Friday, December 29, 2017
I, Too, Am Thinking About Me, Too
Sarah Silverman recently made a video in which she described the painful conflict she was feeling about her good friend of 25 years, Louis CK. Watch it and you will see cognitive dissonance in action: on the one hand, she loves and admires the man, and values their long friendship. On the other hand, she detests and condemns the exhibitionist sexual behavior that he acknowledged. Many of the people watching this video wanted her to reduce that dissonance by jumping one way or the other: disavow their friendship, or trivialize his behavior. In this brave embrace of her emotional conflict and their friendship, she did neither.
Our whole country is living in a constant state of hyper-dissonance: “my political candidate/my most admired actor/a brilliant artist/my dear friend has been accused of sexual abuses and misconduct; how do I cope with this information? Do I support him/see his movies/enjoy his art/keep the friendship or must I repudiate him entirely?” Living with dissonance and complexity is not easy, but surely skeptics, of all people, must try. We hear a story that outrages us and, just like true believers and justice warriors of any kind, we’re off and running, and once we are off and running we don’t want to hear quibbles, caveats, doubts, complexities. Thus, when the Guardian (Dec. 17, 2017) reported Matt Damon’s remarks that there was “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated,” Minnie Driver blasted him: it’s not for men to make distinctions; “there is no hierarchy of abuse”; men should just shut up for once. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble,” she said. “We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”
No hierarchy of abuse? Really? That is one of the universal symptoms of revolutionary zealotry: go for broke, ignore gradations of villainy, who cares if some innocents are thrown over the side, we are furious and we want everything at once. No wonder those of us in the boring older generation, who have lived through cycles of anger and protest, are so annoying. “Wait!” we keep saying. “Be careful! Remember the stupidity of ‘zero tolerance’ programs in schools, where a kid who brings a pocket knife for show-and- tell, or a 6-year-old boy who kisses a 6-year-old girl, got expelled?” We have also learned that while there is a time and place for revolutionary zealotry, the hardest challenge comes next, because change will not be accomplished without allies. (...)
Our whole country is living in a constant state of hyper-dissonance: “my political candidate/my most admired actor/a brilliant artist/my dear friend has been accused of sexual abuses and misconduct; how do I cope with this information? Do I support him/see his movies/enjoy his art/keep the friendship or must I repudiate him entirely?” Living with dissonance and complexity is not easy, but surely skeptics, of all people, must try. We hear a story that outrages us and, just like true believers and justice warriors of any kind, we’re off and running, and once we are off and running we don’t want to hear quibbles, caveats, doubts, complexities. Thus, when the Guardian (Dec. 17, 2017) reported Matt Damon’s remarks that there was “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated,” Minnie Driver blasted him: it’s not for men to make distinctions; “there is no hierarchy of abuse”; men should just shut up for once. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble,” she said. “We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”No hierarchy of abuse? Really? That is one of the universal symptoms of revolutionary zealotry: go for broke, ignore gradations of villainy, who cares if some innocents are thrown over the side, we are furious and we want everything at once. No wonder those of us in the boring older generation, who have lived through cycles of anger and protest, are so annoying. “Wait!” we keep saying. “Be careful! Remember the stupidity of ‘zero tolerance’ programs in schools, where a kid who brings a pocket knife for show-and- tell, or a 6-year-old boy who kisses a 6-year-old girl, got expelled?” We have also learned that while there is a time and place for revolutionary zealotry, the hardest challenge comes next, because change will not be accomplished without allies. (...)
Whenever a movement is fueled by rage and revenge, it is more important than ever to tolerate complexity and ask questions that evoke dissonance. We can all imagine the ways in which “Me, too” might benefit women, but how might it backfire? Because it will. Moralistic crusades to censor “sexist” pornography, for example, led to suppression of lesbian books, sex-ed books, and plain old sexypleasure books that someone thought offensive. What might be the consequences of a moralistic crusade to root out any behavior that might be misconstrued—now, next week, in 10 years—including affectionate touches, supportive hugs, jokes? Do professional women really want a Mike Pence world where they cannot have a business dinner or go to a party without a chaperone? When feminists find themselves in bed with right-wing puritans, they are going to get screwed.
What, exactly, are the goals here? The answer is clear in the case of hotel housekeepers, fast-food workers, and immigrant women who are routinely subjected to disgusting sexual harassment and who rarely have recourse to protect themselves from the powerful men who feel entitled to abuse them; in the case of women who enter formerly male-only occupations (tech, science, the military), where hostile harassment and rape are weapons to convey “you don’t belong here; get out.” The answer is always clear when the goal is to bring down some bad guys and protect the powerless.
But the goals of “me, too” seem eerily non-political, other than “bring down the patriarchy and by the way let me tell you about me.” For the vast majority of women in their personal and professional lives, where the complexities of sexuality abound, surely another goal is to become more assertive and clear about their wishes. If women seek true sexual equality, they have to do some hard thinking about their own behavior. As Laura Kipnis observes in Unwanted Advances, when did “empowerment” for women come to mean filing an assault claim months after a drunken night rather than developing the ability to say to the guy, “take your fucking hand off my knee”?
What, exactly, are the goals here? The answer is clear in the case of hotel housekeepers, fast-food workers, and immigrant women who are routinely subjected to disgusting sexual harassment and who rarely have recourse to protect themselves from the powerful men who feel entitled to abuse them; in the case of women who enter formerly male-only occupations (tech, science, the military), where hostile harassment and rape are weapons to convey “you don’t belong here; get out.” The answer is always clear when the goal is to bring down some bad guys and protect the powerless.
But the goals of “me, too” seem eerily non-political, other than “bring down the patriarchy and by the way let me tell you about me.” For the vast majority of women in their personal and professional lives, where the complexities of sexuality abound, surely another goal is to become more assertive and clear about their wishes. If women seek true sexual equality, they have to do some hard thinking about their own behavior. As Laura Kipnis observes in Unwanted Advances, when did “empowerment” for women come to mean filing an assault claim months after a drunken night rather than developing the ability to say to the guy, “take your fucking hand off my knee”?
by Carol Tavris, Skeptic | Read more:
Image: Getty
All the Money in the World: The Enigma of J. Paul Getty
When David Scarpa heard that a producer wanted to make a movie about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the teenage grandson and namesake of the oil tycoon, the screenwriter wasn’t sure there would be enough content for a feature-length film.
“I said, ‘Well, you’ve got the whole business with the ear, but you can’t base an entire movie on that,” Scarpa told Vanity Fair, recalling the kidnapping’s grisly, most-remembered detail—how Italian captors sliced off the ear of the teenager while he was held hostage.
It was only after Scarpa learned that J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world at the time—worth approximately $2 billion—and still refused to pay his grandson’s ransom of $17 million that the screenwriter became interested and wrote the script that became Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, which opens on Christmas Day.
“It became a story about money and the power that money has over people in my mind,” said Scarpa. “And not just the power that money has over poor people, or ordinary people, but the power money has over the people you think would be most free from it.”
By 1973, the five-times-divorced Getty (played in the film by Christopher Plummer, who replaced Kevin Spacey in a much-publicized story of actor-swapping) was spending most of his time in his 16th-century manor house, Sutton Place, in England, isolated from the four sons he rotated in and out of his will at whim. He was driven to accrue his fortune out of the deep-seated desire to disprove his late father, who expected him to destroy the family business. As Getty’s bank account grew, though, so did his obsession and paranoia. By the time his grandson was kidnapped, Getty had hired his own security team, stationed Alsatian dogs around his estate, and famously installed a coin-operated pay phone in the mansion for guests to use.
“This was happening against the backdrop of the oil crisis of 1973, when the price of oil skyrocketed to the point where Getty’s profits daily would’ve been enough to pay the ransom,” pointed out Scarpa. “Yet the wealthier he became, the more dependent he became on money, like an addict. This idea of that gnawing insecurity never really going away seemed like an interesting jumping off point for kind a Shakespearean drama.”
Getty’s relationship with his fortune was tested, in extreme circumstances, when Italian kidnappers demanded $17 million in exchange for the safe return of his grandson Paul. John Pearson’s 1995 book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty—on which Scott’s film is based—details the magnate’s flimsy family ties at this point in his life. Getty was not speaking to his son and Paul’s father—John Paul Getty Jr., who had squandered his own business opportunities, divorced Paul’s mother, Gail (played by Michelle Williams), and was sliding in and out of drug addiction. The elder Getty disapproved of the bohemian lifestyle of his teenage grandson—who had become a minor celebrity in Rome because of his surname—and suspected that the kidnapping was a hoax concocted by Paul to extract money from him. Though Getty would not return frantic phone calls from Paul’s mother, he did speak to the press, explaining why he would not pay the ransom: “I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” (...)
Paul’s mother, Gail, could not get through to Getty. Paul’s father, John, haunted by his own demons and unable to return to Italy for complicated reasons, would not call Getty on the grounds that he was not speaking to his father. Five weeks into the kidnapping, Getty’s only gesture of goodwill was sending former C.I.A. agent J. Fletcher Chase (played in the film by Mark Wahlberg) to Rome to help Gail. Chase, who believed, along with Italian police, that the kidnapping was a hoax, only affirmed his employer’s suspicions. Gail, without the money to pay her son’s ransom, and not in a position of power for anyone to take her seriously, was left helpless.
“Interestingly, the F.B.I. agent I spoke to while researching, who worked on the case, was actually sympathetic to Getty,” said Scarpa. “At the time this was very much a man’s world, so the men, be it Getty or Chase, felt that this was no place for a woman. Today we would assume, if a woman’s child got kidnapped, she would be in charge in a sense. Yet at the time the attitude was, ‘Well, you can’t possibly involve a woman in all this business, right?’ ”
All Gail could do was wait for phone calls from one of the kidnappers, “Cinquanta,” who found himself, ironically, sometimes pleading on Paul’s behalf.
“Who is this so-called grandfather?” Cinquanta told Gail, according to Pearsons’s book. “How can he leave his own flesh and blood in the plight that your poor son is in. Here is the richest man in America, and you tell me he refuses to find just 10 miliardi for his grandson’s safety. Signora, you take me for a fool.”
Though the idea of a kidnapper actually protecting his hostage—as Cinquanta does in the film—sounds like a fictional flourish, it was not.
“He can’t even conceive the world of these wealthy Americans . . . It’s like, how can you have all this money, and yet the money is more important to you than your kid, and he finds himself sympathizing with the kid,” said Scarpa. “Cinquanta eventually found himself negotiating kind of on Gail’s behalf with the kidnappers.
“I said, ‘Well, you’ve got the whole business with the ear, but you can’t base an entire movie on that,” Scarpa told Vanity Fair, recalling the kidnapping’s grisly, most-remembered detail—how Italian captors sliced off the ear of the teenager while he was held hostage.
It was only after Scarpa learned that J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world at the time—worth approximately $2 billion—and still refused to pay his grandson’s ransom of $17 million that the screenwriter became interested and wrote the script that became Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, which opens on Christmas Day.“It became a story about money and the power that money has over people in my mind,” said Scarpa. “And not just the power that money has over poor people, or ordinary people, but the power money has over the people you think would be most free from it.”
By 1973, the five-times-divorced Getty (played in the film by Christopher Plummer, who replaced Kevin Spacey in a much-publicized story of actor-swapping) was spending most of his time in his 16th-century manor house, Sutton Place, in England, isolated from the four sons he rotated in and out of his will at whim. He was driven to accrue his fortune out of the deep-seated desire to disprove his late father, who expected him to destroy the family business. As Getty’s bank account grew, though, so did his obsession and paranoia. By the time his grandson was kidnapped, Getty had hired his own security team, stationed Alsatian dogs around his estate, and famously installed a coin-operated pay phone in the mansion for guests to use.
“This was happening against the backdrop of the oil crisis of 1973, when the price of oil skyrocketed to the point where Getty’s profits daily would’ve been enough to pay the ransom,” pointed out Scarpa. “Yet the wealthier he became, the more dependent he became on money, like an addict. This idea of that gnawing insecurity never really going away seemed like an interesting jumping off point for kind a Shakespearean drama.”
Getty’s relationship with his fortune was tested, in extreme circumstances, when Italian kidnappers demanded $17 million in exchange for the safe return of his grandson Paul. John Pearson’s 1995 book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty—on which Scott’s film is based—details the magnate’s flimsy family ties at this point in his life. Getty was not speaking to his son and Paul’s father—John Paul Getty Jr., who had squandered his own business opportunities, divorced Paul’s mother, Gail (played by Michelle Williams), and was sliding in and out of drug addiction. The elder Getty disapproved of the bohemian lifestyle of his teenage grandson—who had become a minor celebrity in Rome because of his surname—and suspected that the kidnapping was a hoax concocted by Paul to extract money from him. Though Getty would not return frantic phone calls from Paul’s mother, he did speak to the press, explaining why he would not pay the ransom: “I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” (...)
Paul’s mother, Gail, could not get through to Getty. Paul’s father, John, haunted by his own demons and unable to return to Italy for complicated reasons, would not call Getty on the grounds that he was not speaking to his father. Five weeks into the kidnapping, Getty’s only gesture of goodwill was sending former C.I.A. agent J. Fletcher Chase (played in the film by Mark Wahlberg) to Rome to help Gail. Chase, who believed, along with Italian police, that the kidnapping was a hoax, only affirmed his employer’s suspicions. Gail, without the money to pay her son’s ransom, and not in a position of power for anyone to take her seriously, was left helpless.
“Interestingly, the F.B.I. agent I spoke to while researching, who worked on the case, was actually sympathetic to Getty,” said Scarpa. “At the time this was very much a man’s world, so the men, be it Getty or Chase, felt that this was no place for a woman. Today we would assume, if a woman’s child got kidnapped, she would be in charge in a sense. Yet at the time the attitude was, ‘Well, you can’t possibly involve a woman in all this business, right?’ ”
All Gail could do was wait for phone calls from one of the kidnappers, “Cinquanta,” who found himself, ironically, sometimes pleading on Paul’s behalf.
“Who is this so-called grandfather?” Cinquanta told Gail, according to Pearsons’s book. “How can he leave his own flesh and blood in the plight that your poor son is in. Here is the richest man in America, and you tell me he refuses to find just 10 miliardi for his grandson’s safety. Signora, you take me for a fool.”
Though the idea of a kidnapper actually protecting his hostage—as Cinquanta does in the film—sounds like a fictional flourish, it was not.
“He can’t even conceive the world of these wealthy Americans . . . It’s like, how can you have all this money, and yet the money is more important to you than your kid, and he finds himself sympathizing with the kid,” said Scarpa. “Cinquanta eventually found himself negotiating kind of on Gail’s behalf with the kidnappers.
by Julie Miller, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Fabio Lovino
Thursday, December 28, 2017
The Food Lab: Japanese-Style Tempura
Tempura-style batters were originally brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century.* Since then, tempura has been perfected to a near art form by Japanese chefs. At the best tempura houses in Japan, all of your courses will be cooked by a single tempura chef who spent years in apprenticeship before ever being allowed to touch the batter or fry oil.
* The word tempura itself comes from the Portuguese, as do many other Japanese words. According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, tempora means "period of time" and refers to the fasting seasons during which fried fish was consumed in place of meat. These days, the word refers to any battered and fried item cooked in the manner of tempura fish, much like Americans have their "chicken-fried steak"—steak cooked in the manner of fried chicken.
Tempura chefs are sort of like the Jedi of the cooking world: They must deftly perform with the utmost skill and precision, using extremely dangerous tools, all while maintaining a calm, serene demeanor. It is an elegant technique, from a more civilized time. The bad news is that you, I, and the vast majority of people in the world are never going to become as great as the masters who spend their entire lives training. But the good news is that we can get about 90% of the way there right off the bat.
The key characteristics of a tempura-style batter are extreme lightness of color and texture: Good tempura should be pale blond with an extraordinarily lacy, light, and crisp coating. To achieve this takes just a little more care than other types of batter. Traditional tempura batter is made by combining flour (usually a mix of wheat flour and lower-protein-rice flour—I use wheat flour and cornstarch instead) with eggs and ice-cold water. The batter is mixed until just barely combined so that plenty of pockets of dry flour remain and virtually no gluten development occurs. A tempura batter has a lifespan of only moments before the flour becomes too saturated with water and a fresh batter must be made. But there are ways we can improve on this fickleness, so long as we aren't married to tradition.
First off, using the old vodka-in-the-batter trick (which by now you may be sick of) works very well, limiting the rate of gluten formation so that the batter can sit a bit longer before it goes bad. So does replacing the ice water with club soda, a trick I learned from my old chef Ken Oringer, at Clio Restaurant in Boston. But the real key is in the process: Rather than simply dumping the dry and wet ingredients into a bowl and whisking them together, I found that by adding the wet ingredients to the dry, then immediately lifting up the bowl and shaking it with one hand while simultaneously rapidly stirring with a pair of chopsticks, I could get all of the ingredients incorporated while minimizing the amount of flour that is completely moistened by the liquid.
Recipe: Tempura Vegetables and/or Shrimp
by J. Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats | Read more:
* The word tempura itself comes from the Portuguese, as do many other Japanese words. According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, tempora means "period of time" and refers to the fasting seasons during which fried fish was consumed in place of meat. These days, the word refers to any battered and fried item cooked in the manner of tempura fish, much like Americans have their "chicken-fried steak"—steak cooked in the manner of fried chicken.
Tempura chefs are sort of like the Jedi of the cooking world: They must deftly perform with the utmost skill and precision, using extremely dangerous tools, all while maintaining a calm, serene demeanor. It is an elegant technique, from a more civilized time. The bad news is that you, I, and the vast majority of people in the world are never going to become as great as the masters who spend their entire lives training. But the good news is that we can get about 90% of the way there right off the bat.The key characteristics of a tempura-style batter are extreme lightness of color and texture: Good tempura should be pale blond with an extraordinarily lacy, light, and crisp coating. To achieve this takes just a little more care than other types of batter. Traditional tempura batter is made by combining flour (usually a mix of wheat flour and lower-protein-rice flour—I use wheat flour and cornstarch instead) with eggs and ice-cold water. The batter is mixed until just barely combined so that plenty of pockets of dry flour remain and virtually no gluten development occurs. A tempura batter has a lifespan of only moments before the flour becomes too saturated with water and a fresh batter must be made. But there are ways we can improve on this fickleness, so long as we aren't married to tradition.
First off, using the old vodka-in-the-batter trick (which by now you may be sick of) works very well, limiting the rate of gluten formation so that the batter can sit a bit longer before it goes bad. So does replacing the ice water with club soda, a trick I learned from my old chef Ken Oringer, at Clio Restaurant in Boston. But the real key is in the process: Rather than simply dumping the dry and wet ingredients into a bowl and whisking them together, I found that by adding the wet ingredients to the dry, then immediately lifting up the bowl and shaking it with one hand while simultaneously rapidly stirring with a pair of chopsticks, I could get all of the ingredients incorporated while minimizing the amount of flour that is completely moistened by the liquid.
Recipe: Tempura Vegetables and/or Shrimp
by J. Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats | Read more:
Image: J. Kenji López-Alt
Lady Gaga and the Economics of Las Vegas Residencies
The race to lock down Las Vegas’ highest-paying residency is heating up with Lady Gaga announcing a two-year engagement at the MGM Park Theater. According to two well-placed sources, Gaga is guaranteed just over a million dollars per show, and is committed to 74 appearances. Should all go well with ticket sales, she could extend that run, inching closer to the $100 million mark, a new — and record — threshold for the city and for even the biggest of current pop artists. Gaga stands to earn even more on merchandise sales — typically a 50/50 split with the venue — and VIP offerings.
The price tag for a superstar artist’s residency has been inching up steadily in the post-recession years and as more and more acts, both contemporary (like Bruno Mars, also performing a run of shows at the MGM Park Theater, and Pitbull) and heritage (Cher), nostalgic (Backstreet Boys) and somewhere in between (Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears), plant semi-permanent roots in the desert outpost.
It’s a rite of passage that goes back to the days of Elvis Presley and Dean Martin, the hottest acts of their respective days, but one that eventually gave way to those whose careers were careening to a halt. Which is why in recent decades Las Vegas was viewed more as a destination for also-rans — where a musician goes to die, was a common crack. Not so any more.
“Years ago, artists would put up their noses if I mentioned the thought of a Vegas residency,” says Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich, who has helmed Celine Dion’s Vegas production at Caesars Palace’s Colosseum and, with Raj Kapoor, also produced Mariah Carey’s Colosseum residency and John Fogerty’s Wynn residency. “Honestly, Celine changed all that in one fell swoop and now everyone wants in. I think acts are reacting to the rigors of the road, the uncertainty of fickle audiences today, and the advantages of being in one place for a defined period of time. Frankly, I’d love to do Gaga there… We’ve had some great moments with her over the years and she’s an absolutely perfect act for Las Vegas.”
But industry insiders contend that the Gaga numbers don’t add up in a way that makes financial sense for MGM Resorts, the hotel and casino giant with a current valuation of over $30 billion. “At the very high range, an act might clear $500,000,” says one representative of major music artists who’s familiar with the economics of Vegas residencies. “And that’s at a complete sell-out.” Whether the act draws people to the hotel’s and casino’s bars and restaurants doesn’t get factored into such a talent buy. Rather, it’s a matter of ticket pricing and being able to offer a more affordable tier — or not. At the reported Gaga rate, that means a seat in the 5,200-capacity theater would cost the ticket buyer at least $200 just to clear Gaga’s take-home, a steep price, her production value notwithstanding. (...)
The music stars who offer the biggest bang for a host hotel’s buck in Las Vegas? Dance music DJs like Calvin Harris, David Guetta and Avicii. Paydays for top names in EDM can add up to $400,000 per night, on the high end, but that’s without the expensive set-up of a pop star’s show. “One guy and a laptop,” cracks the insider. “It’s like printing money.”
The price tag for a superstar artist’s residency has been inching up steadily in the post-recession years and as more and more acts, both contemporary (like Bruno Mars, also performing a run of shows at the MGM Park Theater, and Pitbull) and heritage (Cher), nostalgic (Backstreet Boys) and somewhere in between (Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears), plant semi-permanent roots in the desert outpost.It’s a rite of passage that goes back to the days of Elvis Presley and Dean Martin, the hottest acts of their respective days, but one that eventually gave way to those whose careers were careening to a halt. Which is why in recent decades Las Vegas was viewed more as a destination for also-rans — where a musician goes to die, was a common crack. Not so any more.
“Years ago, artists would put up their noses if I mentioned the thought of a Vegas residency,” says Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich, who has helmed Celine Dion’s Vegas production at Caesars Palace’s Colosseum and, with Raj Kapoor, also produced Mariah Carey’s Colosseum residency and John Fogerty’s Wynn residency. “Honestly, Celine changed all that in one fell swoop and now everyone wants in. I think acts are reacting to the rigors of the road, the uncertainty of fickle audiences today, and the advantages of being in one place for a defined period of time. Frankly, I’d love to do Gaga there… We’ve had some great moments with her over the years and she’s an absolutely perfect act for Las Vegas.”
But industry insiders contend that the Gaga numbers don’t add up in a way that makes financial sense for MGM Resorts, the hotel and casino giant with a current valuation of over $30 billion. “At the very high range, an act might clear $500,000,” says one representative of major music artists who’s familiar with the economics of Vegas residencies. “And that’s at a complete sell-out.” Whether the act draws people to the hotel’s and casino’s bars and restaurants doesn’t get factored into such a talent buy. Rather, it’s a matter of ticket pricing and being able to offer a more affordable tier — or not. At the reported Gaga rate, that means a seat in the 5,200-capacity theater would cost the ticket buyer at least $200 just to clear Gaga’s take-home, a steep price, her production value notwithstanding. (...)
The music stars who offer the biggest bang for a host hotel’s buck in Las Vegas? Dance music DJs like Calvin Harris, David Guetta and Avicii. Paydays for top names in EDM can add up to $400,000 per night, on the high end, but that’s without the expensive set-up of a pop star’s show. “One guy and a laptop,” cracks the insider. “It’s like printing money.”
by Shirley Halperin, Variety | Read more:
Image: AP/Darron Cummings
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
The Truth about Pulp Fiction and Ezekiel 25:17
Of the 50+ postings I’ve made on TruthByGrace.org, the runaway most-read post remains the “Top 5 Most Misquoted, Misused, and Misunderstood Bible Verses.”
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the scene. Jackson says,
“Do you read the Bible, Brett? Well there’s this passage I’ve got memorized – sort of fits this occasion. Ezekiel 25:17.”Then Jackson goes on to deliver what appears to be a tremendously dramatic Bible exhortation:
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”*The following video contains violent content not suitable for all viewers.
The thing is, the quotation above is not at all a proper rendering of Ezekiel 25:17. The actual verse reads as follows:
Ezekiel 25:17 And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.Sure Jackson’s quote finishes along the same lines as the Bible verse, but the preceding lines in Pulp Fiction’s rendition appear nowhere in the Bible, and certainly not in Ezekiel chapter 25. Additionally, there are a couple of theological inconsistencies present in the Pulp Fiction monologue. Admittedly, Quentin Tarantino, the writer and director of Pulp Fiction, dreamed up this quotation as a re-imagining of several Biblical themes, and reworked them as a monologue that he believed best expressed the drama intended for the movie scene.
Pretty much all of the themes Jackson’s passage incorporates are found in different places in the Bible, but they are all re-workings, not true to the original text. The portion of the monologue about the tyranny of evil men is inspired by Ezekiel 34. The portion about the valley of darkness refers to King David’s words in Psalm 23, and the portion about being one’s brother’s keeper refers to the first human death, occurring in Genesis 4, in which Cain, after murdering his brother, asks the LORD, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
It should be noted that this post is neither an endorsement of Tarantino’s re-rendering the Bible, nor of the movie Pulp Fiction as a theological guide. I would hope that much would be obvious. But, what I do find most interesting, and want to point out, is that often over-looked in this incredibly popular film is the salvation story of Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield. Toward the end of the movie the savage bounty hunter experiences what clearly seems to resemble the effectual calling of the LORD.
Winnfield, who seemed to have always had a passing fascination with the way the words of the Bible sounded (rather than what they actually meant), comes to confess that in the context of (his rendition of) Ezekiel 25:17, he has always been “the tyranny of evil men.” But by divine revelation (or as he called it, “a moment of clarity”) he has come to the realization that he must denounce his wicked ways and strive to ”be the shepherd.” Jules Winnfield has experienced what Ezekiel 36:26-27 tell us is a regeneration of the heart.
Ezekiel 36:26-27 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.*The following video contains language not suitable for all viewers.
As the end of the movie nears, this enlightened Jules Winnfield, rather than kill a man that he previously would have, says this about (his rendering of) Ezekiel 25:17:
“Now… I been sayin’ that *** for years. And if you ever heard it, that meant your ***. You’d be dead right now. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a ***** before I popped a cap in his ***. But I saw some **** this mornin’ made me think twice. […] See, now I’m thinking it could mean you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. And I’d like that. But that **** ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.”And for that reason, rather than kill Ringo, Jules shares this brief testimony and gives Ringo his wallet (which Ringo was trying to steal). In doing so he begins the process of repentance, turning from his prior way of life.
Lost in the melee of the artistic brilliance and grunge that Pulp Fiction truly is, lies a beautiful, realistic, and moving depiction of God’s sovereign grace in the redemption of lost men.
by Chad Hussey, Truth by Grace | Read more:
Image: Pulp Fiction
[ed. I suppose one can read whatever they like into the Bible or Koran or Torah. Even Tolkien's Silmarillion. Still, this is an interesting and welcome interpretation of a movie classic from a different perspective.]
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
The Difficulty is the Point
I’ve recently finished marking 40-odd exams, mostly written by people between the ages of 18 and 21. In them our students had to answer questions about aspects of literature, such as free indirect speech or genre. They also had to write an essay of 1,000 words, on the work of Helen Garner, Christos Tsiolkas, Judith Wright, Jack Davis or Tim Winton.
My students are, for the most part, education students who live in regional Australia. If they get their degree, they are bound for early childhood centres, preschools, primary schools, high schools. These are our new teachers. (...)
I find myself pausing here, to wonder why I am writing this essay. I have two burning concerns: one is to give readers an insight into what it is currently like to teach at an Australian university. To satisfy this concern I want to tell you about semesters and classes shortened to save money on teaching; on passing incapable students simply to keep quotas up; on teaching students for whom attendance at university is no longer a necessary part of gaining a degree. This loops back to the idea of the university as business. Asking universities to stop making it easy for students to gain entrance, and making it easy for them to pass, is like asking Coca-Cola to slow down its sales. The logic of capitalism overrides everything.
The second concern is more abstract. I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you have little to do with tertiary education you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from campus. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access just enough information about the course to pass. And no one can say a word about the fact that they never came to class.
Spoon-fed, I hear you say? Don’t make me laugh. This is a feast of force-feeding, a Roman orgy of information and assistance, with students helpless and lolling while academics assist them in opening their mouths so the food can be tipped in, and then hold their jaws and help them masticate until it goes down. We keep asking ourselves why this generation are so anxious. They are anxious because nobody lets them do things alone: we intervene before they have had a chance to try, let alone succeed or fail. They never get to feel the limits, or the limitlessness, of their real selves.
But in English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
The first assignment in English One is called a Reading Reflection. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading.
What have our students been reading before they come to our class? Some – a very few, and almost always women – have read 19th century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some – a very few, and almost always men – have read 20th century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their and their friends’ Facebook pages, their own news feed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author.
The first time I taught Monkey Grip in English One I was struck by two things. First, by how many of my students were offended by it. They found it too sexually explicit, too full of “profanity”, and they deplored Norah’s method of parenting: the shared household, the children exposed to drug taking and other radical behaviours.
The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the 10-page extract. They didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?
Here is the book’s opening sentence:
But if you have never read anything more difficult than a Harry Potter book, how are you meant to proceed?
by Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
My students are, for the most part, education students who live in regional Australia. If they get their degree, they are bound for early childhood centres, preschools, primary schools, high schools. These are our new teachers. (...)
I find myself pausing here, to wonder why I am writing this essay. I have two burning concerns: one is to give readers an insight into what it is currently like to teach at an Australian university. To satisfy this concern I want to tell you about semesters and classes shortened to save money on teaching; on passing incapable students simply to keep quotas up; on teaching students for whom attendance at university is no longer a necessary part of gaining a degree. This loops back to the idea of the university as business. Asking universities to stop making it easy for students to gain entrance, and making it easy for them to pass, is like asking Coca-Cola to slow down its sales. The logic of capitalism overrides everything.
The second concern is more abstract. I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you have little to do with tertiary education you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from campus. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access just enough information about the course to pass. And no one can say a word about the fact that they never came to class.Spoon-fed, I hear you say? Don’t make me laugh. This is a feast of force-feeding, a Roman orgy of information and assistance, with students helpless and lolling while academics assist them in opening their mouths so the food can be tipped in, and then hold their jaws and help them masticate until it goes down. We keep asking ourselves why this generation are so anxious. They are anxious because nobody lets them do things alone: we intervene before they have had a chance to try, let alone succeed or fail. They never get to feel the limits, or the limitlessness, of their real selves.
But in English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
The first assignment in English One is called a Reading Reflection. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading.
What have our students been reading before they come to our class? Some – a very few, and almost always women – have read 19th century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some – a very few, and almost always men – have read 20th century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their and their friends’ Facebook pages, their own news feed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author.
The first time I taught Monkey Grip in English One I was struck by two things. First, by how many of my students were offended by it. They found it too sexually explicit, too full of “profanity”, and they deplored Norah’s method of parenting: the shared household, the children exposed to drug taking and other radical behaviours.
The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the 10-page extract. They didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?
Here is the book’s opening sentence:
In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.If you are reading this essay, you’re a reader. You probably know this sentence, and if you don’t, you are comfortable with interpreting it. You can hear a character beginning to form: its romantic, optimistic, nostalgic voice; a voice yearning for simplicity; probably, in its deliberate imitation of a child’s singsong, the voice of a woman, a mother. You know it might take a few pages to learn just who this woman is. You’re skilled in this sort of patience.
But if you have never read anything more difficult than a Harry Potter book, how are you meant to proceed?
by Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Amid Sales Drop, Harley-Davidson Wants to Teach More People to Ride
Harley-Davidson is placing a renewed emphasis on teaching people to ride as part of its efforts to attract more customers.
The Milwaukee-based company's decision to expand the number of dealerships with a Harley "Riding Academy" comes as the industry grapples with years of declining sales and an aging customer base.
The program launched in 2000 with about 50 locations and now 245 dealerships in the U.S. offer the three- or four-day course. The company says about a quarter of those launched since 2014.
Harley sold 124,777 new motorcycles through nine months in 2017, down from 135,581 during the same period the previous year, according to the company's most recent earnings report.
The Motorcycle Industry Council says the median age of motorcycle owners increased from 32 to 47 since 1990. About 46 percent of riders are over 50; only about 10 percent are 30-34.
Samantha Kay rode on the back of her father's motorcycle growing up, but when the 25-year-old took a class to ride for the first time she couldn't help being anxious.
"I think motorcycles inherently do scare a lot of people," said Kay, a Milwaukee woman who is one of 50,000 people nationwide who took a riding course at a Harley-Davidson dealership this year.
The training is one of the ways Harley is trying to attract a new generation of riders like Kay amid big demographic shifts.
"Some of the aging Baby Boomers, which have been the guts of Harley-Davidson's purchasers, they're getting older and some of them are just getting out of the sport because they can't handle the motorcycle anymore," said Clyde Fessler, who retired from Harley-Davidson in 2002 after holding several executive positions over 25 years. He created what became the "Riding Academy."
He said the idea "is getting people comfortable on a motorcycle and getting them to feel safe and confident."
In addition to riders getting older, a slow economic recovery has made it harder for millennials to buy new motorcycles, said Jim Williams, vice president of the American Motorcyclist Association.
Among the newest models, a 2018 Softail Slim starts at $15,899 and a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight at $11,299.
"The younger generations are buying plenty of motorcycles, they're just not new," Williams said.
But it's not all the millennials' fault, said Robert Pandya, who managed public relations for Indian Motorcycles and Victory Motorcycles. Pandya recently launched "Give A Shift," a volunteer group discussing ideas to promote motorcycling. One of their conclusions, he said, is the idea that "if mom rides, the kids will ride."
Currently, women are about 14 percent of the riding population, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.
"The biggest possible opportunity in motorcycling is to invite more women to ride," he said.
The Milwaukee-based company's decision to expand the number of dealerships with a Harley "Riding Academy" comes as the industry grapples with years of declining sales and an aging customer base.
The program launched in 2000 with about 50 locations and now 245 dealerships in the U.S. offer the three- or four-day course. The company says about a quarter of those launched since 2014.Harley sold 124,777 new motorcycles through nine months in 2017, down from 135,581 during the same period the previous year, according to the company's most recent earnings report.
The Motorcycle Industry Council says the median age of motorcycle owners increased from 32 to 47 since 1990. About 46 percent of riders are over 50; only about 10 percent are 30-34.
Samantha Kay rode on the back of her father's motorcycle growing up, but when the 25-year-old took a class to ride for the first time she couldn't help being anxious.
"I think motorcycles inherently do scare a lot of people," said Kay, a Milwaukee woman who is one of 50,000 people nationwide who took a riding course at a Harley-Davidson dealership this year.
The training is one of the ways Harley is trying to attract a new generation of riders like Kay amid big demographic shifts.
"Some of the aging Baby Boomers, which have been the guts of Harley-Davidson's purchasers, they're getting older and some of them are just getting out of the sport because they can't handle the motorcycle anymore," said Clyde Fessler, who retired from Harley-Davidson in 2002 after holding several executive positions over 25 years. He created what became the "Riding Academy."
He said the idea "is getting people comfortable on a motorcycle and getting them to feel safe and confident."
In addition to riders getting older, a slow economic recovery has made it harder for millennials to buy new motorcycles, said Jim Williams, vice president of the American Motorcyclist Association.
Among the newest models, a 2018 Softail Slim starts at $15,899 and a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight at $11,299.
"The younger generations are buying plenty of motorcycles, they're just not new," Williams said.
But it's not all the millennials' fault, said Robert Pandya, who managed public relations for Indian Motorcycles and Victory Motorcycles. Pandya recently launched "Give A Shift," a volunteer group discussing ideas to promote motorcycling. One of their conclusions, he said, is the idea that "if mom rides, the kids will ride."
Currently, women are about 14 percent of the riding population, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.
"The biggest possible opportunity in motorcycling is to invite more women to ride," he said.
by Ivan Moreno, AP | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. Yeah, blame it on boomers, millennials - and women; just my opinion, but Harley's troubles go way beyond those easy targets. I keep seeing articles like this every couple of years. Maybe it's as simple as this: no one wants to ride big hogs anymore. I have a couple friends who sold theirs for smaller, nimbler bikes and couldn't be happier. Also, you don't need Harley to teach you how to ride, just sign up for a basic MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) course. They're everywhere (and only cost about $125, or so). ]
The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights
On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and fans sent paper sailing through reeking cigarette fog. These were objet d’art. They ranged from the purely ironic (a furry outgrowth) to the purely beautiful (chain links encrusted in sherbet crystals). Many were ineffable abstracts, and a few were just satisfying (animal figurines drilled into each other). “My life doesn’t justify a paperweight,” a girlfriend remarked. “My life isn’t settled enough. You don’t buy one until you think you’re not going to move.”
Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don’t have to lug no paperweight.
Then Saturday came without Saturday’s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fiancé found me cradling it to my heart. “You’re going to bring that home, aren’t you,” he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain. (...)
In the late forties, Jean Cocteau arranged for a young Truman Capote to have tea with Colette at her apartment in Paris. They did not manage to discuss literature; instead, Capote was moonstruck by the Frenchwoman’s collection of valuable antique paperweights, which she called “my snowflakes”:
At home, my weight immediately found its use. When you are a paperweight, you have one job, and it is so easy. In theory, any lousy rock could do it: be heavy (glass, crystal, marble, brass, and bronze have been standard issue), be flat-bottomed (spheres, pyramids, cubes, and discs tend not to topple), and sit pretty (on this last point, common geology would fail). If you can do that, you are doing great. Layoffs still involve paperwork, which, once printed, generally has to get notarized and posted; such documents can stagnate on your desk, along with odd to-do lists, tear sheets, bills, and greeting cards. But I found none of it was to be easily ignored or mislaid when it was pinned down by this shroom of glass that catches and carnivalizes the sky.
Last year, Christie’s mounted Dress Your Desk, an online auction of dozens of paperweights that had belonged to Arnold Neustadter, the inventor of that other once-ubiquitous desktop accessory, the Rolodex. He was “the most organized man I ever knew,” his son-in-law told an obit writer. Adding, “Whenever anyone put something on his desk that didn’t belong there, he’d move it.” Carleigh Queenth, head of ceramics at Christie’s, told me, “He had a really lovely collection, including some incredibly rare pieces like a Pantin salamander weight.” Only twenty of those are known to exist, and only extreme talent could have pulled off the forms, textures, and patterns (e.g., polka-dotted amphibian bod on floor of sand and lichen). A prior director of the Corning Museum of Glass, which has assembled one of the most important exhibitions of paperweights, regards these salamanders as “the greatest technical achievements of nineteenth-century paperweight makers.”
by Chantel Tattoli, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Ron Farina
Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don’t have to lug no paperweight. Then Saturday came without Saturday’s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fiancé found me cradling it to my heart. “You’re going to bring that home, aren’t you,” he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain. (...)
In the late forties, Jean Cocteau arranged for a young Truman Capote to have tea with Colette at her apartment in Paris. They did not manage to discuss literature; instead, Capote was moonstruck by the Frenchwoman’s collection of valuable antique paperweights, which she called “my snowflakes”:
There were perhaps a hundred of them covering two tables situated on either side of the bed: crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders, millefiori bouquets, dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of ferns, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras coiled to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias. Colette suggested she might take them with her in her coffin, “like a pharaoh.”When she gave a Baccarat with a single white rose inside to Capote, he caught the fever. He sought paperweights at auctions in Copenhagen and Hong Kong. Once, he found a four-thousand-dollar weight in a junk shop in Brooklyn for which he shelled out just twenty bucks. In East Hampton, he successfully bid seven hundred dollars for a millefiori (“the real thing,” “an electrifying spectacle”) worth seven grand.
At home, my weight immediately found its use. When you are a paperweight, you have one job, and it is so easy. In theory, any lousy rock could do it: be heavy (glass, crystal, marble, brass, and bronze have been standard issue), be flat-bottomed (spheres, pyramids, cubes, and discs tend not to topple), and sit pretty (on this last point, common geology would fail). If you can do that, you are doing great. Layoffs still involve paperwork, which, once printed, generally has to get notarized and posted; such documents can stagnate on your desk, along with odd to-do lists, tear sheets, bills, and greeting cards. But I found none of it was to be easily ignored or mislaid when it was pinned down by this shroom of glass that catches and carnivalizes the sky.
Last year, Christie’s mounted Dress Your Desk, an online auction of dozens of paperweights that had belonged to Arnold Neustadter, the inventor of that other once-ubiquitous desktop accessory, the Rolodex. He was “the most organized man I ever knew,” his son-in-law told an obit writer. Adding, “Whenever anyone put something on his desk that didn’t belong there, he’d move it.” Carleigh Queenth, head of ceramics at Christie’s, told me, “He had a really lovely collection, including some incredibly rare pieces like a Pantin salamander weight.” Only twenty of those are known to exist, and only extreme talent could have pulled off the forms, textures, and patterns (e.g., polka-dotted amphibian bod on floor of sand and lichen). A prior director of the Corning Museum of Glass, which has assembled one of the most important exhibitions of paperweights, regards these salamanders as “the greatest technical achievements of nineteenth-century paperweight makers.”
by Chantel Tattoli, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Ron Farina
War On Terror Has Cost $250 Million A Day For 16 Years
American taxpayers have spent $1.46 trillion on wars abroad since September 11, 2001.
The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.
The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.
The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.
A 2011 paper from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of veterans’ benefits as $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next 40 years. That number was based on 482,364 veterans who were receiving compensation for disability connected to service as of February 2011. Since then, the number of veterans receiving compensation for service-related disability has increased drastically.
According to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration’s 2016 annual benefits report , 1,060,408 veterans are receiving service-related benefits, averaging $15,907 a year. The total annual benefits for Global War on Terror veterans’ benefits are currently $16.8 billion per year, which over the next 40 years would total $674 billion, placing it firmly within Bilmes’ original 2011 estimate.
The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.
The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.
The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.
A 2011 paper from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of veterans’ benefits as $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next 40 years. That number was based on 482,364 veterans who were receiving compensation for disability connected to service as of February 2011. Since then, the number of veterans receiving compensation for service-related disability has increased drastically.
According to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration’s 2016 annual benefits report , 1,060,408 veterans are receiving service-related benefits, averaging $15,907 a year. The total annual benefits for Global War on Terror veterans’ benefits are currently $16.8 billion per year, which over the next 40 years would total $674 billion, placing it firmly within Bilmes’ original 2011 estimate.
by Jay Cassano, IBT | Read more:
[ed. Nice to get some numbers. Other forms of "security" spending like TSA (which is now going global) are excluded, along with normal operational training, personnel and base support around the world.]
It Was Gold
The first thoughts about Joan Didion are not reasonable. The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot. How much can we really rely on someone who loved The Doors? Why do all her last lines give the impression that she’s speaking from beyond the veil? What, in the end, is she actually saying? But surely she has told us that herself, and all along. What she is saying, standing in the corner of every piece, holding her yellow legal pad and watching, is: ‘I was there.’
The Centre Will Not Hold, the new Netflix documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and tastes one or two words longer than the others, for their well-chosenness. It calls to mind Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, distinguishing between ‘the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy’.
It seems like the kind of documentary a nephew would make about an aunt who was not Joan Didion. We zoom in on the dark comprehension of her eyes in snapshots, sift for her face in photos of her pioneer ancestors and find it. The music is soft encouraging swells. The camera waits for her to weep. Dunne’s voice, when he speaks to her, is the voice of someone coaxing her to eat. Perhaps that is the point, even the value of the project. We are seeing a Joan we would not be seeing if she weren’t talking to a member of her family – talking, perhaps, to the child version of him, to whom paradise days are attached.
Still, there are oversized clues to the fact that the subject is out of the ordinary. At one point Dunne asks her how it felt to see the five-year-old child on acid when she was reporting in Haight-Ashbury. Her face works, and you are expecting her to say: ‘It was horrifying.’ Instead a light breaks, and she says: ‘It was gold.’ (...)
I thought of her essay about John Wayne – she loved him, and not just because he gathered the whole American West in a man. It was also because, as Katharine Hepburn observed, it was so thrilling to lean against him. Great like a tree, a place to rest. And didn’t she want to rest? Weren’t her burdens so heavy? In youth she had rested against the strength, the solid thereness of the West; in adulthood, didn’t she become paralysed when she felt it could no longer hold her? When she headed to San Francisco in 1967, wasn’t it because she suddenly saw America as a power that could no longer shoulder its people? (...)
To revisit Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album, in the paperback editions just released by 4th Estate, is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays, the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life. Read ‘Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)’ and see if you do not recognise the man in the modern scene. ‘Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.’ Where things are moving too fast she fixes a focal point. She captures the way the language becomes more memetic, more meaningless just as the ground begins to swell under the feet – as if the herd, sensing some danger, must consolidate its responses. Her adept turn to political writing in the 1980s and 1990s showed the same prescience; if you are tuned to where the language goes strange, you will anticipate the narrative they’re going to try to sell you.
The Centre Will Not Hold, the new Netflix documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and tastes one or two words longer than the others, for their well-chosenness. It calls to mind Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, distinguishing between ‘the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy’.It seems like the kind of documentary a nephew would make about an aunt who was not Joan Didion. We zoom in on the dark comprehension of her eyes in snapshots, sift for her face in photos of her pioneer ancestors and find it. The music is soft encouraging swells. The camera waits for her to weep. Dunne’s voice, when he speaks to her, is the voice of someone coaxing her to eat. Perhaps that is the point, even the value of the project. We are seeing a Joan we would not be seeing if she weren’t talking to a member of her family – talking, perhaps, to the child version of him, to whom paradise days are attached.
Still, there are oversized clues to the fact that the subject is out of the ordinary. At one point Dunne asks her how it felt to see the five-year-old child on acid when she was reporting in Haight-Ashbury. Her face works, and you are expecting her to say: ‘It was horrifying.’ Instead a light breaks, and she says: ‘It was gold.’ (...)
I thought of her essay about John Wayne – she loved him, and not just because he gathered the whole American West in a man. It was also because, as Katharine Hepburn observed, it was so thrilling to lean against him. Great like a tree, a place to rest. And didn’t she want to rest? Weren’t her burdens so heavy? In youth she had rested against the strength, the solid thereness of the West; in adulthood, didn’t she become paralysed when she felt it could no longer hold her? When she headed to San Francisco in 1967, wasn’t it because she suddenly saw America as a power that could no longer shoulder its people? (...)
To revisit Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album, in the paperback editions just released by 4th Estate, is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays, the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life. Read ‘Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)’ and see if you do not recognise the man in the modern scene. ‘Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.’ Where things are moving too fast she fixes a focal point. She captures the way the language becomes more memetic, more meaningless just as the ground begins to swell under the feet – as if the herd, sensing some danger, must consolidate its responses. Her adept turn to political writing in the 1980s and 1990s showed the same prescience; if you are tuned to where the language goes strange, you will anticipate the narrative they’re going to try to sell you.
by Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Ted Streshinsky/Corbis
Monday, December 25, 2017
H. Brockmann Petersen, easy chair, for Louis G. Thiersen & Søn, Denmark. 1953. Teak, brass and cane.
via:
Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair
Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge. Three unsuccessful approaches to conquering it have failed: treating components of age-related ill health as curable diseases, extrapolating from differences between species in the rate of aging, and emulating the life extension that famine elicits in short-lived species. SENS Research Foundation is spearheading the fourth age of anti-aging research: the repair of age-related damage, that is, rejuvenation biotechnology.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.
To see how the goal of negligible senescence could be “engineered,” it is useful to consider a situation in which human ingenuity and perseverance has already achieved an analogous result. Motor vehicles experience a process of wear-and-tear essentially similar to organismal aging; the paint flakes, windowpanes chip, rust infiltrates the pipework, and so forth. Nonetheless, as vintage car owners will attest, it is entirely possible to keep one functional for an essentially indefinite period. Critically, this is achieved not by preventing the wear but by repairing the damage that does occur at a rate sufficient to ensure that the function of the machine is never irretrievably compromised.
Of course, the analogy is inexact; human bodies are far more complex than cars but a closer look at precisely how growing older leads to debility reveals that our ignorance need not be showstopping.
Aging can be characterized as a three-stage process. In the first stage, metabolic processes essential to life produce toxins. Secondly, a small amount of the damage caused by these toxins cannot be removed by the body’s endogenous repair systems, and consequently accumulates over time. In the third stage, the accumulation of damage drives age-related pathology.
This model—metabolism causes damage causes pathology—allows us to clarify the requirements for successful intervention in aging. Unlike the dynamic processes of metabolism and pathology, accumulated damage represents a relatively stationary target. That is to say, it may not be clear whether a given type of damage is pathological (on balance), but its absence from healthy twenty-year-olds indicates that it is not required for healthy life. Conversely it is clear that the total ensemble of types of damage is pathological, since fifty-year-olds have considerably less time to live than twenty-year-olds, and the only static difference between the two groups is the amount of accumulated damage present.
Accepting the implications of this model leads us to the SENS approach; by identifying and repairing all of the damage accumulated during aging, we can restore the body to a youthful state. Consequently, its dynamic metabolic processes will revert to their own norms, and the risk of mortality will be no higher than in any other equivalently “youthful” individual—whether they have actually lived for twenty years or 120. Furthermore—so long as our inventory of damage classes is sufficiently comprehensive—we can repeat this effort on a regular basis, and thus remain indefinitely below the threshold of pathology. Crucially, we can do this without a comprehensive understanding of the complex metabolic processes giving rise to damage, nor of those leading from damage to pathology. We need only an inventory of the types of damage which exist, which can be obtained directly by comparison of older and younger individuals. And, fortunately, it seems that all aging-related damage known to accumulate in the human body can be classified into just seven clearly defined categories: cell loss, cell death-resistance, cell over-proliferation, intracellular and extracellular “junk”, tissue stiffening and mitochondrial defects.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.To see how the goal of negligible senescence could be “engineered,” it is useful to consider a situation in which human ingenuity and perseverance has already achieved an analogous result. Motor vehicles experience a process of wear-and-tear essentially similar to organismal aging; the paint flakes, windowpanes chip, rust infiltrates the pipework, and so forth. Nonetheless, as vintage car owners will attest, it is entirely possible to keep one functional for an essentially indefinite period. Critically, this is achieved not by preventing the wear but by repairing the damage that does occur at a rate sufficient to ensure that the function of the machine is never irretrievably compromised.
Of course, the analogy is inexact; human bodies are far more complex than cars but a closer look at precisely how growing older leads to debility reveals that our ignorance need not be showstopping.
Aging can be characterized as a three-stage process. In the first stage, metabolic processes essential to life produce toxins. Secondly, a small amount of the damage caused by these toxins cannot be removed by the body’s endogenous repair systems, and consequently accumulates over time. In the third stage, the accumulation of damage drives age-related pathology.
This model—metabolism causes damage causes pathology—allows us to clarify the requirements for successful intervention in aging. Unlike the dynamic processes of metabolism and pathology, accumulated damage represents a relatively stationary target. That is to say, it may not be clear whether a given type of damage is pathological (on balance), but its absence from healthy twenty-year-olds indicates that it is not required for healthy life. Conversely it is clear that the total ensemble of types of damage is pathological, since fifty-year-olds have considerably less time to live than twenty-year-olds, and the only static difference between the two groups is the amount of accumulated damage present.
Accepting the implications of this model leads us to the SENS approach; by identifying and repairing all of the damage accumulated during aging, we can restore the body to a youthful state. Consequently, its dynamic metabolic processes will revert to their own norms, and the risk of mortality will be no higher than in any other equivalently “youthful” individual—whether they have actually lived for twenty years or 120. Furthermore—so long as our inventory of damage classes is sufficiently comprehensive—we can repeat this effort on a regular basis, and thus remain indefinitely below the threshold of pathology. Crucially, we can do this without a comprehensive understanding of the complex metabolic processes giving rise to damage, nor of those leading from damage to pathology. We need only an inventory of the types of damage which exist, which can be obtained directly by comparison of older and younger individuals. And, fortunately, it seems that all aging-related damage known to accumulate in the human body can be classified into just seven clearly defined categories: cell loss, cell death-resistance, cell over-proliferation, intracellular and extracellular “junk”, tissue stiffening and mitochondrial defects.
by Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. That's a bold statement. See also: Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair.]
[ed. That's a bold statement. See also: Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair.]
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