via: The eunuch’s children
Monday, June 2, 2014
Paper Was Toast
via: The eunuch’s children
Angelina Jolie’s Perfect Game
Most of us don’t know a life before People magazine. It was started in 1974 as a spin-off of the “People” section in Time magazine, and with the heft of Time Inc. behind it, it enjoyed one of the most successful launches in publishing history. And in the 40 years since its launch, it’s become a publishing juggernaut.
People has dominated a category of “personality journalism” that it created, telling stories, as its first editorial proclaimed, about “the active personalities of our time — in all fields.” Its success sparked dozens of copycats: USA Today, Entertainment Tonight, and one, founded in 1978, funded by the New York Times Company. It was called…Us Magazine.
Over the next decade, the magazine would switch hands several times before Publisher Jann Wenner, best known as the wunderkind responsible for Rolling Stone, took full control in 1989. He experimented with different formats, but by 1999, the magazine was losing $10 million a year, known in the trades as “Wenner’s folly.”
Until, that is, Wenner made the decision to funnel $50 million into a complete redesign and, in 2002, hired Bonnie Fuller as editor-in-chief, notorious for her sensational yet tremendously successful tenure at Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Fuller — and her successor, Janice Min — popularized a feature that we joke about today, but one that had tremendous ramifications on the industry at large, which, as you’ll soon see, dictated the coverage of Pitt and Jolie.
That feature was “Stars: They’re Just Like Us.” You’ve almost certainly seen it, or seen it satirized, but what it did was take photos of stars doing mundane activities — pumping gas, going to the grocery store — and captioned them to suggest that stars are, in fact, just like us. As I highlighted earlier, it’s nothing new, ideologically, but it was a brilliant business move. Because, as Fuller put it, “people don’t like to read,” she flooded the magazines pages with photos — but the cheapest kind available, namely, paparazzi photos of celebrities doing unremarkable things.
Until the late ‘90s, paparazzi had been a rarified vocation. Unless contracted to a specific agency, an individual paparazzo had to bear the cost of an expensive camera, miles of film, development, and distribution. But with the rise of digital technologies at the turn of the millennium, it had become increasingly easy — and cheap — to track a celebrity’s quotidian activities. Anyone with a digital camera and an internet connection could take and sell unauthorized photos of celebrities. The number of paparazzi grew from a “handful” in 1995 to 80 in 2004 and 150 in 2005. (...)
But as Us began to slowly encroach on People’s circulation and advertising dollars, the two began to engage in massive bidding wars over exclusive rights to various photos. With Time Inc. behind it, People was able to offer huge amounts of money for all types of photos, even ones it did not plan to use. For example, People spent $75,000 for a photo of Jennifer Lopez reading Us Weekly, simply to prevent Us from publishing the photo. People was driving up prices, hoping to shut out other magazines with smaller operating budgets from scooping them on any story, no matter how small.
People would always have more buying power, but Us relied on its wiles, as evidenced by the magazine’s scoop on the first photos of the Pitt-Jolie romance. People believed it had secured the rights at $320,000, and Us countered with an offer of $500,000, but only if the agency would sign a contract immediately, without going back to People.
People tried to retaliate with a $1 million offer, but the deal was done, and the magazine had to watch as Us took the glory. When, a year later, the bidding began for the first images of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, People refused to be outbid by Us, even if it meant paying a startling $4.1 million, which became a story in and of itself, especially when Jolie and Pitt turned around and donated that money to African charities.
Throughout this period, gossip blogs were gradually becoming a regular fixture — Perez Hilton, most notoriously, but also Just Jared, The Superficial, Go Fug Yourself, Oh No They Didn’t, and Lainey Gossip — all of which exploited the newly massive stream of digital paparazzi photos. Us and People provided weekly updates, but the blogs helped keep the Brangelina narrative in constant circulation, inundating web users with daily, even hourly updates.
The transformation of Pitt and Jolie’s “scandal” to one of “happy global family” could not have happened, at least not with the efficiency and clarity that it did, if not for the seismic changes in the gossip industry taking place at the same time. Indeed, the successful navigation of the potential scandal of their relationship could have been a fluke — if not for the masterful negotiation of the decade of Brangelina publicity to come.
Looking back, the Brangelina publicity strategy is deceptively simple. In fact, it’s a model of the strategy that has subconsciously guided star production for the last hundred years. More specifically, that the star should be at once ordinary and extraordinary, “just like us” and absolutely nothing like us. Gloria Swanson is the most glamorous star in the world — who loves to make dinner for her children. Paul Newman is the most handsome man in Hollywood — whose favorite pastime is making breakfast in his socks and loafers.
Jolie’s post-2005 image took the ordinary — she was a working mom trying to make her relationship work — and not only amplified it, but infused it with the rhetoric and imagery of globalism and liberalism. She’s not just a mom, but a mom of six. Instead of teaching her kids tolerance, she creates a family unit that engenders it; instead of reading books on kindness and generosity, she models it all over the globe. As for her partner, he isn’t just handsome — he’s the Sexiest Man Alive. And she doesn’t just have a job; instead, her job is being the most important — and influential — actress in the world.
Her image was built on the infrastructure of the status quo — a straight, white, doting mother engaged in a long-term monogamous relationship — but made just extraordinary enough to truly entice but never offend. The line between the tantalizing and the scandalizing is notoriously difficult to tread (just ask Kanye), but Jolie was able to negotiate it via two tactics: First, and most obviously, she accumulated (or, more generously, adopted and gave birth to) a dynamic group of children who were beautiful to observe; second, she figured out how to talk about her personal life in a way that seemed confessional while, in truth, revealing very little; and third, she exploited the desire for inside access into control of that access.
People has dominated a category of “personality journalism” that it created, telling stories, as its first editorial proclaimed, about “the active personalities of our time — in all fields.” Its success sparked dozens of copycats: USA Today, Entertainment Tonight, and one, founded in 1978, funded by the New York Times Company. It was called…Us Magazine.Over the next decade, the magazine would switch hands several times before Publisher Jann Wenner, best known as the wunderkind responsible for Rolling Stone, took full control in 1989. He experimented with different formats, but by 1999, the magazine was losing $10 million a year, known in the trades as “Wenner’s folly.”
Until, that is, Wenner made the decision to funnel $50 million into a complete redesign and, in 2002, hired Bonnie Fuller as editor-in-chief, notorious for her sensational yet tremendously successful tenure at Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Fuller — and her successor, Janice Min — popularized a feature that we joke about today, but one that had tremendous ramifications on the industry at large, which, as you’ll soon see, dictated the coverage of Pitt and Jolie.
That feature was “Stars: They’re Just Like Us.” You’ve almost certainly seen it, or seen it satirized, but what it did was take photos of stars doing mundane activities — pumping gas, going to the grocery store — and captioned them to suggest that stars are, in fact, just like us. As I highlighted earlier, it’s nothing new, ideologically, but it was a brilliant business move. Because, as Fuller put it, “people don’t like to read,” she flooded the magazines pages with photos — but the cheapest kind available, namely, paparazzi photos of celebrities doing unremarkable things.
Until the late ‘90s, paparazzi had been a rarified vocation. Unless contracted to a specific agency, an individual paparazzo had to bear the cost of an expensive camera, miles of film, development, and distribution. But with the rise of digital technologies at the turn of the millennium, it had become increasingly easy — and cheap — to track a celebrity’s quotidian activities. Anyone with a digital camera and an internet connection could take and sell unauthorized photos of celebrities. The number of paparazzi grew from a “handful” in 1995 to 80 in 2004 and 150 in 2005. (...)
But as Us began to slowly encroach on People’s circulation and advertising dollars, the two began to engage in massive bidding wars over exclusive rights to various photos. With Time Inc. behind it, People was able to offer huge amounts of money for all types of photos, even ones it did not plan to use. For example, People spent $75,000 for a photo of Jennifer Lopez reading Us Weekly, simply to prevent Us from publishing the photo. People was driving up prices, hoping to shut out other magazines with smaller operating budgets from scooping them on any story, no matter how small.
People would always have more buying power, but Us relied on its wiles, as evidenced by the magazine’s scoop on the first photos of the Pitt-Jolie romance. People believed it had secured the rights at $320,000, and Us countered with an offer of $500,000, but only if the agency would sign a contract immediately, without going back to People.
People tried to retaliate with a $1 million offer, but the deal was done, and the magazine had to watch as Us took the glory. When, a year later, the bidding began for the first images of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, People refused to be outbid by Us, even if it meant paying a startling $4.1 million, which became a story in and of itself, especially when Jolie and Pitt turned around and donated that money to African charities.
Throughout this period, gossip blogs were gradually becoming a regular fixture — Perez Hilton, most notoriously, but also Just Jared, The Superficial, Go Fug Yourself, Oh No They Didn’t, and Lainey Gossip — all of which exploited the newly massive stream of digital paparazzi photos. Us and People provided weekly updates, but the blogs helped keep the Brangelina narrative in constant circulation, inundating web users with daily, even hourly updates.
The transformation of Pitt and Jolie’s “scandal” to one of “happy global family” could not have happened, at least not with the efficiency and clarity that it did, if not for the seismic changes in the gossip industry taking place at the same time. Indeed, the successful navigation of the potential scandal of their relationship could have been a fluke — if not for the masterful negotiation of the decade of Brangelina publicity to come.
Looking back, the Brangelina publicity strategy is deceptively simple. In fact, it’s a model of the strategy that has subconsciously guided star production for the last hundred years. More specifically, that the star should be at once ordinary and extraordinary, “just like us” and absolutely nothing like us. Gloria Swanson is the most glamorous star in the world — who loves to make dinner for her children. Paul Newman is the most handsome man in Hollywood — whose favorite pastime is making breakfast in his socks and loafers.
Jolie’s post-2005 image took the ordinary — she was a working mom trying to make her relationship work — and not only amplified it, but infused it with the rhetoric and imagery of globalism and liberalism. She’s not just a mom, but a mom of six. Instead of teaching her kids tolerance, she creates a family unit that engenders it; instead of reading books on kindness and generosity, she models it all over the globe. As for her partner, he isn’t just handsome — he’s the Sexiest Man Alive. And she doesn’t just have a job; instead, her job is being the most important — and influential — actress in the world.
Her image was built on the infrastructure of the status quo — a straight, white, doting mother engaged in a long-term monogamous relationship — but made just extraordinary enough to truly entice but never offend. The line between the tantalizing and the scandalizing is notoriously difficult to tread (just ask Kanye), but Jolie was able to negotiate it via two tactics: First, and most obviously, she accumulated (or, more generously, adopted and gave birth to) a dynamic group of children who were beautiful to observe; second, she figured out how to talk about her personal life in a way that seemed confessional while, in truth, revealing very little; and third, she exploited the desire for inside access into control of that access.
by Anne Helen Petersen, Buzz Feed | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Shawshank Residuals
Bob Gunton is a character actor with 125 credits to his name, including several seasons of "24" and "Desperate Housewives" and a host of movie roles in films such as the Oscar-winning "Argo." Vaguely familiar faces like his are common in the Los Angeles area where he lives, and nobody pays much attention. Many of his roles have been forgotten.
But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: "That's the warden in 'Shawshank.' "
He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film's 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get "a very substantial income" long past the age when residuals usually dry up.
"I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks," he said.
"Shawshank" was an underwhelming box-office performer when it hit theaters 20 years ago this September, but then it began to redeem itself, finding an audience on home video and later becoming a fixture on cable TV.
The film has taken a near-mystical hold on viewers that shows no sign of abating. Steven Spielberg once told the film's writer-director Frank Darabont that he had made "a chewing-gum movie—if you step on it, it sticks to your shoe," says Mr. Darabont, who went on to create "The Walking Dead" for AMC.
The movie's enduring popularity manifests itself in ways big and small. "Shawshank" for years has been rated by users of imdb.com as the best movie of all time (the first two "Godfather" films are second and third). On a Facebook page dedicated to the film, fans show off tattoos of quotes, sites and the rock hammer Andy, played by Tim Robbins, used to tunnel out of prison. Type "370,000" into a Google search and the site auto-completes it with "in 1966." Andy escapes in 1966 with $370,000 of the warden's ill-gotten gains. The small Ohio city where it was filmed is a tourist attraction.
In the days when videocassettes mattered, "Shawshank" was the top rental of 1995. On television, as cable grew, it has consistently been among the most-aired movies.
In a shifting Hollywood landscape, film libraries increasingly are the lifeblood of studios. "Shawshank's" enduring appeal on television has made it more important than ever—a reliable annuity to help smooth the inevitable bumps in a hit-or-miss box-office business. When studios sell a package of films—many of them stinkers—a "Shawshank" acts as a much-needed locomotive to drag the others behind it.
"It's an incredible moneymaking asset that continues to resonate with viewers," said Jeff Baker, executive vice president and general manager of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment theatrical catalog.
Warner Bros. wouldn't say how much money it has gleaned from "Shawshank," one of 6,000 feature films in a library that last year helped generate $1.5 billion in licensing fees from television, plus an additional $2.2 billion from home video and electronic delivery, according to SEC filings. But it's on the shortlist of films including "The Wizard of Oz," "A Christmas Story" and "Caddyshack" that drive much of the library's value, current and former Warner Bros. executives say.
But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: "That's the warden in 'Shawshank.' "He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film's 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get "a very substantial income" long past the age when residuals usually dry up.
"I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks," he said.
"Shawshank" was an underwhelming box-office performer when it hit theaters 20 years ago this September, but then it began to redeem itself, finding an audience on home video and later becoming a fixture on cable TV.
The film has taken a near-mystical hold on viewers that shows no sign of abating. Steven Spielberg once told the film's writer-director Frank Darabont that he had made "a chewing-gum movie—if you step on it, it sticks to your shoe," says Mr. Darabont, who went on to create "The Walking Dead" for AMC.
The movie's enduring popularity manifests itself in ways big and small. "Shawshank" for years has been rated by users of imdb.com as the best movie of all time (the first two "Godfather" films are second and third). On a Facebook page dedicated to the film, fans show off tattoos of quotes, sites and the rock hammer Andy, played by Tim Robbins, used to tunnel out of prison. Type "370,000" into a Google search and the site auto-completes it with "in 1966." Andy escapes in 1966 with $370,000 of the warden's ill-gotten gains. The small Ohio city where it was filmed is a tourist attraction.
In the days when videocassettes mattered, "Shawshank" was the top rental of 1995. On television, as cable grew, it has consistently been among the most-aired movies.
In a shifting Hollywood landscape, film libraries increasingly are the lifeblood of studios. "Shawshank's" enduring appeal on television has made it more important than ever—a reliable annuity to help smooth the inevitable bumps in a hit-or-miss box-office business. When studios sell a package of films—many of them stinkers—a "Shawshank" acts as a much-needed locomotive to drag the others behind it.
"It's an incredible moneymaking asset that continues to resonate with viewers," said Jeff Baker, executive vice president and general manager of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment theatrical catalog.
Warner Bros. wouldn't say how much money it has gleaned from "Shawshank," one of 6,000 feature films in a library that last year helped generate $1.5 billion in licensing fees from television, plus an additional $2.2 billion from home video and electronic delivery, according to SEC filings. But it's on the shortlist of films including "The Wizard of Oz," "A Christmas Story" and "Caddyshack" that drive much of the library's value, current and former Warner Bros. executives say.
by Russell Adams, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
Frank Lloyd Wright Tried to Solve the City
Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all. He once wrote, “To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.” Wright was always looking for a way to cure the cancer of the city. For him, the central problem was that cities lacked essential elements like space, air, light, and silence. Looking at the congestion and overcrowding of New York City, he lamented, “The whole city is in agony.”
A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy. (...)
The subtitle of the MOMA show—“Density vs. Dispersal”—suggests a dilemma, a choice. Yet the more you look at Wright’s plans—mile-high skyscrapers on the one hand, meticulously designed, spread-out, semi-rural communities on the other—the more you realize that Wright wasn’t conflicted about density versus dispersal at all. These were just two versions of the same impulse to escape. Wright was a man saying, “Get me the hell out of here.” Sometimes he wanted to go up. Sometimes he wanted to go out. If he pushed hard enough, upward or outward, Wright thought that he could find enough space for us to fix the dehumanizing problems of the city.
Wright spent his early childhood in a place he called “the Valley,” in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The Valley, Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography, was “lovable,” “lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end.” There were natural lines of demarcation between different kinds of terrain. Areas of bare land were set apart from concentrations of vegetable growth. Little houses were tucked in groves of trees here and there, along lanes “worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests.” A root house was “partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth.” In short, there was room for each thing to be just what it needed to be.
The Valley made such an impression on Wright’s sensibilities that he created a code that would make modern cities more like the Valley. He wrote plans and rulebooks for how skyscrapers should be built and cities designed, trying to find the right amount of space between structures and over all. For Wright, implicit rules for “proper spacing” were simply true and universal. They were cosmic rules, written into the land from time immemorial. As an architect and urban planner, Wright’s job was simply to translate these rules into plans for the building of structures and cities.
In this way, Broadacre City makes a very specific kind of sense. Horizontal “spread” would leave room for parks, for personal space, for residential areas, for open vistas, and for light and air. Wright’s vertical ambitions are a little harder to understand. How would towering skyscrapers holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. The mile-high Illinois is not a building that stands alone. It makes space in the city. It allows for the other buildings to find their own height, even to be small. That’s the wonder of Wright’s city concepts. He envisioned his incredible urban structures as vertical “spreaders,” just as he envisioned his planned communities like Broadacre City to be horizontal spreaders, giving different aspects of a community room to exist.
A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy. (...)
The subtitle of the MOMA show—“Density vs. Dispersal”—suggests a dilemma, a choice. Yet the more you look at Wright’s plans—mile-high skyscrapers on the one hand, meticulously designed, spread-out, semi-rural communities on the other—the more you realize that Wright wasn’t conflicted about density versus dispersal at all. These were just two versions of the same impulse to escape. Wright was a man saying, “Get me the hell out of here.” Sometimes he wanted to go up. Sometimes he wanted to go out. If he pushed hard enough, upward or outward, Wright thought that he could find enough space for us to fix the dehumanizing problems of the city.Wright spent his early childhood in a place he called “the Valley,” in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The Valley, Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography, was “lovable,” “lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end.” There were natural lines of demarcation between different kinds of terrain. Areas of bare land were set apart from concentrations of vegetable growth. Little houses were tucked in groves of trees here and there, along lanes “worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests.” A root house was “partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth.” In short, there was room for each thing to be just what it needed to be.
The Valley made such an impression on Wright’s sensibilities that he created a code that would make modern cities more like the Valley. He wrote plans and rulebooks for how skyscrapers should be built and cities designed, trying to find the right amount of space between structures and over all. For Wright, implicit rules for “proper spacing” were simply true and universal. They were cosmic rules, written into the land from time immemorial. As an architect and urban planner, Wright’s job was simply to translate these rules into plans for the building of structures and cities.
In this way, Broadacre City makes a very specific kind of sense. Horizontal “spread” would leave room for parks, for personal space, for residential areas, for open vistas, and for light and air. Wright’s vertical ambitions are a little harder to understand. How would towering skyscrapers holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. The mile-high Illinois is not a building that stands alone. It makes space in the city. It allows for the other buildings to find their own height, even to be small. That’s the wonder of Wright’s city concepts. He envisioned his incredible urban structures as vertical “spreaders,” just as he envisioned his planned communities like Broadacre City to be horizontal spreaders, giving different aspects of a community room to exist.
by Morgan Meis, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Frank Lloyd Wright
Amazon Is Killing My Sex Life
I sat across from him and listened. He was trim, tall, bearded (as they all seem to be), a recent transplant, having only lived in Seattle for a year or so and worked at a start-up, after burning out at Amazon (as they all seem to have). He rode his bike around town; he had good taste in food and wine; and he lived across the street from where we were meeting. He was a software engineer or did something in tech (as they all did). And he was utterly unmemorable.
I don’t think he asked me a single question about myself. Our date—if you call these impromptu Internet meetings, dates—lasted an hour. It felt more like a job interview, but not the way a date is supposed to be a job interview. There was no grilling about where you were from and what your family was like and what you were looking for.
No, I spent a half hour or more listening to him talk about his job. Since I am not in the tech industry, I don’t understand any of it. It was all job speak—the type of language ladder-climbers use; it was the kind of talk that shuts vaginas down cold.
I hadn’t been out of the house all day, I work from home and I see no people except in a computer monitor, so human company, any kind really, was necessary. The restaurant was about to close and we had to go elsewhere or part ways. Even though I was bored, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I wanted to get a second drink. He offered wine back at his house and I said no. He was good-looking enough, but I wasn’t going to be able to get it up for a boring tech dude. And my city, Seattle, like San Francisco is lousy with them.
As technologist and writer, Jeff Reifman, pointed out in a post titled You’ve Got Male: Amazon’s Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene, Amazon, which is located less than a mile from my house, has had a huge, awful impact on Seattle’s dating scene. He estimated that in the 25–44 age group, Seattle “has 119 single men for every 100 single women, slightly better than San Francisco at 121—but equal if you add in the impact from nearby Bellevue, which is an awful 144.”
Many of those men are coming here for Amazon: Reifman estimated that Amazon had hired 15,026 new employees since April 2010. These guys—and as Reifman pointed it out, it’s very nearly always guys (75 percent of Amazon’s workforce is made up of dudes!)—are making $80K or more a year for their second or third job out of college, and their presence was driving the rents up in Seattle to near New York City numbers.
But Reifman’s post confirmed that as Amazon grows, the number of (boring) men grows too. The gender disparity is bad enough in San Francisco that one company, The Dating Ring, has resorted to flying women into San Fran from other cities.
Hold the Champagne, girls.
I don’t think he asked me a single question about myself. Our date—if you call these impromptu Internet meetings, dates—lasted an hour. It felt more like a job interview, but not the way a date is supposed to be a job interview. There was no grilling about where you were from and what your family was like and what you were looking for.No, I spent a half hour or more listening to him talk about his job. Since I am not in the tech industry, I don’t understand any of it. It was all job speak—the type of language ladder-climbers use; it was the kind of talk that shuts vaginas down cold.
I hadn’t been out of the house all day, I work from home and I see no people except in a computer monitor, so human company, any kind really, was necessary. The restaurant was about to close and we had to go elsewhere or part ways. Even though I was bored, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I wanted to get a second drink. He offered wine back at his house and I said no. He was good-looking enough, but I wasn’t going to be able to get it up for a boring tech dude. And my city, Seattle, like San Francisco is lousy with them.
As technologist and writer, Jeff Reifman, pointed out in a post titled You’ve Got Male: Amazon’s Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene, Amazon, which is located less than a mile from my house, has had a huge, awful impact on Seattle’s dating scene. He estimated that in the 25–44 age group, Seattle “has 119 single men for every 100 single women, slightly better than San Francisco at 121—but equal if you add in the impact from nearby Bellevue, which is an awful 144.”
Many of those men are coming here for Amazon: Reifman estimated that Amazon had hired 15,026 new employees since April 2010. These guys—and as Reifman pointed it out, it’s very nearly always guys (75 percent of Amazon’s workforce is made up of dudes!)—are making $80K or more a year for their second or third job out of college, and their presence was driving the rents up in Seattle to near New York City numbers.
But Reifman’s post confirmed that as Amazon grows, the number of (boring) men grows too. The gender disparity is bad enough in San Francisco that one company, The Dating Ring, has resorted to flying women into San Fran from other cities.
Hold the Champagne, girls.
by Tricia Romano, Dame | Read more:
Image: via:
Sunday, June 1, 2014
@HiddenCash
[ed. I love this... a red flashing "FAIL" button on so many levels (like crabs digging in the sand for a few discarded scraps). Just silly amusement for another 1 percent asshole.]
A similar sight greeted visitors to the Empire shopping centre in Burbank on Friday evening, after @HiddenCash secreted three envelopes filled with dollar bills in the area. Reports suggested hundreds swarmed the mall, stopping traffic, clambering over a bus stop and rustling frantically in the bushes until the money was found. One man found $135 (£80) outside a restaurant, another got $200 from a rubbish bin, and a 14-year-old girl walked away with $210 pulled from a flower bed.
On Friday he hinted that the latest location “sounds like where a robin or eagle might keep their money”. A bird-bank? Yes, almost: Burbank. After the cash is found, he retweets photographs of the lucky recipients to his followers, of which he now has at least 410,000.
Each envelope or stuffed bird contains a relatively modest amount of cash, usually somewhere between $100 and $250, but that hasn’t prevented Californians travelling tens of miles to join the hunt. @HiddenCash has described himself as between 35 and 45, and a lucky member of the wealthiest “1 per cent” of America
The furtive philanthropist encourages those who find the cash to share it, calling the game an “anonymous social experiment for good”. In a statement, he said, “There really is no agenda here – not political, not business, not religious – other than bringing people together in a positive way and bringing a smile to people’s faces.” He added: “I’ve made millions of dollars the last few years, more than I ever imagined, and yet many friends of mine, and people who work for me, cannot afford to buy a modest home. This is my way of giving back to the community and also having fun.”
by Tim Walker, The Independent | Read more:
Image: uncredited
You’re Right, I Didn’t Eat That
There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though “active” and “full of energy” make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from “a woman who takes care of herself.” It seems a benign enough request, but one quickly learns that this man is not especially concerned that she has regularly scheduled self-care sessions like time with friends or spa days with a good book. He isn’t asking that her household finances be in order and that she be self-actualized. He is asking her to be thin. When he says “herself,” he means “her body.”
I am not especially bothered by men who desire thin women. They are just as susceptible to messages that these are the women that they should find most attractive as women are to messages that they should look like them. The more troubling kind of man has a caveat about a woman’s thinness. She must not be “obsessed” or “overly concerned” with it. Or at least not visibly so. She mustn’t always order salads or freak out when she doesn’t make it to the gym. Watching her eat a cheeseburger—or better yet, a steak—even oddly enthralls him. (I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation about the appeal of watching big things go into small ones for that but I haven’t found it yet.) An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it.
Men seeking this woman are not seeking a carefree attitude as much as they are seeking a biological anomaly. For the majority of women, being thin is something with which she must be overly concerned in order to achieve and maintain it. Being effortlessly thin is no more achievable through a charmingly carefree attitude than becoming green-eyed or double-jointed. And while naturally thin women exist, of course, their numbers cannot keep pace with the number of men that desire them. And so we must be overly concerned as quietly as possible. (...)
And though I never had trouble getting a respectable amount of romantic attention, at a size 0 it rushed in at such a volume and with such enthusiasm that it was difficult not to be taken aback. I always thought it was a melodramatic cliché when thin women said that the more they disappeared, the more visible they became, but it was now undeniable. Male acquaintances suddenly wanted to spend more alone time together. Compliments during sexual encounters that were once full of the word “beautiful” became dominated by mesmerized declarations about me being so “little” and “tiny.” Men suddenly felt comfortable telling mean-spirited jokes about overweight women and lamenting how poorly other women took care of themselves. I’d only dropped a couple of sizes but I was in an entirely new country.
Covert concern about my body is easy to maintain in the dating phase of relationships. Men will touch a particularly small or toned part of me and remark, “Wow, you must work out.” Upon confirmation that I do, the most frequent reply is, “So what do you do, yoga?” It is generally safe to assume that such men have never practiced yoga. Yoga, in the minds of many straight men, is a placeholder for light but effective exercise done primarily by women. It is a sanitary practice, a form of exercise uncontaminated by sweat or gender-neutral footwear. Something that pretty girls do three times a week in flattering pants. But while the benefits of yoga are tremendous, it cannot turn overweight or average bodies into tiny ones. Real yoga—as opposed to cardio routines that borrow heavily from it—cannot create the calorie deficits required to be thin thin. Real thinness requires something much more brutal.
I am not especially bothered by men who desire thin women. They are just as susceptible to messages that these are the women that they should find most attractive as women are to messages that they should look like them. The more troubling kind of man has a caveat about a woman’s thinness. She must not be “obsessed” or “overly concerned” with it. Or at least not visibly so. She mustn’t always order salads or freak out when she doesn’t make it to the gym. Watching her eat a cheeseburger—or better yet, a steak—even oddly enthralls him. (I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation about the appeal of watching big things go into small ones for that but I haven’t found it yet.) An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it.Men seeking this woman are not seeking a carefree attitude as much as they are seeking a biological anomaly. For the majority of women, being thin is something with which she must be overly concerned in order to achieve and maintain it. Being effortlessly thin is no more achievable through a charmingly carefree attitude than becoming green-eyed or double-jointed. And while naturally thin women exist, of course, their numbers cannot keep pace with the number of men that desire them. And so we must be overly concerned as quietly as possible. (...)
And though I never had trouble getting a respectable amount of romantic attention, at a size 0 it rushed in at such a volume and with such enthusiasm that it was difficult not to be taken aback. I always thought it was a melodramatic cliché when thin women said that the more they disappeared, the more visible they became, but it was now undeniable. Male acquaintances suddenly wanted to spend more alone time together. Compliments during sexual encounters that were once full of the word “beautiful” became dominated by mesmerized declarations about me being so “little” and “tiny.” Men suddenly felt comfortable telling mean-spirited jokes about overweight women and lamenting how poorly other women took care of themselves. I’d only dropped a couple of sizes but I was in an entirely new country.
Covert concern about my body is easy to maintain in the dating phase of relationships. Men will touch a particularly small or toned part of me and remark, “Wow, you must work out.” Upon confirmation that I do, the most frequent reply is, “So what do you do, yoga?” It is generally safe to assume that such men have never practiced yoga. Yoga, in the minds of many straight men, is a placeholder for light but effective exercise done primarily by women. It is a sanitary practice, a form of exercise uncontaminated by sweat or gender-neutral footwear. Something that pretty girls do three times a week in flattering pants. But while the benefits of yoga are tremendous, it cannot turn overweight or average bodies into tiny ones. Real yoga—as opposed to cardio routines that borrow heavily from it—cannot create the calorie deficits required to be thin thin. Real thinness requires something much more brutal.
by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, TNI | Read more:
Image: Alana Massey
Saturday, May 31, 2014
The Full-Bush Brazilian
Who gets the full-bush Brazilian? I asked this of Jola Borzdynski as I lay without pants atop a sheet of paper on a tiny bed at her salon, Audrey. “Girls with hippie boyfriends,” she said. “Hippies with porny sex lives, who need to be hairless for licking,” I concluded. As Jola proceeded to tear 90 percent of my pubic hair out by the roots, I winced and contemplated the wisdom of being a hippie in the front of your crotch and a porn star in the back.
“It’s the normcore of pubes,” my friend Megan said over drinks later that night. “Choosing an anti-grooming appearance, while still grooming pretty carefully, deep down. Literally.” After years of striving for a hairless-Barbie-doll-crotch ideal, prominent women are now rejecting the porny obviousness of total bareness. Hairiness is stylish: Even American Apparel mannequins are sporting full bush these days. As Amanda Hess wrote late last year in T, “there’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature.” For the generation of women who came of age when bare erogenous zones were the norm, the full-bush Brazilian caters simultaneously to the defiance of allowing your pubes to reach their full potential, and the sexual expectations of the modern hairless hookup. The full-bush Brazilian is “having it all,” with pubes.
by Maureen O'Connor, The Cut | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, May 30, 2014
Big Money, the Koch Brothers and Me
It was a dreary Pacific Northwest evening in February 2012, and President Barack Obama’s mood matched the weather. Despite being among supporters who had gathered in a stunning modernist mansion in Seattle’s eastern suburbs, he seemed irritated. Pacing in front of towering 25-foot-high windows that offered a sweeping view of a rain-spattered Lake Washington, he rattled through a short pro forma speech about how his administration was working to help struggling Americans through “the toughest three years economically since the Great Depression.”
Tickets for the speech—a fundraiser for Obama’s reelection campaign—cost $17,900 apiece, so it was unlikely anyone in the small crowd gathered in Medina, Washington, was going to end up in a breadline anytime soon. In the living room of the hosts, Costco cofounder Jeff Brotman and his wife, Susan, Microsoft founder Bill Gates—the richest man in the country—leaned against a black grand piano, while others, including fellow Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer, were scattered about, some standing with their backs to muted off-white walls decorated with colorful bursts of abstract expressionist art. They listened attentively to Obama’s speech, which lasted all of 16 minutes. But they really perked up when he finished and the traveling press pool was escorted from the room, which allowed them to talk candidly with the president.
In their private question-and-answer session, Obama let his guard down and eventually shared some thoughts that revealed more about his view of American politics than perhaps anything he said publicly during the entire campaign. Election Day was still more than eight months away. But Obama, in a previously unreported riff, signaled surrender on one of the fights that had drawn him to politics in the first place: the effort to limit the flow of big money. It was a remarkable concession, one that would have stunned the campaign volunteers who believed so deeply in his promise to change the way politics works. It wasn’t just that he was admitting that his own election prospects would be disproportionately influenced by super-rich donors like those he was addressing. He had already done that 11 days earlier, when he blessed a so-called super PAC collecting million-dollar checks to boost his reelection. What really distinguished his remarks to Gates and company from his carefully calibrated official position was the admission that the grassroots, people-powered politics he had long glorified might never again trump the swelling political buying power of the very richest donors.
“You now have the potential of 200 people deciding who ends up being elected president every single time,” Obama told the group in response to a question about the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in a case called Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which gutted campaign finance restrictions and marked the beginning of a new big-money era in American politics.
Unless things changed dramatically, Obama predicted, “I may be the last presidential candidate who could win the way I won, which was coming out without a lot of special-interest support, without a handful of big corporate supporters, who was able to mobilize and had the time and the space to mobilize a grassroots effort, and then eventually got a lot of big donors, but started off small and was able to build. I think the capacity for somebody to do that is going to be much harder.” He continued, “In this election, I will be able to, hopefully, match whatever check the Koch brothers want to write,” referring to the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. “But I’m an incumbent president who already had this huge network of support all across the country and millions of donors. I’m not sure that the next candidate after me is going to be able to compete in that same way.”
Obama turned to face Gates, who stood awkwardly, his hands stuffed in his suit pants pockets. “And at that point, you genuinely have a situation where 10 people—hey, you know, Bill could write a check.” And, Obama pointed out, it wasn’t just Gates, whose fortune, then estimated at $61 billion, Democrats had been hoping to tap in a big way. “Actually, there are probably five or six people in this room,” Obama said, gesturing to Ballmer and others, as nervous laughter spread through the crowd. Obama plowed ahead insistently, eyebrows raised, his voice rising with agitation as he stepped toward the donors. “I mean, there are five or six people in this room tonight that could simply make a decision—this will be the next president—and probably at least get a nomination, if ultimately the person didn’t win. And that’s not the way things are supposed to work.”
The leader of the free world—the man who had built so much of his identity around the idea that average people could band together to change the world, the politician who once boldly declared that it was time to take government back from “the cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to play”—had become one of the biggest cynics of all. Here he was, freely admitting that American politics had fundamentally changed in a way that made it, at the highest levels, a game for the ultra-rich. And he was right.
Tickets for the speech—a fundraiser for Obama’s reelection campaign—cost $17,900 apiece, so it was unlikely anyone in the small crowd gathered in Medina, Washington, was going to end up in a breadline anytime soon. In the living room of the hosts, Costco cofounder Jeff Brotman and his wife, Susan, Microsoft founder Bill Gates—the richest man in the country—leaned against a black grand piano, while others, including fellow Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer, were scattered about, some standing with their backs to muted off-white walls decorated with colorful bursts of abstract expressionist art. They listened attentively to Obama’s speech, which lasted all of 16 minutes. But they really perked up when he finished and the traveling press pool was escorted from the room, which allowed them to talk candidly with the president.In their private question-and-answer session, Obama let his guard down and eventually shared some thoughts that revealed more about his view of American politics than perhaps anything he said publicly during the entire campaign. Election Day was still more than eight months away. But Obama, in a previously unreported riff, signaled surrender on one of the fights that had drawn him to politics in the first place: the effort to limit the flow of big money. It was a remarkable concession, one that would have stunned the campaign volunteers who believed so deeply in his promise to change the way politics works. It wasn’t just that he was admitting that his own election prospects would be disproportionately influenced by super-rich donors like those he was addressing. He had already done that 11 days earlier, when he blessed a so-called super PAC collecting million-dollar checks to boost his reelection. What really distinguished his remarks to Gates and company from his carefully calibrated official position was the admission that the grassroots, people-powered politics he had long glorified might never again trump the swelling political buying power of the very richest donors.
“You now have the potential of 200 people deciding who ends up being elected president every single time,” Obama told the group in response to a question about the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in a case called Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which gutted campaign finance restrictions and marked the beginning of a new big-money era in American politics.
Unless things changed dramatically, Obama predicted, “I may be the last presidential candidate who could win the way I won, which was coming out without a lot of special-interest support, without a handful of big corporate supporters, who was able to mobilize and had the time and the space to mobilize a grassroots effort, and then eventually got a lot of big donors, but started off small and was able to build. I think the capacity for somebody to do that is going to be much harder.” He continued, “In this election, I will be able to, hopefully, match whatever check the Koch brothers want to write,” referring to the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. “But I’m an incumbent president who already had this huge network of support all across the country and millions of donors. I’m not sure that the next candidate after me is going to be able to compete in that same way.”
Obama turned to face Gates, who stood awkwardly, his hands stuffed in his suit pants pockets. “And at that point, you genuinely have a situation where 10 people—hey, you know, Bill could write a check.” And, Obama pointed out, it wasn’t just Gates, whose fortune, then estimated at $61 billion, Democrats had been hoping to tap in a big way. “Actually, there are probably five or six people in this room,” Obama said, gesturing to Ballmer and others, as nervous laughter spread through the crowd. Obama plowed ahead insistently, eyebrows raised, his voice rising with agitation as he stepped toward the donors. “I mean, there are five or six people in this room tonight that could simply make a decision—this will be the next president—and probably at least get a nomination, if ultimately the person didn’t win. And that’s not the way things are supposed to work.”
The leader of the free world—the man who had built so much of his identity around the idea that average people could band together to change the world, the politician who once boldly declared that it was time to take government back from “the cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to play”—had become one of the biggest cynics of all. Here he was, freely admitting that American politics had fundamentally changed in a way that made it, at the highest levels, a game for the ultra-rich. And he was right.
by Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thursday, May 29, 2014
The Other Side of the Face
When I consider the neck, the first things that spring to mind are guillotines, beheadings, executions. Which does seem a little strange, since we live in a country where executions do not take place, there are no guillotines, and beheading is thus an entirely marginal phenomenon in the culture. Nevertheless, if I think neck, I think, chop it off.
This may simply be because the neck leads a hidden existence in the shadow of the face, that it never assumes a place of privilege in our thoughts about ourselves, and only enters the stage in these most extreme situations which, though they no longer occur in our part of the world, still proliferate in our midst, given the numerous decapitations in fiction. But I think it runs deeper than that. The neck is a vulnerable and exposed part of the body, perhaps the most vulnerable and exposed, and our experience of this is fundamental, even without a sword hanging over us. In this sense, it is related to the fear of snakes or crocodiles, which may as well appear in people living on the Finnmarksvidda plateau as in Central Africa, or for that matter, the fear of heights, which can lie dormant in people who have never seen anything other than plains and sand dunes, lowlands and swamps, fields and meadows.
Fear is archaic, it is embedded in the body, in its purest form untouchable to thought, and it is there to keep us alive. There are other vulnerable parts of the body, the heart being perhaps the most obvious, but when I think of the heart, I don’t think of it being pierced by a javelin or a spear or a bullet; that would be absurd. No, the heart fills me with thoughts of life and force, and if vulnerability and fear are involved, it is no more than a mild concern that one day it will simply stop beating. This must be because the heart belongs to the front of the body, the front we turn to the world, and always keep in check, since we can see what lies ahead of us, we can see what is coming, and take our precautions. The heart feels safe. That the neck is in fact just as safe, since we live in a world where people no longer carry swords, makes no difference to the feeling of vulnerability, it is archaic and closely linked to the fact that the neck belongs to the reverse side of the body, it is always turned toward what we cannot see and cannot control. The fear of everything we cannot see converges on the neck, and if in earlier times it used to be associated with physical violence, the most pressing association now is its figurative sense, which lives on in the social realm, in expressions like being attacked from the rear, getting it in the neck, watch your back, having eyes in the back of your head, being spoken about behind your back.
But the symbolic language that radiates from or the associations that converge on the neck, are not only about being struck, that is, being a passive victim of a surprise attack, or having something taken away from you, but also the opposite, where vulnerability is something that is offered. When we wish to show someone respect or to be polite, we bow to them, in other words, we expose our neck. It is a way of showing trust, and of giving something of yourself to the other, in an ancient system of differentiation where, in face of the supreme, you not only make a deep and sweeping bow, as to a king or other dignitaries, but kneel and lower your head to the ground, as you would before an altar or on a prayer mat. The gesture is humble, self-surrendering, it means laying your life in the hands of others. (...)
But the fact that the neck is unexploited visually and commercially of course does not mean that it stands outside of the culture, to the contrary, the neck, too, is loaded with meaning. It means only that it is marginal, somewhat forgotten, most often associated with not seeing, and with not being seen, that is, with negation, in contrast to the heart, for instance, which is also blind and mute, but in touch with a whole other wealth of signification. The heart signifies love, it means warmth, kindness, consideration. She has a big heart, home is where the heart is, our heartfelt sympathy, his heart is broken. The heart is life, light, love, compassion. The only figurative sense assigned to the neck that I can think of is found in the expression stiff-necked, that is, stubborn, obdurate, willful, intractable, impossible. To be stiff-necked is not to give way, not to yield a single inch, to always know best, always keep one’s cards close to one’s chest. The meaning can be extended to uprightness, which is the positive variant of being stiff-necked, that is, not relinquishing one’s pride and self-respect, holding one’s ground. Thus, the neck, in a certain sense, is linked to an existence outside of the community. The opposite, in the symbolic language of the neck, is to be stooped, that is, cowed, at the mercy of others, but in a more passive and less voluntary sense than when one bows deeply or kneels, out of respect for the other or in awe of the sacred.
It may seem as if the neck, in the symbolic language of body parts, has assumed the place between humility and pride, self-surrender and self-righteousness, but in a most discrete, gray eminence–like way, present only indirectly, as opposed to the more imposing organs and joints, like the brain, the symbol of intelligence, associated with a certain coldness and distance, but also with clarity and objectivity, not drowning in a heaving sea of vague emotions and sentimentality as one who thinks with the heart is.
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Thomas Wågström
This may simply be because the neck leads a hidden existence in the shadow of the face, that it never assumes a place of privilege in our thoughts about ourselves, and only enters the stage in these most extreme situations which, though they no longer occur in our part of the world, still proliferate in our midst, given the numerous decapitations in fiction. But I think it runs deeper than that. The neck is a vulnerable and exposed part of the body, perhaps the most vulnerable and exposed, and our experience of this is fundamental, even without a sword hanging over us. In this sense, it is related to the fear of snakes or crocodiles, which may as well appear in people living on the Finnmarksvidda plateau as in Central Africa, or for that matter, the fear of heights, which can lie dormant in people who have never seen anything other than plains and sand dunes, lowlands and swamps, fields and meadows.Fear is archaic, it is embedded in the body, in its purest form untouchable to thought, and it is there to keep us alive. There are other vulnerable parts of the body, the heart being perhaps the most obvious, but when I think of the heart, I don’t think of it being pierced by a javelin or a spear or a bullet; that would be absurd. No, the heart fills me with thoughts of life and force, and if vulnerability and fear are involved, it is no more than a mild concern that one day it will simply stop beating. This must be because the heart belongs to the front of the body, the front we turn to the world, and always keep in check, since we can see what lies ahead of us, we can see what is coming, and take our precautions. The heart feels safe. That the neck is in fact just as safe, since we live in a world where people no longer carry swords, makes no difference to the feeling of vulnerability, it is archaic and closely linked to the fact that the neck belongs to the reverse side of the body, it is always turned toward what we cannot see and cannot control. The fear of everything we cannot see converges on the neck, and if in earlier times it used to be associated with physical violence, the most pressing association now is its figurative sense, which lives on in the social realm, in expressions like being attacked from the rear, getting it in the neck, watch your back, having eyes in the back of your head, being spoken about behind your back.
But the symbolic language that radiates from or the associations that converge on the neck, are not only about being struck, that is, being a passive victim of a surprise attack, or having something taken away from you, but also the opposite, where vulnerability is something that is offered. When we wish to show someone respect or to be polite, we bow to them, in other words, we expose our neck. It is a way of showing trust, and of giving something of yourself to the other, in an ancient system of differentiation where, in face of the supreme, you not only make a deep and sweeping bow, as to a king or other dignitaries, but kneel and lower your head to the ground, as you would before an altar or on a prayer mat. The gesture is humble, self-surrendering, it means laying your life in the hands of others. (...)
But the fact that the neck is unexploited visually and commercially of course does not mean that it stands outside of the culture, to the contrary, the neck, too, is loaded with meaning. It means only that it is marginal, somewhat forgotten, most often associated with not seeing, and with not being seen, that is, with negation, in contrast to the heart, for instance, which is also blind and mute, but in touch with a whole other wealth of signification. The heart signifies love, it means warmth, kindness, consideration. She has a big heart, home is where the heart is, our heartfelt sympathy, his heart is broken. The heart is life, light, love, compassion. The only figurative sense assigned to the neck that I can think of is found in the expression stiff-necked, that is, stubborn, obdurate, willful, intractable, impossible. To be stiff-necked is not to give way, not to yield a single inch, to always know best, always keep one’s cards close to one’s chest. The meaning can be extended to uprightness, which is the positive variant of being stiff-necked, that is, not relinquishing one’s pride and self-respect, holding one’s ground. Thus, the neck, in a certain sense, is linked to an existence outside of the community. The opposite, in the symbolic language of the neck, is to be stooped, that is, cowed, at the mercy of others, but in a more passive and less voluntary sense than when one bows deeply or kneels, out of respect for the other or in awe of the sacred.
It may seem as if the neck, in the symbolic language of body parts, has assumed the place between humility and pride, self-surrender and self-righteousness, but in a most discrete, gray eminence–like way, present only indirectly, as opposed to the more imposing organs and joints, like the brain, the symbol of intelligence, associated with a certain coldness and distance, but also with clarity and objectivity, not drowning in a heaving sea of vague emotions and sentimentality as one who thinks with the heart is.
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Thomas Wågström
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