Uemura Shoen, Japanese, 1875-1949
via:

Listening to Xanax

In my Brooklyn kitchen last December, not long after a report circulated about veterinarians using Xanax to treat post-traumatic-stress disorder in military dogs, a neighbor mentioned that she had begun to carry Xanax in her purse after her first child entered kindergarten, for relief from the uncontrollable separation anxiety she felt each time she boarded the subway and headed to work. “It was just so obvious that time was passing, and I could never get it back,” she told me. Another friend, the breadwinner in her family, started taking Xanax when she saw that she was about to get laid off, then upped her dose when she did. Around Thanksgiving, I found myself sitting on a plane next to a beautiful young FIT graduate in a rabbit-fur vest. Before takeoff, she neatly placed a pillbox on her knees, plucked out a small tablet, and swallowed it. “Control issues,” she said sweetly, giving me a gorgeous smile. As we became airborne, she reached out and clutched my hand.

If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath. In Prozac Nation, published in 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel describes a New York that today seems as antique as the one rendered by Edith Wharton. In the book, she evokes a time when twenty­somethings lived in Soho lofts, dressed for parties in black chiffon frocks, and ended the night crying on the bathroom floor. Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel to confess in print that she entertained fantasies of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive talent who died too soon, “young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.” (...)

Anxiety can also be a serious medical problem, of course. It sometimes precedes depression and often gets tangled up with it (which is why Prozac-type drugs are prescribed for anxiety too). But anxiety has a second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future. Anxious people dwell on potential negative outcomes and assume (irrational and disproportionate) responsibility for fixing the disasters they imagine will occur. “What’s going to happen?” or, more accurately, “What’s going to happen to me?” is anxiety’s quiet whisper, its horror-show crescendo the thing Xanax was designed to suppress. Three and a half years of chronic economic wobbliness, the ever-pinging of the new-e-mail alert, the insistent voices of prophet-pundits who cry that nuclear, environmental, political, or terrorist-generated disaster is certain have together turned a depressed nation into a perennially anxious one. The editors at the New York Times are running a weekly column on anxiety in their opinion section with this inarguable rationale: “We worry.”

Panicked strivers have replaced sullen slackers as the caricatures of the moment, and Xanax has eclipsed Prozac as the emblem of the national mood. Jon Stewart has praised the “smooth, calm, pristine, mellow, sleepy feeling” of Xanax, and Bill Maher has wondered whether the president himself is a user. “He’s eloquent and unflappable. He’s so cool and calm.” U2 and Lil Wayne have written songs about Xanax, and in her 2010 book Dirty Sexy Politics, John McCain’s daughter Meghan copped to dosing herself and passing out the day before the 2008 election “still in my clothes and makeup.” When news outlets began reporting that a cocktail of alcohol, Valium, and Xanax might have caused Whitney Houston’s death, it felt oddly inevitable. Coke binges are for fizzier eras; now people overdo it trying to calm down.

Anxiety can be paralyzing and life-­destroying for those who suffer it acutely. But functional anxiety, which afflicts nearly everyone I know, is a murkier thing. Not quite a disease, or even a pathology, low-grade anxiety is more like a habit. Its sufferers gather in places like New York, where relentlessness and impatience are the highest values, and in industries built on unrelenting deadlines and tightrope deals. The shrinks say that these people—urban achievers—retain a superstitious belief in the magical powers of their worry. They believe it’s the engine that keeps them going, that gives them an edge, that allows them to work weekends and at five o’clock in the morning, until at last it becomes too much. That’s where the pills come in.

by Lisa Miller, New York Magazine |  Read more:
Illustration by Lola Dupré, based on an original photograph by Shaun Kardinal 

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
   This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

 by William Shakespeare
Image: UNCG

Top Ten Myths About Introverts

[ed. Sounds about right.]

Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.

Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of people. What they need is a reason to interact. They don’t interact for the sake of interacting. If you want to talk to an Introvert, just start talking. Don’t worry about being polite.

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

Myth #4 – Introverts don’t like people.
On the contrary, Introverts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an introvert to consider you a friend, you probably have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a person of substance, you’re in.

Myth #5 – Introverts don’t like to go out in public.
Nonsense. Introverts just don’t like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.

Myth #6 – Introverts always want to be alone.
Introverts are perfectly comfortable with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They daydream. They like to have problems to work on, puzzles to solve. But they can also get incredibly lonely if they don’t have anyone to share their discoveries with. They crave an authentic and sincere connection with ONE PERSON at a time.

Myth #7 – Introverts are weird.
Introverts are often individualists. They don’t follow the crowd. They’d prefer to be valued for their novel ways of living. They think for themselves and because of that, they often challenge the norm. They don’t make most decisions based on what is popular or trendy.

Myth #8 – Introverts are aloof nerds.
Introverts are people who primarily look inward, paying close attention to their thoughts and emotions. It’s not that they are incapable of paying attention to what is going on around them, it’s just that their inner world is much more stimulating and rewarding to them.

Myth #9 – Introverts don’t know how to relax and have fun.
Introverts typically relax at home or in nature, not in busy public places. Introverts are not thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. If there is too much talking and noise going on, they shut down. Their brains are too sensitive to the neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Introverts and Extroverts have different dominant neuro-pathways. Just look it up.

Myth #10 – Introverts can fix themselves and become Extroverts.
Introverts cannot “fix themselves” and deserve respect for their natural temperament and contributions to the human race. In fact, one study (Silverman, 1986) showed that the percentage of Introverts increases with IQ.

This list was inspired by the book The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Laney.

by Jerry Brito via:
Image via Social Natural

Stories to Live With

We tell stories about the dead in order that they may live, if not in body then at least in mind—the minds of those left behind. Although the dead couldn’t care less about these stories—all available evidence suggests the dead don’t care about much—it seems that if we tell them often enough, and listen carefully to the stories of others, our knowledge of the dead can deepen and grow. If we persist in this process, digging and sifting, we had better be prepared for hard truths; like rocks beneath the surface of a plowed field, they show themselves eventually.

The story of my brother’s life is complicated by the fact that in my earliest memories there is no such thing as him or me. My brother was born one year and nine days after me, and although I was older, I have no recollection of life before he arrived. Growing up on a small family farm, we were alone in our play, and before the age of five it was always Dan and me together, sneaking strawberries from the garden, building snowmen in the yard until the darkness fell and our cheeks stung from the cold, whispering in our bunk beds at night. We were more than accomplices, much more even than friends; we were all the other had.

My going to school a year before him loosened that bond, as did overheard jokes about our paternity, for though we were close in age we soon became very different people, to the point where that was our most notable characteristic, the one other people fixated on—our difference. The contrast began but did not end with our physical appearance: his hair was red and his skin pale, while I had our mother’s olive complexion and black hair. Our personalities and interests formed as distinctly as our features. As a teenager my major obsession was sports. I trained for basketball and track in the humid clamor of the school weight room; I pored over copies of the Sporting News after I finished my homework at night. Dan focused his efforts on the wood shop, becoming skilled enough to hire on during summers with his shop teacher, with whom he built furniture and cabinets. As a wrestler, he viewed my passion for basketball as something of a retreat from manlier pursuits. Insofar as my teenage mind believed anything with bedrock conviction, it was that the fast-break style of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Showtime years was the pinnacle of team-sport artistry, and Dan responded by claiming that the Detroit Pistons—known as the Bad Boys, for their intimidating physicality and brutish antics—were his favorite team. Sports fandom, I see now, was an incidental part of his life, a wholly reactionary stance. He spent the weekends tinkering with cars, an investment of time and energy that confounded me, since he would smash them during races at the county fair each August, undoing all his hard work in a few loops around the track.

Our divergent life choices after graduation surprised no one, each of us serving as a foil for the other. He entered the blue-collar workforce, installing fiber-optic cable, while I, sensitive and brooding, went to college thinking I’d become a writer. People no longer joked about how different we were. After a certain point, it was too obvious to be funny.

by Philip Connors, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:
Image: Balloons above the Rio Grande in Alberquerque. Photography by mnchilemom, vi Flickr.

Fiona Apple, Elvis Costello

The Last Drop

Water is often seen as the most basic and accessible element of life, and seemingly the most plentiful. For every gallon in rivers or lakes, fifty more lie buried in vast aquifers beneath the surface of the earth. Yet at least since the cities of ancient Sumeria went to war over control of their rivers—long before tales of Moses parting the Red Sea or the Flood described in the Bible—water has been a principal source of conflict. (The word “rivals” even has it roots in fights over water, coming from the Latin rivalis, for “one taking from the same stream as another.”) By 2050, there will be at least nine billion people on the planet, the great majority of them in developing countries. If water were spread evenly across the globe, there might be enough for everyone. But rain often falls in the least desirable places at the most disadvantageous times. Delhi gets fewer than forty days of rain each year—all in less than four months. In other Indian cities, the situation is worse. Somehow, though, the country has to sustain nearly twenty per cent of the earth’s population with four per cent of its water. China has less water than Canada—and forty times as many people. With wells draining aquifers far faster than they can be replenished by rain, the water table beneath Beijing has fallen nearly two hundred feet in the past twenty years.

Most of the world’s great civilizations grew up around rivers, and few forces have so clearly shaped the destiny of human populations. When full and flowing, rivers have brought prosperity to the cities and nations they feed. Harnessing the power of a major river has been a signature of progress at least since Rome built its first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, more than two thousand years ago. New York, London, and Rome would have disappeared long ago without the Hudson, the Thames, and the Tiber. In the twenty-first century, though, no river can satisfy the demands of the world’s biggest cities. The fourteen million residents of New Delhi consume nine hundred million gallons of freshwater each day; the city supplies nearly seven hundred million gallons from rivers and reservoirs, but more than a third of it is lost to leaks within the ten-thousand-kilometre system of dilapidated pipes and pumping stations. Some of the rest is siphoned off by an increasingly brazen water mafia, which then sells it to people in slums like Kesum Purbahari who are supposed to get it for free.

When you can’t get enough water from the surface of the earth, there are really only two alternatives: pray for rain or start to dig. In India, Africa, China, and much of the rest of the developing world, people are digging as they never have before. Nearly two billion people rely on wells for their water, some of which is easily accessible. Far more lies trapped in the pores of rocks, or buried hundreds of metres below tons of ancient shale and metamorphic debris. Sturdy drills and cheap new pumps have made much of that water available—liberating millions of farmers from centuries of dependence on rain. The freedom comes at a cost, though, because once groundwater is gone it is often gone for good.

There were two million wells in India thirty years ago; today, there are twenty-three million. As the population grows, the freshwater available to each resident dwindles, and people have no choice but to dig deeper. Drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic can begin to seep in. When that happens, an aquifer is ruined forever. Wells throughout the country have become useless. Brackish water has even infiltrated parts of Punjab, the northern state that is India’s most important agricultural region. As sources dry up and wells are abandoned, farmers have turned on each other and on themselves. Indian newspapers are filled with accounts of fights between states or neighbors over access to lakes and reservoirs, and of “suicide farmers,” driven to despair by poverty, debt, and often by drought. There have been thousands of such suicides in the past few years.

by Michael Specter, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Image via:

Social Graph vs. Social Class

[ed. A companion article with less emphasis on the societal implications of social networks and more focus on individual branding effects can be found here:]

I’ve hated the term social graph since Facebook first seized upon it in 2007 to try to legitimate and intellectualize their project of subsuming people’s social lives. But it turns out the term, which describes the map of connections sustained by a network, may be useful in drawing a distinction between the sort of social organization that social media serve to reinforce and the class-based analyses they work to prevent.

Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a network, in which individual “nodes” define themselves (and their worth) in terms of their difference from other nodes. Each individual’s value lies in developing and expressing that difference, finding comparative advantage relative to others. There has to be something unique that you provide to make you worth linking to, though that uniqueness may consist of the unique access you provide to a bunch of other people as well as the unique information you are in a position to supply. At any rate, establishing connections to others serves to spread awareness of that difference, meaning that the relations charted in that network (aka the social graph) draw lines of competition as well as of mere affiliation.

The connections between people are not uniformly reciprocal; the attention and information flowing along the link between people is not even or balanced. Some are followers, some are followed. Some gain value from their connections given their placement in society to make profitable use of what they glean from the network, whereas others can be relatively taken advantage of by their connections, giving up valuable information (possibly inadvertently) while reaping little of its benefits. Networks allow for co-optation as much as cooperation.

All this means that individuals in the network are faced with an ongoing tactical situation. They are under pressure to constant innovate the nature of their identity in the network to find new advantages, invent new differences, propagate new bases for how they can be judged to their advantage and new implied hierarchies to dominate (e.g. “I’m the person with the coolest Deep Purple bootleg blog”; “I’m the quickest to retweet that post”; “I invented a meme that combines Deleuze passages with pictures of Rihanna”; etc.). They also need to make sure they are establishing the right sorts of connection and managing them appropriately so that some or all of its value accrues to them. Given the nature of the value of communication and the sort of consumerist innovation that goes on in manipulating language and symbols (making memes, inventing styles, etc.), the value of virality (or of fashionability or of novelty or what ever you want to call it) is constantly being produced in networks but is not so easily captured. Networks incubate immaterial labor and Virnoesque virtuosity, in which people “perform their own linguistic faculties” to create social value. Networks can circulate that value, which itself is a kind of productive process adding more value. But networks disguise agency; the collective production of value through network effects and the like make it hard to determine whether any individual involved with the processes (which are ongoing, especially with smartphones serving as immaterial labor gleaners) are being exploited.

 by Rob Horning, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

The Hunger Games

Fans give the three-fingered salute of District 12. The gesture is one of admiration, meaning thanks or goodbye to one’s beloved. (photo: Doug Kline / © 2012 PopCultureGeek.com)

[ed. For a different perspective (more cinematic than sociological) read this:]

I was certain I was going to hate it. All of my four kids have been fans of the series of books by Suzanne Collins since before they were cool; therefore when the movie was announced, we all knew the midnight screening on the night of release was a must-do.

But in the run-up to last night’s trip to the IMAX theater, the reviews I read and heard helped confirm my feeling that this would be a disgusting movie: violent, gratuitous in every way, repulsive to my social conscience.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

I tend to approach these cultural phenomena with a concern that my comfort level will be jolted. What I should be concerned about is what these phenomena say about our culture, and in the case of The Hunger Games, what it says about the generation that elevated the story to its current status. With an eye to the latter, I drove home early this morning with a deep satisfaction that my kids were smarter than I was at their age, and that their generation understands something mine did not.

First: yes, the movie is violent, and disturbingly so. The story is one about a future world in which a wealthy ruling class dominates a world that it is linked to, but separate from, itself through overwhelming police and military power, and entertainment that both enthralls and intimidates the underclasses. The focus of the story is an annual gladiatorial ritual in which representatives from the “districts” under domination give up children to a tournament of slaughter and death. Yes, this movie is based around images of children killing each other.

It is a valid question to ask: why must we tell stories that constantly elevate the level of violence necessary to grab our attention? Why is it now necessary to portray children killing other children, and children dying by each others’ hands? This is indeed an important question for our society to wrestle with. But more importantly, we should direct our moralizing to the question the film itself seeks to ask: why are we satisfied to be part of a society that finds it necessary to feed upon its young?

by Steven D. Martin, On Being Blog |  Read more:

Isley Brothers

Aelita Andre, Coral Nebula, acrylic & mixed media on canvas.
via:

The Tyranny of a Dog's Turds

The Marine Conservation Society has reported a large increase in the volume of dog excrement found on British beaches wrapped in bags: for the UK as a whole, a rise of 11% in a single year, 2010 to 2011; for Scotland, the figure is 71%. From south of the border, devo max suddenly seems insufficient.

Most people's reaction to such a statistic is, I imagine, one of uncomplicated revulsion. For dog owners the thought of dog shit evokes a mixture of feelings: revulsion, naturally, but also shame, frustration, self-reproach – how did I allow myself to get into this situation? – and in the end, resignation.

For any dog owner, shit is a major issue, but even among ourselves the subject is hard to discuss. Hence the variety of language, euphemistic, infantilising or loftily medical – all the usual nonsense, plus a few dog-only ones: doggy-doo, business, mess ... This is the opposite of linguistic richness. In the park, we exchange discreet nods and unfinished sentences when an owner has not noticed their dog doing its duty – "Oh look, he's, umm ..." Then, with a display of gratitude, the owner rushes to the spot, pulls out a bag (the fancy bespoke article, lightly scented and biodegradable, or a ragged Tesco carrier), picks the stuff up, and drops it in the nearest bin.

The gratitude is real; though to non-owners it may sometimes seem that the world is drowning in turds, the imperative to pick up your dog's shit has been hammered into most dog owners. Good citizenship aside, to fail to locate your dog's excrement is a source of shame – you're making all of us look bad.

So it is that on winter evenings I find myself grubbing around in darkness, groping for a stray turd by the light of my mobile phone. Sometimes you give up on your own dog's droppings and take what you can find – there's usually something, and that way you've at least left the net level of faeces unchanged. In autumn, wet earth and piles of leaves turn the hunt into an agony; we bless the colder, drier weather which brings the tell-tale column of steam.

by Robert Hanks, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photo: Toby Melville/PA

Invisible Man

Chinese artist Liu Bolin, painted from head-to-toe, stands suitably camouflaged in front of Freedom Tower, where the Twin Towers once stood, in New York. Hiding In New York, his latest exhibition, has just opened at the Eli Klein Gallery in the city.

Other works displayed in Liu's fourth solo exhibition include the artist camouflaged in front of panda toys; standing in the Yellow River in China; and hiding in a supermarket surrounded by Coca-Cola bottles and other top brands.

Previous work has included him blending into an iconic red British telehpone box and standing attention next to a cannon.

Liu claims his art makes a statement about his place in society and sees himself as an outsider whose artistic efforts are not appreciated, especially in his home country.

He has previously said: 'Some people call me the invisible man, but for me it's what is not seen in a picture which is really what tells the story.

'After graduating from school I couldn't find suitable work and I felt there was no place for me in society.

'I experienced the dark side of society, without social relations, and had a feeling that no one cared about me, I felt myself unnecessary in this world.

'From that time, my attitude turned from dependence into revolting against the system.'

by Graham Smith, Mail Online | More pictures here:

Airport Security Since 9/11: More Harm Than Good?

It has been many years since commercial flying was a glamorous experience, especially for those squashed in economy class. But the experience changed for the worse after the attacks on America on September 11th 2001. The exact nature of the weapons used by the terrorists to take control of the four planes will probably never be known, but their effectiveness jolted governments into much closer consideration of their airport-security procedures.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was established two months later to improve security across America's transport systems: luggage screening was widely increased; cockpit doors were strengthened; and passengers were refused entry to the flight deck. In the years since, authorities have responded to further attempted attacks by adding new layers of security. Thanks to Richard Reid's mid-flight efforts to detonate a bomb in his shoe in late 2001, many passengers now have to remove their shoes when passing through security so they can be separately scanned. The arrest in August 2006 of a group of would-be bombers intending to blow up planes using liquid explosives led to the banning of liquids, aerosols and gels of any significant size from hand luggage. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's December 2009 effort to blast a hole in a plane using explosives hidden in his underwear led indirectly to the roll out of full-body scanning machines at numerous airports.

Much has been done, and much money has been spent. So this debate is considering whether the changes made to security have actually made the situation worse—that they annoy passengers is not really in question. Are we less safe now than we were before 9/11? Many regular flyers will have their own stories of indignities suffered at the hands of airport-security staff; and the media revels in tales of the young, the old and the infirm being taken aside for intimate and humiliating searches for banned items. What sensible end does this serve, ask the critics. The whole apparatus of security at airports is sometimes derided as theatre, designed to give the appearance of security, while actually distracting attention and funding from other ways of keeping bombs and bad people off planes. Perhaps more money should be spent on intelligence gathering to try to ensure would-be terrorists don't even make it to the airport, or get jobs in sensitive roles. However, there has been no successful attack on a plane since 9/11, so perhaps we should be ready to give credit to the procedures now in place. They are responses to real threats, many of which the public will never know about, and they require passengers to suffer minor hassles for the good of all. Surveys show that passengers will accept more inconvenience if it makes them feel safer, and airport security does this.

Bruce Schneier, a security expert, is tasked with defending the motion. He says that neither the TSA nor its foreign counterparts have foiled a single terrorist plot in ten years, and that the security procedures put in place since 9/11 are not sufficient to stop well-financed, well-organised terrorists. He condemns developments in airport security as backward looking and overly specific, and argues for a return to the style of security in place before the 9/11 attacks, with money spent instead on investigation and emergency response.

He is opposed by Kip Hawley, who was the head of the TSA between July 2005 and January 2009. Mr Hawley defends the outfit, and says the ten years of safe flying it has overseen show that its methods are indeed working. He admits that the cost to passengers of increases in airport security has been great, but says these procedures are much more adaptable than their forebears, and that a programme made up of multiple layers of security, such as is being developed now, stands a greater chance of success.

Over the next ten days our guests will present further arguments and, I hope, answer the points made by their opponents. But the result of this debate rests in your hands: do not be afraid to vote immediately, as you can change your mind at any time. And once you have cast your vote, please add your voice to the debate and explain your decision. This debate may be American in tone—that is where the 9/11 attacks took place; that is where our debaters are from—but I would ask those of you familiar with airport security in other countries to take part with gusto, and make your experiences and opinions known.

 

by Adam Barnes, The Economist Debates |  Read more:

Why Women Still Can't Enjoy Sex

Slut. I used to fixate on the unfairness of the accusation, particularly given that it seemed to be issued with no particular rhyme or reason other than the accuser’s desire to be hurtful. But recent events (including Limbaugh’s outburst) have made me realize that this isn’t about the kind of sex women are having or even the amount. It’s about the fundamental view that women should have only a peripheral relationship to sex and certainly no active engagement with it – and that these two things will determine if she’s a Lady worthy of respect or a Slut deserving of contempt.

In the subconscious social view, Ladies are naturally disengaged from their sexuality in any kind of human way at all. They view their sexuality peripherally through the gauzy veil of fluttering, dreamlike vistas and romantic fantasies and never, ever as a visceral event involving sweat, dirt and animalistic howls. Those who seek to take charge of their sexuality by, say, accessing birth control aren’t responsible adults making responsible decisions about their future – rather, they’re bitches on heat planning (planning!) grunting sexual encounters to satisfy their craven, unladylike lust for dick. And they pose a threat to masculinity because, given their addiction to birth control, they might now sleep with someone who’s not you.

You can screw these Sluts – but how can you respect them when they have no respect for themselves?

But it’s not just extreme conservatives who diminish women this way. Discomfit around women and sex permeates our culture, and the act itself has become a darkly comic battleground. Otherwise fair-minded women perpetuate the idea of Woman as Gatekeeper, warding off the advances of men and only buckling out of necessity – or worse, pity. This has less to do with women’s natural disdain for sex and more to do with a cultural expectation of how women should participate sexually.

Rather than a fulfilling pursuit in and of itself, Ladies should view sex as a gift to be bestowed upon a worthy suitor. It’s something that should vaguely interest them because it feels good (particularly under the masterful hand that guides them) but its role pales in comparison to the ultimate objective.

Love.

On the fraught path to love, sex is something ladies agree to, not something they do, and those of us who engage too excessively with the latter are pityingly accused of demeaning ourselves in order to find affection, or satisfy our own tragic lack of self esteem.

The conversation is lost in the problematic discussions of double standards. Women become Sluts when they engage in the same kind of behaviour as men, who are apparently called ‘studs’ although I haven’t heard that used since about 1983. But a double standard implies two different treatments of the same thing, and the core issue is that men and women at a base level still aren’t viewed as being the same. Worse, women are just as guilty (if not more so, on occasion) of depicting other women as Sluts in order to leverage themselves into the role of Ladies.

And so the accusation of ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ or ‘prostitute’ is less about how much sex women are supposedly having and how we judge it differently to men, and more to do with how much we demonise women’s enjoyment of sex in general. Think about that for a moment. In order to diminish women in our culture, we accuse them of enjoying sex. Worse, we accuse them of wanting it.

by Clementine Ford, DailyLife |  Read more:
image via:

Lucho Bermúdez

Luis Ricardo Falero
via:

Image: 1st Class, 2011, Xu Bing’s tiger-skin rug made with 500,000 “1st Class” brand cigarettes at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

In his fascinating new book 1493, Charles C. Mann writes about the unprecedented global movements of people, animals, plants, raw materials, and products after the Europeans colonized the Americas, transforming culture, society, and ecology around the world. From the Andes to the Philippines, Spain to China, Africa to Virginia, Mann charts the trans-continental movement of slaves, soldiers, pirates, traders, earthworms, honeybees, potatoes, chocolate, silk, silver, rubber, and viruses too numerous and creepy to count, to mention but some of the subjects in his lively discussion. Among this litany of paradigm-shifting products, though, one—native to the Americas and quickly dispersed to Europe, Asia, and Africa—was particularly addictive. Tobacco, Mann writes, represented “the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty.”

Thus was launched the cult of the cigarette, fittingly described by Richard Klein in his book Cigarettes Are Sublime as “the first modern object,” inspiring everything from opera (think Carmen) to advertising and package design that aimed to advance subliminal seduction to new levels.

Now comes Chinese artist Xu Bing, who had become, to put it mildly, obsessed with tobacco during his time in the American South, first as an artist-in-residence at Duke a decade ago and more recently preparing his current show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Tobacco Project. Xu Bing, who currently has works using the medium of 9/11 dust on West 22nd Street and Chinese calligraphy at the Morgan Library, harnesses the cigarette as surface, sculptural material, and globally distributed graphic-design project. He created objects ranging from a tiger-skin-pattern rug made of more than half a million cigarettes standing on end; to a 440-pound compressed block of tobacco with the raised text “Light as Smoke”; to books made out of tobacco leaves printed with texts and sometimes including tobacco beetles; to trading cards for his “Puff Choice” brand; to a specially made long cigarette burned on a reproduction of a 12-century Chinese scroll.

by Robin Cembalest, LMPS |  Read more:

Hello, Cruel World

The 1.7 million members of the Class of 2011 witnessed, within the four-year span of their college careers, one of the greatest bull markets in United States history and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Last spring, they shed their caps and gowns and joined a kind of B.A. bread line. Unemployment among recent liberal-arts graduates, at 9.4 percent, was higher than the national average, and student-loan debt, at an average of nearly $25,000, had reached record levels. Worse still, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that only 5 of the 20 jobs projected to grow fastest over the coming decade would require a bachelor’s degree. Though the statistics still show that a college degree correlates with both higher income and lower unemployment in the long run, diplomas didn’t seem very valuable when they were handed out last May.

Graduating seniors at schools like Drew University in Madison, N.J., have felt the stresses of the job market acutely. For all its merits — including a much-admired theater department and a prestigious Wall Street internship program — Drew ranks 94th among 178 private liberal-arts colleges on U.S. News & World Report’s annual list. The middle of the collegiate pack is not where you want to be when you’re competing for a diminishing number of entry-level jobs.

Members of Drew’s Class of ’11 are typical of their peers nationally in that their success in the job market seems to have less to do with their G.P.A.’s or their persistence and more to do with their family connections, fields of study, networking skills and luck. How else to account for the unemployed Phi Beta Kappa waiting by a silent phone? Or the anthropology major who is forgoing grad school to become a dog groomer? Or the English major who can’t earn enough money to make the monthly payment on her $128,000 student loan? (Drew is unusually expensive; tuition plus room and board run more than $50,000 a year.) Equals on campus, the 309 members of Drew’s Class of ’11 are already being divided into the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Seven months after graduation, The Times Magazine spoke with 226 of them about their rough journey into the real world.

by Nathaniel Penn, NY Times |  Read more:

The Art and Science of Violin Making

The Violin Maker from Dustin Cohen on Vimeo.

Sam Zygmuntowicz is a world-renowned luthier, or maker of stringed instruments. Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma play his instruments. In 2003, a violin he made for Isaac Stern sold at auction for $130,000–the highest price ever for an instrument by a living luthier. To sum up Zygmuntowicz’s stature as a builder of fine instruments, Tim J. Ingles, director of musical instruments for Sotheby’s, told Forbes magazine: “There are no more than six people who are at his level.”

Zygmuntowicz is the subject of a 2007 book by John Marchese called The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop. In one passage, Marchese writes about the mysterious acoustical qualities of the violin, which he likens to a magic box:

The laws that govern the building of this box were decided upon a short time before the laws of gravity were discovered, and they have remained remarkably unchanged since then. It is commonly thought that the violin is the most perfect acoustically of all musical instruments. It is quite uncommon to find someone who can explain exactly why. One physicist who spent decades trying to understand why the violin works so well said that it was the world’s most analyzed musical instrument–and the least understood.

The most famous, and fabled, stringed instruments are those that were made in Cremona, Italy, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries by Antonio Stradivari and a handful of other masters. In Zygmuntowicz’s workshop in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, there is a bumper sticker that says, “My other fiddle is a Strad.” Behind the joke lies a serious point. Zygmuntowicz wants great musicians to use his instruments–not because they are cheaper than a Stradivarius, but because they are better. He’s trying to break a barrier that has been firmly in place for centuries. “I call it the ‘Strad Ceiling,’” he told NPR in 2008. “You know, if someone has a Strad in their case, will they play your fiddle?”

Although Joshua Bell owns a Zygmuntowicz, he mostly calls on the luthier to make fine adjustments to his Stradivarius. But Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet told Forbes that he actually prefers his Zygmuntowicz to his 1686 Stradivarius in certain situations. “In a large space like Carnegie Hall,” he said, “the Zygmuntowicz is superior to my Strad. It has more power and punch.” In spite of the mystique that surrounds Stradivari and the other Cremona masters, Zygmuntowicz sees no reason why a modern luthier couldn’t make a better instrument. “There isn’t any ineffable essence,” he told the The New York Times earlier this year, “only a physical object that works better or worse in a variety of circumstances.”

via: Open Culture