Ole Miss cheer, known as “Hotty Toddy.” Everyone within earshot yells back: “Helllll yes! Daaamn Right!” The batty, but catchy, cheer rolls on:
Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty
Who the hell are we, Hey!
Flim Flam, Bim Bam
OLE MISS BY DAMN!
Otherwise sane adults are unembarrassed to holler this out every 10 minutes or so. (...)
Amid the crowd, too, you might catch a glimpse of the University of Mississippi’s greatest sports legend, Archie Manning, a kind of secular saint in Oxford. He was Ole Miss’s starting quarterback for three years in the late 1960s and early ’70s — Bear Bryant called him the best college quarterback he’d ever seen — and he is the head of a football dynasty: his sons Peyton and Eli are, respectively, Super Bowl-winning starting quarterbacks for the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Giants. Like his father, Eli was a starting quarterback at Ole Miss; Peyton attended the University of Tennessee. (...)
Mr. Manning’s sons grew up tailgating in the Grove, before it had the recognition it does now. A magazine called Tailgater Monthly — yes, such a journal actually exists — recently named Ole Miss the No. 1 tailgating school in America. This year Newsweek called Ole Miss the most beautiful college in America, as much for its handsome student body as for its leafy campus. The writer and former Harper’s magazine editor Willie Morris, a longtime Oxford resident who died in 1999, once dilated at length on “the beauteous sorority girls for which Mississippi has always been famous.” Don’t underestimate these young women, Morris cautioned. “They are smarter and more tenacious than their sunny countenances suggest. For generations the best of these lustrous cyprinids with double names have grown up to run the Sovereign State of Mississippi, just as their great-grandmothers ran the Old Confederacy, their men dying without shoes in the snows of northern Virginia.”
Read more:
photo: William Widmer for The New York Times
In His Shoes
by Guy Trebay
This is the tale of the little stiletto that could, a shoe that in the long-ago days of the luxury-goods boom scampered to the top of a rarefied heap. It was just a handful of years ago that the name of Manolo Blahnik, a 68-year-old London cobbler born in the Canary Islands, was familiar only to hard-core fashion hunters and residents of ZIP code 10021.
This is the tale of the little stiletto that could, a shoe that in the long-ago days of the luxury-goods boom scampered to the top of a rarefied heap. It was just a handful of years ago that the name of Manolo Blahnik, a 68-year-old London cobbler born in the Canary Islands, was familiar only to hard-core fashion hunters and residents of ZIP code 10021.
Then a funny thing happened: “Sex and the City.”As man-crazy as the character Carrie Bradshaw was on the long-running series, she was just as obsessive about what Vanity Fair once termed every woman’s favorite phallic symbol, shoes. Lust for footwear seldom featured as a continuing television plot line before the show came along. Yet such was the shoe-mania of the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker that, merely by name-checking Manolo Blahnik, she made his a household name.
One sign of the familiarity American women developed with Blahnik’s classically styled shoes — so comfortable, some claimed, you could wear them to scale Everest — was a 2007 survey by Women’s Wear Daily and the trade journal Footwear News. In it, 37 percent of the 2,000 consumers canvassed about their buying habits conceded that they’d willingly bungee-jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in exchange for a lifetime supply of Manolos.
And if they had, they probably would have met Manolo on the way down.
Soon after the 2007 survey appeared, Mr. Blahnik’s name and label took a style dive, his often kittenish designs supplanted by the more aggressive efforts of a new crop of shoemakers, people like Nicholas Kirkwood, Brian Atwood and Christian Louboutin. (...)
Even among those closely associated with the iconic Blahnik shoe there was a sense that the tide had shifted. A time came, Ms. Parker said, “when Manolo wasn’t defining the aesthetic,” when Blade Runner styles took over from smart patent pumps, and wearing Manolos was almost like announcing one had turned in one’s coquette card and started taking style cues from Judge Judy.
Mr. Blahnik, notoriously indifferent to fashion trends, stayed true to an aesthetic that he said was formed in his 1950s boyhood by women like Audrey Hepburn and the ultra-elegant model Dovima, nee Dorothy Juba. “The gimmicky thing I’m not very keen on,” Mr. Blahnik said last week from London. “I’ve never been tempted to do these hideous furniture shoes.”
But fashion, as we all know, is nothing if not fickle; Heidi Klum is merely reporting fact when she notes each week on “Project Runway” that one day you’re in and the next day you’re out. So it should come as no surprise that, suddenly, signs are everywhere that Blahnik is back in style.
Read more:
photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
R.I.P., the Movie Camera: 1888-2011
by Matt Zoller Seitz
We might as well call it: Cinema as we knew it is dead.
An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”
What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.
As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world? We wouldn’t survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.” Bill Russell, ARRI’s vice president of cameras, added that: “The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared.”
Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”
Read more:
***
[ed. A little-known tidbit from Wikipedia:] Until the standardization of the projection speed of 24 frames per second (fps) for sound films between 1926 and 1930, silent films were shot at variable speeds (or "frame rates") anywhere from 12 to 26 fps, depending on the year and studio. "Standard silent film speed" is often said to be 16 fps as a result of the Lumière brothers' Cinematographé, but industry practice varied considerably; there was no actual standard. Cameramen of the era insisted that their cranking technique was exactly 16 fps, but modern examination of the films shows this to be in error, that they often cranked faster. Unless carefully shown at their intended speeds silent films can appear unnaturally fast. However, some scenes were intentionally undercranked during shooting to accelerate the action—particularly for comedies and action films.
Slow projection of a cellulose nitrate base film carried a risk of fire, as each frame was exposed for a longer time to the intense heat of the projection lamp; but there were other reasons to project a film at a greater pace. Often projectionists received general instructions from the distributors on the musical director's cue sheet as to how fast particular reels or scenes should be projected. In rare instances, usually for larger productions, cue sheets specifically for the projectionist provided a detailed guide to presenting the film. Theaters also—to maximize profit—sometimes varied projection speeds depending on the time of day or popularity of a film, and to fit a film into a prescribed time slot.
Low Profile
[ed. Interesting article, more for the insights into U.S./Saudi relations than the man himself. I share Glenn Greenwalds' suspicion that this "plot" has more hidden angles than have been revealed to date.]
by Helene Cooper
For years, Adel al-Jubeir was the playboy Saudi envoy and man about town, hosting parties on the diplomatic circuit, hobnobbing with this city’s political elite and appearing at events with media celebrities like Campbell Brown, then the White House correspondent for NBC News.
Then in 2007, amid tales of palace intrigue and feuding Saudi princes, Mr. Jubeir became the first commoner to be named the Saudi ambassador to the United States. And the youngish-by-Saudi-standards — he was 44 at the time; his predecessor was 61 — envoy for King Abdullah virtually disappeared. From the gossip columns, that is.
The Obama administration’s charge this week that an Iranian-American car salesman backed by Iranian officials hatched a plot to assassinate Mr. Jubeir using a Mexican drug cartel has, by itself, made for riveting reading. But what it has also done is to push the soft-spoken Mr. Jubeir, who had been quietly managing his own reinvention as his king’s most trusted adviser on Saudi-American relations, back into the media glare.
Mr. Jubeir has not been too thrilled with the spotlight. “No, he’s not granting any requests for interviews,” one press aide at the Saudi Embassy said on Thursday. “People keep calling and calling — he doesn’t want to talk.”
Read more:
photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
by Helene Cooper
Then in 2007, amid tales of palace intrigue and feuding Saudi princes, Mr. Jubeir became the first commoner to be named the Saudi ambassador to the United States. And the youngish-by-Saudi-standards — he was 44 at the time; his predecessor was 61 — envoy for King Abdullah virtually disappeared. From the gossip columns, that is.
The Obama administration’s charge this week that an Iranian-American car salesman backed by Iranian officials hatched a plot to assassinate Mr. Jubeir using a Mexican drug cartel has, by itself, made for riveting reading. But what it has also done is to push the soft-spoken Mr. Jubeir, who had been quietly managing his own reinvention as his king’s most trusted adviser on Saudi-American relations, back into the media glare.
Mr. Jubeir has not been too thrilled with the spotlight. “No, he’s not granting any requests for interviews,” one press aide at the Saudi Embassy said on Thursday. “People keep calling and calling — he doesn’t want to talk.”
Read more:
photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Friday, October 14, 2011
Friday Book Club - Life
[ed. Almost done with this and I have to say, this review is spot on. Who would have thought that Keef (of all people) would have it in him? Wonderful.]
by Michiko Kakutani
Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade.
“I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”
By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.
But “Life” — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.
Die-hard Stones fans, of course, will pore over the detailed discussions of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written, the birthing process of some of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mr. Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated, who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling and eloquently told.
Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages — a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak — that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm.
Read more:
photo: Patricia Wall/The New York Times
by Michiko Kakutani
For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.
Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”
By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.
But “Life” — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.
Die-hard Stones fans, of course, will pore over the detailed discussions of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written, the birthing process of some of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mr. Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated, who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling and eloquently told.
Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages — a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak — that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm.
Read more:
photo: Patricia Wall/The New York Times
(Free) Ticket to Ride
by Akiko Fujita
If you’ve ever wanted to visit Japan, this may be your chance.
In a desperate attempt to lure tourists back to a country plagued by radiation fears and constant earthquakes, the Japan Tourism Agency’s proposed an unprecedented campaign – 10,000 free roundtrip tickets.
The catch is, you need to publicize your trip on blogs and social media sites.
The number of foreign visitors to Japan has dropped drastically, since a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Power plant in March. Nearly 20,000 people have been confirmed dead, while more than 80,000 remain displaced because of radiation concerns. In the first three months following the triple disasters, the number of foreign visitors to Japan was cut in half, compared with the same time in 2010. The strong Japanese currency has made matters worse.
The tourism agency says it plans to open a website to solicit applicants interested in the free tickets. Would- be visitors will have to detail in writing their travel plans in Japan, and explain what they hope to get out of the trip. Successful applicants would pay for their own accommodation and meals. They would also be required to write a review their travel experiences, and post it online.
“We are hoping to get highly influential blogger-types, and others who can spread the word that Japan is a safe place to visit,” said Kazuyoshi Sato, with the agency.
The agency has requested more than a billion yen to pay for the tourism blitz. If lawmakers approve the funding, Sato says visitors could begin signing up as early as next April.
via:
Illustration: Katsuyuki Nishijima
In a desperate attempt to lure tourists back to a country plagued by radiation fears and constant earthquakes, the Japan Tourism Agency’s proposed an unprecedented campaign – 10,000 free roundtrip tickets.
The catch is, you need to publicize your trip on blogs and social media sites.
The number of foreign visitors to Japan has dropped drastically, since a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Power plant in March. Nearly 20,000 people have been confirmed dead, while more than 80,000 remain displaced because of radiation concerns. In the first three months following the triple disasters, the number of foreign visitors to Japan was cut in half, compared with the same time in 2010. The strong Japanese currency has made matters worse.
The tourism agency says it plans to open a website to solicit applicants interested in the free tickets. Would- be visitors will have to detail in writing their travel plans in Japan, and explain what they hope to get out of the trip. Successful applicants would pay for their own accommodation and meals. They would also be required to write a review their travel experiences, and post it online.
“We are hoping to get highly influential blogger-types, and others who can spread the word that Japan is a safe place to visit,” said Kazuyoshi Sato, with the agency.
The agency has requested more than a billion yen to pay for the tourism blitz. If lawmakers approve the funding, Sato says visitors could begin signing up as early as next April.
via:
Illustration: Katsuyuki Nishijima
First in Line
by Stan Schroeder
We’re quite sure that Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, could make a phone call and get an iPhone 4S well before it hits the stores. However, he hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s first in line in front of the Apple Store in Los Gatos, California, waiting for his iPhone 4S.
“The long wait begins. I’m first in line. The guy ahead was on the wrong side and he’s pissed,” tweeted Wozniak as he took his place in front of the store.
Wozniak is known for showing up in lines for new Apple products; he was in line for the iPhone 3GS back in 2009, and again for the iPhone 4 in 2010.
This year, he managed to get first place in line (usually, the crowd insists that he goes up front), and he’s killing time by chatting with other Apple fans and signing their iPhones.
Although he could get the latest versions of Apple products in an easier way, Wozniak claims he likes to stand in line at new product launches. “I want to get mine along with the millions of other fans,” he said to CNN.
via: Mashable
[ed. Plus, an excellent recent interview with Woz, here:]
“The long wait begins. I’m first in line. The guy ahead was on the wrong side and he’s pissed,” tweeted Wozniak as he took his place in front of the store.
Wozniak is known for showing up in lines for new Apple products; he was in line for the iPhone 3GS back in 2009, and again for the iPhone 4 in 2010.
This year, he managed to get first place in line (usually, the crowd insists that he goes up front), and he’s killing time by chatting with other Apple fans and signing their iPhones.
Although he could get the latest versions of Apple products in an easier way, Wozniak claims he likes to stand in line at new product launches. “I want to get mine along with the millions of other fans,” he said to CNN.
via: Mashable
[ed. Plus, an excellent recent interview with Woz, here:]
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)