Menopause, Depression, & Me

'It feels like a derangement'

I stare stupidly at it. It’s nothing much to look at. It’s only a small pile of clothing: the shorts and tank top that I wear in bed, which I have thrown onto the floor before getting into the shower. I stare stupidly at the clump because I can’t pick it up. It’s astonishing I managed to shower, because I know already that this is a bad day, one when I feel assaulted by my hormones, which I picture as small pilots in those huge Star Wars armored beasts that turn me this way and that, implacable. On this morning, I wake up with fear in my stomach—fear of nothing—and I know it will be a bad day. (...)

I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake. But I don’t. I look at it, and the thought of accomplishing anything makes my fear and despair grow. Every thought brings on another and that prospect is frightening. All those thoughts. I write that down and I feel stupid and maudlin and dramatic. A privileged freelance writer who does not have a full-time job that requires her presence in an office and can be indulgent of what the medical profession calls “low moods.” In fact, plenty of menopausal women leave their jobs, endure wrecked relationships, suffer, and cope. Or don’t. But I don’t feel maudlin and dramatic in the bathroom, or on any other of a hundred occasions over the past two years. I feel terrified. I have no reason to feel fear. But my body acts as though I do: the blood rushing from my gut to my limbs in case I need to flee, leaving the fluttering emptiness that is called “butterflies,” though that is too pretty a description.

Still, I set off on my bicycle to my writing studio. I hope I can overcome the day. I always hope, and I am always wrong. A few hours later, I find myself cowering in my workspace, a studio I rent in a complex of artists’ studios, scared to go downstairs to the kitchen because I can’t bear to talk to anyone I might find there. I have done nothing of use all day. Every now and then, I stop doing nothing and put my head in my hands because it feels safe and comfortable, like a refuge. I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there. There is no logic to this except that it is out of sight of the door and no one will find me.

Even so, when the phone rings I answer it. I shouldn’t, but I am hopeful that I can manage it and mask it, and I haven’t spoken to my mother for a few days and would like to. It goes well for a few minutes, because I’m not doing the talking. Then she asks me whether I want to accompany her to a posh dinner, several weeks hence. She doesn’t understand when I ask to be given some time to think about it. “Why can’t you decide now?” I say it’s one of the bad days, but I know this is a mixed message: If it’s that bad, how am I talking on the phone and sounding all right? Because I am a duck: talking serenely above, churning below, the weight on my chest, the catch in my throat, the inexplicable distress. I try to explain but I’m also trying hard not to weep, and so I explain it badly.

She doesn’t understand. This is not her fault. She is a compassionate woman, but she had an easy menopause, so easy that she can say, “Oh, I barely remember it.” One of those women: the lucky ones. She doesn’t understand depression, though both her children experience it, because she has never had it. “But you sounded well,” she says, “I thought you were all right.” Now she says, “I don’t understand how your not being well is stopping you deciding whether you want to go to dinner.” Because it is a decision, and a decision is too hard, requiring many things to happen in my brain and my brain is too busy being filled with fear and panic and tears and black numbness. There is no room to spare.

I hang up because I can’t explain this. I stay there for a while, sitting on my couch, wondering how to face cycling home or leaving my studio or opening the door. All these actions seem equally impossible.

It takes a while but finally I set off. I know where I’m going. I have learned. On days like this, there are only two places to be. One is in my darkened bedroom with my cat lying next to me. On days like this, she takes care to lie closer to me than usual because she knows and because she loves me. Maybe my darkness has a smell.

The other place to be is in unconsciousness.

These are the safe places because everything is quiet. On days like this, I wonder if this is what autism feels like, when sensation is overwhelming. Not just noise, but thoughts, sights, all input. It is on the bad days that I realize what a cacophony of impressions we walk through every day, and how good we are at receiving and deflecting, as required. Every day, we filter and sieve; on the bad days, my filters fail.

I sometimes call these bridge days, after a footbridge near my studio that goes at a great height over the busy A64 road. On days like this, that bridge is a danger for me. I am not suicidal, but I have always had the urge to jump. This is a thing with a name. HPP: high places phenomenon. The French call it “l’appel du vide.” So very Sartre of them: the call of emptiness. The A64 is the opposite of emptiness, but still, it is a danger. Today I don’t have the filter that we must all have to function: the one that stops us stepping into traffic or fearing the cars or buses that can kill us at any time. The one that mutes the call of the HPP.

I avoid the bridge. I cycle home, trying not to rage at drivers who cut me off and ignore me. I have no room for rage along with everything else. Thoughts that would normally flow now snag. Every observation immediately triggers a negative thread, a spiral, and a worsening. On a good day, I can pass a child and a mother and think, How nice. Nothing more. Fleeting. Unimportant. On a bad day, I see the same and think of my own infertility, how I have surely disappointed my mother by not giving her grandchildren; how it is all too late, and what have I done with my life, and my book will be a failure and today is lost and I can’t afford to lose the time. It goes on and on. Snagging thoughts that drag me down, that are relentless.

When I get inside my house, I cry. I try to watch something or read, but nothing interests me. This is called anhedonia and is a symptom of depression: the forgetting how to take pleasure. The best thing to do is sleep away the day, as much as I can.

Toward evening, I begin to feel a faint foolishness. This is my sign. Embarrassment. Shame at the day and at my management of it. When I am able to feel that and see that, I am getting better. Now I manage to watch TV, though only foreign-language dramas. Without the filmmaking industries of northern Europe, my menopause would be even bleaker. Foreign words go somewhere shallower in the brain; they are less heavy. But soon I switch it off. I don’t care about the plot. I don’t care about anything. I take a sleeping pill to get the day over with, so the better next day can begin. (...)

Depression, wrote William Styron, is a noun “with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.” It was pioneered by a Swiss psychiatrist who, Styron thought, perhaps had a “tin ear” and “therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.”

Black dog. Walking through treacle. Low moods. Nothing I have read of depression has conveyed the crippling weight of it, that is a weight made out of nothing.

I do not have depression according to most authoritative clinical definitions of the condition. Depression is a long-term chronic illness. Mine is unpredictable, and before I got my HRT dose right, it lasted weeks at a time; but usually, these days, it lasts no more than twenty-four hours. My now-and-thens do not qualify as a disease. I do not count as depressed. Instead, I am one of the women of menopause, who struggle to understand why we feel such despair, why now we cry when before we didn’t, why understanding what is left and what is right takes a fraction longer than it used to: all this is “low mood” or “brain fog.” These diminishing phrases, which convey nothing of the force of the anguish or grief that assaults us, are reserved for women and usually relate to menstrual cycles or hormones.

I have never been sunny. People who can rise from their beds and see joy without working at it, they have always been a mystery. I still feel guilty for once asking a cheery person, cheery very early in the morning, why he was so happy—I made it sound like an accusation not praise—and I watched as his face fell and his warmth iced over. I’m still sorry. Cheeriness always seems like an enviable gift. I have always been susceptible to premenstrual upheaval: two days a month when things feel awful as though they have never been anything else. I endured them. Now and then, there have been therapists sometimes and antidepressants now and then, and, for the last few years, running, in whatever wilds I can find. The best therapy. I have managed. (...)

For many months, I told people I was “unwell.” Not crippled, not weeping, not disabled. “Unwell.” The implication: that there is something physically wrong. A proper illness, not depression. A definition of depression is heartache, but it is my head that aches. What if I told everyone I had a severe headache? A broken ankle not brain? They would understand better. Then, one day, as I sit at my computer and think of the writing deadline that is today and feel despair, and I try to read serious medical literature and instead put my head in my hands again, I decide to write to the commissioning editor, even though she is new and this may form her opinion of me, and say: I can’t function today. I can’t write. And it is because of depression. Please give me leeway. It shames me to write it, but I do. And I do it again, when needed. So far, every response has been profoundly kind. I should have done it sooner.

Mental illness. Such an odd concept. How strange to put a division between mental and physical illness, as if the brain is not in the body. As if emotions are not regulated by the brain. As if feelings are not linked to hormones. As if all maladies are not of the body. And still mental illness is put in its place, which is in a different category. Not “real” illness. Not physical. Easier to fix, to underfund, to sweep into the dark corner of the unspoken. Imagine the contrary. Have you broken your ankle? Cheer up. Do you have third-degree burns? Chin up. Think yourself better, you with your chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Smile.

by Rose George, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Vilhelm Hammershøi: Rest, 1905

Norman Rockwell, Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 1950
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Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade

Sometimes you don’t know how deep the hole is until you try to fill it. In 2009, staring down what looked to anyone with a calculator like the biggest financial crisis since 1929, the federal government poured $830 billion into the economy — a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures, than the entire New Deal — and the country barely noticed.

It registered the crisis, though. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression was indelibly shaped by that experience of deprivation, even though what followed was what Henry Luce famously called, in 1941, “the American Century.” He meant the 20th, and, to judge from our present politics, at least — “Make America Great Again” on one side of the aisle; on the other, the suspicion that the president is a political suicide bomber, destroying the pillars of government — he probably wouldn’t have made the same declaration about the 21st. A decade now after the beginning of what has come to be called the Great Recession, and almost as long since economic growth began to tick upward and unemployment downward, the cultural and psychological imprint left by the financial crisis looks as profound as the ones left by the calamity that struck our grandparents. All the more when you look beyond the narrow economic data: at a new radical politics on both left and right; at a strident, ideological pop culture obsessed with various apocalypses; at an internet powered by envy, strife, and endless entrepreneurial hustle; at opiates and suicides and low birthrates; and at the resentment, racial and gendered and otherwise, by those who felt especially left behind. Here, we cast a look back, and tried to take a seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.

AMERICA STOPPED BELIEVING IN THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Frank Rich, NY Magazine Columnist

If you were standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate. The investment class and humble 401(k) holders alike are beneficiaries of a rising GDP and booming stock market that, as measured by the Dow, is up some 250 percent since its September 10, 2001, close. The most admired person in America, according to Gallup, is the nation’s first African-American president, a man no one had heard of and a phenomenon no one could have imagined at the century’s dawn. Comedy, the one art whose currency is laughter, is the culture’s greatest growth industry. What’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous. In the aftermath of 9/11, the initial shock and horror soon gave way to a semblance of national unity in support of a president whose electoral legitimacy had been bitterly contested only a year earlier. Today’s America is instead marked by fear and despair more akin to what followed the crash of 1929, when unprecedented millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes after the implosion of businesses ranging in scale from big banks to family farms.

It’s not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later, even our current run of ostensible prosperity and peace does not mitigate the one conviction that still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems, except Peak TV (for those who can afford it).

That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. When that tide pulled back in 2008 to reveal the ruins underneath, the country got an indelible picture of just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken, and how many central American institutions, whether governmental, financial, or corporate, had betrayed the trust the public had placed in them. And when we went down, we took much of the West with us. The American Kool-Aid we’d exported since the Marshall Plan, that limitless faith in progress and profits, had been exposed as a cruel illusion. (...)

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WTF HAPPENED?

by Sheila Bair, Former head of FDIC

Once the system was stabilized in early 2009, we had an opportunity to restructure and break up Citigroup in particular, but we didn’t do that. I think that was a missed opportunity. We just reinforced too-big-to-fail with all these bailouts, let’s face it. Other than Lehman Brothers, nobody took their medicine. Restructuring Citigroup would have sent a powerful signal that the government had the gumption and courage to stand up to these very large institutions, and to impose losses on bond holders.

I think we’ve improved the system on the margin. There are higher capital requirements, there’s better bank liquidity, less reliance on short-term financing, less reliance on debt among the regulated banks. Those are all positive things. But the financial system we have is still basically the financial system we had in 2008, with more capital and less reliance on short-term funding, so whether it’s enough? I hope it is.

I wish we had more Republicans who would stand up to these cronies who want the government bailouts. I think a lot of people still want that on Wall Street — it’s secretly what they want. They think it’s the government’s obligation to keep them afloat. I’m a capitalist, and I’d rather have the state own them than have that system.

It’s very frustrating. It’s just stupid economics. Set the morality aside; it’s just dumb economics to have a system like this where you’re propping up inefficient, bloated institutions. So there are good economic reasons to not have the system we had in 2008, and whether we’ve gotten rid of it or not I don’t know. I think we won’t know until a big bank gets in trouble again. Then we’ll see what happens. I don’t even want to think about what the political fallout would be. (...)

by Yves Smith, Founder, Naked Capitalism

Trump is crowing about this 4.1 percent GDP growth, right? Yet if you look at the statistics, real worker wages have continued to be flat for this period. The crisis itself was the greatest looting of the public purse in history. The crisis itself was a huge wealth transfer. The Obama administration should have forced a lot more recognition of the losses. These losses were real. They should have forced more loan write-downs. And recognition of the loss to the financial system. And they should have had a huge stimulus to offset the downdraft of recognizing those losses. And in fact the Japanese, early in their crisis, they said the biggest mistake we made was not writing down the bad loans in the banking system. Don’t repeat our mistake.

And we did this in a more indirect manner by having the Fed engineer these super-low interest rates that were a transfer from savers to the financial system. Economist Ed Kane said that basically savers lost $300 billion in income a year. So that reduction of income right there, you see today. There’s a Wall Street Journalstory about how pension funds are in crisis. There’s not a single mention of the fact that the zero-interest-rate policies are the reason why the pensions are in distress. All retirees and long-term savers, life insurance, they’re all in the same boat. It used to be that if you were a saver or an asset holder, you could get a decent positive return doing something not crazy. And the Fed took that away. The big reason the pensions are in crisis is because the way we dealt with the crisis.

We have this fallacy that normal people should be able to save for retirement. If public pension funds, which can invest at the very lowest possible fees, can’t make this work, how is Joe Mom-and-Pop America gonna be able to do this? Again, it’s back to the stagnant worker wages. So, great, we’re not paying people enough, housing prices are very inflated. We’ve got this horrible medical system that costs way too much, and how are people supposed to put any money aside when their real estate and their rents and their health costs are going up?

Why do you think we have Trump? I mean, even though he did a big bait-and-switch, as we all know, there were a lot of people that lost their homes, their community wasn’t what it used to be, particularly if they lived in the Rust Belt. And then you have these people on the coast saying, “Oh, they should go get training. It’s disgusting.” I mean, let them eat cake is let them get training. What you hear from these coastal elites: People over 40, even over 35, are basically non-hirable. Are you gonna train them? They’re gonna waste their time thinking they can get a new job? I mean, that’s just lunacy.

I think the Republicans, because they’re sort of loud and proud, that’s the way they behave, it’s easier to point fingers at them. And in some sense they are more vocal proponents of bad ideology, but there’s this great tendency in politics and in business to present whatever was done as being terrific and successful when it wasn’t. This is one of my criticisms of the Obama administration, but now appears to be true of the Democratic Party generally, that they think the solution for every problem is better PR.

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by Frank Rich, Sheila Bair, Corey Robin, Robert Shiller, Matt Bruenig, Yves Smith, Boots Riley, Steve Rattner, Astra Taylor, Paul Romer, Stephanie Kelton (and Others), NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Flyer

On a recent, brutally hot morning on the edge of a lake just outside Las Vegas, tech entrepreneur Carter Reum was strapped into his vehicle and ready to lift off into the future. Except he didn’t.

Reum was sitting inside the narrow cockpit of the Flyer, a ten-propeller flying vehicle designed and built by Kitty Hawk, a company started by Google’s Larry Page. It was to be Reum’s inaugural flight in the vehicle after becoming the first person to buy one. (Kitty Hawk would not disclose the price).

But it was not to be. Kitty Hawk’s flight crew, sitting in a white, yurt-like enclosure, scrapped the flight after wind speeds climbed above ten knots. Reum would have to wait another day.

Just a few minutes before, however, flight training manager Brittney Miculka had been at the helm of the Flyer, lifting off from the edge of a pier, rising ten feet above the lake and performing impressive turns and pivots in front of a small group of onlookers. The flight lasted about eight minutes, but in that short time, observers caught a glimpse of what the future might look like; one where the average person will no longer be stuck in soul-crushing traffic, but soaring above it.

“The vision of Kitty Hawk is truly to free the world from traffic,” Todd Reichert, Kitty Hawk’s lead engineer, told Quartz. “It’s incredibly ambitious, and it will take time, and this is the first step.”

The Flyer looks a lot like a hobbyist’s drone. It runs on batteries and can stay aloft for around 20 minutes. Its rotors are large, making it more energy efficient and less noisy, says Reichert. Indeed, from 50 feet away or so, the Flyer sounds no louder than a semi-truck on the highway. Whether that’s going to be too loud when it’s flying over your house is an open question.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around flying cars. But the technology does seem close, even if none of these vehicles have yet gone through the kind of rigorous testing that’s going to be required to ensure passenger safety. More important, perhaps, or at least, more difficult to surmount, will be the vast changes to the regulation of federal airspace that will be required before flying cars become common.

Kitty Hawk is not the only company trying to make flying cars. Companies in China, Germany, Slovakia and elsewhere have been developing flying cars for several years now. But few of them have reached the stage where someone without a pilot’s license could sit inside the vehicle and fly.

Mostly that has to do with the Flyer’s design. It weighs just 250 pounds, thus classifying it under FAA rules as un ultralight, which means no aircraft registration or pilot certification are required. It also means that it won’t be able to fly over congested areas, like cities.

The Flyer is flown with just two controls: one switch to set the altitude, and a small joystick to change direction.

by Erik Olsen, Quartz |  Read more:
Image: Quartz

Nice fish
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‘The Onion’ Proudly Stands With The Media As The Enemy Of The People

In recent days, President Donald Trump has increased his criticism of the media, and at a briefing Thursday, his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, controversially refused to walk back his statements. Recognizing that unity in the journalistic profession is absolutely essential to allowing reporters to bravely and securely practice their craft, The Onion announces that we proudly stand with our brothers and sisters in the media as the enemy of the people.

When the Trump administration refers to news organizations as antagonists to the American public, we know exactly what they’re doing: correctly identifying the awesome power that we hold over the slobbering masses and trying to drive a wedge between the public and the fourth estate. Rest assured, however, that this wedge was already there. We in the news media despised you imbeciles long before Trump, and we’ll despise you long after he’s gone.

Honestly, you empty-headed dipshits who can barely process a simple headline or understand its meaning should be happy we interact with you at all.

An utter contempt for the idiotic multitudes has been a cornerstone of American journalism virtually since its inception, and we at The Onion are grateful for our colleagues at hallowed institutions such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN who have served as pioneers in relentlessly tormenting the public by obscuring the truth, promoting wanton hysteria, and lying to their faces. We stand alongside them as staunch enemies of everyday Americans.

When one of our colleagues at some lesser publication criticizes any politician’s assault on journalists, what you must understand is that this is merely another—in our opinion, fairly transparent—effort to elicit easy sympathy from feeble-minded media consumers for some sort of manufactured conflict between the government and the press. Nevertheless, all that exists is the media’s collective effort to lead you morons further and further from useful information, critical thought, and truth itself. And, honestly, why on God’s green earth should we try to help anyone who is as willfully ignorant and so unconcerned with maintaining a country with even a veneer of representative democracy as Americans?

Mr. Trump believes the press is too critical of him. No fucking shit. We are critical of everyone who is not us. The press hates you. All of you. We are what you deserve.

God bless America.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: An inhabitant of the 8th or 9th Circle of Hell (or both, not sure). Uncredited.

Qin Qi, Zhou Tianbai’s Friend, 2018
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Sex and Hotels

Hotels are synonymous with sex. Sex in a hotel is romantic, daring, unbridled, wild. Sex in a hotel is sexy. If you’ve been having a sexy time at home you’ll have a sexier time in a hotel. And it’s even more fun if there are two of you.

Yes, so far we’ve only been talking about masturbation, an activity that, at home, often has a hurried, lavatorial quality to it. In a hotel—and I should add that “hotel” throughout this piece is short for “expensive hotel”—it’s something to luxuriate in. At home you want to watch news, sports, or documentaries about human rights abuses. If you are watching television in a hotel, on the other hand, you want to see things going in and out of other things in extreme close-up. Ideally, to square the circle, the porno you watch in your hotel room will be set in a hotel room.

And what will you be wearing as you watch hotel porn in your hotel room? Why, a fluffy white bathrobe, of course. Even though they are frequently stolen, these fluffy white bathrobes are theft-proof in the sense that almost as soon as you get them home they lose that fluffy quality. How do hotels maintain robes in that state of perpetual fluffiness? Keeping them white is easy; keeping them fluffy is one of life’s enduring mysteries. Is it a question of using gallons of fabric conditioner? Apparently not (I’ve tried it). The answer can only be: because they are not just fluffy white bathrobes—they are fluffy white hotel bathrobes.

Not only are they fluffy and soft and white—they are also clean. And the chances are that you too are clean beneath your fluffy white robe because everything about a hotel is clean. Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness. A hotel room is horny because it is clean: The sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to—what else?—filthiness. Ideally, the room is so clean as to suggest that it has never been used. It cries out to be defiled. If the room is, in a sense, virginal, then the act of breaking the seal on bars of soap and other stealable accessories has something of the quality of breaking its hymen. Slightly archaic it may be, but to speak of “taking a room” is, in this context, pleasingly suggestive.
Luxury hotels offer the chance to live—for a while—like an 18th-century libertine.

In an effort to keep the rooms unsullied by that dirty stuff, air, urban hotel rooms are almost always sealed off from the outside world, cocooning you totally in the ambient hum of overnight luxury. It doesn’t matter where you are on the planet; you could be anywhere. More exactly, you could be nowhere. The luxury hotel is a quintessential example of what the French theorist Marc Augé calls the “non-place” of supermodernity. In The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe pointed out that the defining architectural feature of the motel—namely, that you don’t “have to go through a public lobby to get to your room”—played a major part in the “rather primly named ‘sexual revolution.’ ” In international hotels, however, the passage through the lobby—a process of which checking in is the ritualistic expression—is also a passage from place to non-place. By checking in and handing over your credit card or passport, you effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity. You become morally weightless. In the confines of the hotel you are no longer Mr. or Ms. Whoever, you are simply the occupant of a room. You have no history. The act of the porter carrying your stuff up to your room means that you are, as they say, not carrying any baggage. (...)

The reality, too, is a kind of historical fantasy. Luxury hotels offer the chance to live—for a while—like an 18th-century libertine for whom life consists entirely of pleasure because there is a retinue of servants to clear up the mess. Every whim is catered for. A hotel is a chore-free zone, leaving you free—DO NOT DISTURB—to engage in limitless carnality. Every hint of the mundane—even turning down the covers of your bed—is taken care of by other people, by the staff. As a consequence, your actions have no consequences. What the British writer Adam Mars-Jones calls “treating the facilities to mild abuse” is certainly the privilege of every hotel guest, but major abuse is also tolerated (as long as it’s paid for). The rock star’s famed tendency—obligation almost—to trash hotel rooms simply takes this to its extreme. Every day is a new beginning. Everything broken can be replaced. Every day the room and its contents are wiped clean of staining evidence and incriminating fingerprints (a fact that, in turn, feeds into the sense of rampant amorality that is at the heart of the hotel experience). This has its dangers, of course; it takes an effort of will not to succumb to the delusion that the mere fact of being in a hotel room is both prophylactic and contraceptive.

At this point a slight qualification is needed, namely, that in some ways a room is more erotic than a suite. A suite subtly revives the division of labor and leisure on which the architecture of the house is predicated. In a suite the bed is kept separate as an adjunct or option. In a room the bed is all-dominating and unavoidable. However big the room, the bed expands proportionately to fill it up. Since the outside world scarcely exists, the bed becomes the world (“This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere,” as the great hotelier John Donne put it.). You do everything in or from this bed: You read, write, watch porno, have sex, sleep, make calls … basically, the only time you’re not stretched out on the bed is when you’re stretched out in the king-size bath, which is, effectively, a liquid bed.

by Geoff Dyer, Slate | Read more:
Image: Doris Liou

The World’s Most Peculiar Company

When I was growing up, my family, like many others, got the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog delivered to our apartment. We never actually ordered anything from it, but I liked to daydream about belonging to a family who did. Whereas my real parents’ mail-order shopping was limited to the occasional windbreaker from Lands’ End, my imaginary Hammacher mom and dad purchased hovercraft, personal submarines, and giant floating trampolines with abandon. They knew how to party.

Between 1983 and 2005, there was a Hammacher Schlemmer store at the foot of Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. I remember gawking outside, thinking that the stones and bricks embedded in the building’s façade—Colonel McCormick’s prized samples from the Great Pyramid, Notre Dame Cathedral, and beyond—were just part of the store’s inventory. After all, if anyone were going to sell a section of the Parthenon, it would be Hammacher Schlemmer.

The store shuttered its doors, but the company is still around, headquartered in the northwest suburbs. And it continues to publish its signature catalog, as it has for the past 137 years. Hammacher Schlemmer mails out 50 million of them a year, in fact. It’s the longest-running catalog in American history.

These mail-order catalogs of bizarre gadgets, esoteric tchotchkes, and peculiar wellness treatments adhere to the same format and style as the ones delivered to my family’s apartment more than 20 years ago. With few exceptions, the four items per page are laid out in a quadrant, each with a photo, a dense block of explanatory text, and, most famously, a descriptive title. Open the 2018 spring catalog supplement and you’ll find the Genuine Handmade Irish Shillelagh, the 911 Instant Speakerphone, the Clarity Enhancing Sunglasses, and the Closet Organizing Trouser Rack all on one page.

In the age of Amazon, few things represent an ethos more diametrically opposed to the “everything store” than the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Typing “socks” into Amazon’s search bar yields a seemingly infinite number of options. But the Hammacher Schlemmer spring catalog supplement offers only the Best Circulation Enhancing Travel Socks and the Plantar Fasciitis Foot Sleeves, 45 pages apart. There are no algorithmically predicted product placements or targeted suggestions.

The mere existence of Hammacher Schlemmer these days invites some fair, yet pointed, questions. Who’s buying this stuff? immediately pops to mind. As does: How has the company lasted this long? And: What kind of person sees the Wearable Mosquito Net and thinks, I must have this?

For much of its history, Hammacher Schlemmer was a distinctly New York brand. It still maintains its only physical store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, but the headquarters have been in the Chicago area since merchandiser and collectible-plate magnate J. Roderick MacArthur (of the MacArthur “genius” grant family) bought the company and relocated it in 1981. As the home of catalog pioneers Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, Chicago was a natural fit for the nation’s most august purveyor of the mail-order medium.

You can find Hammacher Schlemmer’s offices on a broad stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in Niles. The first thing you see when you walk through the double glass doors of the former car dealership is a sunken indoor park, where ferns surround a gurgling stream. A series of displays in the carpeted lobby off the atrium documents the company’s history. One is dedicated to Hammacher Schlemmer’s “notable patrons,” including Steve Jobs, Marilyn Monroe, and Queen Elizabeth II.

Past those displays you’ll come to the Wall of Firsts, a long row of framed posters depicting various objects that debuted in the pages of the catalog. It begins with the First Pop Up Toaster (1931) and proceeds to such advents as the First Electric Food Blender (1934) and the First Microwave Oven (1968). It loses a little steam in the 2010s, thanks to items like the First Fashionista Christmas Tree (2012), yet finishes strong with the First Wellness Monitor Wristband (2015)—a Fitbit, though Hammacher Schlemmer won’t tell you that.

Hammacher Schlemmer’s policy has long been to remove product logos and brand names from its catalog. In the 1980s and ’90s, this was just another example of the retailer’s quirks, a vague gesture toward the privilege of ignorance: Just give me the best vacuum, I don’t care who makes it or how much it costs.

But these days there’s a more practical reason. Stephen Farrell, Hammacher Schlemmer’s director of merchandising, leads the team of buyers responsible for filling out the company’s eclectic inventory. He says the no-brand-name strategy is “particularly relevant today,” as Hammacher Schlemmer hopes to prevent people from simply searching for the products on Amazon and buying them there. (About 45 percent of the catalog inventory is exclusive to Hammacher Schlemmer. “We would prefer nothing is on Amazon,” Farrell tells me, though he says it’s not a deal breaker.)

For example, Hammacher Schlemmer features an item it calls the Barber Eliminator. Per the catalog: “The unit is moved through your hair while accommodating the contours of your pate.” It took me 20 minutes to find the electric razor on Amazon under its official name: the Conair Even Cut Rotary Hair Cut Cutting System. It’s $20 cheaper on Amazon, though it doesn’t come with the lifetime guarantee Hammacher includes with all its products. This is a feature that seemingly everyone I encounter in Niles is eager to tell me about, usually along with the question of whether or not I have heard the story about the poop Roomba.

The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer love the poop Roomba story. It goes like this: In 2016, a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, purchased a robotic vacuum from Hammacher Schlemmer. One evening, while on its automatic timer, the Roomba encountered a pile of puppy excrement and proceeded to spread and spray dog feces all over the house as it traveled along its algorithmically determined route. The man’s Facebook post about the ordeal went viral (359,709 shares, as of this writing), and in it he gives “mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer” for making good on its lifetime guarantee and issuing a full $400 refund.

I can’t imagine the Barber Eliminator getting into any similar kind of trouble, but it carries the same guarantee nonetheless. Were I in the market for an at-home haircutting device, I’m not sure page 32 of Hammacher Schlemmer’s spring catalog supplement would be the first place I’d look for it, but that’s not the point. The catalog tries to sell the item’s purpose (the elimination of my barber) before the product itself. The goal is to persuade page flippers to enter the DIY haircut market right then and there, when they’re least expecting it.

by Nick Greene, Chicago Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Ryan Segedi

Everything's Not O.K.

The story of my professional hockey career isn’t a pretty one. It’s not overflowing with highlight-reel goals or big-game hat tricks.

For the 11 years I played in the NHL, between 2000 and 2011, I was mainly known as a tough guy. I was a fighter, a thug — someone you wouldn’t want to mess with unless you were looking to get punched in the face.

But let me be more specific. You want to know how I played the game?

I tried to hurt people.

That’s what I was there for. A lot of people don’t want to hear that, but it’s the honest truth. So, yes, for instance, I would try to injure you if that was the difference between winning and losing a hockey game. I’d do whatever was asked of me. And I can tell you that, yes, coaches do actually sometimes tap you on the back and tell you to get out there on the ice and fight. Whether you want to believe it or not, it happens.

And I was always game — right there at a moment’s notice, ready to oblige.

I’d do it for my team, and, as weird as it sounds, for … the game. Because as best I could tell, being tough, and one guy knocking the snot out of another guy, and showing no mercy, well … those things had always been part of our sport.

I had it in my head that there was a specific way that hockey needed to be played. And there was a level honor to it, a certain pride that came along with kicking some ass.

It’s what I did, and it paid the bills and allowed me to support my family. But I never loved it. (...)

The thing about hockey is that it’s a fast game. Things happen in the blink of an eye. People are flying around. And when you get your bell rung, it’s not like everything stops. You know what I mean? You just keep playing. That’s how it works.

And it wasn’t really my coaches who pushed me to be that way. I expected it from myself. It was the only way I knew — me basically doing what I thought I was supposed to do, and what I saw everyone else doing. Push through, ignore the pain, finish out the shift, all that shit. It was all second nature to me.

So I’m definitely not looking to blame my coaches or anyone else for all those head hits I took over the years and never really said anything about.

I did it to myself. No doubt.

But over time, all those hits to the head … they add up. And when you look back on it, honestly, it’s hard not to shake your head at how bad things actually were. (...)

I was always hurting. And in order for me to carry on, I had to mask all that pain.

At one point during my career, I was taking so many painkillers and other drugs on a daily basis that I started to not even be able to recognize the person I had become.

Trainers always had painkillers. So I took them. Often. And it just escalated from there. Eventually I couldn’t get as many as I wanted, and so I started buying them from people on the street. Just more and more and more.

After a while, each day, and even entire chunks of the season, became almost like a daze. I was so medicated, and it began to get pretty frightening for me. So I decided that I needed to do something. I got my courage up, and got my shit together, and found a way to tell some people with the team I was playing for that I had a problem. It took everything I had in me to do that, but the response I received when I spoke to people was really uplifting. Everyone I talked to was so understanding. Every single person said they were there for me, and that they wanted to get me the help I needed.

A few weeks later, after the season had ended, I was back home in Nobleton, Ontario, at the old town hall, helping my folks set up for my sister’s buck and doe party before her wedding, when the phone rang.

One of my buddies had seen my name on the ESPN ticker.

“Nick, what the hell, man? I can’t believe it.”

I had no clue what he was talking about.

Turns out that less than a month after I’d gone to my team and asked for help, I got traded away to another city.

Honestly. (...)

By the time I finally started getting help for everything I had been doing to try and ease the pain, I was already in my 30s. And at that point I was basically drinking and self-medicating and doing drugs nonstop. I stayed away from heroin, but other than that everything else was pretty much fair game.

I was a zombie, man. It’s not easy to admit that, but I really, really was.

And anytime I’d drink, I would almost always move on to drugs.

At the tail end of my career, I really, genuinely thought that I was going to die one night during the season. It’s hard to talk about, for sure, but … I had stayed up late doing an obscene amount of coke and things just got out of control. After a while my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I couldn’t get it to slow down. Nothing I did worked. It was probably the most scared I’ve ever been in my life.

I was playing for the Flyers at the time, and we had a morning skate I needed to be at in a few hours. So it was either go to the hospital and check in without anyone noticing or getting word about what had gone down, and then somehow get my ass to practice in the morning … or tell the trainer what had happened and try to make a change.

Basically, it was: Keep putting on an act, or come clean.

You’d maybe think it would have been an easy decision. Like, You were about to die. Get help. What the fuck? Stop living like this. Immediately. But I can tell you that, at the time, it was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever had to make. I agonized over it. Because I knew if I told the trainer, I was going to get in a ton of trouble.

But you know what, though? I fucking told the trainer.

Somehow I landed on the right call. And that was absolutely huge for me.

The Flyers and Paul Holmgren, who was the GM in Philly at the time, didn’t judge me or make me feel like an outcast when they found out. They sent me to rehab and pledged their support. They looked out for me. Even though I hadn’t been looking out for myself.

And to this day, I honestly believe Paul saved my life back then.

If I had been somewhere else, and they had just traded me away … I’d probably be dead.

Actually, there’s no doubt about it. I wouldn’t be sitting here today writing this thing if that had happened. That’s for sure.

I’d be six feet under.

The problem for me since then has been that rehab just hasn’t worked.

When the Flyers sent me, just a few months before I retired, I got off the painkillers and stopped using drugs. And eventually I even stopped drinking, too. But things just kept getting worse and worse for me mentally. A year and a half after I got sober, I was experiencing depression and anxiety worse than anything I’d ever felt before. I was sad all the time, and I’d constantly be on edge — sweating, shaking, nervous, having panic attacks. I’d call family members or friends and just be sobbing for no reason, and making no sense because I was in full-on panic mode. Then, on the day to day, it was almost like a constant state of having the wind knocked out of you. Like walking around your whole life unable to breathe.

I was completely clean, and looking healthy again, and at the same time … I was such a mess on the inside that I couldn’t even leave the house.

Since then, I’ve been to two more drug-and-alcohol rehab places. The NHL paid for me do that, and I commend the league for it. But … I just never got any relief. Those places work for lots of people, and I think that’s great. But with me, I could only get so far with them because they just never really addressed the root problems. They just dealt with what was apparent on the surface.

In some ways, I guess that’s not too surprising, because the types of issues I’ve been dealing with … I don’t know, they’re just not as obvious as some other medical problems. My ankle isn’t broken, you know? There’s no cast to sign. I can’t show my injury to you. And lots of times it’s hard to even describe it. So I can’t really even prove it to you, either.

Depression, anxiety, mental-health issues … that sort of stuff can seem invisible sometimes to those on the outside, but it’s worse than anything else I’ve ever dealt with. It can make you unbelievably sad to the point where you’re crying your eyes out. And then, the next day, you’ll just be so angry that you’re almost out of control. With me, there have been times when the anger has been so bad that I legitimately worried that I might hurt someone, or that I’d injure myself. But when family members, people I truly love and care about, would ask me what was going on, or why I was so mad … I wouldn’t really be able to tell them. I honestly wasn’t even sure.

And, like, AA meetings are supposed to somehow fix something so deep-seated?

That’s fantasyland stuff, right there.

But any time I reached out to the league, or to the players’ union doctors about mental-health issues, that’s all I’d hear. They basically just told me that I was an addict, and that I should sign up for some self-help groups — and that what I actually, really needed was to go do 90 meetings in 90 days.

Over time it became increasingly frustrating, because I tried everything they told me to do … and the depression and anxiety hadn’t gone away.

It’s just not as simple as going to some meetings. You know what I mean?

The kind of stuff I’m talking about here — the things that eventually became too much for those guys I played with who are no longer with us today — just runs so much deeper than some fucking self-help meetings at the neighborhood YMCA.

by Nick Boynton, The Player's Tribune |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Szagola/Icon Sportswire

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

This Sunday, the entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud. And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China’s third largest lake.

The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn’t cut it as an urgent news story: “Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it — and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course: “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilization is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events. And if they did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the tangible solutions, the more they push their elected representatives to take bold action.

Which is why it was so exciting to see the Times throw the full force of its editorial machine behind Rich’s opus — teasing it with a promotional video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Center, and accompanying educational materials.

That’s also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis.

According to Rich, between the years of 1979 and 1989, the basic science of climate change was understood and accepted, the partisan divide over the issue had yet to cleave, the fossil fuel companies hadn’t started their misinformation campaign in earnest, and there was a great deal of global political momentum toward a bold and binding international emissions-reduction agreement. Writing of the key period at the end of the 1980s, Rich says, “The conditions for success could not have been more favorable.”

And yet we blew it — “we” being humans, who apparently are just too shortsighted to safeguard our future. Just in case we missed the point of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now “losing earth,” Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the U.S. government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?)

This misreading has been pointed out by many climate scientists and historians since the online version of the piece dropped on Wednesday. Others have remarked on the maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe a screamingly homogenous group of U.S. power players. Throughout Rich’s accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, somehow able to care about future generations despite being human. The voices of women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as sightings of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker — and when we ladies do appear, it is mainly as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men.

All of these flaws have been well covered, so I won’t rehash them here. My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet. Why? Because the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought.

When I delved into this same climate change history some years ago, I concluded, as Rich does, that the key juncture when world momentum was building toward a tough, science-based global agreement was 1988. That was when James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that he had “99 percent confidence” in “a real warming trend” linked to human activity. Later that same month, hundreds of scientists and policymakers held the historic World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto, where the first emission reduction targets were discussed. By the end of that same year, in November 1988, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premier scientific body advising governments on the climate threat, held its first session.

But climate change wasn’t just a concern for politicians and wonks — it was watercooler stuff, so much so that when the editors of Time magazine announced their 1988 “Man of the Year,” they went for “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth.” The cover featured an image of the globe held together with twine, the sun setting ominously in the background. “No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more,” journalist Thomas Sancton explained, “than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home.”

(Interestingly, unlike Rich, Sancton didn’t blame “human nature” for the planetary mugging. He went deeper, tracing it to the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of “dominion” over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that “the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature — the soil, forest, sea — was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it.”)

When I surveyed the climate news from this period, it really did seem like a profound shift was within grasp — and then, tragically, it all slipped away, with the U.S. walking out of international negotiations and the rest of the world settling for nonbinding agreements that relied on dodgy “market mechanisms” like carbon trading and offsets. So it really is worth asking, as Rich does: What the hell happened? What interrupted the urgency and determination that was emanating from all these elite establishments simultaneously by the end of the ’80s?

Rich concludes, while offering no social or scientific evidence, that something called “human nature” kicked in and messed everything up. “Human beings,” he writes, “whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” It seems we are wired to “obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”

When I looked at the same period, I came to a very different conclusion: that what at first seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing. Because what becomes clear when you look back at this juncture is that just as governments were getting together to get serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the global neoliberal revolution went supernova, and that project of economic and social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and corporate regulation at every turn.

The failure to make even a passing reference to this other global trend that was unfolding in the late ’80s represents an unfathomably large blind spot in Rich’s piece. After all, the primary benefit of returning to a period in the not-too-distant past as a journalist is that you are able to see trends and patterns that were not yet visible to people living through those tumultuous events in real time. The climate community in 1988, for instance, had no way of knowing that they were on the cusp of the convulsive neoliberal revolution that would remake every major economy on the planet.

But we know. And one thing that becomes very clear when you look back on the late ’80s is that, far from offering “conditions for success [that] could not have been more favorable,” 1988-89 was the worst possible moment for humanity to decide that it was going to get serious about putting planetary health ahead of profits.

by Naomi Klein, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image:Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. Part 1: here.]

via:

A Candid Conversation With Vince Gilligan on ‘Better Call Saul’

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Better Call Saul – other than the fact that many Breaking Bad fans have said they prefer the spinoff, and even the ones who disagree don’t find that a ludicrous notion – is how it’s become beloved for the exact opposite reason that its creators expected it to be.

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould — and for that matter, all of us at home — assumed the fun of the prequel would be in spending more time with Bob Odenkirk in the role of Walter White’s shyster lawyer Saul Goodman; it was a way for the show to fill in blanks in the Heisenberg-verse. Instead, most of what makes the show great involves the man he used to be: slick but largely well-meaning lawyer Jimmy McGill, who has the depth and emotional resonance that Saul lacks. The longer we spend with this version of the character – which he still is at the start of Season Four, premiering on August 6th – the less we want to see of Goodman or even Walt himself.

I recently spoke with Gilligan about those early days when he and Gould — who became sole showrunner this year while Gilligan largely focused on developing other ideas — had to wonder if they’d made a terrible mistake. He also talked about the painful process of figuring out how Saul could work, the gradual insertion of other Breaking Bad characters into the spinoff and a lot more. (With occasional kibitzing from Gould and some other writers, since Gilligan will be the first to tell you that he has a terrible memory for detail.)

It took you and Peter a while to figure out what the show was. At what point did you say to yourselves, “Wait a minute, this is actually good? This isn’t just a folly that we’ve done, to keep everyone together?”

We would never put anything on that we had worked less than 100 percent on. Having said that, I didn’t know it would come together. I knew it would be the product of a lot of hard work and a lot of talent, in front of and behind the camera. I thought at worst, we would create something that was admirable and a perfectly legitimate attempt at a show. But I didn’t realize it would be as successful as it is in terms of a fully jelled world, a full totality of creation … [one] that is as satisfying as it is.

When we first started concocting the idea of doing a spinoff, we literally thought it’d be a half-hour show. It’d be something akin to Dr Katz, where it’s basically Saul Goodman in his crazy office with the styrofoam columns and he’s visited every week by a different stand-up comic. It was basically, I guess, legal problems. We talked about that for a day or two. And then Peter Gould and I realized, we don’t know anything about the half-hour idiom. And then we thought, okay, well, so it’s an hour … but it’s going to be a really funny hour. I said, “Breaking Bad is about 25-percent humor, 75-percent drama and maybe this will be the reverse of that.” Well this thing, especially in Season Four, is every bit as dramatic as Breaking Bad ever was. I just didn’t see any of that coming. I didn’t know how good it would all be. I really didn’t.

It’s amazing how hard it was to get it right.

The question we should’ve ask ourselves from the beginning; “Is Saul Goodman an interesting enough character to build a show around?” And the truth is, we came to the conclusion, after we already had the deal in hand [and] AMC and Sony had already put up the money, “I don’t think we have a show here, because I don’t think we have a character who could support a show.” He’s a great flavoring, he’s a wonderful saffron that you sprinkle on your Risotto. But you don’t want to eat a bowl full of saffron, you gotta have the rice, you know? You gotta have the substance.

And it dawned on us that this character seemed so comfortable in his own skin. Peter and I do not possess those kinds of personalities. We thought, “Regardless how much comedy is in it, how do you find drama in a guy who’s basically okay with himself?” So then we thought, “Well, who was he before he was Saul Goodman?”

Because the show is named Better Call Saul, we thought that we had to get to this guy quick or else people will accuse us of false advertising — a bait and switch. Then lo and behold, season after season went by and it dawned on us, we don’t want to get to Saul Goodman … and that’s the tragedy.

If we had thought all of this from the get-go, that would have made us very smart. But as it turns out, we’re very plodding and dumb, and it takes forever to figure this stuff out. Which is why we’re perfectly matched for a TV schedule versus a movie schedule, because you got to get it right the first time when you’re writing a movie. It took us forever to get it right. (...)

Going in, did you expect to be featuring as many Breaking Bad characters as you have? Did you assume at some point we would get to Gus, for instance?

We always assumed we’d get to Gus — I think we thought we might get to him quicker. Just speaking for myself and no one else: I thought we’d have gotten to Walt or Jesse by this point, as sort of the first fan of both shows. I’m greedy to see all of these characters. I thought we would see plenty of Breaking Bad characters. I didn’t know we’d dig as deep for some of them, as we have.

We’ve gotten a great deal of satisfaction from seeing, for instance, that the real estate agent who shows Mike and [his] daughter the new house, was a real estate agent in Breaking Bad, who had the run-in with Marie. Little shout-outs like that, we love for two reasons. We love those Easter eggs for the really astute students of Breaking Bad. And we also know that that young woman who was such a wonderful actress and so much fun to work with on Breaking Bad. We love when someone did a great job for us on a previous show, to pay ’em back by having them on the new show. Which is not to say that we’ll get every single one of those folks, even though we’d love to. There’s probably plenty we’ll never get to, just for lack of time, lack of episodes … but it’s fun to be able to do that.

When you say you expected to get to Walt and Jesse by now, do you mean the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead approach to the Breaking Bad years? Or just that you would have seen what they were up to in this time period?

I thought we would have touched base with them already. But having said that, it makes perfect sense that we haven’t yet touched base with them. Just being in the writers room, you realize that there’s a lot to do before that happens — if and when it does happen. I don’t even want to promise that it will. It’s like what I was saying a minute ago: You play the play the cards that you’ve dealt yourself. There’s no point in cheating in solitaire. That’s a weird analogy, but ultimately, a pretty good one. You can cheat in solitaire, but there’s nothing satisfying about cheating in solitaire.

And the analogy holds when you get to the writer’s room with Better Call Saul. You can change the character’s history, you can have it be that Walter White never comes into it, but it wouldn’t ultimately be satisfying. And when you play the cards out correctly and you see that it’s time to bring Walter White in, for instance, it’s a wonderfully satisfying moment. If you force it, if you cheat the cards, if you bring them in just because folks are demanding it or expecting it, and you kind of bullshit the character’s way into the show, it’s just not going to satisfy anybody. I believe that in my heart.

Has the show evolved and become good enough to the point where it doesn’t need Walter White?

Maybe. I mean, it would be satisfying to see Walt. Not to see him shoehorned in — that would not satisfy me. But to see the character properly arrive at a nexus point with Better Call Saul. That’d be wonderful … [though] it’s very possible it won’t happen if it doesn’t feel properly arrived at. And yes, I believe that Better Call Saul is so much its own creation now, its own thing. It absolutely stands on its own.

We’re enjoying this overlap between Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that we’re continuing to arrive at. But there’s a version of the show where you don’t see it as Breaking Bad stuff at all. Where, for instance, we leave out Mike Ehrmantraut, because he barely ever interacts with Jimmy McGill anymore. We could just stick with the Jimmy McGill story: him, Kim Wexler, Howard Hamlin, all of that stuff. We could have a perfectly satisfying show. But we feel like we’re giving the fans two shows for the price of one. It really does feel like two TV shows in one now.

When Breaking Bad was coming to an end, this was already in the works to some degree. But was there a part of you thinking, “Alright, this show is ending. This is the best thing I’ve ever done it, it’s the best thing I will ever do, my career has peaked. What do I do now?”

That’s exactly why I did this, because I was thinking those thoughts exactly as you just put it: “This is the best thing I’m ever going to do. This in the height of my creative life, my career, it’s never going to get any better than Breaking Bad.” And that’s why I wanted to get right into something else, because I was still only 48, 49 years old, I didn’t want to stop working. I knew in my heart if I took six months off, because everyone said I needed a vacation, then six months would go by, the world would’ve moved on — and worst of all, I would’ve been paralyzed creatively. I would have said to myself, “Okay, time to do something else now. What is it? What’s the next big thing?” And then I would just freeze up, because I would say I would come up with an idea, thinking, “Oh, that’s fun.” And then the editing portion of my brain, which I’ve given too loud a voice over the years, would say: “It’s not to the level of Breaking Bad.”

The best thing I could’ve done personally was to just jump headlong into a show that, admittedly, we didn’t fully understand. Once we really got into it, we thought, “Oh man, we got nothing here.” And then luckily, we just kept banging at it until we figured it out, with the help of a lot of great writers. But the smartest thing I ever did was to keep moving.

And Breaking Bad … the beauty of it is, some people are always going to love Breaking Bad more. But I run into people every day now who say Better Call Saul is their favorite of the two. I love hearing that. I don’t know where I fall personally on that scale, that continuum — I try not to choose. I don’t have children, but this is as close as I’ll ever get to having children. I find it hard to choose between them. But I’m just glad they both exist.

by Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Tom Petty

Tom Petty
via:
[ed. Straight into Darkness  See also: 400 Days (Documentary - highly recommended)]

There was a little girl, I used to know her
I still think about her, time to time
There was a moment when I really loved her
Then one day the feeling just died

We went straight into darkness
Out over the line
Yeah straight into darkness
Straight into night

I remember flying out to London
I remember the feeling at the time
Out the window of the 747
Man there was nothing, only black sky

We went straight into darkness
Out over the line
Yeah straight into darkness
Straight into night

Oh give it up to me I need it
Girl, I know a good thing when I see it
Baby wrong or right I mean it
I don't believe the good times are all over
I don't believe the thrill is all gone
Real love is a man's salvation
The weak ones fall the strong carry on

Straight into darkness
Out over the line
Yeah straight into darkness
Straight into night

Ernst Haas
via:

This Is My Nerf Blaster, This Is My Gun

One late spring day in April, several years ago—one of the last breezy afternoons before the suffocating summer humidity would descend on the rolling green hills of central Virginia—I went to visit friends in Charlottesville. I was on a break from Gaza at the time, where I’d been living for a year and a half while working on a security project for an NGO and reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Virginia Quarterly Review. I’d grown used to the simmering sounds of war; I would hear the thump of Hamas and Islamic Jihad mortars during my afternoon runs and would wake to my windows rattling as Israeli gunboats fired at Palestinian fishermen. Still, I remained hypervigilant—ready to fight, or flee, at any second.

As I approached my friends’ doorstep, I was suddenly caught in an ambush of foam darts, and I looked down to see their seven-year-old son, Jack, grinning behind an azalea bush, aiming his Nerf blaster at my chest.

“Gotcha!” Jack shouted, before sprinting off behind the house in a flash of spindly limbs and towheaded glee.

Jack’s ambushes became a ritual we’d reenact every time I visited. Jack’s first blaster was a Nite Finder, a pistol that fired single foam darts with rubber tips, and had a mock laser sight mounted in front of the trigger assembly, mimicking the emerging fashion in tactical handguns. It was made of gray-and-yellow molded plastic, and though the blaster’s grip bore some resemblance to the sweep of a real semiautomatic pistol grip, it would’ve been more at home on the set of Lost in Space than Die Hard. A few years later, when Jack and his family moved to Nebraska, he got a Nerf rifle called the N-Strike Alpha Trooper CS-18, which featured a detachable stock and a magazine that held 18 foam darts. It had a charging handle on the barrel like a pump shotgun, allowing for rapid fire and a max range of 35 feet—which meant Jack could hide around the side of the house and get me coming down the driveway.

Last year, when Jack was 13 and I was 35, I had the honor of teaching him the fundamentals of firearms safety at a range near my home in Bozeman, Montana, using the same Marlin .22 rifle I’ve had since my 10th or 11th birthday. I remember when my dad and I first brought that rifle home: Running my hands over the smooth, dark-stained wood stock, and the fascination I felt whenever I slid it out of its khaki-colored soft case, the delightful clack of the bolt sliding home and locking down. There was no kick, and wearing earplugs, the shots sounded like bursts from an air compressor—but all the same, the rifle was not a toy. When I put the stock to my shoulder and the scope in front of my eye, I immediately felt more grown-up. Jack clearly did as well, treating the gun with respect and seriousness.

I spent years working as a war correspondent, and for a good portion of the past year I have been reporting on the National Rifle Association’s fear-mongering, gun culture, and the crisis of gun violence in America. Until recently, I had never read too far into our Nerf play, mine and Jack’s, and I had never heard people link Nerf blasters to real violence the way they did with violent video games and movies. But in an era of mass shootings, I’ve started to reconsider the banality of Nerf blasters and other toy guns.

Over the past two decades, Nerf has upped the ante on the power and functionality of its blasters. One model shoots foam balls up to 100 feet per second—fast enough to sting bare skin. Some models, such as the “Doomlands” series, are cartoonish in their appearance, taking the concept of mega firepower to gonzo levels. Others, like the N-Strike models, have become increasingly streamlined, drawing closer to the souped-up tactical firearms that now dominate the real gun market, namely the endless variations on the popular AR-15.

Do toys like these play any part in the fetishizing of guns? Do they blur the line between fantasy and reality, helping to inspire mass shooters like Nikolas Cruz and Dylann Roof? Or are they just good, clean, foam fun? I don’t know if it’s possible to answer those questions, but I know one thing unequivocally: if the kinds of blasters that Nerf offers today had existed when I was little, I would have been completely, hopelessly enthralled.

Nerf’s deep dive into imaginative gunplay began humbly in 1989, when the company introduced Blast-a-Ball, a pair of simple plastic tubes with plunger handles on one end that could launch foam balls up to 30 feet. Nerf called it the “shoot ’em, dodge ’em, catch ’em” game, and, from the very beginning, it was clear that Nerf did not intend for its new toy to be enjoyed alone—each box came with two blasters.

I was born in 1981, and I remember playing with those original ball blasters, but the Nerf products that really took my suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood by storm were the company’s foam footballs. The Turbo was about four-fifths the size of a leather pigskin, which made it easy to throw spirals. In 1991, the same year that Nerf introduced the Vortex—a whistling football with rocket fins—the company also launched the Bow ‘n’ Arrow, a blaster in the shape of a bow that fired large foam missiles. Nerf dominated the birthday-party scene that year. Now, almost 30 years later, Nerf balls appear to have been overshadowed by its toy weapons.

Since their debut in the late 1980s, Nerf blasters have evolved into sophisticated toys capable of rapid fire, some models sporting what are known (on real guns) as high-capacity magazines, each holding a dozen rounds or more—in some cases, as many as 200. Nerf has sometimes looked to historical gun models for inspiration, like the Nerf Zombie Strike SlingFire Blaster, which uses the lever-action reload of the .30-30 Winchester Model 94 rifle, with dashes of fluorescent green and orange to diminish its verisimilitude. The overall aesthetic of Nerf’s blaster lineup remains playful and sci-fi, with wild color schemes and plenty of high-visibility orange, especially on the business end of the barrels. But anyone with a remotely trained eye can see that Nerf’s newer models are edging closer to the features of what are commonly known as assault weapons.

The expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in 2004—along with a 2005 law that protected firearms manufacturers from lawsuits—contributed to a period of furious growth in the firearms market. Sales of handguns more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2016 (spiking in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in anticipation of incoming gun-control legislation). Firearms imports into the United States also increased fivefold. After ten years of restrictions, manufacturers were now free to market a seemingly limitless array of military-style semiautomatic rifles and accessories, benefiting from the free advertising of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At gun shows and in a proliferating number of firearms publications and enthusiast websites, hunting rifles and shotguns took a backseat to variations on the AR-15, the AK-47, and the Bullpup, a close-quarters combat rifle favored by the Israeli and British militaries.

Nerf appears to have taken notice of both the marketing and design tactics of the firearms industry over the years. The most obvious parallel between Nerf’s newer blasters and their deadly cousins is their focus on modularity. A seemingly infinite spectrum of accessories have made semiautomatic “black rifles” such as the AR-15 a hit among enthusiasts of real firearms, spurring enormous growth in aftermarket products. Similarly, recent upgrades to Nerf products have allowed for the reconfiguration of the company’s rifle-style blasters into pistols, and the addition of the Picatinny rail offers users the opportunity to mount accessories such as flashlights, bipods, and red-dot sights.

The company’s Modulus series includes a lineup of accessories that are obviously toy versions of the real add-ons beloved by black-rifle enthusiasts, including foregrips that mount under barrels, faux laser sights, collapsible stocks, and long-range barrel extenders. Certain battery-operated models are even capable of automatic fire, and some kids have figured out how to “bump fire” their nonautomatic models the same way you can bump fire a semiautomatic rifle: by hooking your finger around the trigger and moving the entire rifle back and forth.

Though there were lots of toy guns on the market that looked real when I was a kid, the opposite was not true: the only real guns I ever saw or handled were unmistakably not toys. They were made of black or polished steel and smooth, stained wood. (If they had plastic on them at all, it was black.) But just as Nerf seems to have co-opted the infinite accessorizing possibilities of the actual firearms industry, owners of AR-15s are sending their guns to third-party customizers to incorporate more playful features into their design: a gun can be anodized in virtually any color, or have a custom wrap applied featuring Star Wars and Marvel themes.

Growing up, my friends and I had toy-gun arsenals that would’ve equipped us for any conflict from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam: long-barreled muskets purchased on field trips to Colonial Williamsburg, chrome six-shooters, cork popguns and rubber-band shooters, and battery-operated squirt guns that looked like exact replicas of the TEC-9 and MAC-10. A company called Zap It sold guns shaped like miniature Uzis, which shot blood-colored ink that would stain clothes briefly, then quickly fade and disappear. (An ad from the late 1980s shows a kid popping out from behind a door to shoot the mailman. A few seconds later, his dad shoots him from behind the cover of the morning paper.)

The first toy gun I remember playing with was a chrome cap gun in the shape of a .45 pistol. I was so young I don’t even remember holding it for the first time, but it stayed in my toy bin well into my middle-school years. It had been my dad’s when he was a kid in the 1950s and had plastic grips with real stippling and fired caps from a roll, which meant there was real smoke. It smelled musty and oxidized, like everything else that came out of my Nana’s basement in Missouri—a smell I associated with a grandfather and great-uncles I had never known, who’d fought in the trenches of WWI and on the seas of the North Atlantic, in the Pacific, and across Europe in WWII.

I knew boys who weren’t allowed to play with toy guns at all. Our grandparents were part of the Greatest Generation, survivors of epic struggles that earned them awe and reverence bordering on fear. But we were the children of the Baby Boomers—a generation sent to fight in Vietnam, a confusing conflict with no clear objectives that killed and maimed young draftees by the tens of thousands. Many young people came out of the 1960s committed to breaking the cycle of macho violence by emphasizing nonviolent play at home. When they had kids of their own—my generation, somewhere between Gen Xers and millennials—they forbade backyard war games and the props they thought were necessary to play them.

These attempts were futile. Whenever I was at a friend’s house who wasn’t allowed to have toy guns, we used our fingers for pistols and sticks for rifles. We made machine-gun noises and explosions with our mouths, imagining bullets kicking up dust around the enemy fortifications, smoke and splintered timber rising skyward in theatrical columns of smoke.

by Elliott Woods, Topic | Read more:
Image: Greg Marinovich