The Click Clique

It was a lovely April evening in downtown Dallas, the sky blank and blue. The Kate Spade cocktail party was scheduled to start at six o’clock, and as the minutes ticked past, two hundred young women in all their polymorphic plumage—stilettos, Céline bags, bangles, blowouts, and iPhones, always iPhones—began to gather on an Astroturf lawn across the street from the Joule Hotel. Passersby, leaving their offices for home or happy hours, might have thought the gathering was just another party full of beautiful people, not all that unusual in Dallas.

Except these weren’t just beautiful people. These were fashion bloggers, selfie stars whose facility with heated hair tools and knack for posing long ago upended a field once strictly dominated by runway shows and magazine glossies. In attendance, for example, was Aimee Song (known as@songofstyle, with 1.58 million followers), a Los Angeles blogger famous for her girly grunge aesthetic and lips-parted-eyes-staring-dead-into-the-camera expression; her Instagram of a pair of $580 Isabel Marant sandals (basically Birkenstocks with pink bows), which she’d bought earlier that afternoon, had garnered more than 27,000 likes. There was also Julie Sariñana (@SincerelyJules, 1.4 million), another L.A.-based blogger, whosephoto outside the Joule in a white slip dress and Vince espadrille platform sandals would later be used to advertise the shoe, which had sold out at all department stores, on eBay. There was Andreas Wijk (@andreaswijk, 129k), the orange-colored Justin Bieber of Sweden, and Wendy Nguyen(@wendyslookbook, 510k), subject of the viral YouTube video “25 Ways to Wear a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes!” And then there was Dallas’s own Jane Aldridge(@seaofshoes, 132k), quietly slinking about in leather pants and a red flannel shirt, champagne in hand.

The influence wielded by this flock of pout-prone lips and dewy eyelashes was nothing short of staggering. These partygoers reached more than 13.5 million followers on Instagram combined. Many made more than $20,000 a month—some more than $80,000—just from posting links to sites that sold the short-shorts and Chanel shoes that they wore in their photos. Factoring in the revenue from banner ads on their websites, sponsored posts, and store appearances, a number of top bloggers raked in more than $1 million a year. And now they were waiting—having flown in from Los Angeles and New York and more than eighteen countries, some as far away as Australia and China—to meet the person who had made much of this money-making possible: a redheaded 26-year-old from Highland Park named Amber Venz.

Amber and her boyfriend, Baxter Box, had revolutionized the fashion world a few years earlier when, almost single-handedly, they figured out how to do the near impossible: easily monetize the content of fashion blogs. In 2011, with only a modest family investment, they’d built rewardStyle, a fashion technology company that collects commissions from retailers on behalf of bloggers and more-traditional publishers (think the websites of some major magazines) whose pictures induce readers to buy baubles online. In three years the company had grown to include 87 employees in Dallas and London, a network of 4,000 retailers, and more than 14,000 “publishers,” who drove $155 million in retail sales in 2013 alone (rewardStyle declined to release information about its amount of revenue). As rewardStyle’s top 200 earners, the bloggers on the lawn had been invited to the company’s second annual conference, hosted at the Joule. Because rewardStyle only makes money when its publishers do, the goal of the next three days was to teach the women how to make even more money by giving them strategies for effective website design (NewYorker.com was used as a model) and for search engine optimization (using, as an example, the key words “Valentino Rockstud pumps” ). The cocktail party was a networking event to kick the invitation-only conference off. (...)

Here's a theory about the rise of fashion blogging: in 2008 and 2009, during the dark days of the recession, magazines laid off employees left and right. Ad pages shrank, and, perhaps coincidentally, the brands that continued to advertise continued to be written about. Yet aspiring fashionistas, many of them unemployed millennials living with their parents, had plenty more to say. Blogger software was free and easy, so those young women turned to the Internet and started doing what magazines weren’t—mixing high and low brands and taking pictures that were rough and unexpected. Some bloggers developed loyal followings, and soon icons like Karl Lagerfeld, the white-ponytailed Werner Herzog of fashion, were greeting bloggers like Tavi Gevinson, a then fourteen-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, after their shows. In 2009 Dolce and Gabbana famously upset the runway’s feudal hierarchies when it sat Bryanboy, a Filipino blogger, just two seats away from Vogue’s Anna Wintour in the front row of the Milan spring-summer show.

by Francesca Mari, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Jonathan Zizzo

Outbreak Of Argyle, Evelyn Schless, Vogue 1960s
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How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed

The academic transcript looked like a rap sheet. The 16-year-old had dropped out of boarding schools in England and California because of behavioral problems and had only two semesters left at a small school in Utah. Somehow, he had to raise his grade-point average above a C before applying to college. His confidence was shot, and though his parents didn’t openly discuss it, he knew they were crushed at the thought that he might not get into a reputable college. What the boy didn’t know was that back home in Hong Kong, where his dad is chief executive officer of a big publicly traded investment company, the family was calling in a miracle worker.

Through a friend, his father reached out to Steven Ma, founder of ThinkTank Learning, a chain of San Francisco Bay Area tutoring centers that operate out of strip malls. Like many in the field, Ma helps kids apply to college. Unlike his competitors, Ma guarantees that his students will get into a top school or their parents get their money back—provided the applicant achieves a certain GPA and other metrics. He also offers a standard college consulting package that doesn’t come with a guarantee; for a lower price, Ma’s centers provide after-school tutoring, test prep, college counseling, and extra class work in English, math, science, and history.

Ma, a former hedge fund analyst, makes bets on student admissions the way a trader plays the commodities markets. Using 12 variables from a student’s profile—from grades and test scores to extracurricular activities and immigration status—Ma’s software crunches the odds of admission to a range of top-shelf colleges. His proprietary algorithm assigns varying weights to different parameters, derived from his analysis of the successes and failures of thousands of students he’s coached over the years. Ma’s algorithm, for example, predicts that a U.S.-born high school senior with a 3.8 GPA, an SAT score of 2,000 (out of 2,400), moderate leadership credentials, and 800 hours of extracurricular activities, has a 20.4 percent chance of admission to New York University and a 28.1 percent shot at the University of Southern California. Those odds determine the fee ThinkTank charges that student for its guaranteed consulting package: $25,931 to apply to NYU and $18,826 for USC. “Of course we set limits on who we’ll guarantee,” says Ma. “We don’t want to make this a casino game.”

Some 10,000 students—sixth graders to junior-college grads—use ThinkTank’s services now, generating annual revenue of more than $18 million. Nearly all are Asian immigrants like Ma, 36, who moved to Northern California from Taiwan when he was 11. He reels them in at free seminars, held in Holiday Inn ballrooms on Saturday afternoons. The standing-room-only events, advertised in Bay Area Chinese media, include a raffle of free SAT prep classes and a pep talk for the college-obsessed. Ma reassures the bewildered, multigenerational audiences that top-ranked American universities aren’t nearly as capricious as they seem, once you know their formula. ThinkTank boasts that 85 percent of its applicants get into a top-40 college, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. “Our model knows more about how to get into many colleges than their own admissions officers know,” he says.

Ma also writes “custom contracts,” like the one he struck with the Hong Kong CEO for his wayward son in Utah. The father agreed to participate in this article, and authorized Ma to release their signed agreement, on the condition no family member was named. His son, he explains, doesn’t know how much he paid Ma; the dad worries the truth might hurt the boy’s self-esteem. He feels guilty that he didn’t spend more time with his son growing up. He was too busy running his business; hiring Ma, he says, was his compensation to his son. “They were desperate,” says Ma.

After signing an agreement in May 2012, the family wired Ma $700,000 over the next five months—before the boy had even applied to college. The contract set out incentives that would pay Ma as much as $1.1 million if the son got into the No. 1 school in U.S. News’ 2012 rankings. (Harvard and Princeton were tied at the time.) Ma would get nothing, however, if the boy achieved a 3.0 GPA and a 1600 SAT score and still wasn’t accepted at a top-100 college. For admission to a school ranked 81 to 100, Ma would get to keep $300,000; schools ranked 51 to 80 would let Ma hang on to $400,000; and for a top-50 admission, Ma’s payoff started at $600,000, climbing $10,000 for every rung up the ladder to No. 1.

by Peter Waldman, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Damien Maloney for Bloomberg Businessweek

Home Depot Hacked

Home Depot has confirmed that it suffered a massive security breach that could impact “any customer that has used their payment card” at retail stores in the US and Canada since April. HomeDepot.com does not appear to have been affected.

The company said it is still investigating, but it doesn’t believe that PIN numbers were compromised.

Security researcher Brian Krebs originally reported the issue after seeing a batch of credit cards go up for sale on the black market. According to Krebs, Home Depot was hit with the same malware that Target fell victim to last year.

In a statement, Home Depot reassured customers that they won’t be responsible for any fraudulent charges that stem from the theft. The company is also offering identity protection services for affected customers.

by Josh Ong, TNW |  Read more:

Image: Home Depot

Here's Everything We Expect Apple To Announce During Its Big Event This Week

Apple's first product launch event of the year is on Sept. 9.

It's going to be stacked.

Apple hasn't released a new product in 2014, save for some minor refreshes to a few of its MacBook models. Instead, it's packing all its announcements into the fall. And it all starts Tuesday.

Here's a quick breakdown of what to expect. (...)

While almost everything about the new iPhone has leaked, Apple's first new product under CEO Tim Cook largely remains a mystery.

Apple is expected to unveil its first wearable computing device, which the press has been calling the iWatch, on Tuesday. According to Brian X. Chen of The New York Times, the iWatch will come in two sizes and come packed with health and fitness monitoring sensors. It'll also have a flexible or curved display. Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac reported Saturday that developers will also be able to make apps for the device.

There's a lot of pressure on Apple to prove it can launch a successful new product category. A lot of Apple critics think the company can no longer innovate without Steve Jobs. This will be a big test for Cook. If the iWatch is a dud, then those critics will be right. If the iWatch is a success, Cook will prove that his Apple is just as innovative as Apple was under Jobs. Several companies have tried to make smartwatches over the last year or so, but they're all duds.

Although we'll learn a lot about the iWatch on Tuesday, Apple isn't expected to start selling the device until early 2015, according to John Paczkowski of Re/code.

by Steve Kovach, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Behance/Todd Hamilton

How Are American Families Doing? A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being

How are we doing?

That is the question that reverberates in every report of the latest economic data. It’s the one that nags Americans as they head to the voting booth. It’s the question that sets our national mood. A new report provides the most exhaustive look at how Americans’ personal finances are faring — and sheds light on why the soaring stock market and occasionally giddy headlines have rarely translated into mass contentment with the economy.

Every three years, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances interviews thousands of American families (6,026 for the newly published 2013 edition) about their income, savings, investments and debts. It is some of the richest information available about Americans’ financial lives, particularly in the 2010 to 2013 period of halting, inconsistent recovery from the Great Recession.

So how are we doing?

No recovery in incomes for most groups

The most basic measure of financial well-being is how much money people make and how much that money can buy. Many measures, such as per capita personal income, have risen in recent years, even after adjusting for inflation.

But this survey gives us a richer view of how incomes of people in different groups were affected. It is rather depressing.

Incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.

Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

by Neil Irwin, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: NY Times

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Razvan Boar, Belle, 2010
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Joe Jackson

An Afternoon Drink With Hannah Hart

Hannah Hart may have a YouTube show-turned-small media empire and brand new cookbook called My Drunk Kitchen, but over the course of a hour-long interview at Tom and Jerry’s bar in Soho, she wasn’t sipping anything. True to the ethos of her show, she may have looked like the biggest lush in the room, with two red-hot cocktails (because cocktail number one got spilled and the bartender made her another) and a ginger beer sitting in front of her. But she didn’t take a sip, and wasn’t particularly interested in the drink. She was too busy talking and joking.

She was stoked about the book, which she described as “self-help parody meets cookbook”: the joy on her face when she heard that My Drunk Kitchen was the #45 seller on Amazon was a sight to behold. Her recommendations for its best recipes were “whatever makes your heart feel light. I think they’re all edible. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re tested, I wouldn’t say they’re FDA approved.” But more than a cookbook, My Drunk Kitchen feels like a guide on How to Be an Adult and Figure Your Stuff Out, with lots of jokes and cute pictures. Food is a bit secondary, but always creative, à la the show it was based on. (There is one recipe you absolutely need to try, though: “Chocolate Chipz,” which is chips covered in melted chocolate. Do make that one.)

I had wanted to talk with the charming and warm 27-year-old Hart, a woman who can peel off quite a few jokes per second and a torrent of “you know what I means” in a single conversation, in a location where she could run into some fans. YouTube stardom is such a new classification of celebrity — it’s quantifiable online, yet it has a very specific sort of intimacy, as it’s a one-to-one experience between the video and the viewer. How does that translate into the outside world? Are you an anonymous regular Joe, or are people recognizing you and asking for selfies? The disarming thing about Hart in person is that her My Drunk Kitchen persona is not an act. She’s adorable, can pull off a snap-back baseball cap, and when she described a recent YouTube convention in Milan, she popped into a funny “Italiano” voice while discussing the awkwardness of an LBGT panel in a Catholic country.

by Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire | Read more:
Image: My Drunk Kitchen

Outlook: Gloomy

I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company – that’s what most people pick. But why?

Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.

Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first. (...)

One of the first researchers to explore our negative slant was the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize, and best known for pioneering the field of behavioural economics. In 1983, Kahneman coined the term ‘loss aversion’ to describe his finding that we mourn loss more than we enjoy benefit. The upset felt after losing money is always greater than the happiness felt after gaining the same sum. (...)

It was the University of Washington psychologist John Gottman, an expert on marital stability, who showed how eviscerating our dark side could be. In 1992, Gottman found a formula to predict divorce with an accuracy rate of more than 90 per cent by spending only 15 minutes with a newly-wed couple. He spent the time evaluating the ratio of positive to negative expressions exchanged between the partners, including gestures and body language. Gottman later reported that couples needed a ‘magic ratio’ of at least five positive expressions for each negative one if a relationship was to survive. So, if you have just finished nagging your partner over housework, be sure to praise him five times very soon. Couples who went on to get divorced had four negative comments to three positive ones. Sickeningly harmonious couples displayed a ratio of about 20:1 – a boon to the relationship but perhaps not so helpful for the partner needing honest help navigating the world.

Other researchers applied these findings to the world of business. The Chilean psychologist Marcial Losada, for instance, studied 60 management teams at a large information-processing company. In the most effective groups, employees were praised six times for every time they were put down. In especially low-performing groups, there were almost three negative remarks to every positive one.

Losada’s controversial ‘critical positivity ratio’, devised with psychologist Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and based on complex mathematics, aimed to serve up the perfect formula of 3-6:1. In other words, hearing praise between three and six times as often as criticism, the researchers said, sustained employee satisfaction, success in love, and most other measures of a flourishing, happy life.

by Jacob Burak, Aeon |  Read more:

Image:Springer Collection/Corbis

Julie Blackmon, Thin Mints, 2014
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Full-Metal Dress

Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht has taken fashion to a shocking new level: She recently donned a custom-built metallic dress and zapped herself with nearly half a million volts of electricity. The stunt came about when she met ArcAttack, a band that makes music with giant Tesla coils. Together they decided to craft a shockproof costume for an upcoming show. Wipprecht built a spiked helmet and plate-metal dress and secured them over a head-to-toe suit of chain mail. For extra flair, she hacked toy plasma balls into shoulder ornaments.

Jessie Geoffray, Popular Science | Read more:
Image: Kyle Cothern

Steve'n'Seagulls

[ed. Finnish band Steve'n'Seagulls plays AC/DC's awesome song 'Thunderstruck'. Original version here.]

Work It

It is six AM. I am in an industrial warehouse in Bushwick. Instead of thin plastic cups of Old Crow and Rolling Rock, the cute, amicable bartenders are serving boutique coffee and nine dollar organic pressed juices. The clientele looks eminently employable. A man wearing face paint is hanging from a rope swing over a foam pit. I am attending my first-ever sober rave. There’s the muffled groove of house music bouncing off of empty brick buildings; there’s the bouncer at the door checking wrist stamps; there’s the high, industrial ceiling with its exposed beams. But instead of ambling past the K-holed zombie waste-oids and afterhours addicts double-fisting Red Bull cans, I’m being greeted by the event’s anointed “hugger” who drapes a plastic lei around my neck and wishes me a good morning.

The dance floor is spring-loaded and a group of scruffy, possible startup consultants sweating in their unbuttoned pinstripe shirts, are bouncing and giggling, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. A couple of wiry thirtysomethings wearing prayer beads and colorful athleticwear are upside down, challenging each other to duration handstands (they must be vegan; I don’t know how else you get that skinny). The dance movement therapists by the DJ booth see me looking out of place and invite me to express myself through free-form improvisational movement; I politely decline.

It turns out there’s an international network of Yoga Raves™ that spans Argentina, Lithuania, and South Africa, plus plenty of general purpose early morning sober parties in cities like London, New York, and Sydney. There are hour-long lunchtime dance parties in Midtown Manhattan, so you can goof off in between shifts. There is a whole world of un-inebriated clubbing to be done out there, a parallel dimension of party populated by the affluent professional class and New Age disciples.

As someone whose average Saturday morning begins with a few hours of chest-rattling techno followed by a daylight stroll home from some forgotten warehouse district, I naturally balked at the idea of white collar health nuts stepping onto my turf. At the parties I prefer to haunt, half the attendees can barely hold down their bike messenger jobs, let alone handle an administrative gig for some socially-minded non-profit. But, masochist that I am, I knew I had to see it for myself before all the burners left town.

“I have a really crazy mind,” said Scotty Lavella, a frequent morning raver, volunteer hugger, self-described health nut, and part-time anesthesia engineer who is currently producing a web-based comedy cooking show. I had gone out for a cigarette and found him leaning against the back of the warehouse, savoring a breather and watching the sun rise over barbed wire fences and cinder block buildings. “My mind can’t be silenced by sitting in a corner sniffing Yohimbe root and sage-ing myself; I have to dance; I have to run. I dance—and my mind slows down.” Like most of the party’s attendees, mindfulness and self care is central to his lifestyle. He doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t do hard drugs; he drinks only occasionally. “I’m totally being present,” he says. “It’s like meditation.” (...)

Hardcore party culture has always had an ambiguous relationship to labor. In the New York City discotheques of the 1970s, where club culture as we know it first flourished, hard work permeated every membrane of the city’s sprawling pleasure complex. “They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend,” DJ Ian Levine told author Peter Shapiro in Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. His description of the culture at the time captures its ambivalent relationship to the looming presence of labor and its successor, death. “Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat,” he says, describing the exhaustive effort that preceded, followed, and in many ways pervaded Saturday night out at the club. (...)

Even now, the pleasure-seeking class of full-time partiers in Berlin will tell you that all of this leisure time is actually a lot of work. Ask one of the gaunt, leather-harnessed demi-gods at Berghain for advice on how to keep partying for 14 hours and they’ll likely provide some variation on the following: bring a backpack with snacks and toiletries, dress sensibly, space your drug use out at a reasonable pace, and most importantly, when that moment comes where you hate yourself and you feel poisoned and scared and you just want to go home, power through it and you may come out the other side to reach unprecedented heights. And if you’re really fading, taking a nap for an hour or two in the corner of the club, then get up and keep going. It sounds like workplace advice for a new hire.

by Max Pearl, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via:

Workin it # 1
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Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

The End of the End of History?

In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his infamous essay declaring the global triumph of free-market liberal democracy over communism as the end of ideology as such. Not only that, but he also claimed the world was on the cusp of realizing what Fukuyama’s mentor Alexandre Kojève called the “universal homogenous state,” which would be the climax of a particular Western idealist tradition stretching back to Hegel. It would be the endpoint of a human consciousness based in accumulative historical progress that also grounded the thinking of Marx himself, who pegged his own philosophy to a conception of time and human advancement as a constant moving towards a projected endpoint. But seriously, regardless of whether this endpoint has been reached, how advanced do you really feel? How many artworks have you seen in recent years that even struck you as being relevant as art? And the insane proliferation of regressive ultranationalist and ethnic or sectarian violence hardly points to historical progress either. This phenomenon is spreading nearly everywhere, from the EU parliament elections, to India, Iraq, Hungary, Russia, Japan, and so forth. The list is endless.

Since Fukuyama wrote his essay, he has been considered primarily a free-market ideologist seizing an early chance to declare the dismantling of the Soviet Union as the definitive moral victory of Western capitalist democracy—a kind of master ideology to end all ideologies. But those who once disregarded him should now look more closely at his essay, because it is absolutely prophetic. Of course, Fukuyama was not only writing as an intellectual, but also as a senior policymaker at the US State Department and a former analyst at the RAND Corporation. And while his essay did not officially reflect the views of the American state, it was nevertheless written by a man who was not only close to power, but also possessed the means to implement his declarations. So if it comes across as prophetic, it wouldn’t be a coincidence. The essay now reads as a crystal-clear blueprint for a peculiarly murky apolitical nonideological condition that has proven to be incredibly difficult to work from—particularly for artists.

And yet what rescues Fukuyama’s intellectual integrity from those who prefer to set him up as a free-market huckster is how he so beautifully expresses reservations about the very posthistorical condition he professes. He closes the essay by writing:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

History is coming back, but not in the way we understood it in the idealist tradition. If Kojève’s universal homogenous state (which is probably also the EU) is characterized by unbearable boredom and stagnation, it starts to make sense that the only political horizon available to not only the wishy-washy centrists of electoral democracies, but also to the uprisings and Occupy movements of recent years, was liberal democracy in its present form. And yet we are increasingly bumping up against the utter failure of liberal democracy to account for the bankers and corrupt regimes who commit their worst crimes from within the logic of economic freedom and electoral democracy. So even as we feel the people around us becoming more comfortable making racist remarks, we also start to sense our political consciousness shifting, because it seems clear that the consolidation of free-market democracy is starting to buckle completely. It might be that we are only now seeing how it was a Ponzi scheme all along. History is not beginning again, because it never really ended. Rather, the idea of a homogenous system built on idealism has become unsustainable and has given way to the many identitarian battles that it has had to suppress in order to keep itself going. Only the end of history is ending.

by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, e-flux | Read more:

Image:Nicola Costantino, “Nicola and Her Double. In Front of the Television" 

Exotics

It was mid-June and north Texas was a smoking hotplate. In the cotton fields outside of town farmers were doing something to raise the dust. There was nothing to see and you couldn’t see it if there was.

In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighbourhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A Martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.

James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn’t seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago he’d been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they’d told him that once, in Iowa, they’d dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw, in them, all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things past. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines running on memories?

After a week of loafing at Casey’s, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda – she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches – was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.

James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was succinct.

WANTED: Seasonal ranch labourer.
No experience necessary.
Beautiful location. Remote. HARD WORK.
Fair pay.

James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he was in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he’d forgotten to ask about pay.

When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. ‘Y’all take care now darlin’,’ she said.

He pointed his car south once more into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of  Texas.

by Callan Wink, Granta | Read more:

Image: Edward Tuckwell

Postcards from Another Planet

The Daily gets thousands of comments a day. Nearly all of them are spam. This should be annoying, and I suppose it can be. Problem is, I find myself captivated by our spam, so much so that I keep a running list of my favorite comments. As far as I know, they’re entirely computer generated: an algorithm hurls together bits of text from around the Internet, hoping to rustle up enough verisimilitude to trick our spam filter. The results are unduly captivating—they’re by turns ludic, cryptic, disquieting, emotional, and inadvertently profound. On many days they’re more interesting than the comments we receive from real people.

Here, for instance, is an automated comment from “geniadove”:

If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadove

That swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do.

Here’s another, from “getfave.com,” with the original spelling and punctuation preserved:

The Helmet Communicator is currently available in three different configurations - the HBC 100 Moto, the HBC 120 Snow, and the HBC 130 Bike. Nellie enjoyed playing bingo, going to the Caymans dead or alive. Cheap Sympathy Flowers can be ordered online, or by telephone, you must be a registereed menber and loggedd in. Mr Nicelli responded hat Mr. These memorial timber are planted by the name of the particular items and services you offer and where they can get tooo vague. Frankly, if they are willing to do violate the family’s privacy that way?

The best spam coalesces—with its typos, its competing voices, and its gloriously infelicitous phrasings—into a sort of nauseous goulash. Reading it is roughly akin to parsing the overlapping fragments of dialogue in a Robert Altman movie or sorting through the polyphony in certain works of high modernism: Gaddis’s J. R., maybe, or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson.

But there are a number of literary antecedents here: found poetry, Dadaist ready-mades, collage and bricolage, cutups, aleatoric poems, various Oulipo shenanigans. Most especially, there’s spoetry, spam lit, and flarf, similar movements from the past two decades that have made poetic hay from the Internet’s endless detritus. Flarf descends from Gary Sullivan, who collaborated with other poets online, constructing abhorrently bland poems from the results of random Google searches, workplace memos, Associated Press stories, and the like. (“awe yea You see, somebody’s done messed up / my latvian women’s soccer team fantasy REAL bad, / oh pagers make of cheese,” goes a representative sample.) As the flarfist Sharon Mesmer told Poets & Writers in 2009,

There’s this idea that juxtaposition creates a little pop in your mind to take you out of your immediate, mundane reality. When we do these crazy things with Google, a lot of times we’re putting something beautiful together with something ugly, and it makes this third thing that is completely delightful and unexpected.

And in 2008, the Guardian ran a piece on spam lit and its practitioners, especially Ben Myers and Lee Ranaldo, both of whom have published volumes of work derived from spam:

These instances of found poetry—often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty—seemed, in Myers’s words, like “scriptures from the future” or “postcards from another planet.” Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.

That sense of private discovery, of trespassing, is key to the somewhat vertiginous feeling you get from reading a quality piece of spam: you’ve gone past the edge of something, and you’re not supposed to be there, but there you are, enjoying the vista.

by Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review | Read more:
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