Stale Ph.D.'s Need Not Apply

When Harvard University and Colorado State University recently posted job ads indicating that applicants should be very recent recipients of Ph.D.'s, many people saw the ads as confirmation of something they already suspected about the unspoken hiring preferences for entry-level positions in the humanities.

Search committees, say professors and leaders of scholarly associations, strongly favor applicants whose degrees are not more than two or three years old.

Two weeks ago, Colorado State University's English department posted an ad seeking an assistant professor specializing in pre-1900 American literature and culture. The ad specified that applicants should have a "Ph.D. in English or American Studies or closely related area between 2010 and time of appointment."

Harvard University's comparative-literature department had posted a similar ad this month. It stated that applicants for a tenure-track assistant professor opening "must have received the Ph.D. or equivalent degree in the past three years (2009 or later), or show clear evidence of planned receipt of the degree by the beginning of employment."

Marc Bousquet, an associate professor in English at Emory University, said the ads reflect the reality of whom search committees routinely favor without saying so explicitly. "They blurted out the truth about the feelings and biases that people on hiring committees have," he said. "This is not unusual. What's unusual is that they were published." (...)

'Damaged Goods'

"Nobody's Ph.D. really goes stale," Mr. Bousquet said. He said that he's been on search committees where faculty members expressed their suspicions about candidates who were more than three years removed from graduate school and had not been hired. "They asked, 'How can this person be so great and not yet be hired?' There's a degree of ageism, sexism, and a failure to understand nontraditional career paths, or work choices of candidates who are parents," he said.

Michael F. Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association, was also disturbed by the recent job postings. "There are still plenty of clueless people out there who think that candidates are damaged goods if their Ph.D. is four or five (or, in Colorado State's case, three) years old. That foolishness can be entertained only by people who have no idea what the job market has been like since 2008," Mr. Bérubé said.

by Stacey Patton, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams

Out of Focus

In January, Eastman Kodak filed Chapter 11 documents in U.S. bankruptcy court. Its debts exceeded its assets by approximately $1.7 billion. The New York Stock Exchange delisted it. Three weeks later, the company announced that it will stop making digital cameras, camcorders, and digital picture frames some time this year in an effort to cut costs and further reduce its workforce. Apparently Kodak believes there are people somewhere who will still buy whatever it will still be selling at that point, but according to all the experts, the company that created a mass market for personal photography has officially morphed from viable commercial enterprise into picturesque curio, another victim of the Internet’s punishing economies.

Like many other media behemoths that fell before it, Kodak had trouble embracing the notion that the products it had sold effortlessly and profitably for so long would become worthless so quickly. So a few horny geeks had started trading 256-color images of old porn mags on CompuServe. So what? So digital cameras were getting cheaper and more powerful. Who cares? Hundreds of millions of people around the world weren’t going to just stop buying film overnight. “You come back in 10 years, there will be a film business here,” a Kodak executive told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2009. Six months later, the company discontinued the last remaining version of its iconic Kodachrome line.

“They were a company stuck in time,” Ryerson University professor Robert Burley explained to Bloomberg News. But if any company should have recognized what 2012 would be like in, say, 1988, Kodak should have. After all, it pretty much invented 2012 in 1888. That was the year that company founder George Eastman introduced the Kodak No. 1, catalyzing a new way of looking at the world, a new mode of existence that would make Kim Kardashian a millionaire and Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

As Alexis Madrigal explains at The Atlantic, Kodak referred to this new mode of existence — in which a camera or some other recording device is ever-present; in which making images, consuming images, and other forms of self-documentation and self-curation are major aspects of one’s life — as Kodakery. Unfortunately for Kodak, it wasn’t able to maintain the sort of proprietary hold on this mode of existence that the name suggests. Even in 1888, Kodakery (or as we might more generally call it, snapshot culture) was too big an idea for just one company to control.

by Greg Beato, The Smart Set |  Read more:

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They Taught America to Watch Football

[ed. Steve Sabol (October 2, 1942 – September 18, 2012)]

In the summer of 1968, Steve Sabol went on the road. He was driving a beat-up old car with the windows open. From Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana, the towns drifted by, the neon vacancy signs outside the motels, the taverns, the fields where the high-school football teams played. Steve was 26, strong as a horse, his hair too long for the Podunk provinces. He had a reel-to-reel projector in the backseat, the kind every randy best man used to drag to stag parties in the 1950s. Each night, he set up in another wood-paneled room where, after the Kiwanians or Rotarians or Boy Scouts had finished their business, he showed his movie. He was stumping like a politician, building an audience for a film he’d made guerrilla-style, with nothing but a few thousand dollars and a vision. He wanted to show football as it might have been shown by the old Hollywood directors: the game as directed by John Ford.

They Call It Pro Football was produced by NFL Films, a small company Steve’s father, Ed, had founded as Blair Productions in 1962. After Steve had first shown it in New York several months earlier, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle shook his hand and said, “That’s not a highlight film, it’s a real movie.” But none of the TV networks were interested, so Steve had to find his viewers, one screening at a time, amassing an audience that would eventually be among the most prized in the marketplace. But even in the beginning, when there was just this determined kid and a weird movie that could not find a distributor, all the elements were there: speed, color, narrative. The first line of They Call It Pro Football sets the tone: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” A primer on the game itself, with passages dedicated to “the linemen,” “the quarterbacks,” and so on, the movie is a collection of dramatic images, explained, glorified, set to music. It came to define the aesthetic of modern, hyper-­vivid sports coverage, taking viewers inside the huddle, letting them hear the collisions and understand the coaches’ tactics. It turned every game into Waterloo and every player into an epic hero. It taught America how to watch football.

The bloody fingers of the lineman, the clouds of breath on the cold, clear day, the chewed-up turf, Gale Sayers pulling away from the last defender like a driver who had discovered a seventh gear (Sayers in the film: “Sixteen inches of daylight, that’s all I need”), the uncertain wobble of a mid-flight football—­and always the heroic voice-over: “Special men in a special game. A uniquely American game with a history as rich and as rugged as the country in which it was born.” It was all there, crystallized, perfected. If Steve showed it to kids on a Friday, they’d be in their yards early the next morning, the narrator’s voice running through their heads as the receiver ran the hook-and-ladder: “His range carries him into heavy traffic, or through the shifting dangers of a broken field … Men on the run, measuring their survival by the twist of a shoulder.”

That voice, the NFL Films voice—Steve calls it “the voice of God”—would become more than a sports narrator: for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it remains the voice in our heads, lending drama to even the most mundane decisions (“Cohen knew the tortilla chips were old, possibly stale, but hunger is a beast that first devours the mind of a man”). For many years, that voice belonged to John Facenda, a Philadelphia broadcaster, though others have filled the role as well. In 1969, for instance, Burt Lancaster narrated Big Game America—he took the gig in return for a football signed by Johnny Unitas—because, as I said, Steve wanted to show the game as it would’ve been shown by Hollywood.

They Call It Pro Football finally made it to television in 1969. It was shown early in the morning, late at night. Junk time. Garbage hour. Just ask Fidel Castro: all revolutions begin in the sticks.

NFL Films is located in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. The sprawling complex and the parking lot, with its gleaming rows of Mercedes and Saabs, speak of the success of They Call It Pro Football and the hundreds of movies and millions of miles of footage that have followed. The company has produced some 10,000 features since 1964, and supplies hundreds of hours of content a year to HBO, ESPN, ABC, Fox, CBS, and Showtime, including the highlights played during halftime and the features for the Sunday pregame shows. NFL Films generates 25 percent of all content for the NFL Network, including award-winning shows such as Hard Knocks and America’s Game. In 2004, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Steve and his father, Ed, its Lifetime Achievement Emmy—one of 107 Emmys the company has won over the years. In 2011, Ed was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a signature recognition for a man who neither played nor coached.

But all of this actually understates the company’s achievement. Slow motion, color, extreme close-up, ubiquitous micro­phones and cameras, omniscient voice-over: the Sabols pioneered the style of modern sports coverage. There are no secrets in the Sabols’ NFL. Everything is revealed. As much as George Halas and Sid Luckman, or Tom Landry and Roger Staubach, it was Ed and Steve who created the modern game, a contest more in tune with the speed and violence of modern America than any other sport. Baseball? Please! Nine angels dancing on the head of a pin. Football is blood and guts, the ticking clock, sudden death, the sack, the blitz, the bomb—symbols of a nation locked in endless war. Almost every detail of the game has come to the attention of its fans through the sensibilities of the Sabols. Asked to describe his goals, Steve paraphrased Matisse: “The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.”

by Rich Cohen, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: NFL Films

David Hockney (British, b. 1937), A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (153 x 153 cm). Collection of Lyn and Norman Lear.

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The Internet Has Created a New Industrial Revolution

Back in the early 1940s my grandfather had a great idea. Noting the obsession Californians have with perfectly green front lawns, he decided that what they needed was an automatic sprinkler system. He lavished time and love on it, inventing this and fine-tuning that, and eventually came up with what was essentially an electric clock that could be timed to turn water valves on or off at given times of the day and night. Patent number 2311108 was duly filed in 1943, at which point my grandfather started knocking on manufacturers' doors. It was a long, arduous process. Finally, in 1950, after endless discussions, the Moody Rainmaster hit the stores. It earned my grandfather a modest income.

Recently, I decided to follow in his footsteps, but apply a little 21st-century know-how to the mix. Online I found a few like-minded souls interested in producing an improved water sprinkler. We used open-source software to help us create a sprinkler system not only capable of being operated remotely via an app by worried gardeners on holiday, but also sophisticated enough to factor in the latest local weather forecasts before deciding whether to switch the system on or off. We then sent our designs to an assembly house who duly came up with a smart-looking finished product. It has proved quite popular. It took my grandfather a decade and a small fortune to perfect his device and market it. It took us a few months and $5,000.

And that in a nutshell is the Maker movement – harnessing the internet and the latest manufacturing technologies to make things. The past 10 years have been about discovering new ways to work together and offer services on the web. The next 10 years will, I believe, be about applying those lessons to the real world. It means that the future doesn't just belong to internet businesses founded on virtual principles. but to ones that are firmly rooted in the physical world.

This has massive implications not just for would-be entrepreneurs but for national economies. The fact is that any country, if it wants to remain strong, must have a manufacturing base. Even today, about a quarter of the US economy rests on the creation of physical goods. A service economy is all well and good, but eliminate manufacturing and you're a nation of bankers, burger flippers and tour guides. As for software and information industries, they may get all the press, but they employ just a small percentage of the population.

The nascent Maker movement offers a path to reboot manufacturing – not by returning to the giant factories of old, with their armies of employees, but by creating a new kind of manufacturing economy, one shaped more like the web itself: bottom-up, broadly distributed, and highly entrepreneurial. The image of a few smart people changing the world with little more than an internet connection and an idea increasingly describes manufacturing of the future, too.

by Chris Anderson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: Ichiro/Getty Images

BTU

When it comes to safely transporting an infant or toddler in a car there are hundreds of elaborately designed car seats to choose from. But when it comes to safely getting a trio of newborn growler bottles home from a brewery, you're expected to just toss them in you trunk and hope for the best. Well thanks to the Growler On Board, that's no longer the case.

Also referred to as the Beer Transport Unit—or BTU for short—the koozie-like foam support holds up to three bottles in a vertical orientation so there's less risk of them bouncing around, colliding with each other, or spilling. And while the $30 BTU is just as effective when placed on the floor or in the trunk of your car, for maximum safety you can even buckle it into the front seat so there's absolutely no risk of anything happening to your bottles. After all, you'd never think of throwing your kids in the trunk, would you? So why would you put your even more fragile microbrews at risk?

by Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo |  Read more:

Lan-Chiann Wu
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Neil Young Comes Clean

Young has routinely fled success, severed profitable musical partnerships, dumped finished records and withdrawn when it was precisely the moment to cash in. He is a person who will never leave well enough alone. “Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death,” he writes in “Waging Heavy Peace.”

Doing as he pleases has worked out pretty well for him. As a young musician torn between the crunch of the Rolling Stones and the lyricism of Bob Dylan, he avoided the fork altogether and forged his own path. Over the course of more than 40 records and hundreds of performances that date to the mid-’60s, he has backed Rick James, jammed with Willie Nelson, dressed up with Devo, rocked with Pearl Jam and traded licks with Dylan. Some of it has been terrible, much of it remarkable. He has made movies by himself and with Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme. He called out Richard Nixon, praised Ronald Reagan and made fun of the second Bush. And he has little interest in how all of that was received. “I didn’t care and still don’t,” he said, then went on: “I experimented, I tried things, I learned things, I know more about all of that than I did before.”

His longtime manager and friend Elliot Roberts describes Young as “always willing to roll the dice and lose” and says: “He has no problem with failure as long as he is doing work he is happy with. Whether it ends up as a win or loss on a consumer level is not as much of an interest to him as one might think.” (...)

Two nights before, at the Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Young headlined with Crazy Horse, their sixth performance this year after going the better part of a decade without playing together. Beck went on before them and covered “After the Gold Rush,” and Foo Fighters followed, with Dave Grohl mentioning that the sooner he got done, the sooner they’d all get to hear Young play. (He stood at the side of the stage afterward for Young’s entire set.)

The youthful festival crowd wore little more than tattoos on this damp summer night. Young and Crazy Horse took the stage looking like the Friday-night band at the local V.F.W.: big shirts, work boots and hair gone gray or just gone. Given the growing chill and a restless crowd, it would have made sense to begin with a song reminding the audience that a Big Deal Rock Star was at work.

Instead, the band kicked into “Love and Only Love,” a remarkable song from Young’s 1990 album with Crazy Horse, “Ragged Glory,” but hardly a singalong. It lasted 14 minutes, with Young shredding huge reams of noise and mixing it up with his fellow guitarist Frank (Poncho) Sampedro. Seeing them play was like watching an ancient steam shovel unfurl, claw the night air and dig in. “We thought it was important to introduce ourselves, to remind people what Crazy Horse is all about,” Sampedro said later.

Young, who has never been a graceful stage presence, lurched to the front. He is old — he began playing in this town more than 40 years ago — and bent over his guitar, but he is not old and bent. Young has never been physically whole, but that brokenness has annealed rather than slowed him. He is anything but a frail man when he has a guitar in his hand. (...)

The band’s music with Young is built around a long-running sibling argument between Young and Old Black, his painted-over Gibson Les Paul guitar. Young, born in 1945, is the older brother to Old Black, made in 1952. Through the years, Old Black has been souped up, tweaked and rebuilt, but it has never been replaced as his musical partner. When he plays it, he often looks and sounds furious. (In explaining the equanimity that characterizes his book, he writes: “Sometimes it’s better not to blow up at someone. I can save that anger and emotion for my guitar playing.”)

Young can plink out a song on a piano, and play harmonica when it serves, but he has an intimate, if savage, relationship with his guitars. “If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar,” he said to Patti Smith onstage at a book convention earlier this year to promote “Waging Heavy Peace.”

He played that night as if he were mad at Old Black, even if he smiled into the squall. The crowd remained enthralled as he tortured a single note with the whammy bar, although this kind of indulgence has worn out some of his other playing partners. “We’ve played that note, can we move on, Neil?” Stephen Stills says with a laugh over the phone as he recalls playing with Young.

The guitar owned the night, but the secret to Young’s durability is his voice, a nasal-inflected borderline whine that was never a luxurious instrument, but remains intact. He sounded as he always did, yelling the chorus to “Powderfinger” or plaintively singing “The Needle and the Damage Done.” (...)

Tonight, he was feeling playful, telling the crowd, “I wrote this one this morning,” before starting into “Cinnamon Girl,” one of a trilogy of songs, which also includes “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River,” that he wrote in a single-day fever back in 1968. Later, he stepped to the mike and introduced a new song by saying: “We can’t help ourselves, we’re trained like chimps. They trained us to write songs, and we don’t know how to stop.”

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Rolling Stone

Romance, the Quirky Souvenir

This summer, during a conference in Berlin, a fellow attendee told me about the kind of summer love that arises in his profession.

He was a military officer who had been posted in Europe, and not infrequently a soldier would come back from a furlough in Croatia confessing he had fallen in love with a stripper. Not in lust, in love, the soldier would insist, and he wanted to marry her.

A fellow officer had developed a question to test the depth of a young man’s passion, though the officers still rolled their eyes at the idea that enduring love could be born in a pole-dancing joint in Dubrovnik.

“Do you know her parents’ names?” he would ask his love-struck charge. “If not, you can’t marry her.”

I laughed. Not because the soldier’s feelings were ridiculous, but because they were so recognizable.

I’ve always fallen in love on vacation. Who hasn’t? There’s a distinctive intensity to vacation romances. The object of our affection rises from the crowd like fireworks, simultaneously illuminating the unfamiliar landscape of our travels and obliterating its interest.

Why do we fall so hard on vacation? I have my theories.

The first is that the vacation, as a setting, imbues a crush with a heightened sense of meaning. Although conventional wisdom says we have flings on vacation because they won’t have to mean anything, this couldn’t be more wrong. We have flings on vacation because they seem to mean everything.

You know the feeling, when away, that the new and magical environment you are in is trying to send you a message about how to live? A week in Paris reiterates the power of great food; a month in Joshua Tree National Park admonishes you to wedge time out of your work flow for the contemplative and the holy.

We’re primed, on vacation, to recognize such messages in what we see, hear and eat, and in the people we meet. These strangers often seem to carry important information about what is valuable in life, and this makes them incredibly alluring.

by Eve Fairbanks, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Brian Rea 

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Steve McQueen
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Dancing dogs
200 B.C.–A.D. 200
Late Preclassic
Mexico
Princeton University Art Museum
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The Honor System

On or about March 15 of this year, Teller — the smaller, quieter half of the magicians Penn & Teller — says he received an e-mail from a friend in New York. In that e-mail, the friend included a link to a video on YouTube called the Rose & Her Shadow. Teller, sitting at his computer in his Las Vegas home, within eyeshot of a large black escape cross once owned by Houdini, clicked on the link. The video lasted one minute and fifty-one seconds. "I had what I can only describe as a visceral reaction to it," Teller says today.

The video was posted by a magician who works under the stage name Gerard Bakardy; his real name is apparently Gerard Dogge. (Bakardy, a fifty-five-year-old Dutch national born in Belgium, is more than a magician; he prefers the title entertainer, because he's a musician, too. Along with his blond partner, Nadia, he was, until recently, part of a lounge act called Los Dos de Amberes, the Two from Antwerp, booked mostly in the resort of Fuerteventura on the Canary Islands off Spain. "A lovely way to spend an evening," they said in online advertisements that have since disappeared.) Leaning into his computer screen, Teller watched Bakardy perform some kind of trick.

Against a crimson curtain, Bakardy had erected an easel with what looked like a large pad of white paper on it. Perhaps six feet in front of the easel sat a small wood table bearing a glass Coke bottle filled with water. That bottle also contained a single rose. A spotlight, outside of the camera's view, cast the rose's shadow on the paper on the easel. Dressed in a dark suit, Bakardy appeared in the frame carrying a large knife in his right hand. He sliced it deep into the rose's shadow. And when he cut into its shadow, something impossible happened: The corresponding part of the rose fell off the stem and onto the table. Petal by petal, Bakardy cut at the rose's shadow until that Coke bottle somehow held only a decapitated stem, which he removed as though to demonstrate the absence of wires. He then lifted up the bottle itself — still no strings attached — and poured out the water. Ta-da.

The video ended with Bakardy's e-mail address and an offer to sell the props necessary for the Rose & Her Shadow for what turned out to be 2,450 euros, or about $3,050 at the time. In bold white type across the bottom of the screen, Bakardy left a final message for his fellow magicians, including a dumbstruck Teller: EASY TO PERFORM.

On or about March 22 of this year, Teller called Gerard Bakardy. They would talk many times on the phone, Teller says, and they would also exchange e-mails. Teller told Bakardy that the Rose & Her Shadow looked a little too much like a trick of his own called Shadows that he conceived when he was a teenager and has performed at nearly every one of his shows since 1975. If you saw Bakardy's version and only it, you would think that it was very good. To paraphrase Penn, it would be like hearing the Byrds play "Mr. Tambourine Man." Watching Teller performing Shadows is like hearing Dylan. (...)

Shadows is the most elusive sort of trick, beautiful and mystifying. It's also particularly ripe for theft, because it's small and self-contained. Penn's solo tricks might involve nail guns or fire eating, and together, Penn & Teller shoot pistols and risk asphyxiating each other inside giant bags of helium. But in Teller's solo tricks, in his silent, lonely tricks, the only props might be a red ball or a single rose in a vase and a knife. When Teller is just Teller — he has legally dropped his given name, Raymond, as needless clutter — his tricks are stripped down to their glowing white cores. (...)

Until Bakardy came along, Teller had never needed his copyright filings to stake a claim. "It's not like good manners and generosity are inappropriate ways to behave in the world," he says. When he has contacted light-fingered magicians in the past, they have always apologized and stopped performing the trick. For instance, he does a trick in which he spills handfuls of coins into a tank filled with water, and they somehow turn into living, breathing goldfish. It's a throat-catching effect, and a magician in Sweden, who had seen Teller performing the trick on TV, studied the tape and finally lifted it. After Teller called him, the magician said sorry, boxed up his props in a crate, minus the fish, and shipped them to Las Vegas.

This time around, Teller offered to pay Gerard Bakardy several thousand dollars for the time he spent working on the Rose & Her Shadow. He had to promise only that he would stop performing and selling the trick. Bakardy, after asking whether Teller might help him bring Los Dos de Amberes to America, countered with a higher price. No one will confirm exactly what that amount was, but it was allegedly more than $100,000. "It really wasn't possible for me to come to any terms," Teller says. "It ended up having certain elements that reminded me of a kidnapping."

Teller, who had already persuaded YouTube to take down the offending video, asked Bakardy whether his demands were firm. Bakardy said they were.

Teller had a decision to make.

by Chris Jones, Esquire | Read more:

Photo: Peter Yang

Storied TV: Cable Is the New Novel

In 1973, Tom Wolfe, nattily dressed ringleader-theoretician of the New Journalism, declared that his uppity oeuvre had bumped off "the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century." Licking his chops over the carcass, he explained that the no-longer-Great American Novel had croaked as a result of complications from congenital self-absorption and straying from the healthy engagement with manners and morals that had been the novel's lifeblood since its birth in the 18th century. "The top rung is up for grabs," he gloated. "The Huns have arrived."

As usual, Wolfe was a little hyperbolic, but he had a point. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and his own The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—not to mention any issue of Rolling Stone or Esquire—contained more razor-edged prose and narrative propulsion than the dreary cascade of academic-minded fiction dripping from writers' workshops, where the target readership was mainly other writers.

A similar status upheaval may be happening in the realm of screen entertainment. Long top dog in the media hierarchy, the Hollywood feature film—the star-studded best in show that garnered the respectful monographs, the critical cachet, and a secure place on the university curriculum—is being challenged by the lure of long-form, episodic television. Let's call the breed Arc TV, a moniker that underscores the dramatic curvature of the finely crafted, adult-minded serials built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life span of the series. Shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—the highest-profile entrees in a gourmet menu of premium programming—are where the talent, the prestige, and the cultural buzz now swirl. Fess up: Are you more jazzed about the release of the new Abraham Lincoln biopic by Steven Spielberg or the season premiere of Homeland (September 30, 10 p.m., on Showtime)? The lineup hasn't quite yet dethroned the theatrical feature film as the preferred canvas for moving-image artistry, but Hollywood moviemakers are watching their backs. (...)

Traditionally, even late into the age of cable, television thrived on two durable genres, the weekly 30-minute sitcom and the hourlong drama. Play the theme song, rack up the signature montage, and a virgin viewer has no trouble following along. Each episode was discrete and self-contained, wrapped up on schedule, with no overarching Ur-plot, designed to be digested full at one sitting, and meant to spiral autonomously ever after in syndication: Gilligan stranded forever on his island, Columbo freeze-framed in his trench coat.

The dramatis personae existed in a realm that was picaresque, a pre-novel mode in which a one-dimensional protagonist is hit by one damn thing after another. A viewer could spend years, maybe decades, with the likes of Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke or Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-Oand not know a whit about the hero's psychic interior or personal history. Many of the surviving remnants of network television follow that time-worn template. The repetition compulsion of Homer Simpson—always the same, never learning from experience—is an ironic homage to the picaresque legacy: "D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!"

By contrast, Arc TV is all about back story and evolution. Again like the novel, the aesthetic payoff comes from prolonged, deep involvement in the fictional universe and, like a serious play or film, the stagecraft demands close attention. For the show to cast its magic, the viewer must leap full body into the video slipstream. Watch, hour by hour, the slow-burn descent into the home-cooked hell of the high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White in Breaking Bad, or the unraveling by degrees of the bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison, falling off her meds and cracking to pieces in Homeland.

At its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel, where small gestures and table manners reveal the content of a character molded by convention, class, and culture. In an emblematic moment in Mad Men, Don Draper cues up his turntable to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," gives the trippy dissonance a fair hearing, and walks away unmoved: He will live and die a Sinatra man. For the viewer who tunes in late, the strands of the intricate plot lines may seem too tangled ever to unthread, but the insular complexities are how the shows pack their punch. One of the nice things about Mad Men is that there is no top-of-the-episode recap for come-latelies: If you can't take the heat, get out of the gestalt.

The Era of the Arc would have been impossible without two blessings of the post-network age: the decline of censorship and the revolutions in television technology. Freed from the corset of the Television Code, the video successor to Hollywood's restrictive Production Code, even basic cable may venture into topics, language, and imagery unthinkable during the zenith of three-network hegemony. The way Game of Thrones flaunts full frontal nudity or The Walking Dead wallows in forensic gross-out are the most naked manifestations of the new license, but the more provocative defiance is in the breaking of generic conventions embedded in the DNA of the medium since the days of kinescope. (...)

The new technologies of reception and delivery may have been even more pivotal than the loosening of censorship in nurturing the growth of the genre. Viewing and reviewing shows on mobile devices, iPads, and computer screens, or via DVR and box sets, not only helps aficionados connect dots and track motifs across a season but encourages artists to more carefully embroider the details of their product. Often consumed in marathon sessions of obsessive binge viewing, the television box set, a season's worth of episodes sans commercials, often with commentary tracks and behind-the-scenes extras, assumes that no less than the big screen, the small screen is worth a second and third look.

by Thomas Doherty, The Chronicle Review  |  Read more

Photo: AMC

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The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy

When you see the entrance to Marquee at 11 P.M. on a Saturday, you know why the promoters call this process "bringing the shitshow." Massing out front were, by my estimation, at least 2,000 people. Packs of Asian bachelorettes sucking on cock-and-balls lollipops. Pods of probably either Libyan or Italian princes of the overclass in blazers and exposed solar plexuses and calfskin loafers and Adrian Grenier knit caps. Teams of 29-year-old white men in untucked dress shirts and heavy cuff links who stood stunned mute by the endless throng of women wearing almost identical vagina-length dresses that perpetually seemed on the verge of revealing at least, at least, a butt cheek—though by some invisible force above the hemline never, never ever did. It wasn't just for show, either, this massing of people. Las Vegas isn't New York, where part of the social psychology is the difficulty of entrance. "We don't do a door-hold just for the sake of doing a door-hold, so we can look busy," one of the owners had told me. Inside, they were already at capacity.

A series of velvet ropes tranched the guests into classes—extreme VIPs, semi-VIP hot ladies, unrich ladyless dudes who probably wouldn't get in before 2 A.M. I guesstimate the general-admission line was a quarter mile long, stretching past the Cosmopolitan hotel's curated "shopping experience" and into a recessed hallway of Pentagonian proportions.

This was maybe the sixth or seventh night I'd been to Marquee. On other nights I would show up before the club opened, so I could observe the hidden machinery and ascertain how the people who run the place go about manufacturing the communal fun-gasm that made Marquee the highest-grossing nightclub in Las Vegas and very likely the universe. But tonight I was with a bachelor party, and in honor of the occasion we'd decided to avail ourselves of a table reservation. A table reservation requires guests to spend between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on the night, and among its perks is access to a special line. The table line is the line you're supposed to see from other lines and think: Why am I not in that line? Or: Why didn't my boyfriend get me into that line?

A trim woman wearing smart business attire and a clear Secret Service earpiece greeted me as if she had been waiting all night to see me. She had a tiny envelope with my name on it, and into this tiny envelope she deposited my driver's license and credit card. She then passed the envelope to a man in a dark suit, a VIP host, who shook my hand with similar warmth. All the suited functionaries at Marquee that night treated me as if I were an important business partner in a business where important business partners may or may not be bought prostitutes.

An elevator car with glass walls, lit like a lounge, was waiting. The desperate sounds of human beings begging doormen and imploring homeys to hurry up because I'm waiting for you at the entrance, son,were silenced by the shush of the closing doors. A woman in a white short-sleeve shirt, whom you might call an elevator host, pressed a button on the control panel and then began a speech prepared to last precisely the duration of one elevator ride to the fourth floor.

Hello, gentlemen, she said. My name is Laura. When you step out of the elevators, you will find our Boom Box bar, down the stairs. Upstairs is the Library, our exclusive lounge. And just outside, you'll find our main level. There is a bar straight ahead, and to our right the dance floor, where your table is. Benny Benassi will be DJ'ing tonight. We have 60,000 square feet of nightclub. Our outdoor space is open. Roam the club. Find some ladies. Bring them back to your table. The elevator jostled us gently as it stopped. Welcome to Marquee, gentlemen. Your party starts...now.

by Devin Friedman, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Lauren Gtreenfield

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