Beat Boutique

On February 5, 2012, the quasi-maybe-sorta-sometimes-revolutionary pop star M.I.A. performed alongside Madonna at the Super Bowl half-time show. Despite the fact that M.I.A.’s music interrogates ideas about revolt, nationalism, and the distribution of wealth (“Pull up the people. / Pull up the poor,” goes the chorus of the first song on her major-label debut, Arular), and that her early albums were embraced by indie audiences, there was a time when M.I.A.’s appearance alongside one of the most famous people in the world, at an event that roughly half of the American population was watching, would have been perceived as “the ultimate sell-out move.” But in an article on the website Grantland about M.I.A.’s performance, Hua Hsu begged to differ. “[Today], we’ve grown accustomed to how deeply entangled the interests of art and commerce have become,” he wrote (thinking, no doubt, of such cultural phenomena as 30 Rock and Lady Gaga), “the way a sitcom can be meta and experimental while convincing you that you desperately want a McFlurry.” To him, M.I.A.’s Super Bowl appearance (which ended, now infamously, with her flipping off the camera) was hopeful and exciting, as it signaled the end of the previous generation’s simplistic ideas about the relationship between art and commerce, and trumpeted a new cultural reality: “the impossibility of selling out.” (...)

A couple of years ago, I was working as a production assistant for a television newsmagazine show. If you have ever been on a film or TV set before, you know production assistant is industry jargon for “person who does whatever nobody else really wants to do,” so you will understand that a task I enjoyed infinitely more than steam-cleaning the host’s pants suit or picking up fancy lunches for the show’s guests or logging surprisingly vast amounts of archived B-roll following a former member of the Monkees around his stately New England home, was scouring the production library for background music.

Usually it would work like this: an editor would describe to me some images or sequences she needed music for (“man on a mountain peak at sunset”), and I’d plug certain mood-related keywords (motivational/inspirational) into the online archive for which our company had paid access, which in this case was an L.A.-based library called Killer Tracks. I’d put a few of my chosen tracks on a flash drive and walk it over to the editor, who’d usually send me back with more-specific guidelines (“I want something more dramatic than ‘Extraordinary Determination,’ but with slightly less gusto than ‘Overcoming Challenges’”), at which point I’d continue to scour and eventually hit upon a winner (“Follow Me Up,” perhaps, which the site describes as “inspirational, indie/alternative rock” and has for cover art a distressed photo of a colonial-era drum corps with the title “Motivational 8” scrawled in a graffiti-inspired typeface).

Library music (sometimes referred to as “production music” or “stock music”) generally refers to music that has been composed and recorded for commercial purposes and which is licensed not through the composer but the library for which it has been recorded. This means it is much easier and cheaper to use in a movie or TV show than a hit song, which requires copyright clearance from the songwriter and record label, and, in some cases, separate clearances depending on the countries in which the work will be screened. Library music cuts out the middleman, but it also means that most of it can be licensed to any number of projects, so occasionally while scanning through the Killer Tracks archives I’d get this uncanny “Where have I heard that before?” twinge, until I realized it was from, say, a local furniture commercial, or maybe the corporate-diversity video my colleagues and I sat through last week.

For anyone who keeps up with pop culture, browsing through certain corners of the Killer Tracks catalog is like traipsing through a bizarre shadow world full of easily identifiable doppelgängers. Songs for Shady Living features a Toby Keith look-alike on its cover and such instant classics as “I Pulled a Muscle (Loving You)”; Soul Pop includes Amy Winehouse–inspired jams and a beehive-coiffed cover model; and, with artwork that showcases a hand-drawn bird and a dead ringer for Ellen Page, Sweet & Quirky seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the fey indie-pop on the Juno soundtrack. My time spent browsing the Killer Tracks catalog sometimes brought on flashbacks of Dr. Thunder, the cheap, off-brand soda that my family used to buy at Walmart when I was growing up—just unique enough to evade a lawsuit, but conveniently blatant enough that consumers knew exactly what was being ripped off.

Even more surreal to me were the moments when the pop world explicitly intersected with the library-music world. Killer Tracks features a special series called “REALITY by C. Franke,” which it describes as “a new reality music library from composer Christopher Franke (The Amazing Race, Supernanny, Big Brother, former member of Tangerine Dream).” What sort of world was this—in which a credit from Supernanny had more cache than being in a legendary kraut-rock band?

Library music fascinated me. At the time I was an aspiring music critic (aspiring here being industry jargon for “unpaid”), and we critics love to ponder the conflicts between things like art and commerce, or authenticity and artifice. Forget the glittery, Gaga-inspired pop music topping the charts; I could not imagine a kind of music more squarely on the latter side of both those divides—more blatantly commercial and in conflict with the rebellious, individualistic spirit of the punk and indie rock I’d grown up on—than library music.

It would be another year or so before I realized that I was completely wrong.

by Lindsay Zoladz, The Believer |  Read more:
Illustration by Tony Millionaire

Libor

The rates in question — the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and the Euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor — are used to determine the borrowing rates for consumers and companies, including some $10 trillion in mortgages, student loans and credit cards. The rates are also linked to an estimated $700 trillion market in derivatives, which banks buy and sell on a daily basis. If these rates are rigged, markets are rigged — against bank customers, like everyday borrowers, and against parties on the other side of a bank’s derivatives deals, like pension funds.  (...)

The evidence, cited by the Justice Department — which Barclays agreed is “true and accurate” — is damning. “Always happy to help,” one employee wrote in an e-mail after being asked to submit false information. “If you know how to keep a secret, I’ll bring you in on it,” wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to an attempt to align their strategies for mutual gain.

If that’s not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?

Rigged Rates, Rigged Markets - NY Times

Of Feta Cheese and Finance

It has been years since anyone said anything positive about the Greek economy. But as one Greek economist recently told me, there’s a local saying that when a spring is pressed down hardest, it can spring back the fastest. Let’s consider the country’s natural resources, or at least two of them. Feta cheese, which is increasingly popular throughout the world, is mandated by an E.U. ruling to come from Greece. The country also harvests arguably the best olives for making olive oil. Yet somehow Greece has only 28 percent of the global feta market and a mere 4 percent share of the international olive-oil industry.

How is this possible? In the last decade or so, companies in the United States, France, Denmark and elsewhere flouted the feta ruling and invested in their own food-science research and manufacturing equipment. They subsequently turned the salty, crumbly cheese into spreadable, grillable, fat-free and shelf-stable forms. In Italy and Spain, small olive-oil producers merged into globally competitive conglomerates and replaced presses with more efficient centrifugal technology. The two countries now provide nearly all the world’s supply. And the Greeks, despite their numerous inherent advantages, remain in the least profitable part of the supply chain, exporting raw materials at slim margins. (...)

Consulting firms are constantly issuing utopian national-economic strategies. What makes the McKinsey plan stand out is that it feels plausible. The greatest returns may come from investing in things the Greeks already know how to do — no matter how distressed or unloved they have become. This could have a significant impact. Greece is a small country with 11 million people and 5 million workers. Reasonable success in a few sectors could create decent jobs and more tax revenue. Greece could start to grow again.

The biggest challenge to this plan involves confronting a more distressing aspect of the Greek economy. It’s hard to believe now, but Greece outpaced the average European growth rate for much of the last 60 years. Its farmers turned bombed-out fields into modestly productive farms. The government rapidly shifted parts of the country from an agrarian economy into an industrial one that developed specialties in construction materials — concrete, aluminum, rebar — and generic drugs. Greece also benefited greatly from the rapid growth in global trade. Greece is now responsible for the largest shipping fleet in the world. No other nation besides Japan even comes close.

Yet Greece still joined the euro zone as the second-poorest country in Western Europe. That’s because the Greek economic miracle came during some disastrous governance from both left-leaning leaders and an anticommunist dictatorship. As often happens with unstable governments, a winner-take-all system developed in which new officials and private-sector cronies tried to capture as much money as they could during their time in office. Nikos Ventouris, an economist at Greece’s independent Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, told me that during these postwar decades, the incentive structure went upside down. Business leaders learned that they could make a whole lot more money a lot more quickly through contracts with a “friend” in the government (who wasn’t particular about things like skewed labels) than by trying to compete globally.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration by Peter Oumanski

Rainbow Roll (by greentealover79)

Source: Flickr / ilovegreentea

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The ‘Busy’ Trap

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

by Tim Kreider, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brecht Vandenbroucke

Rob Hann
Rice, California
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Can you hear me now?
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A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

[ed. Libor, the inter-bank lending rate that affects a host of financial instruments (e.g. futures, variable rate mortgages, currencies, etc. It was announced today that the chairman of Barclays has resigned.]

This is a huge story:

On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It’s been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:

Barclays employees agreed to manipulate the rates they submitted to the banking authority that oversees the daily Libor report for seemingly anyone who asked them to monkey with it: senior Barclays officials concerned that the bank would look weak if it reported too high a borrowing rate; interest rate swap traders trying to improve Barclays' derivatives trading position; even former Barclays traders begging for favors. We're talking naked, blatant manipulation. Here's one exchange cited in the DOJ filing:

Trader: "Can you pls continue to go in for 3m Libor at 5.365 or lower, we are all very long cash here in ny."

Libor rate submitter: "How long?"

Trader: "Until the effective date goes over year end (i.e. turn drops out) if possible."

Submitter: "Will do my best sir."

This is unbelievable, shocking stuff. A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

How William Faulkner Tackled Race — and Freed the South From Itself

A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the “greatest Southern novel ever written,” by a decisive margin — and the poll was conducted while looking back on a century in which a disproportionate number of the best American books were Southern — so to say that this novel requires no introduction is just to speak plainly.

Of course, it’s the kind of book a person would put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident, in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex (unintelligible, a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always maintained), “Absalom, Absalom!” partakes of what the critic Irving Howe called “a fearful impressiveness,” the sort that “comes when a writer has driven his vision to an extreme.” It may represent the closest American literature came to producing an analog for “Ulysses,” which influenced it deeply — each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history — and like “Ulysses,” it lives as a book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.

But good writers don’t look for impressedness in their readers — it’s at best another layer of distortion — and “greatness” can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason so many have turned away from “Ulysses” over the last near-hundred years is that they can’t read it without a suffocating sense of each word’s cultural importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to ask is, What happens with “Absalom, Absalom!” if we set aside its laurels and apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?

A prose of exceptional vividness, for one thing. The same few passages, in the very first pages, remind me of this — they’re markings on an entryway — sudden bursts of bristly adjective clusters. The September afternoon on which the book opens in a “dim hot airless” room is described as “long still hot weary dead.” If you’ve ever taken a creative-writing workshop, you’ve been warned never to do this, pile up adjectives, interpose descriptive terms between the reader’s imagination and the scene. But here something’s different. Faulkner’s choices are so precise, and his juxtaposition of the words so careful in conditioning our sense reception, that he doesn’t so much solve as overpower the problem. The sparrows flying into the window trellis beat their wings with a sound that’s “dry vivid dusty,” each syllable a note in a chord he’s forming. The Civil War ghosts that haunt the room are “garrulous outraged baffled.”

The rules Faulkner doesn’t ignore in this novel he tends to obliterate. The plot, for instance. There is none. He tells us on the third page (in italics) pretty much everything that will happen in the book, actionwise. If you ever feel lost, you can refer back to it, a little not-even-paragraph that begins, “It seems that this demon — his name was Sutpen”

A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is keeping things from falling together too soon.” What we discover, though, on advancing into the novel’s maze, is that Faulkner has given nothing away, not of the things he most values. He’s not concerned with holding us in suspense over the unearthing of events but in keeping us transfixed, as he goes about excavating the soil beneath them, and tracing their post-mortem effects (embodied, perhaps, by the worm that comes to light in a shovelful of dirt, “doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again”). The nightmare of the Southern past exists — an accomplished thing. To delve into the nature of the tragedy is the novel’s drama.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, NY Times |  Read more:

Karen Hollingsworth, Beach Read
Oil on canvas
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thomas saliot. Walking Kubrick.
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The Medication Generation

When I was a college freshman in the late 1990s, antidepressants were everywhere. Prozac was appearing on magazine covers, and I'd just seen my first commercial for Paxil on TV. Halfway through the semester, I was laid out by a prolonged anxiety attack and found myself in the school's campus health center, tearfully telling a newly minted psychiatry resident about my feelings of panic and despair. Given the spirit of the times, it wasn't a complete surprise when she sent me away a few minutes later with a prescription and a generous supply of small cardboard boxes full of beautiful blue pills, free samples dropped off on campus by a company rep.

The school psychiatrist didn't suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a "med check" every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working.

Work they did. My dread burned off like valley fog in the sun, and my tears dried up as decisively as if someone had turned off a spigot. Soon I felt less anxious and more sociable than I could ever remember being.

When I started using antidepressants, I didn't know anyone else my age who was taking them. Within a few years, I felt hard-pressed at times to find someone who wasn't. Antidepressants and other psychiatric medications went mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s, and my generation became the first to use these drugs in significant numbers as adolescents and young adults.

Young people are medicated even more aggressively now, and intervention often starts younger. In children, as in adults, antidepressants and medications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are often used continuously for years. These trends have produced a novel but fast-growing group—young people who have known themselves longer on medication than off it. (...)

Like me, most young adults who take antidepressants have felt relief from symptoms. But there are several aspects of the experience of growing up on antidepressants that should give us pause.

First, using antidepressants when you're young raises tough questions of personal identity. Adults who take these drugs often report that the pills turn them back into the people they were before depression obscured their true selves. But for adolescents whose identity is still under construction, the picture is more complex. Lacking a reliable conception of what it is to feel "like themselves," young people have no way to gauge the effects of the drugs on their developing personalities.

Emily, 28, grew up in the Midwest and began taking Prozac for the depression and anxiety that began to overwhelm her at age 14. (Like all the young people I interviewed, she agreed to talk on the condition of being identified by a pseudonym.) She has used it nearly continuously since. Emily is confident that Prozac helps her, even crediting it with allowing her to work. Even so, she describes a painful and persistent desire to know what she would be like without medication.

"I think Prozac has helped me a lot," she said. "But I wonder, if I'd never gotten antidepressants, who would I be? What would I be like?"

by Katherine Sharpe, WSJ |  Read more:
Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster

Albert Marquet, Bay of Naples, c. 1908 or 1930s
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Getting Away with It

In the spring of 2012 the Obama campaign decided to go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that had specialized in taking over companies and extracting money for its investors—sometimes by promoting growth, but often at workers’ expense instead. Indeed, there were several cases in which Bain managed to profit even as it drove its takeover targets into bankruptcy.

So there was plenty of justification for an attack on Romney’s Bain record, and there were also clear political reasons to make that attack. For one thing, it had worked for Ted Kennedy, who used tales of workers injured by Bain to good effect against Romney in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. Also, to the extent that Romney had any real campaign theme to offer, it was his claim that as a successful businessman he could fix the economy where Obama had not. Pointing out both the many shadows in that business record and the extent to which what was good for Bain was definitely not good for America therefore made sense.

Yet as we were writing this review, two prominent Democratic politicians stepped up to undercut Obama’s message. First, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, described the attacks on private equity as “nauseating.” Then none other than Bill Clinton piped up to describe Romney’s record as “sterling,” adding, “I don’t think we ought to get into the position where we say ‘This is bad work. This is good work.’” (He later appeared with Obama and said that a Romney presidency would be “calamitous.”)

What was going on? The answer gets to the heart of the disappointments—political and economic—of the Obama years.

When Obama was elected in 2008, many progressives looked forward to a replay of the New Deal. The economic situation was, after all, strikingly similar. As in the 1930s, a runaway financial system had led first to excessive private debt, then financial crisis; the slump that followed (and that persists to this day), while not as severe as the Great Depression, bears an obvious family resemblance. So why shouldn’t policy and politics follow a similar script?

But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935.

by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, NY Review of Books |  Read more:
Photo: Pete Souza/White House

The Four-Stringed Wonder

Until a few years ago, most Americans thought of the ukulele—if they thought of it at all—as a fake instrument. It was just a toy, something your grandpa might've played in the living room during the family cocktail hour, or a prop for vaudeville routines. The uke had a few high-profile partisans over the years—including George Harrison, who reportedly brought them to friends' houses as gifts—but as far as the rest of the world was concerned, the ukulele stopped with "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" and Tiny Tim.

Ten or 15 years ago, things started to change. (...)

"It's like a little chord machine," Beloff said. "There are all kinds of musically sophisticated things you can wring out of those four strings." He pointed to old players like Lyle Ritz—of the elite session band the Wrecking Crew, who played for Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, etc.—who made extraordinary ukulele jazz records. Beloff and his wife are about to release a songbook with ukulele arrangements for works by Vivaldi, Bach, and other baroque composers. (...)

Eddie Vedder, who has composed on the ukulele for years, found his first serious one on a surfing trip in a remote Hawaiian town. He went to the liquor store for some cases of beer and was sitting on them, waiting for a friend who'd gone to the grocery store. "I turned around and there was this ukulele hanging on the wall, right above my shoulder," he said, "just like a parrot on a pirate." He bought it and started fooling around in the sun. He'd left the case open on the sidewalk and people started throwing money into it. A new relationship was born.

"Instruments can be friends, and there's a big transition playing an instrument when it becomes your friend," he said. "You remember the day when it isn't a guest/host relationship. Most instruments take a while before they let you play them. The ukulele is different—it's a really gregarious little friend. And for its size, it's really forthright and giving. It doesn't have a Napoleon complex."

A good ukulele sounds gregarious. Vedder told one story about a night playing casually with a fellow musician. The friend was in the corner, trying to write something dark and evil-sounding on the ukulele, like it was a challenge. But he couldn't do it. They stayed up all night trying—and partying. "In the fog of the morning, he was vomiting over the balcony," Vedder said. "The uke had won!"

by Brenden Kiley, The Stranger |  Read more:
Photo:  Collings Guitars

Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary

I've been thinking a lot about the ordinary and extraordinary lately. All year, my sons’ school newsletters were filled with stories about students winning prizes for university-level scientific research, stellar musical accomplishments and statewide athletic laurels.

I wonder if there is any room for the ordinary any more, for the child or teenager — or adult — who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material, who will be a good citizen but won’t set the world on fire.

We hold so dearly onto the idea that we should all aspire to being remarkable that when David McCullough Jr., an English teacher, told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts recently, “You are not special. You are not exceptional,” the speech went viral.

“In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement,” he told the students and parents. “We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”

I understand that Mr. McCullough, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is telling these high school seniors that the world might not embrace them as unconditionally as their parents have. That just because they’ve been told they’re amazing doesn’t mean that they are. That they have to do something to prove themselves, not just accept compliments and trophies.

So where did this intense need to be exceptional come from?

Madeline Levine, a psychologist, said that for baby boomers, “the notion of being special is in our blood.” She added: “How could our children be anything but? And future generations kept building on that.”

by Alena Tugend, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

The Perfect Listen: Fiona Apple As A Lesson In Irrational Music Rituals

On June 19, a week and a half ago, Fiona Apple released a brand new album, her first in seven years. The entire album had been available for streaming by NPR Music for a week and a half by then. Three days later, my copy arrived in the mail. It hasn't left my desk since.

I still haven't listened to it.

Mind you, I've been looking forward to The Idler Wheel... more than maybe any other album this year. Her stunning Boston show in March floored me; it was unquestionably the best concert I've seen in five years, and it took me half a day to recover to a point where I could even listen to other music. Sure, the album's reviews have been breathless and hagiographic, but the prospect of it falling short of expectations – which is always a possibility, though similar reports about her recent performances turned out to be right on target – isn't the issue.

What has kept me from just putting the damn thing in my CD player and pressing "play" is a bit of what I fully accept is compulsive irrationality: I want to hear it so much that I want to make sure that conditions are exactly right the very first time I listen to it, and conditions have not been exactly right. And that is, in a word, stupid.

And I know stupid, because I have my own first-listen music-listening rituals. The first time I play an album, I have to listen to it straight through, with no interruptions, no pausing, no "I'll get to the rest of it later"; if it's 60 minutes long, then I'd better be sure I can carve out an hour for it. If there are lyrics in the liner notes, I'll read along as it plays. What I want, really, is to be able to give it my full, undivided attention.

But for all the romanticizing of the first time we hear an album or a song, that's almost never the moment of its crucial impact. That's not really how music works, not if it can actually hold up beyond that first listen. Unlike books, movies or plays (and television, to a lesser extent), recorded music is consumed repetitively. It's usually anywhere between the second and fifth listen that fragments that maybe weren't evident on first glance suddenly come at you or your brain makes a connection that could only have been made indirectly. That's when a song start to mean something to you.

by Marc Hirsh, NPR |  Read more:
Photo: Fiona Apple, by Jack Plunkett/AP

René Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938, oil on canvas (via The Art Institute of Chicago)
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"I would characterize it sort of like a powerful interest group within a political party at this point. It used to be the entire political party."
—Iggy Pop explains his current relationship with his penis.

h/t The Awl 

California Takes Foie Gras Off the Menu

At Mélisse in Santa Monica, diners were preparing Saturday for "one last huzzah" in honour of a controversial delicacy that will soon become contraband across California.

Awaiting them at the upmarket French bistro is a feast of foie gras, a seven-course special celebrating the food stuff that makes animal rights campaigners gag, but leaves aficionados wanting more.

Those who make it through to the final dish – a strawberry shortcake stuffed with foie gras mouse and accompanied with foie gras ice cream – will be battling time, as well as their belts.

For at midnight California will enact a law it promised eight years ago, making the fattened livers of force-fed ducks and geese illegal.

Foie gras has long been a target for those calling for the ethical treatment of livestock. Translated to English as "fatty liver", foie gras is produced by a process known as gavage, in which the birds are force-fed corn through a tube.

It is designed to enlarge the birds' livers before being slaughtered, after which the organs are harvested and served up as a rich – and to fans a mouth-watering – delicacy.

The process dates back centuries. But in late 2004, then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill banning the sale of foie gras.

Diners and chefs were given a suitably long grace period to find an alternative method to gavage or wean themselves off the stuff it produces.

But despite a concerted effort by some to get the proposed ban overturned, seven and a half years down the line the law is now to be enacted.

From July 1, any restaurant serving foie gras will be fined up to $1,000 according to the statute. As the deadline has neared, restaurants have seen a growth in patrons wanting foie gras.

by Matt Williams, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images