Friday, November 28, 2014
The Identity Crisis Under the Ink
Some weeks ago, during a bleary-eyed subway ride to work, I found myself staring at a young woman on the other side of the car. She wore business attire with a North Face jacket and flip-flops, and she had an infinity symbol tattooed along the outside of her left foot, only a portion of the loop had been left out to make room for the word Love. Next to her, a scruffy guy in t-shirt and jeans had ornate black and gray murals inked on each arm, one of which seemed to depict an alien fight scene, the other some sort of robot love story. To his left, squeezed in at the end of the bench, was a man thumbing his phone with quick, nervous jabs. When he turned his hand over, I saw the word Jasmine tattooed above his knuckles and a date printed beneath it.
Then there was me, a blank canvas, wondering if I was missing something. Each inked-up person on the train appeared to be in the same age group—Millennials, to use the much-maligned descriptor. Being of the same generation, presumably we all post to social media on a regular basis, through profiles and accounts that compel us to confront the question, Who are you? For some, that choice is liberating: It’s a chance to start from scratch. For others, the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing. In either case, modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.
Growing up in a rapidly changing and challenging world, most young people have struggled at some point or another with figuring out who they might be. Tattoos, recent research suggests, don’t just express identity: They help define it. Modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.
Although tattoos have been around for millennia, they’re more popular now than ever. In 1960, there were approximately 500 professional tattoo artists operating in the United States. By 1995, that number had risen to over 10,000. Nearly 20 years later, demand continues to surge, and by the latest estimates, roughly 20 percent of Americans have a tattoo. What’s more, 40 percent of the people in that group are Millennials, which some academics argue isn’t a coincidence.
“We’re living in this world that’s so fragmented and so chaotic,” says Anne Velliquette, a professor at the University of Arkansas who studies the relationship between consumer behavior and popular culture. Velliquette argues that we’re more able now than ever before to “recreate identities very easily,” both online and in real life.
In 1998, Velliquette and colleagues conducted an interview-based study that found people use tattoos as a way to cement aspects of their current selves. “We were hoping to look at the postmodern identity, and really what we found is that we were in this modern era where people did know who they were,” she said. “They had a sense of their core self.” Eight years later, the team revisited the idea. The second study, like the first, found that people used tattoos as a means to express their past and present selves. But the people interviewed in the second group also seemed to need proof that their identities existed at all. They relied on tattoos as a way to establish some understanding of who they actually were.
“We continue to be struck by rapid and unpredictable change,” study co-author Jeff Murray said at the time. “The result is a loss of personal anchors needed for identity. We found that tattoos provide this anchor. Their popularity reflects a need for stability, predictability, permanence.”
For people who study identity, this permanence is key. We define who we are by the elements that stick with us—people, stories, places, memories—and we measure ourselves in relation to them, patching the highlights together into what sociologists call a “personal myth.” These myths make sense of often-turbulent lives, integrating our “remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future,” as Velliquette wrote in her 2006 report. Some people use institutions such as religion, work, and family to create this myth. Others use material objects like houses and cars to define it. But Millennials are something of a breed apart. Without access to many of the anchors their parents had to create their personal myths, that sense of stability and permanence is often harder to find.
People rarely get just one tattoo. About half of the inked-up population has between two and five, and 18 percent have six or more. In other words, tattoos aren’t just snapshots. They’re part of the ongoing narrative of the personal myth. Unlike material objects, part of what makes them so meaningful is the degree of sacrifice involved in the process. A tattoo’s acquisition “involves a painful ritual that may take hours,” Velliquette writes, and in fact “becomes a part of the object, since the experience adds meaning and becomes embodied in the tattoo.” And unlike trucks or apartments, which get manufactured en masse, “every tattoo is unique from the beginning.” People age with their tattoos and can chart the timeline of their personal myth from start to finish, just by running a finger over their skin.
Then there was me, a blank canvas, wondering if I was missing something. Each inked-up person on the train appeared to be in the same age group—Millennials, to use the much-maligned descriptor. Being of the same generation, presumably we all post to social media on a regular basis, through profiles and accounts that compel us to confront the question, Who are you? For some, that choice is liberating: It’s a chance to start from scratch. For others, the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing. In either case, modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.Growing up in a rapidly changing and challenging world, most young people have struggled at some point or another with figuring out who they might be. Tattoos, recent research suggests, don’t just express identity: They help define it. Modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.
Although tattoos have been around for millennia, they’re more popular now than ever. In 1960, there were approximately 500 professional tattoo artists operating in the United States. By 1995, that number had risen to over 10,000. Nearly 20 years later, demand continues to surge, and by the latest estimates, roughly 20 percent of Americans have a tattoo. What’s more, 40 percent of the people in that group are Millennials, which some academics argue isn’t a coincidence.
“We’re living in this world that’s so fragmented and so chaotic,” says Anne Velliquette, a professor at the University of Arkansas who studies the relationship between consumer behavior and popular culture. Velliquette argues that we’re more able now than ever before to “recreate identities very easily,” both online and in real life.
In 1998, Velliquette and colleagues conducted an interview-based study that found people use tattoos as a way to cement aspects of their current selves. “We were hoping to look at the postmodern identity, and really what we found is that we were in this modern era where people did know who they were,” she said. “They had a sense of their core self.” Eight years later, the team revisited the idea. The second study, like the first, found that people used tattoos as a means to express their past and present selves. But the people interviewed in the second group also seemed to need proof that their identities existed at all. They relied on tattoos as a way to establish some understanding of who they actually were.
“We continue to be struck by rapid and unpredictable change,” study co-author Jeff Murray said at the time. “The result is a loss of personal anchors needed for identity. We found that tattoos provide this anchor. Their popularity reflects a need for stability, predictability, permanence.”
For people who study identity, this permanence is key. We define who we are by the elements that stick with us—people, stories, places, memories—and we measure ourselves in relation to them, patching the highlights together into what sociologists call a “personal myth.” These myths make sense of often-turbulent lives, integrating our “remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future,” as Velliquette wrote in her 2006 report. Some people use institutions such as religion, work, and family to create this myth. Others use material objects like houses and cars to define it. But Millennials are something of a breed apart. Without access to many of the anchors their parents had to create their personal myths, that sense of stability and permanence is often harder to find.
People rarely get just one tattoo. About half of the inked-up population has between two and five, and 18 percent have six or more. In other words, tattoos aren’t just snapshots. They’re part of the ongoing narrative of the personal myth. Unlike material objects, part of what makes them so meaningful is the degree of sacrifice involved in the process. A tattoo’s acquisition “involves a painful ritual that may take hours,” Velliquette writes, and in fact “becomes a part of the object, since the experience adds meaning and becomes embodied in the tattoo.” And unlike trucks or apartments, which get manufactured en masse, “every tattoo is unique from the beginning.” People age with their tattoos and can chart the timeline of their personal myth from start to finish, just by running a finger over their skin.
by Chris Weller, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via:
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s—AAAACK!
I’m dreaming of a drone Christmas. Tiny drones tucked into stockings. Bigger drones beneath the tree. A drone for Dad, another for Junior, a third for your cool tween niece.
Anecdotal reports suggest that drones are topping Christmas lists all over. Why are holiday shoppers so excited? 1) These newer-model aircraft are meant to be far easier to fly than their predecessors. 2) They have cameras, allowing for all manner of creative (or mischievous) projects. 3) Folks just seem to be jazzed ever since we started calling these things “drones.” (...)
One of the leading consumer drone brands is DJI, and its Phantom drones are hugely popular, so I tried one of these first. When the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Quadcopter arrived, I pulled it from its box, screwed on its propellers (as though I were assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture), and folded open its one-page “Quick Start Guide.” The steps looked straightforward. Thinking I’d run a casual, preliminary experiment—maybe send the thing 10 feet in the air and then immediately land it—I walked to a softball field around the corner from Slate’s New York office. After switching on the remote control and the drone itself, I calibrated the drone’s compass as the guide instructed. All systems go. I fired up its four propellers.
Now, before I characterize what happened next, I’d like to issue a disclaimer: I am mostly not an idiot, but sometimes it is useful—in my guise as a tech columnist—when I act like one. Why? Because most of us act like idiots at one time or another. We are harried, and distracted, and it’s Christmas morning and our kid wants to fly her drone RIGHT NOW. So we glance at the Quick Start Guide and think, Hey, looks easy, and thusly we wade into a minor catastrophe.
Anyway, here’s what happened. The drone lifted off the ground and, despite all my efforts to control it, ascended to a height of 20 feet before veering straight into the chain-link fence at the edge of the field and wedging itself deeply therein. I had to climb up the fence to retrieve it. It was stuck good.
Perhaps a wiser person would have paused at this point. I did not. Undeterred, I again followed the steps in the Quick Start Guide—calibrating, starting the propellers, nudging the drone into the air with the joystick. The events that followed are seared into my brain like freeze frames from a car accident. The drone zoomed to a height of 50 feet or so, far above the top of that tall chain-link fence I’d been counting on to limit potential damage. The airborne monster did not respond to my frantic jiggling of the joystick, or to my plaintive cries of “Come back!” Instead it rose and rose—and then suddenly rocketed sidewise at alarming velocity. I watched in terror as it flew across a busy street and crashed into the third story of a tall building. It tumbled to the sidewalk with a clatter of broken, scattering plastic.
A very nice woman stood by the wreckage to safeguard it for me as I ran across the street to inspect the wounded drone. Its camera was sheared clean off. Its propellers had snapped. Its battery pack had flown loose and been badly dented. It was pure luck that nobody got hurt. I felt immensely guilty and unspeakably stupid. I genuinely hoped that no witnesses would report me to the cops.
“The most dangerous thing in that box is the Quick Start Guide,” says Peter Sachs, a drone advocate and the founder of the Drone Law Journal. “There should be no such thing. Your experience isn’t surprising—learning from just the Quick Start Guide is inevitably going to result in a crash.” Sachs says any new drone owner should be sure to study basic aeronautics and meteorology, and should initially operate only under the tutelage of an experienced drone pilot in a designated recreational airspace. I did none of that, and, yes, shame on me. At the same time, I’ve a strong hunch my desultory approach will be replicated again and again, in the days following Christmas, by excited drone newbies all over the country. People very rarely choose to study aeronautics when they can look at a Quick Start Guide. We are impatient. We do dumb stuff.
Which—given that these things weigh as much as a steam iron, soar through the skies at 30 mph, and have whirring propellers just hankering to slice through somebody’s cornea—suggests that maybe there ought to be some regulations out there to protect us from ourselves. Can you just fly a drone anywhere? Like, say, smack in the middle of a crowded city? Without any kind of permit?
Anecdotal reports suggest that drones are topping Christmas lists all over. Why are holiday shoppers so excited? 1) These newer-model aircraft are meant to be far easier to fly than their predecessors. 2) They have cameras, allowing for all manner of creative (or mischievous) projects. 3) Folks just seem to be jazzed ever since we started calling these things “drones.” (...)
One of the leading consumer drone brands is DJI, and its Phantom drones are hugely popular, so I tried one of these first. When the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Quadcopter arrived, I pulled it from its box, screwed on its propellers (as though I were assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture), and folded open its one-page “Quick Start Guide.” The steps looked straightforward. Thinking I’d run a casual, preliminary experiment—maybe send the thing 10 feet in the air and then immediately land it—I walked to a softball field around the corner from Slate’s New York office. After switching on the remote control and the drone itself, I calibrated the drone’s compass as the guide instructed. All systems go. I fired up its four propellers.Now, before I characterize what happened next, I’d like to issue a disclaimer: I am mostly not an idiot, but sometimes it is useful—in my guise as a tech columnist—when I act like one. Why? Because most of us act like idiots at one time or another. We are harried, and distracted, and it’s Christmas morning and our kid wants to fly her drone RIGHT NOW. So we glance at the Quick Start Guide and think, Hey, looks easy, and thusly we wade into a minor catastrophe.
Anyway, here’s what happened. The drone lifted off the ground and, despite all my efforts to control it, ascended to a height of 20 feet before veering straight into the chain-link fence at the edge of the field and wedging itself deeply therein. I had to climb up the fence to retrieve it. It was stuck good.
Perhaps a wiser person would have paused at this point. I did not. Undeterred, I again followed the steps in the Quick Start Guide—calibrating, starting the propellers, nudging the drone into the air with the joystick. The events that followed are seared into my brain like freeze frames from a car accident. The drone zoomed to a height of 50 feet or so, far above the top of that tall chain-link fence I’d been counting on to limit potential damage. The airborne monster did not respond to my frantic jiggling of the joystick, or to my plaintive cries of “Come back!” Instead it rose and rose—and then suddenly rocketed sidewise at alarming velocity. I watched in terror as it flew across a busy street and crashed into the third story of a tall building. It tumbled to the sidewalk with a clatter of broken, scattering plastic.
A very nice woman stood by the wreckage to safeguard it for me as I ran across the street to inspect the wounded drone. Its camera was sheared clean off. Its propellers had snapped. Its battery pack had flown loose and been badly dented. It was pure luck that nobody got hurt. I felt immensely guilty and unspeakably stupid. I genuinely hoped that no witnesses would report me to the cops.
“The most dangerous thing in that box is the Quick Start Guide,” says Peter Sachs, a drone advocate and the founder of the Drone Law Journal. “There should be no such thing. Your experience isn’t surprising—learning from just the Quick Start Guide is inevitably going to result in a crash.” Sachs says any new drone owner should be sure to study basic aeronautics and meteorology, and should initially operate only under the tutelage of an experienced drone pilot in a designated recreational airspace. I did none of that, and, yes, shame on me. At the same time, I’ve a strong hunch my desultory approach will be replicated again and again, in the days following Christmas, by excited drone newbies all over the country. People very rarely choose to study aeronautics when they can look at a Quick Start Guide. We are impatient. We do dumb stuff.
Which—given that these things weigh as much as a steam iron, soar through the skies at 30 mph, and have whirring propellers just hankering to slice through somebody’s cornea—suggests that maybe there ought to be some regulations out there to protect us from ourselves. Can you just fly a drone anywhere? Like, say, smack in the middle of a crowded city? Without any kind of permit?
by Seth Stevenson, Slate | Read more:
Image: Robert Neubecker
Thursday, November 27, 2014
via:
The Problem With Music
I. A & R Scouts
Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.
There are several reasons A & R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A & R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.
When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast.
By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A & R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.
These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.
The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.
These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.
One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A & R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises [something he did with similar effect to another well-known band], and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A & R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it.
The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.
Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.
There are several reasons A & R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A & R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.
When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast.
By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A & R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.
These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.
The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.
These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.
One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A & R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises [something he did with similar effect to another well-known band], and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A & R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it.
The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.
by Steve Albini, Won't Anybody Listen | Read more:
Image: via:
The Long Thanatopsis
In 30 years, the assisted suicides of people won’t be met by the furor that followed the death of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who ended her own life with a fatal dose of barbiturates on Nov. 1.
In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.
This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.
For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)
All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.
In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.
This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)
All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.
by Michael Erard, TMN | Read more:
Image: Colin Chillag, Grandma-Grandpa, 2012
Able-Bodied Until It Kills Us
My first white-collar job was “coordinator” at my college’s chapter of the Public Interest Research Group—yes, PIRG, mother ship of pie-eyed campus activists. It turned out to be manual labor after all. Nearly all the anticapitalist staff, board members, and volunteers had one or another malady, allergy, or disability that prevented them from fixing the ceiling, running the computer cables, moving the boxes, vacuuming, or cleaning anything. I remember one board member explaining to me how she couldn’t touch the ceiling tiles because she was allergic to fiberglass—it made her itch. Fiberglass makes everyone itch. But with that magic word, “allergy,” she was off the hook.
We endlessly criticized corporate agriculture at the PIRG, but I couldn’t talk about my gardening contracts with my coworkers because images of crawling around in sheep manure, worms, and caterpillars triggered their phobias. So did my stories about plumbing and any carpentry that involved a saw. When I mentioned that I had to drink from garden hoses, a colleague squealed, “Ew! That’s so gross!” She had a “hose phobia.” Allergies exempted this cadre of activists from physical labor. Phobias meant they would never have to hear about it.
As I scrambled up the rungs of the meritocracy, with my supererogatory privilege of four able limbs and all, I noticed ever-newer stylings in the lingo that heavily credentialed people devise to shirk routine labor. It wasn’t only allergies and phobias; it was ADD, ADHD, and PTSD, all of them rampant at my graduate school. There must have been at least six empathy-inducing acronyms for writing is hard, so I refresh my Facebook page all day instead. Meanwhile, every time I walked up the stairs to my new office and passed by the ZAPPY ELECTRIC sticker on the breaker box, I remembered a former lover of mine—an electrician who had rewired the building a few years back—coughing bitterly and complaining about the walls and floors being full of asbestos, which he’d been expected to inhale on a daily basis for eight months.
Installed there as a graduate student, I heard other students in the building complain, whenever workers came in to polish floors, fix radiators, or do electrical work, about the minor amount of dust that they themselves had to inhale—and how the lobby smelled of industrial cleaners. I interrupted one such conversation to say, “This building is full of asbestos; did you know? Just imagine how the guy drilling in the ceiling feels!” Every student in the lobby perked up. “They have us working in a building full of asbestos?!” Ew!
And now, with ten years of graduate school under my belt, it’s become my job to guess how to grade papers that come with special slips marked “dyslexia”; those slips mean, basically, that I’m not supposed to judge the writing on the basis of syntax, grammar, or coherence. Of course, the dyslexic papers are always diverse—some have syntactic mix-ups that are clearly symptomatic of the disorder, some do not, some appear simply to be bad papers written by someone who did not read the book, and some are as good as the best papers in the non-dyslexic category. The non-dyslexic category involves a similar spread—a certain proportion have the syntactic mishaps that are the classic signature of dyslexia, most do not, some are terribly bad, and some are great.
What divides students with the special slip from everyone else is not always or only dyslexia. Some students work the system—i.e., have parents who bestow on them a sense of entitlement and access to expensive special health services that it doesn’t even occur to ordinary people to ask for. Disability then turns into class power misrecognized. The rebranding of social and cultural capital via a class-encoded discourse of health allows the privileged student to get ahead with even less merit than before. After all, it is only when pain is the exception rather than the rule that it is noticed; only those who can imagine escaping their pain bother to complain about it, and only those who know the system can have the strength to manipulate it.
We endlessly criticized corporate agriculture at the PIRG, but I couldn’t talk about my gardening contracts with my coworkers because images of crawling around in sheep manure, worms, and caterpillars triggered their phobias. So did my stories about plumbing and any carpentry that involved a saw. When I mentioned that I had to drink from garden hoses, a colleague squealed, “Ew! That’s so gross!” She had a “hose phobia.” Allergies exempted this cadre of activists from physical labor. Phobias meant they would never have to hear about it.As I scrambled up the rungs of the meritocracy, with my supererogatory privilege of four able limbs and all, I noticed ever-newer stylings in the lingo that heavily credentialed people devise to shirk routine labor. It wasn’t only allergies and phobias; it was ADD, ADHD, and PTSD, all of them rampant at my graduate school. There must have been at least six empathy-inducing acronyms for writing is hard, so I refresh my Facebook page all day instead. Meanwhile, every time I walked up the stairs to my new office and passed by the ZAPPY ELECTRIC sticker on the breaker box, I remembered a former lover of mine—an electrician who had rewired the building a few years back—coughing bitterly and complaining about the walls and floors being full of asbestos, which he’d been expected to inhale on a daily basis for eight months.
Installed there as a graduate student, I heard other students in the building complain, whenever workers came in to polish floors, fix radiators, or do electrical work, about the minor amount of dust that they themselves had to inhale—and how the lobby smelled of industrial cleaners. I interrupted one such conversation to say, “This building is full of asbestos; did you know? Just imagine how the guy drilling in the ceiling feels!” Every student in the lobby perked up. “They have us working in a building full of asbestos?!” Ew!
And now, with ten years of graduate school under my belt, it’s become my job to guess how to grade papers that come with special slips marked “dyslexia”; those slips mean, basically, that I’m not supposed to judge the writing on the basis of syntax, grammar, or coherence. Of course, the dyslexic papers are always diverse—some have syntactic mix-ups that are clearly symptomatic of the disorder, some do not, some appear simply to be bad papers written by someone who did not read the book, and some are as good as the best papers in the non-dyslexic category. The non-dyslexic category involves a similar spread—a certain proportion have the syntactic mishaps that are the classic signature of dyslexia, most do not, some are terribly bad, and some are great.
What divides students with the special slip from everyone else is not always or only dyslexia. Some students work the system—i.e., have parents who bestow on them a sense of entitlement and access to expensive special health services that it doesn’t even occur to ordinary people to ask for. Disability then turns into class power misrecognized. The rebranding of social and cultural capital via a class-encoded discourse of health allows the privileged student to get ahead with even less merit than before. After all, it is only when pain is the exception rather than the rule that it is noticed; only those who can imagine escaping their pain bother to complain about it, and only those who know the system can have the strength to manipulate it.
by June Thunderstorm, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nolan Pellitier
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Read by Tim Robbins
I hope that Ray Bradbury, in whatever alternate dimension he now occupies, will overlook the transgression and forgive readers like me who have regarded “Fahrenheit 451” as perhaps his finest novel while being such poor stewards of its legacy.
Since its publication in 1953, “Fahrenheit 451” has handily retained its place in the canon of dystopian fiction: more approachable than “1984,” not nearly as baroque as “A Clockwork Orange.” (All three made for equally flamboyant motion pictures.) Its longstanding presence on adolescent reading lists makes it no less worthy of adult attention, and in an era when accessibility to books is still regularly denied — whether by jittery school boards or petulant online retailers — its relevance can hardly be disputed.
But like the somnambulant suburbanites who wander the pages of “Fahrenheit 451,” misremembering their own lives and established history like the hazy contents of dreams, we seem to have forgotten what gives the novel its enduring, prophetic power. It is indeed a story about a world where books are outlawed and burned, but it is also a tale about the value of intellect, the importance of information and the singular, irreplaceable experience of reading books as books — as physical, palpable and precious objects.
It’s not hard to guess why Tim Robbins, the outspoken liberal activist and Academy Award-winning star of films like “Mystic River,” “The Player” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” agreed to serve as the narrator for this project, produced by Audible Studios (owned by Amazon, another despotic state that will someday surely inspire its own great novel about a dehumanized future).
The actor certainly does not phone in his assignment, even if, in this modern age, it may be possible to do the recording work entirely by phone. Robbins has both a gruffness and a gentleness in his voice, and these qualities especially suit his portrayal of the “Fahrenheit 451” protagonist, Guy Montag, a so-called fireman in a future society, whose job is not to put out blazes but to set them in homes and locations suspected of harboring books, and who has become increasingly conflicted about his profession, wondering why it is necessary.
Big Cannabis
[ed. See also: Leafly the "Yelp of Weed".]
A 46-year-old mother of three, Dooley is the cofounder and president of Julie’s Baked Goods, a purveyor of cannabis-infused snacks. She has celiac disease and wanted to create gluten-free products that would relieve her pain without damaging her intestine. Dooley’s Denver company released its first product, granola mixed with cranberries and almonds, in 2010 and now sells about 6,000 units a month, employing 11 people.Even in Colorado, where medical and recreational marijuana are both legal, the cannabis business involves its share of hassles. Initially, Dooley’s license cost $1,250 and required a 25-page application. Renewing it, she said, cost more than twice that and required investing about $25,000 in the company’s kitchen, including a security system with 24-hour video surveillance. She wouldn’t have a business today if her husband weren’t a manufacturing specialist, she says.
As hard as she’s worked, Dooley’s experience has been relatively easy for a medical marijuana business in this country. Marijuana remains illegal federally, which leaves every state which allows the product to figure out its own regulations. Colorado was one of the first states to legalize recreational marijuana, and its regulations help ensure that cannabis companies have to pay close attention to the regulatory landscape to ensure they’re in step with the law. "I know every city councilman," Dooley said. "I don’t want to."
Colorado has plenty of small potrepreneurs like Dooley. Marijuana advocates talk up the value of their businesses to create jobs, pay taxes and help the sick. But at last week’s National Marijuana Business Conference in Las Vegas, the future of pot looked much less like an archipelago of mission-driven small enterprises than an emerging mega industry to be dominated by large companies.
Big Cannabis is coming. Increasingly, state regulations for legal marijuana are tilted toward outfits with deep pockets. Venture capitalists are looking for the brands that can ramp up and be everywhere overnight. (Just this week Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm, and the family of reggae legend Bob Marley announced that they will release Marley Natural, a cannabis brand inspired by the singer.) And people who are working to start small businesses—who often believe cannabis as a social or medical good—wonder if the gold rush is going to pass them by.
by Alex Halperin, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: PRILL via Shutterstock
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Luck Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity
I know, I know, no football. But I could not help seeing this catch last night by NY Giants receiver Odell Beckham. Many are calling it the best catch anyone has ever made in the history of the NFL.
As a player, how do you prepare yourself for making the greatest catch in history? It would be easy to dismiss this catch as a lucky fluke...one-handed, fighting off a defender, just gets it by his fingertips. But here's the thing: Beckham practices exactly this catch:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Preparation, kids. Preparation.
As a player, how do you prepare yourself for making the greatest catch in history? It would be easy to dismiss this catch as a lucky fluke...one-handed, fighting off a defender, just gets it by his fingertips. But here's the thing: Beckham practices exactly this catch:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Preparation, kids. Preparation.
via: Kottke.org
The Cult of the Leica Camera
The camera arrives in a thin, brown cardboard box. Inside the box is another box, also cardboard, but this time shiny silver with a small red dot on the side. One opens the top and the sides fall away in unison, like a Buster Keaton film set, only to reveal yet another box, this one black with hidden magnetic clasps. Open this and there is, of course, another box, grey and black this time, with that red dot again, and within this – finally – is a block of aluminium that has been polished by hand for 45 minutes (you can see a film of this on YouTube that’s called “The Most Boring Ad Ever Made?” ). Inside this aluminium block is 100 years of German engineering, and when you hold it in your hands you may unaccountably feel, as I did with all that cardboard detritus happily discarded around me, that you are holding the weighty sum of human worth.
Just a camera, of course. The lump of aluminium is called the Leica T, and it is an unusual thing. It’s not just a new Leica camera, but a new Leica system. The system – much to the horror of those who picked up a Leica in the days when Henri Cartier-Bresson was dancing through the streets of Paris – is the first Leica designed and marketed for the iPhone generation, with a large touch-screen taking up almost the whole of its back and not very much else. Leica has been making mass-market digital cameras since 2005, which is the year the company came close to bankruptcy for failing to tackle the digital market earlier.
But the new T abandons itself to pixels as never before. With a bit of external design advice from Audi, Leica has jettisoned almost every visible element that the company once considered necessary to take photos: the chunky shutter speed and synchro dials; the rangefinder window and eyepiece; the distance indicator on the helical focus mount – long forgotten and so grandfatherly.
In their place is one slightly raised button for taking a photograph, and two gently recessed programmable dials, which may be completely bypassed by tapping on the screen. But within all this reductionist, modernist, shiny newness, Leica has retained one feature that sets it apart from all the Nikons and Canons and Rolleiflexes you can amass: its sheer, undentable, age-defying, spirit-lifting, grown-men-weeping desirability. Only those with steel hearts will be able to hold one and not reach for their credit card.
The cult of Leica takes many different forms, but it may be best defined by one anecdote. An absurd story you may safely try at home. A couple of years ago, a man on an online forum was pondering what really made Leica, Leica? Why was the brand so indestructible and perennially appealing? Why would normally sensible people pay much more for a Leica than another camera capable of achieving comparable results? One can argue endlessly about the quality of the lenses, and about the solidity of manufacture, but the forum guy believed there was another factor: the red dot logo. He took this theory onto the streets. He put a red paper sticker on his digital Panasonic Lumix (which uses Leica lenses, and is, give or take a bit of lens coating, practically a Leica without the badge), and started taking photos.
He felt bolder. He felt more able to edge himself into situations from which he previously would have shrunk. When he reviewed his pictures later, he found them to be better than those he had taken before. All of which doesn’t say much for Leica cameras, but says rather a lot about their image. The tiny red dot enclosing the word “Leica” in flowery script is the smallest piece of successful branding in the history of photography. It may also be the most alluring piece of miniature branding in the history of luxury consumerism – some logos on watches are larger. Surprisingly, its presence on cameras is relatively new, and dates only from the mid-Eighties (for a decade before, the name within the dot read “Leitz”, the name of the parent company). When I recently mentioned the forum guy’s red dot story to Stefan Daniel, Leica’s head of product development, he said, “Maybe we should just sell red dots.”
by Simon Garfield, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Martha Pavildou
Just a camera, of course. The lump of aluminium is called the Leica T, and it is an unusual thing. It’s not just a new Leica camera, but a new Leica system. The system – much to the horror of those who picked up a Leica in the days when Henri Cartier-Bresson was dancing through the streets of Paris – is the first Leica designed and marketed for the iPhone generation, with a large touch-screen taking up almost the whole of its back and not very much else. Leica has been making mass-market digital cameras since 2005, which is the year the company came close to bankruptcy for failing to tackle the digital market earlier.But the new T abandons itself to pixels as never before. With a bit of external design advice from Audi, Leica has jettisoned almost every visible element that the company once considered necessary to take photos: the chunky shutter speed and synchro dials; the rangefinder window and eyepiece; the distance indicator on the helical focus mount – long forgotten and so grandfatherly.
In their place is one slightly raised button for taking a photograph, and two gently recessed programmable dials, which may be completely bypassed by tapping on the screen. But within all this reductionist, modernist, shiny newness, Leica has retained one feature that sets it apart from all the Nikons and Canons and Rolleiflexes you can amass: its sheer, undentable, age-defying, spirit-lifting, grown-men-weeping desirability. Only those with steel hearts will be able to hold one and not reach for their credit card.
The cult of Leica takes many different forms, but it may be best defined by one anecdote. An absurd story you may safely try at home. A couple of years ago, a man on an online forum was pondering what really made Leica, Leica? Why was the brand so indestructible and perennially appealing? Why would normally sensible people pay much more for a Leica than another camera capable of achieving comparable results? One can argue endlessly about the quality of the lenses, and about the solidity of manufacture, but the forum guy believed there was another factor: the red dot logo. He took this theory onto the streets. He put a red paper sticker on his digital Panasonic Lumix (which uses Leica lenses, and is, give or take a bit of lens coating, practically a Leica without the badge), and started taking photos.
He felt bolder. He felt more able to edge himself into situations from which he previously would have shrunk. When he reviewed his pictures later, he found them to be better than those he had taken before. All of which doesn’t say much for Leica cameras, but says rather a lot about their image. The tiny red dot enclosing the word “Leica” in flowery script is the smallest piece of successful branding in the history of photography. It may also be the most alluring piece of miniature branding in the history of luxury consumerism – some logos on watches are larger. Surprisingly, its presence on cameras is relatively new, and dates only from the mid-Eighties (for a decade before, the name within the dot read “Leitz”, the name of the parent company). When I recently mentioned the forum guy’s red dot story to Stefan Daniel, Leica’s head of product development, he said, “Maybe we should just sell red dots.”
by Simon Garfield, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Martha Pavildou
Monday, November 24, 2014
Bob Dylan Plays Concert for One Insanely Lucky Superfan
This wasn't Punk'd, and within 10 minutes of Wikingsson taking his seat, the lights dimmed and Dylan took the stage alongside his touring band. Playing to an audience of one, they abandoned their usual repertoire and played Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat," Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill," Chuck Willis' "It's Too Late (She's Gone)" and a blues jam that Wikingsson has been unable to identify. "I was smiling so much it was like I was on ecstasy," he says. "My jaw hurt for hours afterwards because I couldn't stop smiling."
The incredible concert was part of an ongoing Swedish film series Experiment Ensam (Experiment Alone), where people experience things completely alone that are usually reserved for large crowds. Past films focused on a lone people at comedy clubs or karaoke bars. The filmmakers thought a lot bigger for this one and made arrangements with Dylan's camp for the private show, paying him an undisclosed amount of money. "I have no idea how much it was," says Wikingsson. "But it was probably more than he gets for a normal gig."
Wikingsson's friend Anders Helgeson is the director of Experiment Ensam, and when he told him about the Dylan concept he begged to be the subject. "I had an endless series of meetings where I managed to convince people my extreme fandom made me the best candidate for the enviable task," he says. "I'm very passive and I always picture myself as the guy that wouldn't be able to save himself on a sinking ship. I'd just lay down and die. I have no real ability to grab the moment, but when I heard about this I thought, 'For once, I have to stop everything in my life and go for something.'"
by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Simon Rudholm
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