U.S. Open Will Test the Limits at Merion

St. George’s Episcopal Church is about 150 yards from the sixth green at the Merion Golf Club, where the United States Open will begin June 13.

The bells in the 81-year-old church tower ring every 30 minutes, a harmonic, if striking, clangor that interrupts the usual hush enveloping a putting green.

Imagine Tiger Woods poised over a crucial putt on the sixth hole during the final day of the Open. If his caddie has done his homework, he will not let Woods begin his stroke at the top or the bottom of the hour.

Because no one has told St. George’s to turn off its bells.

Over at the pivotal 18th tee, it will be a little more complicated charting the ambient sound. Caddies will need a commuter train schedule and a stopwatch to time the piercing air horn of a nearby train. Federal transportation safety regulations require the high-pitched air horn to blast at certain intervals. The trains, which pass various holes, are not stopping for the championship either.

This year’s United States Open will be different from any other in the modern history of the event, and not solely because of the potential auditory distractions.

The United States Golf Association, in an endorsement of old-style golf architecture and in a bold tribute to the game’s roots, has chosen to bring its signature championship to pocket-size and hemmed-in Merion.

The fabled East Course at the club, which hosted its first national championship in 1904, has been home to more national championships than any American site. But the last time the Open was at Merion, 32 years ago, the consensus was that the off-the-course extravaganza had grown so outsize, it would be the final time the modest club would see the event. The United States Open has grown exponentially since. (...)

The Merion grounds are about half the size of a 21st-century United States Open location. The club is confined by public roads, a bordering college, a meandering railway and dozens of homes.

In scale, bringing the modern United States Open to little Merion and its serene suburban environs is like bringing the Super Bowl to a small-college football field. And in this case, the Super Bowl comes for four consecutive days.

When the first tee shots rise into the air June 13, golf fans should be ready for things they have never seen before at a United States Open — and not just caddies reading putts with an eye on their wristwatches.

When was the last time a golfer in a major championship hooked a shot just 25 yards off line and landed in somebody’s patio barbecue grill? Or a second-floor bedroom? It’s possible on Merion’s 15th hole.

About 12,000 people live in the less than two square miles of Ardmore, the orderly, uncluttered Philadelphia suburb where the Merion Golf Club was built in 1896.

When the United States Open descends here, the number of security personnel, members of the news media, officials and volunteers will equal the community’s population. They will be joined by a clamorous congregation of 190,000 spectators, who over four days will flock to an immense corporate tent city, multiple hospitality villages, a 24,000-square-foot merchandising store and acres of temporary grandstands, spectator plazas and food courts. It is a golf-themed Mardi Gras wrapped within one of the year’s biggest sporting events — all encircled by nine miles of chain-link fencing.

But Merion is also hallowed golf ground, and returning American golf to its embryonic grass roots is expected to be part of the charm. This is where Bobby Jones completed his Grand Slam in 1930; where Ben Hogan launched his historic 1-iron at the 18th hole in 1950; where Lee Trevino pulled a fake snake from his golf bag before winning his playoff with Jack Nicklaus in 1971.

The whole idea is old time meets big time.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:
Photos: Ryan Collerd for NY Times and USGA

Thomas Albdorf, Untitled
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A Couple of Guys

“If Not For You,” Bob Dylan and George Harrison rehearsing for the Concert For Bangladesh, Aug. 1971.
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[ed. Hot dogs and 45's.]
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Consider the Foul

About one of every six pitches is hit out of play—inert, a do-over, a mentally discarded blip as the ball shanked foul is discarded into the stands. No other sport includes this regular pileup of outcomes empty of conclusive results.

Another unique element: when a foul ball reaches the seats, the game breaks the fourth wall. Only in baseball does the action penetrate the crowd so routinely. And it is no easy action: catching a foul pop-up barehanded stings, and a screaming line drive into the seats can kill you. Most people at Durham Bulls Athletic Park don’t pay much attention to the game, at their own risk.

I recently started taking more notice of foul balls, tracking them on my score sheet along with all the other subparticulars I habitually tally: balls and strikes; first-pitch strikes; total pitches thrown per inning and per pitcher, broken down by balls and strikes; total swings; and swings-and-misses. There are plenty of reasons for this extensive annotation, but mainly it keeps me tuned into the action, pitch by pitch. (...)

Foul balls require more than just extra pitches; they also make pitchers expend more mental energy. When a hitter fouls off a pitch, he disrupts the rhythm of the pitcher, who has to watch and wait out the flight of the ball into the blurry periphery, and then wait again for the umpire to give him a new one—which he has to inspect, rub up, and so on. Pitchers can be finicky about the ball itself and will sometimes reject the one they’re given. (...)

From a wider perspective, fouls can help explain a pitcher’s overall work. Steve Geltz relieved Colome and threw a nine-pitch seventh inning. There were three foul balls—a high proportion, but not for him. Among Bulls pitchers, Geltz’s foul-ball rate is the highest, 23 percent. In the roughly average four-pitch at-bat, one of his pitches will be hit foul. Geltz relies on a fastball that seems to rise as it approaches the plate, partially because he’s short and doesn’t generate much downward plane. The high fastball is one of the easiest pitches for hitters to read: it stays at eye level longer and it’s very inviting to swing at. But located correctly, up at the top of the strike zone or just above it, it’s very hard to hit solidly. (“Chocolate mousse,” a Durham Bulls hitter once called them, because “it looks so good but it’s so bad for you.”) The result is a high rate of balls fouled up in the air, straight back or into the bleachers. Although Geltz doesn’t throw anywhere near as hard as Colome does, he gets even more strikeouts, not by pitch velocity or movement but by forcing hitters to foul off those tempting, almost taunting, high fastballs until finally they just miss one—which they are likely to do eventually if Geltz hits his target. (He’s kind of like the guy sitting in the dunking machine at the fair, daring you to sink him from sixty feet away.) Foul balls are probably not a deliberate part of Geltz’s strategy, but they are nonetheless essential to his success.

by Adam Sobsey, Paris Review |  Read more:

Photo by Kate Joyce.

A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza

In Brooklyn, the No. 3 subway line ends at New Lots Avenue, where passengers descend from the elevated tracks to what used to be a nasty intersection, trafficked by prostitutes, drug dealers — “You name it,” as Eddie Di Benedetto, the owner of Caterina’s Pizzeria, put it the other day. Not long ago, a coalition of local merchants and community leaders turned to the New York City Department of Transportation, which runs a program to make traffic circles, triangles and streets into pedestrian plazas.

The department brought in some potted trees and chairs, closed off a short street and voilà, what had been a problem became a boon. Since the plaza opened last summer, crime has plummeted, Mr. Di Benedetto told me, crediting the local police precinct. He heads the New Lots Avenue Triangle Merchants Association.

“People use the place all the time now, meaning the area is watched and safe,” he said. “I’ve had my pizzeria since 1971, so I can tell you, this is a renaissance.”

Cities need public spaces like plazas. For years they have mostly been planned from the top down. In New York, zoning laws have carved many of these spaces from commercial developments, which have been given bonuses to include them. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing a new proposal to rezone east Midtown, near Grand Central, that is a variation on this same old trickle-down theme.

But fresh thinking has focused on cheap, quick, temporary and D.I.Y.-style approaches to creating public space — among these, curbside “parklets” in San Francisco and a communal farm on what had been a derelict parcel in the middle of Phoenix. “Small steps, big changes,” as Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Department of Transportation commissioner, described the logic of plazas like that at New Lots.

And guess what? A beer garden made out of freight containers on an empty plot turns out to be a lot more popular and better for a city than a sad corporate atrium with a few cafe tables and a long list of don’ts on the wall.

As more and more educated Americans, especially younger ones, are looking to move downtown, seeking alternatives to suburbs and cars, they’re reframing the demand for public space. They want elbow room and creative sites, cooked up by the community or, like the plaza program, developed from a democratic mix of top-down and bottom-up governance.

The other day I visited Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, has drawn the maps that accompany the new bike-share program. Pentagram’s New York office faces Madison Square Park. Mr. Bierut remembered when the plaza program started to take over the pedestrian-unfriendly territory where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, just next to the park. Traffic patterns improved, but he still thought the city was nuts to create plazas from concrete islands marooned between busy boulevards when there was already, right there, one of the most gorgeous parks in the city.

“Was I wrong,” he said, laughing.

The plazas outside his building are mobbed on warm days, with people even toting Shake Shack burgers out of the park to sit next to all the traffic — partly for the view (the Flatiron building one way, the Empire State Building the other) but also for the reason people gravitate to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.

To be in the middle of things.

“It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” said Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directs the Department of Transportation’s plaza program. “That’s where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”

by Michael Kimmelman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: New York City Department of Transportation

Jim Roberts, Gyotaku
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Justin Santora, At the Ready
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War

Sand-greens Golf

A column in today's online Wall Street Journal brought back a lot of pleasant memories. It reported on the "sand-greens" division of the Kansas high school golf championships.

Back in the 1950s, one of the courses where my family played golf (Tianna Country Club, Walker, Minnesota) had sand greens. They were a cheaper alternative to the manicured grass used in conventional golf courses; greens fees could be substantially lower than on grass-greens courses, and courses could be constructed in communities that couldn't otherwise afford a golf course.

The sand would sometimes be moistened with vegetable or motor oil. After completing play on a hole, it was the responsibility of the golfers to drag the green in a spiral fashion from the center to the edge with a piece of carpet to restore the smoothness of the sand for the next players. I don't remember ever using a roller to flatten a path between one's ball and the cup, and suspect that is a more modern intervention.

I'm delighted to learn that sand-green golf still exists. For the golfers out there, here are links to a Sports Illustrated history of sand-greens golf, and to Pasture Golf, which "features golf courses that have the distinction of not being excessively manicured but which are fun and affordable to play. These courses are a surviving link to the original Scottish links courses, golf’s historical grassroots."

by Stan, TYWKIWDBI |  Read more:

Photo: John Paul Newport/The Wall Street Journal

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Net Loss

Spencer Baird had blamed the messy, voracious bluefish for decimating fish populations in New England, but he had the foresight to warn against the trawler as an even more destructive force. Like the bluefish, trawlers are incredibly wasteful predators, destroying everything in their paths. But unlike the bluefish, which create a buffet for the scavengers traveling in their wake, thereby helping to maintain the existing food web, bottom trawlers leave only rubble, making it difficult for the marine environment to recover to its natural state. Bottom trawlers destroy 4 to 16 pounds of marine life for every fish they catch. This waste, known as bycatch, can include other species of fish (including sharks), sea turtles, dolphins, octopuses, corals, and more--anything that has the misfortune to be caught in the path of a rumbling trawl.

Today's trawlers use much the same technology as in Baird's time. But the difference is twofold. First, in scale: The world's largest supertrawler, the Atlantic Dawn, debuted in 2000. It isn't just a fishing ship. It's a huge floating factory. Weighing 14,000 tons unloaded and stretching longer than 11/2 football fields, the Atlantic Dawn can store 18 million servings of frozen fish in its hold. The ship's otter trawl is supersized, at 200 feet wide and 40 feet tall: A 747 jet could fly through the metal doors. The weighted net is so heavy and powerful that it can sink to the bottom and shove aside 25-ton boulders as it chases down fish.

The second difference is the digital technology. It's been a long time since anyone could catch flatfish by hand in shallow waters, as colonists described with such heady enthusiasm. Modern industrial fishing ships are equipped with satellite technology, seabed-mapping software, sonar, radar, GPS devices, and more tools that transform the ships into highly sophisticated fish-seeking missiles.

Most trawlers aren't nearly as massive as the Atlantic Dawn. Just 1 percent of the world's fishing fleet can be called supertrawlers. But these few massive ships catch a huge portion of the world's seafood.

Meanwhile, in coastal regions and in seas like the Mediterranean, you're more likely to see boats hardly bigger than a large speedboat hauling the otter trawl's telltale steel doors. But what these ships lack in tonnage, they make up for in number. Together with the supertrawlers, they rake a seafloor area twice the size of the continental United States every year. Spencer Baird would be loath to visit New England's remaining fishing ports today. The trawler fleet there fishes an area the size of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine combined.

Trawlers are the flagships, so to speak, of a global fleet that has expanded exponentially since the end of World War II. The naturalist Walter Garstang reported that fishing effort had more than tripled on England's shores in the decade he studied the nascent trawling industry, and yet catches were dropping. And now we have added to the weaponry other specialist fishing gear like the purse seine, which targets fish at the top and middle of the ocean's water column. The seiners encircle schooling fish with 1,000-yard nets before dragging them into the hold. Without laws to protect marine mammals, it is purse seiners that are the most likely to drown dolphins and porpoises chasing schooling tuna.

This story has repeated itself again and again on a global scale since the early 20th century. Improved technology has allowed fishing fleets to search farther, deeper, and longer for fish. This expansion is not driven by some unspoken desire to conquer the oceans, like summiting Mount Everest or hiking Death Valley. It's because we've already laid waste to the marine wildlife that was easiest to catch. We started with the slowest and most trusting seabirds and marine mammals (sorry, Steller's sea cows!) and are now in pursuit of the most elusive fish in the world's remotest underwater places.

by Andy Sharpless and Suzannah Evans, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Flickr / sludgegulper

George Plimpton As Himself

[ed. I've been a fan of George Plimpton ever since reading Paper Lion as a football-playing teenager. What a keen intellect, matched with a generous dose of humility and boundless curiosity. See also: this loving tribute by his son Taylor -- My Father's Voice.] 

Although no one currently on staff at The Paris Review ever worked directly with George Plimpton, the legacy of the editor of 50 years obviously looms large over the publication. Coincident with the 60th anniversary of the magazine is the release of the documentary Plimpton!: Starring George Plimpton As Himself. The cover of the Spring 2013 issue of The Paris Review was a photograph of a poster made by the French artist JR—Unframed: George Plimpton, 1967, from a photograph by Henry Grossman—designed to look like a cover (the Spring 2013 cover, in fact) of The Paris Review pasted on a wall in Paris.

There are as many layers in Plimpton! worth rolling one’s eyes at: George’s pedigree; his legacy; the mythology surrounding him to which a documentary would seemingly only contribute. Such eye-rolling would not be entirely misplaced: an unattributed newspaper headline displayed in the documentary reads, "Being Born To Lose Has Made George Plimpton A Winner," although someone who can trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower, who can get kicked out of Exeter in his senior year and still end up at Harvard, who goes sailing with the Kennedy’s (and maybe dated Jacqueline Onassis?) hardly seems appropriately described as "born to lose."

But looking past the man as brand, it becomes apparent that Plimpton retained through it all a sense of joy and wonder—mouth agape, Plimpton watches as Ali trounces Foreman—that deflates cynicism. Anyway it's hard to think ill of a man who watched as Robert F. Kennedy, one of his best friends, was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan right in front of him. (Plimpton would help tackle Sirhan and disarm him. He never spoke of the incident publicly.) Later, during a period of economic turmoil, Plimpton appeared on a number of infomercials to help keep the magazine alive. If his writer friends looked down upon his practice of participatory journalism, one can only imagine the disdain they must have felt at such debasement.

by Brendan O'Connor, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: Larry Fink

Angelo Davoli , Untitled . Oil on board MDF, 100x75 cm, 2012
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The Death Instinct

Punk was about fashion from the beginning. The story goes like this. A British man named Malcolm McLaren was interested in music, fashion, and art. He met a girl named Vivienne Westwood at art school. They opened up a clothing shop in London. One day, members of a band called The New York Dolls walked into the store. McLaren was fascinated by the look and style of the band. The Dolls played angry and aggressive songs, but they did so in tights and high heels. McLaren followed The Dolls to New York. In New York City, McLaren bumped into a man named Richard Hell: poet, singer, scumbag. McLaren loved something about Hell. “Here was a guy,” McLaren said, “all deconstructed, torn down, looking like he'd just crawled out of a drain hole, covered in slime, looking like he hadn't slept or washed in years, and looking like he didn't really give a fuck about you!” McLaren went back to England. He wanted to build his own Richard Hell, further deconstructed, torn down completely, covered in even more slime. McLaren found a broken man with decaying teeth named Johnny Lydon, renamed him Johnny Rotten (the teeth), and surrounded him with a couple of other miscreants who could barely play their instruments. The Sex Pistols was born.

McLaren and Westwood renamed their clothing shop SEX and began to sell ripped clothing, dirty t-shirts and repurposed S&M outfits. You could walk into SEX and buy all the gear that would make you look just like a member of The Sex Pistols. The “look” that McLaren saw in The New York Dolls, in Richard Hell and in Johnny Rotten was central to what became known as “punk.” Punk was a fashion before it became a subculture, a politics, a style of music. (...)

If punk is more than just fashion, it leads us to another question. What is fashion? According to Andrew Bolton and the people who put the show together at the Met, fashion is a form of freedom and self-expression. Punk was therefore important to fashion because it opened up new possibilities. Any kid could rip up some jeans and stick clothespins in a shirt and become the master of his or her destiny. Punk, so this thinking goes, made everyone into a designer and made any attire possible. The current Do-It-Yourself ethos within fashion and the culture at large is a direct result of the freedom given to us by punk. That’s the way Punk: Chaos to Couture sees it.

But fashion is only about freedom and self-expression on the surface. At its core, fashion is a kind of death drive. The number one imperative of fashion is, after all, to produce something new every season. This means killing the style of the last season. This process is relentless—some would say exhausting. The styles that are killed off are inevitably recycled down the line, only to be killed again in a cyclical process that never ends. (...)

Fashion took off as an industry around the same time that Nietzsche was thinking about nihilism. Fashion works well in a society that is unsure about its highest values because fashion has nothing to do with values. The point of fashion is to produce style. No style is inherently better than any other style. One can’t be better than another, since every style is only good for the moment. There is a democratic spirit to fashion for this reason, and a sense of freedom. But the freedom of fashion has a desperate quality. The newest style in fashion is fresh for the brief period in which it is new. Then it must be discarded.

The excitement of fashion is the constant excitement of novelty. But the flip side of this excitement is exhaustion, boredom. When Malcolm McLaren discovered Richard Hell in New York City in the 1970s, he loved Hell’s broken down and carefree look. One of the words McLaren used to describe Hell was “bored.” McLaren said, “He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn and ripped t-shirt.” You see that look on the faces of many classic punk rockers. They were dirty and bored. In many ways, the boredom was more unsettling than the anger. Sid Vicious could look scary when he put on a scowl and flipped you the bird. But he looked truly terrifying when he stared blankly into the camera lens, caring not at all whether he — or you — lived or died.

by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set |  Read more:

Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Who Looks Like That

If you discount countless, forgettable chunks of time spent at school, home, and 7-Eleven, I passed most of my waking hours from ages ten through twelve playing baseball and goofing off with friends at the Point Loma Little League fields. Those two adjacent baseball fields were about a mile from my house, and twice a week my team, the San Diego Credit Union Padres, would gather there to practice.

"You should just be called the Padres, not all that bullshit about credit unions," my dad said, as he drove me to the field on the opening day of the season when I was eleven years old.

"But the credit union pays for us to have a team," I said.

"Yeah, well, I pay for you to do everything, and you don't see me making you wear a shirt with my giant goddamned face on it."

"That would be a weird shirt," I said.

"Please. You wear all kinds of dopey shirts, and — what the fuck am I talking about right here? The shirt's not real, I'm just making a point. You got your gear?" he asked, pulling up to the field.

Saturdays were filled with a full lineup of games, all of which the league's players were required to attend, so my parents could drop me off bright and early and then do whatever they wanted all day until my game. The prospect of a morning to himself was very exciting for my dad.

"There's a lot of good teams this year, I think," I said, continuing our conversation as we arrived at the fields.

He reached over me and popped open my door.

"Fascinating. Now out of the car. Vamoose. Out! Out! Have fun and don't screw with anyone bigger than you. I'll be in the stands when your game starts," he said.

I put my hand up for a high five, and he used that hand to push me out of the car. Then his Oldsmobile screeched away up the street, like he was fleeing the scene of a double homicide.

When we weren't playing in a game, most of the Little Leaguers would keep busy playing tag in between the two fields or eating a spicy linguiça sausage made by the local Portuguese family that ran the snack shack above the field.

Every once in a while, someone would raise talk of venturing into the canyon that sat about fifty yards beyond the outfield fences. We were all scared of the canyon. It was packed with trees that grew so close together their branches became intertwined like a bundle of snakes. The canyon's ground was muddy, and it emitted an odor that registered somewhere between "maple syrup" and "rest-stop bath room." It was a group of cannibals short of being the perfect setting for an Indiana Jones film.

Every kid you ran into had a different theory about what lurked inside the canyon walls. "My brother found a pile of poo there that he said was too big to be dog poo or cat poo, but not big enough to be human poo. He said it's probably wolf poo," said my friend Steven as we waited for the game ahead of us to finish so we could take the field.

"Your brother's an idiot," said Michael, the chubby catcher on my team, who always wore his hat backward, so that the back of it came down right above his dark-green eyes. "A bunch of gays live in there. That's where they butt-fuck each other."

"What? Why wouldn't they do that at their house?" I asked.

"I don't know, I'm not a homo. But if you want to get butt-fucked, go into that canyon," he responded, inhaling a bite of sausage that would have killed a lesser twelve-year-old.

At that point in my life, the only two things that scared me were the movie Arachnophobia and that canyon. I tried to never get too close to it, for fear that something might reach out of the forest and pull me in. If I absolutely had to go near to chase an errant throw, my neck would stiffen and my breath would quicken as my body prepared to flee. I decided to run the theories about its inhabitants past my father to see if he had a scientific opinion on the matter.

"Why would gay people screw each other in a canyon filled with wolves?" my dad asked me as he drove us home after my game, my mom sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

"No, that's not what I said. One kid said there were wolves. It was a different kid who said the thing — "

"Hey, look at me, I'm screwing. My pants are off. Oh shit, there's an angry fucking wolf. Does that make any goddamn sense to you?"

"No. But that's not — "

"Plus," my dad interrupted again, "I don't even think wolves are indigenous to this area. Your school takes field trips. You ever heard them say shit to you about wolves? You gotta think about these things critically, son."

"No, I do. I didn't think that the wolves were — "

My mom turned to face me in the backseat. "Also, Justy, you know that homosexuals have sex just like heterosexuals do: in the privacy of their homes. Not in the woods."

"Although sometimes straight people do screw each other in the woods. Mostly when you're in high school, though," my dad added.

I decided to drop the conversation. But that week, on two consecutive nights, I had nightmares about the canyon. Each involved me finding something terrifying in a clearing at the center. In the first dream, I stumbled upon an aquarium that had a screaming Patrick Swayze trapped inside of it, begging me for help, but I was too scared to approach him. In the second, I was confronted by a large squid that had two or three sets of human legs. After that last dream I shot up out of bed, wide awake. I tried falling back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I pictured the canyon, then Swayze, then Squidman.

Hoping it would relax me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom to grab some water from the kitchen. I was still shaken from the dream, and the shapes of the shadows on the hallway wall looked ominous. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move, and I froze in place. It's just a shadow that looks like a person, I told myself. It's not a person.

"What in the hell are you doing?"

I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.

"Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I had a freaky dream," I said, trying to catch my breath. "What are you doing?"

"I'm sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?"

"Why are you doing that right now? It's the middle of the night."

"Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I'm going to have to start waking up earlier."

"Oh. Well, sorry. Didn't mean to bother you," I said, turning to head back to bed, glass of water forgotten.

"No apologies necessary," he said.

Maybe it was the bourbon in the hot toddy, or the serenity of the darkness all around him, but at that moment my dad seemed uncharacteristically at ease.

"Can I ask you a question?" I said, turning to face him again.

"Fire away."

"If something's freaking you out, what do you do to not freak out about it?"

"Is this about that Arachnophobia movie, again? I told you, a spider that large couldn't sustain itself in an urban environment. The ecosystem is too delicate. Not fucking plausible."

"It's not about Arachnophobia. It's just — if something's freaking you out, how do you get it to not freak you out?"

He raised his mug of hot toddy to his lips and took a big slurp.

"Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever's freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello," he said.

I had no idea what that meant, and even in the dimly lit living room he could tell.

"I'm saying, if something's scaring you out, don't run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain't the unknown anymore and it ain't scary." He paused. "Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though."

As I padded down the hallway back to my room, I knew what had to be done: I had to enter the canyon. There was just no way I was going it alone.

by Justin Halpern, Grantland |  Read more:

Photo: courtesy Justin Halpern

Cy Tombly from Cycles and Seasons 
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Aldo Rossi / 1981
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Natalie Maines: A Dixie Chick Declares War on Nashville

In 1986, while George W. Bush was busy finding Jesus and swearing off alcohol, a spunky little blond girl named Natalie Maines was finishing sixth grade in sleepy Lubbock, Texas. At a graduation ceremony, one of her favorite teachers offered a mock prediction: She would be elected president of the United States, then get "kicked out of office for excessive talking." For Maines, who instead grew up to be the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, then the most vilified woman in Dixie, and now, at age 38, a fledgling solo artist, the story proves one thing: "I was born outspoken. It followed me my whole life."

For nearly seven years, though, in the wake of the Chicks' last album, 2006's Taking the Long Way, she was uncharacteristically quiet. Instead of recording new music or touring (outside of scattered Chicks dates), Maines was at home: raising two kids while her husband, former Heroes star Adrian Pasdar, pursued his acting career; gardening in her lush Brentwood backyard; folding laundry while she listened to Howard Stern on the radio. "People have a very romantic idea of what they'd do if they could sing," she says, displaying no apparent exertion as she trots up a nearly vertical section of a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains, a few minutes from home. "But I'm a mom, and it takes a lot of time." She claims, with a laugh, that she put out her rock-dominated solo debut, Mother, largely to get people to stop bugging her to make new music. "I didn't think I had time in my life for this," she says. "I sing all the time. But maybe nobody's hearing it, because I'm singing in my car or in my house or whatever. I don't need the roar of the crowd, and I don't need to hear cheers to feel validated."

Six mornings a week, Maines hikes this vertiginous five-mile-long path, which offers a brutal workout and a Lord of the Rings-worthy view that stretches for miles, even on today's cool and overcast spring morning. Maines is as fed up with country music as anyone still in a group called the Dixie Chicks could possibly be, but she still craves the wide-open spaces she used to sing about. Or else she just needs someplace big and quiet to process all that's happened to her. "It's probably good for her mentally, to kind of air her brain out," says her dad, Lloyd Maines, a famed steel guitarist and producer in his own right. "And she looks to me like she's in the best shape of her life." It's almost silent up here, except for the crunch of our feet on the dirt trail, the panting of her dogs, Mabel (a white Labrador) and Banjo (a friendly, dreadlocked puli, a breed introduced to her by Taking the Long Way producer Rick Rubin), and my own increasingly labored breathing. "I usually run the second part," Maines says. "But I won't make you do that!"

When fellow hikers pass by, they offer no more than friendly nods – no one recognizes her. Maines has a blunt-force haircut she compares to Rachel Maddow's, and is wearing a blue windbreaker over a sleeveless sweatshirt, a gray tee, running shorts and yellow-and-blue-neon running shoes. She looks, at the moment, more like an unusually attractive high school volleyball coach than anyone's idea of a star. "The short hair fits my personality more," she says. "I think maybe, with long hair, it was a role – I was playing dress-up a bit." (...)

For anyone who really knew her, it was no surprise when, on March 10th, 2003, Maines stood onstage in London, on the eve of the Iraq War, and made a casual comment, punctuated with a smile: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." For country-radio programmers, and at least a hysterical minority of fans, it was as if she'd French-kissed Saddam Hus­sein while setting fire to a puppy wrapped in the American flag. An unprecedented boycott and high-tech lynching followed – often overtly sexist, with drown-the-witch overtones: Bill O'Reilly calling them "callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around" wasn't even the worst of it. As chronicled in the superb 2006 documentary Shut Up and Sing, Maines and her bandmates handled it with strength and grace, touring in the face of death threats, playing with their young kids backstage while protesters screamed and smashed CDs outside the venues. Recorded with the controversy fresh in their minds, the barely-country Taking the Long Way turned out to be one of the Chicks' best albums, slapping down their critics while winning five Grammys and selling 2.5 million copies despite near-zero country-radio support.

But the backlash left inevitable scars. "I joke that I have PTSD, but there's probably truth in that joke," Maines says, blue eyes shining. "It all put an ugly light on people that I was kind of happily naive to. But when I was going through it, I really didn't feel like it was affecting me. I was in fight mode and battle mode, and I felt, you know, I was right, and free to say what I want to say." She went into therapy in the past few years. "Not just stuff with the controversy, but I think I've always been sort of a person that just pushes the feelings down, and then they do eventually come back up. So I didn't have tools to know how to deal with them or acknowledge them. I always like to pretend everything's OK. I'm a shyer person now, less trusting." (...)

Harper and Maines never discussed genre: "The words 'rock,' or 'country,' or 'soul' . . . none of that ever came up," says Harper. But as co-producer, Maines knew exactly what she wanted it all to sound like, even singing melodies for guitar solos and bass lines – and she was quite certain that she never wanted to make anything resembling a country album again. "I can't listen to our second album," she says, referring to the Chicks' 1999 breakthrough, Fly. "Because I was really, like, embracing country and really waving that country flag. My accent is so out of control on that album. I'm like, 'Who is that?'"

When the Bush controversy hit, Maines was stunned. "I always thought they accepted us in spite of the fact that we were different," she says. "It shocked me and kind of grossed me out that people thought I would be a conservative right-winger, that I'd be a redneck. But at that time, people didn't ask us things like, 'What do you think of gay marriage?' If they had, they would have learned how liberal I was. But I was so confused by who people thought I was and what I had been putting out there."

Afterward, she started acting out. "There was a part of me that was like, 'Oh, this isn't OK? Fuck that.' I didn't know the cat was in the bag, but it felt so good that the cat was out of the bag. Then I definitely just went, 'Oh, really? You don't like that? Well, how about this? Not only do I not like this president, I love gay people! And I'm pro-legalization of marijuana and all drugs! Yeah, let me blow your mind.'"

by Brian Hyatt, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Photo: Mark Seliger

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