[ed. See also: Gould's Book of Fish (part of my permanent collection).]

William Buelow Gould, Cat o' nine tails
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Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch
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Fortune’s Child

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
—William Wordsworth

I first encountered “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” in November 1953, on the same day in a college survey of English literature that introduced the class to Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. The professor in charge of the lesson pointed to the portrait as an embodiment of the further thought some lines later in Wordsworth’s poem that “a six years’ darling of a pygmy size” is both a “mighty prophet” and a wise philosopher, that a “growing boy” is “nature’s priest.”

I didn’t know the painting, but the costume I recollected from having seen it on the person of Larry Spenser, five years old in September 1940, stepping out of a chauffeured Rolls-Royce on his first day at the Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, trailing precisely the same cloud of glory—blue silk suit, lace collar, white stockings, ribboned shoes—except that he was wearing, not holding, the plumed hat. The noisy, unkempt children already present in the schoolyard, myself among them, stared in silent, gap-toothed wonder at the heaven-sent being that had cometh from afar to fall in our midst, not in utter nakedness, but in his mother’s intimations of immortality.

Larry’s mother was devoted to “the arts” and rich enough to afford the privilege of her enthusiasms—multiple husbands, houses in Switzerland and Italy, a large estate in the hills west of Palo Alto furnished with pavilions in the Chinese style, best of all with Larry, her life’s star and most prized possession. He looked the part, but the picture was deceptive. Willful, clever, ruthless, predatory, vain, Larry was nature’s brute creation, a growing beast.

Between the ages of five and eight we spent a good deal of time together, at school and on the hillside estate, where I could count on always finding him either angry or aggrieved—the German governess had burned the milk; he didn’t like the Shetland pony his mother found for him in Scotland. What she had brought him that he really liked was a sword said by the dealer in Paris to have accompanied Napoleon to Austerlitz, worn by Larry in the sash from one of his pirate costumes. His passion was cruelty to small animals, and what he liked to do with the sword was to stab a frog, behead a chicken, roast a chipmunk or a squirrel.

I was well acquainted with the swiftness of Larry’s deft and joyful turns to violence when on a Saturday afternoon in 1943 we went together to a children’s concert in the San Francisco Opera House to see Pierre Monteux conduct the orchestra playing Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The two of us at the age of eight were seated in the center of a row thirty feet from the stage, and Larry had with him what looked to be an old and venerable book, fitted with brass hinges and bound in leather. Ten minutes into the performance he decided that he didn’t like the music, found it so disagreeable that he thought the time had come to play a merry prank and do away with the fat man waving the baton. Opening the book that proved to be a box, he drew forth an eighteenth-century dueling pistol (another present from his mother’s Paris connection), its barrel oiled and loaded, its flash pan primed with powder.

As to what happened next I can’t now say for certain. I remember knowing at the time that Larry was a harsh critic, apt to act on impulse and not likely to make an important distinction between a Frenchman and a squirrel. Maybe he was only fondling the pistol to show and tell himself a mighty prophet and a wise philosopher. Then again, maybe not.

by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Thomas Gainsborough

Ninja Sex Party

Rebooting YouTube

When Susan Wojcicki took over YouTube in February, she received almost as much unsolicited advice as there are YouTube videos. One open letter not-so-subtly pleaded with Wojcicki, "So please, I'm begging you, please, please, please, don't f*** it up."

"There were lots of letters, public letters," says Wojcicki when we meet in her office in mid-June at YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters. "'Open Letter to Susan Wojcicki.' 'Do These Five Things.' There were videos from creators." Even her family got in on the act. "My mom is a high school teacher, so she would tell me, 'Oh, the students liked the video you posted today. Oh, the students didn't like the video that you posted today.' As though I, personally, posted a video!" she says, laughing.

Her four kids gave her a YouTube crash course. "I was just starting to get to know a lot of these videos, and they'd be like, 'Oh, no, Mom. That video came out like six months ago.' And then they would go on about the whole backstory of this content and this creator. I didn't know how much time they were spending watching YouTube."

The ambush of advice was, she admits in her amiable way, "a little overwhelming." Wojcicki, 46, is a consummate insider­--she's Google employee No. 16--and a publicity deflector who isn't used to being in direct communication with a fan base as vocal and passionate as YouTube's. (...)

Her skills as a leader and operator are going to be tested at YouTube like they never were during her 15-year career at Google. Although YouTube is one of the most important brands at Google, "there's a perception that YouTube is punching below its weight," says Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Maker Studios, one of the leading management-production companies that work with YouTube creators to help them be more professional and make more money. "I assume even Google and YouTube believe it can monetize better. This is something Susan is very focused on."

Analysts estimate YouTube's 2013 revenue at $5.6 billion. (Google does not break out YouTube's revenue in its financial filings.) Facebook, the other Internet phenomenon with more than 1 billion users worldwide, brought in more than $7 billion in 2013, almost half from mobile advertising. Indeed, Facebook has been far more swift and nimble than YouTube in migrating both its audience and its business to phones, which is reflected in its $170 billion market cap. YouTube, by contrast, is valued at only $15 billion to $20 billion.

Complicating matters, Wojcicki joined YouTube amid a rising chorus of concern that creators cannot make a living producing content for the video site. The complaints: that YouTube takes a hefty 45% of revenue from ads that run with videos; and that there is such a glut of content--YouTube brags that 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site per minute--that it depresses ad rates and inhibits even the most popular creators from selling out their inventory. (...)

With both creators and their management feeling disrespected and restless, bigfoot competitors such as Amazon, Disney, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo are circling. If YouTube can't translate its longtime dominance of online video into converting the $212 billion global TV advertising market to digital, its would-be rivals figure that maybe they can.

To fend off the encroaching opposition, Wojcicki has to align the interests of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley--all of which play important roles in the increasingly complicated YouTube ecosystem. At the same time, she may also have the most daunting job at Google. Inside the advertising giant, the perennial question is, Where is the next $10 billion in revenue coming from? Right now all eyes are on Wojcicki.

by Nicole Laporte, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Adam Fedderly

California’s Drought Just Keeps Getting Worse

All of California is in "severe drought" (shown in orange), and 82 percent is rated “extreme drought” (in red). The agency’s highest drought rating -- “exceptional drought” (crimson) -- now covers 58 percent of the state, up from 36 percent a week ago. Exceptional drought is marked by crop and pasture loss and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles of the drought indicators.

The water reserves in California’s topsoil and subsoil are nearly depleted, and 70 percent of the state’s pastures are now rated “very poor to poor,” according to the USDA.

Reservoir levels are dropping, and groundwater is being drained from the state as farms and cities pull from difficult-to-replenish underground caches. The state’s 154 reservoirs are at 60 percent of the historical average, or 17.3 million acre feet lower than they should be. That’s more than a year’s supply of water gone missing.

It’s not the worst drought California has ever seen -- in 1977, the state’s water storage was at 41 percent of the historical average -- but conditions are still getting worse.

by Tom Randall, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Brad Rippey/U.S. Drought Monitor

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[ed. Alas, not Plato, but Mitch Hedberg.]
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The Problem with OKCupid is the Problem with the Social Web

On Monday, I tried to list some reasons why OKCupid's self-acknowledged experiments on its users didn't seem to be stirring up the same outrage that Facebook's had. Here at the end of the week, I think I was largely right: fewer people are upset, the anger is more tempered, and that has a lot to do with the reasons I gave. But one reaction I didn't expect is that some people took it as saying that I wasn't upset by what OKCupid did, or that people shouldn't be as upset by it.

What OKCupid did has actually made me madder and madder as the week's gone on, but for reasons that are different from other people's. I think this is pretty important, so I'm going to try to explain why. (...)

We all buy in to Facebook (and Twitter, and OKCupid, and every other social media network), giving them a huge amount of personal data, free content, and discretion on how they show it to us, with the understanding that all of this will largely be driven by choices that we make. We build our own profiles, we select our favorite pictures, we make our own friends, we friend whatever brands we like, we pick the users we want to block or mute or select for special attention, and we write our own stories.

Even the filtering algorithms, we're both told and led to assume, are the product of our choices. Either we make these choices explicitly (mute this user, don't show me this again, more results like these) or implicitly (we liked the last five baby pictures, so Facebook shows us more baby pictures; we looked at sites X, Y, and Z, so we see Amazon ads for people who looked at X, Y, and Z. It's not arbitrary; it's personalized. And it's personalized for our benefit, to reflect the choices that we and the people we trust have made.

This is what makes the user-created social web great. It's the value it adds over traditional news media, traditional classified ads, traditional shopping, everything.

We keep copyright on everything we write and every image we post, giving these services a broad license to use it. And whenever the terms of service seem to be saying that these companies have the right to do things we would never want them to do, we're told that these are just the legal terms that the companies need in order to offer the ordinary, everyday service that we've asked them to do for us.

This is why it really stings whenever somebody turns around and says, "well actually, the terms you've signed give us permission to do whatever we want. Not just the thing you were afraid of, but a huge range of things you never thought of." You can't on one hand tell us to pay no attention when you change these things on us, and with the other insist that this is what we've really wanted to do all along. I mean, fuck me over, but don't tell me that I really wanted you to fuck me over all along.

Because ultimately, the reason you needed me to agree in the first place isn't just because I'm using your software, but because you're using my stuff. And the reason I'm letting you use my stuff, and spending all this time working on it, is so that you can show it to people.

I'm not just a user of your service, somebody who reads the things that you show it to me: I'm one of the reasons you have anything that you can show to anyone at all.

by Tim Carmody, Kottke.org |  Read more:

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Mosquito Hell

[ed. The irresistible joys of roughing it in the Alaska bush. When you're breathing mosquitoes (or trying to shit in a black cloud of fast, biting bugs), you really do ask yourself, what the hell am I doing here?]

It's not always easy to talk to Outsiders about mosquitoes. They nod knowingly and mention Maine or Minnesota. I usually stop and talk about something else. I've been to those places, and Central America, and Africa. I remember the dark, warm nights, the rain, the bandits with machetes and machine guns. But not so much the mosquitoes.

These last two springs, the young, aggressive bugs have hatched late. Recently, my coworker Linnea Wik and I flew to Ambler. Even though it was early June, we saw only two or three mosquitoes all weekend. It was cold, yet strangely pleasant with no bugs. I liked the reprieve, but worried the swallows and other species might be starving while we humans gloated.

Sure enough, as soon as the cool weather eased slightly, hungry young mosquitoes swarmed. I knew it was bad when Don Williams and his son Alvin both texted me from Ambler about the bugs. They don't usually mention them.

About that time, a French archaeology student, Angelique, emailed me, asking if I might hike with her into the mountains north of the Kobuk to look for various sources of jade used by the old Inupiaq to make weapons and tools. All I knew about this woman was that she'd first contacted me a year ago, was half Polish and was very persistent. I wrote back, saying I was busy, she should hire villagers for any transport and the only thing I knew about archaeology was that she needed to get explicit permission from landowners. I also warned her about the brush -- thick nowadays back in the hills -- and the mosquitoes.

Unfortunately, talking about bugs in the Arctic right away makes a person sound like they're exaggerating. “It's hard to breathe,” I tell people. “Don't worry about bears. Going to the bathroom is going to seem like a life-threatening experience.” (...)

By midnight the first day, sweating and scratched after 11 hours thrashing through mindlessly thick brush, we slumped in damp moss, not quite desperate but getting there. We were too tired to eat and nearly out of water, again. Somehow the bugs seemed to worsen, hour after hour. Clouds pelted us and rode along on our packs; the buzzing was ceaseless and every 15 minutes we had to re-spray our bug shirts. I'd never seen dwarf birch like these in the Arctic -- over our heads and as thick around as my wrist, blocking all view, tangling our feet and tearing at our skin and clothes. Our progress for the last four hours had been about 900 yards an hour. My arm was numb from swinging the machete and my elbow bruised from hitting the butt of my pistol. My shoulder holster under my pack chafed through to the meat.

Angelique's boots had worn holes and her feet were soaked and blistered. With a pack on her back and another on her front, half-blinded by her bug shield, she'd fallen countless times in the brush and into creeks and swamps we crossed. Throughout the day I'd heard her call out, “Set? Set?” as she tried to locate me a few yards ahead in the brush. I hadn't heard a complaint, though. (...)

“Whose idea was this?” I muttered -- my perennial mantra.

“He usually says that when something was his idea,” Linnea reassured Angelique.

We laughed and shared the last of our water and a granola bar, doing what we'd been doing all day: suffering, sharing and laughing. In that way I guess this really was Angelique's idea -- because I imagine the old people did a lot of that: suffering, sharing, and laughing. (...)

The following day we broke camp, our packs heavy with rocks, and headed downstream, along the thickly vegetated banks of the creek. Travel was hideous. My jeans were frayed fuzzy and torn, and black flies swarmed, crawling everywhere under our clothes, biting and joining the frenzy of the mosquitoes.

Angelique's feet, after days wet, were a puffy mess. The plan had been to inflate our packrafts here and drift, maybe barefoot in the boats, resting, occasionally paddling while pleasantly dreaming of cold beers.

Unfortunately, the thickets along the banks were crisscrossed with overgrown dead-fall spruce, mired with sinkholes and wet side-channels. The pretty blue line on my USGS map translated into a narrow, turbulent chute with boulder teeth. Every hundred yards or so, a log lay across the creek, limbs combing the water.

Angelique informed me again that she couldn't swim. I assured her that it would be fine -- I couldn't either. We weren't getting in that creek anyway; we were stuck behind my machete, slashing a path, staying beside the stream so she could collect more samples.

That night, in addition to mosquitoes, our tent filled with tiny, crawling black flies. We sprayed the netting with bug dope until they fell, covering the floor and our clothes and sleeping bags with writhing half-dead bugs. Outside, the tent was being pelted. During the night I awoke, convinced that now it really was raining, a soft steady downpour. “It is rain?” Angelique asked. But it was only more and more insects striking the tent.

by Seth Kantner, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Stephen Nowers

Guy Bourdin
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Massive Attack

A Man And His Cat

I lived with the same cat for 19 years — by far the longest relationship of my adult life. Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm, pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it was Cat Food Time. As I often told her, in a mellow, resonant, Barry White voice: “There is no luuve … like the luuve that exists … between a man … and his cat.”

The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother’s ghost.

I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry them around in handbags and BabyBjorns, have professional portraits taken of them and retouched to look like old master oil paintings. When people over the age of 10 invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft etiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order to decline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane.

This is especially true of childless people, like me, who tend to become emotionally overinvested in their animals and to dote on them in a way that gives onlookers the creeps. Often the pet seems to be a surrogate child, a desperate focus or joint project for a relationship that’s lost any other raison d’être, like becoming insufferable foodies or getting heavily into cosplay. When such couples finally have a child their cats or dogs are often bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of pet; instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy, they’re given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt.

I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that you do not want to know. I could tell you what I spent on my own cat’s special kidney health cat food and kidney and thyroid medication, and periodic blood tests that cost $300 and always came back normal, but I never calculated my own annual spending, lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. What our mass spending on products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or eating the guts out of rodents — who don’t, in fact, seem significantly less happy if they lose half their limbs — tells us about ourselves as a nation is probably also something we don’t want to know. But it occurs to me that it may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn.

by Tim Kreider, NY Times |  Read more:

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Disenfranchised

Bhupinder “Bob” Baber bought two Quiznos franchises in Long Beach, California, in 1998 and 1999. His investment totaled $500,000, and Baber’s wife, Ratty, quit her job to work at the restaurants for no pay. The Babers did this because, as Bob would later recall, he “trusted in Quiznos.” But, as he soon found out, being a franchisee can be a very swift and painful way to lose a lot of money.

Over the past year, thousands of fast-food workers have staged protests and rallies for a higher hourly wage. As they see it, big corporations like McDonald’s and Domino’s can well afford to pay workers more. But the vast majority of these workers don’t work for these giants. They work for people like Bob Baber. Franchisees don’t enjoy the market powers and economies of scale of their parent companies. Rather, they run small businesses with narrow profit margins, high failure rates, and plenty of anti-corporate grievances of their own. Anyone who wants to help immiserated fast-food workers, in other words, also needs to spare a few thoughts for their immiserated bosses. That means reforming the deeply troublesome franchise system. (...)

In the 20th century, businesses began to see the value of franchising in the service sector. Howard Johnson used franchising in the 1930s, and Ray Kroc built an empire on McDonald’s franchises in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Today, fast food is sold almost entirely through franchises. Worldwide, franchises represent about 80 percent of McDonald’s restaurants, 95 percent of Burger King restaurants, and 100 percent of Subway restaurants. (The rest are usually company-owned flagship restaurants in high-profile locations or restaurants relinquished by one franchisee and not yet assigned to another.)

The positioning of franchisees between fast-food workers and large fast-food companies is part of a larger trend within the economy that might be termed (with apologies to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) “the devolution of the proletariat.” As the Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield observes, corporations and even the federal government have learned to use “suppliers, subsidiaries, franchisees, contractors, to avoid responsibility” for the welfare of those at the bottom of what business schools call the “value chain.” The low- wage jobs are offloaded onto smaller entities. Making things worse for workers is a lack of opportunities to move up the corporate ladder, since a burger-flipper doesn’t actually work for the company whose logo decorates his uniform.

by Timothy Noah, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Image: Public Domain

Stop Making Sense: Thirty Years Later

"We didn't want any of the bullshit," former Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz says about Stop Making Sense, the band's influential 1984 concert film. "We didn't want the clichés. We didn't want close-ups of people's fingers while they're doing a guitar solo. We wanted the camera to linger, so you could get to know the musicians a little bit."

It was December 1983 when the group filmed three shows at Hollywood's Pantages Theater, while on a tour for Speaking in Tongues that found them playing in an extended lineup with extra percussion, keyboards and guitar. The one thing the band wanted from the movie – directed by Jonathan Demme, who would later win an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs ­– was something that would be the complete opposite of anything on MTV at the time. The film had long, drawn-out close-ups on the musicians' faces, it barely showed the audience and it used dramatic lighting to exaggerate the choreography. The group, which consisted of Frantz, vocalist David Byrne, guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison and bassist Tina Weymouth, financed the movie mostly by itself and by the time Stop Making Sense came out, that tenacity had given way to a hit. Filmgoers were literally dancing in the aisles as the movie played.

Last month, a 30th anniversary edition Stop Making Sense came out digitally and it is also being re-released at various theaters throughout the United States. Rolling Stone recently caught up with the drummer – who is still recording with his wife, Tina Weymouth, in the Tom Tom Club – to find out how the film holds up three decades later.

What do you think of Stop Making Sense the last time you saw it?
All the nice things that people say about Talking Heads? It just confirms those statements are true [laughs]. We were very fortunate in that everybody who worked on it did such a good job. I would pay 1,000 bucks to see that show [laughs]. (...)

When did the idea that the band would be introduced individually come about?

That was all decided on before the tour began. It's a little bit of a revision of what really happened in real life. I think what David would like to convey is that it began with David Byrne and then he invited Tina to join the band and then he invited Chris and then he invited Jerry and then he invited Steve Scales and so on, but it wasn't like that. What really happened was Tina, David and I moved to New York with the idea that we might start a band. I convinced David that it was a good idea. I asked Tina to join the band. I asked Jerry Harrison to join the band. So it's a little bit of a revision, but it works really well as a narrative for the movie.

What do you remember about David's intro with the playing "Psycho Killer" to a drum loop?

David put that together himself; I was not party to that or anything like that. He didn't ask anybody, it was like "I'm going to do this." It worked well.

When you get onstage, you listen to a headphone for a minute. Was Jonathan directing you?

No. In the headphone, I was listening to the tempo. Because we were shooting over three nights, we wanted to make sure each song began at the same tempo. So I devised a click track to listen to at the beginning. Sometimes when you play live, you might speed up a little bit, especially in punk, New-Wave style; the audience likes to get hammered, they like to have a lively performance, so we had to make sure it wasn't too lively.

The movie has so many great close-ups on band members' faces. What are your favorites?

Tina looks really angelic and great throughout the whole film, and I love when Bernie Worrell gives some of his weird glances at who knows what [laughs]. Bernie's a funny guy to watch. David is awesome throughout.

by Kory Grow, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Rolling Stone via Warner Bros.

Dead Baby Downhill 2014

[ed. One of the finest nights I can remember. The annual Dead Baby Downhill event in Seattle (“The best party known to humankind". I know, the name sucks). Ear piercing music, insane bike aerobatics, a debauched crowd of drugged and drunken party-goers, packed bars, streets and alley ways. All free. There must have been 300-400 cool kids there (and not so cool ones), 20s, 30s, ... but hardly anyone older than me (insert joke here). Never been that close to a mosh pit before and was engulfed (advice: just a hard forearm or a shove now and then and you can generally stay vertical). Way too much fun! Special note: Alexi Void and the band Go Like Hell. Wow! See below: in the alley, next to Georgetown Records].

Go Like Hell! They're a lean, mean, punk rock machine technically referred to as a weapon of mass destruction, and guess what, they think you're dumb, fat and ugly. You better run like hell because this outrageous five piece is coming to a town near you. Go Like Hell will kick you in the balls, bust up your face, and kick your ass into outer space. (...)

Go Like Hell's live show is what sets the band apart. In fact, The Misfits have been known to indulge in an entire show. Full of personality, sexuality, and unbridled passion, they play with a sense of urgency and a set full of unexpected surprises. You might say that watching them live is like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.

by CDBaby | Read more:
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Video: markk

[ed. Sorry, had a few distractions lately. brb.]