Wednesday, July 4, 2012
The Audition
Mike Tetreault has spent an entire year preparing obsessively for this moment. He's put in 20-hour workdays, practiced endlessly, and shut down his personal life. Now the percussionist has 10 minutes to impress a Boston Symphony Orchestra selection committee. A single mistake and it's over. A flawless performance and he could join one of the world's most renowned orchestras.
It’s close to 5 o’clock on a late afternoon in January when Mike Tetreault, a tall, lanky redhead, turns off Massachusetts Avenue and enters Symphony Hall through a side door. He checks in with the security guard and then heads for the basement, wrestling with more than 150 pounds of gear (mallets, snare drums, tambourines) in a backpack and a roller bag. The rest of the instruments he’ll need tonight will be supplied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He’s an hour and a half early.
The basement of Symphony Hall is nothing like the velvety opulence upstairs. It’s cold down here, with concrete walls and harsh fluorescent lights. As Tetreault signs in at a table and waits to get into a practice room, he notices the oversize instrument travel cases that are strewn everywhere, ready to safeguard harps and timpani during symphony tours. Tetreault, a Colorado-based percussionist, has already survived a nerve-wracking round of cuts to get this opportunity tonight to audition for one of two openings at the world-renowned BSO. He reads the list of the other contenders and is pleased to see a bunch of names he doesn’t know. Younger, he reassures himself. Less experienced. Hopefully that’s an advantage for him.
Tetreault has been working and practicing for this audition ever since Facebook, the online message boards, and the trade magazines began buzzing a year ago about two BSO spots opening up at the same time, one because of a retirement and one because a percussionist had been denied tenure, a polite way of saying he’d been shown the door. Tetreault knew all about this second opening, because the guy who’d gotten the ax was actually his former schoolmate. Now, in his friend’s misfortune, he saw the opportunity he’d been working for his entire career.
At 33, Tetreault was putting in 100-hour weeks on a patchwork of gigs he’d pieced together — simultaneously serving as the music director at the Galilee Baptist Church in Denver; teaching at the University of Colorado; and working various gigs with the Boulder Philharmonic, the Fort Collins Symphony, the Colorado Ballet, the Colorado Symphony, and Opera Colorado. Yes, he was doing what he loved for a living, but when he added it all up, it was barely a living at all. He’d made $55,000 the previous year, pretty good — until you factored in all the hours, and the fact that the salary had to support two since his wife, Rachel, had been laid off in 2010 from a communications job with the Colorado Symphony. The couple was living in a 625-square-foot one-bedroom apartment.
Waiting for his practice room in Symphony Hall, Tetreault reminds himself that if he can win a spot with the BSO, his very existence will be transformed. He’s aware of the challenges — the selection process is brutal, and even if he lands a job, there’s no guarantee he’ll keep it (as his former schoolmate learned). But the orchestra is a godsend for the very few who make it. The positions pay more than $100,000 a year. You get health benefits. You get vacation. You get to lead a normal life. Which is why the BSO is one of the handful of orchestras for which musicians the world over will drop everything to scramble for a job. Like Tetreault, they’ll practice endlessly for months, sacrificing family and personal time. They have to.
The classical audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Each applicant has 10 minutes at most to play in a way so memorable that he stands out among a lineup of other world-class musicians. Tetreault has prestigious degrees from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London, and he’s studied under the world-renowned performer Christopher Lamb, but at his audition, the only thing that will matter is how he performs in the most pressure-packed few minutes of his life. If he squeezes his glockenspiel mallet too hard, choking the sound, or if he overthinks the dotted rhythm or fails to adjust to the BSO’s oddly scaled xylophone bars and misses a few notes, the whole thing will be over. Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony, sums up the audition process this way: “I want someone to be so brilliant that there’s no question.”
by Jennie Dorris, Boston Magazine | Read more:
Photo by Sean Hagwell
Thinking Outside The Bento Box
Get recipes for Spicy Tuna Stuffed Tomatoes, Salmon Musubi, Bright Pinwheels, Vegetables And Yogurt Dip and Syrian Egg Patties.
I'm sure you're a very good cook. But if you want to feel bad about yourself, spend five minutes cruising the Internet for photos of bento boxes.
They won't be hard to find. Originally just a convenient boxed lunch for Japanese field workers, bentos today can be high art, with flower-petal carrots, hard-boiled eggs shaped into bunnies, broccoli sculpted into trees. The moms who make them — because they're mostly moms, and not necessarily Japanese — are eager to share their edible masterpieces.
Confession: I have a problem with food that is cute. I even pick the buttons off gingerbread men. I'm also against expending that much effort just to coax my kid to eat. (Yes, my daughter thinks I'm "mean.") That said, I truly believe that we eat first with our eyes. And because of that, there is much to learn from the art of the bento.
Bento boxes go back to at least the 5th century A.D., when Japanese field workers, hunters and fishermen would pack dried rice into boxes. Somewhere around the 19th century, makunouchi, or "intermission," bentos emerged, packed with side dishes and treats for theatergoers to munch between acts. When the railroads arrived, ekiben — station boxes — filled with local specialties became popular. Today, many Japanese men and women carry bentos to work, and schoolchildren tote colorful arrangements of checkerboard-carved apples and rice balls shaped like Hello Kitty. Of course, these Japanese lunches will have Japanese food: rice balls (onigiri) stuffed with pickled apricot or baked cod roe, deep-fried pork cutlets, vegetables simmered in sweet soy sauce. But you don't have to cook Japanese food — or make cute cutouts — to reap the benefits of the bento.
Cookbook author and Japan expert Debra Samuels says the five main elements of a bento are color, texture, seasonality, presentation and nutrition (and let's not forget portion control — how much can you cram into those little compartments?). She says many Japanese believe that including five colors on your plate — red, yellow, green, white and black — means you have a balanced meal.
by Michele Kayal, NPR | Read more:
Photos: Debra G. Samuels and Michele Kayal
Nobody Knows You’re a Drone
"What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."
— Steve Jobs
Forty years ago, in a hundred garages through-out the Silicon Valley, across the country and around the world, hobbyists pushed forward the state of the art of a technology developed by mega-contractors at great military expense. Steve Jobs’s techno-Utopianism evinced in the quote above is both clear and typical of the era. A million geeks worked with visions of beating high-tech swords into ploughshares, creating tools that would make life better and bring the world together. More subversively, computers and networks would restructure society, for the first time ever, in a truly meritocratic way. Decades before anyone had heard the phrase, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” the so-called hacker ethic, described in Steven Levy’s Hackers, dictated that criteria like age, degrees, race, position, or gender were irrelevant.
Such a benevolent role for computers represented a dramatic shift from the way they had been perceived previously. Just a few years before Jobs began tinkering with them, computers were seen as cold, calculating, a symbol so “odious” that the leaders of the Free Speech Movement on the steps of the university across the Bay encouraged students to throw their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” Students wore signs on their chest that co-opted the language of the punch cards so deeply intertwined with computers of the day: “Don’t bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate.”
Forty years later, we’ve seen a new wave of military technology take flight in the form of aerial vehicles — drones. Their rise has been anything but benevolent, turning into the military’s most relied upon and most lethal weapon. But in small circles of technology enthusiasts, these machines have captured the imagination in a way that’s reminiscent of the personal computer revolution, a fascination that doesn’t stem from their role as a weapons delivery system. As terrifying as the implications of armed and unmanned patrols overhead may be, remote destruction isn’t what holds the imagination.
Drones have not only destroyed thousands of lives, but delivered back real-time images of the destruction. As a domestic tool, drones aren’t the next development of projectiles or even aircraft, they are the latest stage in surveillance gathering and analysis, outfitted with a vehicle and sometimes a weapon. Understanding drones in this way welcomes another separation between the oncoming drone revolution and that of personal computers: If the PC is a bicycle for our minds, as Jobs said, what are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), when liberated from the military and operated by the general public? Instead of increasing our understanding, they extend our senses. They extend our vision, giving us “eyes in the sky,” overhead or across the globe. Drones exist in a curiously intimate spot, that thin membrane between ourselves and the world, expanding and filtering what we may take in. More even than “thinking” technologies, “seeing” technologies become a part of us.
by Trevor Timm and Parker Higgins, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Image by Imp Kerr
Are Cycle Helmets Really Useful?
It is at first surprising to many people that the wearing of helmets
by cyclists is a controversial subject. However, cycling safety is a
much more complex issue than many people realise, where best evidence
and real-world experience sometimes conflict with received opinion. Key
considerations about risk when cycling, what influences cycling safety
and the inter-relationships between safety interventions, cycle use,
behaviour and health (both individual and public) are often poorly
understood. In particular, opinions as to whether cycle helmets are an
appropriate, proportionate or effective intervention are often dominated
by emotion and expressed with exaggeration, which can make it difficult
to know what to believe. (...) A little history
Cycle helmets have been around since 1975. They were originally a 'spin-off' product from the development of expanded polystyrene foams in motorcycle helmets, intended to supersede the old 'hair net' style of head gear then used in cycle sport. However, the protection offered by cycle helmets is very much less than that provided by motorcycle helmets due to the compromises in weight and ventilation necessary in order to make them acceptable for an activity such as cycling that involves much physical exertion. Indeed, because of changes to design in order to address concerns about comfort, modern helmets with soft shells are considered to offer less protection than some earlier designs with hard shells.
At first cycle helmets were promoted mainly by their manufacturers, with competing claims about their effectiveness. Then, during the 1980s, reports began to be published suggesting that if cyclists wore helmets they would be less likely to suffer head injury. From that time, the promotion of helmet wearing by cyclists has been a main thrust of road safety and health practitioners in many countries.
Attitudes to cycle helmets
The active promotion of helmet use by cyclists is a fiercely controversial and often emotional subject, with views put forward with great conviction both for helmets and sceptical of their value (very few people argue against the voluntary use of cycle helmets per se). Controversy is particularly acute with regard to mandatory helmet laws.
The arguments in favour of helmet use are invariably based upon the premise that in the event of a fall, a helmet might substantially reduce the incidence and severity of head injuries. A relatively small number of medical research papers are cited in support of this premise, most based on case-control studies. One 1989 paper is cited more often than any other, with its claim that helmets reduce head injuries by 85% and brain injuries by 88%. However, the methodology and findings of this paper have been widely criticised and there is no real-world evidence to support its predictions.
Proponents of helmet use include people from within the medical and road safety professions and also people who believe that a helmet has already saved them, or a relative or acquaintance, from serious injury.
Helmet-sceptic arguments are more varied. Originally based largely on issues associated with personal liberty, the balance of helmet-sceptic arguments changed during the 1990s as the health benefits of cycling became more acknowledged and as independent research started to be undertaken into the outcomes of rising helmet use and, in particular, the effects of cycle helmet laws.
Principal helmet-sceptic arguments are:
- The risk of serious head injury is small and frequently overstated. The promotion or mandation of cycle helmets is a disproportionate response to this risk.
- There is no real-world evidence that helmets have reduced the likelihood or severity of head injuries among whole populations of cyclists.
- Helmet promotion (and especially compulsion) reduces cycling and the health benefits of cycling. Less cycling increases risk for those who continue to cycle, whether they wear helmets or not.
- Much pro-helmet research and promotional material is flawed or one-sided.
- Insofar as there are risks associated with cycling as a form of transport, the greatest risks of serious injury come from inappropriate motor vehicle use and poor cycling behaviour. Institutionalising the idea that wearing a helmet is necessary for safe cycling diverts attention from more important actions to prevent crashes happening in the first place and results in victim-blaming when crashes do occur through no fault of the cyclist.
- Cyclists should not be singled out for helmets when head injuries to pedestrians and motorists are much more numerous.
In recent years many individuals and cycling organisations have swung from pro-helmet to helmet-sceptic as a result of experience with helmet laws and the growing breadth of evidence.
via: cyclehelmets.org
Image via: Metamorphostuff
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Roberts Switched Views to Uphold Health Care Law
Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."
The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.
Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.
The inner-workings of the Supreme Court are almost impossible to penetrate. The court's private conferences, when the justices discuss cases and cast their initial votes, include only the nine members - no law clerks or secretaries are permitted. The justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential.
But in this closely-watched case, word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the court, and is known among law clerks, chambers' aides and secretaries. It also has stirred the ire of the conservative justices, who believed Roberts was standing with them.
After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate. There were other issues being argued - severability and the Medicaid extension - but the mandate was the ballgame.
It required individuals to buy insurance or pay a penalty. Congress had never before in the history of the nation ordered Americans to buy a product from a private company as part of its broad powers to regulate commerce. Opponents argued that the law exceeded Congress' power under the Constitution, and an Atlanta-based federal appeals court agreed.
The Atlanta-based federal appeals court said Congress didn't have that kind of expansive power, and it struck down the mandate as unconstitutional.
On this point - Congress' commerce power - Roberts agreed. In the court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.
Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.
Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the court's historic decision. He kept it for himself.
by Jan Crawford, Face the Nation | Read more:
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press
Andy Griffith (June,1926 – July,2012)
[ed. A scene from one of his greatest movies, A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan. If you want to understand the genesis of present day "superstars" like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin there is no better tutorial.]
See also: Sheriff Who Gave Stature to Small-Town Smarts
Lost in Sighs
The History of the Nun, 1688
“I was but young,” said Katteriena, “about thirteen, and knew not what to call the new-known pleasure that I felt when even I looked upon the young Arnaldo; my heart would heave whenever he came in view, and my disordered breath came doubly from my bosom; a shivering seized me, and my face grew wan; my thought was at a stand, and sense itself for that short moment lost its faculties. But when he touched me, O, no hunted deer, tired with his flight and just secured in shades, pants with a nimbler motion than my heart! At first I thought the youth had had some magic art to make one faint and tremble at his touches, but he himself, when I accused his cruelty, told me he had no art but awful passion and vowed that when I touched him, he was so: so trembling, so surprised, so charmed, so pleased. When he was present, nothing could displease me, but when he parted from me, then ’twas rather a soft, silent grief that eased itself by sighing and by hoping that some kind moment would restore my joy. When he was absent, nothing could divert me, however I strove, however I toiled for mirth; no smile, no joy dwelt in my heart or eyes; I could not feign, so very well I loved, impatient in his absence, I would count the tedious parting hours and pass them off like useless visitants whom we wish were gone. These are the hours where life no business has—at least, a lover’s life. But, O, what minutes seemed the happy hours when on his eyes I gazed and he on mine, and half our conversation lost in sighs—sighs, the soft, moving language of a lover."
via: Lapham's Quarterly
Beat Boutique
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. (...)
Rigged Rates, Rigged Markets - NY Times
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
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
Monday, July 2, 2012
The ‘Busy’ Trap
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
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