Artists of the Floating World

In 1871 Claude Monet stumbled across a pile of Japanese prints in an Amsterdam shop and snapped them up. His discovery transformed Western perceptions of Japan (though Japanese art had first arrived in the West some decades earlier), inspiring artists such as Van Gogh and Whistler, as well as Monet himself, and sparking Japonisme, the enthusiasm for all things Japanese that swept across Europe.

Today Hokusai's Great Wave is one of the most recognisable images in the world. In fact Westerners tend to equate Japanese art with wood-block prints, which, as Timon Screech writes in Obtaining Images, 'would have chilled the blood of the shogunate and of most sober-minded people of the period'. To Japanese of the time, wood-block prints were akin to pin-up posters by and for the lower orders. Real art was very different.

Screech is Professor of the History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of memorably witty and insightful books such as Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan, 1720-1810, a study of prints that to Western eyes look decidedly pornographic. Obtaining Images is his most ambitious work yet, a crisply written and copiously illustrated account of Japanese art throughout the Edo period (1603-1868). In it he explores not just the art but its context: why it was made, for whom, how much it cost, who would have seen it, and what it meant to the people of the day.

A detail from a handscroll shows a bridge over the River Sumida in Edo, present-day Tokyo, bustling with people. But who would have commissioned it, and why? Works painted on folding screens, room dividers or scrolls to hang in alcoves were for public display, but a small painting on a fan or a handscroll, like this one, was for private perusal. People who seldom went out, such as high-ranking ladies, had handscrolls to while away the long hours, enabling them to picture the lively world outside their walls, which they had very little chance of ever seeing themselves.

The higher a person's rank, the more secluded their life was. Dutch merchants stationed in Nagasaki had an audience with the shogun once a year. When one merchant tried to sneak a look at him, an official promptly shoved his face down on the floor. A Japanese who went to Russia brought back a portrait of Catherine the Great. The revelation that there were countries where commoners could actually depict and see their ruler was so subversive that the traveller was locked away for the rest of his life.

This affected portraiture. If the artist, a lower-class man, was not allowed to enter your presence, let alone look at you, how could he paint your portrait? The Kanō, the official painters of the shogun's court, had military rank and could mix more freely with the higher orders. But they still couldn't look on people of very superior rank. When the retired emperor Go-Mizunoo wanted his portrait painted, his son, who was a monk and thus allowed to meet lay people of any rank, posed for the artist wearing his father's clothes. Then he sketched his father's face and the artist copied the sketch onto the portrait.

The Kanō were part of the apparatus of government. They painted castle and temple interiors with images that bolstered and underlined the shogun's power: landscapes, auspicious beasts and heroic battles of the past, against lavish gold backgrounds. Nij_ Castle, the shogun's residence in Kyoto, is a fine example of the Kanō style. The gold-encrusted walls of the vast audience hall are painted with pine trees, with one spreading its branches above the shogun's seat. Pine trees are venerable and long-lived, just as the shogun intended his government to be.

Every element in a Japanese painting has symbolic value, chosen for its auspicious nature. Catalogue entries that describe a work merely as 'birds and flowers' entirely miss the point. Specific creatures have specific meanings and are associated with particular plants and seasons. Cranes go with pines, tortoises with bamboo, and all four signify long life. Screech quotes a humorous poem to the effect that the inept artist adds bamboo to an image so that the viewer will know that the animal in his picture is a tiger, not a cat. Tigers went with bamboos, cats with peonies.

by Leslie Downer, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image via: Wikipedia

Ani DiFranco

out of the impossible

out of the impossible i have no choice but to fabricate the future something said in me. then it laid me down and gave me shiatsu and when i got up from it said i looked different and indeed i felt different. i have walked to shed everything with which i had formerly been laden. then my heart got tired and tired. inside your head the skull says i don’t want to know what it feels like to be you anymore. puts the substance of grass into her fists. talks aloud. the snake upon the bursted fruit. i see a sand where i hold a purple stone up to my eye. ratchet the image up to the level of myself. many friends called but i wasn’t home. then i got home and i was like no actually, no. nobody’s home actually. nobody’s home. i closed the curtains and took off my clothes and laid down on the floor. then a god like a clod of earth descended to the level of my head and looked upon me. i don’t remember how to be in the world i said to it. i wanted to cry and be comforted but maintained my composure and grace, insofar as i could, being that i lay there, prostrate as one might say. i said, i don’t remember how to be in the world; even how to want to; i just project this voice out of the boiling pit at the base of my spine. that is correct it said. well i don’t really want to anymore. that is well understood by us said the little god. i asked it what it wanted from me now. i’m killed i added. i don’t want to write another book or a play. additionally i don’t want to go outside at all. or to eat or drink or know anything or say anything. everything beautiful doesn’t entice me anymore, what is wrong with me, i don’t even want anything. i don’t want anything little god, i said, what is wrong with me. he put away childhood things said the little god, quoting john ashbery. why won’t you just tell me what to do i said. you’re doing it he said. this? what i’m doing as i am doing it? like little jesus on the cross we like you like this said the little god. i don’t like it at all i said. what comes to me i often do not want. that feels like a sin i said. the fish leaps onto my hook. i unhook the hook from its bloodied cheek and throw it back. i do not eat the fish which nevertheless dies. why am i on this pier, whose buoys are those bouncing there, what do you want with me here little god. you are here to be sick and to convalesce it said. you are here for the vision we have prepared for you, toward whose purpose the sun will heat you. there will be a flood and there will be a world there said the small god, a world like a blade of grass. can you draw me back out of this death i asked. can you reverse my root i asked it. i can it said. will you i asked. yes it said. i will. but there is one thing said the little god. anything i said, tell me it, tell me it. this adventure with form that you’ve had, this adventure with form you’ve embarked upon by distrusting it so said the little god. yes i said wearily, my adventure with form, i remember it well, it tastes like puke in my mouth, fleeing everything willing to take shape. indeed said the little god, your abstraction has nearly killed you. do i not have form said the little god. you do i said. and so do you he said. barely anymore i said i am so catastrophized and i have seen too much sorrow. i think god has no shape because of how much misery he’s seen and i feel guilty like him in all his formlessness. you are a clever girl said the little god but of course you also know it is not so simple. i know little god i said. you are commanding that i remember how to wear clothes, how to have taste, how to be a woman, how to want things and care about things. you want me to take a shape as you have taken one. correct said the little god. i have taken this one for your sake, this shape. I can take others. i don’t want to think about what you do for others i said, in my delirium misapprehending his meaning a bit, i don’t want to think about you in other shapes. i want you to be only for me little god. as it happens said the little god, i am only for you. you will get sick said the little god and then you will not be sick anymore and then you will enter the world. if you say so i said. that means making a choice said the little god. uh huh i said. the choice of a voice is no longer my choice i added. correct said the little god. it is now required that you make of form, in form, a choice. a formal choice is what will be required of you said the little god. and that he said is what will become you.

by Ariana Reines

Suzanne Lalique-Haviland

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Big Med

It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food—pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.

The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entrée is under fifteen dollars. The décor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food—can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?—it was delicious.

The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).

I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything’s pretty much made from scratch—except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.

I’d come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital.

It’s easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factory—restaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the “casual dining sector,” as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldn’t previously find or afford. The ideas start out in élite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms—miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cake—spread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains reëngineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?

Big chains thrive because they provide goods and services of greater variety, better quality, and lower cost than would otherwise be available. Size is the key. It gives them buying power, lets them centralize common functions, and allows them to adopt and diffuse innovations faster than they could if they were a bunch of small, independent operations. Such advantages have made Walmart the most successful retailer on earth. Pizza Hut alone runs one in eight pizza restaurants in the country. The Cheesecake Factory’s major competitor, Darden, owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Red Lobster, and the Capital Grille; it has more than two thousand restaurants across the country and employs more than a hundred and eighty thousand people. We can bristle at the idea of chains and mass production, with their homogeneity, predictability, and constant genuflection to the value-for-money god. Then you spend a bad night in a “quaint” “one of a kind” bed-and-breakfast that turns out to have a manic, halitoxic innkeeper who can’t keep the hot water running, and it’s right back to the Hyatt.

Medicine, though, had held out against the trend. Physicians were always predominantly self-employed, working alone or in small private-practice groups. American hospitals tended to be community-based. But that’s changing. Hospitals and clinics have been forming into large conglomerates. And physicians—facing escalating demands to lower costs, adopt expensive information technology, and account for performance—have been flocking to join them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only a quarter of doctors are self-employed—an extraordinary turnabout from a decade ago, when a majority were independent. They’ve decided to become employees, and health systems have become chains. (...)

Historically, doctors have been paid for services, not results. In the eighteenth century B.C., Hammurabi’s code instructed that a surgeon be paid ten shekels of silver every time he performed a procedure for a patrician—opening an abscess or treating a cataract with his bronze lancet. It also instructed that if the patient should die or lose an eye, the surgeon’s hands be cut off. Apparently, the Mesopotamian surgeons’ lobby got this results clause dropped. Since then, we’ve generally been paid for what we do, whatever happens. The consequence is the system we have, with plenty of individual transactions—procedures, tests, specialist consultations—and uncertain attention to how the patient ultimately fares.

Health-care reforms—public and private—have sought to reshape that system. This year, my employer’s new contracts with Medicare, BlueCross BlueShield, and others link financial reward to clinical performance. The more the hospital exceeds its cost-reduction and quality-improvement targets, the more money it can keep. If it misses the targets, it will lose tens of millions of dollars. This is a radical shift. Until now, hospitals and medical groups have mainly had a landlord-tenant relationship with doctors. They offered us space and facilities, but what we tenants did behind closed doors was our business. Now it’s their business, too.

The theory the country is about to test is that chains will make us better and more efficient. The question is how. To most of us who work in health care, throwing a bunch of administrators and accountants into the mix seems unlikely to help. Good medicine can’t be reduced to a recipe.

Then again neither can good food: every dish involves attention to detail and individual adjustments that require human judgment. Yet, some chains manage to achieve good, consistent results thousands of times a day across the entire country. I decided to get inside one and find out how they did it.

by Atul Gawande, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Harry Campbell

by horitomo

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Raising Successful Children

Phrases like “tiger mom” and “helicopter parent” have made their way into everyday language. But does overparenting hurt, or help?

While parents who are clearly and embarrassingly inappropriate come in for ridicule, many of us find ourselves drawn to the idea that with just a bit more parental elbow grease, we might turn out children with great talents and assured futures. Is there really anything wrong with a kind of “overparenting lite”?

Parental involvement has a long and rich history of being studied. Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child’s autonomy. These “authoritative parents” appear to hit the sweet spot of parental involvement and generally raise children who do better academically, psychologically and socially than children whose parents are either permissive and less involved, or controlling and more involved. Why is this particular parenting style so successful, and what does it tell us about overparenting?

For one thing, authoritative parents actually help cultivate motivation in their children. Carol Dweck, a social and developmental psychologist at Stanford University, has done research that indicates why authoritative parents raise more motivated, and thus more successful, children.

In a typical experiment, Dr. Dweck takes young children into a room and asks them to solve a simple puzzle. Most do so with little difficulty. But then Dr. Dweck tells some, but not all, of the kids how very bright and capable they are. As it turns out, the children who are not told they’re smart are more motivated to tackle increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibit higher levels of confidence and show greater overall progress in puzzle-solving.

This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children’s talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one’s status as “smart” and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes. Dr. Dweck’s work aligns nicely with that of Dr. Baumrind, who also found that reasonably supporting a child’s autonomy and limiting interference results in better academic and emotional outcomes.

Their research confirms what I’ve seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.

The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality. If you treat your walking toddler as if she can’t walk, you diminish her confidence and distort reality. Ditto nightly “reviews” of homework, repetitive phone calls to “just check if you’re O.K.” and “editing” (read: writing) your child’s college application essay.  (...)

So if children are able to live with mistakes and even failing, why does it drive us crazy? So many parents have said to me, “I can’t stand to see my child unhappy.” If you can’t stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn’t bring you running) present the opportunity for “successful failures,” that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.

While doing things for your child unnecessarily or prematurely can reduce motivation and increase dependency, it is the inability to maintain parental boundaries that most damages child development. When we do things for our children out of our own needs rather than theirs, it forces them to circumvent the most critical task of childhood: to develop a robust sense of self.

by Madeline Levine, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Lizzy Stewart

Living, Thinking Houses

In the sizzling summer heat I’ve been thinking about igloos. To chill out in, of course, but also because I admire their elemental simplicity. Inuits traditionally used bone knives to carve bricks from quarries of hardened snow. A short, low tunnel led to the front door, trapping heat in and keeping out fierce cold and critters. Mortar wasn’t needed, because the snow bricks were shaved to fit, and at night the dome ossified into a glistening ice fort. The human warmth inside melted the ice just enough to seal the seams.

The idea behind such homes was refuge from elements and predators, based on a watchful understanding of both. The igloo was really an extension of the self — shoulder blades of snow and backbone of ice, beneath which a family slept, swathed in thick animal fur, beside one or two small lamps burning blubber. All the building materials lay at hand, perpetually recycled, costing nothing but effort.

Picture most of our houses and apartment buildings today — full of sharp angles, lighted by bulbs and colors one doesn’t find in nature, built from plywood, linoleum, iron, cement and glass. Despite their style, efficiency and maybe good location, they don’t always offer us a sense of sanctuary, rest or well-being. Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

This tradition of doing and undoing doesn’t really make sense or promote healthy living or a sustainable planet, so there’s an impassioned trend worldwide toward building green cities with living walls and roofs and urban farms in skyscrapers. Referring to “the north 40” would mean crops 40 floors up. In such a cityscape, the line blurs between indoor and outdoor.

Vertical gardens and living roofs are sprouting up everywhere.Mexico City’s three eco-sculptures, carpeted in over 50,000 plants, tower above car-clogged avenues. A blooming tapestry of plants adorns the exterior walls of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Inside Lisbon’s Dolce Vita shopping center, a plush vertical meadow undulates. In Milan’s Café Trussardi, diners and flâneurs sit in a glass-box courtyard beneath a hint of heaven: a vibrant cloud of frizzy greens, cascading vines and flowers. The Plant, an old meatpacking building in Chicago, has morphed into an eco farm, home to tilapia fish breeders, mushroom gardeners and hydroponically grown vegetables. Xero Flor America, based in North Carolina, has already sold 1.2 million square feet of living roofs.

by Diane Ackerman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Rodrigo Cruz

Sean Costello

[ed. Repost. Check out the music archives.]

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How To Do What You Love

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.

I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

Bounds

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.

by Paul Graham |  Read more:

Pasión, vigor, desengaños…
El tango, más que un baile, es una forma de vida.
- Pillole di Tango
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Grey Area: How ‘Fifty Shades’ Dominated the Market

By late May, more than ten million copies of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy, an erotic romance series about the sexual exploits of a domineering billionaire and an inexperienced coed, had been sold in the United States, all within six weeks of the books’ publication here. This apparently unprecedented achievement occurred without the benefit of a publicity campaign, formal reviews, or Oprah’s blessing, owing to a reputation established, as one industry analyst put it, “totally through word of mouth.”

It’s not news that “word of mouth” has become a business model in the book industry. But E.L. James, a forty-nine-year-old former television executive from West London whose real name is Erika Leonard, has exceeded the sales feats of previous reader-discovered authors by such a staggering magnitude that she is in a category of her own. Last year’s breakout success, Amanda Hocking, sold merely a million copies of her self-published young-adult novels over the course of eleven months before signing a four-book deal with St. Martin’s Press.

The crucial difference may have less to do with talent, content, or luck than with a peculiarity of Leonard’s early readership: her work originated as fan fiction, a genre that operates outside the bounds of literary commerce, in online networks of enthusiasts of popular books and movies, brought together by a desire to write and read stories inspired by those works. Leonard’s excursion in the genre provided her with a captive audience of thousands of positively disposed readers, creating a market for her books before they ever carried price tags. But fan fiction is inherently collaborative and by convention resolutely anti-commercial, attributes which make its role in the evolution of her work both highly unusual and ethically fraught.

Beginning in 2009, Leonard posted, under a different title, a version of the Fifty Shades trilogy on a well-trafficked fan-fiction forum devoted to the Twilight series, the vampire-themed romance blockbusters by Stephenie Meyer. Leonard’s “TwiFic” shed Meyer’s supernatural story line and transposed the largely chaste love story of her protagonists, Edward and Bella, into a sexually explicit register. Like many fan-fiction writers, Leonard uploaded her work in serial installments, a method that enables readers to weigh in as the story progresses and allows writers to incorporate feedback as they go. Writers also read one another’s fan fictions and can infer, from the number and tenor of reader responses, what kinds of stories are popular. Leonard’s story reportedly received more than 37,000 reviews, and was read by untold thousands more who did not post reviews.

Early in 2011, after amending the work and expunging all traces of its connection to Twilight, she contracted with a small Australian press to publish it as the Fifty Shades trilogy, in ebook and print-on-demand paperback formats. By March of this year, when Vintage acquired the rights to the trilogy for more than a million dollars, all three books were at or near the top of The New York Times’ combined print and ebook bestseller list.

The vast majority of Fifty Shades’s readers are presumed to be women, as are the vast majority of fan-fiction producers and consumers, and anecdotal evidence suggests that, at least initially, there was much overlap between these groups. At Goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than nine million members, readers began reviewing Fifty Shades of Grey, the first book in the trilogy, in the spring of 2011, many noting that they had first encountered the story in its fan-fiction incarnation. “I loved this story as a fanfic and the characters have stolen my heart all over again!” wrote a reader named Ashley, who, along with more than 55,000 other Goodreads members, gave Fifty Shades of Grey the site’s highest rating, five stars.

Critics, by contrast, have found much to abhor about the work. Many have lamented Leonard’s “stilted,” “cliché-ridden” prose (a typical line: “my very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba”) and decried as retrograde the sexual mores of her (now renamed) protagonists: Anastasia (Ana) Steele, a willing but inexplicably chaste college senior at Washington State University, and Christian Grey, a buff but troubled Seattle mogul who seeks to enlist her as his sexual slave. Christian is partial to BDSM—an umbrella term encompassing the erotic practices of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism—and his penthouse includes a “playroom” kitted out with chains, shackles, whips, and other kinky toys. But before Ana can experience its exquisite tortures, she must sign a contract, devised by Christian’s lawyer, consenting to become his submissive (or “sub”), ceding control over her body, diet, hygiene, sleep, and wardrobe, and stipulating her tolerance for various sexual acts and accessories (manacles, hot wax, genital clamps, etc.).

Together, the Fifty Shades books run to more than fifteen hundred pages, many if not most of them sexually explicit. (One of Leonard’s few obvious talents as a writer is maintaining variety in the frequent couplings.) What Ana, who narrates the series, refers to as Christian’s “predilection” lends to the strenuous antics a transgressive frisson. Yet critics have noted that the erotic content breaks no new ground, citing equally explicit, better-written fare, in particular The Story of O, Anne Declos’s indubitably literary portrayal of female sexual slavery, published in 1954. In a cover story for Newsweek, Katie Roiphe concluded that what’s “most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambiance, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.”

by Emily Eakin, New York Review of Books |  Read more:

Photo: Getty images

Subway Stories by Jaya Suberg
I go to my lover…
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The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry

While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

There is a reason, of course, that the semen that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie produces has become such a hot commodity in what one artificial-insemination company calls "today's fast paced cattle semen market." In January of 2009, before he had a single daughter producing milk, the United States Department of Agriculture took a look at his lineage and more than 50,000 markers on his genome and declared him the best bull in the land. And, three years and 346 milk- and data-providing daughters later, it turns out that they were right.

"When Freddie [as he is known] had no daughter records our equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull," USDA research geneticist Paul VanRaden emailed me with a detectable hint of pride. "Now he is the best progeny tested bull (as predicted)."

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America's dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole "big data" thing, the animal sciences -- and dairy breeding in particular -- have been using large amounts of data since long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo via Reuters, h/t 3 Quarks Daily

Marcus Samuelsson, a Chef, a Brand and Then Some

Marcus Samuelsson, dapper in a Ralph Lauren tuxedo and patterned scarf, is working the celebrity-couture crowd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It is a Monday evening, just around 7, and Mr. Samuelsson — hotshot chef, food impresario and kinetic force behind Red Rooster Harlem, one of Manhattan’s restaurants of the moment — is displaying his usual verve.

On the red carpet, he snaps a picture of his glamorous wife, the model and philanthropist Maya Haile, with Beyoncé. In the European sculpture gallery, he is chatting with Kanye West and several of the New York Knicks. At the Temple of Dendur, he is dining with André Balazs, the hotel owner, and Chelsea Handler.

The next morning at 10, Mr. Samuelsson, in a fresh shirt and tux trousers, is sitting in a sound studio some 60 blocks downtown, painstakingly recording the audio version of his new memoir, “Yes, Chef.” Six hours later, in a vintage, red velvet tuxedo jacket, he is overseeing an intimate dinner for 350 at Gotham Hall on behalf of Queen Silvia and Princess Madeleine of Sweden.

And the morning after that, Mr. Samuelsson is back uptown to work the lunch rush at Red Rooster, that culinary mosaic of Southern, Swedish and Ethiopian comforts on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.

Such is the wild and frenetic life of the modern celebrity chef, that strange amalgam of food savvy, marketing acumen and business skill all wrapped, in Mr. Samuelsson’s case, into a media-ready package. At 41, he has exploded not only onto New York’s food scene but also onto its cutthroat food business scene.

Yes, there is Red Rooster and five other restaurants. But there is more — much more. A forthcoming cookware collection for Macy’s. A new line of teas. Deals with American Airlines and MasterCard. Appearances on “Top Chef Masters,” “Chopped All-Stars” and “The Next Iron Chef.” Two Web sites, FoodRepublic.com andmarcussamuelsson.com, not to mention four cookbooks and the memoir. His growing, multimillion-dollar enterprise stretches from New York to Chicago to California to Stockholm, and employs more than 700 people.

It is a time-tested recipe. Mr. Samuelsson is the figurative heir of Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck, but he is hardly the only one. Mario Batali, Todd English, Tom Colicchio, Alain Ducasse, Bobby Flay, Lidia Bastianich, David Burke — the list of marquee names in celebrity chefdom is long. Many of these chefs have built sprawling empires of restaurants — Mr. Batali has 25 — and have captured the popular imagination with TV shows, iPhoneapps and assorted products.

The question for Mr. Samuelsson and other rising stars is how far and how fast they can push a personal brand. The more business ventures they start, the less they can personally control the quality. It is a quandary that any successful entrepreneur faces as a business grows.

“We constantly have to edit, curate, sift through our brand,” Mr. Samuelsson says. “Where is the stretch? Where is the perfect fit? Where does it make sense? You have to be a Baryshnikov.”

It is a challenge, but the financial rewards can be big. Successful restaurants in major cities can bring in $10 million a year, more for hot spots like Red Rooster. But chefs can easily double their income with endorsements, books, consulting jobs and just about anything emblazoned with their names.

Mr. Puck, who got the initial idea for a line of frozen foods from Johnny Carson, a regular at his Spago restaurant in the 1980s, today oversees a $400 million-a-year company. Some $30 million of that comes from consumer products like soups and sauces. His line of appliances and cookware generates $50 million. “Cooking is an evolution,” he says. “If you don’t change, you fall behind.”

by Adrienne Carter, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Tony Cenicola

Air-Pumped

As he rounded a corner of the display floor, Bowen saw the booth that would change his life—and eventually the lives of many others. It belonged to a company that made tube signs, gaudy 3- by 21-foot inflatable banners with peel-and-stick lettering. He imagined them swaying in the Nebraska breeze above a new appliance store or a spruced-up coffee shop, visible for blocks. Bowen immediately signed up to be a local distributor. He’d found a new gig—one that would have his kids climbing onto Omaha rooftops to install the signs over the next few years. But that was only the first weird twist waiting for him in the inflatable sign business.

When the parent company folded, he bought the leftover vinyl and some cheap fans, and contracted with a tarp-making company to sew up more inventory. By the early 1990s Bowen was shipping hundreds of signs around the country. He had to contend with different zoning restrictions in every jurisdiction, which was a pain, but whatever—the best part happened at home, when Bowen would hand his kids a rag and let them zip into the blow-ups to clean them. With a person horsing around inside them, the signs would contort and flex into all sorts of funny shapes.

Wait a minute, Bowen thought. Why not put people inside them? Converting the inflatable banners into walking blow-up signs that people wore like a costume would mean that he could dodge all those code restrictions. In 1991, Bowen hand-cut a prototype, a giant panda, for an existing client, a Chinese restaurant in Japan. The operator would wear a lightweight nylon belt with a shoulder strap that supported a 12-volt battery and fan. Bowen reinforced the fan’s housing with steel pins to make sure it wouldn’t crack or shift speeds if jostled, and he vented an intake coil out the leg of the costume. Now the contraption inflated from the operator’s thigh, at the fan, which helped maintain air pressure. The suit was virtually sag-proof—excess air leaked through the seams, just like in the old tube signs. The method turned out to have an added bonus: “We are able to push a lot of body heat out,” Bowen says. It was hot inside, but the pilot wouldn’t roast to death. Sales took off immediately—not just to stores, but to anyone who wanted a giant walking advertisement. Bowen found himself in the mascot business.

The costumes turned out to have a major problem—one Bowen didn’t see until he sold his first major sports commission to the University of Nebraska a couple of years later. When the grinning, kid-like cherub called Lil’ Red debuted on Husker sidelines in 1993, he was big, bulky, and, well, just sort of stood there. “If I’m standing on the sidelines and fans can’t see the game, it pisses them off,” says Brad Post, one of the first Lil’ Red operators. The suit got booed.

But Post, a pre-engineering student with no formal mascot experience, provided the solution. He’d been curious about the new suit from the start. “Mostly, I just wanted to get inside it and see how it worked,” Post says. He realized that while operators couldn’t do the same gymnastic maneuvers as classical, furry-suited mascots, diving and mugging up and down the sidelines, they also had fewer physical limitations. It didn’t matter what happened inside the suit, as long as the action outside looked cool. Post came up with a new move: He would lie on his stomach, pull his feet out of the legs, do a somersault, and stand back up with his feet in the costume’s head. Voilà! Lil’ Red seemed to have somersaulted into a headstand. Post also pulled the character’s head and feet together—it looked like he was shrinking. The boos turned to cheers. “It was really sort of a blank slate,” he says. “I just did what I thought would get a reaction.” (Post’s special genius was eventually rewarded—today he’s the mascot coordinator for the Denver Broncos.)

Bowen took what Post had figured out and ran with it. Back at his workshop, he added internal handles so operators could spin and jump at all angles inside the suits, straps to twist facial expressions, and swiveling couplers that allowed for flexible intake coils. By 1999, pro teams and major brands were calling with their own crazy design ideas. The Florida Marlin—the baseball team’s mascot—now spits on fans of the opposing team at baseball games, thanks to a pressure washer built into his mouthpiece. The Philadelphia Eagle shoots fireworks from the top of his head. Bowen’s outfits—his company, Signs & Shapes International, sells them as “WalkArounds”—appear in everything from Disney’s Toy Story 3 on Ice (think: super-expandable Slinky Dog) to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway (pop-up, supersize supervillains) to in-store promos for Purina cat food and Tyson chicken. “If something looks cool,” Bowen says, “we’ll do it.”

The field of sports mascotting would never be the same. “Lee is very good at digesting these pie-in-the-sky ideas and then making them a reality with some simple engineering,” says Robert Boudwin, mascot operator for the Houston Rockets. (In other words, he’s Clutch the Bear.) Boudwin was instrumental in coming up with Air Head Clutch, an extra-rotund costume that can “swallow” a cheerleader by unlatching a hidden mouth compartment. It’s a special power lots of other mascots have bought since then. (The cheerleader is usually regurgitated unharmed.)

by Ben Paynter, Wired |  Read more:

Paco de Lucía

Marlo Pascual, Untitled, 2011
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ines-montenegro
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