Tuesday, July 19, 2016
YouTube: Wrecking the Music Industry – Or Putting New Artists in the Spotlight?
As artists, record labels, music publishers and managers line up to lobby the US Congress and the European Union, it might seem as if YouTube is the worst thing to happen to the music business since Napster in 1999. The streaming service, the aggrieved parties claim, is causing a massive “value gap” that is unsustainable. In brief, millions of users watching billions of videos are contributing peanuts towards ad revenue. The video service is also, they feel, building a huge business around their copyrights by gaming the safe harbour exemptions in the law, which mean it is absolved of guilt if its users upload music without a licence and only has to comply if told to take it down.
According to those who oppose the service, YouTube is slowly killing the music industry, one tiny cut at a time. It is anti-artist and anti-copyright, they claim. Meanwhile, every major artist has a channel on YouTube and wouldn’t dream of releasing a new record without YouTube involved in its launch.
Although many have a conflicted relationship with YouTube, there is a generational conflict dividing the field. Those in the “old” music industry want to keep things the way they always were, nailing down copyright in every way possible. Yet around them a “new” business is emerging – prescient and whip-smart artists, managers, labels and media organisations – who see YouTube as a facilitator of a creative renaissance rather than a death sentence.
Leeds-based singer-songwriter Hannah Trigwell describes discovering YouTube’s promotional potential as “like finding treasure”. Six years ago, she started uploading videos of her own songs, all without using her real name, to avoid her classmates finding out what she was doing. It was a stark contrast to the busking she had been doing.
“I didn’t have a fanbase at the time and it was difficult to get gigs with promoters because no one knew who I was,” she says. “It was obvious to me that unless I was very lucky with the right person coming along at the right time, I was going to have to forge my own journey.”
She praises the immediacy of the YouTube platform, whereby she can get instant feedback on songs or works in progress, as well as its global reach. A cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car was a success on her channel and the data tools YouTube supplies to all users revealed an unexpected detail: her fastest growing audience was in south-east Asia.
Although Trigwell knows she cannot survive on YouTube income alone, she believes it provides opportunities for profit to be made. “YouTube is definitely my main focus, but it is primarily a promotional tool,” she says. “The things that come indirectly from YouTube – the touring and selling merchandise online – would be impossible without it.”
Having recently signed a partnership deal with Absolute Label Services – a music marketing and distribution company – she does not see YouTube as a fast track to a traditional record contract. “If the right one came along I would consider it, but I’m not desperate for a record deal as I am a full-time musician right now,” she says. “YouTube has made it possible to be like that.”(...)
Traditionally it has been the label that has sat between the artist and the audience, and their business model has revolved around the acquisition and exploitation of sound recording rights: insisting on being paid for every use and refusing to loosen their stranglehold on copyrights.
NoCopyrightSounds (the clue is in the name) was set up in 2011 by Billy Woodford to address a problem for his video games review channel on YouTube. He wanted to use music in those videos, but the only copyright-free music online – on sites such as Creative Commons was – to his taste, not very good. There was also a risk of having a copyright strike against his channel if he used music from a label without paying for it.
His idea was to scour SoundCloud for good copyright-free music and make it available to gamers, and others on YouTube, for free. All they had to do was list the name of the artist and song so any viewers, if they liked the music, could investigate further. “I was just promoting free music,” Woodford says of the early days of NCS. “I saw a pretty good business opportunity as no one else was doing it. Still to this day, record labels haven’t seen the potential in this.”
The business model behind NCS is to use YouTube and YouTubers to build interest in music and for that to be monetised elsewhere. It regards YouTube as the starting point to make money through other channels – primarily via links to Spotify and Apple Music. “The way I have always seen it is people using our music are showcasing it in their videos to potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” Woodford explains. “If you get 10% of those people who like the song [to play it elsewhere], it keeps growing like that.”
by Eamonn Forde, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Asia Pracz Photography
According to those who oppose the service, YouTube is slowly killing the music industry, one tiny cut at a time. It is anti-artist and anti-copyright, they claim. Meanwhile, every major artist has a channel on YouTube and wouldn’t dream of releasing a new record without YouTube involved in its launch.Although many have a conflicted relationship with YouTube, there is a generational conflict dividing the field. Those in the “old” music industry want to keep things the way they always were, nailing down copyright in every way possible. Yet around them a “new” business is emerging – prescient and whip-smart artists, managers, labels and media organisations – who see YouTube as a facilitator of a creative renaissance rather than a death sentence.
Leeds-based singer-songwriter Hannah Trigwell describes discovering YouTube’s promotional potential as “like finding treasure”. Six years ago, she started uploading videos of her own songs, all without using her real name, to avoid her classmates finding out what she was doing. It was a stark contrast to the busking she had been doing.
“I didn’t have a fanbase at the time and it was difficult to get gigs with promoters because no one knew who I was,” she says. “It was obvious to me that unless I was very lucky with the right person coming along at the right time, I was going to have to forge my own journey.”
She praises the immediacy of the YouTube platform, whereby she can get instant feedback on songs or works in progress, as well as its global reach. A cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car was a success on her channel and the data tools YouTube supplies to all users revealed an unexpected detail: her fastest growing audience was in south-east Asia.
Although Trigwell knows she cannot survive on YouTube income alone, she believes it provides opportunities for profit to be made. “YouTube is definitely my main focus, but it is primarily a promotional tool,” she says. “The things that come indirectly from YouTube – the touring and selling merchandise online – would be impossible without it.”
Having recently signed a partnership deal with Absolute Label Services – a music marketing and distribution company – she does not see YouTube as a fast track to a traditional record contract. “If the right one came along I would consider it, but I’m not desperate for a record deal as I am a full-time musician right now,” she says. “YouTube has made it possible to be like that.”(...)
Traditionally it has been the label that has sat between the artist and the audience, and their business model has revolved around the acquisition and exploitation of sound recording rights: insisting on being paid for every use and refusing to loosen their stranglehold on copyrights.
NoCopyrightSounds (the clue is in the name) was set up in 2011 by Billy Woodford to address a problem for his video games review channel on YouTube. He wanted to use music in those videos, but the only copyright-free music online – on sites such as Creative Commons was – to his taste, not very good. There was also a risk of having a copyright strike against his channel if he used music from a label without paying for it.
His idea was to scour SoundCloud for good copyright-free music and make it available to gamers, and others on YouTube, for free. All they had to do was list the name of the artist and song so any viewers, if they liked the music, could investigate further. “I was just promoting free music,” Woodford says of the early days of NCS. “I saw a pretty good business opportunity as no one else was doing it. Still to this day, record labels haven’t seen the potential in this.”
The business model behind NCS is to use YouTube and YouTubers to build interest in music and for that to be monetised elsewhere. It regards YouTube as the starting point to make money through other channels – primarily via links to Spotify and Apple Music. “The way I have always seen it is people using our music are showcasing it in their videos to potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” Woodford explains. “If you get 10% of those people who like the song [to play it elsewhere], it keeps growing like that.”
by Eamonn Forde, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Asia Pracz Photography
At Age 75, the Moscow Mule Gets Its Kick Back
Ten years ago, I attended a seminar on the history of vodka at Tales of the Cocktail, the annual New Orleans convention. The moderator mentioned a cocktail named the Moscow Mule as “the drink that started it all” — that is, vodka’s popularity in the United States. Invented in 1941, the drink was a mix of vodka, lime juice and ginger beer, typically served in a copper mug.
I had never heard of it.
Last year, in a nothing-special bar in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. (population 9,500 or so), I sat with my niece, who had recently reached drinking age. She struggled over what to order. The waitress suggested, “How about a Moscow Mule?”
Once a curious footnote, the Moscow Mule, which turns 75 this year, is now one of the most common drinks on the planet. Snobs may sniff at it, but few drinks have so completely benefited from the current cocktail revival.
On a recent episode of “Better Call Saul,” a lawyer orders a Moscow Mule over lunch. The traditional mugs, once rare antiques, can be bought at Bed Bath & Beyond. And Tales of the Cocktail has declared this year’s event, held Tuesday through Sunday, “the year of the mule.”
Not far from Sturgeon Bay in the even-tinier town of Ellison Bay, Mike Holmes, owner and bar manager of the Wickman House restaurant, recently ordered a new batch of mugs. The cocktail is so popular, he said, that whenever one person orders a Moscow Mule, there is a run on the drink.
How does a cocktail go from obscurity to ubiquity in a decade? That the mule is one of the few classic cocktails made with vodka helps; the industry has promoted it heavily.
“We’ve really seen it rise in popularity on the coasts three or four years ago,” said Nick Guastaferro, brand director for Absolut vodka in the United States, “and we saw it as a way to focus our cocktail strategy on the mule.”
That strategy includes educating bartenders and consumers about the drink, campaigning to get it onto bar menus, and providing bars with those pricey copper cups. (Look at your mug next time you order one; chances are, there is a vodka brand’s logo on it.)
GuestMetrics, a data analytics firm that tracks consumer spending, reports that Moscow Mule menu placements in 2015 rose 60 percent over the previous year. Requests for the drink constituted more than 7 percent of all cocktail orders last year, making it nearly as popular as the Bloody Mary and the mojito.
Appropriately, the story of the Moscow Mule’s origin is a tale of pure capitalism.
I had never heard of it.
Last year, in a nothing-special bar in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. (population 9,500 or so), I sat with my niece, who had recently reached drinking age. She struggled over what to order. The waitress suggested, “How about a Moscow Mule?”Once a curious footnote, the Moscow Mule, which turns 75 this year, is now one of the most common drinks on the planet. Snobs may sniff at it, but few drinks have so completely benefited from the current cocktail revival.
On a recent episode of “Better Call Saul,” a lawyer orders a Moscow Mule over lunch. The traditional mugs, once rare antiques, can be bought at Bed Bath & Beyond. And Tales of the Cocktail has declared this year’s event, held Tuesday through Sunday, “the year of the mule.”
Not far from Sturgeon Bay in the even-tinier town of Ellison Bay, Mike Holmes, owner and bar manager of the Wickman House restaurant, recently ordered a new batch of mugs. The cocktail is so popular, he said, that whenever one person orders a Moscow Mule, there is a run on the drink.
How does a cocktail go from obscurity to ubiquity in a decade? That the mule is one of the few classic cocktails made with vodka helps; the industry has promoted it heavily.
“We’ve really seen it rise in popularity on the coasts three or four years ago,” said Nick Guastaferro, brand director for Absolut vodka in the United States, “and we saw it as a way to focus our cocktail strategy on the mule.”
That strategy includes educating bartenders and consumers about the drink, campaigning to get it onto bar menus, and providing bars with those pricey copper cups. (Look at your mug next time you order one; chances are, there is a vodka brand’s logo on it.)
GuestMetrics, a data analytics firm that tracks consumer spending, reports that Moscow Mule menu placements in 2015 rose 60 percent over the previous year. Requests for the drink constituted more than 7 percent of all cocktail orders last year, making it nearly as popular as the Bloody Mary and the mojito.
Appropriately, the story of the Moscow Mule’s origin is a tale of pure capitalism.
by Robert Simonson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mike Roemer
Monday, July 18, 2016
Darkness Falls on the Dinosaurs
At least five times in the past five hundred million years, the normally meticulous scalpel of natural selection, which excises this moth or spares that finch on account of the tiniest differences in wing color or beak shape, has become the evolutionary equivalent of a machete. Whole taxonomic groups of organisms—not merely individuals or species but genera, families, and orders—have been cut down in swift, indiscriminate strokes. After each of these mass extinctions, life on Earth eventually recovered but was irrevocably changed, with the creatures that survived, as much by happenstance as hard-earned fitness, becoming the unlikely founders of brave new biospheres. The blue whales, polar bears, and Siberian tigers that today symbolize the threat of extinction in the Anthropocene, the geologic age wrought by humans, owe their very existence to the demise of the most charismatic of all megafauna, the dinosaurs, at the close of the Cretaceous period.
Of the great mass extinctions, the end-Cretaceous event ranks third or fourth in severity by most measures, but it certainly looms largest in the popular imagination. The dinosaurs were not only dramatic in life but also operatic in death. In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, with his son Walter, a Berkeley geologist, and two of the elder Alvarez’s colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed what has become the preëminent theory of the dinosaurs’ annihilation. They proposed that an asteroid some six miles wide struck Earth at the same geologic instant that the dinosaurs and many other organisms went extinct. There was a searing pulse of heat, after which pulverized rock was ejected into the stratosphere, creating a dusty shroud that put the entire planet in shadow. Photosynthesis ceased; the herbivores died, then the carnivores. The idea, published just a month after the ash-spewing eruption of Mt. St. Helens, resonated with the existential anxieties of the late Cold War and seized the public’s attention.
Yet among geoscientists, there has been a lingering sense that the story has not been told in full. Initially, the extraterrestrial-impact theory seemed intellectually distasteful. It was too tidy, violating a deep-seated taboo against catastrophic explanations for geologic phenomena. Worse, the senior Alvarez antagonized paleontologists who had spent years puzzling over the Cretaceous fossil record by publicly dismissing them as “stamp collectors.” In the next ten years, as the search for the impact site finally led to the discovery of a buried crater of precisely the right age off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, most paleontologists swallowed their indignation and came to embrace the asteroid hypothesis. But still they questioned whether the fallout scenario could account for all the particulars. The extinction had, in fact, been somewhat selective: while most dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles died off, a small group of theropods (the predecessors of birds), as well as crocodilians, snakes, amphibians, and mammals, survived. In the oceans, the coiled ammonites that had ruled the Mesozoic seas were virtually wiped out, while bony fish suffered relatively few losses. Certain groups of clams and corals were decimated, as were the most important primary producers of the time, tiny planktonic foraminifera—one-celled organisms that create minute and wondrously elaborate shells of calcite. But foraminifera that lived in deeper water and nearer the equator fared better than those from the ocean surface and the high-latitude regions. Surely the mute fossils had something important to say about the horrors they had seen.
By the time the Yucatán crater was identified, in 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen. As the threat of nuclear holocaust began to fade from the collective consciousness, it was replaced by a growing awareness that environmental malefaction might be humanity’s downfall. Acid rain was shown to be devastating forests in New England and Scandinavia, the legacy of sulfurous emissions from decades of coal burning. The pattern of marine extinction at the end of the Cretaceous suddenly looked very much like what one would expect in an ocean that had become soured, the creatures’ shells broken down by sulfuric acid. And the rocks in the Yucatán crater had plenty of sulfur in them: they included thick layers of a mineral called anhydrite, or calcium sulfate, which would have been vaporized in the impact, hurled into the atmosphere, and then precipitated as burning acid rain. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines—ten times more powerful than that of Mt. St. Helens—provided further insight. The eruption injected enough sulfate particles into the stratosphere to counteract, for two years, the inexorable climb in global temperatures related to rising greenhouse-gas concentrations. The immense volumes of brimstone blasted from the hundred-and-fifty-mile-wide Yucatán crater could have caused far more severe cooling—devastating to organisms accustomed to the warm Cretaceous world—before falling out of the atmosphere as the rain from hell. It seemed, then, that sulfur, not dust, must be the real culprit in the end-Cretaceous extinction.
But for the past twenty years, many paleontologists, with their renowned philatelic attention to detail, have remained unsatisfied with this explanation, too. Caustic acid rain should have been especially harmful to freshwater ecosystems, yet species in these environments, including frogs and other amphibians sensitive to changes in water chemistry, had survival rates of close to ninety per cent—far higher than those that lived on dry land, where only twelve per cent endured the cataclysm. The failure of any of the proposed kill mechanisms to account for the details of the fossil record has led some paleontologists to propose that the asteroid was not a lone assassin but struck a global ecosystem already weakened by other injuries. The most frequently cited accomplice is volcanic activity, in particular the eruptions that produced the Deccan Traps, a mile-thick stack of basalt flows in present-day India. For tens of thousands of years leading up to the extinction, the oozing lavas released enormous quantities of carbon dioxide. In recent reconstructions of the Cretaceous finale, the murderous asteroid has been forced to share the stage with unglamorous greenhouse gases.
Now, a paper just published in Scientific Reports has named another possible conspirator: crude oil. According to Kunio Kaiho and his colleagues at Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan, the sudden ignition of underground oil at the Yucatán impact site could have jetted into the upper atmosphere a mass of fine black carbon, also known as soot. Human-made black carbon, the bane of Beijing, remains in the lower atmosphere for only a matter of days before falling back to the surface, where it warms the planet by absorbing heat. But black carbon injected into the stratosphere would have the opposite effect, acting as a long-lived sunshade that could abruptly cool Earth and inhibit photosynthesis over a period of years. Kaiho’s team suggests that the asteroid may have sent up as much as three billion tons of soot, hundreds of times more than the world’s industries release each year. Petroleum—the ectoplasm of ancient organisms, our shameful Anthropocene addiction—may have come back to haunt the dinosaurs, too.
by Marcia Bjornerud, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Felix Clay
Of the great mass extinctions, the end-Cretaceous event ranks third or fourth in severity by most measures, but it certainly looms largest in the popular imagination. The dinosaurs were not only dramatic in life but also operatic in death. In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, with his son Walter, a Berkeley geologist, and two of the elder Alvarez’s colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed what has become the preëminent theory of the dinosaurs’ annihilation. They proposed that an asteroid some six miles wide struck Earth at the same geologic instant that the dinosaurs and many other organisms went extinct. There was a searing pulse of heat, after which pulverized rock was ejected into the stratosphere, creating a dusty shroud that put the entire planet in shadow. Photosynthesis ceased; the herbivores died, then the carnivores. The idea, published just a month after the ash-spewing eruption of Mt. St. Helens, resonated with the existential anxieties of the late Cold War and seized the public’s attention.Yet among geoscientists, there has been a lingering sense that the story has not been told in full. Initially, the extraterrestrial-impact theory seemed intellectually distasteful. It was too tidy, violating a deep-seated taboo against catastrophic explanations for geologic phenomena. Worse, the senior Alvarez antagonized paleontologists who had spent years puzzling over the Cretaceous fossil record by publicly dismissing them as “stamp collectors.” In the next ten years, as the search for the impact site finally led to the discovery of a buried crater of precisely the right age off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, most paleontologists swallowed their indignation and came to embrace the asteroid hypothesis. But still they questioned whether the fallout scenario could account for all the particulars. The extinction had, in fact, been somewhat selective: while most dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles died off, a small group of theropods (the predecessors of birds), as well as crocodilians, snakes, amphibians, and mammals, survived. In the oceans, the coiled ammonites that had ruled the Mesozoic seas were virtually wiped out, while bony fish suffered relatively few losses. Certain groups of clams and corals were decimated, as were the most important primary producers of the time, tiny planktonic foraminifera—one-celled organisms that create minute and wondrously elaborate shells of calcite. But foraminifera that lived in deeper water and nearer the equator fared better than those from the ocean surface and the high-latitude regions. Surely the mute fossils had something important to say about the horrors they had seen.
By the time the Yucatán crater was identified, in 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen. As the threat of nuclear holocaust began to fade from the collective consciousness, it was replaced by a growing awareness that environmental malefaction might be humanity’s downfall. Acid rain was shown to be devastating forests in New England and Scandinavia, the legacy of sulfurous emissions from decades of coal burning. The pattern of marine extinction at the end of the Cretaceous suddenly looked very much like what one would expect in an ocean that had become soured, the creatures’ shells broken down by sulfuric acid. And the rocks in the Yucatán crater had plenty of sulfur in them: they included thick layers of a mineral called anhydrite, or calcium sulfate, which would have been vaporized in the impact, hurled into the atmosphere, and then precipitated as burning acid rain. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines—ten times more powerful than that of Mt. St. Helens—provided further insight. The eruption injected enough sulfate particles into the stratosphere to counteract, for two years, the inexorable climb in global temperatures related to rising greenhouse-gas concentrations. The immense volumes of brimstone blasted from the hundred-and-fifty-mile-wide Yucatán crater could have caused far more severe cooling—devastating to organisms accustomed to the warm Cretaceous world—before falling out of the atmosphere as the rain from hell. It seemed, then, that sulfur, not dust, must be the real culprit in the end-Cretaceous extinction.
But for the past twenty years, many paleontologists, with their renowned philatelic attention to detail, have remained unsatisfied with this explanation, too. Caustic acid rain should have been especially harmful to freshwater ecosystems, yet species in these environments, including frogs and other amphibians sensitive to changes in water chemistry, had survival rates of close to ninety per cent—far higher than those that lived on dry land, where only twelve per cent endured the cataclysm. The failure of any of the proposed kill mechanisms to account for the details of the fossil record has led some paleontologists to propose that the asteroid was not a lone assassin but struck a global ecosystem already weakened by other injuries. The most frequently cited accomplice is volcanic activity, in particular the eruptions that produced the Deccan Traps, a mile-thick stack of basalt flows in present-day India. For tens of thousands of years leading up to the extinction, the oozing lavas released enormous quantities of carbon dioxide. In recent reconstructions of the Cretaceous finale, the murderous asteroid has been forced to share the stage with unglamorous greenhouse gases.
Now, a paper just published in Scientific Reports has named another possible conspirator: crude oil. According to Kunio Kaiho and his colleagues at Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan, the sudden ignition of underground oil at the Yucatán impact site could have jetted into the upper atmosphere a mass of fine black carbon, also known as soot. Human-made black carbon, the bane of Beijing, remains in the lower atmosphere for only a matter of days before falling back to the surface, where it warms the planet by absorbing heat. But black carbon injected into the stratosphere would have the opposite effect, acting as a long-lived sunshade that could abruptly cool Earth and inhibit photosynthesis over a period of years. Kaiho’s team suggests that the asteroid may have sent up as much as three billion tons of soot, hundreds of times more than the world’s industries release each year. Petroleum—the ectoplasm of ancient organisms, our shameful Anthropocene addiction—may have come back to haunt the dinosaurs, too.
by Marcia Bjornerud, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Felix Clay
Flight of the Conchords: Aimless, and That’s O.K.
[ed. Glad to see the guys back. Yeah, they got it goin' on..]
Surrounded by the awe-inspiring geological formations that cradle Red Rocks Amphitheater here, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie could not help but contemplate the passage of time.
On a cool July evening, these two comedians and musicians from New Zealand, who perform together as Flight of the Conchords, told more than 9,000 gathered fans that they were sorry for having grown older since their last tour of the United States three years ago.
As they age, Mr. Clement said, “It ultimately reminds you of your mortality, and for that, we apologize.”
Their advancing years are showing, too. “In that time,” Mr. McKenzie said, “we’ve come to like jazz music.”
For the 18 years that this band has existed, Flight of the Conchords has been distinguished by its subtlety: songs, jokes and stage banter so understated, you could be forgiven for not realizing when the two men performing them are joking.
“There’s a very blurred line between the material and us just talking about things,” Mr. McKenzie, 40, said earlier that afternoon as he sat beside Mr. Clement, 42, on a dressing-room couch.
“The audience thinks everything is a bit,” Mr. McKenzie continued. “But often it’s not a bit — it’s just us figuring something out.”
There was a time, about 10 years ago, when this unassuming pair seemed to have it all figured out in their own quiet way. They had a well-received HBO series and two Top 20 albums, as well as a Grammy for an earlier EP.
They also had (and still have) a bluntness about their careers — a lack of interest in familiar enticements like wealth and fame, if not an outright cynicism about the entertainment industry — that can be mistaken for their authentically low-key demeanors.
So it was a shock to fans when, in 2009, Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie boldly walked away from their HBO series, “Flight of the Conchords,” which they produced in New York and starred in for two seasons. They put their partnership on pause and returned home to Wellington, New Zealand.
“It basically stopped being fun,” Mr. McKenzie said. “It really wasn’t a decision about money. It was definitely a decision about enjoying our lives.” (...)
On their present itinerary, they have nothing to figure out (except a few new songs) and nothing to promote (except themselves). They find themselves playing in bigger spaces than they wished to more admirers than they thought they had.
While they are flattered to still have a following, they point out that Flight of the Conchords was intended, as Mr. Clement put it, “as a hobby and a side thing” — something to do, to help them reach the things they really wanted to be doing. “This was just our learning-guitar project,” he said. “And then we had two songs. And then three.” (...)
This summer they have been trying out tunes about partying as tepid, timid grown-ups; a duet that imagines Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie as a dysfunctional father and son; and a country-western ballad about a mean-tempered hombre who meets his doppelgänger. (Their repertoire still includes favorites like the dystopian death anthem “Robots” and the domestic sex jam“Business Time,” on which Mr. Clement whispers that Tuesday night is when “we go and visit your mother, but Wednesday night we make sweet, weekly love.”) (...)
Friends of the band mates say they approached their hiatus with an intentional aimlessness.
The humorist John Hodgman, who often performs with Flight of the Conchords, said, “The feeling I got was not that they were itching to see what else was out there for them, but they wanted to see how much less was available.”
Surrounded by the awe-inspiring geological formations that cradle Red Rocks Amphitheater here, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie could not help but contemplate the passage of time.
On a cool July evening, these two comedians and musicians from New Zealand, who perform together as Flight of the Conchords, told more than 9,000 gathered fans that they were sorry for having grown older since their last tour of the United States three years ago.
As they age, Mr. Clement said, “It ultimately reminds you of your mortality, and for that, we apologize.”Their advancing years are showing, too. “In that time,” Mr. McKenzie said, “we’ve come to like jazz music.”
For the 18 years that this band has existed, Flight of the Conchords has been distinguished by its subtlety: songs, jokes and stage banter so understated, you could be forgiven for not realizing when the two men performing them are joking.
“There’s a very blurred line between the material and us just talking about things,” Mr. McKenzie, 40, said earlier that afternoon as he sat beside Mr. Clement, 42, on a dressing-room couch.
“The audience thinks everything is a bit,” Mr. McKenzie continued. “But often it’s not a bit — it’s just us figuring something out.”
There was a time, about 10 years ago, when this unassuming pair seemed to have it all figured out in their own quiet way. They had a well-received HBO series and two Top 20 albums, as well as a Grammy for an earlier EP.
They also had (and still have) a bluntness about their careers — a lack of interest in familiar enticements like wealth and fame, if not an outright cynicism about the entertainment industry — that can be mistaken for their authentically low-key demeanors.
So it was a shock to fans when, in 2009, Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie boldly walked away from their HBO series, “Flight of the Conchords,” which they produced in New York and starred in for two seasons. They put their partnership on pause and returned home to Wellington, New Zealand.
“It basically stopped being fun,” Mr. McKenzie said. “It really wasn’t a decision about money. It was definitely a decision about enjoying our lives.” (...)
On their present itinerary, they have nothing to figure out (except a few new songs) and nothing to promote (except themselves). They find themselves playing in bigger spaces than they wished to more admirers than they thought they had.
While they are flattered to still have a following, they point out that Flight of the Conchords was intended, as Mr. Clement put it, “as a hobby and a side thing” — something to do, to help them reach the things they really wanted to be doing. “This was just our learning-guitar project,” he said. “And then we had two songs. And then three.” (...)
This summer they have been trying out tunes about partying as tepid, timid grown-ups; a duet that imagines Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie as a dysfunctional father and son; and a country-western ballad about a mean-tempered hombre who meets his doppelgänger. (Their repertoire still includes favorites like the dystopian death anthem “Robots” and the domestic sex jam“Business Time,” on which Mr. Clement whispers that Tuesday night is when “we go and visit your mother, but Wednesday night we make sweet, weekly love.”) (...)
Friends of the band mates say they approached their hiatus with an intentional aimlessness.
The humorist John Hodgman, who often performs with Flight of the Conchords, said, “The feeling I got was not that they were itching to see what else was out there for them, but they wanted to see how much less was available.”
by Dave Itzkoff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Terry Ratzlaff for The New York Times
Sunday, July 17, 2016
8 Types of Foreigners in Beijing
[ed. See also: $7,000-a-Month ‘Shameless China’ Blogger Loses All With One Post]
We all think we are unique, but more or less we fall into stereotypes. What kind of foreigners are you, Beijing folks?
No.1 The Gulou Hipsters
They live in hutongs or those six-floor buildings. They like Baijiu, Peking duck and bragging that they know where to get the best dumplings. Their obsession with Beijing fixates on the antique and crappy parts of the city which fuels their oriental fantasy. Most conversations with Gulou hipsters revolve around them recounting funny exchanges they had with taxi drivers in Chinese, providing a convenient excuse for them to show off.
No.2 The Wudaokou Students
The loyal customers of La Bamba, Propaganda, and that one Xinjiang restaurant at Minzu University which has just THE BEST 大盘鸡. Easily spotted by their baseball jackets, sneakers, backpacks and the innocent, vapid, pimply smile. Learning the language? Only if it helps them fuck Chinese chicks. (Oops, except for the gays, and the Koreans)
No.3 The English Teachers
When foreigners say they are English teachers, actually they are telling only one thing about themselves: a don’t-know-what-to-do-with-his-life loser. No offense, it’s okay to take it temporarily or as a part-time, but in the long run, dude you need to pull yourself together. Easily recognized (and avoided) by the shit-eating grin they wear into Kokomo after 1am.
No.4 The iBankers
Expensive suits, first class planes, five star hotels, the iBankers are exactly the opposite of the Gulou hipsters. Most often encountered at D Lounge (D for douchebag) or prowling for Glamor Asians at Xiu, and make people who are not as rich as them fall in love with hip-hop and rap. They don’t even enjoy Beijing, since as long as they are making a shit load of money, they don’t give a fuck.
by Laura Lian, Shameless | Read more:
Images: uncredited
We all think we are unique, but more or less we fall into stereotypes. What kind of foreigners are you, Beijing folks?
No.1 The Gulou Hipsters
They live in hutongs or those six-floor buildings. They like Baijiu, Peking duck and bragging that they know where to get the best dumplings. Their obsession with Beijing fixates on the antique and crappy parts of the city which fuels their oriental fantasy. Most conversations with Gulou hipsters revolve around them recounting funny exchanges they had with taxi drivers in Chinese, providing a convenient excuse for them to show off.
The loyal customers of La Bamba, Propaganda, and that one Xinjiang restaurant at Minzu University which has just THE BEST 大盘鸡. Easily spotted by their baseball jackets, sneakers, backpacks and the innocent, vapid, pimply smile. Learning the language? Only if it helps them fuck Chinese chicks. (Oops, except for the gays, and the Koreans)
No.3 The English Teachers
When foreigners say they are English teachers, actually they are telling only one thing about themselves: a don’t-know-what-to-do-with-his-life loser. No offense, it’s okay to take it temporarily or as a part-time, but in the long run, dude you need to pull yourself together. Easily recognized (and avoided) by the shit-eating grin they wear into Kokomo after 1am.
No.4 The iBankers
Expensive suits, first class planes, five star hotels, the iBankers are exactly the opposite of the Gulou hipsters. Most often encountered at D Lounge (D for douchebag) or prowling for Glamor Asians at Xiu, and make people who are not as rich as them fall in love with hip-hop and rap. They don’t even enjoy Beijing, since as long as they are making a shit load of money, they don’t give a fuck.
by Laura Lian, Shameless | Read more:
Images: uncredited
What To Do If a Grizzly Bear Is Stalking You
Betty Snyder
via: Denali Hikers Escape Bear
[ed. I've had this happen and can say it gives your nerves a real workout. FYI grizzly/brown bears don't generally "stalk" people (as prey), but will do so if conditioned to expect food.]
A Final Round for the Ages at the British Open
I was fortunate to watch every second of today’s final round of the Open Championship, and I thought it was fantastic. Phil Mickelson played one of the best rounds I have ever seen played in the Open and Henrik Stenson just played better—he played one of the greatest rounds I have ever seen. Phil certainly has nothing to be ashamed of because he played wonderfully. Henrik played well from beginning to end. He drove the ball well; his iron game was great; his short game was wonderful; and his putting was great. Henrik was simply terrific. To win your first major championship is something special in and of itself, but to do it in the fashion Henrik did it in, makes for something very special and incredibly memorable. I'm proud of and happy for Henrik. Some in the media have already tried to compare today’s final round to 1977 at Turnberry, with Tom Watson and me in what they called the “duel in the sun.” I thought we played great and had a wonderful match. On that day, Tom got me, 65-66. Our final round was really good, but theirs was even better. What a great match today.
~ Jack Nicklaus
[ed. What a golfing clinic (and total nail-biter)! Really exceptional golf at the highest level. Congratulations to both Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson. See also: Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson deliver 'the greatest Open ever' and Instant Classic.]
~ Jack Nicklaus
[ed. What a golfing clinic (and total nail-biter)! Really exceptional golf at the highest level. Congratulations to both Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson. See also: Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson deliver 'the greatest Open ever' and Instant Classic.]
TROON, Scotland — This was an arm wrestle, a free-throw shooting contest, a 50-yard dash. It was a tug of war, a sprint to the top of the hill, a game of rock-paper-scissors.
It was, really, a match race: a pair of thoroughbreds, separated from the field and cut loose from the gate, going stride for stride around the track with no need to look back. All that mattered was keeping one nose in front.
One hundred and fifty-six players began the British Open, and 81 played the weekend. There were 173,000 fans who passed through the gates at Royal Troon during the past week, and in the end, the spotlight illuminated just two men. There was no one in front, no one close behind, no one else in the frame. They were alone.
Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson played together on Saturday and then again on Sunday, and they were, quite simply, superior. Mickelson and Stenson were not so much in a different class from everyone else as they were in a completely different school district. Consider this: Mickelson made two birdies and an eagle in his first six holes on Sunday, made four bogeys in the entire tournament, shot 70-65 over his final two rounds and still — somehow — lost by three strokes as Stenson went 68-63 to finish at 20 under par. J. B. Holmes was the next closest competitor, 11 shots behind Mickelson or, put another way, the same distance back of second place that Jim Herman, who tied for 43rd, was of third.
The separation was so complete that at various points during Sunday’s round, Mickelson found himself thinking of the famous 1977 British Open, in which Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, miles adrift of anyone else on the leader board, waged a similar weekend sword fight just down the road from here at Turnberry.
Mickelson was certainly not the only one. The so-called Duel in the Sun is famous in golf lore, one of the sport’s greatest sequences. It involved Nicklaus shooting 65-66 in his final two rounds, Watson shooting 65-65, and nearly four decades later, it led to perhaps the only instance in memory in which a professional golfer longed, more than anything, not to resemble the Golden Bear.
“I know that I wanted to be more of Tom in that case than Jack, but unfortunately,” Mickelson said, his voice trailing off. He hesitated. “It’s bittersweet, I guess.”
Golf rarely delivers such theater, but the scattered instances of showdowns like these always linger in a special area of the sport’s institutional memory. Sunday charges, such as Nicklaus’s at Augusta in 1986 or Mickelson’s in 2013 at Muirfield, are thrilling, to be sure, but there is nothing quite like the clarity of a true one-on-one. (...)
At Troon, there was no need to look at the leaderboards. As Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion and the former No. 1 golfer in the world, said after shooting a final-round 67 to finish tied for fifth: “Look what those guys have done. There’s no chance of me getting to that score.” By the middle of the front nine, when the leaders were already seven shots clear, even Mickelson — always wary of the unexpected — could acknowledge the anomaly here.
“By the sixth hole, it was pretty obvious it was going to be just us,” he said.
It was. And in that sense, some golf fans may be tempted to compare this day to 2000, when Tiger Woods and the largely anonymous (both before and since) Bob May ran away from the field on the back nine on Sunday at the P.G.A. Championship while waging a battle full of birdies that, ultimately, Woods won in a playoff.
But this day was different. Woods and May at Valhalla will always be remembered, if only because of how Woods chased one of his putts all the way to the hole. Yet the quality of golf on display here Sunday was perhaps even more sensational, particularly in light of the circumstances.
by Sam Borden, NY Times | Read more:It was, really, a match race: a pair of thoroughbreds, separated from the field and cut loose from the gate, going stride for stride around the track with no need to look back. All that mattered was keeping one nose in front.
One hundred and fifty-six players began the British Open, and 81 played the weekend. There were 173,000 fans who passed through the gates at Royal Troon during the past week, and in the end, the spotlight illuminated just two men. There was no one in front, no one close behind, no one else in the frame. They were alone.Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson played together on Saturday and then again on Sunday, and they were, quite simply, superior. Mickelson and Stenson were not so much in a different class from everyone else as they were in a completely different school district. Consider this: Mickelson made two birdies and an eagle in his first six holes on Sunday, made four bogeys in the entire tournament, shot 70-65 over his final two rounds and still — somehow — lost by three strokes as Stenson went 68-63 to finish at 20 under par. J. B. Holmes was the next closest competitor, 11 shots behind Mickelson or, put another way, the same distance back of second place that Jim Herman, who tied for 43rd, was of third.
The separation was so complete that at various points during Sunday’s round, Mickelson found himself thinking of the famous 1977 British Open, in which Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, miles adrift of anyone else on the leader board, waged a similar weekend sword fight just down the road from here at Turnberry.
Mickelson was certainly not the only one. The so-called Duel in the Sun is famous in golf lore, one of the sport’s greatest sequences. It involved Nicklaus shooting 65-66 in his final two rounds, Watson shooting 65-65, and nearly four decades later, it led to perhaps the only instance in memory in which a professional golfer longed, more than anything, not to resemble the Golden Bear.
“I know that I wanted to be more of Tom in that case than Jack, but unfortunately,” Mickelson said, his voice trailing off. He hesitated. “It’s bittersweet, I guess.”
Golf rarely delivers such theater, but the scattered instances of showdowns like these always linger in a special area of the sport’s institutional memory. Sunday charges, such as Nicklaus’s at Augusta in 1986 or Mickelson’s in 2013 at Muirfield, are thrilling, to be sure, but there is nothing quite like the clarity of a true one-on-one. (...)
At Troon, there was no need to look at the leaderboards. As Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion and the former No. 1 golfer in the world, said after shooting a final-round 67 to finish tied for fifth: “Look what those guys have done. There’s no chance of me getting to that score.” By the middle of the front nine, when the leaders were already seven shots clear, even Mickelson — always wary of the unexpected — could acknowledge the anomaly here.
“By the sixth hole, it was pretty obvious it was going to be just us,” he said.
It was. And in that sense, some golf fans may be tempted to compare this day to 2000, when Tiger Woods and the largely anonymous (both before and since) Bob May ran away from the field on the back nine on Sunday at the P.G.A. Championship while waging a battle full of birdies that, ultimately, Woods won in a playoff.
But this day was different. Woods and May at Valhalla will always be remembered, if only because of how Woods chased one of his putts all the way to the hole. Yet the quality of golf on display here Sunday was perhaps even more sensational, particularly in light of the circumstances.
Image: Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Trump Days
Trump is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain: Alan Hale from “Gilligan’s Island,” say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident. We are afforded a side view of a head of silver-yellow hair and a hawklike orange-red face, the cheeks of which, if stared at steadily enough, will seem, through some optical illusion, to glow orange-redder at moments when the crowd is especially pleased. If you’ve ever, watching “The Apprentice,” entertained fantasies of how you might fare in the boardroom (the Donald, recognizing your excellent qualities with his professional businessman’s acumen, does not fire you but, on the contrary, pulls you aside to assign you some important non-TV, real-world mission), you may, for a brief, embarrassing instant, as he scans the crowd, expect him to recognize you. (...)
It’s considered an indication of authenticity that he doesn’t generally speak from a teleprompter but just wings it. (In fact, he brings to the podium a few pages of handwritten bullet points, to which he periodically refers as he, mostly, wings it.) He wings it because winging it serves his purpose. He is not trying to persuade, detail, or prove: he is trying to thrill, agitate, be liked, be loved, here and now. He is trying to make energy. (At one point in his San Jose speech, he endearingly fumbles with a sheaf of “statistics,” reads a few, fondly but slightingly mentions the loyal, hapless statistician who compiled them, then seems unable to go on, afraid he might be boring us.)
And make energy he does. It flows out of him, as if channelled in thousands of micro wires, enters the minds of his followers: their cheers go ragged and hoarse, chanting erupts, a look of religious zeal may flash across the face of some non-chanter, who is finally getting, in response to a question long nursed in private, exactly the answer he’s been craving. One such person stays in my memory from a rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, in March: a solidly built man in his mid-forties, wearing, in the crazy heat, a long-sleeved black shirt, who, as Trump spoke, worked himself into a state of riveted, silent concentration-fury, the rally equivalent of someone at church gazing fixedly down at the pew before him, nodding, Yes, yes, yes. (...)
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman is shouting “Fuck you, Trump!” in a voice so thin it seems to be emanating from some distant neighborhood, where a girl is calling home her brother, Fuckhugh Trump.
The shouter is Esperanza Matamoros, tiny, seventeen years old. The crowd now halts her forward progress, so she judiciously spins and, still shouting, heads toward the exit. As she passes a tall, white-haired, professorial-looking old man, he gives her a little shove. He towers over her, the top of her head falling below his armpit. She could be his daughter, his granddaughter, his favorite student. Another man steps in front of her to deliver an impromptu manners lesson; apparently, she bumped him on her way up. “Excuse me,” he says heatedly. “Around here, we say excuse me.”
An ungentleness gets into the air when Trump speaks, prompting the abandonment of certain social norms (e.g., an old man should show forbearance and physical respect for a young woman, even—especially—an angry young woman, and might even think to wonder what is making her so angry), norms that, to fired-up Trump supporters, must feel antiquated in this brave new moment of ideological foment. They have thought and thought, in projective terms, about theoretical protesters, and now here are some real ones.
This ungentleness ripples out through the crowd and into the area beyond the fence where the protesters have set up shop. One of them, Sandra Borchers, tells me that out there all was calm (she was “actually having dialogues” with Trump supporters, “back-and-forth conversations, at about this talking level”) until Trump started speaking. Then things got “violent and aggressive.” Someone threw a rock at her head. A female Trump supporter “in a pink-peachy-color T-shirt” attacked a protester, kicking and punching him. Rebecca LaStrap, an African-American woman, twenty years old, wearing a “fuck trump” T-shirt, was grabbed by the breast, thrown to the ground, slapped in the face. (She was also told to “go back on the boat,” a perplexing instruction, given that she was born and raised in Mesa.) Later that day, in Tucson, two young Hispanic women, quietly watching the rally there, are thrown out of the venue, and one (as a member of Trump’s security staff bellows, “Out! Out! Out!”) is roughly shoved through a revolving door by a Trump supporter who looks to be in his seventies and who then performs a strange little quasi-karate move, as if he expects her to fly back in and counterattack. A pro-immigration protester named George Clifton, who is wearing a sign that says “Veteran: U.S.M.C. and C.I.A.,” tells me that two Trump supporters came up to him separately after the Fountain Hills rally and whispered “almost verbatim the same thing, not quite, but in a nutshell”: that they’d like to shoot him in the back of the head.
In Tucson, Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating. When a confrontation occurs, people rush toward it, to film it and stoke it, in the hope that someone on the other side will fly off the handle and do something extreme, and thereby incontrovertibly discredit his side of the argument. This river-and-shore arrangement advantages the Trump supporters: they can walk coolly past, playing the offended party, refusing to engage.
Most do, but some don’t.
“Trump is racist, so are you!” the protesters chant, maximizing the provocation. A South Asian-looking youth of uncertain political affiliation does a crazy Borat dance in front of the line as a friend films him. An aging blond bombshell strolls by in a low-cut blouse, giving the protesters a leisurely finger, blowing them kisses, patting one of her large breasts. A matronly Hispanic protester says that the woman has a right to do what she likes with her breasts since, after all, “she paid for them.” A grandmotherly white woman tucks a strand of graying hair behind her ear, walks resolutely over, and delicately lifts a Mexican flag from where it lies shawl-like across the shoulders of a young, distractedly dancing Hispanic girl, as if the flag had fallen across the girl’s shoulders from some imaginary shelf and the grandmother were considerately removing it before it got too heavy. The girl, offended, pulls away. But wait: the woman shows her anti-Trump sign: they’re on the same side. The girl remains unconvinced; she’ll keep the flag to herself, thanks. “So sorry,” the white woman says and rejoins a friend, to commiserate over the girl’s response, which strikes her, maybe, as a form of racial profiling.
It’s considered an indication of authenticity that he doesn’t generally speak from a teleprompter but just wings it. (In fact, he brings to the podium a few pages of handwritten bullet points, to which he periodically refers as he, mostly, wings it.) He wings it because winging it serves his purpose. He is not trying to persuade, detail, or prove: he is trying to thrill, agitate, be liked, be loved, here and now. He is trying to make energy. (At one point in his San Jose speech, he endearingly fumbles with a sheaf of “statistics,” reads a few, fondly but slightingly mentions the loyal, hapless statistician who compiled them, then seems unable to go on, afraid he might be boring us.)And make energy he does. It flows out of him, as if channelled in thousands of micro wires, enters the minds of his followers: their cheers go ragged and hoarse, chanting erupts, a look of religious zeal may flash across the face of some non-chanter, who is finally getting, in response to a question long nursed in private, exactly the answer he’s been craving. One such person stays in my memory from a rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, in March: a solidly built man in his mid-forties, wearing, in the crazy heat, a long-sleeved black shirt, who, as Trump spoke, worked himself into a state of riveted, silent concentration-fury, the rally equivalent of someone at church gazing fixedly down at the pew before him, nodding, Yes, yes, yes. (...)
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman is shouting “Fuck you, Trump!” in a voice so thin it seems to be emanating from some distant neighborhood, where a girl is calling home her brother, Fuckhugh Trump.
The shouter is Esperanza Matamoros, tiny, seventeen years old. The crowd now halts her forward progress, so she judiciously spins and, still shouting, heads toward the exit. As she passes a tall, white-haired, professorial-looking old man, he gives her a little shove. He towers over her, the top of her head falling below his armpit. She could be his daughter, his granddaughter, his favorite student. Another man steps in front of her to deliver an impromptu manners lesson; apparently, she bumped him on her way up. “Excuse me,” he says heatedly. “Around here, we say excuse me.”
An ungentleness gets into the air when Trump speaks, prompting the abandonment of certain social norms (e.g., an old man should show forbearance and physical respect for a young woman, even—especially—an angry young woman, and might even think to wonder what is making her so angry), norms that, to fired-up Trump supporters, must feel antiquated in this brave new moment of ideological foment. They have thought and thought, in projective terms, about theoretical protesters, and now here are some real ones.
This ungentleness ripples out through the crowd and into the area beyond the fence where the protesters have set up shop. One of them, Sandra Borchers, tells me that out there all was calm (she was “actually having dialogues” with Trump supporters, “back-and-forth conversations, at about this talking level”) until Trump started speaking. Then things got “violent and aggressive.” Someone threw a rock at her head. A female Trump supporter “in a pink-peachy-color T-shirt” attacked a protester, kicking and punching him. Rebecca LaStrap, an African-American woman, twenty years old, wearing a “fuck trump” T-shirt, was grabbed by the breast, thrown to the ground, slapped in the face. (She was also told to “go back on the boat,” a perplexing instruction, given that she was born and raised in Mesa.) Later that day, in Tucson, two young Hispanic women, quietly watching the rally there, are thrown out of the venue, and one (as a member of Trump’s security staff bellows, “Out! Out! Out!”) is roughly shoved through a revolving door by a Trump supporter who looks to be in his seventies and who then performs a strange little quasi-karate move, as if he expects her to fly back in and counterattack. A pro-immigration protester named George Clifton, who is wearing a sign that says “Veteran: U.S.M.C. and C.I.A.,” tells me that two Trump supporters came up to him separately after the Fountain Hills rally and whispered “almost verbatim the same thing, not quite, but in a nutshell”: that they’d like to shoot him in the back of the head.
In Tucson, Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating. When a confrontation occurs, people rush toward it, to film it and stoke it, in the hope that someone on the other side will fly off the handle and do something extreme, and thereby incontrovertibly discredit his side of the argument. This river-and-shore arrangement advantages the Trump supporters: they can walk coolly past, playing the offended party, refusing to engage.
Most do, but some don’t.
“Trump is racist, so are you!” the protesters chant, maximizing the provocation. A South Asian-looking youth of uncertain political affiliation does a crazy Borat dance in front of the line as a friend films him. An aging blond bombshell strolls by in a low-cut blouse, giving the protesters a leisurely finger, blowing them kisses, patting one of her large breasts. A matronly Hispanic protester says that the woman has a right to do what she likes with her breasts since, after all, “she paid for them.” A grandmotherly white woman tucks a strand of graying hair behind her ear, walks resolutely over, and delicately lifts a Mexican flag from where it lies shawl-like across the shoulders of a young, distractedly dancing Hispanic girl, as if the flag had fallen across the girl’s shoulders from some imaginary shelf and the grandmother were considerately removing it before it got too heavy. The girl, offended, pulls away. But wait: the woman shows her anti-Trump sign: they’re on the same side. The girl remains unconvinced; she’ll keep the flag to herself, thanks. “So sorry,” the white woman says and rejoins a friend, to commiserate over the girl’s response, which strikes her, maybe, as a form of racial profiling.
by George Saunders, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Seymoure Chwast
Friday, July 15, 2016
An Assault On Us All
There is a peculiar horror in the attack in Nice which has killed at least 84 men, women and children. The weapon, the target and even the place might have been chosen to maximise the damage caused to the web of trust in one another’s intentions that sustains civilisation. Though we don’t know for sure whether this was a deliberate act of terrorism it is possible that all were deliberately chosen with this in mind. Although many attacks are carefully planned, others arise spontaneously when local or personal grievances are given a global habitation and a name by jihadi ideology. That sort is almost more frightening.
The victims, as so often in these atrocities all around the world, were entirely innocent people, often whole families, caught up in a moment of celebration, one of those times when everyone in the crowd seems united in a common determination to enjoy the moment until the unthinkable violence strikes. Whether it is the Shia crowds celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast in the recent Baghdad bombing (which killed 156), concert-goers of last autumn’s atrocity in Paris, or the 74 Christians celebrating Easter in a park in Lahore in April the intended message is always the same: that nowhere is safe and no one can be trusted.
The weapon, too, though it has never been wielded to such deadly effect, is one that maximises the distrust and fear that these attacks intend. A truck on the streets is about as normal and everyday a sight as can be imagined. Of course there are no physical barriers to stop it from mounting the pavement but the restraints of civilisation and of sanity which we rely on make it almost unthinkable that this will happen.
War tears all restraint away. In war everything is a potential weapon and unexpectedness can make weapons more deadly. The use of civilian aircraft in the 9/11 attacks in the US is only the deadliest example of this and the disruption and loss of innocence they caused to all civilian air travel since then one of the minor victories of Osama bin Laden.
Even the city of Nice is one of the most vulnerable places in France to this kind of attack, not just because of the presence of large crowds on a road which we have been suddenly forced to see as hideously exposed, but because of its already divided politics, with a strong Front National vote which this atrocity will do nothing to diminish.
There is no guarantee possible that such an attack will not happen again. It may very well happen in Britain. We have been lucky here and not all our luck has been earned. In any case, the enemy need only be lucky once, whereas we must be lucky every time. (...)
France, and Britain too, is under attack from an apocalyptic blend of politics and religion. The dreadful simplicity of war can make use of every kind of human material, from the cold and rational planner to the angry criminal thug or the psychologically disturbed. There is no single jihadi type any more than there is a single route to radicalisation, something that makes the task of the security services much harder.
The challenge to our values is at the same time political, religious, military and social. So must the response be. This has implications that go beyond politics or security policies. Acts of war like the atrocity in Nice are above all affronts to the decency that all human beings have in common: as ordinary unheroic citizens we can stand in solidarity with the ordinary citizens of Nice and share small acts of common decency with our neighbours.
The victims, as so often in these atrocities all around the world, were entirely innocent people, often whole families, caught up in a moment of celebration, one of those times when everyone in the crowd seems united in a common determination to enjoy the moment until the unthinkable violence strikes. Whether it is the Shia crowds celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast in the recent Baghdad bombing (which killed 156), concert-goers of last autumn’s atrocity in Paris, or the 74 Christians celebrating Easter in a park in Lahore in April the intended message is always the same: that nowhere is safe and no one can be trusted.The weapon, too, though it has never been wielded to such deadly effect, is one that maximises the distrust and fear that these attacks intend. A truck on the streets is about as normal and everyday a sight as can be imagined. Of course there are no physical barriers to stop it from mounting the pavement but the restraints of civilisation and of sanity which we rely on make it almost unthinkable that this will happen.
War tears all restraint away. In war everything is a potential weapon and unexpectedness can make weapons more deadly. The use of civilian aircraft in the 9/11 attacks in the US is only the deadliest example of this and the disruption and loss of innocence they caused to all civilian air travel since then one of the minor victories of Osama bin Laden.
Even the city of Nice is one of the most vulnerable places in France to this kind of attack, not just because of the presence of large crowds on a road which we have been suddenly forced to see as hideously exposed, but because of its already divided politics, with a strong Front National vote which this atrocity will do nothing to diminish.
There is no guarantee possible that such an attack will not happen again. It may very well happen in Britain. We have been lucky here and not all our luck has been earned. In any case, the enemy need only be lucky once, whereas we must be lucky every time. (...)
France, and Britain too, is under attack from an apocalyptic blend of politics and religion. The dreadful simplicity of war can make use of every kind of human material, from the cold and rational planner to the angry criminal thug or the psychologically disturbed. There is no single jihadi type any more than there is a single route to radicalisation, something that makes the task of the security services much harder.
The challenge to our values is at the same time political, religious, military and social. So must the response be. This has implications that go beyond politics or security policies. Acts of war like the atrocity in Nice are above all affronts to the decency that all human beings have in common: as ordinary unheroic citizens we can stand in solidarity with the ordinary citizens of Nice and share small acts of common decency with our neighbours.
by Editors, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: : Francois Mori/AP
Too Big to Jail: Eric Holder’s Longtime Excuse for Not Prosecuting Banks Just Crashed and Burned
[ed. We've had a terrible string of AGs for quite a while now... remember Ashcroft and Gonzalez? Holder was a Wall Street lackey through and through. Was there ever any doubt?]
Eric Holder has long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.
When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”
He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”
The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.
In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.
The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.
Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”
But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”
The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.
According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.
No guilty plea was required.
But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.
The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.
In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.
As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.
In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.
Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.
The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.
Eric Holder has long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”
He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”
The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.
In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.
The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.
Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”
But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”
The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.
According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.
No guilty plea was required.
But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.
The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.
In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.
As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.
In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.
Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.
The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.
by David Dayen, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
The Suit That Couldn't Be Copied
About two years ago, I became interested in the garments of Davide Taub, the head cutter for Gieves & Hawkes, a house in London at which Alexander McQueen apprenticed, and which has a reputation for designs that are both elegant and daring. A cutter is the equivalent of a designer, and Taub is considered by some to be the finest cutter on Savile Row. I had come across his work on his blog, where he posts images of his more ambitious clothes and their construction. There are images of an alpaca-wool greatcoat whose collar, when upturned, evokes a tulip, and another called the Barrel-Back Overcoat, which, when Taub is shown wearing it, makes him appear large and mysterious and from a different era.
There is also a photograph of one of his most famous garments, a commission from Bentley, which asked four Savile Row houses to make a driving coat inspired by one of the carmaker’s current or historical sedans. You can see the garments on YouTube. Each is well made, but seeing them one after the other is a little like seeing a Golden Delicious apple, a Fuji apple, a McIntosh apple, and, at 3:55, when Taub’s jacket appears, a fighter jet.
His coat is made of a luxurious olive flannel that is obviously sturdy and obviously soft; the pockets are higher than one would expect, and slanted so that one can reach into them easily while sitting. His driving coat uses action pleats behind the sleeves, to ease mobility, and has a detachable bib, much more beautiful than the word implies, with a crosshatched pattern that suggests the days of open-top roadsters. This mixing and matching of historical styles is one of the reasons that his garments are distinctive. They suggest a controlling intelligence.
When I saw Taub’s clothes, I was struck with desire. I have always dressed like a schlub; to do otherwise feels like competing to make myself attractive, which feels like setting myself up for humiliation. But I had the sense that if I wore a garment by Taub, I would become a different person. It was this desire—combined with the fact that one of his overcoats starts at around six thousand dollars, and one of his suits at eight thousand—that made me wonder if I could get a tailor in some less expensive part of the world to copy one of his garments.
This idea did not seem outlandish to me, since I travel to Asia regularly. I was also aware that handmade clothing is not necessarily associated with luxury there, as it in the West. In fact, when I was growing up, in India, machine-made clothes were more expensive than handmade ones, and everybody preferred the former because the handmade ones always had strange problems—one pant leg being shorter than the other, or shirts with a saggy bag of cloth between the shoulder blades. Still, I’d had clothes made by Asian tailors before, and I thought I could find one who could make a sophisticated garment.
I was concerned, though, about copying Taub’s designs—in effect stealing his intellectual property. To me, this seemed cretinous; I’m bothered, after all, that people have posted PDFs of my novels on the Web, so why should I do the same to someone else? With the hope of getting Taub’s blessing, I e-mailed him and asked if he would be willing to comment on and perhaps advise a tailor who was trying to copy what he had done. I told him that I would write an article about this attempt at reproduction.
Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely a form. Many of the decisions that go into making a garment what it is—how tightly a piece of cloth is pinched when it is sewn, or what angle the needle enters at—leave no trace except in the result.
Gieves & Hawkes sends Taub to New York every February, June, and October to see clients. Last February, I met with him briefly, and we sat in a hotel-lobby restaurant. Taub is slender, dark-haired, bearded. He tends to be so quiet—not initiating conversations but instead waiting for the other person to speak—that he can seem aloof.
I had brought with me a jacket that I’d had made by a tailor in India, whom I thought I might hire to copy Taub’s work. I pulled the jacket from a plastic grocery bag, and he turned it inside out and spread it out over the table. A pained look appeared on his face. After a moment, he asked me how much the jacket had cost to construct. I said two hundred and fifty dollars. He nodded. “One of my pockets costs more than that.” He added, with kindness, “Every garment has its own story. I can’t tell what pressures the tailor was working under. We have customers who will pay a lot and who will give us time to make the best product possible.”
I asked him what faults he was finding in the jacket. He hesitated, but I pressed him. He then explained that the stitching around the buttonholes was very rough, and that this is such a basic mistake that it even has a name: the squashed bug. As Taub analyzed the jacket, I realized that there were also differences between what I had asked the tailor to do and what he had actually done. For instance, I had asked him to sew the canvas, which gives the jacket much of its shape, and not to fuse it, since the latter can cause the jacket to begin puckering after a few years. The tailor had told me that he had done as I requested, but Taub said that this was not the case. (Later, I called the tailor in India, because I’d been speaking with him about reproducing Taub’s work. He said that he had not expected I would find out about the fusing. He sounded angry at me, as if I had created a problem for myself.)
After looking at the jacket, Taub suggested that it might be best that I not try to have replicated one of the more challenging garments he had displayed on his blog. Maybe I should try to get a traditional suit made, instead. Most tailors can make some semblance of a suit, he explained.
In the months that followed, as we e-mailed back and forth about the article, Taub continued to offer me a jacket to take apart, but he ultimately convinced me that a tailor trying to copy Gieves & Hawkes’s work might only become befuddled. He suggested that the best way for a not-so-great tailor to show off his abilities would be by doing what he already does well.
I began to think that I should abandon my project. I no longer believed that a tailor in the developing world could make a Savile Row–level garment, and the essential unfairness of asking somebody in India to try to do so felt increasingly clear. I could, of course, experiment, but I didn’t have money to waste. A high-quality suit made with high-quality cloth, wherever it was made, was bound to cost at least six or seven hundred dollars.
Still, something had happened to me. I had become like a child who wants one particular toy and dreams of it all the time. I somehow knew, intellectually, that what I wanted was not going to happen, and yet I continued down the path I was on.
by Akhil Sharma, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Lakeman
There is also a photograph of one of his most famous garments, a commission from Bentley, which asked four Savile Row houses to make a driving coat inspired by one of the carmaker’s current or historical sedans. You can see the garments on YouTube. Each is well made, but seeing them one after the other is a little like seeing a Golden Delicious apple, a Fuji apple, a McIntosh apple, and, at 3:55, when Taub’s jacket appears, a fighter jet.His coat is made of a luxurious olive flannel that is obviously sturdy and obviously soft; the pockets are higher than one would expect, and slanted so that one can reach into them easily while sitting. His driving coat uses action pleats behind the sleeves, to ease mobility, and has a detachable bib, much more beautiful than the word implies, with a crosshatched pattern that suggests the days of open-top roadsters. This mixing and matching of historical styles is one of the reasons that his garments are distinctive. They suggest a controlling intelligence.
When I saw Taub’s clothes, I was struck with desire. I have always dressed like a schlub; to do otherwise feels like competing to make myself attractive, which feels like setting myself up for humiliation. But I had the sense that if I wore a garment by Taub, I would become a different person. It was this desire—combined with the fact that one of his overcoats starts at around six thousand dollars, and one of his suits at eight thousand—that made me wonder if I could get a tailor in some less expensive part of the world to copy one of his garments.
This idea did not seem outlandish to me, since I travel to Asia regularly. I was also aware that handmade clothing is not necessarily associated with luxury there, as it in the West. In fact, when I was growing up, in India, machine-made clothes were more expensive than handmade ones, and everybody preferred the former because the handmade ones always had strange problems—one pant leg being shorter than the other, or shirts with a saggy bag of cloth between the shoulder blades. Still, I’d had clothes made by Asian tailors before, and I thought I could find one who could make a sophisticated garment.
I was concerned, though, about copying Taub’s designs—in effect stealing his intellectual property. To me, this seemed cretinous; I’m bothered, after all, that people have posted PDFs of my novels on the Web, so why should I do the same to someone else? With the hope of getting Taub’s blessing, I e-mailed him and asked if he would be willing to comment on and perhaps advise a tailor who was trying to copy what he had done. I told him that I would write an article about this attempt at reproduction.
Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely a form. Many of the decisions that go into making a garment what it is—how tightly a piece of cloth is pinched when it is sewn, or what angle the needle enters at—leave no trace except in the result.
Gieves & Hawkes sends Taub to New York every February, June, and October to see clients. Last February, I met with him briefly, and we sat in a hotel-lobby restaurant. Taub is slender, dark-haired, bearded. He tends to be so quiet—not initiating conversations but instead waiting for the other person to speak—that he can seem aloof.
I had brought with me a jacket that I’d had made by a tailor in India, whom I thought I might hire to copy Taub’s work. I pulled the jacket from a plastic grocery bag, and he turned it inside out and spread it out over the table. A pained look appeared on his face. After a moment, he asked me how much the jacket had cost to construct. I said two hundred and fifty dollars. He nodded. “One of my pockets costs more than that.” He added, with kindness, “Every garment has its own story. I can’t tell what pressures the tailor was working under. We have customers who will pay a lot and who will give us time to make the best product possible.”
I asked him what faults he was finding in the jacket. He hesitated, but I pressed him. He then explained that the stitching around the buttonholes was very rough, and that this is such a basic mistake that it even has a name: the squashed bug. As Taub analyzed the jacket, I realized that there were also differences between what I had asked the tailor to do and what he had actually done. For instance, I had asked him to sew the canvas, which gives the jacket much of its shape, and not to fuse it, since the latter can cause the jacket to begin puckering after a few years. The tailor had told me that he had done as I requested, but Taub said that this was not the case. (Later, I called the tailor in India, because I’d been speaking with him about reproducing Taub’s work. He said that he had not expected I would find out about the fusing. He sounded angry at me, as if I had created a problem for myself.)
After looking at the jacket, Taub suggested that it might be best that I not try to have replicated one of the more challenging garments he had displayed on his blog. Maybe I should try to get a traditional suit made, instead. Most tailors can make some semblance of a suit, he explained.
In the months that followed, as we e-mailed back and forth about the article, Taub continued to offer me a jacket to take apart, but he ultimately convinced me that a tailor trying to copy Gieves & Hawkes’s work might only become befuddled. He suggested that the best way for a not-so-great tailor to show off his abilities would be by doing what he already does well.
I began to think that I should abandon my project. I no longer believed that a tailor in the developing world could make a Savile Row–level garment, and the essential unfairness of asking somebody in India to try to do so felt increasingly clear. I could, of course, experiment, but I didn’t have money to waste. A high-quality suit made with high-quality cloth, wherever it was made, was bound to cost at least six or seven hundred dollars.
Still, something had happened to me. I had become like a child who wants one particular toy and dreams of it all the time. I somehow knew, intellectually, that what I wanted was not going to happen, and yet I continued down the path I was on.
by Akhil Sharma, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Lakeman
Thursday, July 14, 2016
The (G.O.P.) Party’s Over
This column has argued for a while now that there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy. At least a one-party autocracy can order things to get done.
A one-party democracy — that is, a two-party system where only one party is interested in governing and the other is in constant blocking mode, which has characterized America in recent years — is much worse. It can’t do anything big, hard or important.
We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.
That is the best thing that could happen to America, at least for the next two years — that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls. That would have multiple advantages for our country.
First, if Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance (depending on the size of a Democratic majority in the Senate) to pass common-sense gun laws. That would mean restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted as part of the 1994 federal crime bill but expired after 10 years, and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun.
I don’t want to touch any citizen’s Second Amendment rights, but the notion that we can’t restrict military weapons that are increasingly being used in mass murders defies common sense — yet it can’t be fixed as long as today’s G.O.P. controls any branch of government.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can borrow $100 billion at close to zero interest for a national infrastructure rebuild to deal with some of the nation’s shameful deferred maintenance of roads, bridges, airports and rails and its inadequate bandwidth, and create more blue-collar jobs that would stimulate growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would stimulate more clean energy production and allow us to reduce both corporate taxes and personal income taxes, which would also help spur growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can fix whatever needs fixing with Obamacare, without having to junk the whole thing. Right now we have the worst of all worlds: The G.O.P. will not participate in any improvements to Obamacare nor has it offered a credible alternative.
At the same time, if Clinton crushes Trump in November, the message will be sent by the American people that the game he played to become the Republican nominee — through mainstreaming bigotry; name-calling; insulting women, the handicapped, Latinos and Muslims; retweeting posts by hate groups; ignorance of the Constitution; and a willingness to lie and make stuff up with an ease and regularity never seen before at the presidential campaign level — should never be tried by anyone again. The voters’ message, “Go away,” would be deafening.
Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
Our country needs a healthy center-right party that can compete with a healthy center-left party. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whoever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
The party grew into a messy, untended garden, and Donald Trump was like an invasive species that finally just took over the whole thing.
A one-party democracy — that is, a two-party system where only one party is interested in governing and the other is in constant blocking mode, which has characterized America in recent years — is much worse. It can’t do anything big, hard or important.
We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.That is the best thing that could happen to America, at least for the next two years — that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls. That would have multiple advantages for our country.
First, if Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance (depending on the size of a Democratic majority in the Senate) to pass common-sense gun laws. That would mean restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted as part of the 1994 federal crime bill but expired after 10 years, and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun.
I don’t want to touch any citizen’s Second Amendment rights, but the notion that we can’t restrict military weapons that are increasingly being used in mass murders defies common sense — yet it can’t be fixed as long as today’s G.O.P. controls any branch of government.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can borrow $100 billion at close to zero interest for a national infrastructure rebuild to deal with some of the nation’s shameful deferred maintenance of roads, bridges, airports and rails and its inadequate bandwidth, and create more blue-collar jobs that would stimulate growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would stimulate more clean energy production and allow us to reduce both corporate taxes and personal income taxes, which would also help spur growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can fix whatever needs fixing with Obamacare, without having to junk the whole thing. Right now we have the worst of all worlds: The G.O.P. will not participate in any improvements to Obamacare nor has it offered a credible alternative.
At the same time, if Clinton crushes Trump in November, the message will be sent by the American people that the game he played to become the Republican nominee — through mainstreaming bigotry; name-calling; insulting women, the handicapped, Latinos and Muslims; retweeting posts by hate groups; ignorance of the Constitution; and a willingness to lie and make stuff up with an ease and regularity never seen before at the presidential campaign level — should never be tried by anyone again. The voters’ message, “Go away,” would be deafening.
Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
Our country needs a healthy center-right party that can compete with a healthy center-left party. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whoever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
The party grew into a messy, untended garden, and Donald Trump was like an invasive species that finally just took over the whole thing.
by Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills, NY Times
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