Sunday, May 15, 2016
The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop
The tube is out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel—like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube is a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum the air out. Ultimately, capsules will scream through the center of such a tube at 700 miles per hour on a cushion of air—a way to get from A to B faster and more efficiently than planes or trains. The first public tests of this concept, albeit on an open-air track, will take place in North Las Vegas this week (you can read about the results of that test here). They’re aiming to hit 400 miles per hour.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk introduced the world to the concept of a giant vacuum-tube transportation system, the Hyperloop, two and a half years ago. The basic idea is to build a partially evacuated tube, inside which capsules would float on a layer of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from electromagnets in the tube’s walls. Musk talked of trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes, with off ramps at each end loading and unloading pods with 28 seats every two minutes. Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven, something often overlooked. But Musk was too busy revolutionizing the space industry (as CEO of his company SpaceX), the automotive industry (as CEO of his other company, Tesla Motors), and the energy industry (as chairman of his other other company, SolarCity), to devote any time to the Hyperloop. He released a 58-page outline of his implausible idea and left it to someone else to finish it off.
In a former ice factory by the paved-over Los Angeles River, a startup company called Hyperloop Technologies is trying, using $100 million from optimistic venture capitalists. Musk’s improbable and incomplete design and his unlikely plan to get it built are suddenly looking less unbelievable—maybe even conceivable. Maybe. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists,” Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop Tech, tells me before we step into the backyard to look at the various elements of the Hyperloop that do exist. There's the tube, the robots, a length of track, and various pieces of the electromagnetic propulsion system. A couple of hundred miles away, 2,000 feet of track in the Nevada desert is being readied for a public test of the track and electromagnetic propulsion system. (...)
“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to,” Lloyd continues. The Hyperloop does not exist until it exists, and politicians won’t believe in it either until it exists, he says. Lloyd went state to state looking for somewhere with a loose enough regulatory system that a test site could be built more or less immediately. Although many states boasted the necessary “regions of great flatness and straightness,” as Lloyd puts it, all clammed up at the thought of a big, heavy, fast test track. All except reliably business-friendly and regulation-free Nevada. “People we got here hate waiting to do things,” Giegel says. So North Las Vegas was it. Lloyd says he is closing in on a deal overseas for a larger test site that could turn into a full-scale production system. As well as much more track, it would have the capacity to try out hauling, loading, and unloading shipping containers, and integrating with existing transportation facilities, such as docks.
Indeed, although Musk emphasized transporting people, Hyperloop Tech’s vision is broader. Lloyd tells me to think of it as a network of tubes, exchange points, and off-ramps that can transport all kinds of things. It sounds a lot like the Internet, and not by accident. Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech after retiring as president of networking equipment company Cisco, where he spent decades building Internet infrastructure through deals brokered with governments and businesses worldwide. He was convinced to join Hyperloop Tech by the company’s cofounder and chairman, investor Shervin Pishevar, most famous for making a large bet on Uber.
“Transportation is the new broadband,” says Pishevar. He sees Uber and Hyperloop as complementary. “You are taking atoms and bits and, for the first time in history, smashing them together,” he says. “I can take my phone out and move a car in Beijing if I wanted to. Hyperloop will do the same, but between cities.”
Entrepreneur Elon Musk introduced the world to the concept of a giant vacuum-tube transportation system, the Hyperloop, two and a half years ago. The basic idea is to build a partially evacuated tube, inside which capsules would float on a layer of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from electromagnets in the tube’s walls. Musk talked of trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes, with off ramps at each end loading and unloading pods with 28 seats every two minutes. Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven, something often overlooked. But Musk was too busy revolutionizing the space industry (as CEO of his company SpaceX), the automotive industry (as CEO of his other company, Tesla Motors), and the energy industry (as chairman of his other other company, SolarCity), to devote any time to the Hyperloop. He released a 58-page outline of his implausible idea and left it to someone else to finish it off.In a former ice factory by the paved-over Los Angeles River, a startup company called Hyperloop Technologies is trying, using $100 million from optimistic venture capitalists. Musk’s improbable and incomplete design and his unlikely plan to get it built are suddenly looking less unbelievable—maybe even conceivable. Maybe. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists,” Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop Tech, tells me before we step into the backyard to look at the various elements of the Hyperloop that do exist. There's the tube, the robots, a length of track, and various pieces of the electromagnetic propulsion system. A couple of hundred miles away, 2,000 feet of track in the Nevada desert is being readied for a public test of the track and electromagnetic propulsion system. (...)
“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to,” Lloyd continues. The Hyperloop does not exist until it exists, and politicians won’t believe in it either until it exists, he says. Lloyd went state to state looking for somewhere with a loose enough regulatory system that a test site could be built more or less immediately. Although many states boasted the necessary “regions of great flatness and straightness,” as Lloyd puts it, all clammed up at the thought of a big, heavy, fast test track. All except reliably business-friendly and regulation-free Nevada. “People we got here hate waiting to do things,” Giegel says. So North Las Vegas was it. Lloyd says he is closing in on a deal overseas for a larger test site that could turn into a full-scale production system. As well as much more track, it would have the capacity to try out hauling, loading, and unloading shipping containers, and integrating with existing transportation facilities, such as docks.
Indeed, although Musk emphasized transporting people, Hyperloop Tech’s vision is broader. Lloyd tells me to think of it as a network of tubes, exchange points, and off-ramps that can transport all kinds of things. It sounds a lot like the Internet, and not by accident. Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech after retiring as president of networking equipment company Cisco, where he spent decades building Internet infrastructure through deals brokered with governments and businesses worldwide. He was convinced to join Hyperloop Tech by the company’s cofounder and chairman, investor Shervin Pishevar, most famous for making a large bet on Uber.
“Transportation is the new broadband,” says Pishevar. He sees Uber and Hyperloop as complementary. “You are taking atoms and bits and, for the first time in history, smashing them together,” he says. “I can take my phone out and move a car in Beijing if I wanted to. Hyperloop will do the same, but between cities.”
by Ryan Bradley, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: Hyperloop Technologies
The Partnership Between Colleges and Helicopter Parents
A few days after dropping off her youngest child at college, Andrea got a phone call. The wounds in her daughter’s mouth from a recent wisdom-tooth surgery had gone septic. Andrea drove there immediately, located an oral surgeon in town, booked a room at the university hotel, and put her daughter to bed to recover. The next morning, Andrea went to her daughter’s classes, taking notes on her behalf. It was important to Andrea, a professor, and her husband, an MBA, that their daughter head into the first semester of college without missing a beat: A future dental career required four years of a stellar undergraduate academic record.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter’s new university specifically for its Greek life, big-time sports, and array of not particularly challenging majors. She and her husband, a CFO of a major Fortune 500 company, were intent on giving their daughter the ideal social experience in college. But when she got there, she seemed not to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who “didn’t ever want to go out [and] meet people”—and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates. Alexis also shipped bags of designer clothes to help her child fit in with affluent sorority members.
Both Andrea and Alexis are examples of “helicopter parents,” defined by their hovering and readiness with supplies, assistance, and guidance. Their interventions were costly—requiring time, financial reserves, social savvy, comfort with authority figures, and knowledge of higher education—though they had different purposes. While Andrea was a focused on her daughter’s human capital—the skills, credentials, and knowledge that often lead to career success and economic security—Alexis was invested in her daughter’s social and extracurricular activities, consumption, and sorority status. Her husband explicitly told their daughter to “marry rich” in the years after college.
I had the chance to observe these parents—and many others—from 2004 to 2009, when I followed 41 families as their children moved through a public flagship university. (As is typical practice in sociology research, the name of the university will remain anonymous—but it is representative of a typical experience for many public-university students across the U.S.) Parents of college students are rarely studied. However, many U.S. universities, particularly those lacking the deep pockets and extensive resources of elite privates, have come to rely on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions.
My focus on parents of daughters was not incidental, as today the majority of college students are women; they enroll in and complete college at higher rates than men. The university these women attended has increasingly catered to out-of-state families who are willing to pay full tuition and board in exchange for a degree from a “name” school. And while the number of families I studied is small, I made up for it with depth of knowledge: All the students started college in same residence hall, where I observed them during their first year, after which I interviewed them every year for five years. As the women approached graduation, I also interviewed both their mothers and fathers.
Most—but not all—of the parents in my sample fell neatly into several categories. About two-fifths were “helicopter” parents like Andrea and Alexis, regarded in the media as among the most reviled figures of 21st-century parenting—pesky interlopers who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of “coddled,” “entitled,” and “under-constructed” youth.
Yet intensive parenting is, in many ways, a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood. Increasing income inequality, high rates of young-adult unemployment, and a decline in stable and well-paying entry-level jobs loom threateningly in the foreground. Declines in state and federal support for higher education, coupled with rising administrative costs in a complex regulatory environment, have led to skyrocketing tuition. Additionally, the sheer diversity of academic and social options, particularly at large public universities, makes it easy for college students to make costly mistakes. Involved parents provide insurance against risk.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter’s new university specifically for its Greek life, big-time sports, and array of not particularly challenging majors. She and her husband, a CFO of a major Fortune 500 company, were intent on giving their daughter the ideal social experience in college. But when she got there, she seemed not to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who “didn’t ever want to go out [and] meet people”—and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates. Alexis also shipped bags of designer clothes to help her child fit in with affluent sorority members.Both Andrea and Alexis are examples of “helicopter parents,” defined by their hovering and readiness with supplies, assistance, and guidance. Their interventions were costly—requiring time, financial reserves, social savvy, comfort with authority figures, and knowledge of higher education—though they had different purposes. While Andrea was a focused on her daughter’s human capital—the skills, credentials, and knowledge that often lead to career success and economic security—Alexis was invested in her daughter’s social and extracurricular activities, consumption, and sorority status. Her husband explicitly told their daughter to “marry rich” in the years after college.
I had the chance to observe these parents—and many others—from 2004 to 2009, when I followed 41 families as their children moved through a public flagship university. (As is typical practice in sociology research, the name of the university will remain anonymous—but it is representative of a typical experience for many public-university students across the U.S.) Parents of college students are rarely studied. However, many U.S. universities, particularly those lacking the deep pockets and extensive resources of elite privates, have come to rely on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions.
My focus on parents of daughters was not incidental, as today the majority of college students are women; they enroll in and complete college at higher rates than men. The university these women attended has increasingly catered to out-of-state families who are willing to pay full tuition and board in exchange for a degree from a “name” school. And while the number of families I studied is small, I made up for it with depth of knowledge: All the students started college in same residence hall, where I observed them during their first year, after which I interviewed them every year for five years. As the women approached graduation, I also interviewed both their mothers and fathers.
Most—but not all—of the parents in my sample fell neatly into several categories. About two-fifths were “helicopter” parents like Andrea and Alexis, regarded in the media as among the most reviled figures of 21st-century parenting—pesky interlopers who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of “coddled,” “entitled,” and “under-constructed” youth.
Yet intensive parenting is, in many ways, a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood. Increasing income inequality, high rates of young-adult unemployment, and a decline in stable and well-paying entry-level jobs loom threateningly in the foreground. Declines in state and federal support for higher education, coupled with rising administrative costs in a complex regulatory environment, have led to skyrocketing tuition. Additionally, the sheer diversity of academic and social options, particularly at large public universities, makes it easy for college students to make costly mistakes. Involved parents provide insurance against risk.
by Laura Hamilton, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Chor Sokunthea / Reuters
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Obama’s Gorgeous Goodbye
In this twilight of his presidency, Barack Obama is unlikely to deliver much in the way of meaningful legislation.
But he’s giving us a pointed, powerful civics lesson.
Consider his speech to new graduates of Howard University last weekend. While it brimmed with the usual kudos for hard work, it also bristled with caveats about the mistakes that he sees some young people making.
He chided them for demonizing enemies and silencing opponents. He cautioned them against a sense of grievance too exaggerated and an outrage bereft of perspective. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” he said. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice.”
He was by no means telling them to be satisfied, and he wasn’t talking only or even chiefly to them. He was talking to all of us — to America — and saying: enough. Enough with a kind of identity politics that can shove aside common purpose. Enough with a partisanship so caustic that it bleeds into hatred.
Enough with such deafening sound and blinding fury in our public debate. They make for entertainment, not enlightenment, and stand in the way of progress.
His remarks at Howard were an extension of those in his final State of the Union address in January and of those to the Illinois General Assembly in February, nine years to the day after he announced his history-making bid for the presidency. The Illinois speech, wise and gorgeous, received less attention than it deserved.
“We’ve got to build a better politics — one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas,” he said then. Otherwise, he warned, “Extreme voices fill the void.” This current presidential campaign has borne him out.
Obama detractors and skeptics probably hear in all of this a professorial haughtiness that has plagued him and alienated them before. And there’s legitimate disagreement about the degree to which he has been an agent as well as a casualty of the poisoned environment he rues. His administration’s actions haven’t always been as high-minded as his words.
But we should all listen to him nonetheless, for several reasons.
But he’s giving us a pointed, powerful civics lesson.
Consider his speech to new graduates of Howard University last weekend. While it brimmed with the usual kudos for hard work, it also bristled with caveats about the mistakes that he sees some young people making.
He chided them for demonizing enemies and silencing opponents. He cautioned them against a sense of grievance too exaggerated and an outrage bereft of perspective. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” he said. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice.”He was by no means telling them to be satisfied, and he wasn’t talking only or even chiefly to them. He was talking to all of us — to America — and saying: enough. Enough with a kind of identity politics that can shove aside common purpose. Enough with a partisanship so caustic that it bleeds into hatred.
Enough with such deafening sound and blinding fury in our public debate. They make for entertainment, not enlightenment, and stand in the way of progress.
His remarks at Howard were an extension of those in his final State of the Union address in January and of those to the Illinois General Assembly in February, nine years to the day after he announced his history-making bid for the presidency. The Illinois speech, wise and gorgeous, received less attention than it deserved.
“We’ve got to build a better politics — one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas,” he said then. Otherwise, he warned, “Extreme voices fill the void.” This current presidential campaign has borne him out.
Obama detractors and skeptics probably hear in all of this a professorial haughtiness that has plagued him and alienated them before. And there’s legitimate disagreement about the degree to which he has been an agent as well as a casualty of the poisoned environment he rues. His administration’s actions haven’t always been as high-minded as his words.
But we should all listen to him nonetheless, for several reasons.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CBS News
My Secret Life as a High-Functioning Drug User
It’s Saturday night and I’m having dinner at a friend’s house. After dinner has been cleared, someone produces a small bag of cocaine and begins to cut it into lines at the table. I take a gram of cocaine and another of MDMA. I smoke some weed and drink three to four glasses of good red wine.
We dance. The 15 of us who have gathered – old friends, some of whom I’ve known since school – push aside the coffee table and twirl around the living room, holding hands, laughing and marvelling at how lucky we are to have these exact friends and to be exactly here, in this moment. “You lot are the best,” we say over and over.
I feel as though I’ve never been so happy, so lucky, so brilliant. I am the very best version of myself. I have a deep sense of compassion for every person in the room. I can reveal any part of myself, say anything, no matter how personal or banal.
At around 4am, high as kites and exhausted from dancing, we all sit down and play charades. “Film!” “Two words!” “Jumanji?” It’s not exactly Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
At some point, I think around 9am, we call the dealer again. The prospect of the comedown, an achy, twitching sadness where you can’t stop thinking about a bad thing you said three-and-a‑half years ago, seems too awful to bear. Because he won’t come for anything less, we order another 2g of coke and another 2g of MDMA (total cost £180). At 2pm on Sunday, almost out of white powder and with the working week looming large on the horizon, we go home to nurse our heads. On Monday, we each crawl into work clutching triple-shot americanos and pretending to our colleagues that we’ve had quiet weekends.
Take that model, and repeat – sometimes as much as every weekend for a few months, sometimes as little as once a month – and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of how I’ve spent my 20s. I’m now 28 and a writer on a national magazine. I grew up on the outskirts of a city in the north of England, but I’ve lived in London since 2011. I enjoy reading and going to the gym. I take drugs most weekends, but I wouldn’t call myself an addict, any more than someone who spends their weekend drinking gin and tonics and doing shots would call themselves an alcoholic.
But then, I do wonder. My own father died when I was 19 because of complications that arose from his chronic alcoholism. In the bad times, he would drink a bottle of vodka a day. He would steal and lie and get unspeakably angry. Other times, he would be lovely and affable and completely sober. I can’t help but wonder when the habit became an addiction for him. I’ve never allowed myself to linger too much on his memory, because in the end he wasn’t a nice man; but every so often, going past a mirror, I catch a glimpse and pause. I can see him in myself and think that maybe it’s time to stop, or slow down.
Perhaps I’m hiding behind excuses; in denial, on the steady downward spiral of someone not ready to admit they’ve got a problem. Of course I don’t think that’s the case – if it were, then almost every friend I have who is living in a major city in the UK has a serious problem.
Are we – me, my nearest and dearest – actually the happy, dancing-in-the-living-room, social users we see ourselves as? Or have we begun to push through that flimsy membrane?
One conversation from last week’s party has stuck with me. Bella, 29, is a financial consultant. We’ve known each other since meeting in halls at university. I was bemoaning the fact that we’d been too busy to go to an exhibition and now it was finished. “Well,” she laughed, “we’re not that busy. We just fill our time doing this.” She gestured to the line of coke I was fashioning with the edge of my gym membership card. “There’s no time for exhibitions when this is your hobby.”
I would truly hate to tot up all the midnight cash withdrawals I’ve made throughout my 20s, the time spent making shady deals late at night in the backs of cars with men you don’t really want to bump into after dark. In a heavy month, my drug spend can be around £400. That’s a quarter of my income. “But it’s great,” Bella continued. “Can you imagine me mountaineering or something? I’d rather be here, with you guys, having a good time.”
Bravado is easy when you’re high: you’re on top of the world, so of course it’s worth it. But what about after, on a Wednesday night, when work worries are made all the more worrisome by an unshakable anxiety, a feeling that lurks at the edges of your consciousness for a few days after a heavy session. “Did I actually say it was that great?” she laughs a few days later. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s not something I’m overly proud of.”
Like me, Bella has gone through periods of less and more regular usage. I’ve never been able to ascribe a certain mental state to either – usually, I take more drugs when there are birthdays or other reasons to celebrate – but for Bella, who in the past has dealt with social anxiety through a combination of CBT and medication, it’s more obvious. “Whenever I’m most anxious, I tend to have heavier weekends, drugs-wise,” she says. “I don’t do it consciously, but looking back I can see the pattern. The fact is, taking some coke, or whatever else, makes me feel better, even if that’s short-lived. It’s fun. I feel my stresses fall away for a night. And it’s brought me much closer to all of my friends – closer than I thought I could be because of my anxiety. I’ve always found it hard to open up because I worry about what people will think of me. In the past, that might have made me seem standoffish, but spending time in these situations has been really liberating.”
But the relief can be short-term. “My comedowns are worse than most people’s, from what I can tell. I get a thought stuck in my head, usually something I’ve forgotten to do that’ll get me into trouble at work, and it’s really hard to get past it.”
After a few days, though, those feelings abate. “Friday rolls around and I’m ready to go again. It’s a running joke. Monday to Wednesday you tell yourself you won’t do it this weekend, Thursday you feel OK, Friday you’re back on form.”
Alcohol, she agrees, is the gateway drug, and two drinks – where you feel just tipsy enough to be reckless – the golden quantity. “After two drinks, I want to cut loose,” Bella explains. “In the way that others might crave a glass of wine to unwind, I want a line. Not every weekend, but usually when work has been stressful. It’s a guaranteed good time.”
Bella uses the same dealer every time. Like me, she met hers through friends. We each have a few numbers of reliable guys (it’s always men) whose product is of an OK quality. Bella’s dealer has branded loyalty cards, much like the ones you get at coffee shops. For every pick-up, she gets a stamp. She texts the amount, he drives to meet her wherever she is, and five stamps equal a free gram of cocaine; it’s an audacious but effective method of marketing. “When I’m out with a certain set of friends at the weekend, it feels almost inevitable that we’ll do it. Before I know it, one of us is popping outside to meet the dealer and the next few hours are brilliant.”
I wouldn’t call this an addiction – I’ve seen drug addiction. I grew up on an estate, and while I’d be loth to paint too predictable a picture of it (I had a nice childhood and have friends who still live there), drugs were everywhere. My mum still lives in the semi-detached I grew up in, and just last year her neighbour’s house was raided by police. The people living there were dealing heroin (“He always helped me bring in my shopping, though,” Mum said when I told her I was worried). And it was easy to spot the hollow-eyed, desperate-looking types who would hang around waiting for the dealer to let them in. I can’t relate to that kind of physical need. But then, my friends and I never thought we’d still be doing this within touching distance of 30. And instead of becoming firmer, our self-control has just become more slippery. The older we’ve got, the less we’re inclined to curb our appetites.
We dance. The 15 of us who have gathered – old friends, some of whom I’ve known since school – push aside the coffee table and twirl around the living room, holding hands, laughing and marvelling at how lucky we are to have these exact friends and to be exactly here, in this moment. “You lot are the best,” we say over and over.
I feel as though I’ve never been so happy, so lucky, so brilliant. I am the very best version of myself. I have a deep sense of compassion for every person in the room. I can reveal any part of myself, say anything, no matter how personal or banal.At around 4am, high as kites and exhausted from dancing, we all sit down and play charades. “Film!” “Two words!” “Jumanji?” It’s not exactly Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
At some point, I think around 9am, we call the dealer again. The prospect of the comedown, an achy, twitching sadness where you can’t stop thinking about a bad thing you said three-and-a‑half years ago, seems too awful to bear. Because he won’t come for anything less, we order another 2g of coke and another 2g of MDMA (total cost £180). At 2pm on Sunday, almost out of white powder and with the working week looming large on the horizon, we go home to nurse our heads. On Monday, we each crawl into work clutching triple-shot americanos and pretending to our colleagues that we’ve had quiet weekends.
Take that model, and repeat – sometimes as much as every weekend for a few months, sometimes as little as once a month – and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of how I’ve spent my 20s. I’m now 28 and a writer on a national magazine. I grew up on the outskirts of a city in the north of England, but I’ve lived in London since 2011. I enjoy reading and going to the gym. I take drugs most weekends, but I wouldn’t call myself an addict, any more than someone who spends their weekend drinking gin and tonics and doing shots would call themselves an alcoholic.
But then, I do wonder. My own father died when I was 19 because of complications that arose from his chronic alcoholism. In the bad times, he would drink a bottle of vodka a day. He would steal and lie and get unspeakably angry. Other times, he would be lovely and affable and completely sober. I can’t help but wonder when the habit became an addiction for him. I’ve never allowed myself to linger too much on his memory, because in the end he wasn’t a nice man; but every so often, going past a mirror, I catch a glimpse and pause. I can see him in myself and think that maybe it’s time to stop, or slow down.
Perhaps I’m hiding behind excuses; in denial, on the steady downward spiral of someone not ready to admit they’ve got a problem. Of course I don’t think that’s the case – if it were, then almost every friend I have who is living in a major city in the UK has a serious problem.
Are we – me, my nearest and dearest – actually the happy, dancing-in-the-living-room, social users we see ourselves as? Or have we begun to push through that flimsy membrane?
One conversation from last week’s party has stuck with me. Bella, 29, is a financial consultant. We’ve known each other since meeting in halls at university. I was bemoaning the fact that we’d been too busy to go to an exhibition and now it was finished. “Well,” she laughed, “we’re not that busy. We just fill our time doing this.” She gestured to the line of coke I was fashioning with the edge of my gym membership card. “There’s no time for exhibitions when this is your hobby.”
I would truly hate to tot up all the midnight cash withdrawals I’ve made throughout my 20s, the time spent making shady deals late at night in the backs of cars with men you don’t really want to bump into after dark. In a heavy month, my drug spend can be around £400. That’s a quarter of my income. “But it’s great,” Bella continued. “Can you imagine me mountaineering or something? I’d rather be here, with you guys, having a good time.”
Bravado is easy when you’re high: you’re on top of the world, so of course it’s worth it. But what about after, on a Wednesday night, when work worries are made all the more worrisome by an unshakable anxiety, a feeling that lurks at the edges of your consciousness for a few days after a heavy session. “Did I actually say it was that great?” she laughs a few days later. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s not something I’m overly proud of.”
Like me, Bella has gone through periods of less and more regular usage. I’ve never been able to ascribe a certain mental state to either – usually, I take more drugs when there are birthdays or other reasons to celebrate – but for Bella, who in the past has dealt with social anxiety through a combination of CBT and medication, it’s more obvious. “Whenever I’m most anxious, I tend to have heavier weekends, drugs-wise,” she says. “I don’t do it consciously, but looking back I can see the pattern. The fact is, taking some coke, or whatever else, makes me feel better, even if that’s short-lived. It’s fun. I feel my stresses fall away for a night. And it’s brought me much closer to all of my friends – closer than I thought I could be because of my anxiety. I’ve always found it hard to open up because I worry about what people will think of me. In the past, that might have made me seem standoffish, but spending time in these situations has been really liberating.”
But the relief can be short-term. “My comedowns are worse than most people’s, from what I can tell. I get a thought stuck in my head, usually something I’ve forgotten to do that’ll get me into trouble at work, and it’s really hard to get past it.”
After a few days, though, those feelings abate. “Friday rolls around and I’m ready to go again. It’s a running joke. Monday to Wednesday you tell yourself you won’t do it this weekend, Thursday you feel OK, Friday you’re back on form.”
Alcohol, she agrees, is the gateway drug, and two drinks – where you feel just tipsy enough to be reckless – the golden quantity. “After two drinks, I want to cut loose,” Bella explains. “In the way that others might crave a glass of wine to unwind, I want a line. Not every weekend, but usually when work has been stressful. It’s a guaranteed good time.”
Bella uses the same dealer every time. Like me, she met hers through friends. We each have a few numbers of reliable guys (it’s always men) whose product is of an OK quality. Bella’s dealer has branded loyalty cards, much like the ones you get at coffee shops. For every pick-up, she gets a stamp. She texts the amount, he drives to meet her wherever she is, and five stamps equal a free gram of cocaine; it’s an audacious but effective method of marketing. “When I’m out with a certain set of friends at the weekend, it feels almost inevitable that we’ll do it. Before I know it, one of us is popping outside to meet the dealer and the next few hours are brilliant.”
I wouldn’t call this an addiction – I’ve seen drug addiction. I grew up on an estate, and while I’d be loth to paint too predictable a picture of it (I had a nice childhood and have friends who still live there), drugs were everywhere. My mum still lives in the semi-detached I grew up in, and just last year her neighbour’s house was raided by police. The people living there were dealing heroin (“He always helped me bring in my shopping, though,” Mum said when I told her I was worried). And it was easy to spot the hollow-eyed, desperate-looking types who would hang around waiting for the dealer to let them in. I can’t relate to that kind of physical need. But then, my friends and I never thought we’d still be doing this within touching distance of 30. And instead of becoming firmer, our self-control has just become more slippery. The older we’ve got, the less we’re inclined to curb our appetites.
by Anonymous, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Corey Bartle-Sanderson
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Baked Possum
Before entering the realm of food preparation, I’d like to make absolutely clear how much I love possums. They live the way I feel most of the time—a nomadic living fossil, a loner unable to tolerate company except during mating season. Fortunately for them that occurs every six months. Possum, opossum, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways!
You have opposable thumbs!
You are the only marsupial in the entire Western hemisphere!
You will eat darn near anything!
You have a prehensile tail!
You act in movies when the script calls for a rat!
You have over fifty teeth!
You are immune to rattlesnake venom and rabies!
Possums are the oldest surviving mammals in North America, having successfully defended themselves in the most absurd way possible. When scared, they bare their teeth in a hiss, self-induce a temporary comatose state, and emit a stench that smells like rotting meat. This response to attack has kept the species alive and unchanged for 75 million years.
The following recipe for Baked Possum is from More Than Moonshine, by Sidney Saylor Farr, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1983. The book is divided into nineteen sections with an extensive index. When her mother fell ill, Miss Sidney dropped out of school in seventh grade to take care of her nine younger siblings. She married at age fifteen and attained her high school degree through correspondence courses. She eventually wrote several books, worked as a librarian at Berea College, and edited Appalachian Heritage for fourteen years.
The primary ingredient for this recipe is of course American Opossum, which most folks know as roadkill. Possums are not available in stores or at organic farms. You can harvest a possum with a dog and a shotgun, but you run into the problem of breaking your tooth on a pellet lodged in the meat. Possums are inherently “free-range,” which means they are the ultimate scavengers, willing to eat all manner of garbage. Ideally you will trap a possum and keep it alive for a week, feeding it a steady diet of roughage to clean out its system. They’re not easy to trap. They like trees, and have the habit of changing dens every few days to foil predators. Experienced possum seekers carry a small mirror to hold beneath the animal’s nose to check for life. If the glass fogs, your possum is playing possum.
Before we begin preparing the possum for baking, I’d like to relate two highly personal stories about possums. One is quite sentimental and the second has a squeamish element, so I will lead with the sweet and kind.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: “Possum” (2009) by Allison Schulnik.
You have opposable thumbs!You are the only marsupial in the entire Western hemisphere!
You will eat darn near anything!
You have a prehensile tail!
You act in movies when the script calls for a rat!
You have over fifty teeth!
You are immune to rattlesnake venom and rabies!
Possums are the oldest surviving mammals in North America, having successfully defended themselves in the most absurd way possible. When scared, they bare their teeth in a hiss, self-induce a temporary comatose state, and emit a stench that smells like rotting meat. This response to attack has kept the species alive and unchanged for 75 million years.
The following recipe for Baked Possum is from More Than Moonshine, by Sidney Saylor Farr, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1983. The book is divided into nineteen sections with an extensive index. When her mother fell ill, Miss Sidney dropped out of school in seventh grade to take care of her nine younger siblings. She married at age fifteen and attained her high school degree through correspondence courses. She eventually wrote several books, worked as a librarian at Berea College, and edited Appalachian Heritage for fourteen years.
The primary ingredient for this recipe is of course American Opossum, which most folks know as roadkill. Possums are not available in stores or at organic farms. You can harvest a possum with a dog and a shotgun, but you run into the problem of breaking your tooth on a pellet lodged in the meat. Possums are inherently “free-range,” which means they are the ultimate scavengers, willing to eat all manner of garbage. Ideally you will trap a possum and keep it alive for a week, feeding it a steady diet of roughage to clean out its system. They’re not easy to trap. They like trees, and have the habit of changing dens every few days to foil predators. Experienced possum seekers carry a small mirror to hold beneath the animal’s nose to check for life. If the glass fogs, your possum is playing possum.
Before we begin preparing the possum for baking, I’d like to relate two highly personal stories about possums. One is quite sentimental and the second has a squeamish element, so I will lead with the sweet and kind.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: “Possum” (2009) by Allison Schulnik.
The World’s Smallest Ukelele
It’s playing for the mere millionaires being humiliated by billionaires in paradise.
Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, a surging mass of magma beneath the Pacific Ocean burst through the earth’s crust and began burping out a stream of lava, first underwater, then above, to form land. As the tectonic plate shifted, the eruption created a string of four islands—all of which are pretty nice, but the largest, known today as Hawaii’s Big Island, is as close to paradise as any human might deserve. On the beaches, the temperature hardly ever roams above the mid-80s F or below 70. It’s the tropics, yet it’s seldom muggy. And rain, when it comes, is like an afterthought—the gentlest of reminders of how achingly wonderful the island is the rest of the time.
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.
Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.
As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Don Riddle/Courtesy The Four Seasons
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
The Meaningful Disappearance of Germaine Greer
One great thing about the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was its ability to make a scene. Take the unforgettable “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” a panel that took place in New York City in 1971 in which four female delegates were tapped to speak in a discussion moderated by Norman Mailer, who had just published the decidedly un-feminist The Prisoner of Sex. Billed as a dialogue, the result—documented in filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall—more closely resembled a riot. The teeming crowd became unruly even before the event had started, with one heckler yelling out above the din, “Women’s lib betrays the poor! Norman Mailer betrays the poor!” The audience, which included Betty Friedan and a soft-spoken Susan Sontag, came to hear about the burgeoning revolution. They came to see Mailer publicly attack, and be attacked by, the women’s libbers about the politics of sex. But most of all, they came to see Germaine Greer.
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)
The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
The Science of Tattoo Removal Cream Just Left the World of Wishful Thinking
Tattoos are supposed to be permanent — that’s kind of their whole thing. But maybe not for long. A Canadian Ph.D. student has invented a topical cream that he says can cheaply and easily remove unwanted tattoos. He’s just sold the idea to a pharmaceutical company that specializes in dermatology for an unnamed amount (but enough to make a Ph.D. student giddy). Alec Falkenham says his product can remove tattoos cheaply, quickly, and painlessly. If he’s right, his innovation will destroy the laser tattoo removal market and overhaul our cultural relationship to inked skin.
There are many (unregulated) tattoo removal creams on the market today, and they’re basically all crap. They target the top layer of skin with abrasion and chemicals, which is mostly useless because your tattoo ink sits within the deeper layers of skin. If they manage to fade the tattoo at all, it’s likely because of the increased immune response in the area as your body fights the damage being done to your outer layer of skin. Ouch.
To understand why tattoos are so difficult to remove, you need to understand how they get there in the first place. Needles filled with ink pierce your skin many thousands of times, injecting the pigment into your skin. Your body instantly reacts to this assault, and sends out its repair agents to heal your wound. Ironically, it’s actually this immune response that allows the tattoo to become permanent.
Special white blood cells, called macrophages, come into the area to clean up the debris. After gobbling up the pigment, some of these cells make it back to your lymph nodes, where the junk is processed and expelled. But some of these cells get stuck, still full of ink, in the gel-like matrix under the top layer of skin. Because the pigment has been consumed by your cells, your body no longer considers it a foreign object and stops fighting to get rid of it. So it just hangs out there, visibly flooding your inner skin with color.
The best technology humans have previously come up with to disrupt the permanence of the tattoo is the laser. Lasers work by targeting pigments at a specific frequency, which blasts them into smaller pieces, making it easier for your immune system to digest them naturally. Laser tattoo removal has gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still pretty hard to do. Different colors of pigment have to be targeted separately, and some are harder to remove than others. A single session of laser removal can cost $100 or more, and it usually takes several sessions, sometimes 10 or more, over many months to get rid of the tattoo completely. Even then, some scarring or discoloration will often remain.
Falkenham’s product is different. It’s a chemical compound that he had been studying in his research on healing heart tissue, until he wondered what it might do to a tattoo. The active ingredient, called bisphosphonate liposomal, penetrates the skin and selectively targets macrophages, leaving other cells in the area unharmed. When these cells die, other macrophages come in to clean up the debris and replace the dead cells, ultimately removing the tattoo ink. The product has only been tested on pigs and mice so far, but Falkenham told CBC News that he’s seen complete tattoo removal in a week. He told Buzzfeed that he expects treatment of a three-inch-square area to cost about $4.50.
by Jacqueline Ronson, Inverse | Read more:
There are many (unregulated) tattoo removal creams on the market today, and they’re basically all crap. They target the top layer of skin with abrasion and chemicals, which is mostly useless because your tattoo ink sits within the deeper layers of skin. If they manage to fade the tattoo at all, it’s likely because of the increased immune response in the area as your body fights the damage being done to your outer layer of skin. Ouch.To understand why tattoos are so difficult to remove, you need to understand how they get there in the first place. Needles filled with ink pierce your skin many thousands of times, injecting the pigment into your skin. Your body instantly reacts to this assault, and sends out its repair agents to heal your wound. Ironically, it’s actually this immune response that allows the tattoo to become permanent.
Special white blood cells, called macrophages, come into the area to clean up the debris. After gobbling up the pigment, some of these cells make it back to your lymph nodes, where the junk is processed and expelled. But some of these cells get stuck, still full of ink, in the gel-like matrix under the top layer of skin. Because the pigment has been consumed by your cells, your body no longer considers it a foreign object and stops fighting to get rid of it. So it just hangs out there, visibly flooding your inner skin with color.
The best technology humans have previously come up with to disrupt the permanence of the tattoo is the laser. Lasers work by targeting pigments at a specific frequency, which blasts them into smaller pieces, making it easier for your immune system to digest them naturally. Laser tattoo removal has gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still pretty hard to do. Different colors of pigment have to be targeted separately, and some are harder to remove than others. A single session of laser removal can cost $100 or more, and it usually takes several sessions, sometimes 10 or more, over many months to get rid of the tattoo completely. Even then, some scarring or discoloration will often remain.
Falkenham’s product is different. It’s a chemical compound that he had been studying in his research on healing heart tissue, until he wondered what it might do to a tattoo. The active ingredient, called bisphosphonate liposomal, penetrates the skin and selectively targets macrophages, leaving other cells in the area unharmed. When these cells die, other macrophages come in to clean up the debris and replace the dead cells, ultimately removing the tattoo ink. The product has only been tested on pigs and mice so far, but Falkenham told CBC News that he’s seen complete tattoo removal in a week. He told Buzzfeed that he expects treatment of a three-inch-square area to cost about $4.50.
by Jacqueline Ronson, Inverse | Read more:
Image: via:
Typing in the Sky
Making the connection is the difficult part—a long, vertical line of smoke and then twisting off into a new direction and across the atmosphere.
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.
“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Skytypers Inc.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Book Review: The Art of the Deal
Many of my friends recommend Robert Cialdini’s Influence, a book about how to be persuasive and successful. I read a most of the way through, and it was okay, but I didn’t have it in me to finish the whole thing. It’s not that being persuasive and successful doesn’t sound pretty neat. It’s just that I wasn’t sure the book could deliver the goods.
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Donald Trump is also not God-Emperor, but he’s at least sort of on the short-list for the position. I knew that Trump wrote his own book on success and persuasion back in 1988 – Trump: The Art of the Deal – and I wondered if it might not be the anti-Cialdini.
Trump is no psychology expert, but he’s sure done well persuading people in real life. After a few months of attributing his victories to blind luck, most people have accepted Scott Adams’ hypothesis that he’s really a “master persuader”. Salon, Daily Caller, Bill Maher, and the Economist all use the word “genius”. The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any. If this guy has written a book on how to be persuasive and successful, that’s a book I want to read.
The downside of buying a book by a master manipulator is that sometimes you learn you were manipulated into buying the book.
Trump: The Art Of The Deal is 365 pages of some of the biggest print I have ever seen. The cover has a quote from the New York Times – “Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again” – which some poor reviewer is probably desperately wishing he could take back right now.
Although the blurb says that he “fully reveals the deal-maker’s art” and that it is “an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making” and “the ultimate read for anyone interested in achieving money and success” – only seventeen pages of very large print are anything resembling business advice. The rest of it is a weirdly deal-focused autobiography that doesn’t mention marrying his wife or having children, but devotes a lovingly detailed twenty-four pages to the time he renovated the Commodore Hotel.
But first, those seventeen pages. I am pleased to report that Donald Trump is well-abreast of modern science – he tells his readers looking for advice about how to make it big that deal-making is probably just genetic.
Either you’ve got the deal gene or you don’t:
Is there anything at all worth reading in these seventeen pages? Oh yes. But not for the reason I expected. (...)
I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? They don’t design buildings; they hire an architect for that part. They don’t construct the buildings; they hire a construction company for that part. They don’t manage the buildings; they hire a management company for that part. They’re not even the capitalist who funds the whole thing; they get a loan from a bank for that. So what do they do? Why don’t you or I take out a $100 million loan from a bank, hire a company to build a $100 million skyscraper, and then rent it out for somewhat more than $100 million and become rich?
As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had. The whole thing sounds very stressful.
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Donald Trump is also not God-Emperor, but he’s at least sort of on the short-list for the position. I knew that Trump wrote his own book on success and persuasion back in 1988 – Trump: The Art of the Deal – and I wondered if it might not be the anti-Cialdini.
Trump is no psychology expert, but he’s sure done well persuading people in real life. After a few months of attributing his victories to blind luck, most people have accepted Scott Adams’ hypothesis that he’s really a “master persuader”. Salon, Daily Caller, Bill Maher, and the Economist all use the word “genius”. The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any. If this guy has written a book on how to be persuasive and successful, that’s a book I want to read.
The downside of buying a book by a master manipulator is that sometimes you learn you were manipulated into buying the book.
Trump: The Art Of The Deal is 365 pages of some of the biggest print I have ever seen. The cover has a quote from the New York Times – “Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again” – which some poor reviewer is probably desperately wishing he could take back right now.
Although the blurb says that he “fully reveals the deal-maker’s art” and that it is “an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making” and “the ultimate read for anyone interested in achieving money and success” – only seventeen pages of very large print are anything resembling business advice. The rest of it is a weirdly deal-focused autobiography that doesn’t mention marrying his wife or having children, but devotes a lovingly detailed twenty-four pages to the time he renovated the Commodore Hotel.
But first, those seventeen pages. I am pleased to report that Donald Trump is well-abreast of modern science – he tells his readers looking for advice about how to make it big that deal-making is probably just genetic.
Either you’ve got the deal gene or you don’t:
More than anything else, I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes…unlike the real estate evangelists you see all over television these days, I can’t promise you that by following the precepts I’m about to offer you’ll become a millionaire overnight. Unfortunately, life rarely works that way, and most people who try to get rich quick end up going broke instead.This is a weirdly humble and self-aware Trump. It might be that the book medium suits him well; more likely he just has a really good ghost-writer. Unfortunately, he has much to be humble about. His advice, while not bad, is vague and not too useful. For example, his first rule is “think big”. But his second rule is “protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself”, which he explains as:
It’s been said that I believe in the power of positive thinking. In fact, I believe in the power of negative thinking. I happen to be very conservative in business. I always go into the deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst – if you can live with the worst – the good will take care of itself.So – take a lot of risks, but also be very cautious. Okay. I’m not saying his advice is literally contradictory – it makes sense that you can have big plans but also be very careful about them. I just don’t get the feeling that his advice is too helpful in narrowing down your plans.
Is there anything at all worth reading in these seventeen pages? Oh yes. But not for the reason I expected. (...)
I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? They don’t design buildings; they hire an architect for that part. They don’t construct the buildings; they hire a construction company for that part. They don’t manage the buildings; they hire a management company for that part. They’re not even the capitalist who funds the whole thing; they get a loan from a bank for that. So what do they do? Why don’t you or I take out a $100 million loan from a bank, hire a company to build a $100 million skyscraper, and then rent it out for somewhat more than $100 million and become rich?
As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had. The whole thing sounds very stressful.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Twitter
Ways to Be Pretentious
[ed. Not much of a Patti Smith fan but loved her memoir Just Kids.]
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
For its awed young audience, Horses was a noisy firework inauguration; for Smith, it pretty much announced the end of an era. She had developed her work from the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s inside a small protective circle of New York friends: no pressure, no deadlines, all the time to rewrite in the world. She could experiment with how much to reveal, what to mythologise, how far to dare, how loud or quiet to read, what to hold back. One of the reasons Smith sounds so confident on her debut is that she had been working on it for years. The unforgettable intro of the opening song, ‘Gloria’ (‘Jesus died/for somebody’s sins/but not mine’), began life as a long, barely punctuated text from 1970 originally titled ‘Oath’, and later ‘In Excelsis Deo’, as she confirms in Collected Lyrics 1970-2015. If these spooky proclamations don’t sound like your average 1970s rock song it’s partly because they didn’t start out as rock songs. They started out as poems, or as the kind of avant-garde-lite poetry in vogue at the time. No capital letters, ‘w/’ instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. (...)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
by Ian Penman, LRB | Read more:
Image: Robert Mapplethorpe in front of his cover for Patti Smith’s Horses, 1975 ca
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