Monday, August 20, 2012
Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works
Wilson had been quite a mess when he checked in the day before, so the attending physician, William Silkworth, subjected him to a detox regimen known as the Belladonna Cure—hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug made from a poisonous plant. The drug was coursing through Wilson’s system when he received a visit from an old drinking buddy, Ebby Thacher, who had recently found religion and given up alcohol. Thacher pleaded with Wilson to do likewise. “Realize you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to God,” Thacher counseled his desperate friend. Wilson, a confirmed agnostic, gagged at the thought of asking a supernatural being for help.
But later, as he writhed in his hospital bed, still heavily under the influence of belladonna, Wilson decided to give God a try. “If there is a God, let Him show Himself!” he cried out. “I am ready to do anything. Anything!”
What happened next is an essential piece of AA lore: A white light filled Wilson’s hospital room, and God revealed himself to the shattered stockbroker. “It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing,” he later said. “And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.” Wilson would never drink again.
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that alcoholics simply lacked moral fortitude. The best science could offer was detoxification with an array of purgatives, followed by earnest pleas for the drinker to think of his loved ones. When this approach failed, alcoholics were often consigned to bleak state hospitals. But having come back from the edge himself, Wilson refused to believe his fellow inebriates were hopeless. He resolved to save them by teaching them to surrender to God, exactly as Thacher had taught him.
Following Thacher’s lead, Wilson joined the Oxford Group, a Christian movement that was in vogue among wealthy mainstream Protestants. Headed by a an ex-YMCA missionary named Frank Buchman, who stirred controversy with his lavish lifestyle and attempts to convert Adolf Hitler, the Oxford Group combined religion with pop psychology, stressing that all people can achieve happiness through moral improvement. To help reach this goal, the organization’s members were encouraged to meet in private homes so they could study devotional literature together and share their inmost thoughts.
In May 1935, while on an extended business trip to Akron, Ohio, Wilson began attending Oxford Group meetings at the home of a local industrialist. It was through the group that he met a surgeon and closet alcoholic named Robert Smith. For weeks, Wilson urged the oft-soused doctor to admit that only God could eliminate his compulsion to drink. Finally, on June 10, 1935, Smith (known to millions today as Dr. Bob) gave in. The date of Dr. Bob’s surrender became the official founding date of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In its earliest days, AA existed within the confines of the Oxford Group, offering special meetings for members who wished to end their dependence on alcohol. But Wilson and his followers quickly broke away, in large part because Wilson dreamed of creating a truly mass movement, not one confined to the elites Buchman targeted. To spread his message of salvation, Wilson started writing what would become AA’s sacred text: Alcoholics Anonymous, now better known as the Big Book.
The core of AA is found in chapter five, entitled “How It Works.” It is here that Wilson lists the 12 steps, which he first scrawled out in pencil in 1939. Wilson settled on the number 12 because there were 12 apostles.
In writing the steps, Wilson drew on the Oxford Group’s precepts and borrowed heavily from William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Wilson read shortly after his belladonna-fueled revelation at Towns Hospital. He was deeply affected by an observation that James made regarding alcoholism: that the only cure for the affliction is “religiomania.” The steps were thus designed to induce an intense commitment, because Wilson wanted his system to be every bit as habit-forming as booze.
The first steps famously ask members to admit their powerlessness over alcohol and to appeal to a higher power for help. Members are then required to enumerate their faults, share them with their meeting group, apologize to those they’ve wronged, and engage in regular prayer or meditation. Finally, the last step makes AA a lifelong duty: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” This requirement guarantees not only that current members will find new recruits but that they can never truly “graduate” from the program.
Aside from the steps, AA has one other cardinal rule: anonymity. Wilson was adamant that the anonymous component of AA be taken seriously, not because of the social stigma associated with alcoholism, but rather to protect the nascent organization from ridicule. He explained the logic in a letter to a friend:
[In the past], alcoholics who talked too much on public platforms were likely to become inflated and get drunk again. Our principle of anonymity, so far as the general public is concerned, partly corrects this difficulty by preventing any individual receiving a lot of newspaper or magazine publicity, then collapsing and discrediting AA.
AA boomed in the early 1940s, aided by a glowing Saturday Evening Post profile and the public admission by a Cleveland Indians catcher, Rollie Hemsley, that joining the organization had done wonders for his game. Wilson and the founding members were not quite prepared for the sudden success. “You had really crazy things going on,” says William L. White, author of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. “Some AA groups were preparing to run AA hospitals, and there was this whole question of whether they should have paid AA missionaries. You even had some reports of AA groups drinking beers at their meetings.”
The growing pains spurred Wilson to write AA’s governing principles, known as the 12 traditions. At a time when fraternal orders and churches with strict hierarchies dominated American social life, Wilson opted for something revolutionary: deliberate organizational chaos. He permitted each group to set its own rules, as long as they didn’t conflict with the traditions or the steps. Charging a fee was forbidden, as was the use of the AA brand to endorse anything that might generate revenue. “If you look at this on paper, it seems like it could never work,” White says. “It’s basically anarchy.” But this loose structure actually helped AA flourish. Not only could anyone start an AA group at any time, but they could tailor each meeting to suit regional or local tastes. And by condemning itself to poverty, AA maintained a posture of moral legitimacy.
Despite the decision to forbid members from receiving pay for AA-related activity, it had no problem letting professional institutions integrate the 12 steps into their treatment programs. AA did not object when Hazelden, a Minnesota facility founded in 1947 as “a sanatorium for curable alcoholics of the professional class,” made the steps the foundation of its treatment model. Nor did AA try to stop the proliferation of steps-centered addiction groups from adopting the Anonymous name: Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous. No money ever changed hands—the steps essentially served as open source code that anyone was free to build upon, adding whatever features they wished. (Food Addicts Anonymous, for example, requires its members to weigh their meals.)
By the early 1950s, as AA membership reached 100,000, Wilson began to step back from his invention. Deeply depressed and an incorrigible chain smoker, he would go on to experiment with LSD before dying from emphysema in 1971. By that point, AA had become ingrained in American culture; even people who’d never touched a drop of liquor could name at least a few of the steps.
“For nearly 30 years, I have been saying Alcoholics Anonymous is the most effective self-help group in the world,” advice columnist Ann Landers wrote in 1986. “The good accomplished by this fellowship is inestimable … God bless AA.”
There’s no doubt that when AA works, it can be transformative. But what aspect of the program deserves most of the credit? Is it the act of surrendering to a higher power? The making of amends to people a drinker has wronged? The simple admission that you have a problem? Stunningly, even the most highly regarded AA experts have no idea. “These are questions we’ve been trying to answer for, golly, 30 or 40 years now,” says Lee Ann Kaskutas, senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, California. “We can’t find anything that completely holds water.”
by Brendan I. Koerner, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Christian Stoll
Schmooze or Lose
The planning for the fund-raisers seemed to underline this estrangement. Obama’s first event was a 6 P.M. dinner at the Four Seasons. About forty contributors, many of them from Wall Street, had paid thirty thousand dollars each to dine with him. Some of the invitees were disgruntled supporters who felt unfairly blamed for the country’s economic problems, and they wanted to vent about what they considered Obama’s anti-business tone. But the President did not have enough time to hear them out—or even share a meal—because after only an hour he was scheduled to leave for the second fund-raiser, at the downtown home of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. At the Four Seasons, the President could spend about seven minutes per table, each of which accommodated eight donors. This was fund-raising as speed-dating.
The President’s staff knew that Obama wouldn’t have a moment to eat properly that day, and that it would be hard for him to do so while being the focus of attention at the fund-raisers. So time was set aside at the Four Seasons for Obama to grab a bite, in a “ready room,” with Reggie Love, his personal aide, and Valerie Jarrett, his close friend, senior adviser, and liaison to the business community. This arrangement, however, inadvertently left the impression that Obama preferred his staff’s company to that of the paying guests.
“Obama is very meticulous—they have clockwork timing,” one of the attendees says. “After a few minutes at each table, a staffer would come and tap him on the shoulder, and he’d get up. But when people pay thirty thousand they want to talk to you, and take a picture with you. He was trying to be fair, and that’s great, but every time he started to have a real conversation he got tapped.”
The attendee appreciates that such events must get tiresome for Obama. “Each person, at each table, says to the President, ‘Here’s what you have to do . . .’ At the next table, it’s the same.” Even so, he noted that Bill Clinton—who set the gold standard for the art form known as “donor maintenance”—would have presided over the same event with more enthusiasm: “He would have stayed an extra hour.” After that Four Seasons dinner, the attendee adds, “people were a little mad.”
Top Obama donors began grumbling on the first day of the Administration. “The swearing-in was the beginning of pissing off the donors,” a longtime Washington fund-raiser says. “During the inaugural weekend, they didn’t have the capacity to handle all the people who had participated at the highest levels, because there were so many.” One middle-aged widow, from whom the fund-raiser had secured fifty thousand dollars, got four tickets to the swearing-in, but none of them were together. “She was so offended!” the fund-raiser says. “And I got no credit, by the way, for bringing her in. Important donors need to be cultivated so that they’re there four years later.”
As the Washington fund-raiser sees it, the White House social secretary must spend the first year of an Administration saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Instead, the fund-raiser says, Obama’s first social secretary, Desirée Rogers—a stylish Harvard Business School graduate and a friend from Chicago—made some donors feel unwelcome. Anita McBride, the chief of staff to Laura Bush, says, “It’s always a very delicate balance at the White House. Do donors think they are buying favors or access? You have to be very conscious of how you use the trappings of the White House. But you can go too far in the other direction, too. Donors are called on to do a lot. It doesn’t take a lot to say thank you.” One of the simplest ways, she notes, is to provide donors with “grip-and-grin” photographs with the President. “It doesn’t require a lot of effort on anyone’s part, but there’s been a reluctance to do it” in the Obama White House. “That can produce some hurt feelings.”
Big donors were particularly offended by Obama’s reluctance to pose with them for photographs at the first White House Christmas and Hanukkah parties. Obama agreed to pose with members of the White House press corps, but not with donors, because, a former adviser says, “he didn’t want to have to stand there for fourteen parties in a row.” This decision continues to provoke disbelief from some Democratic fund-raisers. “It’s as easy as falling off a log!” one says. “They just want a picture of themselves with the President that they can hang on the bathroom wall, so that their friends can see it when they take a piss.” Another says, “Oh, my God—the pictures, the fucking pictures!” (In 2010, the photograph policy was reversed; Rogers left the Administration that year.)
Creating a sense of intimacy with the President is especially important with Democratic donors, a frustrated Obama fund-raiser argues: “Unlike Republicans, they have no business interest being furthered by the donation—they just like to be involved. So it makes them more needy. It’s like, ‘If you’re not going to deregulate my industry, or lower my taxes, can’t I at least get a picture?’ ”
by Jane Mayer, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Barry Blitt
Deluded Individualism
There is a curious passage early in Freud’s “Ego and the Id” where he remarks that the id behaves “as if” it were unconscious. The phrase is puzzling, but the meaning is clear: the id is the secret driver of our desires, the desires that animate our conscious life, but the ego does not recognize it as such. The ego — what we take to be our conscious, autonomous self — is ignorant to the agency of the id, and sees itself in the driver seat instead. Freud offers the following metaphor: the ego is like a man on horseback, struggling to contain the powerful beast beneath; to the extent that the ego succeeds in guiding this beast, it’s only by “transforming the id’s will into actionas if it were its own.”
By Freud’s account, conscious autonomy is a charade. “We are lived,” as he puts it, and yet we don’t see it as such. Indeed, Freud suggests that to be human is to rebel against that vision — the truth. We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish — strain, strive, against the grain of reality — to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?
Perhaps Freud is too cynical regarding conscious autonomy, but he is right to question our presumption to it. He is right to suggest that we typically — wrongly — ignore the extent to which we are determined by unknown forces, and overestimate our self-control. The path to happiness for Freud, or some semblance of it in his stormy account of the psyche, involves accepting our basic condition. But why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?
I was reminded of Freud’s paradox by a poignant article in The Times a few months back, which described a Republican leaning district in Minnesota, and its constituents’ conflicted desire to be self-reliant (“Even Critics of the Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” Feb. 11). The article cited a study from Dartmouth political science professor Dean Lacy, which revealed that, though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.
In Chisago County, Minn., The Times’s reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support. Tea Party aficionados, and many on the extreme right of the Republican party for that matter, are typically characterized as self-sufficient middle class folk, angry about sustaining the idle poor with their tax dollars. Chisago County revealed a different aspect of this anger: economically struggling Americans professing a robust individualism and self-determination, frustrated with their failures to achieve that ideal.
Why the stubborn insistence on self-determination, in spite of the facts? One might say there is something profoundly American in this. It’s our fierce individualism shining through. Residents of Chisago County are clinging to notions of past self-reliance before the recession, before the welfare state. It’s admirable in a way. Alternately, it evokes the delusional autonomy of Freud’s poor ego.
These people, like many across the nation, rely on government assistance, but pretend they don’t. They even resent the government for their reliance. If they looked closely though, they’d see that we are all thoroughly saturated with government assistance in this country: farm subsidies that lower food prices for us all, mortgage interest deductions that disproportionately favor the rich, federal mortgage guarantees that keep interest rates low, a bloated Department of Defense that sustains entire sectors of the economy and puts hundreds of thousands of people to work. We can hardly fathom the depth of our dependence on government, and pretend we are bold individualists instead. (...)
Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth. But the notion of self-reliance is also a fallacy.
By Freud’s account, conscious autonomy is a charade. “We are lived,” as he puts it, and yet we don’t see it as such. Indeed, Freud suggests that to be human is to rebel against that vision — the truth. We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish — strain, strive, against the grain of reality — to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?Perhaps Freud is too cynical regarding conscious autonomy, but he is right to question our presumption to it. He is right to suggest that we typically — wrongly — ignore the extent to which we are determined by unknown forces, and overestimate our self-control. The path to happiness for Freud, or some semblance of it in his stormy account of the psyche, involves accepting our basic condition. But why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?
I was reminded of Freud’s paradox by a poignant article in The Times a few months back, which described a Republican leaning district in Minnesota, and its constituents’ conflicted desire to be self-reliant (“Even Critics of the Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” Feb. 11). The article cited a study from Dartmouth political science professor Dean Lacy, which revealed that, though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.
In Chisago County, Minn., The Times’s reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support. Tea Party aficionados, and many on the extreme right of the Republican party for that matter, are typically characterized as self-sufficient middle class folk, angry about sustaining the idle poor with their tax dollars. Chisago County revealed a different aspect of this anger: economically struggling Americans professing a robust individualism and self-determination, frustrated with their failures to achieve that ideal.
Why the stubborn insistence on self-determination, in spite of the facts? One might say there is something profoundly American in this. It’s our fierce individualism shining through. Residents of Chisago County are clinging to notions of past self-reliance before the recession, before the welfare state. It’s admirable in a way. Alternately, it evokes the delusional autonomy of Freud’s poor ego.
These people, like many across the nation, rely on government assistance, but pretend they don’t. They even resent the government for their reliance. If they looked closely though, they’d see that we are all thoroughly saturated with government assistance in this country: farm subsidies that lower food prices for us all, mortgage interest deductions that disproportionately favor the rich, federal mortgage guarantees that keep interest rates low, a bloated Department of Defense that sustains entire sectors of the economy and puts hundreds of thousands of people to work. We can hardly fathom the depth of our dependence on government, and pretend we are bold individualists instead. (...)
Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth. But the notion of self-reliance is also a fallacy.
by Firmin Debrabander, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Leif Parsons
Sunday, August 19, 2012
An Open Letter to People Who Take Pictures With Instagram
[ed. Bonus: Sweet Potato Veggie Burgers with Avocado!]
Dear People Who Take Pictures of Food With Instagram,
Just because the picture looks artsy doesn’t mean you are. I get it. We all went through our creative, experimental stages. There is a period in all of our lives where we think we can probably make money off our pseudo-artistic talent of choice. And now, you think you are a photographer because Instagram does the work for you. Do you have to focus anything? Do you have to worry about lighting? Do you have to think at all? Not really. You are part of a fast growing legion of people that have been duped into believing they are visionaries, auteurs, even.
“<3 <3 Gorgeous day for lunch outside <3 <3,” you post to the image of a set of railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s.
So now that you’re a professional photographer, you need to capture the simpler things in life. All of them. It is your duty as an artist, after all. And there is nothing simpler than your pretentious foodie excursions. You posted an Instagram-ed picture of a handful of blueberries the other day. What would your day have been without those blueberries? Would you have felt a little less connected to the earth and, ultimately, yourself? Would you have felt guilty about letting all of nature’s candy go to waste? Or perhaps the real question is this: how disappointed would you have felt if your beautiful, plump blueberries got less than 15 likes? It would have made blueberry picking pretty pointless, right? But no, you are popular and people like to feel earthy and spontaneous by livng vicariously through you and your blueberry-picking adventure. So people leave comments like, “Yummy. <3. Jealous!!!” And sadly the commenter is actually jealous and thinks that you are rustic and outdoorsy and simple, but in an old-timey Norman-Rockwell-America-is-really-great! way. You were creative enough to think of this super-fun activity, one that does not involve being cooped up inside, or drinking, or giving into any of the other demands of capitalist America. This makes you better than all of us. And this also gives you permission to take pictures of what you made for dinner.
And then you did.
“Avocado and lime marinated partridge medallions with coconut milk and ginger quinoa, slow baked paprika kale chips and hand cranked, blueberry crumble pie ice cream. YUM!”
That doesn’t even sound very good.
You proceed to take various angled shots of the avocado being sliced, the blueberries getting washed, and your bearded boyfriend plucking feathers from the partridges because the Farmer’s Market only sold them with feathers, because plucking out the feathers themselves would be too mean and they’re the nice kind of farmers who kill with love. And now that your meal looks professional and Alexandra Gaurnaschelli would approve of it (but Scott Conant would totally get the one piece of undercooked bird) there is a great final product shot taken, complete with two Coronas because you were feeling summery.“Ah, the good life,” you caption, wanting me to be simultaneously awed and intimidated by your domesticity. “This looks awesome! Wow!! You two are so cute!!!” writes jealous girl between drafts of her latest Game of Thrones fan fiction. That’s when you know you’ve done it: you are officially the greatest woman on the entire planet.
What happened to everyone complaining about how much they have to do today? Or the posting of emotionally ambiguous song lyrics? What happened to those? Where are all the bitches and sluts and why aren’t they hanging out in the club anymore? You used to merely use your words to let me know that YOU WERE HAVING A BAD DAY. But now all you do is flaunt how awesome you are, and expect me to leave a comment that confirms this fallacy.
I think it’s best, especially in the interest of honesty and my mounting rage, to tell you that no, no, I really, truly, absolutely, do not care about you or your food. I don’t. Sorry. Take more pictures of your cat. That might keep me interested.
By the way, your new apartment looks really cute!
Best,
Katie
Dear People Who Take Pictures of Food With Instagram,Just because the picture looks artsy doesn’t mean you are. I get it. We all went through our creative, experimental stages. There is a period in all of our lives where we think we can probably make money off our pseudo-artistic talent of choice. And now, you think you are a photographer because Instagram does the work for you. Do you have to focus anything? Do you have to worry about lighting? Do you have to think at all? Not really. You are part of a fast growing legion of people that have been duped into believing they are visionaries, auteurs, even.
“<3 <3 Gorgeous day for lunch outside <3 <3,” you post to the image of a set of railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s.
So now that you’re a professional photographer, you need to capture the simpler things in life. All of them. It is your duty as an artist, after all. And there is nothing simpler than your pretentious foodie excursions. You posted an Instagram-ed picture of a handful of blueberries the other day. What would your day have been without those blueberries? Would you have felt a little less connected to the earth and, ultimately, yourself? Would you have felt guilty about letting all of nature’s candy go to waste? Or perhaps the real question is this: how disappointed would you have felt if your beautiful, plump blueberries got less than 15 likes? It would have made blueberry picking pretty pointless, right? But no, you are popular and people like to feel earthy and spontaneous by livng vicariously through you and your blueberry-picking adventure. So people leave comments like, “Yummy. <3. Jealous!!!” And sadly the commenter is actually jealous and thinks that you are rustic and outdoorsy and simple, but in an old-timey Norman-Rockwell-America-is-really-great! way. You were creative enough to think of this super-fun activity, one that does not involve being cooped up inside, or drinking, or giving into any of the other demands of capitalist America. This makes you better than all of us. And this also gives you permission to take pictures of what you made for dinner.
And then you did.
“Avocado and lime marinated partridge medallions with coconut milk and ginger quinoa, slow baked paprika kale chips and hand cranked, blueberry crumble pie ice cream. YUM!”
That doesn’t even sound very good.
You proceed to take various angled shots of the avocado being sliced, the blueberries getting washed, and your bearded boyfriend plucking feathers from the partridges because the Farmer’s Market only sold them with feathers, because plucking out the feathers themselves would be too mean and they’re the nice kind of farmers who kill with love. And now that your meal looks professional and Alexandra Gaurnaschelli would approve of it (but Scott Conant would totally get the one piece of undercooked bird) there is a great final product shot taken, complete with two Coronas because you were feeling summery.“Ah, the good life,” you caption, wanting me to be simultaneously awed and intimidated by your domesticity. “This looks awesome! Wow!! You two are so cute!!!” writes jealous girl between drafts of her latest Game of Thrones fan fiction. That’s when you know you’ve done it: you are officially the greatest woman on the entire planet.
What happened to everyone complaining about how much they have to do today? Or the posting of emotionally ambiguous song lyrics? What happened to those? Where are all the bitches and sluts and why aren’t they hanging out in the club anymore? You used to merely use your words to let me know that YOU WERE HAVING A BAD DAY. But now all you do is flaunt how awesome you are, and expect me to leave a comment that confirms this fallacy.
I think it’s best, especially in the interest of honesty and my mounting rage, to tell you that no, no, I really, truly, absolutely, do not care about you or your food. I don’t. Sorry. Take more pictures of your cat. That might keep me interested.
By the way, your new apartment looks really cute!
Best,
Katie
Artist Eddie Colla has proven himself the past few years as being one of the most prolific, interesting and hard working street artists to come out of San Francisco. We’ve been following his work for years with great interest and are proud to introduce his fine art as part of our upcoming Summer Group Show, opening Thursday, August 2nd.
Learn more about the exhibition and RSVP here
If you would like to receive an advance collector’s preview of Eddie’s original work, please contact us at spokeartgallery@gmail.com
Come Join Our Prayer Group - Slash - Cheese Tasting - Slash - Orgy
Every Saturday, we get together at St. Bart’s community center for group prayer. We pour some wine and sample a variety of cheeses. Then we make sex like Roman gladiators heading off to battle against a stronger foe, during which most of us will die excruciating deaths and this is our last night of engaging in unconventional positions with multiple genders who happen to also enjoy prayer and cheese. Don’t forget it’s BYOC—that’s bring your own condoms for you first timers. Hah! We’re just kidding. You don’t have to wear condoms with us. That ‘C’ is for cheese, and we’re looking to sample all sorts of crazy fungi and molds.
Our evenings include it all: The Rosary, Round Robin Prayer, Select Hymnals, Colby jack, gorgonzola, spicy gouda, Doggy Style, the Holy Cheddar Train, woman on woman, man on man, intermittent cheese breaks, Group Spooning—if you can imagine it, we can put it to prayer, stick it on a Ritz or rearrange the furniture, respectively. (Note: Before participating in the Holy Cheddar Train, first-timers must sign a release.)
We begin with 20 minutes of silent benedictions. We then sample some mild cheeses that are easy on the palette. Then once the wine is flowing, we fornicate like Neanderthals who have only recently discovered their genitalia and are eager to catch up for lost time. Like monks who have taken a vow of celibacy and are on their way to a weekend retreat, when their bus collides with a truck carrying a secret government aphrodisiac, and 14 miles of bumper-to-bumper motorists inhale the erotic potion until they’re all lying naked across car hoods and windshields shagging strangers from the traffic jam.
Again, folks, this is a prayer group/cheese tasting/orgy. We are not just a prayer group, not just a cheese tasting, and not just an orgy. Over the years, there have been couples who didn’t really understand this and they were offended by the mandatory praying, or our expectation they sample ALL the cheeses and not just the ones they can pronounce, or all the nakedness being flung about. It’s important you come to terms with the triple essence of our gatherings.
This week my wife Hilda has prepared some gospel songs, along with a garlic-horseradish gruyère she aged herself for seven months in our basement. After her rendition of “Amazing Grace,” we will sample her curdled wares. And then we will romp like savage Vikings adrift at sea for months who had lost hope of ever seeing land again, and then after hope ran dry the food ran dry and we turned to cannibalism to meet our daily caloric intake, eating the smallest and weakest of our Viking crew, only to finally spy land and come ashore to a naughty magnificence of nymphs and whores who had crashed en route to an Australian prison camp and were left man-less and cheese-less until we arrived, so that we Vikings and those harlots turned that sandy beach into a carnal buffet of loins and moldy deliciousness where we fondled and nibbled until we passed out from exhaustion.
As a matter of hygiene, please respect our ban on Velveeta, which we learned the hard way does not double as a lubricant. God Bless and see you Saturday for some wholesome prayer, cheese and organized adultery.
Image: Wikipedia
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Under Our Skins
It starts with the simple questions: Can I afford not to own a cell phone? Would I still be employable if I didn’t own one? Would I still know what is happening and get invited to parties? The next year, it’s owning a smart phone. Or being on Facebook. Or getting an iPad for the children. None of this is about being aspirational. It’s about keeping up, an imperative sharpened by the economic crisis. So we cut expenses, but not when it comes to technology. Perhaps we eat out less, or travel less. But the cell phone — which
by now has become a smartphone — stays. And the thing about smartphones is that in order to be fully functional they need to know where they are — that is to say, where we are. This knowledge defines them. It is what makes them smart.
by Giovanni Tiso, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Tweeting the Beat
The New Inquiry: Who are you?
Sheboygan Scanner: I am a chronically unemployed person living in Sheboygan County.
TNI: What’s the history of Sheboygan Scanner? When did you start listening to the police scanner, and why did you start to tweet what you heard?
SS: I got my first scanner for Christmas in 2004. I took it out of the box, put in batteries, turned it on, and heard a plane crash! I didn’t listen to it too much, but I noticed that a lot of interesting things never showed up in our local paper, which is woefully inadequate. In February 2009, I heard a call about an old woman who was found dead outside an assisted-living facility, possibly due to exposure. There was nothing about it in any local news sources. Nada. I started on Twitter soon after that. I added an RSS feed to Facebook a year or so ago, though I kind of regret that because I have to spend an inordinate amount of time refereeing the poo-flingers that show up.
TNI: You’re very prolific—since you started you’ve posted over 45,000 tweets. How do you manage to keep up with the scanner?
SS: It’s not that difficult. I keep the scanner on while I’m doing everyday activities, and I almost always have a computer nearby. Two at once during the day, actually. So I usually have it on all day unless I’m out of the county or running errands.
TNI: What have you learned about Sheboygan through the scanner?
SS: People here drink too much and aren’t fazed by drunk driving penalties. It’s part of the culture. Because what else are you going to do when it’s 10 below and the Packers just lost?
TNI: With reports like “dog wants to go to school,” your feed often takes on a surreal quality. Is Sheboygan weirder than other cities?
SS: Not at all. I haven’t heard scanners in other places, but I’ve lived in five major metropolitan areas across the country, and I don’t think there’s anything too unique about Sheboygan.
TNI: What’s the strangest thing you’ve heard come in over the scanner?
SS: Probably the man who created a disturbance because he was angry about an Italian restaurant serving Italian food. It also came out that he tends to sit and watch the seagulls, but he does not like seagulls.
by Adrian Chen, The New Inquiry | Read more:
You Are Listening To...
[ed. Speaking of scanners here's a repost of a really cool site: police scanners and ambient music - in real time: http://youarelistening.to/losangeles]
How YouTube Put an End to the MTV Generation
The majority of American teenagers now prefer to listen to music via YouTube over iTunes, radio and CDs. Nearly two-thirds of 18-year-olds and younger US teens say that they prefer the Google-owned video platform ahead of all other music mediums.
The report, Music 360, compiled by the research company Nielsen, is hardly ground-breaking – YouTube has been a very popular music platform for some time – but it confirms that the MTV generation is no more.
The report, Music 360, compiled by the research company Nielsen, is hardly ground-breaking – YouTube has been a very popular music platform for some time – but it confirms that the MTV generation is no more.
Gone are the days when most of the discovery and enjoyment of music happened via TV stations, radio programmes and buying CDs.
The study also underlines that teenagers do not see why they need to own music, or even pay for a digital music service such as Spotify. (...)
Mark Mulligan, an independent music analyst, believes that the music experience on YouTube is “too good” – and its functionality (such as the recent addition of a playlist function) needs to be scaled back if the record labels are ever to see young people return to buying music.
“YouTube has transformed what the music buyer’s expectations are of what the digital music experience is. In a way it’s too good,” he says.
“In the UK since 2008, five million buyers have disappeared from the music market. This is because more people have stopped buying CDs than the number who have started buying digital tracks.
“It is totally understandable that people don’t want to pay for MP3s when the experience is poorer than what they get via YouTube.”
Mulligan goes a step further, advising record labels to “up their game” and create a new “next generation music format” which has all of the audio visual, interactive and social elements of YouTube – in other words, make a product worth paying for.
by Emma Barnett, The Telegraph | Read more:
The study also underlines that teenagers do not see why they need to own music, or even pay for a digital music service such as Spotify. (...)
Mark Mulligan, an independent music analyst, believes that the music experience on YouTube is “too good” – and its functionality (such as the recent addition of a playlist function) needs to be scaled back if the record labels are ever to see young people return to buying music.
“YouTube has transformed what the music buyer’s expectations are of what the digital music experience is. In a way it’s too good,” he says.
“In the UK since 2008, five million buyers have disappeared from the music market. This is because more people have stopped buying CDs than the number who have started buying digital tracks.
“It is totally understandable that people don’t want to pay for MP3s when the experience is poorer than what they get via YouTube.”
Mulligan goes a step further, advising record labels to “up their game” and create a new “next generation music format” which has all of the audio visual, interactive and social elements of YouTube – in other words, make a product worth paying for.
by Emma Barnett, The Telegraph | Read more:
Cabin Fever: I Want a Tiny Home
I know I'm not alone in finding tiny homes so weirdly compelling. People have lived in very small spaces since the dawn of civilisation, of course, whether out of necessity or monkish self-denial. But it is only very recently – in the last decade, according to Greg Johnson, co-founder of the US-based Small House Society, and a self-described "claustrophile" – that tiny-home appreciation has congealed into a movement. Its hardcore members buy homes from designers such as Jay Shafer, who runs the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and who will sell you a wooden bungalow with 99 square feet of floor space, easily transportable on a trailer, for £8,900. (If you'd rather build it yourself, he'll sell you the plans for about £60.) The movement's hangers-on, like me, just slaver over a burgeoning number of tiny home blogs, including not just Cabin Porn but also the Tiny House Blog, the Tiny Life and This Tiny House. "I have never met a link promising a teeny tiny home that I was not compelled to click on," a fellow addict, the writer Emily Badger, admitted on the Atlantic Monthly's website the other day.
"People do seem to be really attracted to the idea of the lifestyle," says Johnson, who lived in a 10ft x 7ft house – built by Shafer – for six years from 2003. "We hear a lot from people who you know won't ever make the jump. But they love thinking about it." A piece of fan mail received at Cabin Porn vividly conveys this: "Thank you for this, it is the only site on the internet that I have ever found therapeutic. I am an anxious office worker living in the suburbs. Scrolling through the cabins releases physical tensions in my upper back."
There are several very down-to-earth reasons why a resurgence of interest in very small homes should be happening now. When last month New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced a competition for developers to design 300 square feet "micro-units", it was a response to high rents and the rise in one-person households; newly-built British homes are the smallest in Europe, primarily because home-builders make the most cash that way. The rural wing of the tiny homes movement, meanwhile, is motivated primarily by environmental concerns. How much more lightly can you tread on the planet than by having only one room to heat, and no space to accumulate the detritus of the modern consumer economy?
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Kim Hadley
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