Thursday, July 9, 2015
The Less I Know the More I Want You
I have a lot of friends who are freaking out about not being married yet. They appear to be channeling all of their existential anxiety into that one goal, perhaps because it is easier to have a container for one's anxiety than let it float freely. They seem to feel that if they could just put that piece of the puzzle together, then everything, in all areas of life, would be OK.
Romantic comedies often end with a wedding. But what about after? What do you do with a lifetime of longing, the forward motion of love-anxiety, once you've hit your target? Does it just become existential anxiety again?
I think the velocity of pursuit is an addictive state. It's often why the people who rejected us, or whom we perceive rejected us, are the hardest to get over. When we get rebuffed in the moment that occurs right before we touch the love object—or when we are spurned in the peak of an early-stage love high—we want to get back there forever. We might not even really miss the person. We might just miss the feeling.
The other day I saw my hot neighbor Edward making out with a woman by her car. Edward is an eternal boy—sun-kissed and scruffy. Rumor has it that the only furniture in his studio apartment is a futon bed. I've never seen him without a board of some kind—surf or skate. I totally want Edward. But more than anything, I think I want to be Edward.
It was very early Sunday morning, very postcoital, and I knew this woman wasn't his girlfriend. I knew it because Edward is in no way the type to have a girlfriend. Also, I've seen a lot of other women come and go from his apartment. But the way that he had his arm gently around her waist, and the electricity and spit between them, made it look to me—in that one moment—like they were each others' forever.
In the book The Evolution of Human Sexuality , Donald Symons writes, "The partner with the lesser emotional investment in a relationship controls the relationship." The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around Edward. I noticed that she was holding on just a little bit tighter than he was. I also noticed that he was the one who stopped kissing first. When she got in her car, she looked back to see if he was still looking at her. He wasn't.
All week, after witnessing the postcoital makeout, I pretended I was this woman. On Sunday night I felt the anxiety of wondering whether he would text or not. On Monday, I pictured her semi-hopeful for a text; Tuesday, growing impatient, checking her phone all day. Wednesday brought the reality that it might not ever happen, and the depression that comes with a rejection. I felt her wondering how he could not desire more of the sex that had led to that kissing moment, which seemed so beautiful and romantic. Thursday was empty and listless. Friday, like: Fuck him, he's an asshole. Saturday, nostalgic for the Saturday night before. Sunday, just saying "fuck it" and texting him.
I have no way of knowing whether or not this was her experience. I haven't seen either of them in a week, so maybe they are huddled together on his futon. Maybe he is texting her every day. But this is the narrative I projected on them, perhaps to ease the sadness I felt when the moment of beauty they shared was not mine.
Recently I made a list of every person I have ever kissed. Most of them were more than just kissing: oral sex, fucking, fingering, or at least rolling around in our undies. But I wanted to look at the full count of everyone I've ever engaged with romantically. I looked at the people on the list with whom I felt the most obsessed. I put an asterisk next to them. I then looked at the people whom I initially pined for, but then quickly grew lukewarm. Next to them I placed a dot. Then I looked at the people I have loved, but for whom I never longed, burned, or crushed in a dramatic or poetic way. Next to them I put an X.
Romantic comedies often end with a wedding. But what about after? What do you do with a lifetime of longing, the forward motion of love-anxiety, once you've hit your target? Does it just become existential anxiety again?I think the velocity of pursuit is an addictive state. It's often why the people who rejected us, or whom we perceive rejected us, are the hardest to get over. When we get rebuffed in the moment that occurs right before we touch the love object—or when we are spurned in the peak of an early-stage love high—we want to get back there forever. We might not even really miss the person. We might just miss the feeling.
The other day I saw my hot neighbor Edward making out with a woman by her car. Edward is an eternal boy—sun-kissed and scruffy. Rumor has it that the only furniture in his studio apartment is a futon bed. I've never seen him without a board of some kind—surf or skate. I totally want Edward. But more than anything, I think I want to be Edward.
It was very early Sunday morning, very postcoital, and I knew this woman wasn't his girlfriend. I knew it because Edward is in no way the type to have a girlfriend. Also, I've seen a lot of other women come and go from his apartment. But the way that he had his arm gently around her waist, and the electricity and spit between them, made it look to me—in that one moment—like they were each others' forever.
In the book The Evolution of Human Sexuality , Donald Symons writes, "The partner with the lesser emotional investment in a relationship controls the relationship." The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around Edward. I noticed that she was holding on just a little bit tighter than he was. I also noticed that he was the one who stopped kissing first. When she got in her car, she looked back to see if he was still looking at her. He wasn't.
All week, after witnessing the postcoital makeout, I pretended I was this woman. On Sunday night I felt the anxiety of wondering whether he would text or not. On Monday, I pictured her semi-hopeful for a text; Tuesday, growing impatient, checking her phone all day. Wednesday brought the reality that it might not ever happen, and the depression that comes with a rejection. I felt her wondering how he could not desire more of the sex that had led to that kissing moment, which seemed so beautiful and romantic. Thursday was empty and listless. Friday, like: Fuck him, he's an asshole. Saturday, nostalgic for the Saturday night before. Sunday, just saying "fuck it" and texting him.
I have no way of knowing whether or not this was her experience. I haven't seen either of them in a week, so maybe they are huddled together on his futon. Maybe he is texting her every day. But this is the narrative I projected on them, perhaps to ease the sadness I felt when the moment of beauty they shared was not mine.
Recently I made a list of every person I have ever kissed. Most of them were more than just kissing: oral sex, fucking, fingering, or at least rolling around in our undies. But I wanted to look at the full count of everyone I've ever engaged with romantically. I looked at the people on the list with whom I felt the most obsessed. I put an asterisk next to them. I then looked at the people whom I initially pined for, but then quickly grew lukewarm. Next to them I placed a dot. Then I looked at the people I have loved, but for whom I never longed, burned, or crushed in a dramatic or poetic way. Next to them I put an X.
by So Sad Today, Vice | Read more:
Image: Joel Benjamin 
How Esquire Engineered the Modern Bachelor
The social connotations of being a single man in America have changed a lot over the past three centuries. According to John Gilbert McCurdy in Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States, the word “bachelor” was first enshrined into American law in 1703, as part of a New York City ordinance taxing unmarried men at the same rate as married men for a new city project. This ordinance was one in a series of laws that determined that single men were capable of financial contribution to the state, even if they did not own property. After the Revolutionary War, American leaders were intent on differentiating the new nation from their former British masters, and redefining manhood became part of that change. John Adams saw British bachelors as “effeminate,” yet touted American bachelors as virtuous and able to resist temptations of vice. McCurdy writes that once bachelors were seen as equal to married men under the law (a common regulation by 1800), the image of the bachelor became associated with masculine independence and autonomy, even as he remained a subject of suspicion when it came to morality; the common sentiment at the time, according to McCurdy, was that “a bachelor may make all the wrong decisions and devote himself to a life of luxury, but this was the bachelor’s prerogative, which few Americans felt any compunction to hinder.”
The bachelor remained a fixture of public life and popular culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most important developments in bachelor culture was the emergence of sporting-male societies in the early eighteen hundreds, which celebrated male friendship, exclusive clubs, and vigorous exercise. In American sporting-male culture, middle- and working-class men spent time together in gambling houses, brothels, and billiard clubs; their independence and autonomy were held up as markers of masculinity among their peers—having a wife and children was a trap to be avoided for any man who valued his freedom. Some sporting-male bachelors had left their families in other countries or in other parts of the country, resulting in less surveillance from relatives and communities. And even though many bachelors held down steady white-collar jobs and lived with family members, many who had blue-collar jobs lived alone in boarding or rooming houses (some of these houses were exclusively held for bachelors, and became clubhouses as well as lodging). One example of this celebration of homosocial (and sometimes homosexual) bachelor subculture is the -essay collection by writer Donald Mitchell, called Reveries of a Bachelor, published in 1850:
In the twenties and thirties, the bachelor rose to prominence in pop culture as a symbol of a hedonistic life that some men were leading, and others wished they could. Unmarried or married, George Chauncey writes in “Trade, Wolves, and the Boundaries of Normal Manhood,” the bachelor subcultures of nineteen-twenties New York, particularly for working-class immigrants, were home to men who “forged an alternative definition of manliness that was predicated on a rejection of family obligations.” This rejection was often based on immigration or migration circumstances, but in other cases, it was a choice to be a bachelor, or at least to pretend to be one to avoid responsibility or to meet other men.
This wishful thinking fuelled Esquire’s approach to the bachelor lifestyle. (...)
This ideal reader was sophisticated, rich, and interested in the finer things in life. He also did what he wanted—freedom from obligation was crucial to the Esquire brand, and that obligation extended to freedom from women. Instead of highlighting the realities of single life, Esquire‘s portrayal of bachelorhood was based on looking and acting the part of the swinging ladies’ man, even though most of the magazine’s readers were married. Esquire’s idealized postwar bachelor had no obligations outside of his own desire for women and luxury products (often considered one in the same). He bought his own clothes, drove his own car, and took solo vacations to exotic places. The bachelor became a symbol of postwar consumerism and hedonism, and as a result, became a symbol of freedom for white American men looking for a way to feel important again. Because Esquire relied on corporate advertising to continue existing, overthrowing corporate hierarchy and stratification didn’t factor into their discussions of masculine rejuvenation. In the Handbook, women were presented as an obstacle to men’s success at entertaining, which reinforced the theory that women were ultimately responsible for men’s inability to control their lives.
The ideal life of the bachelor may have been one of absolute freedom, but the instructional elements of the Handbook made it clear that there was a right way to live a bachelor life, and it involved buying the right clothes, décor, food, and drinks. By lumping bachelors and married men together, the book’s editors implied that one could be a bachelor in every way but semantics, if he could follow the rules. Esquire encouraged both groups to consider themselves part of a new revolution in bachelorhood that didn’t actually require a man to be single, but to act like he was one by purchasing the luxury clothes, food, and other items necessary to convey a hedonistic lifestyle.
by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Esquire
The bachelor remained a fixture of public life and popular culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most important developments in bachelor culture was the emergence of sporting-male societies in the early eighteen hundreds, which celebrated male friendship, exclusive clubs, and vigorous exercise. In American sporting-male culture, middle- and working-class men spent time together in gambling houses, brothels, and billiard clubs; their independence and autonomy were held up as markers of masculinity among their peers—having a wife and children was a trap to be avoided for any man who valued his freedom. Some sporting-male bachelors had left their families in other countries or in other parts of the country, resulting in less surveillance from relatives and communities. And even though many bachelors held down steady white-collar jobs and lived with family members, many who had blue-collar jobs lived alone in boarding or rooming houses (some of these houses were exclusively held for bachelors, and became clubhouses as well as lodging). One example of this celebration of homosocial (and sometimes homosexual) bachelor subculture is the -essay collection by writer Donald Mitchell, called Reveries of a Bachelor, published in 1850:Can a man stake his bachelor respectability, his independence, and comfort, upon the die of absorbing, unchanging, relentless marriage, without trembling at the venture? Shall a man who has been free to chase his fancies over the wide-world, without let or hindrance, shut himself up to marriage-ship, within four walls called Home, that are to claim him, his time, his trouble, and his tears, thenceforward forever more, without doubts thick, and thick-coming as Smoke?By 1900, the image of the bachelor had become firmly intertwined with the image of the rugged American man—a Marlboro Man-type who embodied a frontier spirit of self-reliance and separation from workplace hierarchies, salaried jobs, and the demands of marriage and family life. Around this time, a growing parenting movement encouraged middle-class men to be more involved in their children’s lives, to a point; it was thought that fathers could provide necessary moral and career knowledge to their sons. So while more middle-class men engaged in childrearing activities that kept them closer to home, popular literature, film, and advertising celebrated the lone wolf persona of the bachelor in his many forms: hardboiled detective, rugged adventurer, artist, or writer. In all of these situations, it was the detachment of the man from his environment, along with his rejection of class structure that made him an appealing character to readers and viewers.
In the twenties and thirties, the bachelor rose to prominence in pop culture as a symbol of a hedonistic life that some men were leading, and others wished they could. Unmarried or married, George Chauncey writes in “Trade, Wolves, and the Boundaries of Normal Manhood,” the bachelor subcultures of nineteen-twenties New York, particularly for working-class immigrants, were home to men who “forged an alternative definition of manliness that was predicated on a rejection of family obligations.” This rejection was often based on immigration or migration circumstances, but in other cases, it was a choice to be a bachelor, or at least to pretend to be one to avoid responsibility or to meet other men.
This wishful thinking fuelled Esquire’s approach to the bachelor lifestyle. (...)
This ideal reader was sophisticated, rich, and interested in the finer things in life. He also did what he wanted—freedom from obligation was crucial to the Esquire brand, and that obligation extended to freedom from women. Instead of highlighting the realities of single life, Esquire‘s portrayal of bachelorhood was based on looking and acting the part of the swinging ladies’ man, even though most of the magazine’s readers were married. Esquire’s idealized postwar bachelor had no obligations outside of his own desire for women and luxury products (often considered one in the same). He bought his own clothes, drove his own car, and took solo vacations to exotic places. The bachelor became a symbol of postwar consumerism and hedonism, and as a result, became a symbol of freedom for white American men looking for a way to feel important again. Because Esquire relied on corporate advertising to continue existing, overthrowing corporate hierarchy and stratification didn’t factor into their discussions of masculine rejuvenation. In the Handbook, women were presented as an obstacle to men’s success at entertaining, which reinforced the theory that women were ultimately responsible for men’s inability to control their lives.
The ideal life of the bachelor may have been one of absolute freedom, but the instructional elements of the Handbook made it clear that there was a right way to live a bachelor life, and it involved buying the right clothes, décor, food, and drinks. By lumping bachelors and married men together, the book’s editors implied that one could be a bachelor in every way but semantics, if he could follow the rules. Esquire encouraged both groups to consider themselves part of a new revolution in bachelorhood that didn’t actually require a man to be single, but to act like he was one by purchasing the luxury clothes, food, and other items necessary to convey a hedonistic lifestyle.
by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Esquire
The Death of Golf
[ed. Maybe it could die a little sooner so I could get a tee time.]
One night last September, my 15-year-old daughter, Esmee, told me her plan to try out for the girls golf team here in Pacific Palisades, California. While I was pleased with her interest in golf — which I'd played semiseriously, along with seemingly every other man under 40 in the Tiger-dominated late '90s — I felt I had to prepare her for the inevitable letdown. She lacked the requisite power and the repeating, compact swing I assumed were required of a varsity golfer. Do your best, I told her, but be prepared for the possibility that you might not make the team.
When she texted me a week later to say she'd made the cut, I was stunned. In the years I'd gone to the school, the golf team was a bunch of country club regulars whose swings were nice right-path whips, golfers who'd been playing for a half-decade by the time they got to high school. I asked the coach, James Paleno, what had changed.
"There just isn't the interest we used to have 14, 15 years ago," he says. "Now I have kids showing up who have never hit a golf ball before. Kids are just less aware of golf. They have too many other options. And then when they find out it takes five and a half hours to play 18 holes, they're just not interested."
By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge." (...)
Not long ago, the game could count on young fathers to hide out on the links, and weekend tee slots are still filled with plenty of off-duty dads. But it takes two to properly helicopter-parent a family these days, and that means parents are spending more of their weekends at the playground than at the country club.
During the Tiger boom, everything about the game seemed to expand, from the length of the putters to the size of driver heads to the scale of the courses themselves. "When I won the U.S. Open at Bellerive in 1965, the course measured 7,191 yards. It was a monster," notes Gary Player, the only non-American to win a career Grand Slam. "Now," he says, "7,500-yard courses are everywhere." And those courses have raised their greens fees. Pebble Beach may be able to charge $495 for a round, but when your local public course wants $150, it gets steep. And many of those golf courses weren't designed merely for golf; they were the lure for tens of thousands of homes that aimed to deliver one version of the American dream: golf course frontage. (...)
By now the various attempts to "save" golf by making the game faster, cheaper, and easier to play have all taken on an air of desperation. There have been a number of initiatives and innovations designed to lure younger players onto the course — most of them attempts to speed up the game. "Golf is losing fans because of time," says Phil Smith. "We need to provide for that." That means shorter courses, some three- or four-hole loops that can be played "through" existing courses, or bigger holes or short-game areas — anything so that a player can go out and swing a club and get back before sundown. "We have to shorten the courses and change the equipment," Gary Player says. "Your average golfer will have a much better experience if he or she doesn't feel the need to hit a driver off of every tee box."
There is also FootGolf, essentially golf played with a soccer ball, and Big Hole Golf, where the game is played with cups as wide as 15 inches, and, of course, Frisbee golf. The PGA and USGA have introduced Tee It Forward, which encourages players to set their tees well ahead of their normal tees, with the hope that beginner players can finish a round in three hours. "I'd like to play a game that can take place in three hours," Nicklaus told CNN this past January. "And something that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg."
At every turn, the game is trying to lure younger golfers into the clubhouse. The USGA sponsors Drive, Chip & Putt, a skills program for juniors similar to the NFL's Punt, Pass & Kick, and one of last year's participants, 11-year-old Lucy Li, became the youngest player in history to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open. The First Tee, a partner of the PGA, LPGA, and several major corporations, has focused on introducing golf into schools by donating equipment and providing a golf-friendly curriculum.
Still, the sparse crowd on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Golf Show definitely skews more Arnold Palmer than Lucy Li. In fact, there's hardly anyone under the age of 50 who isn't manning a booth. There were a few dozen golf courses and country clubs trolling for members: Angeles National, Rio Hondo, the Crossings at Carlsbad, each offering deeply discounted rounds and practically begging me to play at their courses. Their sales managers touted their yardage, conditions — "the only Nicklaus Design golf course in Los Angeles County," a "$44 weekday special including a hot dog and a soda" — and said they believed the golf business was finally rebounding. But I didn't have to press very hard to get them to admit that business was slow. "It's a challenge," says Debora Main, marketing and sales manager of Candlewood. "It's been a tough few years."
Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges. Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling. The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.
One night last September, my 15-year-old daughter, Esmee, told me her plan to try out for the girls golf team here in Pacific Palisades, California. While I was pleased with her interest in golf — which I'd played semiseriously, along with seemingly every other man under 40 in the Tiger-dominated late '90s — I felt I had to prepare her for the inevitable letdown. She lacked the requisite power and the repeating, compact swing I assumed were required of a varsity golfer. Do your best, I told her, but be prepared for the possibility that you might not make the team.
When she texted me a week later to say she'd made the cut, I was stunned. In the years I'd gone to the school, the golf team was a bunch of country club regulars whose swings were nice right-path whips, golfers who'd been playing for a half-decade by the time they got to high school. I asked the coach, James Paleno, what had changed."There just isn't the interest we used to have 14, 15 years ago," he says. "Now I have kids showing up who have never hit a golf ball before. Kids are just less aware of golf. They have too many other options. And then when they find out it takes five and a half hours to play 18 holes, they're just not interested."
By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge." (...)
Not long ago, the game could count on young fathers to hide out on the links, and weekend tee slots are still filled with plenty of off-duty dads. But it takes two to properly helicopter-parent a family these days, and that means parents are spending more of their weekends at the playground than at the country club.
During the Tiger boom, everything about the game seemed to expand, from the length of the putters to the size of driver heads to the scale of the courses themselves. "When I won the U.S. Open at Bellerive in 1965, the course measured 7,191 yards. It was a monster," notes Gary Player, the only non-American to win a career Grand Slam. "Now," he says, "7,500-yard courses are everywhere." And those courses have raised their greens fees. Pebble Beach may be able to charge $495 for a round, but when your local public course wants $150, it gets steep. And many of those golf courses weren't designed merely for golf; they were the lure for tens of thousands of homes that aimed to deliver one version of the American dream: golf course frontage. (...)
By now the various attempts to "save" golf by making the game faster, cheaper, and easier to play have all taken on an air of desperation. There have been a number of initiatives and innovations designed to lure younger players onto the course — most of them attempts to speed up the game. "Golf is losing fans because of time," says Phil Smith. "We need to provide for that." That means shorter courses, some three- or four-hole loops that can be played "through" existing courses, or bigger holes or short-game areas — anything so that a player can go out and swing a club and get back before sundown. "We have to shorten the courses and change the equipment," Gary Player says. "Your average golfer will have a much better experience if he or she doesn't feel the need to hit a driver off of every tee box."
There is also FootGolf, essentially golf played with a soccer ball, and Big Hole Golf, where the game is played with cups as wide as 15 inches, and, of course, Frisbee golf. The PGA and USGA have introduced Tee It Forward, which encourages players to set their tees well ahead of their normal tees, with the hope that beginner players can finish a round in three hours. "I'd like to play a game that can take place in three hours," Nicklaus told CNN this past January. "And something that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg."
At every turn, the game is trying to lure younger golfers into the clubhouse. The USGA sponsors Drive, Chip & Putt, a skills program for juniors similar to the NFL's Punt, Pass & Kick, and one of last year's participants, 11-year-old Lucy Li, became the youngest player in history to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open. The First Tee, a partner of the PGA, LPGA, and several major corporations, has focused on introducing golf into schools by donating equipment and providing a golf-friendly curriculum.
Still, the sparse crowd on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Golf Show definitely skews more Arnold Palmer than Lucy Li. In fact, there's hardly anyone under the age of 50 who isn't manning a booth. There were a few dozen golf courses and country clubs trolling for members: Angeles National, Rio Hondo, the Crossings at Carlsbad, each offering deeply discounted rounds and practically begging me to play at their courses. Their sales managers touted their yardage, conditions — "the only Nicklaus Design golf course in Los Angeles County," a "$44 weekday special including a hot dog and a soda" — and said they believed the golf business was finally rebounding. But I didn't have to press very hard to get them to admit that business was slow. "It's a challenge," says Debora Main, marketing and sales manager of Candlewood. "It's been a tough few years."
Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges. Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling. The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.
by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Men's Journal | Read more:
Image: Todd Anthony
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
The Data or the Hunch
This was the early 1920s. By 1930, Harlem had usurped the South Side of Chicago as the prime destination for America’s jazz and blues musicians. At venues like the Lafayette, Big John’s Gin Mill, Minton’s and the Cotton Club, players and fans would drink, flirt, smoke and play. Hammond was still making the trip uptown, only now they let him into the clubs. In his button-down shirt and tie, he cut an incongruous figure. But he was friendly with dozens of black musicians and club-owners who knew that this lemonade-sipping young white man loved the same music they did and knew all about it.
Hammond was born to immense wealth (his mother was a Vanderbilt) but longed to fly the gilded cage. To his father’s dismay, he dropped out of Yale in 1931 to work in the fast-growing record business. To succeed, he needed to find and record new artists. So he crisscrossed New York, from Greenwich Village to Harlem, in search of undiscovered talent. “Drop into almost any nightclub…any recording date or broadcast or audition or rehearsal,” wrote a jazz critic, Otis Ferguson, “and if you stick around long enough, you are almost sure to see John Henry Hammond, Jr, in the flesh, if briefly.”
One February night in 1933, Hammond rapped on an anonymous door on 133rd St. One of his singer friends, Monette Moore, ran a new speakeasy, and he had come to see her perform. As it turned out, she couldn’t make it. Her replacement was a girl called Billie Holiday. Hammond hadn’t heard of her—which meant nobody had—but she took his breath away. Just 17, Holiday was tall, unconventionally beautiful, with an imperious bearing. Her artistry gave Hammond shivers. She sang just behind the beat, her voice wafting languidly over the accompaniment like smoke from a cigarette. She didn’t just sing the songs, she played them with her voice. “I was overwhelmed,” Hammond said.
Billie Holiday became the first big find of John Hammond’s career, which is recounted in Dunstan Prial’s biography “The Producer”. Hammond’s protégés included many influential jazz artists: the “king of swing” Benny Goodman, the swing pianist Teddy Wilson, the vibes player and bandleader Lionel Hampton, the guitar wizard Charlie Christian. Hammond had exceptional antennae for talent. One night in 1936, restless after watching Goodman perform in Chicago, he went to his car, switched on the radio and spun through the airwaves. Through the crackle at the end of the dial, he picked up the faint sound of a swing band with a driving rhythm section. It was a live transmission from the Reno club in Kansas City, and the band was the Count Basie Orchestra. It wouldn’t be long before Basie, sitting at his piano at the Reno, was presented with the open hand of a conservatively dressed man with an outsized grin. “Hi. I’m John Hammond.”
At the time, black musicians were not supposed to play with white ones. Hammond thought this was crazy. He hated segregation and pushed for racially integrated bands at every opportunity. He also believed that virtually all good popular music had its roots in black culture, and thought it an outrage that, as jazz became popular across America, its origins were being obscured from view. So he decided to educate white people. In 1938 he organised a concert at Carnegie Hall called “From Spirituals to Swing”, tracing the lineage of popular music from African drumming to slave chants, Southern blues, gospel and jazz. It featured Basie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Joe Turner and many others. It was a sell-out. Nobody had told Hammond to go and see Billie Holiday that night in Harlem. She had no fan base, no manager pressing her claims. Nobody would record her. But the moment he saw Holiday, John Hammond knew she was going to be a star. He just had a feeling about this girl. A hunch.
The gift for talent-spotting is mysterious, highly prized and celebrated. We love to hear stories about the baseball coach who can spot the raw ability of an erratic young pitcher, the boss who sees potential in the guy in the post room, the director who picks a soloist out of the chorus line. Talent shows are a staple of the TV schedules. We like to believe that certain people—sometimes ourselves—can just sense when a person has something special. But there is another method of spotting talent which doesn’t rely on hunches. In place of intuition, it offers data and analysis. Rather than relying on the gut, it invites us to use our heads. It tends not to make for such romantic stories, but it is effective—which is why, despite our affection, the hunch is everywhere in retreat.
Strike one against the hunch was the publication of “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis (2003), which has attained the status of a management manual for many in sport and beyond. Lewis reported on a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, who enjoyed unlikely success against bigger and better-funded competitors. Their secret sauce was data. Their general manager, Billy Beane, had realised that when it came to evaluating players, the gut instincts of experienced baseball scouts were unreliable, and he employed statisticians to identify talent overlooked by the big clubs.
The analysts were students of the game but outsiders, less susceptible to the illusory certainties of baseball lore. The scouts might say a young player had “a great body” for the game, or rate a pitcher just by watching him throw. Beane’s stat-heads would find that a player deemed too fat was actually an above-average catcher, or that a player with unorthodox movement was effective. The analysts also noticed that scouts were unduly swayed by whatever they had seen in the last game, and relied on received notions like “clutch ability” that proved, on closer examination, to be meaningless.
The scouts were being hoodwinked by their own brains. The year before “Moneyball”, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman had won a Nobel prize for his research into the rickety apparatus of human cognition, and his work influenced Paul DePodesta, a Harvard statistician who was Billy Beane’s main analyst at the A’s. At first, baseball coaches scorned the idea that nerds with computers could teach them anything, or that there could be any substitute for “good eyes”. But the success of the A’s proved that nerds can see things jocks can’t. “The idea that I trust my eyes more than the stats, I don’t buy that,” said Beane, “because I’ve seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I just know that the rabbit’s not in there.”
In football (the non-American version), expert hunches are similarly flawed, and top clubs now employ analysts to offset them. Size doesn’t matter as much as they thought: analysts found that clubs recruit a lot of big players, but use smaller ones more. Some players with a languid style, labelled slow or lazy by coaches, turn out to be covering a lot of ground. And studies suggest that even experienced coaches recall only 60% of the critical events in a match they have just watched—while believing that they noticed everything.
These days, when a football club is interested in a player, it considers the average distance he runs in a game, the number of passes and tackles or blocks he makes, his shots on goal, the ratio of goals to shots, and many other details nobody thought to measure a generation ago. Sport is far from the only industry in which talent-spotting is becoming a matter of measurement. Prithwijit Mukerji, a postgraduate at the University of Westminster in London, recently published a paper on the way the music industry is being transformed by “the Moneyball approach”. By harvesting data from Facebook and Twitter and music services like Spotify and Shazam, executives can track what we are listening to in far more detail than ever before, and use it as a guide to what we will listen to next.
Historically, the music industry has run on hunches. John Hammond is the archetype of what later became known as A&R (artists and repertoire)—the business’s talent scouts. Being an A&R man in the industry’s heyday was a dream job: you were paid to go to gigs and hang out with musicians eager to win your approval. If you spotted more than one or two successes, you were said to have good ears, and handed a fat salary. But the ears of A&R now compete with algorithms.
Next Big Sound in New York is one of a growing number of firms that sell data-based analyses to record companies. According to Forbes magazine, it has found that musicians who gain 20,000 to 50,000 Facebook fans in a month are four times more likely to reach a million fans. It claims to be able to predict album sales within 20% accuracy for 85% of artists. That may not sound so impressive, but then it depends on what you’re comparing it with: the track record of A&Rs was not pretty. In his novel “Kill Your Friends”, John Niven, a former A&R man himself, paints a vivid picture of the job, in the words of his narrator, Steven Stelfox: “Now, I don’t have a perfect track record. No one does. But I’m pretty fucking good. On average I only get it wrong maybe eight or nine times out of ten. That is to say, if you played me ten pieces of unsigned music I might instantly dismiss three or four acts that might go on to enjoy enormous success…We, my label, have spent millions, literally millions, signing and developing music that, as it turned out, no sane person wanted to hear.”
The old music industry turned many young acts into big stars. But it placed many, many more wagers on acts that didn’t sell enough records to pay back; William Goldman’s axiom, “Nobody knows anything”, applies to music as much as the movies. In the social-media era, big bets on untested talent are rarer. This is partly because there’s less money to spray around. But also because the record companies are using data to lower the risk.
This is the day of the analyst. In education, academics are working their way towards a reliable method of evaluating teachers, by running data on test scores of pupils, controlled for factors such as prior achievement and raw ability. The methodology is imperfect, but research suggests that it’s not as bad as just watching someone teach. A 2011 study led by Michael Strong at the University of California identified a group of teachers who had raised student achievement and a group who had not. They showed videos of the teachers’ lessons to observers and asked them to guess which were in which group. The judges tended to agree on who was effective and ineffective, but, 60% of the time, they were wrong. They would have been better off flipping a coin.
by Ian Leslie, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Peter Horvath
The Psychology of the Suitcase
Full Disclosure: I hate packing. More, even, than the first whiff of aviation fuel, getting out the suitcases makes my stomach flip over. I regard those unruffled business travellers, with their capsule wardrobes folded into tiny, carry-on wheelie bags, as an alien species. Admittedly I am a nervous flyer, so while I’m packing there is always a corner of my brain wondering what my belongings will look like hanging from a tree on the television news. But that’s far from the only reason packing is stressful.
There is plenty of advice in the cybersphere and declutter-your-life books about packing. There’s the luggage itself. Hard- or soft-sided? Four wheels or two? Then there’s whether it’s better to roll your clothes or pack them flat. People with naive ideas about how suitcases are treated at airports swear you must pack your shoes at the “bottom”. Others will tell you to put everything into plastic bags first—true, I think, only of sponge bags, which are prone to leaking at altitude. On arrival, if your clothes are creased (perhaps you forgot to interleave them with tissue paper?) you can supposedly transform them in a bathroom filled with steam. And so on, and on.
There is less analysis of what makes packing so stressful in the first place. It seems to me that the combination of rigid constraints—the deadlines, weight- and size-limits on luggage—and the unknown variables of different climates and unfamiliar dress codes is tailor-made to induce anxiety. (...)
Coincidentally, one of the few times I envy men the simplicity of their uniform is when faced with an empty suitcase (one word). Men don’t, as a rule, need to pack tights as well as socks, or different underwear for different outfits, or make-up and heels for evening. Women don’t actually need these, we just feel we do. Because clothes are a kind of camouflage, they are about fitting in. When we travel—indeed one of the reasons we do it—our routines are broken. So we can’t know exactly what we’ll have to fit in with. The trauma of packing is about squeezing the infinite possibilities of elsewhere into a couple of pieces of luggage.
Travelling light to faraway places is a result of the democratisation of travel, which began in the late 19th century, and the ascendancy of the aeroplane. In the days when only rich people travelled for leisure it was a process more akin to moving house, with porters and staff to do the carrying and the packing, and dozens of pieces of luggage each with a specific function, from vast trunks to hat boxes. The suit case, then two separate words, was simply the one dedicated to holding men’s dress suits. (...)
The only rational way to prepare for the unexpected is, like a prosperous Victorian, to take everything with you—which is impossible unless you have the same bag as Mary Poppins. We know we own too much stuff, that we’re too attached to material things, and that it would be good to ditch most of it. But we fear being ill-equipped. At this time of year it’s traditional for a newspaper article to point out what we already know: that we use only 50% of what we pack. But the thing is, we don’t know beforehand which half it will be. Perhaps on a business trip you can predict exactly, boringly, what you’ll need. Otherwise packing is a kind of spread-betting: the extra 50% is to cover the possibilities, as well as ourselves.
by Rebecca Willis, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Bill Brown
There is plenty of advice in the cybersphere and declutter-your-life books about packing. There’s the luggage itself. Hard- or soft-sided? Four wheels or two? Then there’s whether it’s better to roll your clothes or pack them flat. People with naive ideas about how suitcases are treated at airports swear you must pack your shoes at the “bottom”. Others will tell you to put everything into plastic bags first—true, I think, only of sponge bags, which are prone to leaking at altitude. On arrival, if your clothes are creased (perhaps you forgot to interleave them with tissue paper?) you can supposedly transform them in a bathroom filled with steam. And so on, and on.There is less analysis of what makes packing so stressful in the first place. It seems to me that the combination of rigid constraints—the deadlines, weight- and size-limits on luggage—and the unknown variables of different climates and unfamiliar dress codes is tailor-made to induce anxiety. (...)
Coincidentally, one of the few times I envy men the simplicity of their uniform is when faced with an empty suitcase (one word). Men don’t, as a rule, need to pack tights as well as socks, or different underwear for different outfits, or make-up and heels for evening. Women don’t actually need these, we just feel we do. Because clothes are a kind of camouflage, they are about fitting in. When we travel—indeed one of the reasons we do it—our routines are broken. So we can’t know exactly what we’ll have to fit in with. The trauma of packing is about squeezing the infinite possibilities of elsewhere into a couple of pieces of luggage.
Travelling light to faraway places is a result of the democratisation of travel, which began in the late 19th century, and the ascendancy of the aeroplane. In the days when only rich people travelled for leisure it was a process more akin to moving house, with porters and staff to do the carrying and the packing, and dozens of pieces of luggage each with a specific function, from vast trunks to hat boxes. The suit case, then two separate words, was simply the one dedicated to holding men’s dress suits. (...)
The only rational way to prepare for the unexpected is, like a prosperous Victorian, to take everything with you—which is impossible unless you have the same bag as Mary Poppins. We know we own too much stuff, that we’re too attached to material things, and that it would be good to ditch most of it. But we fear being ill-equipped. At this time of year it’s traditional for a newspaper article to point out what we already know: that we use only 50% of what we pack. But the thing is, we don’t know beforehand which half it will be. Perhaps on a business trip you can predict exactly, boringly, what you’ll need. Otherwise packing is a kind of spread-betting: the extra 50% is to cover the possibilities, as well as ourselves.
by Rebecca Willis, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Bill Brown
Meanwhile, Over at the Real New York Stock Exchange
[ed. How convenient, just as the market was tanking: Outage upends an already tough day for markets. And: Meanwhile over at the real New York Stock Exchange.]
Germany Crushes All Hope Of Greece Getting Debt Relief
As the Grexit debate is falling into the background a new, far more powerful conflict emerges: one between Germany on one side, and the IMF, France, Italy, and perhaps even the US, when it comes to the all important issue of debt relief.
As a reminder, it was the unexpected release of the IMF's debt (un)sustainability draft late last week (with US support over the vocal objections of Europe) that not only gave Tsipras a Greferendum win (he did not desire), but showed clearly that without a debt haircut of at least 30%, any Greek deal will merely lead to another, even more violent Greek default down the line.
Of course, it is not only Greece that needs debt reduction but so do all the other peripheral nations:
Overnight, the Telegraph reported that the "debt-haircut" axis has even more supporters in Europe:
Finally, it was none other than Tsipras who piggybacked on the IMF's imlicit recommendation and in the hours following the "victorious" Greferendum, made a clear demand of Europe:
Nein. (...)
Reuters just reported that "the German government does not see any reason to grant Greece either a classic debt haircut or any other measures that would slash the value of money on loan to the crisis-ridden country, a spokesman for the finance ministry said on Wednesday.
The only quesiton is whether the German hard-line stance against Greek debt reduction also means that the Troika as we know it is finished, and even more importantly, whether the two European camps, one for and one against debt reduction are now on terminal collision course. (...)
And all to preserve the equity "wealth" of a few banker oligarchs because as we showed on Tuesday, saving the banks is what this has been all about from day one.
As a reminder, it was the unexpected release of the IMF's debt (un)sustainability draft late last week (with US support over the vocal objections of Europe) that not only gave Tsipras a Greferendum win (he did not desire), but showed clearly that without a debt haircut of at least 30%, any Greek deal will merely lead to another, even more violent Greek default down the line.
Of course, it is not only Greece that needs debt reduction but so do all the other peripheral nations:
Overnight, the Telegraph reported that the "debt-haircut" axis has even more supporters in Europe:
French leaders are working in concert with the White House. Washington is bringing its immense diplomatic power to bear, calling openly on the EU to put "Greece on a path toward debt sustainability" and sort out the festering problem once and for all.The Franco-American push is backed by Italy's Matteo Renzi, who said the eurozone has to go back to the drawing board and rethink its whole austerity doctrine after the democratic revolt in Greece. He too now backs debt relief for Greece.
Finally, it was none other than Tsipras who piggybacked on the IMF's imlicit recommendation and in the hours following the "victorious" Greferendum, made a clear demand of Europe:
Fast forward to this morning when shortly after the latest Greek capitulation, when in Tsipras' official request for ESM bailout he said timidly that "as part of a broader discussion to be held, Greece welcomes the opportunity to explore potential measures to be taken so that its official sector related debt becomes both sustainable and viable over the long term" Germany made it very clear whether there will be any debt haircuts, or reprofiling in the coming years.
- TSIPRAS ASKS FOR 30 PERCENT DEBT HAIRCUT
Nein. (...)
Reuters just reported that "the German government does not see any reason to grant Greece either a classic debt haircut or any other measures that would slash the value of money on loan to the crisis-ridden country, a spokesman for the finance ministry said on Wednesday.
The only quesiton is whether the German hard-line stance against Greek debt reduction also means that the Troika as we know it is finished, and even more importantly, whether the two European camps, one for and one against debt reduction are now on terminal collision course. (...)
And all to preserve the equity "wealth" of a few banker oligarchs because as we showed on Tuesday, saving the banks is what this has been all about from day one.
by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge | Read more:
Images: ZeroHedge
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Looking It in the Face
Of course, I never really believed it would happen. Grow old, I mean. I knew it was coming, saw the evidence of it in my friends and relatives, but despite that, I acted as if aging had nothing to do with me. Even having people congratulate me on my seventy-fifth birthday doesn’t sound right to me. Either they or I must have screwed up the count somewhere along the way. Knowing the truth, of course, is better than fooling oneself, but who wants to look truth in the face every morning? Over the years, I’ve watched a few people on their deathbeds and they were not entirely convinced either about what was coming. They held on to a small hope that they would turn out to be exceptions to the rule. “You’ll get caught,” I remember telling a couple of chums in my youth who were planning to break into a garage in the neighborhood that night and carry off some tools. How they cackled! How they made fun of me! Dummies get nabbed, but not smart guys like them, they assured me; and promptly found themselves in jail the next day.
“You’ll see when you grow old,” someone was always telling us when we were young. In the days before cash machines, when we had to run to our grandmothers for emergency funds, they made us sit and listen to a lecture first. They told us how the world had changed for the worst, how when they were young, boys called their fathers Sir, and girls from good homes had the modesty to blush when spoken to by boys. I would sit at the edge of my chair, nodding in agreement, waiting for grandma to click open her purse and hand over the money. Even then, I vaguely understood that grumbling about the young was one of the few satisfactions people have left in old age. I didn’t mind hearing about the calamities that befell members of our family who failed to listen to the sensible advice I was getting—and I would get all that I could put up with, until she started sighing and telling me how I’ll come to understand everything she was saying now when I reached her age. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Poor grandma, what a drag she was, though I have to admit today that she was right. With age, I do see things differently than I once did.
The reality of that didn’t hit me until I was almost fifty. I woke up one morning a few days before my fiftieth birthday and suddenly grasped the enormity of it. A half a century is no joke. When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn’t the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it—if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace.
In the final months of my father’s life, every time I went to visit him we talked about books. He had no patience for novels any more. History still fascinated him, and so did certain philosophers. The gloomier the thinker he was reading, the more pleased my father became, since it confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell. Naturally, we argued about that. At least one is never bored in hell, I kept reminding him, only in paradise. I’m what you may call a part-time pessimist. I could smell the evils to come as well as he could, but I tend to be of a cheerful temperament. I wake up most mornings full of hope. Still, I can’t deny that in the thirty years since we had these conversations, I’ve grown progressively more exasperated about our species and foresee a day when I will no longer be able to bring myself to read newspapers and watch television out of concern for my mental health.
“You’ll see when you grow old,” someone was always telling us when we were young. In the days before cash machines, when we had to run to our grandmothers for emergency funds, they made us sit and listen to a lecture first. They told us how the world had changed for the worst, how when they were young, boys called their fathers Sir, and girls from good homes had the modesty to blush when spoken to by boys. I would sit at the edge of my chair, nodding in agreement, waiting for grandma to click open her purse and hand over the money. Even then, I vaguely understood that grumbling about the young was one of the few satisfactions people have left in old age. I didn’t mind hearing about the calamities that befell members of our family who failed to listen to the sensible advice I was getting—and I would get all that I could put up with, until she started sighing and telling me how I’ll come to understand everything she was saying now when I reached her age. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Poor grandma, what a drag she was, though I have to admit today that she was right. With age, I do see things differently than I once did.The reality of that didn’t hit me until I was almost fifty. I woke up one morning a few days before my fiftieth birthday and suddenly grasped the enormity of it. A half a century is no joke. When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn’t the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it—if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace.
In the final months of my father’s life, every time I went to visit him we talked about books. He had no patience for novels any more. History still fascinated him, and so did certain philosophers. The gloomier the thinker he was reading, the more pleased my father became, since it confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell. Naturally, we argued about that. At least one is never bored in hell, I kept reminding him, only in paradise. I’m what you may call a part-time pessimist. I could smell the evils to come as well as he could, but I tend to be of a cheerful temperament. I wake up most mornings full of hope. Still, I can’t deny that in the thirty years since we had these conversations, I’ve grown progressively more exasperated about our species and foresee a day when I will no longer be able to bring myself to read newspapers and watch television out of concern for my mental health.
by Charles Simic, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Grandville
Paul McCartney Opens Up
There are long breaks in the schedule, of course, and there have been years when McCartney didn't perform in public at all, but at least since the turn of the century he has been out there (if not, until recently, "Out There"), with much the same band and much the same crew and friends and associates in tow, singing the songs that made him rich and famous and adored, many of which you and everyone you know and millions of people you'll never meet can sing word for word. Really, who doesn't know the opening lines to 'Yesterday'?
McCartney's flight landed at Kansai International at 7am on 20 April, and was met with the same tightly controlled arrivals-hall hysteria he's been causing since the early Sixties. One suspects an unsparing internal investigation would be launched inside Camp Macca were the boss ever to arrive anywhere unnoticed. How would Japan learn of his presence without a minor scuffle at the airport? What's a rock star without a hyperventilating frenzy to follow him around?
It's hard to get a sense, from the shaky video clip I see on his publicist Stuart Bell's phone later that day, of the number of people who greeted him at the airport (estimates vary between 500 and 800). What's certain is that most had been waiting for him since the early hours, in heavy rain, holding aloft notably polite homemade placards – YOU ARE MY SINGER; THANK YOU PAUL, YOU CAME BACK – and that when he did at length appear, in the traditional manner they screamed and shook and palpitated and covered their mouths with their hands in tremulous overexcitement.
Accompanied by his wife, Nancy, McCartney stepped off the plane in his current off-duty uniform: dark jeans and a denim jacket over a white shirt, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He was carrying the Hofner violin bass guitar that is one of his trademarks – he has had this one since the Royal Variety performance of 1963 – and that travels everywhere with his personal assistant, John Hammel, who has been with him almost as long. Like Hammel, the Hofner gets its own seat. (Later, backstage, a friendly guitar tech lets me inspect it and, expert that I am, I can confirm that it is indeed a guitar.)
McCartney had flown in from Cleveland, Ohio, where the previous evening he had inducted Ringo Starr into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (McCartney: "As my daughter said when I got inducted, 'About fucking time.'") He slept well on the plane, he said, and by the time he arrived at the Kyocera Dome, a baseball stadium where the following evening he and his band were booked to play to a sell-out crowd of 55,000, he seemed rested and relaxed.
His touring routine is well established: breakfast, a workout, perhaps a massage, then meetings with his team. If the weather's clement and security conditions are favourable, a bike ride around the locality of the hotel. If there's water nearby, he might try to get out on it in a boat. Today, he will rehearse with the band, then have a quiet early dinner with Nancy and a few friends from the touring party. Tomorrow's soundcheck will be any time between 3pm and 4:30pm. Then, as show time approaches, he will retreat to his dressing room to watch trashy American TV. After the concert, a drink, dinner, bed. And up early to travel to Tokyo for the next show.
"It's what I do," he told me, when I asked what kept him at it all after all these years. "It's my life."
I am introduced to McCartney in a corridor backstage at the concert venue, on the afternoon of his arrival in the city. As expected, he is slim and spry, his handshake vigorous, his gaze direct, his movements swift and decisive; this is not a man who wants to be detained long, in a corridor or anywhere else.
Any of us should be so lucky to make it to McCartney's age – 73 by the time you read this – in such fine fettle. But there's a cruelty to growing old in public. McCartney was the most cherubic of the Fabs, doe of eye and cheeky of grin. No septuagenarian looks the same as he did at 20, and McCartney is not an exception. He dresses like a younger man: today, grey jeans, a casual blue shirt with the cuffs rolled back, black skate-style slip-ons. The chestnut hair is reliably ageless: flicky, collar-length, grey only at the sideburns. But the Bambi eyes are hooded now, the lips, once pouty, are pursed. His face is lined, craggy. Those high, arched eyebrows seem coolly appraising; one gets the feeling of being sized up: Is he OK? Can we trust him? Should we let him in?
The (mostly) fond caricature of McCartney as pop culture's slightly embarrassing uncle – Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft, as Smash Hits famously had it – seems pretty comprehensively wide of the mark. Yes, in public when the mood takes him he makes silly faces and strikes ironic poses and gives the double thumbs-up. But in private, it seems to me, there is a seriousness of purpose to him. Nobody suffers fools gladly – that's a ridiculous idea – but most of us do suffer them, out of necessity if for no other reason. McCartney, one guesses from his brisk, no-nonsense manner, is unwilling to suffer fools at all. He certainly has the effect on me of making me want to raise my game, so as not to irritate him, or bore him.
That said, once one is past the initial bedazzlement – Jesus Christ, it's Paul fucking McCartney! – he's extremely good at putting people at ease, loose and chatty and good humoured. He asks questions, makes small talk, cracks jokes, so that it's almost, almost possible to forget that you're looking into the eyes of one of the most recognisable people on the planet. (...)
Each generation struggles to escape the shadow of the one before it. McCartney, I think, rather than an embarrassing uncle, is a sort of dad figure to pop culture, someone whose influence we can't help but acknowledge, someone we admire – love, even, without always wanting to admit it – but also someone to criticise; someone whose minor faults are exaggerated and whose abundant qualities are diminished or overlooked. Dads can be mortifying, and our relationships with them can be fraught. Paul McCartney, unlike Keith Richards or Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or, for that matter, John Lennon, grew up to be a respectable family man, happily married, nicely turned out with lovely manners and clean fingernails. He is not a rock renegade. He was never a drug addict, or a womaniser, or a trasher of hotel rooms. He's a great cultural ambassador for Britain – which is admirable, but not very rock'n'roll.
Whatever feelings you have about McCartney, conflicted, contradictory, or otherwise, before you file him away consider this. He wrote, among many others, the following songs: 'Hey Jude', 'Blackbird', 'Jet', 'Band on the Run', 'Good Day Sunshine', 'Yesterday', 'Penny Lane', 'And I Love Her', 'Helter Skelter', 'Hello Goodbye', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Maybe I'm Amazed', 'Live and Let Die', 'Let it Be'. And he kept it together well enough to be able to play them to millions of people around the world into his seventies.
How to fit it all into a magazine interview? What to ask the man who's been asked everything? And, worse luck, answered it all obligingly, and at considerable length.
by Alex Bilmas, Esquire | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Robert Caro and the Man/Monster Who Built New York
Walking uncertainly through the crowds on Oxford’s High Street is an elderly man in a blue jacket, light blue pullover and red and black tie. When he is yards away from me, I notice he is also wearing scholarly bifocals. “Robert,” I say.
“Broyan — oi wasn’t sure oi’d recognoise you.”
This is the first thing you need to know about Robert Caro: he has a New York accent so thick, you feel as if you’re in a Jimmy Cagney movie. The second thing you need to know is that he is one of the great reporters of our time — he smells of my trade: I am a sucker for that smell — and probably the greatest biographer.
He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done. Once we are seated, with coffee, I mention this page to him. Unexpectedly, he looks shocked and moved.
“You are the first person who has ever interviewed me who has picked out that page. You write something and you know it’s going to be in your mind for ever — and no one mentions it again for the rest of your life. I wrote that page over and over. I gotta tell you, Bryan, however your story comes out, you made my day. I’m going to tell Ina [his wife].”
When, as a young reporter, he started his book, he taught himself the craft of writing by reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Tolstoy’s War and Peace — one chapter of one, then one of the other. “I believe there’s something not understood enough about biography. If you want a work of history or biography to endure, the writing, the prose, the narrative, has to be at the same level as a work of fiction.”
Caro published The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in 1974. It was garlanded with awards, including a Pulitzer, and the reviews were sensational. It was said to be one of the greatest nonfiction works ever written. But it is only now being published in the UK. Why? Well, because nobody here had heard of Moses — mind you, not many people in America had heard of him before Caro came along.
It is being published now because of the recent success of Caro’s second biography. This is, so far, a four-volume life of Lyndon Johnson (he is working on the fifth, while acknowledging that, being 79, he may not finish it). Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read it, because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They’re nearly right: it’s the second greatest after The Power Broker.
His first book happened because, great reporter that he is, he asked the right question and saw a truth invisible to others. The question was: how do cities decide to build bridges, roads and so on? He got plenty of answers, particularly when he took a break from his job to do a course in urban planning at Harvard for a year, but he didn’t believe any of them.
“These two guys had written a textbook on highway and land planning, and they explained it by mathematical equations. I’m sitting there, taking assiduous notes, and all of a sudden it came to me — this is all bullshit. OK, I know why highways get built. They get built because Robert Moses wants them built. They’re writing this book about power and didn’t understand where power comes from, and neither did anybody else.”
For half a century, Moses was the most powerful man in New York, outwitting and outlasting political masters including Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor, and President Franklin D Roosevelt. He was also the greatest builder the world has ever known. He constructed state parks, vast highways, expressways and parkways, the colossal Triborough, Verrazano and countless other bridges, Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center, hundreds of playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools and baseball diamonds, the UN building, apartment complexes… In a nutshell, he built the New York you now know.
“Power reveals. One of the things people need to understand is that when a person is climbing to power, he has to conceal what he really is. But then maybe they recoil from what he is really like.”
Moses was arrogant beyond belief. Caro interviewed him several times (he died in 1981) until he asked a tricky question and was cut off. The man was a vicious racist and an intolerable snob. He built hundreds of playgrounds all over Manhattan, but only one in Harlem. He was convinced black people hated swimming in cold water, so a pool near Harlem was kept cold. And they stayed away, not because of the water, but because of the animosity of the guards. Ever wonder why those stone bridges over the parkways are so low? To keep buses containing black and poor people out. His “projects” — public housing complexes — were miserable buildings, designed to keep residents out of sight and out of mind.
“When you fly into JFK and look down, there’s this huge beach on the left, miles and miles long. It’s called the Rockaways, and there are rows and rows of 18-, 19-, 20-storey apartment houses, all for poor people, all low-income. When he got the power to build this stuff in Manhattan, he had to get rid of the people who lived there, so he hounded them out like cattle. He told everyone he was doing it humanely, but he just hounded them out with phoney eviction notices. He had embodied racism in concrete. He wanted to make people feel poor. He was very racist. This city is still divided by race and income because he believed in that.”
This was a man who started out as an idealist. Understanding how he became that monster and grabbed power — well, you’re going to read it, so that’s enough about Moses. What about Caro?
by Bryan Appleyard, Bryan Appleyard.com | Read more:
“Broyan — oi wasn’t sure oi’d recognoise you.”This is the first thing you need to know about Robert Caro: he has a New York accent so thick, you feel as if you’re in a Jimmy Cagney movie. The second thing you need to know is that he is one of the great reporters of our time — he smells of my trade: I am a sucker for that smell — and probably the greatest biographer.
He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done. Once we are seated, with coffee, I mention this page to him. Unexpectedly, he looks shocked and moved.
“You are the first person who has ever interviewed me who has picked out that page. You write something and you know it’s going to be in your mind for ever — and no one mentions it again for the rest of your life. I wrote that page over and over. I gotta tell you, Bryan, however your story comes out, you made my day. I’m going to tell Ina [his wife].”
When, as a young reporter, he started his book, he taught himself the craft of writing by reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Tolstoy’s War and Peace — one chapter of one, then one of the other. “I believe there’s something not understood enough about biography. If you want a work of history or biography to endure, the writing, the prose, the narrative, has to be at the same level as a work of fiction.”
Caro published The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in 1974. It was garlanded with awards, including a Pulitzer, and the reviews were sensational. It was said to be one of the greatest nonfiction works ever written. But it is only now being published in the UK. Why? Well, because nobody here had heard of Moses — mind you, not many people in America had heard of him before Caro came along.
It is being published now because of the recent success of Caro’s second biography. This is, so far, a four-volume life of Lyndon Johnson (he is working on the fifth, while acknowledging that, being 79, he may not finish it). Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read it, because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They’re nearly right: it’s the second greatest after The Power Broker.
His first book happened because, great reporter that he is, he asked the right question and saw a truth invisible to others. The question was: how do cities decide to build bridges, roads and so on? He got plenty of answers, particularly when he took a break from his job to do a course in urban planning at Harvard for a year, but he didn’t believe any of them.
“These two guys had written a textbook on highway and land planning, and they explained it by mathematical equations. I’m sitting there, taking assiduous notes, and all of a sudden it came to me — this is all bullshit. OK, I know why highways get built. They get built because Robert Moses wants them built. They’re writing this book about power and didn’t understand where power comes from, and neither did anybody else.”
For half a century, Moses was the most powerful man in New York, outwitting and outlasting political masters including Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor, and President Franklin D Roosevelt. He was also the greatest builder the world has ever known. He constructed state parks, vast highways, expressways and parkways, the colossal Triborough, Verrazano and countless other bridges, Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center, hundreds of playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools and baseball diamonds, the UN building, apartment complexes… In a nutshell, he built the New York you now know.
“Power reveals. One of the things people need to understand is that when a person is climbing to power, he has to conceal what he really is. But then maybe they recoil from what he is really like.”
Moses was arrogant beyond belief. Caro interviewed him several times (he died in 1981) until he asked a tricky question and was cut off. The man was a vicious racist and an intolerable snob. He built hundreds of playgrounds all over Manhattan, but only one in Harlem. He was convinced black people hated swimming in cold water, so a pool near Harlem was kept cold. And they stayed away, not because of the water, but because of the animosity of the guards. Ever wonder why those stone bridges over the parkways are so low? To keep buses containing black and poor people out. His “projects” — public housing complexes — were miserable buildings, designed to keep residents out of sight and out of mind.
“When you fly into JFK and look down, there’s this huge beach on the left, miles and miles long. It’s called the Rockaways, and there are rows and rows of 18-, 19-, 20-storey apartment houses, all for poor people, all low-income. When he got the power to build this stuff in Manhattan, he had to get rid of the people who lived there, so he hounded them out like cattle. He told everyone he was doing it humanely, but he just hounded them out with phoney eviction notices. He had embodied racism in concrete. He wanted to make people feel poor. He was very racist. This city is still divided by race and income because he believed in that.”
This was a man who started out as an idealist. Understanding how he became that monster and grabbed power — well, you’re going to read it, so that’s enough about Moses. What about Caro?
by Bryan Appleyard, Bryan Appleyard.com | Read more:
Image: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images North America via:
How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines
At a personal level, Falkowski’s work is also challenging. We are used to thinking of ourselves as composed of billions of cells, but Falkowski points out that we also consist of trillions of electrochemical machines that somehow coordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision. As we contemplate the evolution and maintenance of this complexity, wonder grows to near incredulity.
One of the most ancient of Falkowski’s biological machines is the ribosome, a combination of proteins and nucleic acids that causes protein synthesis. It is an entity so tiny that even with an electron microscope, it is hard to see it. As many as 400 million ribosomes could fit in a single period at the end of a sentence printed in The New York Review. Only with the advent of synchrotrons—machines that accelerate the movements of particles, and can be used to create very powerful X-rays—have its workings been revealed. Ribosomes use the instructions embedded in our genetic code to make complex proteins such as those found in our muscles and other organs. The manufacture of these proteins is not a straightforward process. The ribosomes have no direct contact with our DNA, so must act by reading messenger RNA, molecules that convey genetic information from the DNA. Ribosomes consist of two major complexes that work like a pair of gears: they move over the RNA, and attach amino acids to the emerging protein.
All ribosomes—whether in the most humble bacteria or in human bodies—operate at the same rate, adding just ten to twenty amino acids per second to the growing protein string. And so are our bodies built up by tiny mechanistic operations, one protein at a time, until that stupendous entity we call a human being is complete. All living things possess ribosomes, so these complex micromachines must have existed in the common ancestor of all life. Perhaps their development marks the spark of life itself. But just when they first evolved, and how they came into being, remain two of the great mysteries of science.
All machines require a source of energy to operate, and the energy to run not only ribosomes but all cellular functions comes from the same source—a universal “energy currency” molecule known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In animals and plants ATPis manufactured in special cellular structures known as mitochondria. The nanomachines that operate within the mitochondria are minute biological electrical motors that, in a striking parallel with their mechanical counterparts, possess rotors, stators, and rotating catalytic heads.
The ATP nanomachine is the means by which life uses electrical gradients, or the difference in ion concentration and electrical potential from one point to another, to create energy. The nanomachine is located in a membrane that separates a region of the cell with a high density of protons (hydrogen ions) from an area with a lower density. Just as in a battery, the protons pass from the area of high density into the area of lower density. But in order to do so in the cell, they must pass through the ATP nanomachine, and their flow through the minute electric motor turns its rotor counterclockwise. For every 360-degree turn the rotor makes, three molecules of ATP are created.
Living things use a great many primary energy sources to create ATP. The most primitive living entities are known as archaea. Though bacteria-like, they are a distinct group whose various members seem to have exploited almost every energy source available on the early Earth. Some, known as methanogens, cause carbon dioxide to react with hydrogen to create the electrochemical gradient required to make ATP, producing methane as a by-product. Others use ammonia, metal ions, or hydrogen gas to create the electrochemical gradient. Bacteria also use a variety of energy sources, but at some point a group of bacteria started to use sunlight to power photosynthesis. This process yielded vastly more energy than other sources, giving its possessors a huge evolutionary advantage. Falkowski has spent most of his career unraveling the deep mystery of photosynthesis and how it changed the world.
by Tim Flannery, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Martin Oeggerli/Micronaut
Monday, July 6, 2015
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