Ben Hogan Isn’t Walking Out of That Sand Trap

The old scrivener stood above the putting green as if ready to dive into a pool of sensory memory … Whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing. Dan Jenkins was at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth the other day. Here’s some stuff he might have sensed. Distant train brakes, screeching. Mantis-like transmission towers, dotting the horizon. A complete lack of non-golf vegetation, thanks to the Texas winter. As Jenkins once wrote, “The scrub oaks looked like twisted wrought iron, and everybody’s front yard had turned the color of a corn tortilla.”

Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.

“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said. Then he came to the edge of the terrace, where he could look down onto the putting green.

Jenkins told of an encounter that happened at about this spot in 1949. Before he got famous writing for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, before he became the writer Palmer and Nicklaus confided in, Jenkins was a 20-year-old cub reporter at the Fort Worth Press. Down on the putting green, he spotted Ben Hogan — just the greatest golfer in the world. A golfer nine months removed from the car accident that nearly took his life. A golfer with a don’t-screw-with-me stare that could separate Fort Worth’s mounted cops from their horses.

Jenkins steeled his nerves, walked over, and introduced himself. A divine yellow light enveloped Jenkins and Hogan, as if they’d gotten lost in Jack Nicklaus’s hair … whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing.

Dan Jenkins didn’t allow that kind of writing. The miracle of Jenkins is that he became the best golf writer ever by disabusing the sport of its literary pretensions. It’s as if Hunter Thompson had become the dean of racing writers. In a new memoir, His Ownself, Jenkins sketches out what we might call his issue positions. For being funny. For picking on golfers who deserve it. Against magical realism. Against turning the Eisenhower Cabin into the Shrine at Compostela. Against Tiger Woods, famously. If Sports Illustrated of the ’60s and ’70s thickened the sportswriter’s thesaurus, Jenkins was the guy insisting his words be precise and potent and unflowery. (...)

Here’s what it was like to watch Dan Jenkins get sweet, delicious revenge. You might remember this. It had been bubbling. When Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, in 1996, it wasn’t enough to say he could be the greatest golfer ever. “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … ” Earl Woods told Sports Illustrated. “He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.”

Jenkins wasn’t walking into that sand trap. But Woods did pique his interest. Woods had scored a phone call with Ben Hogan before he died in 1997 and soaked up wisdom from the old master. Jenkins saw a potential golf-history nut. In the early 2000s, Golf Digest reached out to Woods’s agent to set up an off-the-record dinner. Like the ones he’d had with Palmer and Hogan.

The answer came back from the Woods camp: “We have nothing to gain.”

Jenkins spent the next decade in what the Brits would call the shadow government. He gave Woods credit for his wins. He once allowed that Woods was a better shotmaker than even Hogan. But he poked at the excesses of Tigermania. In Golf Digest, Jenkins wrote up an imaginary press conference in which Mark O’Meara, who’d barnacled himself to Woods, began his answers with, “Tiger and me were discussing it earlier … ”

In 2001, Jenkins told the magazine, “Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.” To quote a Fort Worth overheard, he was both right.

In 2010, Woods compared his injury comeback to Hogan’s. “Hogan nearly died,” Jenkins remarked. “All Tiger did was damn near get syphilis.” It wasn’t that Jenkins thought Woods had become evil. That would turn Earl Woods’s hook into a slice. No, Jenkins’s revelation was simpler. “He is a hell of a talent,” Jenkins told me. “He just happens to be an asshole.” To hear Jenkins tell it, the subtle russet peddlers who had turned golf into a religion and given Augusta National cathedral status had also erroneously granted Tiger a soul.

In a column, Jenkins withdrew the dinner invitation. “Now it’s too late,” he wrote. “I’m busy.”

by Bryan Curtis, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It

[ed. See also: Edward Snowden addresses SXSW conference.]

I once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. I have to admit I thought Dick’s idea of “pre-crime” to be unrealistic back then. I don’t anymore.

Most likely, 50 years from now ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance will be the norm. The internet is a tracking machine. It is engineered to track. We will ceaselessly self-track and be tracked by the greater network, corporations, and governments. Everything that can be measured is already tracked, and all that was previously unmeasureable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable.

We’re expanding the data sphere to sci-fi levels and there’s no stopping it. Too many of the benefits we covet derive from it. So our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers. The first option is hell, the second redeemable.

We can see both scenarios beginning today. We have the trade-secret algorithms of Google and Facebook on one hand and the secret-obsessed NSA on the other. Networks require an immune system to remain healthy, and intense monitoring and occasional secrets are part of that hygiene to minimize the bad stuff. But in larger doses secrecy becomes toxic; more secrecy requires more secrets to manage and it sets up a debilitating auto-immune disease. This pathology is extremely difficult to stop, since by its own internal logic it must be stopped in secret.

The remedy for over-secrecy is to think in terms of coveillance, so that we make tracking and monitoring as symmetrical — and transparent — as possible. That way the monitoring can be regulated, mistakes appealed and corrected, specific boundaries set and enforced. A massively surveilled world is not a world I would design (or even desire), but massive surveillance is coming either way because that is the bias of digital technology and we might as well surveil well and civilly.

In this version of surveillance — a transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other — a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves. The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going. They will pay you to track yourself. Citizens film the cops, while the cops film the citizens. The business of monitoring (including those who monitor other monitors) will be a big business. The flow of money, too, is made more visible even as it gets more complex.

by Kevin Kelly, Wired |  Read more:
Image: Twentieth Century Fox & Dreamworks

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Equations As Art

When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define.

In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. (...)

Mathematicians say they are unsurprised by the findings. "When I see a beautiful mathematical construction, or an unexpected and wonderfully intricate argument with precise logical interlocking pieces in a proof, I do feel the same way as when I see some art that amazes me," says mathematician Colin Adams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says beautiful math results "sound like a melody. For me equations are beautiful if they have elegant solution or lead to unexpected, surprising results."

Understanding just what beauty is, not to mention what makes a thing beautiful, is not easy. Beauty is not simply something pleasing that brings happiness. Sad things, after all, can be beautiful. "There is the experience of beauty in pain," Zeki says. Take Michelangelo's Pietà, a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus Christ in her arms. "It's not a joyful thing, but it's very beautiful." (...)

Zeki and his colleagues admit that beauty is not perfectly defined, but say their studies could lead toward a deeper understanding of the idea. "The question we address is what neural mechanisms allow us to experience beauty," Zeki says. "The central issue that emerges from this work for the future is, why is it that an equation is beautiful?"

The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."

by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image:Quinn Dombrowski/Wikimedia Commons

St. Vincent (Annie Clark)

[ed. Recently released 'St. Vincent' album. Don't know how long it'll be up. Here's a review:]. 

To Have and to Hold

The MacGuffin, in Alfred Hitchcock’s formulation, is “the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story” — the object of desire, the ball all eyes are kept on. The Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin, as are the letters of transit in “Casablanca,” and a MacGuffin par excellence is all the more potent, dramatically, because its exact significance and innate value go unexplained. One thinks of the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction” as an iconic MacGuffin: What is in it? No one will ever know, but every viewer feels the power of the symbol.

One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity.

I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out.

What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically blue-collar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight.

No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning “little place”) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol.

by Troy Patterson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: john Vink/Magnum Photos

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Yangyang Pan, Ashore With Tide's Flow.
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Aberdeen unveiled this statue today to mark the city’s first annual Kurt Cobain Day. It would have been the Aberdeen native’s 47th birthday.

Just more evidence why Kurt Cobain wanted to get the fuck out of Aberdeen.

Jesus wept.

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[ed. I've been to Aberdeen twice, once more than necessary.]

We Won't Be Together Much Longer

To those of us for whom life is an incessant montage of badly-lighted scenes detailing mistakes made and opportunities squandered, this endless winter has been something of a comfort in that we are no longer alone: It's dark out there for everyone now. Oh, you're a little down because it is cold and gray all the time? WELCOME TO MY WORLD. Huh, you never really realized just how sad things can get at 5:15 of a Wednesday evening? MY LIFE IS AN ENDLESS SERIES OF WEDNESDAY EVENING, 5:15s. Perhaps "comfort" is not the appropriate word, though: What I am trying to convey is the small sense of belonging we melancholics finally feel now that everyone around us has grasped just how empty, meaningless and sorrowful it all is, and how even the sharpest sparkle on things that seem streaked with salvation is only the errant reflection from a sliver of sun that was meant to shine for someone else. Sadly, though, just as we are getting comfortable with the idea that we are part of the larger group, along comes the clock to save the rest of you: this Sunday everything goes an hour ahead. When you are living in your bright new world, one that is suffused with light and joy, please every now and then give a thought to those of us left behind, those of us for whom the darkness never ends. You know who we are now. You were once like us. Spring forward.

by Alex Balk, The Awl 

Image: Jeffrey Zeldman, via Flickr

[ed. Public Service Announcement. Am I the only one who forgot it was Daylight Savings Time today? My bedside clock automatically changes (who knew?) and I actually manually reset it back to the wrong time.]

How Silence Became a Luxury Product

Within a few short weeks of our relocation to New York City, my husband and I received an anonymous note on the doormat in front of our apartment. “Your dog has been barking all day. Please keep him quiet.” The following day, we steeled ourselves and knocked on our neighbors’ doors to apologize, only to be met with empty stares. The mystery of the note’s origin made it no less panic-inducing. We live in a co-op; the rules regarding neighborly disturbance are clear. The law, too.

Unwanted noise is perhaps the most irksome form of sensory assault. A bothersome sight? Close your eyes or turn the other way—eyesores are, generally, immobile. An annoying taste? Spit it out. (Why was it in your mouth?) Sound, on the other hand, is ambient, elusive, enveloping. Even the softest drone can echo cacophonously if it worms itself into your head. Ulysses was not seduced by the sight of the sirens. Poe’s telltale heart does not torment with its smell. “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption,” groused the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.”

Noise ranks as the number one gripe of restaurant-goers nationally according to a Zagat survey, and it is the complaint submitted to New York City’s 311 hotline with the greatest frequency. (From 2012 to 2013, noise-related calls to 311 increased 16 percent according to noise activist Arlene Bronzaft.) Even if these complaints are just cyclical resurgences of an age-old problem—the ancient Greek colony Sybaris mandated that certain noisy tradesmen (potters, tinsmiths) had to live outside the city walls; Elizabethan men couldn’t beat their wives past 10 p.m.—we seem to be dealing with it differently. From noise-canceling headphones to the popularity of silent retreats, there has never been quite so great a premium placed on silence. And not only do we value it in a general sense, we’re willing to pay for it. Silence has become the ultimate luxury. (...)

Why has silence become a commodity? To some extent it seems an outgrowth of a back-to-basics, purity-as-priority impulse. Food can’t get from the farm to the table fast enough; toxins must be avoided at all costs; the “disconnectionists” preach digital detox. Absence, in other forms, has become a commodity. How many products advertise their virtues by what they don’t include? BPA-free baby bottles, GMO-free tomatoes, and gluten-free oatmeal—never mind that it didn’t have gluten to begin with—are all available at your local supermarket.

by Chloe Schama, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Image Source

In the Name of Love

“Do what you love. Love what you do.”

The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.

Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room — where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love — is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not?

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

Aphorisms have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the generic and hackneyed nature of DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and François Rabelais, among others. The internet frequently attributes it to Confucius, locating it in a misty, Orientalized past. Oprah Winfrey and other peddlers of positivity have included it in their repertoires for decades, but the most important recent evangelist of the DWYL creed is deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

His graduation speech to the Stanford University class of 2005 provides as good an origin myth as any, especially since Jobs had already been beatified as the patron saint of aestheticized work well before his early death. In the speech, Jobs recounts the creation of Apple, and inserts this reflection:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

In these four sentences, the words “you” and “your” appear eight times. This focus on the individual is hardly surprising coming from Jobs, who cultivated a very specific image of himself as a worker: inspired, casual, passionate — all states agreeable with ideal romantic love. Jobs telegraphed the conflation of his besotted worker-self with his company so effectively that his black turtleneck and blue jeans became metonyms for all of Apple and the labor that maintains it.

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.

by Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Leslie A. Wood

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Life

For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.

Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade.

“I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”

By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.

But “Life” — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.

Die-hard Stones fans, of course, will pore over the detailed discussions of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written, the birthing process of some of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mr. Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated, who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling and eloquently told.

Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages — a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak — that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm.

by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
photo: Patricia Wall/The New York Times
[Repost: October 14, 2011]

lembrou canela
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