Being Honest About Trump

[ed. Whatever you think of Donald Trump's chances in November it says a lot about our country that he's achieved what he has so far. In the end, it's not enough to say... oh, I made a mistake, or, I thought we just needed a change (Brexit, anyone?). Even if you're not fully aware, you're still fully culpable. See also: The Beginning of the End.]

...We walk out of the beautiful museum and find ourselves back in a uniquely frightening moment in American life. A candidate for President who is the announced enemy of the openness that America has traditionally stood for and that drew persecuted émigrés like Moholy-Nagy to America as to a golden land, a candidate who embraces the mottos and rhetoric of the pro-fascist groups of that same wretched time, has taken over one of our most venerable political parties, and he seems still in the ascendancy. His language remains not merely sloppy or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency that have governed American politics. Most recently, just this week, he has repeated the lie that there has been a call for “a moment of silence” in honor of the murderer of five policemen in Dallas.

This ought to be, as people said quaintly just four or five months ago, “disqualifying.” Nonetheless, his takeover of the Republican Party is complete, and, in various postures of spinelessness, its authorities accede to his authority, or else opportunistically posture for a place in the wake of it. Many of them doubtless assume that he will lose and are hoping for a better position afterward—still, the very small show of backbone that would be required to resist his takeover seems unavailable. Even those who clearly fear and despise him, like the Bush family, seem able to register their opposition only in veiled language and cautiously equivocal formulations; Jeb Bush knows what Trump is, but still feels obliged to say that he would “feel sad” if Trump lost.

What is genuinely alarming is the urge, however human it may be, to normalize the abnormal by turning toward emotions and attitudes that are familiar. To their great credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it, insisting on her “criminality” at the very moment when it’s officially rejected, and attempting to equate this normal politician with an abnormal threat to political life itself. They do this, in part, to placate their readership. In the so-called mainstream (call it liberal) media, meanwhile, the election is treated with blithe inconsequence, as another occasion for strategy-weighing. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this! While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.

A certain number of the disengaged insist that Trump isn’t really as bad as all that. And there may indeed be another universe in which Donald Trump is one more blowhard billionaire with mixed-up politics but a basically benevolent heart, a Ross Perot type, or perhaps more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, preaching some confused combination of populism and self-help and doomed to flounder when he comes to power. This would not be the worst thing imaginable. Unfortunately, that universe is not this one. Trump is unstable, a liar, narcissistic, contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a pathos to his followers’ dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But he did not come to political attention as a “populist”; he came to politics as a racist, a proponent of birtherism.

As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences invariably are. Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against it fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

Hillary Clinton is an ordinary liberal politician. She has her faults, easily described, often documented—though, for the most part, the worst accusations against her have turned out to be fiction. No reasonable person, no matter how opposed to her politics, can believe for a second that Clinton’s accession to power would be a threat to the Constitution or the continuation of American democracy. No reasonable person can believe that Trump’s accession to power would not be.

By Adam Gopnik , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Spencer Platt/Getty

Val Archer (b. 1946), Pearl
via:

How to Avoid the Most Common Fake Foods on Restaurant Menus

Traditionally, food fraud scandals have involved supermarket staples like domestic Parmesan cut with high levels of cellulose, extra-virgin olive oil that failed to meet the extra-virgin standard, honey diluted with corn syrup, or dried spices "extended" with chopped weeds.

But lately the media focus has turned to restaurant menus. Inside Edition reported that Red Lobster’s namesake bisque and Nathan’s Famous’ lobster salad both missed a crucial ingredient — lobster. A scathing Tampa Bay Times report bashed self-proclaimed "farm-to-table" restaurants for lying about almost everything down to the names of local farmer purveyors, and serving farmed Asian pollock as Alaskan wild-caught, drug-addled feedlot cattle as grass-fed, and, worst of all for those following Jewish or Muslim dietary customs, swapping cheaper pork for veal.

Food fraud is a sophisticated $50 billion annual industry, according to Michigan State University's Food Fraud Initiative, and while many of the nation's scams occur in grocery store aisles and retail shops, what has surprised many readers of my new book Real Food/Fake Food the most is the Wild West of restaurant menus. There’s a perception that spending more or visiting "name" chefs is an insurance policy against counterfeits, but that’s not really true. Food deceptions are institutionalized in the food-service industry: Some occur further up the supply chain, and many are in fact perfectly legal, even if morally outrageous.

Reading the menu and the waiter is as much art as science, so here are the top three fake food flags — keep an eye out especially for red snapper, Kobe, or the use of truffle oil — that should impact your evaluation of all claims on a restaurant’s menu.

1. Where’s the beef? USDA Prime, Kobe, and "Dry-Aged"

It is important to understand that menus and restaurant food claims are largely unregulated, exempt from Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture rules for retail. Label a "Choice" steak "USDA Prime" in the supermarket and you’ll likely get fined; label it "USDA Prime" on a menu and you just significantly enhanced your margin. Diners take it for granted that 28-day dry-aged beef was actually aged, that heirloom breed pork is not the standard Sysco version, and that organic produce is organic. They should not. If investigations like the Tampa Bay Times' have shown one thing, it’s that the more "value added" tasty-sounding adjectives adorn a menu, the more likely there are lies. This is especially true in the highest-priced sections of most restaurant menus, meat and seafood.

The single biggest menu red flag, regardless of the price level of the establishment, is the use of the words "Kobe beef." When Inside Edition confronted New York’s Old Homestead steakhouse about serving $350 Kobe steak that was not from Kobe, the spokesman basically dismissed their finding as semantics. The supply of the real thing is so scarce that individual restaurants are licensed by Kobe’s marketing council to buy it, and you can literally count the restaurants in this country serving the real thing on your fingers. The nine such places in the country proudly display golden steer plaques, usually at the front counter. The other 99+ percent of Kobe claims are lies, including all for burgers, sliders, hot dogs, and anything cheap — the real thing sells for well over$20 an ounce.

Other beef claims are much harder to evaluate. But as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of beef produced in this country is not of high quality — it is industrial feedlot beef, reared on drugs and silage, a fermented corn stew, as well as animal by-products. Yet there are a lot of restaurants serving steak, many of them upscale. Less than two percent of the beef produced in the country grades USDA Prime (the USDA’s numbers report they declare four percent of American beef "Prime," but that only reflects the percentage of beef that’s actually submitted to be graded; lower-quality beef often isn’t graded at all). Only a small percentage of our beef is truly grass fed and even less is also raised drug- and animal-byproduct free. There are just a handful of established steakhouses like Keens in New York and Bern’s in Tampa that dry-age their own meat in house. And only a tiny handful of wholesalers like New York’s DeBragga distribute Japanese beef.

In all these cases, the question you should be asking your waiter is "where does your meat come from?" If they can unflinchingly name a specialty distributor, a growers’ cooperative like Niman Ranch, or a particular farm such as Colorado’s 7X ranch, it’s a good sign. If they can’t answer this question specifically and without hesitation, it’s a terrible sign — all these meats are highly specialized and need to be carefully sourced.

2. Red snapper = red flags

Seafood is even worse. In the largest nationwide study conducted by Oceana in 2013, 38 percent of all restaurants — and a staggering 74 percent of all sushi eateries — mislabeled the species of fish served. While businesses inevitably blamed distributors and wholesalers, it was no accident — the substitute was always less expensive than the one claimed on the menu.

How to avoid that upcharge? Rockefeller University's Dr. Mark Stoeckle, involved in DNA species testing for the Barcode of Life project, gave me this tip: "Just don’t ever order red snapper." The poster child for fraud, the real thing is served up less than six percent of the time. At New York sushi temple Sushi Nakazawa, often rated the Big Apple’s best, the fraud risk is so high they simply they won’t serve red snapper — ever. Eat this fish out every night for a week and odds are you still won’t have tasted it, and just seeing it on a menu at anything less than one of the country’s top seafood restaurants makes me immediately suspect of everything else.

But it’s not just red snapper: cod, halibut, flounder, and grouper are commonly faked, often by Cambodian ponga, a catfish mass-produced in Asian fish farms under suspect conditions that have included banned drugs. In sushi restaurants, white tuna, widely used in rolls, did almost as poorly as red snapper, and the primary substitute is escolar, known in the trade as the "Ex-Lax fish" due to the digestive distress it can cause — it used to be banned on our shores. The reason seafood is so widely and easily faked is because most diners are so disconnected from it: If you don’t fish, you have no idea what most fish look like. In any case, in restaurants it is almost always entirely prepared, already cut into filets — which with white fishes, are largely indistinguishable, especially under a mound of sauce or in cioppino.

by Larry Olmsted, Eater | Read more:
Image: Alena Haurylik/Shutterstock

Sanyu (1901-1966), Three Nudes, 1950s
via:

Gineke Zikken
via:

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.

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.

by James Poniewozik, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

Ron Lawson
via:

via:

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

R.E.M.

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.]

"I'd very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” Taylor Swift writes in a statement released to the world via an Instagram post. She is upset that she has been “falsely painted as a liar” in a series of events that amount to “character assassination”. Someone is offering the world a story about her, a story in which she is the villain. Swift doesn’t want to accept that role.

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

Beck

via:

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

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.

by Robert Simonson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mike Roemer

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

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.”

by Dave Itzkoff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Terry Ratzlaff for The New York Times

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

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.]