Thursday, September 20, 2012
The Next Panic
But the economic disasters of our time—which involve big banks in rich countries, call into question the viability of government debt, and seriously threaten the reach of even the most self-confident nations—will not end with the euro debacle. The euro zone is well down the path to severe crisis, but other industrialized democracies are hot on its heels. Do not let the euro zone’s troubles distract you from the bigger picture: we are all in a mess.
Who could be next in line for a gut-wrenching loss of confidence in its growth prospects, its sovereign debt, and its banking system? Think about Japan.
Japan’s post-war economic miracle ended badly in the late 1980s, when the value of land and stocks spiked dramatically and then crashed. This boom-and-bust cycle left people, companies, and banks with debts that took many years to work off. Headline-growth rates slowed after 1990, leading some observers to speak of one or more “lost decades.”
But this isn’t the full picture: after a post-war baby boom, population growth in Japan decelerated sharply; the number of working-age people has declined fairly rapidly since the mid-’90s. Once you account for that, Japan’s economic performance looks much better. The growth in Japan’s output per working-age person—a measure of productivity for those who have jobs—has actually kept up with most of Europe’s, and has lagged only slightly behind that of the United States. Japan is a rich country with low unemployment. Its private sector is by no means broken.
So why is Japan’s government now one of the most indebted in the world, with a gross debt that’s 235.8 percent of GDP and a net debt (taking some government assets into account) that’s 135.2 percent of GDP? (In the euro zone, only Greece has government debt approaching the Japanese level.)
After World War II, Japan built a financial system modeled on those of Europe and the United States. Financial intermediation is an old and venerable idea—connecting people with savings to other people wanting to make investments. Such a sensible use of savings was taken to a new level in Japan, the U.S., and Europe in the decades following 1945—helping to fuel unprecedented growth for entrepreneurs and a genuine accumulation of wealth for the burgeoning middle class.
But such success brings vulnerability. Modern financial systems also permit governments to borrow large sums from investors, and as finance has evolved, that borrowing has become easier and cheaper. In the most-advanced countries, governments have increasingly taken advantage of expanding markets for short-maturity debt, whose principal is due soon after the loan is made. This has allowed them to borrow far more, and at cheaper rates, than they otherwise would have been able to do. Typically, these governments then take out new loans as the old ones come due, “rolling over” their debts. This year, for example, the Japanese government needs to issue debt amounting to 59.1 percent of GDP; that is, for every $10 that Japan’s economy generates this year, the government will need to borrow $6. It will probably be able to do so at very low interest rates—currently well below 1 percent. (...)
About half of the Japanese government’s annual budget now goes to pensions and interest payments. As the government has spent more and more to support its growing elderly population, Japanese savers have willingly financed ever-increasing public-sector debts.
Elderly people hold their savings in the form of cash and bank deposits. The banks, in turn, hold a great deal of government debt. The Bank of Japan (the country’s central bank) also buys government bonds—this is how it provides liquid reserves to commercial banks and cash to households. Similarly, Japan’s private pension plans—many promising a defined benefit—own a great deal of government bonds, to back their future payments. Few foreigners hold Japanese government debt—95 percent of it is in the hands of locals.
Given Japan’s demographic decline, it would make sense to invest national savings abroad, in countries where populations are younger and still growing, and returns on capital are surely higher. These other nations should be able to pay back loans when they are richer and older, supplying some of the funds needed to meet Japan’s pension promises and other obligations. This is the strategy that Singapore and Norway, for example, have undertaken in recent decades.
Instead, the Japanese government is using private savings to fund current spending, such as pensions and wage payments. With projected annual budget deficits between 7 and 10 percent of GDP, Japanese savers are essentially tendering their savings in return for newly issued government debt, which is not backed by hard assets. It is backed only by an aging, shrinking population of taxpayers.
by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Koji Sasahara/AP
The Eastwood Conundrum
Eastwood has occupied the bungalow since 1976. He and his fledgling production company, Malpaso, had just left Universal. He was making The Outlaw Josey Wales and incurred the wrath of the directors' union for firing the director and taking over himself. He wanted to make movies his way — he wanted to make what members of his crew call "Clint Movies" — and Warner Bros. wanted him to feel comfortable doing so. It gave him the bungalow, and with it a place where only he can sit.
It is not called a special place, and visitors who make the mistake of sitting in it are not kicked out, not exactly. They are only told, by his assistant, that they are sitting in the place where Clint Eastwood "feels comfortable." This is not a reference to the softness of the couch. This is the first lesson in how Eastwood does business: He does not do anything unless he feels comfortable. He does not make a movie unless he feels comfortable. He does not hire an actor unless he feels comfortable, and once he's on the set he sees to it that his actors and everyone else who works for him feel comfortable in return. He makes most of his movies about people in extremely uncomfortable situations, and the precondition for making them is a feeling of comfort that should never be confused with ease. He sees work as the necessary ingredient of comfort and comfort as the necessary ingredient of work. He draws no distinction between them, and makes his movies — Clint Movies — as a way of demonstrating that they are the same. (...)
He has made Clint Movies in four phases of his life. He has made Clint Movies as an actor, as an icon, as an artist, and now he is making Clint Movies as an old man. He has controlled both his career and his image through the making of Clint Movies; a Clint Movie is indeed the expression of his desire for comfort and control, and he is able to keep making them as an old man because of the choices he made as a young one.
He has starred in fifty-one movies and directed thirty-two. He also composes his soundtracks and pilots a helicopter. He works out every day and plays golf every weekend. He is husband to a woman thirty-five years younger than he is, and is father to seven children ranging in ages from forty-five to fifteen by five different women. He takes long family vacations. He is a famously loyal friend and the employer of sixty-odd souls. He served as a small-town mayor, claims to be a libertarian, and recently endorsed Mitt Romney's presidential run. He disparages Barack Obama every chance he gets and did a famous commercial for a car company he believes should have been allowed to die. He has survived one plane crash and didn't board a doomed flight that killed several of his friends. He is an Army veteran who never served in a war and possibly the most prolific cinematic killer of all time. He embodies ingrained American badassery and exists as a principle as much as he lives as a person; he also shows up as the reluctant supporting player on a reality-TV series starring his wife and daughters.
And yet for all that he has done and decided to do, he has lived a life of epic refusals. He has refused to stop working, but he has also always refused to work harder than he has to. He has made Clint Movie after Clint Movie, but the Clint Movie is itself defined by what he won't do. He won't go over budget. He won't go over schedule. He won't storyboard. He won't produce a shot list. He won't rehearse. He doesn't say "Action" — "When you say 'Action' even the horses get nervous" — and he doesn't say "Cut." He won't, in the words of his friend Morgan Freeman, "shoot a foot of film until the script is done," and once the script is done, he won't change it. He doesn't heed the notes supplied by studio executives, and when Warner Bros. tried to tone down the racial innuendo in Nick Schenk's script for Gran Torino, he told them, according to Schenk, "Take it or leave it." He won't accept the judgment of test screenings; as he once told one of his screenwriters, "If they're so interested in the opinion of a grocery-store clerk in Reseda, let them hire him to make the movie."
What he will do and has always done: use his leverage, in all senses of the word. He earned his leverage as an actor, as an icon, and as an artist; he is using it as an old man, with executives, with other actors, and with audiences. With executives, the Clint Movie exists as a form of leverage, because it exists as a form of thrift. With actors, he's leveraged both his artistry and his iconic status — his fifty years of stardom.
by Tom Junod, Esquire | Read more:
Photo: Nigel Parry
Stale Ph.D.'s Need Not Apply
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:
Out of Focus
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:
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
They Taught America to Watch Football
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
The Internet Has Created a New Industrial Revolution
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:
Neil Young Comes Clean
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
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
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.
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
The Honor System
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
Monday, September 17, 2012
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