In Silicon Valley, Partying Like It’s 1999

These are fabulous times in Silicon Valley.

Mere youths, who in another era would just be graduating from college or perhaps wondering what to make of their lives, are turning down deals that would make them and their great-grandchildren wealthy beyond imagining. They are confident that even better deals await.

“Man, it feels more and more like 1999 every day,” tweeted Bill Gurley, one of the valley’s leading venture capitalists. “Risk is being discounted tremendously.”

That was in May, shortly after his firm, Benchmark, led a $13.5 million investment in Snapchat, the disappearing-photo site that has millions of adolescent users but no revenue.

Snapchat, all of two years old, just turned down a multibillion-dollar deal from Facebook and, perhaps, an even bigger deal from Google. On paper, that would mean a fortyfold return on Benchmark’s investment in less than a year.

Benchmark is the venture capital darling of the moment, a backer not only of Snapchat but the photo-sharing app Instagram (sold for $1 billion to Facebook), the ride-sharing service Uber (valued at $3.5 billion) and Twitter ($22 billion), among many others. Ten of its companies have gone public in the last two years, with another half-dozen on the way. Benchmark seems to have a golden touch.

That is generating a huge amount of attention and an undercurrent of concern. In Silicon Valley, it may not be 1999 yet, but that fateful year — a moment when no one thought there was any risk to the wildest idea — can be seen on the horizon, drifting closer.

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dan Taylor for Techcrunch

Stephanie Galli
via:

Dealer's Hand

Very important people line up differently from you and me. They don’t want to stand behind anyone else, or to acknowledge wanting something that can’t immediately be had. If there’s a door they’re eager to pass through, and hundreds of equally or even more important people are there, too, they get as close to the door as they can, claim a patch of available space as though it had been reserved for them, and maintain enough distance to pretend that they are not in a line.

Prior to the official opening of Art Basel, the annual fair in Switzerland, there is a two-day V.I.P. preview. In many respects, the preview is the fair. It’s when the collectors who can afford the good stuff are allowed in to buy it. After those two days, there isn’t much left for sale, and it becomes less a fair than a kind of pop-up museum, as the V.I.P.s, many of whom have come to Basel from the Biennale in Venice, continue on, perhaps to London for the auctions there. The international art circuit can be gruelling, which is why pretty much everyone who participates in it takes off the month of August, to recuperate.

The Basel preview began at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in June. The meat of the fair was in a gigantic convention center on the east side of the Rhine. The dealers’ booths were arrayed along two vast rectangular grids, which enclosed a circular courtyard that resembled a panopticon. The fair occupied two floors. The bottom one featured blue-chip art, offered by the powerhouse dealers; Picassos and Warhols could be seen among more contemporary work. Upstairs, for the most part, was younger work, exhibited by smaller galleries.

On the morning of the preview, after a champagne breakfast in the panopticon, the V.I.P.s gathered at the doors, under the watchful eye of guards in berets and dark crewneck sweaters. Through a window in the door, you could see, down the hall, the dealer David Zwirner, with his sales staff huddled around him, as though for a pep talk. The Zwirner booth was just past the Fondation Beyeler’s. (The Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler, who died in 2010, was one of Art Basel’s founders and its presiding spirit.) Zwirner comes in force: he had about a dozen salespeople with him, a mixture of partners, directors, and associates, as well as a platoon of assistants and art handlers. A few minutes before the doors opened, they took up positions in a sales-floor spread defense. Bellatrix Hubert, a Zwirner partner, pantomimed a gesture of being slammed by an incoming flood. The doors parted, and the buyers poured in. (...)

“One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain—dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base.

Since the doldrums of the early nineties, the market for contemporary art, which has various definitions (work created after the Second World War, or during “our” lifetime, or post-1960, or post-1970), has rocketed up, year after year, flattening out briefly amid the financial crisis and global recession of 2008-09, before resuming its climb. Big annual returns have attracted more people to buying art, which has raised prices further. It is no coincidence that this steep rise, in recent decades, coincides with the increasing financialization of the world economy. The accumulation of greater wealth in the hands of a smaller percentage of the world’s population has created immense fortunes with a limitless capacity to pursue a limited supply of art work. The globalization of the art market—the interest in contemporary art among newly wealthy Asians, Latin Americans, Arabs, and Russians—has furnished it with scores of new buyers, and perhaps fresh supplies of greater fools. Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence. Its elusive valuation makes it conducive to extremely creative tax accounting.

“These are the highest-luxury goods man has ever known,” a dealer told me. “If you’re in the business of selling art, you’re an idiot if you don’t respond to that.”

by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Pari Dukovic

Gil Scott Heron

Jo Oakley
via:

via:

Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.

Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.

Wealth Disrupts

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. The “1 percent” becomes “2 percent.” Or even more. There are many more millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires today compared with 30 years ago, as a proportion of the population.

Let’s take households worth $10 million or more (in 1995 dollars). According to the research by economist Edward Wolff, from 1983 to 2010 the number of American households worth at least $10 million grew to 350,000 from 66,000.

Rich Americans tend to be more politically active than the rest of the population. They supportcandidates who share their views and values; they sometimes run for office themselves. Yet the supply of political offices has stayed flat (there are still 100 senators and 435 representatives -- the same numbers as in 1970). In technical terms, such a situation is known as “elite overproduction.”

A related sign is the overproduction of law degrees. From the mid-1970s to 2011, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled to 1.2 million from 400,000. Meanwhile, the population grew by only 45 percent. Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. recently estimated that twice as many law graduates pass the bar exam as there are job openings for them. In other words, every year U.S. law schools churn out about 25,000 “surplus” lawyers, many of whom are in debt. A large number of them go to law school with an ambition to enter politics someday.

Don’t hate them for it -- they are at the mercy of the same large, impersonal social forces as the rest of us. The number of newly minted MBAs has expanded even faster than law degrees.

Lawyer Glut

So why is it important that we have a multitude of desperate law school graduates and many more politically ambitious rich than 30 years ago?

Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction. The other two important elements were stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state.

by Peter Turchin, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Daniel

Trigger

The guitar—a Martin N-20 classical, serial number 242830—was a gorgeous instrument, with a warm, sweet tone and a pretty “mellow yellow” coloring. The top was made of Sitka spruce, which came from the Pacific Northwest; the back and sides were Brazilian rosewood. The fretboard and bridge were ebony from Africa, and the neck was mahogany from the Amazon basin. The brass tuning pegs came from Germany. All of these components had been gathered in the Martin guitar factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and cut, bent, and glued together, then lacquered, buffed, and polished. If the guitar had been shipped to New York or Chicago, it might have been purchased by a budding flamenco guitarist or a Segovia wannabe. Instead it was sent to a guitarist in Nashville named Shot Jackson, who repaired and sold guitars out of a shop near the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969 it was bought by a struggling country singer, a guy who had a pig farm, a failing marriage, and a crappy record deal.

Willie Nelson had a new guitar.

Forty-three years later—after some 10,000 shows, recording sessions, jam sessions, songwriting sessions, and guitar pulls, most taking place amid a haze of tobacco and reefer smoke and carried out with a particular brand of string-pounding, neck-throttling violence—the guitar looks like hell. The frets are so worn it’s a wonder any tone emerges at all. The face is covered in scars, cuts, and autographs scraped into the wood. Next to the bridge is a giant maw, a gaping hole that looks like it was created by someone swinging a hammer.

Most guitars don’t have names. This one, of course, does. Trigger has a voice and a personality, and he bears a striking resemblance to his owner. Willie’s face is lined with age and his body is bent with experience. He’s been battered by divorce, the IRS, his son Billy’s suicide, and the loss of close friends like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and his longtime bass player Bee Spears. In the past decade, Willie has had carpal tunnel surgery on his left hand, torn a rotator cuff, and ruptured a bicep. The man of flesh and bone has a lot in common with the guitar of wire and wood.

“Trigger’s like me,” Willie said with a laugh on a cool morning last April at his ranch by the Pedernales River. “Old and beat-up.” (...)

According to legend, Roy Rogers stumbled across his famous horse back in 1938 when he was preparing to shoot a movie. The horse was a palomino named Golden Cloud. Rogers rode him, fell in love with how he handled, bought him, and then changed his name. A singing cowboy with a guitar and a gun needed a horse with a name like Trigger.

According to legend, Willie stumbled across his famous Martin guitar back in 1969, after his previous guitar had been knocked out of commission. He and his band were playing at the John T. Floore Country Store, in Helotes, Willie remembers, and at some point he laid down his Baldwin acoustic guitar in its case on the stage. “A drunk stepped on it,” Willie says. He had a couple of his guys take the guitar back to Nashville, to Shot Jackson, whom Willie had known since the early sixties.

The thing is, Willie didn’t much care about the guitar, an 800C Electric Classical, which had a thick, beefy neck. The guitar had been a promotional gift from Baldwin—a piano company—in 1968, along with a C1 amp. What Willie really liked was the sound he could get from the guitar’s pickup, a revolutionary Prismatone piezoelectronic model, made with six tiny ceramic sensors. Before the Prismatone, acoustic players like Willie had to play into a microphone, which meant they were usually drowned out by the band. The new pickup allowed him to play an acoustic guitar onstage with a band and actually be heard, especially with the C1 amp, a solid-state piece of machinery that was designed by Baldwin’s organ engineers to work with the Prismatone via a special stereo wiring system. The amp had a brushed aluminum top and five colorful “Supersound” tone buttons—red, lime green, yellow, blue, and purple—that evoked the groovy sixties. “Hear it,” promised the Baldwin catalog, “and you might think it’s a happening!”

Jackson couldn’t salvage the guitar, he told Willie over the phone. It was too busted up. Jackson did mention, though, that he had a Martin N-20 on hand and could transfer the pickup into it. Martin was the premier maker of steel-stringed guitars; the N-20, which had been introduced the year before, was a nylon-stringed, or gut-string, guitar, an attempt by Martin to make inroads in the Spanish-style market. Willie liked gut-string guitars well enough, but he was a little uncomfortable buying one over the phone. “Is it any good?” he asked. “Well, Martins are known for good guitars,” Jackson responded. Willie asked the price. Seven hundred and fifty dollars, Jackson told him. “I had just bought a roping horse for seven hundred and fifty dollars,” Willie recalls. “So I said, ‘That’s pretty cool.’ ” He bought it, sight unseen.

by Michael Hall, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Wyatt McSpadden

Al Capone’s jail cell at the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
via:

Richard Hamilton. Swingeing London III, 1972.
via:

Cannibal Habits of the Common Tourist

The most iconic moment in Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke's 1988 documentary about the absurdities of global tourism, comes 40 minutes into the film, when European and American tourists visit a village along Papua New Guinea's once-isolated Sepik River. As the sweaty white folks wander around snapping photos and haggling for souvenirs, a handsome young Papuan tribesman speaks to an offscreen interviewer, earnestly explaining what he thinks of the outsiders.

"When the tourists come to our village, we are friendly towards them," he says, his words translated in the subtitles. "They like to see all the things in the village. We accept them here." While he's saying this, an elderly German woman wearing high-hitched khaki trousers and silver horn-rimmed spectacles creeps into the background, fumbles with the settings on her camera, and — oblivious to what the tribesman is saying — snaps a picture of him before scuttling back out of the frame. Upon initial viewing, this interaction seems to perfectly encapsulate the strained guest-host dynamic portrayed in Cannibal Tours: even as the Sepik native takes pains to affirm the humanity of tourists, the tourist's first instinct is to treat him like scenery.

Though Cannibal Tours was never meant to be taken as comedy, its more memorable scenes have a cringe-inducing quality that calls to mind the delicious discomfort of watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office. In basic narrative terms, the documentary depicts a meandering series of interactions between luxury liner tourists and the Papuans who live in various Sepik River villages. What the film lacks in plot arc, however, it makes up for in awkward tension as it probes the mutual suspicion and misunderstanding that arises when wealthy outsiders visit once-primitive communities in a far-flung corner of the world.

In a typical scene, a tourist draped in expensive camera gear and boutique safari-wear might fawn over a woven-grass handicraft, ponder aloud what it's supposed to be ("Is that a dress, or is it a bag?"), inquire in half-shouted English about its price, express surprise at how cheap it is, then — often at the prodding of other tourists — ask for an even cheaper "second price." One American couple, theatrical in their condescension, offers cigarettes in exchange for a discounted souvenir; another American, a self-declared "exponent of primitive art," natters on about how tourists are ruining local craft traditions, seemingly unaware of the irony as she shops for crafts with her fellow tourists. Villagers, interviewed individually by the filmmaker, react to the presence of the tourists with a mix of befuddlement and frustration. "I want them to pay me without any fuss," one gray-bearded man says. "When I go to those big shops in the town, I can't buy things for 'second price.' [...] I must pay the first price for a shirt or trousers." In a later scene, the same elderly Papuan admits he can't understand why the tourists come there to begin with. "We sit here confused," he says, "while they take pictures of everything." (...)

Should we find it easy to recognize how the tourists' camera lenses dehumanize the Papuans, however, it's just as easy to overlook how O'Rourke's lens has a way of dehumanizing the tourists. For example: in the iconic shot that seems to sum up the entire film — a horn-rimmed tourist barging in to snap a picture of a young Papuan, mid-interview — one might eventually come to wonder just what the elderly German lady was trying to document. Why would this woman want a picture of the tribeman's back? Upon reflection, one is liable to conclude that she wasn't merely out to get a picture of the Papuan from behind; she was photographing the photographer — O'Rourke — as he conducted the interiew.

by Rolf Potts, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: YouTube, h/t The Dish

Paul Klee, Comedy 1921
via:

Tom Hussy, Reflections
via:

The Nature of David Suzuki

David Suzuki has finally realized that there are some hills he can’t climb. Now 77 years old, dealing with gout and other indignities of age, the world’s best-known environmentalist recently traded in his mountain bike for one with an electric motor. The ride from his waterfront home in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood to his office on West 4th Avenue, isn’t very long, but it’s mostly uphill. And although it has never been enjoyable, the effort suddenly started to seem unbearable this past summer. So he sought technological assistance. “God, at my age, can’t I cheat a little?” he asks.

The small admission of defeat came just a few weeks after a much more potent reminder of where he’s headed. On July 9, Tara Cullis, his wife of 40 years, and 13 years his junior, suffered acute heart failure while swimming in the ocean off their home. She made it to shore, where someone on the beach called 911, and then called their house. Suzuki, barefoot and wearing a Yakuta, a traditional Japanese housecoat, made it to her side before the ambulance arrived. She survived, but the road to recovery has been rocky. Suzuki has drastically cut back his speaking engagements and travel. The couple has sworn off alcohol and salt. It has been a time for reflection for both of them. “The reality is that at my age, I could kick the bucket tomorrow,” says Suzuki. “Everybody goes, ‘Oh, no. You’re going to live into your 80s.’ But the reality is that I’m living in the death zone and I accept that.”

His scientific career began in the late 1950s; his media one, a decade later. Since 1979, he’s been the face of CBC’s The Nature of Things, an internationally distributed science program that’s now in its 53rd season. Suzuki’s official CV runs 17 pages. It lists dozens of academic and broadcasting awards as well as his 25 honorary degrees. Now a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, he has authored or collaborated on 50 books. In 2011, Reader’s Digest anointed him as its “most trusted Canadian.” And this October, he topped an Angus Reid poll of the country’s most admired figures, with 57 per cent of respondents giving him the thumbs up. However, lately, he seems to have been garnering more controversy than accolades. Suzuki has come under fire for his outspoken views on immigration—that Canada is at its environmental capacity, basically. On a swing through Australia in September, he drew criticism for suggesting the country’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, is guilty of negligence and “crimes against future generations” for scrapping a carbon tax and dismantling climate change bodies. He has stepped down from the board of his eponymous foundation, uttering dark warnings about the bullying of Canadian scientists and the federal government’s attempts to marginalize environmentalists. His critics in the media have become emboldened, savaging “Saint Suzuki” for his personal life as well as his politics. (...)

For a while now, the green movement’s chief messenger has been wondering just what he and his compatriots have really accomplished.

“Environmentalism has failed,” Suzuki declared in a dark blog post in the spring of 2012. The heady victories of the 1970s and ’80s over air pollution, acid rain, and clear-cut logging are distant memories. The oil and gas industry has never been stronger, sinking ocean wells, fracking across the continent, and going full-bore on Alberta’s oil sands. Meanwhile, the fight against climate change has come to a virtual halt, as governments around the world put the economy ahead of the environment. “We’ve come to a point where things are getting worse, not better,” he said in an interview with Maclean’s. (...)

Suzuki’s strength has always been his ability to translate the world of science for the layperson, cutting through the jargon and breaking down complex ideas into digestible television bites. At the height of its popularity in the mid-1980s, The Nature of Things was drawing a weekly audience of 1.3 million, or almost 20 per cent of all Canadian viewers. And the entire series was being broadcast in 13 countries, including the U.S., with 55 more nations picking up individual episodes. That success is what made David Suzuki a trusted global brand. He still defines himself as a geneticist, but it’s been decades since he was an active researcher or has even taught in a university setting. And his role as science’s interpreter was long ago supplanted by his calling as environmental evangelist.

by Jonathon Gatehouse, McLeans | Read more:
Image: Brian Howell

Conference Chic, or, How to Dress Like an Anthropologist

Wondering what to wear to the AAAs? We’ve got you covered. For women: throw a few scarves in your suitcase, a suitable range of black clothes, a kick-ass pair of shoes or boots, and some anthropological “flair,” and you should be good to go. Men need to pack their nice jeans, a good buttoned shirt, and the pièce de résistance: a stylish jacket. Unless you’re an archaeologist. Then all you need are jeans.

Anthropologists around the world are packing for the annual American Anthropological Association meetings (“the AAAs”) being held this year in balmy Chicago from November 20-24. What, you might wonder, are they packing? What look do anthropologists go for at the AAAs where thousands of anthropologists gather each year? We’ve turned to our social media networks to find out, posting this question on Twitter and on multiple Facebook accounts to learn just what fashion choices anthropologists are making this week.

We’ve identified six categories of anthropological fashion and/or fashion concern:

• Wearing one’s fieldsite, or, the “anthropological” flair requirement.
• Looking professional, but not too formal or business-y.
• Capitalism, consumerism, & fashion for the critical anthropologist.
• Stages of one’s career: from grad student to job market to professor.
• Differences across the subdisciplines.
• Scarves. (Yes, scarves get their own category.)

Here’s what our friends and colleagues had to say about all of these: (...)

The AAAs: the one time each year where anthropologists can get dressed up in front of each other without being made fun of. Instead, as one tenured male professor shared, it’s fun to dress up for the AAAs.

Anthropologists, one now-tenured female professor was told as a grad student in the 1990s, always have good shoes. This reputation continues today, at least among anthropologists as we talk about ourselves to ourselves. As one male professor offered, “To my eyes, for the ladies, it is all about the boots/shoes. The guys, it is all about the jacket.” Finding the right jacket is key as one anthropologist lamented: “I never feel like my clothes fit the bill. I either feel overdressed (black pants and dress shirt) or underdressed (jeans and dress shirt). I am missing the perfect jacket that distinguishes those jeans and dress shirts enough to elevate me from slacker to professional.”

Despite the overwhelming response that a jacket was the “It” item among male anthropologists, there were some dissenters. One professor stated that he “leans ‘teaching casual’: jeans or cords and a collared shirt with no coffee stains. No blazer, no tie.”

No tie. It seems redundant to even mention that.

by Carole McGranahan et. al, Savage Minds | Read more:
Image: UO

Edmund Witecki, Untitled 1963
via:

Ray LaMontagne

via:

Brothers Johnson

[ed. Repost. Love this one, it always makes me feel good.]

c. 1935-39 RCA Victor Special 78 Portable Record Player| Artist: John Vassos | Manufacturing Co., Inc. , NYC | Medium: Decorative Arts and Utilitarian Objects, Metalwork | It debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. - Via: 1 | 2

via: