Robert LaDuke, Wings
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The Time I Spent Nine Hours in Jail

It Wasn't for Any Good Reason, It Was for the Dumbest Reason Imaginable

I didn't go to jail for any kind of a cool reason. I wasn't arrested at a protest; I didn't assault somebody deserving. I went to jail because I was a doofus. How I became a doofus of the magnitude I was—that's a different story.

Step one was a car accident. I caused it. It was the summer of 1998, I'd just turned 29, and I was leaving Capitol Hill in my old Volvo one late afternoon, heading back to Fremont, where I lived. I was near the old B&O Espresso, making a right turn onto East Olive Way, and I didn't leave enough room between cars going by for me to fit in, and I got rear-ended. The car behind me got rear-ended, too.

There was no place to pull over without blocking traffic, and I didn't get that I didn't have to find a great parking spot to deal with this matter. I didn't know that you can and should just stop and get out and face the music. So I did a U-y and parked on a side street across the way.

I got out of the car and checked things out. There, across the way, were two angry-looking men out of their cars, yelling at each other. I watched them do that for a spell. If this were a party, I wouldn't have gone up and introduced myself just then. It wouldn't have been the right moment.

And then I reflected for a bit on how nice it was that there were three of us, three cars involved in this accident. Each mad guy over there already had someone to yell at. Why mess with something that's worked out so elegantly? Shouldn't I just let them continue? Isn't it, in a way, more polite? Because aren't they just going to get madder and more stressed out if I go over there?

The sun was setting in the west, meanwhile—so pretty. I'd been driving west, heading to my apartment, where no men were yelling. And then I thought about the sounds of the accident. On the spectrum of sounds caused by cars making contact with other cars, I rated the sounds I'd heard at about a 2. No explosions, no crunching. Just boonk. Boonk. And so maybe this day didn't have to end with bad feelings! For me, I mean. Maybe I could just get back into my car and drive toward the sun, like I was doing, and then take a right and be home, all by myself, the evening my oyster.

So that's what I did.

We have to double back now to an earlier bad decision, one that took place seven years before the car accident. A group of people in a bar was proclaiming that my friend Caitlin and I would never get tattoos. The implication was that we were pussies. Well, fuck these people. We weren't pussies. Caitlin and I vowed right then and there that not only would we get tattoos, we would get them the very next morning.

After the sun came up, Caitlin pulled up in front of my apartment in her little Corolla and we drove to the tattoo parlor. Caitlin already knew what she was going to get, AS YOU SHOULD WHEN YOU ARE RIGHT ABOUT TO GET A TATTOO. She was going to get a small blue rose on her left shoulder. I didn't know what I was going to get. I only knew that I wasn't a pussy.

Caitlin went first, and I flipped through the idea book to see what I maybe wanted on my body for the rest of my life. Eventually I saw a little picture of the Cat in the Hat. This seemed kind of good. I liked Dr. Seuss. That book was pretty good. Not a favorite, necessarily, but hey. Good enough. Done. And so I got a small, meaningless, shitty Cat in the Hat tattoo on my left shoulder, right where it would show if I were wearing a tank top and standing on a side street on Capitol Hill and somebody who'd witnessed a car accident could use it as an identifying characteristic when they reported the person who caused it leaving the scene of said accident to the police.

by Tina Rowley, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Mike Force

Aaron Rodgers: Master of the Hard Count

During every Green Bay training camp, an inexperienced defensive lineman rotates in for a play or two, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers stifles a laugh. He glances at the Packers’ defensive line coach, Mike Trgovac, who knows precisely what Rodgers is about to do but is powerless to stop it.

Toward the end of his cadence, just before Rodgers calls for the ball to be snapped, he articulates the word “hut” with such gusto that the poor lineman bulldozes over the line of scrimmage, goaded offside by the N.F.L.’s leading expert in pre-snap subterfuge.

Just as valuable an asset as his arm strength, mobility and microprocessor of a brain is Rodgers’s voice, loaded with bass and thump and a tinge of soul. With it, he has coaxed eight neutral-zone infractions this season — including three in the first 21 minutes against Carolina last month — by using rhythm and inflection to exploit defenders’ aggressiveness, a tactic known as a hard count.

When deployed, it puts stress on the opposition, forcing players to ponder a challenge besides merely trying to thwart Rodgers, the league’s best quarterback for the past two months. It slows the pass rush, reveals potential blitzers and helps Rodgers decipher a defense, uploading critical data about its alignment and assignments.

The tactic can enable Green Bay to steal 5 free yards via a penalty, and sometimes — in third-and-short situations, especially — that is the team’s objective. But because the play often continues after the flag is thrown, Rodgers immediately looks to throw downfield for a long gain.

“He’s a master at a lot of things,” the ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer said, “but he’s completely mastered this.”

by Ben Shpigel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeff Haynes/Associated Press

H. Alan Cheung, Chinese Graffiti II (1995).
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Talking Heads

[ed. The apartment building in 'Singles', one of my all-time favorite movies. See it here, with a cameo by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. I think that's Janet's car out front (with new windows).] photo: markk

Sherree Valentine Daines, Champagne rendezvous
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Understanding “New Power”

We all sense that power is shifting in the world. We see increasing political protest, a crisis in representation and governance, and upstart businesses upending traditional industries. But the nature of this shift tends to be either wildly romanticized or dangerously underestimated.

There are those who cherish giddy visions of a new techno-utopia in which increased connectivity yields instant democratization and prosperity. The corporate and bureaucratic giants will be felled and the crowds coronated, each of us wearing our own 3D-printed crown. There are also those who have seen this all before. Things aren’t really changing that much, they say. Twitter supposedly toppled a dictator in Egypt, but another simply popped up in his place. We gush over the latest sharing-economy start-up, but the most powerful companies and people seem only to get more powerful.

Both views are wrong. They confine us to a narrow debate about technology in which either everything is changing or nothing is. In reality, a much more interesting and complex transformation is just beginning, one driven by a growing tension between two distinct forces: old power and new power.

Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.

New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

The battle and the balancing between old and new power will be a defining feature of society and business in the coming years. In this article, we lay out a simple framework for understanding the underlying dynamics at work and how power is really shifting: who has it, how it is distributed, and where it is heading.

by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, Harvard Business Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Forty Years Young: Hello Kitty and the Power of Cute

It's 15 minutes before the doors will open at the very first Hello Kitty convention in downtown Los Angeles, and thousands of people are lined up to get in. Some have been there since three in the morning, and most are decked out in some sort of Hello Kitty gear, whether it be full-on cosplay or a favorite T-shirt.

There's just somuch. So much to look at, so much to do, so much to buy.Kitty Con, like the Hello Kitty brand itself, is a lot to take in. There's just so much. So much to look at, so much to do, so much to buy. You can have Hello Kitty nail art done by Sanrio's resident nail artist, Masako Kojima, while you eat a bow-adorned donut from the Hello Kitty Cafe truck and a complimentary Hello Kitty Yoplait yogurt in Friendship Berry. You can revive your phone at a glowing Hello Kitty charging station, take out cash at a Hello Kitty-wrapped ATM, and wash your hands with Hello Kitty soap in the bathrooms. (Rumor has it there was also Hello Kitty toilet paper in the stalls, but that was all used—or stashed in the plastic Hello Kitty backpacks that came with admission—by the end of the first morning.)

You can get free Hello Kitty tattoos, both temporary and very permanent ("Hug Life" in ornate script is a personal favorite), and you can spend gobs of money on merch like Hello Kitty Spam musubi kits and Beats by Dre headphones, all charged on a Hello Kitty credit card that you can sign up for at a kiosk some 20 feet away. You can get schooled in the art of Hello Kitty flower arranging, cookie decorating, and scrapbooking. You can play Hello Kitty Wheel of Fortune and take part in a Hello Kitty cosplay contest. You can Instagram yourself in any number of Hello Kitty-themed tableaux. You can even meet Hello Kitty herself, dressed up in one of her myriad outfits whipped up expressly for the occasion.(...)

Hello Kitty was birthed in 1974, not quite girl, not quite cat, but rather gijinka—an anthropomorphization. It was anthropologist Christine Yano who caused the internet to explode this summer with her declaration to the Los Angeles Times that "Hello Kitty is not a cat" in promotion of the Japanese American National Museum exhibit she curated to coincide with Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary.

Let's clear something up, before we get in too deep: Technically, sure, Hello Kitty is not a cat—she's a character, not an actual animal. But she's a character in the form of a cat, the semantics of which were lost in translation and generated a collective freak-out. She's not a cat, but she's not not a cat, and that's something we're going to have to be okay with. (...)

The core of Hello Kitty's near-universal appeal comes from her impeccable simplicity: two eyes, six whiskers, a nose, and a bow, all on a pleasingly round face. "I really look at her as the most perfect of our designs," notes Sanrio art director Dan Peters. "Her basic shape is really appealing. She's huggable, and there are no sharp edges to her. I think everybody can relate to that and be like, 'Oh my gosh, she is just so cute.' She's a simple, perfectly drawn character, and it's very difficult to find that."

The result is a "Zen-like countenance," as Dave Marchi calls it. Marchi has been at Sanrio for nearly 15 years (this is a company that truly retains its employees) and is currently its senior director of brand management and marketing.

"People look at her and feel this love or whatever it is they feel, which is also described as this element of kawaii, a very particular Japanese form of cuteness," he says. "But to call it cuteness is just not enough—it goes beyond that. It's a feeling that you get from looking at Hello Kitty that's almost like being in love. It's this insatiable hunger."

"To call it cuteness is just not enough—it goes beyond that. It's this insatiable hunger."For Hello Kitty, as per the JANM exhibit, "kawaii can be taken as a relational term, swaddled in emotions of attachment that draw people to an object." It should come as no surprise that girl culture is at the very heart of kawaii, though you most certainly don't have to be a girl to take comfort in Kitty. "So CUTE!" is a common refrain at Kitty Con, from men and women alike.

by Julia Rubin, Racked |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth Daniels

Obsessed With Baby Names

Writers are largely preoccupied with words, rolling them around like unpolished rocks in our minds and on the page until smooth, glistening sentences emerge. For some, it can take a painstaking amount of time to determine whether the leaves on a tree are evergreen or olive-hued. My low point arrived when I had a heated internal debate over whether or not a tapenade could be “slathered.”

Despite being control-freak wordsmiths, though, we have almost no control over the most important word in our lives: our name. There’s no mental ping-pong over what we’d like to be called happening in utero, no roundtable discussion with fellow crying newborns in the nursery about whether we should be called “Arthur” or “Arlo.”

I’ve been deeply fascinated with names since I was a child—their cadence and candor, how they flit off of the tongue—and how powerful they can be. My childhood stories hammered out on a chunky Royal typewriter were filled with elaborately noir-named female detectives (Thora Marigold Dell) and anthropomorphic unicorns with Victorian surnames (Cornelius Thurston Vandenberg). A pair of Norwegian Elkhounds I raised as a child were christened with long, rambling pedigree names (Sophia Amalie Adelheide and Kristian Thor Gunnar) more befitting a royal toddler than a fuzzy sidekick.

Such a quirky interest isn’t something that’s easy to chatter about at slumber parties or sock hops, and certainly wasn’t a way to make my fellow middle schoolers think I was less of an odd duck. Fortunately, I found a name-loving tribe in the wilds of the Internet: baby name message boards.

My message board home base, Nameberry, is full of name enthusiasts actively discussing the way that names flow together—mostly in preparation for their own child. There are several moderators who serve as elders, calling back trends from decades prior and making lofty recommendations with the help of regulars concerned with syllables, consonant sounds, and how to blend a poster’s family heritage with personal naming taste. Among others, there are message boards for naming boys, girls, pets, and characters in a novel. There’s an entire vernacular to learn in order to be able to use the forums effectively: “Berries” are users, “sibsets” look at how sibling names work together, and “teenberries” are a cluster of teenage-name lovers. It’s not unusual to witness an intense discussion about whether “Daphne Jane” or “Daphne June” has a better aural flow.

What I love most about these baby names websites, and the message boards therein, is that they’re places of eternal optimism about the future. There’s nothing but pure, radiating excitement about the days lying ahead and unabashed hopefulness for new life. When situations feel grim or the world feels dire, it’s easy to swaddle myself in a community that’s not only thinking long and hard about words, but words that will name people and things that will inhabit a brighter tomorrow. A soon-to-be named Clara might be a future Supreme Court Justice, an Ezra could help craft an international peace treaty. In many ways, those name choices will have helped them to reach those lofty goals.

by Sarah Baird, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Tamaki Sono/The Atlantic

Yuji Moriguchi
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Turntable Room
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contr4stt: Chasing
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We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

~ Ursula Le Guin accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards Ceremony November 19, 2014.

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‘One Problem With Skate Skiing: It’s Hard’

For a long time I just didn’t “get” cross-country skiing. Shuffling through the woods while dangling a scratchy wool scarf? Too stuffy, too twee, too boring — a sport better left to old Norwegians and young honeymooners. I’m not ready to stride across a Currier & Ives print, I scoffed.

Then a friend introduced me to skate skiing, “classic” Nordic’s zippy younger brother. If traditional Nordic skiing is a walk in the woods, then skate skiing — which was born only in the 1970s — is more like trail running. It’s swooping. It’s fast. It’s graceful. It’s even a bit sexy, something its buttoned-up older brother has never been accused of. No wonder that more runners and cyclists have discovered the discipline as a great winter counterpart. Purchase of skate skis has been on a slow, steady rise in recent years, accounting for 16 percent of cross-country skis bought in 2012-13.

There’s just one problem with skate skiing: It’s hard. While anyone can hop on old-school Nordic skis and at least poke around the forest, big lungs are hugely helpful in skate skiing — yet even more important is good technique. I tried to teach myself, bulling my way to proficiency. It didn’t work. On the trail, women in their 70s would chirp, “Good morning!” as they skated effortlessly past my gasping, lathered frame. I needed help. (...)

In traditional Nordic skiing, skiers drive forward in a linear kick-then-glide motion. Skate skiing, by contrast, is more like ice skating: It’s a V-stride in which a skier pushes off with the edge of one angled ski and shifts his body weight to the other ski, driving forward, then reversing the process — and, with luck, gliding down the trail. As a result the skis are several inches shorter, lighter and shaped differently; the boots have more ankle support; and the poles are longer. Skate skiing also isn’t done in set tracks like its cousin but on smooth, manicured (and usually flat to moderately hilly) terrain.

Now we worked on shifting our weight back and forth from one ski to another. Here came Tip No. 2: When you push off from one ski onto another, think “nose over knees over toes,” Mr. Paulsen said — a position called being “stacked.” When you’re centered like this, the ski can glide nicely instead of digging in, he explained. Learning how to efficiently glide is key as a skate skier. “The push is good,” Mr. Paulsen told us. “But the glide is better.”

“The big-timers who come out there, it’s just refinement of all this,” he told us. “Now, let’s get our poles and hit the trails and get a scenery change.” We skidded behind him onto the green (easiest) trails, a pack of wobbly puppies, until we reached a forgivingly wide, flat piece of trail.

The arms, and use of the poles, are the second half of a skier’s engine. “We’re going to get into the world of different poling techniques,” Mr. Paulsen said. “There are about five of them.”

by Christopher Soloman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Bonny Makarewicz for The New York Times

The Internet of Value: Why Banks Fear Bitcoin

Bitcoin heralds a new age more disruptive than that of today’s Internet. Disruption can be a good thing, especially when it affects banking, a failing set of business models which, for all the tweaks, have been virtually unchanged for millennia. Paradoxically, some banks are afraid of Bitcoin because it would force them to innovate.

Bitcoin is but the most famous example of an emerging technology network with the potential to improve banking. It belongs to the new type of financial animal called crypto currencies, i.e. decentralized, secure money storage and money transfer enabled by the Internet. What Bitcoin, and the even more promising Ripple network do, is not to poke a hole in banking’s basic business models—lending, deposits, trading, and money exchange—but to create the embryos for entirely new markets typically referred to as the Internet of Value. That is, a way for regular folks, as well as specialists, to potentially monetize everything, regardless of location, traditional market access and jurisdiction.

Cryptocurrencies have been with us for over five years, an eternity by Internet time. Using the elegance of mathematics they enable almost instant transfer of value at almost no cost between two parties without the need for a trusted third party. The disruption lies exactly there: in disrupting the intermediaries.

For a few years already, we have been talking about the sharing economy. Companies like AirBnb and Uber have enabled previously untapped, idle assets such as your empty bedroom or your second car to be mobilized for financial gain. Liquidizing such stale assets has added convenience in the utterly inefficient markets of room rentals and transportation services.

The Internet of Value would go a few steps further. Imagine a world where you can literally become your own market maker; you can create markets for any of your own assets—which could be thought of as anything you own, think or do, or can influence others to do.

In contrast, and to the great disappointment of many financial tech (‘fintech’) startups, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) last month released new guidance for virtual currency exchanges and payment processors, ruling that such companies may be considered money services businesses under US law and would be subject to new regulations. The ruling is well meaning, but quite contradictory, and, more importantly, wrongheaded. Prematurely imposing such limitations will have little long term impact beyond dulling the US’s innovative edge.

In the 2001 book, The Architecture of Market, my former UC Berkeley colleague Neil Fligstein makes the excellent point that markets cannot be thought of as automatically or magically appearing on their own, neither by individuals acting alone nor by structures and established institutions acting in concert. Rather, markets are elaborate and complex creations by communities with a joint purpose, and they must be sustained by those who use them in order to survive.

In the case of Bitcoin, what is being enabled here is not merely a new market, but a market of markets; a platform for all kinds of new markets to emerge. In it, lies the promise of a transformation, as strange as it sounds, greater than the Internet. Denying such a potential is equal to denying the reality of globalization.

by Trond Undheim, Fortune | Read more:

Image: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg—Getty Images

Kikuchi Kyoko, room
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Requiem for Rod Serling

[ed. One of the best tv shows, ever. Ever.]

An airliner vanishes from the sky. Intruders stray across unenforced borders. Technophobes succumb to gadgets while automatons steal their jobs. Identities are erased. Aliens lurk.

After the framework for each installment in The Twilight Zone has been teased, the camera whip-pans to Rod Serling, the embodiment of American anxiety. He presides from a safe distance — tucked into a witness stand, a corner booth, a Culver City soundstage — and talks through his teeth, wrists clasped at the waist. Reinforced in this device, perhaps the most effective method of introduction ever designed for television, is the secret formula of The Twilight Zone — the act that isolates. As spellbound travelers wander through empty towns and doppelgängers chase each other down deserted streets, only the viewer and the narrator share their findings. Were cameras and kinescopes unable to track these subjects as their lives spiraled out of control, there would always be Serling’s monologues to encapsulate the unexplainable. A pitch, a premise, a nightmare.

Accepting his second Emmy for Best Teleplay Writing, in 1957, Serling said, “A writer rarely gets an opportunity to get in front of the camera, so I’m gonna take this opportunity.” Two years later, the Twilight Zone pilot would air on CBS, the first of 156 episodes, 92 of which were written or adapted by Serling. As head writer and narrator, appearing on-camera from the second season until the fifth and final in 1964, Serling would perhaps reconsider his remark at the Emmy podium. While his deadpan monologues appear to be the model of composure, he once quipped, “Only my laundress really knows how frightened I am.”

While Serling holds his iconic on-camera stance, two scars hide in plain sight. One is from the shrapnel that tore through his wrist during a bomb blast at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in 1944. The other is a twice-broken nose, received not from combat, but during his training as a paratrooper in Georgia and Louisiana, where he boxed as a flyweight with his fellow “paraguys,” as he affectionately called them. Known for his berserker style, Serling tried his hand at the Golden Gloves, though he promptly retired from boxing when his nose was bashed for the second time, during his 17th and final fight.

In his work, Serling would return often to the hardships of the war-weary, but he reserved some of his most powerful observations for broken-down boxers, particularly those who failed to achieve stardom. Serling’s fighters would never be heavyweight champions, the men who come the closest, as Norman Mailer once wrote, to being “the big toe of God.”

With boxing as my through line, I immersed myself in Serling’s work, beginning with his radio dramas of the 1940s through the avalanche of teleplays, screenplays, and novellas he completed before his death in 1975. I searched his archives and pored over letters of rebuke he mailed to bigots and censors who menaced the media landscape. I listened to Dictabelt recordings of screenplays he acted out for his secretary to transcribe. And I spoke with a range of voices influenced by Serling’s legacy. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, suggested that The Twilight Zone prepared his generation for hallucinogenic drugs. Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, praised Serling for his embrace of irrationalism in a world that couldn’t be explained by the scientific and technological revolutions of the late 1950s. Rick Baker, who terrified a generation with his makeup artistry for “Thriller” and An American Werewolf in London, recalled being inspired to dress as an ape at drive-in screenings of  Planet of the Apes— another celebrated script written by Serling — and emerge from his trunk to scare unsuspecting moviegoers. Anne Serling, author of As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, recalled watching her first episode of The Twilight Zone at the family cottage in upstate New York and being “absolutely horrified” by what kind of material her otherwise fun-loving father was writing in his backyard office back in Los Angeles.

Throughout this search, I was reminded of the ingenuity of television’s most provocative voices at the midcentury mark. As noted by the late John Frankenheimer, who directed several Serling scripts for big and small screens, there were no old days when he and other television pioneers like Serling got their start. “We were the old days,” he said. Circumnavigating censors at that time was commonplace. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, Serling recounted his frustrations in trying to bring an unvarnished account of the murder of Emmett Till to air on The United States Steel Hour in 1956. After the location was shifted from Mississippi to New England and even Coca-Cola bottles were removed from the set to satisfy sponsors’ fears of a Southern connotation, Serling knew he needed to escape even further, to other planets if necessary, to smuggle his socially conscious messages onto American airwaves. Less than three years later, The Twilight Zone was born.

Likewise, when Serling used sports as a portal to connect with viewers, he often did so with a light touch, presenting an escape from the everyday. There was “Casey at the Bat” with robots, or his segment for an unmade Twilight Zone film, in which baseball’s most bruising slugger turns out to be a figment of the imagination of a lonely hot dog vendor at Shea Stadium. But when Serling focused on boxing, he achieved a level of verisimilitude that is particularly striking. He addressed issues of race and class head-on. He drew from his own memories during the most combative and challenging chapter of his life. Dodging censors and skittish sponsors, he landed punches in prime time. It was this side of Serling that I hoped to connect with — the fighter’s instincts that helped change the face of a new medium.

by James Hughes, Grantland | Read more:
Image :Glueck

Claudio Riccio on Flickr

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