Thursday, July 21, 2016
Group Therapy: Was It Really a Game?
Before A Question of Scruples, Loaded Questions, or Curses; decades before Cards Against Humanity, Drunk Stoned or Stupid, or Never Have I Ever; before Nasty Things, What’s Yours Like?, or Disturbed Friends, there was Group Therapy, the original psychological adult board game. Released in 1969, Group Therapy straddled the free-love ’60s and the ’70s Me Decade, groovy and real, a plain black box with white text, just the name and question: “Is it really a game"? Yes, reads the instruction booklet, Group Therapy is a game. “But Group Therapy is for people who want to do more than just play games. For people who want to open up. Get in touch. Let go. Be free.”
The rules are simple. Players move their tokens along a game board from the beginning space marked “Hung Up” to the final space marked “Free.” To reach “Free,” players must draw from three decks of cards and perform the cards’ instructions. These tasks grow more difficult as you move along the board, from yellow to blue to red.
From the yellow deck: “Ask someone to hold you and rock you. Give yourself to the experience.”
From the blue deck: “Stand facing the group member who threatens you most. Pushing your hands against his, tell him why he frightens you.”
And from the red deck, my absolute favorite card: “You have been accused of over-intellectualizing your hang-ups. Respond — without falling victim to that criticism.”
Within a minute after performing each card’s instruction, players must issue a judgment by displaying a card. One side reads “With It,” the other “Cop Out.” With each “With It” judgment, players advance a space, and go back for each “Cop Out.” A player may also read, pass, and move their token one space back.
A better tagline for Group Therapy might be one I read online: “It’s like Candyland except with more awkwardness and crying.” (...)
Saturday, November 3, 1973. All in the Family, the number one show in the country with an average weekly audience of 20 million viewers, airs an episode entitled “The Games Bunkers Play.” Mike, better known as “Meathead,” breaks out a board game after dinner and invites his friend, Lionel Jefferson, and the Lorenzos, the Bunkers’ neighbors, along with Archie, Edith, and Gloria to play.
“It’s a psychological game — if you play this game right, you could really learn a lot about yourself,” Meathead explains enthusiastically. “You pick a card when it comes your turn, you read it and do what it’s says.”
“Sounds left-wing to me,” Archie quips.
Archie picks the first card: “Do an interpretive dance that shows how you feel when you think nobody likes you.” The audience erupts in laughter. Archie makes a face, picks another: “Discuss the part of your body which you are most proud of.”
With that Archie exits (“I’m doing my interpretative of a guy going down to Kelsey’s for a couple of beers.”) The group plays on. Meathead loses his cool when they judge him as a “Cop Out.” He accuses everyone of criticizing him just as harshly as Archie. Edith follows him into the kitchen. Archie doesn’t hate you, Edith explains. He criticizes you because he sees in you all the things that he can never be.
When Archie comes home, oblivious to what had gone one, Mike says he understands and hugs him.
4.
Inside our home in Maple Shade, N.J., a working class suburb of Philadelphia, the Summer of Love arrived around 1975. Mom, who worked part-time as a secretary at our Catholic school, read Leo Buscaglia pop psychology books and prayer booklets she kept in her bedside table. Dad, a local delivery truck driver, played whale call cassettes and ordered home wine-making kits. We traced biorhythm charts with a Spirograph-looking instrument that determined if our energies were compatible, if we were having “up” or “down” days. Mom and Dad may have taken part in a few hippie things, but were far from hippies. They had more in common with All in the Family than Jefferson Airplane.
Dad bought Group Therapy at a toy store in 1974. Mom’s high school friends, ex-cheerleaders all, came by to play, and brought their husbands along. Marlboro smoke filled the kitchen on these adult get-togethers. I am reminded of one night when I was eight years old, sitting down next to empty bottles of Boone’s Farm wine, and insisting on playing the game as well.
I drew the card that read “You are advertising yourself as a lover. What does the ad say?”
Mom told me to pick another one, then sent me back to bed, without the group giving their judgment.
The rules are simple. Players move their tokens along a game board from the beginning space marked “Hung Up” to the final space marked “Free.” To reach “Free,” players must draw from three decks of cards and perform the cards’ instructions. These tasks grow more difficult as you move along the board, from yellow to blue to red.From the yellow deck: “Ask someone to hold you and rock you. Give yourself to the experience.”
From the blue deck: “Stand facing the group member who threatens you most. Pushing your hands against his, tell him why he frightens you.”
And from the red deck, my absolute favorite card: “You have been accused of over-intellectualizing your hang-ups. Respond — without falling victim to that criticism.”
Within a minute after performing each card’s instruction, players must issue a judgment by displaying a card. One side reads “With It,” the other “Cop Out.” With each “With It” judgment, players advance a space, and go back for each “Cop Out.” A player may also read, pass, and move their token one space back.
A better tagline for Group Therapy might be one I read online: “It’s like Candyland except with more awkwardness and crying.” (...)
Saturday, November 3, 1973. All in the Family, the number one show in the country with an average weekly audience of 20 million viewers, airs an episode entitled “The Games Bunkers Play.” Mike, better known as “Meathead,” breaks out a board game after dinner and invites his friend, Lionel Jefferson, and the Lorenzos, the Bunkers’ neighbors, along with Archie, Edith, and Gloria to play.
“It’s a psychological game — if you play this game right, you could really learn a lot about yourself,” Meathead explains enthusiastically. “You pick a card when it comes your turn, you read it and do what it’s says.”
“Sounds left-wing to me,” Archie quips.
Archie picks the first card: “Do an interpretive dance that shows how you feel when you think nobody likes you.” The audience erupts in laughter. Archie makes a face, picks another: “Discuss the part of your body which you are most proud of.”
With that Archie exits (“I’m doing my interpretative of a guy going down to Kelsey’s for a couple of beers.”) The group plays on. Meathead loses his cool when they judge him as a “Cop Out.” He accuses everyone of criticizing him just as harshly as Archie. Edith follows him into the kitchen. Archie doesn’t hate you, Edith explains. He criticizes you because he sees in you all the things that he can never be.
When Archie comes home, oblivious to what had gone one, Mike says he understands and hugs him.
4.
Inside our home in Maple Shade, N.J., a working class suburb of Philadelphia, the Summer of Love arrived around 1975. Mom, who worked part-time as a secretary at our Catholic school, read Leo Buscaglia pop psychology books and prayer booklets she kept in her bedside table. Dad, a local delivery truck driver, played whale call cassettes and ordered home wine-making kits. We traced biorhythm charts with a Spirograph-looking instrument that determined if our energies were compatible, if we were having “up” or “down” days. Mom and Dad may have taken part in a few hippie things, but were far from hippies. They had more in common with All in the Family than Jefferson Airplane.
Dad bought Group Therapy at a toy store in 1974. Mom’s high school friends, ex-cheerleaders all, came by to play, and brought their husbands along. Marlboro smoke filled the kitchen on these adult get-togethers. I am reminded of one night when I was eight years old, sitting down next to empty bottles of Boone’s Farm wine, and insisting on playing the game as well.
I drew the card that read “You are advertising yourself as a lover. What does the ad say?”
Mom told me to pick another one, then sent me back to bed, without the group giving their judgment.
by Daniel Nester, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Daniel Nester
‘BoJack Horseman’: Hilarious and Hallucinatory
[ed. See also: The World According to ‘BoJack Horseman’]
The first time I watched “BoJack Horseman,” I thought I’d seen this sort of thing too many times before. This may sound like an odd thing to say about an animated comedy featuring a washed-up sitcom actor who happens to be a horse, but bear with me.
The premise felt like one more cynical take on showbiz shallowness and debauchery — “Entourage” and “Episodes” crammed into two ends of a horse costume. The players were familiar types: an entitled, has-been title character (Will Arnett); his tightly wound agent and ex-lover, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), a cat; his shiftless houseguest, Todd (Aaron Paul), a 20-something human; his amiable frenemy, a Labrador retriever named Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins).
But by the middle of the first season and throughout its spectacular second one, “BoJack Horseman,” created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, revealed itself as another, much more thoughtful creature.
Tired of living on the residual money and fame from his corny hit ’90s sitcom (“Horsin’ Around,” about a horse who adopts three human children), BoJack decides to pursue his dream of starring in the biopic “Secretariat.” (Tagline: “He’s tired of running in circles.”) The process forces him to get serious about his work, to confront the number of people he’s hurt over the course of his career and, ultimately, to grapple with his own self-destructiveness and depression.
BoJack, an ass of a horse, is right in the wheelhouse of Mr. Arnett, who has played self-centered oafs like Gob Bluth in “Arrested Development.” But he’s also deeply, well, human: self-absorbed, self-destructive, but self-aware enough to know that he wants to be better than he is, even as he fails.
In the third season, which arrives on Friday on Netflix, BoJack has realized his goal — kind of. After he flaked out on the set of “Secretariat,” the director completed his scenes by using a C.G.I. horse — which, it turned out, played the role better than BoJack himself.
Now he’s doing an awards-season press tour under the eye of his “Oscar whisperer” publicist, Ana Spanikopita (Angela Bassett), taking credit for the work of an improved electronic simulacrum of himself.
For the BoJack we thought we knew in the beginning of the series, this might be enough: praise, validation and love, without having to work for them. Now, he realizes, he wants to be good enough to have done it.
But actually doing the work is hard, and in the amniotic infinity pool of celebrity that BoJack floats in, there are too many incentives just to do the easy thing. BoJack is, among other things, an addict — booze, drugs, sex — and the endorphin rush of public adulation is one of the toughest buzzes for him to kick.
The Oscar campaign provides the arc of the new season, as BoJack endures press interviews (including one with a reporter from “Manatee Fair”) and schmoozes with industry types at parties including a “bat bat mitzvah,” where the young celebrant becoming an adult is, in fact, a bat. (“BoJack” is not above a broad animal joke; when Ana orders soup in a restaurant, the waiter who brings it is, naturally, a fly.)
The absurdist comedy and hallucinatory visuals match the series’s take on Hollywood as a reality-distortion field. But the series never takes an attitude of easy superiority to its showbiz characters. At heart, “BoJack Horseman” is a comedy about lonely people (and animals) who are never by themselves.
The first time I watched “BoJack Horseman,” I thought I’d seen this sort of thing too many times before. This may sound like an odd thing to say about an animated comedy featuring a washed-up sitcom actor who happens to be a horse, but bear with me.
The premise felt like one more cynical take on showbiz shallowness and debauchery — “Entourage” and “Episodes” crammed into two ends of a horse costume. The players were familiar types: an entitled, has-been title character (Will Arnett); his tightly wound agent and ex-lover, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), a cat; his shiftless houseguest, Todd (Aaron Paul), a 20-something human; his amiable frenemy, a Labrador retriever named Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins).
But by the middle of the first season and throughout its spectacular second one, “BoJack Horseman,” created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, revealed itself as another, much more thoughtful creature.Tired of living on the residual money and fame from his corny hit ’90s sitcom (“Horsin’ Around,” about a horse who adopts three human children), BoJack decides to pursue his dream of starring in the biopic “Secretariat.” (Tagline: “He’s tired of running in circles.”) The process forces him to get serious about his work, to confront the number of people he’s hurt over the course of his career and, ultimately, to grapple with his own self-destructiveness and depression.
BoJack, an ass of a horse, is right in the wheelhouse of Mr. Arnett, who has played self-centered oafs like Gob Bluth in “Arrested Development.” But he’s also deeply, well, human: self-absorbed, self-destructive, but self-aware enough to know that he wants to be better than he is, even as he fails.
In the third season, which arrives on Friday on Netflix, BoJack has realized his goal — kind of. After he flaked out on the set of “Secretariat,” the director completed his scenes by using a C.G.I. horse — which, it turned out, played the role better than BoJack himself.
Now he’s doing an awards-season press tour under the eye of his “Oscar whisperer” publicist, Ana Spanikopita (Angela Bassett), taking credit for the work of an improved electronic simulacrum of himself.
For the BoJack we thought we knew in the beginning of the series, this might be enough: praise, validation and love, without having to work for them. Now, he realizes, he wants to be good enough to have done it.
But actually doing the work is hard, and in the amniotic infinity pool of celebrity that BoJack floats in, there are too many incentives just to do the easy thing. BoJack is, among other things, an addict — booze, drugs, sex — and the endorphin rush of public adulation is one of the toughest buzzes for him to kick.
The Oscar campaign provides the arc of the new season, as BoJack endures press interviews (including one with a reporter from “Manatee Fair”) and schmoozes with industry types at parties including a “bat bat mitzvah,” where the young celebrant becoming an adult is, in fact, a bat. (“BoJack” is not above a broad animal joke; when Ana orders soup in a restaurant, the waiter who brings it is, naturally, a fly.)
The absurdist comedy and hallucinatory visuals match the series’s take on Hollywood as a reality-distortion field. But the series never takes an attitude of easy superiority to its showbiz characters. At heart, “BoJack Horseman” is a comedy about lonely people (and animals) who are never by themselves.
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Netflix
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Too Cool
The news was enough to have French smokers choking on their morning cigarette: France is considering banning some tobacco brands because they are just too cool.
Among those threatened are Gitanes and Gauloises, beloved of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to puff through five packets of filterless Gitanes a day.
The ban, which could also cover the Lucky Strike, Marlboro Gold, Vogue and Fortuna brands, is the logical conclusion of a new public health law – based on a European directive – which stipulates tobacco products “must not include any element that contributes to the promotion of tobacco or give an erroneous impression of certain characteristics”.
Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vague”, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociability”. (...)
In May, France ordered all cigarette manufacturers to create neutral packaging. The bill means that from November, French shops can only sell the new packets that are of a uniform size and colour and have the brand name in a small uniform font.
The new packs are part of a hotly disputed health reform bill voted through by French MPs in 2014 which also tackles eating disorders, sunbed use and binge drinking. An attempt to scrap the neutral cigarette package clause failed by just two votes in November 2015.
by Kim Willsher, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sonny Meddle/Rex/Shutterstock
Among those threatened are Gitanes and Gauloises, beloved of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to puff through five packets of filterless Gitanes a day.The ban, which could also cover the Lucky Strike, Marlboro Gold, Vogue and Fortuna brands, is the logical conclusion of a new public health law – based on a European directive – which stipulates tobacco products “must not include any element that contributes to the promotion of tobacco or give an erroneous impression of certain characteristics”.
Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vague”, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociability”. (...)
In May, France ordered all cigarette manufacturers to create neutral packaging. The bill means that from November, French shops can only sell the new packets that are of a uniform size and colour and have the brand name in a small uniform font.
The new packs are part of a hotly disputed health reform bill voted through by French MPs in 2014 which also tackles eating disorders, sunbed use and binge drinking. An attempt to scrap the neutral cigarette package clause failed by just two votes in November 2015.
by Kim Willsher, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sonny Meddle/Rex/Shutterstock
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Kim Kardashian vs Taylor Swift: a Battle of Two PR Styles
[ed. Nice to get caught up every seven years or so.... or, maybe not.]
How did we get here? If you haven’t been following the drama of Swift vs West for the past seven years, here are the basics of what we know. In 2009, Swift was awarded the MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video. Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech to insist that, with “Single Ladies”, a song nominated for the same award, Beyoncé “had one of the best videos of all time”. West’s reputation as (in Barack Obama’s words) “a jackass”, was cemented: the majority of people watching at home were resoundingly on Swift’s side. West apologised. Fast forward a few years, and the two have kissed and made up: at the 2015 VMAs, Swift presented West with an award of his own. A month later, West sends Swift flowers – she posts a picture of them to Instagram, hastags it #BFFs, and it becomes her most popular post to the site. Then, in February of this year, West debuts his new album, including the song “Famous”, which contains the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? / I made that bitch famous” – tabloids were shocked. West claims that he had Swift’s approval. Swift denied it, in her first of several statements she would make in relation to this incident.At the Grammy Awards a few days later, Swift made a thinly veiled allusion to those who “try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame”. West claimed that despite her comments, Swift had approved the lyrics in question during a phone call. A video for the song comes out, showing a naked Swift lookalike in bed next to West – many labelled it misogynistic. At this point, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, started to defend her husband, insisting that the phone conversation had happened on film in an interview with GQ – and that she has the tapes. In a somewhat condescending statement, Swift denied that she had ever heard the song or approved the specific lyrics in question, but confirmed that Kanye West had called her to ask her something else about the song.
“Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West. However, that does not change the fact that much of what Kim is saying is incorrect. Kanye West and Taylor only spoke once on the phone while she was on vacation with her family in January of 2016 and they have never spoken since. Taylor has never denied that conversation took place. It was on that phone call that Kanye West also asked her to release the song on her Twitter account, which she declined to do. Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term ‘that bitch’ in referencing her. A song cannot be approved if it was never heard. Kanye West never played the song for Taylor Swift. Taylor heard it for the first time when everyone else did and was humiliated. Kim Kardashian’s claim that Taylor and her team were aware of being recorded is not true, and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”
Then, last night, just after an episode of her reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians aired discussing the whole affair, Kim Kardashian West posted the video footage to her Snapchat.
In the video we see Kanye reading her the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex”. We don’t see him reading the line about how he made her famous, but we can tell that something that is at least similar is read, by Swift’s response: “You honestly didn’t know who I was before that. It doesn’t matter if I sold seven million of that album before you did that, which is what happened. You didn’t know who I was.” Less than an hour later, Swift released a statement which emphasises that she was not aware that she would be referred to as “that bitch” in the song, hence her change in tone.
The charitable reading of Swift is that she was overly nice to West on the phone without knowing the specifics. The less charitable reading is that she wanted the lyric to be released to the public, but to also publically reject it as misogynistic: because, as Kim Kardashian West says on KUWTK, she wanted to “play the victim” as “it worked so well for her the first time”. Many agreed with Kardashian West. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty and #KimExposedTaylorParty started trending on Twitter – the most enthusiastic followers of to-the-minute celebrity gossip felt it was high time the sweet, girlish singer was “exposed” as something a lot less innocent. People were taking sides – and they chose Kim’s.
Kim Kardashian West and Taylor Swift have very different types of fame, and very different approaches to being famous, but both are powerful women renowned – infamous, even – for controlling their public image down to the minute details. They have both spent years crafting channels that give the illusion of intimacy with their audiences, building relationships (romantic and otherwise) with other celebrities, turning unsavoury tabloid stories to their own advantage, carefully selecting which parts of their personal lives to share with the world. As Taylor’s fear of “narrative” exemplifies, they are, in essence, storytellers. This feud represents a battle between two very different styles of storytelling.
by Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Kevin Mazur/WireImage, E!; Taylor Swift
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
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