Milton Glaser Still Hearts New York

Milton Glaser still loves New York, but these days, he said, it sometimes worries him. Mr. Glaser, 87, created one of the most potent designs of the last century: I ♥ NY, a rallying symbol for New York when the city and state were in crisis in 1977. On a recent afternoon, he puzzled over what design he would create for the New York of 2016.

This city, he said, is in a different crisis, brought on by its own success.

“That’s an enormous problem,” he said, seated in the canary-colored conference room of his design studio on East 32nd Street, where he has worked since 1965. Childish shrieks from the schoolyard next door rippled through the office. Scattered around the room were some of his recent designs, including bottles of Trump Vodka and a poster proclaiming, “To Vote Is to Exist.”

“You can’t have this much development, and the consequential eviction of hundreds of thousands of people who will have no place to live,” Mr. Glaser said. “There’s some fundamental misjudgment about the balance between ordinary people and people who make enormous amounts of money. The idea of apartments for $50 million. What? On what basis?”

If he were to design a successor to the I ♥ NY logo today, he said, “What you would want is more of a sense of fairness in the city, whatever that means.”

“I can’t be glib about this,” he continued, “because the problem is too enormous and difficult to deal with.”

New York is, famously, a town of transience, with newcomers arriving constantly, either making their mark or coming a cropper, then leaving for jobs overseas, or back home, or the sun of California. The human tides are as regular as the cycles of boom and bust and boom.

But there are also the lions who didn’t leave, who put their imprint on the battered city of the 1970s and remain part of the metropolis that emerged from it. New York is filled with them: Felix G. Rohatyn and Gloria Steinem, Charles B. Rangel and Robert M. Morgenthau, Diane von Furstenberg and Grandmaster Flash, Harry Belafonte and Larry Kramer. When others left, they kept on keeping on.

Milton Glaser’s 87-year love affair with New York is a fable of the city itself, beginning in one era of economic and ethnic division, the 1930s in the South Bronx, and arriving now in another one, with different fault lines and promises. Along the way, his I ♥ NY logo, first drawn on a scrap of paper in the back of taxi, has declared that love in a nearly universal language, understood in every corner of the planet.

“It’s freakish,” Mr. Glaser said. “Also, it’s something I wish people would forget, because I’ve done other things.”

During a visit to his studio, where the front door bears the motto “Art Is Work,” Mr. Glaser smiled when asked why he kept working. Upstairs, he and Clay Felker started New York magazine in 1968; on another floor, he once had 30-odd workers designing displays for Grand Union supermarkets.

“You really want an answer?” he said. “It’s the greatest source of pleasure in my life. I am so thrilled by making something that didn’t exist before. There’s nothing, nothing even close. I never go to the theater, I never go to concerts, I no longer go to movies. I don’t do anything except work. It’s like magic.

“I also think there’s an opportunity to do good. Not in a moralistic sense, but to feel that you’re a part of something larger than yourself. But that’s not really why I do it. I do it because it is so pleasurable for me. I derive this deep, deep satisfaction that nothing else, including sex, has ever given me. It’s the reason I’m here, is to do the work. And I’m so happy that I can still do it well.”

by John Leland, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Nicole Bengiveno and Milton Glaser

Jamie xx

[ed. Interesting videography.]

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On Political Fiction

In May of this year, more than 450 American novelists, poets and literary critics signed an “Open Letter to the American People” opposing Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. The letter, initially posted on the literary website Lit Hub, takes the form of a list:

Because we believe that any democracy worthy of the name rests on pluralism, welcomes principled disagreement, and achieves consensus through reasoned debate; 

Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another; 

Because the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies; ...

Because neither wealth nor celebrity qualifies anyone to speak for the United States …

Following a few more bullet points, the letter concludes by stating that Trump “appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society,” and that his candidacy therefore demands an “immediate and forceful response” from each one of us. The letter is meant, presumably, to constitute such a response.

About a week after the letter was posted, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon published a response, also on Lit Hub, explaining why he had declined to sign, despite his opposition to Trump. He began by addressing the letter’s contradictory approach to the democratic process. The letter’s authors imply that Trump is trying to become president based on his “wealth” and “celebrity”; in fact, Hemon pointed out, if one believes in the legitimacy of our democratic system, then the only way Trump or anyone else can become president is to win the most votes. The letter’s authors are surely right that “the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies,” but, as Hemon put it, “Trump is presently abiding by the rules of democratic election … Horrifying as that may seem, that’s how the system works—the election is the job interview.”

Hemon has a point. Voters—that is, actual Americans—do seem to be quite horrifying to many of the letter’s signatories, despite their intimation that they are defending the will of the people against a demagogic interloper: on the @WritersOnTrump Twitter handle, Dave Eggers is quoted as saying he is embarrassed that Trump has “garnered any votes at all,” while Jane Smiley insists that no “sane people” could possibly be supporting him.

Hemon, though, had a second, and larger, charge to level at the letter’s signatories, one that struck less at the content of the letter than at what it was being advanced in place of. Citing a decade’s worth of Pulitzer nominees, Hemon alleged that it was hard to recall a novel that addressed the facts of American life, and of American “decline,” in the past fifteen years. If our poets and novelists really believe that our political situation calls for a forceful response, Hemon asked, shouldn’t they be writing poems and novels about it, as opposed to open letters?

Hemon is right that the American novel appears to be undergoing a phase of retrenchment. With Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth edging into their senescence, the field will soon be clear of the writers we have long counted on for big, ambitious explorations of American history and society.

Perhaps in reaction to the previous generation’s often panoramic ambitions, the novelists poised to take their place—they are named Dave, and Jennifer, and (most often) Jonathan—are more commonly concerned with the individual’s estrangement from American history and society, and sometimes with his estrangement from himself. Even when one of these novelists does try, as Hemon advises, to “forcefully address the iniquities of the post-9 /11 era: the lies, the crimes, the torture, the financial collapse,” the result can be uninspiring, as in the case of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), which attempted to chronicle the lies and crimes of the Bush years and yet ended up merely registering, at an earsplitting decibel, the insular complaints of its liberal readership. A more characteristic example of this generation’s approach to politics can be found in the much-acclaimed 10:04 (2014), by the Brooklyn-based poet and novelist Ben Lerner, which includes a protracted sequence where the narrator (also a Brooklyn-based poet and novelist) cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, all the while worrying about whether he should feel bad that, rather than going with the protester to Zuccotti Park that night, he’s going to see a play.

The detached sensibility of these novels discourages engagement with the larger forces that shape our democracy; more importantly, they appear largely insensible to the voices currently driving our most energetic political conversations. American fiction has been “haunted” since its inception, as Toni Morrison has put it, by its exclusion of African-Americans, and the scarcity of compelling black characters in contemporary literary fiction is even more conspicuous given the recent emphasis on the importance of black lives in our politics. But we can also speak today of a second haunting exclusion, of which the open letter provides a textbook example, namely that of those often referred to as the “aggrieved” white working class.

If these are the people actually voting for Trump, as nearly every op-ed published since January has insisted, then it is conspicuous that they appear in the open letter only by implication—as, presumably, the “base and violent” social elements to whom the would-be dictator stands accused of appealing. The authors are not wrong that much that is base and violent has appeared in this year’s presidential campaigns; what is strange is just their implication that such elements have ever been alien or marginal to our politics. The same idea seems to be behind their assertion that, notwithstanding some brief interludes of intolerance, American history should be thought of as a “grand experiment in bringing people together, not pitting them against one another.”

Maybe the America the letter’s signatories live in is essentially, as opposed to aspirationally, a tolerant, pluralist place, full of enlightened citizens who settle their differences via “principled disagreement.” That would certainly account for the letter’s failure to recognize Trump’s success as an accomplishment of our democracy, as opposed to a subversion of it. And it might also offer an explanation, beyond disinterest or distraction, for why a compelling political novel about the post-9 /11 era has not materialized. For this novel would have to expose not, in the first place, any “lies,” “crimes” or “iniquities,” but rather the increasingly prevalent illusion that it is possible to wall ourselves off from the America that disappoints, frightens or disgusts us.

by The Editors, The Point |  Read more:

Image: via:

Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night

[ed. I'd never heard of Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night until today (talk about an insane euphemistic construction), so of course didn't know about Shirō Ishii and Unit 731. All wars are horrendous and frequently expose unknown depths of human depravity. The fact that immunity was granted by the U.S. after WWII to facilitate our own biological weapons program is equally saddening/maddening (but not surprising).]

Sue Howells
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When Your Dinner Guest Orders a $700 Bottle of Wine: An Etiquette Guide

[ed. I have this problem all the time. You can't enjoy a nice dinner for under $3000 these days.]

A high priced restaurant experience, complete with a wine hijacking, wasn’t a topic I expected to discuss during a routine dental checkup and cleaning last month. But that’s exactly what my dentist, David Silverstrom, wanted to talk about when I sat down in his chair.

Dr. Silverstrom and a colleague had recently invited a third dentist to dinner, and it quickly turned into a pretty pricey affair. Their guest, a self-declared wine expert, ordered three bottles of Napa Cabernet for a total of over $1,000—and let them pick up the check. Had I ever heard of such a thing? Dr. Silverstrom wanted to know. I most certainly had.

A few weeks earlier, some friends told a similar tale. The couple, who prefer to remain nameless, had been invited to spend the weekend with friends who own a beach house, and on the last night, as a thank you, they took their hosts to dinner. At the restaurant, the hosts’ 20-something son ordered some very expensive wine, turning my friends’ little sojourn into anything but a “free” weekend at the beach.

Although most wine drinkers comport themselves with a certain degree of decorum, shameless business associates or greedy “friends” holding their hosts fiscal hostage by ordering a pricey Burgundy or Bordeaux is nothing new. I’ve never experienced it myself—my being a wine journalist probably keeps people from trying to pull such tricks—but I’ve often been on the receiving end of other less costly but no less disgraceful examples of bad wine etiquette.

Take, for instance, the person who brings a particular bottle to a party or orders a special wine at dinner, only to repeatedly fill up his or her glass without pouring it for, or offering it to, anyone else. Witnessing such antics, I sometimes find myself having to almost wrest the bottle away from the sticky-fingered offender. This sort of behavior is the opposite of a gracious host or true wine lover, who always serves others first. Wine is for sharing, not hoarding, after all.

A slightly more passive version of the example above is the act of maximizing the amount of wine in one’s glass. When the waiter approaches the table to refill the wine glasses, a certain sort of drinker will immediately down the contents of his glass, thereby ensuring that he will get the largest share of the wine.

My friend Paul Sullivan, author of “The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy,” admits that he has done a bit of speedy wine swallowing himself. But he insists that he only does so when a guest orders an expensive wine on his tab, as a way of getting a little something back.

Paul has an even more effective bait-and-switch strategy for dealing with piggish guests: If they pick an absurdly expensive wine from the restaurant wine list, Paul says something like, “That’s a fascinating choice, but I don’t know if it will go with what we’re having” and promptly summons the sommelier. After telling the sommelier the name of the wine his guests have chosen, he points to a more moderately priced selection on the list, making sure his guests can’t see what he’s doing, and asks if there is “something over here that’s more interesting.” A good sommelier always catches on, said Paul, and “suggests” the new wine in his preferred price point.

by Lettie Teague, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Rafa Alverez

Frederic Chopin

Rune Christensen
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Stuff

Joy points upward, according to Marie Kondo, whose name is now a verb and whose nickname is being trademarked and whose life has become a philosophy. In April at the Japan Society in New York, she mounted a stage in an ivory dress and silver heels, made namaste hands at the audience and took her place beneath the display of a Power­Point presentation. Now that she has sold nearly six million copies of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks and counting, she was taking the next logical step: a formal training program for her KonMari method, certifying her acolytes to bring the joy and weightlessness and upward-pointing trajectory of a clutter-free life to others. The humble hashtag that attended this event was #organizetheworld.

Upon entering the Japan Society, the 93 Konverts in attendance (and me) were given lanyards that contained our information: our names, where we live and an option of either the proud “Tidying Completed!” or the shameful “Tidying Not Yet Completed!” In order to be considered tidy, you must have completed the method outlined in Kondo’s book. It includes something called a “once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon,” which means piling five categories of material possessions — clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items, including photos, in that order — one at a time, surveying how much of each you have, seeing that it’s way too much and then holding each item to see if it sparks joy in your body. The ones that spark joy get to stay. The ones that don’t get a heartfelt and generous goodbye, via actual verbal communication, and are then sent on their way to their next life. This is the crux of the KonMari — that soon-to-be-trademarked nickname — and it is detailed in “The Life-Changing Magic” and her more recent book, “Spark Joy,” which, as far as I can tell, is a more specific “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” but with folding diagrams. She is often mistaken for someone who thinks you shouldn’t own anything, but that’s wrong. Rather, she thinks you can own as much or as little as you like, as long as every possession brings you true joy. (...)

By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.

People had an unnaturally strong reaction to the arrival of this woman and her promises of life-changing magic. There were people who had been doing home organizing for years by then, and they sniffed at her severe methods. (One professional American organizer sent me a picture of a copy of Kondo’s book, annotated with green sticky notes marking where she approved of the advice and pink ones where she disapproved. The green numbered 16; the pink numbered more than 50). But then there were the women who knew that Kondo was speaking directly to them. They called themselves Konverts, and they say their lives have truly changed as a result of using her decluttering methods: They could see their way out of the stuff by aiming upward.

At the Japan Society event, we were split into workshop groups, where we explained to one another what had brought us here and what we had got out of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” Most of the women at the event could not claim “tidying completed!” status; only 27 in the room did, or less than a third. One woman in my group who had finished her tidying, Susan, expressed genuine consternation that a bunch of women who wanted to become KonMari tidying consultants hadn’t even “completed tidying!” How were they going to tidy someone else’s home when they couldn’t even get their own in order? How could they possibly know how profoundly life could improve if they hadn’t yet completed their tidying? (...)

During her lecture, Marie demonstrated how the body feels when it finds tidying joy. Her right arm pointed upward, her left leg bent in a display of glee or flying or something aerial and upright, her body arranged I’m-a-little-teacup-style, and a tiny hand gesture accompanied by a noise that sounded like “kyong.” Joy isn’t just happy; joy is efficient and adorable. A lack of joy, on the other hand, she represented with a different pose, planting both feet and slumping her frame downward with a sudden visible depletion of energy. When Kondo enacted the lack of joy, she appeared grayer and instantly older. There isn’t a specific enough name for the absence of joy; it is every emotion that isn’t pure happiness, and maybe it doesn’t deserve a name, so quickly must it be expunged from your life. It does, however, have a sound effect: “zmmp.”

Joy is the only goal, Kondo said, and the room nodded, yes, yes, in emphatic agreement, heads bobbing and mouths agape in wonder that something so simple needed to be taught to them. “My dream is to organize the world,” Kondo said as she wrapped up her talk. The crowd cheered, and Kondo raised her arms into the air like Rocky. (...)

When she enters a new home, Kondo says, she sits down in the middle of the floor to greet the space. She says that to fold a shirt the way everyone folds a shirt (a floppy rectangle) instead of the way she thinks you should (a tight mass of dignified envelope-shaped fabric so tensile that it could stand upright) is to deprive that shirt of the dignity it requires to continue its work, i.e. hanging off your shoulders until bedtime. She would like your socks to rest. She would like your coins to be treated with respect. She thinks your tights are choking when you tie them off in the middle. She would like you to thank your clothes for how hard they work and ensure that they get adequate relaxation between wearings. Before you throw them out — and hoo boy will you be throwing them out — she wants you to thank them for their service. She wants you to thank that blue dress you never wore, tell it how grateful you are that it taught you how blue wasn’t really your color and that you can’t really pull off an empire waist. She wants you to override the instinct to keep a certain thing because an HGTV show or a home-design magazine or a Pinterest page said it would brighten up your room or make your life better. She wants you to possess your possessions on your own terms, not theirs. (This very simple notion has proved to be incredibly controversial, but more on that later.)

She is tiny — just 4-foot-8. When I interviewed her, not only did her feet not touch the ground when we were sitting, but her knees didn’t even bend over the side of the couch. When she speaks, she remains pleasant-faced and smiling; she moves her hands around, framing the air in front of her, as if she were the director on “Electric Company” or Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.” The only visible possessions in her hotel room for a two-week trip from Tokyo were her husband’s laptop and a small silver suitcase the size of a typical man’s briefcase. She has long bangs that obscure her eyebrows, and that fact — along with the fact that her mouth never changes from a faint smile — contributes to a sense that she is participating in more of a pageant than an interview, which possibly is what it does feel like when big-boned American interviewers whose gargantuan feet do touch the ground come to your hotel room and start jawing at you through an interpreter. Her ankles are skinny but her wrists are muscular. When she shows pictures of herself in places she has tidied, before she starts, she looks like a lost sparrow in a tornado. On the other side, in the “after” picture, it is hard to believe that such a creature could effect such change.

Her success has taken her by surprise. She never thought someone could become so famous for tidying that it would be hard to walk down the street in Tokyo. “I feel I am busy all the time and I work all the time,” she said, and she did not seem so happy about this, though her faint smile never wavered. She sticks with speaking and press appearances and relegates her business to her handlers — the team of men who pop out of nowhere to surround any woman with a good idea. She feels as if she never has any free time.

I spent a few days with her in April, accompanied by her entire operation (eight people total). I attended her “Rachael Ray” appearance, where she was pitted against the show’s in-house organizer, Peter Walsh, in what must have been the modern talk show’s least fair fight ever. Kondo was asked about her philosophies, and she relayed her answers through her interpreter, but when Walsh countered by explaining why an organizing solution Kondo offered was nice but didn’t quite work in the United States, his response was never translated back to Kondo, so how was she supposed to refute it? She stood to the side, smiling and nodding as he proceeded. Had she been told what Walsh was saying, she would say to him what she said to me, that yes, America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.

Kondo does not feel threatened by different philosophies of organization. “I think his method is pretty great too,” she told me later. She leaves room for something that people don’t often give her credit for: that the KonMari method might not be your speed. “I think it’s good to have different types of organizing methods,” she continued, “because my method might not spark joy with some people, but his method might.” In Japan, there are at least 30 organizing associations, whereas in the United States we have just one major group, the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). Kondo herself has never heard of NAPO, though she did tell me that she knows that the profession exists in the United States. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone in particular, but what I’ve heard is that thanks to my book and organizing method, now the organizing industry in general kind of bloomed and got a spotlight on it,” she said, though I cannot imagine who told her this. “They kind of thanked me for how my book or method changed the course of the organizing industry in America.”

The women (and maybe three or four men) of NAPO would beg to differ.

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image:Andrew T. Warman

My Spotless Mind

Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hearing footsteps behind you. Before you can turn around, a man sprints up and stabs you in the stomach. When you fall to the ground, he kicks you, grabs your backpack, and runs off. Fortunately a bystander calls an ambulance which takes you, bleeding and shaken, to the nearest hospital.

The emergency room physician stitches you up and tells you that, aside from the pain and a bit of blood loss, you’re in good shape. Then she sits down and looks you in the eye. She tells you that people who live through a traumatic event like yours often develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition can be debilitating, resulting in flashbacks that prompt you to relive the trauma over and over. It can cause irritation, anxiety, angry outbursts and a magnified fear response. But she has a pill you can take right now that will decrease your recall of the night’s events – and thus the fear and other emotions associated with it – and guard against the potential effects of PTSD without completely erasing the memory itself.

Would you like to try it?

When Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, asked nearly 1,000 people a similar question, more than 80 per cent said: ‘No.’ They would rather retain all memory and emotion of that day, even if it came with a price. More striking was the fact that 46 per cent of them didn’t believe people should be allowed to have such a choice in the first place.

Every day, science is ushering us closer to the kind of memory erasure that, until recently, was more the province of Philip K Dick. Studies now show that some medications, including a blood-pressure drug called propranolol, might have the ability to do just what the ER doctor described – not just for new traumas, but past ones too.

Granted, that future is not yet here. Most of the time, we’re still better at subconsciously editing our own recollections than any new technology is. But with researchers working on techniques that can chisel, reconstruct and purge life’s memories, it becomes crucial to ask: do we need our real memories? What makes us believe that memory is so sacrosanct? And do memories really make us who we are?

Many would argue that humans are driven by their stories. We create our own narratives based on the memories we retain and those we choose to discard. We use memories to build an understanding of self. We lean on them to make decisions and direct our lives.

But what happens to our sense of self if we purge the most distasteful memories and cherry-pick the good ones? When some things are hard to think about, or so injurious to our self-image, are we better off creating a history in which they no longer exist? And if we do, are we doomed to repeat our mistakes without learning from them, doomed to fight the same wars? By finding ways to erase our memories, are we erasing ourselves? (...)

For decades, most memory researchers compared memories to photographs, and our brains to albums or filing cabinets stuffed full of them. They believed that each photo required an initial development period – much the way that pictures are processed in a darkroom – and then was filed away for future reference.

But in the past few decades, scientists have discovered that memory is far more plastic than that. It doesn’t just fade like a photograph tucked away in an album. The details subtly morph and shift. It’s malleable. And some research suggests it might be erasable.

Individual neurons communicate using chemicals called neurotransmitters, which flow from one neuron to the next across synapses – small gaps between the nerve cells. When memories are formed, protein changes at the nerve synapses must be consolidated and translated into long-term circuits in the brain. If consolidation is interrupted, the memory dissolves.

Different types of memories are stored in different places in the brain, and each memory has a dedicated network of neurons. Short-term memories such as a grocery list or an address live, briefly, in the pre-frontal cortex – the foremost area of the folded grey matter that encases the brain. Fear and other intensely emotional memories exist in the amygdala, while facts and autobiographical events are located in the hippocampus. But memories aren’t isolated in these different areas – they overlap and intertwine and connect and diverge like the tangled branches of an old lilac tree. Even when a factual memory fades it can leave an emotional trace behind, much the way that the lilac flower still knows how to open once it’s been snipped from the tree. Much the way the flower’s scent instantly transports you to a particular place and time, even if you can’t remember what you were doing or why you were there.

by Lauren Gravitz, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Simon Pemberton/Heart Agency

Custom Wedges Offer Words of Confidence, or Crassness

Since he started engraving his wedges with funny quotes from his favorite movies two years ago, Robert Streb has envisioned the moment in which his puerile sense of humor might actually help him on the course.

It would be a tense situation: down the stretch of a closely contested major championship.

His caddie, Steve Catlin, would approach him with a suggestion to use his wedge.

“Which one?” Streb would ask.

“Let’s go with the Ted Clubberlang,” Catlin would respond.

There is nothing like a reference to the raunchy comedy “Ted 2” to lighten the mood on a Sunday on the PGA Tour.

Streb just happens to have the reference carved into the back of his 46-degree Titleist attack wedge, one of two custom-stamped wedges he carried around with him this week at the P.G.A. Championship. The other said “#myamazingsummer,” another nod to “Ted 2,” which stars Mark Wahlberg and a talking stuffed animal.

Among tour players, such steel tattoos are rampant. Some are meant to be silly, provoking a laugh or a smile any time the player reaches into his bag. Others are sentimental: song lyrics, Bible quotes or the names of family members. Still others require less analysis. Andrew Johnston, the affable fan favorite known as Beef, carries a sand wedge that is covered with the names of various cuts of meat, like porterhouse, sirloin and brisket.

William McGirt, who in the past has stamped his Srixon clubs with nicknames like McDirty and McNasty, said that just owning a custom engraved wedge could supply an instant confidence boost.

“You get one of those, and you feel like it’s a special wedge,” McGirt said. “Then you chip good with it, and you’re like, All right, let’s go.” (...)

Just getting a custom wedge stamp is viewed as a sort of a rite of passage. It indicates that the craftsmen of a golfer’s club of choice are willing to take the time to customize something out of the ordinary, to be put on display. It is not unusual for budding professionals or college players to be handed a club with their initials engraved on it. But to get something unique or personal, a golfer needs to really earn it.

by Zach Schonbrun, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ben Solomon
[ed. If I ever had the opportunity to have one of my wedges engraved, I know exactly what I'd put on it:]

Dirty Words

The first play I ever wrote, at the age of 21, was about a woman who drank and smoked too much. (Write what you know.) The opening scene found our sauced heroine returning to her hotel room and trying in vain to light a cigarette with a childproof lighter, scourge of the mid-’90s. For drunks, igniting those tricky plastic contraptions could be like cross-stitching while wearing oven mitts, so her efforts were nothing but a series of flinty scratches. “Fuck the children!” she finally says, flinging the lighter against the wall, which always got a laugh, especially among the smokers.

It was my friend Bryan’s idea to produce a double bill of one-acts in our senior year of college. Normally I preferred locking up my artistic efforts in the file folders of my clunky old Mac, but I was trying to take more risks in those days, even if it kept me up at night, even if I had to chug a beer every time I thought about the curtain opening on an audience of strangers.

Strangers, it turned out, were not the problem. One night, my older brother came to the show. Afterward, we stood across from each other in the auditorium, two empty rows between us.

“There was a lot of cussing in that show,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said, stung by his sole assessment and trying not to let it show.

Technically, my brother was correct. The 45-minute play contained probably a dozen f-bombs, and at least one reference to the sucking of a hard male body part. But come on. This was 1996, the golden age of Tarantino and Goodfellas. Cussing was a badge of authenticity, a sign that your work was raw and vital. So many aspects of that play rattled around in my brain: Was it any good? Did it reveal too much about my own private sadness? Would the sound cues work? I had never once worried about the language.

“Have mom and dad seen this?” my brother asked.

“They came last week.”

He let out an exaggerated cry of despair, meant to make me laugh. Instead I carried this moment around for years, like a jagged stone of anger I could rub with my fingers whenever I felt the need to inflame my own sense of being misunderstood. Too much cussing. What the fuck did that mean, anyway? (...)

I was in fifth grade when I learned the thrill of teaching cuss words to my classmates. I loved scandalizing those innocents with a new and dangerous vocabulary. The discovery of dirty words was a bit like the discovery of sex itself, an induction to the shadow side. Simple children’s book words like “cock” and “pussy” were leading double lives. Vulgarity turned out to be a matter of tone, context, and tiny spelling changes. “Come” versus “cum.” “Dam” versus “damn.” Language was a spin toy I never grew tired of twirling across a wooden floor.

The dirty words arrived from various sources. My older cousins were a reliable supplier of R-rated comedies starring Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Steve Martin. The Breakfast Club came out my fifth-grade year and beefed up my playbook. I prided myself on reading beyond my age range: Stephen King, John Irving, V.C. Andrews. And of course there was Top 40 radio. I was 11 when Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore, launched a nationwide campaign against filth in pop songs, which was pretty much a checklist of my favorite artists: Prince, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Mötley Crüe. It seemed to me, even then, the only art that mattered was the art that contained questionable language, double entendre, “adult situations.” Was something in poor taste? Then you could find my name in bubbly letters on the waiting list.

Cussing was also an adult privilege. I was the youngest in a large brood of cousins, and some of my earliest memories involve being teased for my softness, my clinginess. I was a sensitive kid, who over-identified with her stuffed animals. By the time I’d reached double digits, I was ready to leave the vulnerability of childhood behind. Dirty words were a way to brine the tender pink baby skin so that it became thicker, coarser, calloused. Cussing made you tough.

Fifth grade happens to be the year I got busted for cussing. A group of us had a habit of passing notes behind the teacher’s back and hiding them in our desks, a stash eventually discovered, although mine were the standouts: I called the teacher a bitch. I used words like “bullshit.” After class, I slouched in my plastic seat as the teacher chided us, and each of us was sent home with an uncomfortable letter for our parents.

“Help me understand why you’re so angry,” my mom said when she came into my room that night. My mother was training to be a therapist. She saw in my notes a simmering rage I had masked in our polite interactions, and I told her I wasn’t angry, because I longed to be a good kid, a sweetheart, a straight-A student. I did not understand that sweethearts still felt anger, too, and that “anger” was exactly the word to describe the burning I felt.

I was angry I had been born into a family of earthy, middle-class eggheads, then drop-kicked into a rich school district where tony labels and status cars determined your value. I was angry that my underwear clotted with blood each month, even though, to my knowledge, no other girl had gotten her period and I was the youngest kid in the class. I was angry that my mother spent all her time with other children instead of her own, that my father was silent and unknowable, that my brother preferred football practice and computer games to the company of his younger sister, and that for years I had been forced to stay with the librarian after school, watching the same boring filmstrips over and over until one of the older neighbor kids got out of class and could walk me home. I was angry because I was weird and wrong-sized and alone, but in fifth grade, you can’t get your hands around those feelings. You just have “shit,” “bitch,” “motherfucker,” “goddammit.”

By middle school, my mother was fighting me on so many fronts. The amount of television I watched. The kind of food I ate. My commitment to Sun-In, electric blue mascara, and Clinique foundation in unnatural shades of tan. However, she did not fight me on cussing, and I am grateful for this. It was a soft sin, so much superior to fists and punched walls. She understood the pressure-valve release of those bleep-able words. Cussing may be objectionable to some, but it is also one of the greatest mental health regimens ever invented. The gratification of a dramatically drawn-out “f,” the grand, percussive “k” at the end. Use in case of emergency.

by Sarah Hepola, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Marbella, Spain, 2014. Chris Goldberg

Bill Murray

[ed. On the question: What do you want that you don't already have?]

h/t: 3QD

 

Edward Li
photo: markk

photo: markk, four boys

Wolverine Creek

[ed. I think I'll post a few old photos for a change. Here's one challenging project, trying to keep bears and idiots fisherpeople separated at Wolverine Creek, AK.]

photos: markk

Can the World Deal With a New Bank Crisis?

As Europe braces for the release of its bank stress tests on Friday, the world could be on the verge of another banking crisis. The signs are obvious to all. The World Bank estimates the ratio of non-performing loans to total gross loans in 2015 reached 4.3 percent. Before the 2009 global financial crisis, they stood at 4.2 percent.

If anything, the problem is starker now than then: There are more than $3 trillion in stressed loan assets worldwide, compared to the roughly $1 trillion of U.S. subprime loans that triggered the 2009 crisis. European banks are saddled with $1.3 trillion in non-performing loans, nearly $400 billion of them in Italy. The IMF estimates that risky loans in China also total $1.3 trillion, although private forecasts are higher. India’s stressed loans top $150 billion.

Once again, banks in the U.S., Canada, U.K., several European countries, Asia, Australia and New Zealand are heavily exposed to property markets, which are overvalued by historical measures. In addition, banks have significant exposure to the troubled resource sector: Lending to the energy sector alone totals around $3 trillion globally. Borrowers are struggling to service that debt in an environment of falling commodity prices, weak growth, overcapacity, rising borrowing costs and (in some cases) a weaker currency.

To make matters worse, the world’s limp recovery since 2009 is intensifying loan stresses. In advanced economies, low growth and disinflation or deflation is making it harder for companies to pay off what they owe. Many European firms are suffering from a lack of global competitiveness, exacerbated by the effects of the single currency.

Government efforts to revive growth -- largely through a targeted expansion of bank lending -- are having dangerous side effects. With safe assets offering low returns, banks have financed less creditworthy borrowers, especially in the shale oil sector and emerging markets. Abundant liquidity has inflated asset prices and banks have lent against this overvalued collateral. Low rates have allowed weak borrowers to survive longer than they should, which delays the necessary pain of writing off bad loans.

In developing economies, strong capital inflows, seeking higher returns or fleeing depreciating currencies, have contributed to a risky buildup in leverage. So have government policies encouraging debt-funded investment or consumption to stimulate aggregate demand.

What’s most worrying, though, is the fact that the traditional solutions to banking crises no longer seem available or effective.

To recover, banks need strong earnings, capital infusions, a process to dispose of bad loans and industry reforms. Yet today, banks’ ability to earn their way out of their problems and write off losses is limited.

by Satyajit Das, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: none

via:

Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, Aoife O'Donovan

Here and Heaven

With a hammer and nails and a fear of failure we
are building a shed
Between here and heaven between the wait and the
wedding for as long as we both shall be dead
to the world beyond the boys and the girls trying
to keep us calm
We can practice our lines 'til we're deaf and blind
to ourselves to each other where it's
Fall not winter spring not summer cool not cold
And it's warm not hot have we all forgotten that
we're getting old

With an arrow and bow and some seeds left to sow
we are staking our claim
On ground so fertile we forget who we've hurt along
the way and reach out for a strange hand
to hold someone strong but not bold enough to
tear down the wall
'Cause we ain't lost enough to find the stars ain't
crossed why align them why fall hard
not soft into
Fall not winter spring not summer cool not cold
Where it's warm not hot have we all forgotten that
we're getting old

Lyrics via: