Mavericks

The air smells faintly of salt water, and strongly of bonfires, diesel fuel, and weed. Seagulls squawk, the sky on the horizon is just turning green, and the air is cold in that prankish West Coast way that’s impossible to take seriously and pointless to dress for. Once the sun comes up and the fog burns off, it’s going to be a perfect day.

It’s 6 AM, high tide, and I’m a thirty-minute, eucalyptus-dense drive south of San Francisco in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a tiny village with some of the biggest waves in the world and not much else. Shadowy figures are perched in the beds of pickup trucks; they speak in low voices and occasionally take sips of coffee. I’m sitting on the ground in the near dark, waiting for a surf contest to begin.

An unusually steep, unusually deep Pliocene-epoch sedimentary reef rises half a mile offshore. This is where Mavericks breaks, where from November to March waves can top out at 100 feet, making them roughly ten times the height of what most surfers would consider “big.” Sharks are common, as are riptides and exposed rocks. Accomplished big-wave surfers — famous ones — have died here.

Some years — when tides and swells and winds and storms combine infelicitously — the waves here fail to break at anything above twenty feet, which means for Mavericks that they are hardly waves at all. If the conditions aren’t right, the contest doesn’t happen. When it does happen, the Mavericks Invitational is announced a few days ahead of time, and even in this case the plan is provisional at best. The inconvenience is unavoidable; one elemental change can ruin the wave.

It’s Sunday, and the Mavericks Invitational was announced on Thursday, which means that twelve of the twenty-four competitors had to buy plane tickets — from Los Angeles, Hawaii, Brazil, and South Africa — fast. The other twelve live less than an hour’s drive away, and would probably be surfing here today, contest or no contest. They all know each other, and most surf together regularly. On this winter morning, it’s been three years since the last invitational.

Compared with most professional athletes, these guys are ancient. Matt Ambrose of Pacifica is 40. Shane Desmond and Ken “Skindog” Collins, both from Santa Cruz, are 42 and 43, respectively. At 31, Shawn Dollar, also from Santa Cruz, is one of the youngest competitors. He also holds the world record for the biggest wave ever paddled into (sixty-one feet, a scale at which almost every other surfer would opt for tow-in). I ask Dollar why the surfers at Mavericks are so old. “It’s scary as shit,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “It takes you years and years and years to break down fear. Put a 16-year-old kid out there? He’s probably going to drown.”

Surfers have the odd habit of saying “I drowned” when they mean “I almost drowned.” Drowning, after all, feels like almost drowning until it feels like nothing. When I ask Dollar to explain the sensation of almost drowning, his answer, and the way he holds his face as he says it, makes me feel that the question is an intrusive one. “It’s just depressing and lonely,” he says, not making eye contact. “The lights start turning off, literally. It blinks in your mind and goes black. Pretty soon, it’s just lights out and you’re done.” He pauses awkwardly. “It’s really fucking weird.” (...)

The crowd contains a lot of stupidly handsome Australians, even more obese adults in 49ers gear, and a good number of cruel-seeming young boys. Their mothers, though irresponsibly tan, appear attentive. They wear flared jeans, snug tank tops, and platform flip-flops. They have French manicures, puka-shell necklaces, and toe rings. Either their taste has not changed since spring break 1998 or they’ve just decided, dispassionately, that this is the hottest way to dress.

A lot of the people here — both men and women — possess all the features that constitute a modern, normative standard of beauty, but exaggerated to a ghoulish degree. They’re so blond and so tan and so lean that it all actually starts to look like one big mess of congenital disorders. A towheaded guy kisses his towheaded girlfriend, and it’s shocking — seconds before I had assumed they were fraternal twins.

by Alice Gregory, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Letter from Israel: On Gas Masks and Belonging

The cockroaches in Tel Aviv are nuclear-apocalypse huge. How adorable, how terribly petite the roaches of New York seem to me now. In a million years, the spacemen who descend to this place will find only styrofoam cups and the hard-shelled family living under my sink. I am a coward. Afraid to get close, I kill them with a chemical spray. They fall from the wall or garbage bin, thud. They heave madly in tortured circles, stopped by convulsions that come at smaller and smaller increments, cramming themselves into the ground as if to disappear. Their stomachs bulge and seep out. After they die — or as they are dying — their feelers twitch, twitch, twitch.

This was the month for gas masks in Israel. Fearing that Assad might use his sarin-bearing rockets on Israel next, those who did not yet have gas masks picked one up at the post office. Every outlet reported it, and every lede was the same: “Long lines and high tensions in Israel today as civilians obtain gas masks from local distribution centers…” I don’t have a gas mask. I’m not a citizen, and therefore not eligible for a free gas mask from the post office. I can buy one for — 400 sheckels — a bit over $100 from a war profiteer. That’s a month’s worth of groceries, nearly, but not quite a prohibitive cost. Still, I don’t buy one. “Assad’s not that crazy, don’t give it another thought,” says my Hebrew teacher, rolling her eyes. Then almost as an afterthought, “But pick one up anyway.”

An American friend of mine, perhaps trying to console me regarding my lack of mask, tells me that the Israeli gas mask kits lack the antidote for the specific nerve gas — sarin — present in Syrian weapons. He also reminds me that during World War I, soldiers used alternate methods to survive gas attacks. He is right: it is a proud element of Canadian history that one of our own boys figured out you could survive a mustard gas attack if you covered your mouth with a cloth soaked in your own urine. I’m saved! He laughs. We are on a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Thursday (Israel’s Friday) and the bus is filled with soldiers coming home for the weekend. Everyone is sleeping. Soldiers are always sleeping. And after the conversation, my friend and I sit in silence, and I wonder how small the gas masks come. Do they make them for toddlers? For newborns?

I have someone here. He is in the Israeli Army and so he is away a lot. Please get your mask, he begs me. If things get hot — this is how he talks — if things get hot you will not be able to reach me. He tells me if worse comes to worst I can go to his widowed grandfather, who now has an extra mask. What are you doing here? I want to ask him. You should be a camp counselor in rural Vermont. He is worried about his girlfriend jury-rigging a gas mask with her own pee; he is worried about the extra chemicals weapons training courses this new situation might entail. I am picturing him teaching children to canoe. I live in a country without civilians. Everyone I know has the same green khaki duffle bag. It’s usually sitting on top of her closet: out of the way but easy to reach. It is kind of natty looking, actually. Madewell would sell it for $278 as a Weekender Duffle in Hunter Green. But it’s the bag they take with them on reserve duty. I actually do not know what is inside because I am too embarrassed to ask. I would guess that it is a uniform, boots, underwear, socks, toothbrush, a few granola bars, maybe some expired pepper spray for the ladies. And under his bed, everyone has a cardboard box with a gasmask and antidotes. (...)

The State of Israel defines Jewishness as having one or more Jewish grandparent. My gentile mother is one hell of a lawyer, and has reviewed the terms of the Law of Return carefully with me. This law grants any Jew the right to live and work in Israel — immigrating or obtaining various visas. However, a substantial chunk of public life in Israel is overseen by an Orthodox rabbinate. This creates more than a little tension regarding who is Jewish and what being a Jew means. So, when I desperately need a work visa to stay in the country, I find myself in the Ministry of the Interior, biting my nails while a hard-faced Russian-Israeli named Anya or some such reviews my visa materials. She is reading my “proof of Judaism” — a letter from the rabbi heading the congregation where my father was Bar Mitzvahed. She is frowning. My shoulders begin to droop when her colleague, a traditionally-dressed Orthodox Jewish woman in a headcovering, leans in and read my letter over Anya’s shoulder. I breathe in sharp. “Give her the visa, Anya.” Exhale. Anya looks incredulous and starts to protest. Headcovering clucks in slight impatience, Anya prints out my visa on peach colored paper and sticks it into my passport.

by Rebecca Sacks, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Rebecca Sacks

[ed. From the comments: Thanks for an entertaining and thoughtful piece. I urge you to continue to explore the question of the refugees, and why Israel won’t take them. Having lived in the ‘the territories’ myself for a year and a half, I believe that this question will lead you to address deeper questions, and some fundamental problems inherent in founding a state on an identity of religion and ethnicity (ironically enough, in answer to persecution and murder on the basis of religion and ethnicity.) I believe that this idea is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and as bad for Tutsis and Hutus as it is for Bosnians an Serbs as it is for Palestinians and Israelis. But like all newcomers to Israel, you’ll have to make up your own mind.]

Jonas Bendiksen, Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. Altai Territory, 2000
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They don’t want to be found
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Dafni Melidou
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Frank Hazebroek Nemo at 42nd Street New York 
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The End of the Nation-State?

Every five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, “Alternative Worlds,” which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.

One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.

The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.

A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re “para-states” — or, in one common parlance, “special economic zones.”

Across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, hundreds of such zones have sprung up in recent decades. In 1980, Shenzhen became China’s first; now they blanket China, which has become the world’s second largest economy.

The Arab world has more than 300 of them, though more than half are concentrated in one city: Dubai. Beginning with Jebel Ali Free Zone, which is today one of the world’s largest and most efficient ports, and now encompasses finance, media, education, health care and logistics, Dubai is as much a dense set of internationally regulated commercial hubs as it is the most populous emirate of a sovereign Arab federation.

This complex layering of territorial, legal and commercial authority goes hand in hand with the second great political trend of the age: devolution.

In the face of rapid urbanization, every city, state or province wants to call its own shots. And they can, as nations depend on their largest cities more than the reverse.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City is fond of saying, “I don’t listen to Washington much.” But it’s clear that Washington listens to him. The same is true for mayors elsewhere in the world, which is why at least eight former mayors are now heads of state.

Scotland and Wales in Britain, the Basque Country and Catalonia in Spain, British Columbia in Canada, Western Australia and just about every Indian state — all are places seeking maximum fiscal and policy autonomy from their national capitals.

by Parag Khanna, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén

The New Canon

When I was an undergrad, my professor would talk about stars and directors by showing us actual slides of them, all loaded up into the Don Draper “Carousel.” Clips were on actual film, with actual projectionists, or an assortment of badly edited VHS tapes. When a professor recommended a film, I’d go to the video store and rent it for 99 cents, the standard fee for classic movies. I never missed a screening, because it would be nearly impossible to find many of the films on my own, let alone someone with a VHS that wasn’t the common room at the end of my dorm floor. It was the good old analog days, when film and media studies was still nascent, the internet only barely past dial-up, and internet media culture as we know it limited to a healthy growth of BBS, listservs, and AOL chat rooms. It was also less than 15 years ago.

My four years in college coincided with dramatic changes in digital technology, specifically the rise of the (cheap) DVD and the personal computer DVD player. Before, cinephilia meant access to art house theaters or a VHS/television combination in addition to whatever computer you had. . . . by the time I graduated, most computers came standard with a DVD player and ethernet, if not wireless, connectivity. That Fall, I signed up for Netflix. I envied those with TiVo. Two years later, the growing size of hard drives and bandwidths facilitated the piracy culture that had theretofore mostly been limited to music. Then YouTube. Then streaming Netflix. Then Hulu. Then AppleTV. Then HBOGO. Or something like that.

Today, we live in a television culture characterized by cord-cutters and time-shifters. Sure, many, many people still appointment view or surf channels old school style. I know this. I also know people watch the local news. Yet as a 30-something member of the middle class, I catch myself thinking that my consumption habits — I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Full Cable; I still appointment view several shows — are somewhat typical.

I’m so wrong, but not in the way I might have expected. My students taught me that. They watch Netflix, and they watch it hard. They watch it at the end of the night to wind down from studying, they watch it when they come home tipsy, they binge it on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Most use their family’s subscription; others filch passwords from friends. It’s so widely used that when I told my Mad Men class that their only text for the class was a streaming subscription, only one student had to acquire one. (I realize we’re talking about students at a liberal arts college, but I encountered the same levels of access at state universities. As for other populations, I really don’t know, because Netflix won’t tell me (or anyone) who’s using it.

Some students use Hulu, but never Hulu Plus — when it comes to network shows and keeping current, they just don’t care. For some super buzzy shows, like Game of Thrones and Girls, they pirate or find illegal streams. But as far as I can tell, the general sentiment goes something like this: if it’s not on Netflix, why bother?

by Anne Helen Petersen, LARB Blog |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

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Kurt Solmssen, Red Centerboard
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Whatever Happened to Chores?

Recently, a close colleague sent me a flyer from a local children's shoe store that read: "Do you have a child who is interested in learning to tie their own shoes?" I confess that I sighed, thinking about how toddlers in most societies learn basic skills and self-care by routinely watching older siblings and other family members in the course of their everyday lives. They don't need a workshop on it.

Some note sensibly that expectations of children will vary according to what is needed to flourish in their respective societies. According to this logic, children in small-scale societies will learn subsistence skills and assist in tasks early in life. Alternatively, post-industrial societies privilege children's academic skills needed to grasp rapidly changing technologies, complex systems, and global influences on just about everything. Saddled with homework and extra-curricular activities, these children have little time to lend a hand at home or offer service to others in the community, the thinking goes.

In isolation this means-ends argument sounds reasonable. But in the context of the social and emotional fabric of middle-class families in many post-industrial societies, the weakened emphasis on children's practical contributions to the household warrants a second hearing. As widely noted, the hectic reality of middle class families in the US and Europe involves two parents working, raising a family, and maintaining a home. At 5 pm, you are likely to find a parent (typically mom) at home exhausted from work and literally running from one task to another – homework help, food prep, laundry, tidying up, readying kids for bed, and maybe sneaking a peek at email messages.

Parents invest huge amounts of time (and money) to nurture children's interests, intervene whenever children face a problem big or small, and give children sole credit for accomplishments that required considerable parental involvement. Yet, these same parents garner little or no assistance in chores from their children in return. In our UCLA Sloan study of Los Angeles households, children ignored, resisted, or refused to respond to parents' appeals to help in 22 out of the 30 families observed. In the 8 families where children were cooperative, they were requested to do very little (see Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work and Relationships in Middle Class America).

This is a somewhat uniquely American phenomenon. Middle class parents in other prosperous nations are less tolerant of children's reluctance to do their part around the house. In Sweden, for example, middle class parents insist that each family member is responsible for cleaning up after themselves and keeping the house in order. Small children are expected to clean their dishes and rooms. Sweden's idea of a universal social welfare state begins in early childhood.

The problem in many American households is that parents place a high value of their children's right to pursue their individual desires. It's as if children's "rights" obscure children's obligations. Is it my imagination or has "duty" dropped out of the American child-rearing lexicon?

by Elinor Ochs, Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

The Inner Life of James Bond

It’s 1927 and Ian Fleming, age 19, climbs off a train in the small Tyrolean town of Kitzbühel. He’s under a cloud: you can almost see it, small and discolored, parked a foot or so above his head, intermittently shedding rain. Fleming moves gracefully, but there is a sense of encumbrance about him, a kind of private sluggishness or surliness of mood. In his face—austere brow, thick-lidded eyes, bruiser’s nose, prissy mouth—severity blends with the instincts of the pleasure-seeker, the lotus-eater: a sadist’s face, really. Fleming has been dispatched to these mountains by his mother (“M,” as he sometimes calls her) because he’s made a mess of his education back in England. Shuffled out of Eton for some small scandal, he has more recently exited, under his little cloud, the officer’s academy at Sandhurst. Now he is entering the maternally mandated care of a British couple named Forbes Dennis, progressive educators and acolytes of the Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler. During the next four years, under the guidance of the Forbes Dennises, Fleming will move from Kitzbühel to Munich to Geneva, inhaling as he goes the headiest drafts of High Europe: Rilke, Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler, and the fathers of psychoanalysis. In due course, he will receive written permission from Carl Jung to translate one of the great man’s lectures, a disquisition on the alchemist and doctor Paracelsus. And 26 years later, he’ll sit down in his Jamaican villa and type The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

Was James Bond—neck-snapper, escape artist, serial shagger—the last repudiation of his creator’s cultural pedigree? Take that, fancy books; take that, whiskered shrinks. I, Ian Fleming, give you a hero almost without psychology: a bleak circuit of appetites, sensations, and prejudices, driven by a mechanical imperative called “duty.” In Jungian-alchemical terms, 007 is like lead, the metal associated with the dark god Saturn, lying coldly at the bottom of the crucible and refusing transformation. Boil him, slash him, poison him, flog him with a carpet beater and shoot his woman—Bond will not be altered.

The distinction has to be made, before we go any further, between the Bond of Fleming’s novels and the Bond of the movies. For that matter, distinctions have to be made among the various movie Bonds. You can’t really play him, because there’s nothing to play; you have to be him. Sean Connery had the darkness and the hairy chest. George Lazenby was a misfire. Roger Moore was a brilliant anti-actor, sleek with the absurd good fortune of landing such a plum gig. Timothy Dalton, the late-’80s Bond, trailed terrible whiffs of the ’70s: almost everything he did felt anachronistic. Pierce Brosnan had such a likable face, too likable, surely, for 007. But Daniel Craig, our current Bond, has a soured, turned-off quality that is very satisfying. He seems almost to be playing the role under duress, his features thickened and smeared as if goons from the Fleming estate have been working him over between takes.

The latest film, Skyfall, took us deeper into Bond than any of the previous ones, to the very brink of identifiable psychology. The death of the mother figure in the remote chapel, the plunge through the ice, the resurrection motifs: we seemed at moments to be entering the phantasmagoria of the Bond title sequences themselves, those underworld (undersea, sometimes) montages of flames and bullets and writhing women, occasionally churned by shock waves of Shirley Bassey.

Fleming’s novels, too, skirt the droning vacuum of Bond’s inner life. Is he human at all? From time to time he slumps, depressively—as, for example, in the opening pages of Thunderball: “Again Bond dabbed with the bloodstained styptic pencil at the cut on his chin and despised the face that stared sullenly back at him from the mirror above the washbasin. Stupid, ignorant bastard!” But this discontent is due to the fact that he has a hangover, he is between missions (traditionally a dangerous moment for Bond), and he has cut himself shaving. An immediate and physical ennui, in other words. He’ll be all right in a minute.

The theologian Cardinal Newman wrote that as we come to understand “the nothingness of this world … we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it.” So it is with the Bond books, the difference being that in Bond’s universe the two great solitaries of existence are Bond himself and his controller, M: the vinegary omnipotence, the “shrewd grey eyes.” M sends him out; M calls him back; Bond will die for M. The books contain other characters, of course. The villains glow fantastically, fanatically, cranking their evil plots; the CIA’s Felix Leiter and assorted sidekicks come and go; and there are always the women, the beautiful women who cannot resist him. (Bond has to be irresistible—his irresistibility, his crude magnetic pull, is what he has in the place of charm.) But this is a ghost parade. It all comes down to Bond, and M, and the mission.

by James Parker, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Christy

Mabuchi Toru, Dried Fish on the Table - 卓上干魚 1963
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Ani DiFranco

Simon Palmer, The Woman Who Would Not Give Way
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Janiva Magness

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Elephant Revival

Tina Kazakhishvili 
[She's never coming back]

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