Thursday, November 1, 2018
How I Learned to Dive
I was fifteen, and he was in his twenties.
I wasn’t coerced, though. I wasn’t tricked or manipulated. I said yes—said it freely—because I wanted something. I wanted sex—or whatever it was that happened between two men. Of course, I wasn’t a man yet.
When I think back on this, I wonder if I can trust my yes, the yes of a child. My body says that I can, but maybe I can’t trust my body to work this out.
I hadn’t thought about the man in a while; my time with him was more than thirty years ago. But lately his ghost has returned—maybe in light of the current debates about sex and power. These conversations have got under my skin, like a virus, making me sick with questions I’d never asked before: Was I manipulated? Was there an imbalance of power?
It’s entirely plausible. I was a small, skinny guy who self-identified as weak, and so shy that I could barely speak in social situations. Often, when required to interact with strangers, I would begin to shake, in a frightening, fit-like manner.
The man—let’s call him Sam—was quite the opposite: muscular, steady, confident, a lifeguard at the beach where I sometimes went with my parents. I had seen him a few times, certain he’d never noticed me. The day of our first encounter, I watched from a short distance as he taught a class to teen-agers—lifeguards in training, I suppose. The students were putting their mouths against a dummy.
I wasn’t old enough to participate; to be a lifeguard, you had to be at least sixteen. And surely you needed more than golf balls for biceps—which, along with freakish, flagpole legs, were the sum of my physique.
Later that day, I saw him again, leaning against his scaffolded throne, eating a nectarine. He caught me looking, and then he was walking toward me. I stared at my feet.
“You were in my class, right?” I heard him say.
“No,” I muttered. “I was just watching.”
When I glanced up, he nodded—and immediately I felt my cheeks burning. Did he know what I’d been watching? His bare chest and tanned legs, the snug black Speedo.
I was trembling by that point, but for some reason when he said, “Walk with me,” I followed him.
For a few minutes, we didn’t talk—which both disturbed and excited me. Our silence seemed to suggest that we agreed on something. It was like a pact.
I followed him to a more deserted part of the beach, and then we were walking away from the ocean, toward some scrubby hills. I reminded myself that a lifeguard was like a policeman—a person you could trust.
“Are you O.K.?” he asked, noticing my jitters, or perhaps hearing how my teeth were chattering in spite of the scorching August sun.
When he finally stopped and turned toward me, we were in a patch of shade, surrounded by larger bushes and even some trees. If my mind said run, my body argued stay. I was locked in place by confusion and desire and a slow-reeling vertigo.
He asked why I was standing so far away.
I shrugged, and when I made a move to leave he approached, and touched my arm. “Don’t.”
He wasn’t rough; he smiled. I could see the blond stubble on his golden chin. His beauty was formidable.
I said that I should probably go, while, below, my arousal contradicted me. He noticed, and drew my attention to the fact that he was experiencing a similar “problem.” As we made small talk—the weather, the waves, my sunburn—the real conversation seemed to be happening between our bathing suits.
Somehow, a few minutes later, we were naked, with our hands going exactly where hands shouldn’t go—or exactly where they should. I was in a limbo, in which there seemed to be no difference between the forbidden and the necessary. The sense of inevitability, of falling, was profound.
I had been with girls before, but we’d only kissed—and never with our clothes off. And those experiences had always felt like rehearsals for desire, ones in which I played my part perhaps too fervently, knowing that I’d been miscast.
But now, as I followed the lifeguard’s lead, I felt that he was pulling me closer to myself. Strangely, this did not feel safe; it felt like drowning.
And then we were both lying on the sand, soaked and winded. For a moment, we stayed knotted together, as if untangling ourselves might prove to be too much effort, or leave too much room for questions and regret.
Finally, I slid away, and as I put on my bathing suit I felt a need to defend myself. I told the man I’d never done anything like that before.
“Me neither,” he said.
I didn’t believe him—he looked like a movie star. But maybe he meant he’d done it only with girls.
When I asked for his name, he told me.
He didn’t ask for mine, and I thought, I’ll never see him again.
But, as I turned to leave, he took a notebook from his backpack and wrote down a number.
“Call me,” he said. “O.K.?”
I wasn’t coerced, though. I wasn’t tricked or manipulated. I said yes—said it freely—because I wanted something. I wanted sex—or whatever it was that happened between two men. Of course, I wasn’t a man yet.
When I think back on this, I wonder if I can trust my yes, the yes of a child. My body says that I can, but maybe I can’t trust my body to work this out.
I hadn’t thought about the man in a while; my time with him was more than thirty years ago. But lately his ghost has returned—maybe in light of the current debates about sex and power. These conversations have got under my skin, like a virus, making me sick with questions I’d never asked before: Was I manipulated? Was there an imbalance of power?
It’s entirely plausible. I was a small, skinny guy who self-identified as weak, and so shy that I could barely speak in social situations. Often, when required to interact with strangers, I would begin to shake, in a frightening, fit-like manner.
The man—let’s call him Sam—was quite the opposite: muscular, steady, confident, a lifeguard at the beach where I sometimes went with my parents. I had seen him a few times, certain he’d never noticed me. The day of our first encounter, I watched from a short distance as he taught a class to teen-agers—lifeguards in training, I suppose. The students were putting their mouths against a dummy.I wasn’t old enough to participate; to be a lifeguard, you had to be at least sixteen. And surely you needed more than golf balls for biceps—which, along with freakish, flagpole legs, were the sum of my physique.
Later that day, I saw him again, leaning against his scaffolded throne, eating a nectarine. He caught me looking, and then he was walking toward me. I stared at my feet.
“You were in my class, right?” I heard him say.
“No,” I muttered. “I was just watching.”
When I glanced up, he nodded—and immediately I felt my cheeks burning. Did he know what I’d been watching? His bare chest and tanned legs, the snug black Speedo.
I was trembling by that point, but for some reason when he said, “Walk with me,” I followed him.
For a few minutes, we didn’t talk—which both disturbed and excited me. Our silence seemed to suggest that we agreed on something. It was like a pact.
I followed him to a more deserted part of the beach, and then we were walking away from the ocean, toward some scrubby hills. I reminded myself that a lifeguard was like a policeman—a person you could trust.
“Are you O.K.?” he asked, noticing my jitters, or perhaps hearing how my teeth were chattering in spite of the scorching August sun.
When he finally stopped and turned toward me, we were in a patch of shade, surrounded by larger bushes and even some trees. If my mind said run, my body argued stay. I was locked in place by confusion and desire and a slow-reeling vertigo.
He asked why I was standing so far away.
I shrugged, and when I made a move to leave he approached, and touched my arm. “Don’t.”
He wasn’t rough; he smiled. I could see the blond stubble on his golden chin. His beauty was formidable.
I said that I should probably go, while, below, my arousal contradicted me. He noticed, and drew my attention to the fact that he was experiencing a similar “problem.” As we made small talk—the weather, the waves, my sunburn—the real conversation seemed to be happening between our bathing suits.
Somehow, a few minutes later, we were naked, with our hands going exactly where hands shouldn’t go—or exactly where they should. I was in a limbo, in which there seemed to be no difference between the forbidden and the necessary. The sense of inevitability, of falling, was profound.
I had been with girls before, but we’d only kissed—and never with our clothes off. And those experiences had always felt like rehearsals for desire, ones in which I played my part perhaps too fervently, knowing that I’d been miscast.
But now, as I followed the lifeguard’s lead, I felt that he was pulling me closer to myself. Strangely, this did not feel safe; it felt like drowning.
And then we were both lying on the sand, soaked and winded. For a moment, we stayed knotted together, as if untangling ourselves might prove to be too much effort, or leave too much room for questions and regret.
Finally, I slid away, and as I put on my bathing suit I felt a need to defend myself. I told the man I’d never done anything like that before.
“Me neither,” he said.
I didn’t believe him—he looked like a movie star. But maybe he meant he’d done it only with girls.
When I asked for his name, he told me.
He didn’t ask for mine, and I thought, I’ll never see him again.
But, as I turned to leave, he took a notebook from his backpack and wrote down a number.
“Call me,” he said. “O.K.?”
by Victor Lodato, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris Rush
Is There a New Tiger Versus an Old Tiger?
This past season much was made about Tiger Woods being a changed person. That this latest comeback, from passed out behind the wheel in post-surgical hell to nearly winning majors, has given him "a new lease on life." It seems all the announcers and media have latched on to this narrative. Friendlier, warmer, tastes great and less filling. Well, I think it's a bunch of bull.
Sure, there have been divergences. The old Tiger didn't walk down the range saying hello to rookies, like I saw him do at Tampa. The old Tiger didn't wait around the last green to congratulate the guy who beat him, like he did for Brooks in St. Louis. He wouldn't fight back tears like he did at East Lake.
Certainly, the prospect of never competing again felt scarily real to him at one point. And finally having one's family life in order years after a messy divorce must add perspective. Still, I'm not buying that he's "changed." Because what most people don't know is, Tiger's always been a good guy.
Whatever a man has done or not done in his private life is another matter. All I know is, there are few golfers better to sit down with for lunch and shoot the breeze than Tiger, and it's been that way ever since I was a rookie. In a one-on-one setting, he's a completely different person than the one the world sees in interviews. (...)
I couldn't imagine being him. The moment the locker-room door swings open, his world changes. At the first FedEx Cup event in New Jersey, there must've been 30 people clamoring to snap his picture at the back entrance of the clubhouse, which is a restricted area. I'm thinking, Haven't you people seen someone get into a car before? What are you going to do with a crappy photo like that on your phone, anyway?
Sure, there have been divergences. The old Tiger didn't walk down the range saying hello to rookies, like I saw him do at Tampa. The old Tiger didn't wait around the last green to congratulate the guy who beat him, like he did for Brooks in St. Louis. He wouldn't fight back tears like he did at East Lake.Certainly, the prospect of never competing again felt scarily real to him at one point. And finally having one's family life in order years after a messy divorce must add perspective. Still, I'm not buying that he's "changed." Because what most people don't know is, Tiger's always been a good guy.
Whatever a man has done or not done in his private life is another matter. All I know is, there are few golfers better to sit down with for lunch and shoot the breeze than Tiger, and it's been that way ever since I was a rookie. In a one-on-one setting, he's a completely different person than the one the world sees in interviews. (...)
I couldn't imagine being him. The moment the locker-room door swings open, his world changes. At the first FedEx Cup event in New Jersey, there must've been 30 people clamoring to snap his picture at the back entrance of the clubhouse, which is a restricted area. I'm thinking, Haven't you people seen someone get into a car before? What are you going to do with a crappy photo like that on your phone, anyway?
My Shot: Gil Hanse
Golf course architecture
This morning, Bill Kittleman, one of our design partners and the head pro at Merion from 1963-'96, came out to the 15th green to discuss the finishing touches of our restoration work there. It's always fun being with Bill because his experiences at Merion made him a very wise man with a great eye. One time Bill was helping us on another project here in Philadelphia. The maintenance crew had left early and had taken their equipment with them. Bill, noticing an imperfection along the edge of a bunker, grabbed a stick on the ground and started chopping away at it. After a few minutes he stopped, took a long draw on his cigar and said, "Look at us. We're just a bunch of [bleeping] cave men hacking away out here." Ever since, we've referred to the fine-tuning we do with rakes and shovels—and sometimes our bare hands or soles of our shoes—as "cave-man construction." It's part nonsense, part truth. Some architects really do get down and dirty like that.
I WAS A BABY CAVE MAN. At age 11, my brothers and I built golf holes in the dirt in the back yard of our home in Babylon, Long Island. We didn't just build golf holes, but really intricate dams and levees, using a garden hose. Eventually I got a master's degree in landscape architecture at Cornell and got into course design while I was there. But it all started in my back yard.
EIGHTSOMES, PLAYING BAREFOOT AND LISTENING TO MUSIC. Grandparents playing alongside toddlers. Near-beginners jumping up and down when they hit a green in regulation for the first time. Experienced players playing with only one or two clubs, drinks in hand, laughing, with no pencil touching a scorecard. That's what happens at The Cradle, the nine-hole par-3 course at Pinehurst that opened last year. It might be the most successful of all our designs because we accomplished exactly what we set out to do—grow the game and make it fun. When the U.S. Open returns to Pinehurst No. 2 in 2024, The Cradle will be used as the practice range. But the hope is to shut down the range for a few hours and send the players out there with their children or kids from the community. Similar to the Par-3 Contest at the Masters. How cool would that be?
THE NEXT TIME YOU DESIGN A FEW HOLES IN YOUR HEAD, or imagine how a couple at your course might be redesigned, start with the notion that water flows downhill. Drainage is always first and foremost. Think of the water principle, and your design will get much better because you'll be doing it in the context of solving a problem. And it will provide clues as to why that crazy architect did what he did, and you might decide he wasn't so crazy after all.
GOLFERS LOVE PAR 3S, and architects know it, so we tend to hoard them for later in the front and back nines. We try to put them later, too, because they take the longest to play, and you don't want a backup on a par-3 second hole. I'd go so far as to say we'd never design a course with a par 3 early, except that the second I say it, a piece of land will dictate otherwise. (...)
IN THE BEGINNING, MOST COURSES IN THE U.S. WERE DESIGNED to be very expansive because there was no irrigation to speak of. Certainly that's the case with Oakmont, Winged Foot and Oak Hill, among others. Trees weren't even in the minds of the architects. With the advent of single-row irrigation systems, the fairways got narrower because they couldn't water the entire property. So now they had green fairways that looked out of scale against the brown areas. Greens committees quite understandably added trees to fill in those areas. Trees became the standard. But over time, a lot of downsides emerged. Because trees grow, they eventually limit strategy and shut off opportunities for recovery shots. And they're terrible for grass, period. Tree-removal programs began in earnest. I love trees as much as the next person, but I've learned to take a clinical, unromantic approach to taking them out. Our restoration work at Aronimink, Sleepy Hollow and Winged Foot included significant tree removal. Members think they'll miss them, but I've never heard a single complaint once they're gone.
ARCHITECTS CAN IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON LANDFORMS. They can construct ponds, fill in swamps, create islands and build bunkers. But they can't dominate the weather. Courses built on flood plains are going to get flooded. A sand dune built near a wash, sooner or later is going to wind up in a dump truck. If you take on Mother Nature, you're eventually going to lose that fight. (...)
THE DAYS OF A YOUNG PERSON COMING OUT OF COLLEGE with a landscape-architecture degree and finding work in a top designer's office are long gone. There just aren't enough courses being built. To design a course with your name on it, you're going to have to work for years on the construction side, building up calluses, being super passionate and doing everything you're asked to do. Show one shred of entitlement, and you're going to be weeded out in a hurry. It's a very tough field to succeed in. (...)
I APPLAUD OLD COURSES THAT REFUSE TO ADD LENGTH IN AN EFFORT TO NOT BECOME "OBSOLETE." Adding length separates the proximity of greens to tees, and it changes angles and shot values, often irreparably. A prime example is St. George's Golf and Country Club, a 1917 Devereux Emmet de-sign on Long Island. It is one of the great unheralded courses in America. Everyone who visits there gasps, it's so good. It measures just over 6,400 yards from the blue tees. The people there feel its first iteration is its best iteration.
MARK PARSINEN, OUR CO-DESIGNER AT CASTLE STUART, says, "The defining characteristic of a great course is the perspective of the golfer facing his third shot on a par 4." That's profound, because architects traditionally have focused on the drive, approach and then the green complexes. But Mark's point is that very few golfers hit many greens in regulation. If we can make the recovery scenarios around the greens more interesting—little golf courses in themselves—it turns the whole golf course up a notch. (...)
I FEAR GOLF SIMULATORS ARE GOING TO BECOME MUCH MORE ADVANCED. Technology 30 years from now will provide golf experiences more lifelike than we can imagine. Sights, sounds and climate will be duplicated, rain and temperature included. On every shot, the quality of your lie will be adjusted, the slopes just like the real thing. Wind will be provided. You might be able to walk to your ball. Smells, conversation, bad bounces, they'll have it all. I sincerely believe all of this is inevitable. And I hope I'm dead by the time it happens.
by Gil Hanse, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Finlay MacKay
This morning, Bill Kittleman, one of our design partners and the head pro at Merion from 1963-'96, came out to the 15th green to discuss the finishing touches of our restoration work there. It's always fun being with Bill because his experiences at Merion made him a very wise man with a great eye. One time Bill was helping us on another project here in Philadelphia. The maintenance crew had left early and had taken their equipment with them. Bill, noticing an imperfection along the edge of a bunker, grabbed a stick on the ground and started chopping away at it. After a few minutes he stopped, took a long draw on his cigar and said, "Look at us. We're just a bunch of [bleeping] cave men hacking away out here." Ever since, we've referred to the fine-tuning we do with rakes and shovels—and sometimes our bare hands or soles of our shoes—as "cave-man construction." It's part nonsense, part truth. Some architects really do get down and dirty like that.
I WAS A BABY CAVE MAN. At age 11, my brothers and I built golf holes in the dirt in the back yard of our home in Babylon, Long Island. We didn't just build golf holes, but really intricate dams and levees, using a garden hose. Eventually I got a master's degree in landscape architecture at Cornell and got into course design while I was there. But it all started in my back yard.EIGHTSOMES, PLAYING BAREFOOT AND LISTENING TO MUSIC. Grandparents playing alongside toddlers. Near-beginners jumping up and down when they hit a green in regulation for the first time. Experienced players playing with only one or two clubs, drinks in hand, laughing, with no pencil touching a scorecard. That's what happens at The Cradle, the nine-hole par-3 course at Pinehurst that opened last year. It might be the most successful of all our designs because we accomplished exactly what we set out to do—grow the game and make it fun. When the U.S. Open returns to Pinehurst No. 2 in 2024, The Cradle will be used as the practice range. But the hope is to shut down the range for a few hours and send the players out there with their children or kids from the community. Similar to the Par-3 Contest at the Masters. How cool would that be?
THE NEXT TIME YOU DESIGN A FEW HOLES IN YOUR HEAD, or imagine how a couple at your course might be redesigned, start with the notion that water flows downhill. Drainage is always first and foremost. Think of the water principle, and your design will get much better because you'll be doing it in the context of solving a problem. And it will provide clues as to why that crazy architect did what he did, and you might decide he wasn't so crazy after all.
GOLFERS LOVE PAR 3S, and architects know it, so we tend to hoard them for later in the front and back nines. We try to put them later, too, because they take the longest to play, and you don't want a backup on a par-3 second hole. I'd go so far as to say we'd never design a course with a par 3 early, except that the second I say it, a piece of land will dictate otherwise. (...)
IN THE BEGINNING, MOST COURSES IN THE U.S. WERE DESIGNED to be very expansive because there was no irrigation to speak of. Certainly that's the case with Oakmont, Winged Foot and Oak Hill, among others. Trees weren't even in the minds of the architects. With the advent of single-row irrigation systems, the fairways got narrower because they couldn't water the entire property. So now they had green fairways that looked out of scale against the brown areas. Greens committees quite understandably added trees to fill in those areas. Trees became the standard. But over time, a lot of downsides emerged. Because trees grow, they eventually limit strategy and shut off opportunities for recovery shots. And they're terrible for grass, period. Tree-removal programs began in earnest. I love trees as much as the next person, but I've learned to take a clinical, unromantic approach to taking them out. Our restoration work at Aronimink, Sleepy Hollow and Winged Foot included significant tree removal. Members think they'll miss them, but I've never heard a single complaint once they're gone.
ARCHITECTS CAN IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON LANDFORMS. They can construct ponds, fill in swamps, create islands and build bunkers. But they can't dominate the weather. Courses built on flood plains are going to get flooded. A sand dune built near a wash, sooner or later is going to wind up in a dump truck. If you take on Mother Nature, you're eventually going to lose that fight. (...)
THE DAYS OF A YOUNG PERSON COMING OUT OF COLLEGE with a landscape-architecture degree and finding work in a top designer's office are long gone. There just aren't enough courses being built. To design a course with your name on it, you're going to have to work for years on the construction side, building up calluses, being super passionate and doing everything you're asked to do. Show one shred of entitlement, and you're going to be weeded out in a hurry. It's a very tough field to succeed in. (...)
I APPLAUD OLD COURSES THAT REFUSE TO ADD LENGTH IN AN EFFORT TO NOT BECOME "OBSOLETE." Adding length separates the proximity of greens to tees, and it changes angles and shot values, often irreparably. A prime example is St. George's Golf and Country Club, a 1917 Devereux Emmet de-sign on Long Island. It is one of the great unheralded courses in America. Everyone who visits there gasps, it's so good. It measures just over 6,400 yards from the blue tees. The people there feel its first iteration is its best iteration.
MARK PARSINEN, OUR CO-DESIGNER AT CASTLE STUART, says, "The defining characteristic of a great course is the perspective of the golfer facing his third shot on a par 4." That's profound, because architects traditionally have focused on the drive, approach and then the green complexes. But Mark's point is that very few golfers hit many greens in regulation. If we can make the recovery scenarios around the greens more interesting—little golf courses in themselves—it turns the whole golf course up a notch. (...)
I FEAR GOLF SIMULATORS ARE GOING TO BECOME MUCH MORE ADVANCED. Technology 30 years from now will provide golf experiences more lifelike than we can imagine. Sights, sounds and climate will be duplicated, rain and temperature included. On every shot, the quality of your lie will be adjusted, the slopes just like the real thing. Wind will be provided. You might be able to walk to your ball. Smells, conversation, bad bounces, they'll have it all. I sincerely believe all of this is inevitable. And I hope I'm dead by the time it happens.
by Gil Hanse, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Finlay MacKay
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
If You See This Symbol on Your Favorite Costco Item, Stock Up Now
Big box store members are already smitten with perks like these little-known benefits of having a Costco card. But then there are the products themselves. Not only does Costco have unbeatable prices, but it also carries top-quality options. So when you find a favorite item, it can be devastating to realize it’s no longer carried the next time you stop by.
Part of the reason Costco’s prices are so cheap is that it only carries a limited number of products. Of course, that also means that the store won’t hang onto an item that isn’t selling when it could replace it with something more appealing. Luckily, there’s an easy way to find out if your favorite product is about to be discontinued.
Take a look at the upper right corner of a Costco price tag. If you see an asterisk, that’s a sign that the wholesale store won’t be restocking the item. Maybe the product hasn’t been selling well, or maybe the manufacturer upped its prices. Either way, it could be your last shot to get your hands on that item in-store—at least for now. To start, see if any of these 15 Costco must-buy products have the special price tag.
Even if a product disappears from the shelves temporarily, it might pop up again in the future. For instance, seasonal items like holiday gift wrap or certain foods might not appear until the next year, but they’ll show up again once they’re back in season. Still, if you have your sights on a nonperishable item that you know you’ll use up within a few months, might as well stock up on more to make it through the year. Next, find out the 15 secrets Costco employees won’t tell you.
by Marissa Laliberte, Reader's Digest | Read more:
Image:John Greim/REX/Shutterstock
Part of the reason Costco’s prices are so cheap is that it only carries a limited number of products. Of course, that also means that the store won’t hang onto an item that isn’t selling when it could replace it with something more appealing. Luckily, there’s an easy way to find out if your favorite product is about to be discontinued.Take a look at the upper right corner of a Costco price tag. If you see an asterisk, that’s a sign that the wholesale store won’t be restocking the item. Maybe the product hasn’t been selling well, or maybe the manufacturer upped its prices. Either way, it could be your last shot to get your hands on that item in-store—at least for now. To start, see if any of these 15 Costco must-buy products have the special price tag.
Even if a product disappears from the shelves temporarily, it might pop up again in the future. For instance, seasonal items like holiday gift wrap or certain foods might not appear until the next year, but they’ll show up again once they’re back in season. Still, if you have your sights on a nonperishable item that you know you’ll use up within a few months, might as well stock up on more to make it through the year. Next, find out the 15 secrets Costco employees won’t tell you.
by Marissa Laliberte, Reader's Digest | Read more:
Image:John Greim/REX/Shutterstock
[ed. Be sure to click on the links (which include other links) for additional Costco insights. See also: coupons for additional savings at Costco Insider.]
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
When Is Screen Addiction Actually Addiction?
Addiction is one of those things where, the more you learn about it, the more terrifying it gets. For instance, some studies suggest it can impede your ability to manage pain in your body and even enjoy chocolate or sex. For years or decades.
And anyone who follows brain science knows that brain plasticity is pretty hip these days. Now we know it lasts way into old age and can do some pretty amazing things. But it’s not unlimited, especially during crucial developmental periods. In fact, there is some evidence that regular teenage drug users lose their plasticity – their ability to create new connections in the brain – which can change the way the brain is wired.
Connections in the brain are a little like roads. And you can only build so many over the landscape. This may account for some cognitive deficits observed in regular drug users. Drug addiction, it seems, may hoard all the roads for itself, which can be devastating for a teen who is building the roads she will use the rest of her life.
But what is addiction, though? How do you know if you are addicted? I spend at least 10 hours per day in front of a screen – am I addicted? Can you get addicted to Microsoft Word? Or Facetime? My sister has an unhealthy obsession with the NFL and the Patriots in particular. Is she addicted to Tom Brady (yeah right, in her dreams)? I smoked cigarettes on and off for years – just at parties and on top of rocks, mind you. Is that addiction?
Yes, actually, that one probably is. I would literally kill the next person I saw if it would allow me to smoke again. I doubt I’d even feel all that bad about it.
Now, no one is saying that screen addiction – if it even is a true addiction – is just like heroin addiction or even smoking. In one case, you are getting hooked on your own internal reward chemicals and in the other you are hooked on a chemical that is tailor made to hook you. Certainly being hooked on screen time is healthier for your liver and lungs than alcohol, drugs, or tobacco.
“We don’t think that every child that is given lots of screen time will show ADHD or will become a screen time addict,” says Susan Ferguson, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, who was involved in the mouse work. “We just don’t know how addictive it is.”
Screen time may not be as addictive as traditional drugs, but measuring addictiveness is notoriously hard to do. Indeed, gambling, running, and sex can all be addictive. And tobacco addiction is arguably more powerful than harder drugs, without considering any other factors.
Man, I could really use a smoke. Anyone want to split one with me?
Anyway, the real test of addiction is how it affects your life. Does it negatively impact you? Experts disagree over the particulars on this, which sounds like petty bickering at first, but then you realize that how you define addiction vastly changes the scale of the problem. One definition puts it at half a percent of the population while another puts it at ten percent. That’s tens of millions of people in the United States.
Mark Griffiths, a British addiction expert at the University of Nottingham Trent University (which is very different from their rivals, Nottingham University, fact I only learned about after I had gotten it wrong, sadly), had one of my favorite lists. He says addiction a) becomes the most – or almost the most – important thing in your life, b) changes your mood considerably, c) pushes you to get ever more of it, d) triggers withdrawal if you don’t, e) often triggers relapses into addictive cycles, and, most importantly, f) causes conflict.
That last one can be between you and loved ones or you and yourself. It can also be terrifying. I heard stories of families ripped apart and lives ruined by something as stupid as a smart phone. Though, I suppose it’s no more stupid than online poker, methamphetamines, or some weird leaf that’s dried out, crushed up, lit on fire, and inhaled through a filter.
God, I would kill for a cigarette right now.
Anyway, Griffiths’ list isn’t too strange, but he is unusual in that he insists that all criteria be met before using the label “addiction,” ensuring that very few people cross that threshold. And it’s interesting. Take my smoking – only b), c), maybe d), and e) really applied. I guess I have friends who experienced a) and that’s why quitting was so much harder for them.
But f) is the one that really catches my eye, because there was really only conflict later in my life, once I realized how bad it was for me. That’s when I felt conflicted about it. So, paradoxically, it was only when I saw it as an addiction that it might have actually become an addiction.
There is another reason to have such a strict criteria for addiction. It cordons off a few people who really need to focus on this as a truly life-destroying problem, ideally with professional help. It’s hard to know how many people fit into this category, but it’s likely to be less than one percent of users (given that gambling addiction, which is better studied, hovers around one percent and screen addiction does not seem to have risen to that level yet).
This creates a wide, crucial space for those who have a problem but aren’t technically addicted. Those of us who sense that maybe screens have crept a little too far into our lives but snort derisively when someone calls us an addict. It kind of frees screen addiction from the controversy of “addiction.”
Like me and my smoking. I wasn’t addicted, according to Griffith’s list, but it was a problem. And, while I would go months without a smoke, it was always there in the back of my mind as something I’d like to do. And if I had a stressful day or was out with buddies – bang! – I was smoking as soon as I could.
According to experts I talked to, this is where many people are with screen addiction. They like it a lot, do it too much, kinda know it, but manage their lives just fine. And like me and cigarettes, they will have to make a choice. Independent of labels and stigma, is this something that is lessening our quality of life? Is this causing damage to us?
And anyone who follows brain science knows that brain plasticity is pretty hip these days. Now we know it lasts way into old age and can do some pretty amazing things. But it’s not unlimited, especially during crucial developmental periods. In fact, there is some evidence that regular teenage drug users lose their plasticity – their ability to create new connections in the brain – which can change the way the brain is wired.
Connections in the brain are a little like roads. And you can only build so many over the landscape. This may account for some cognitive deficits observed in regular drug users. Drug addiction, it seems, may hoard all the roads for itself, which can be devastating for a teen who is building the roads she will use the rest of her life.But what is addiction, though? How do you know if you are addicted? I spend at least 10 hours per day in front of a screen – am I addicted? Can you get addicted to Microsoft Word? Or Facetime? My sister has an unhealthy obsession with the NFL and the Patriots in particular. Is she addicted to Tom Brady (yeah right, in her dreams)? I smoked cigarettes on and off for years – just at parties and on top of rocks, mind you. Is that addiction?
Yes, actually, that one probably is. I would literally kill the next person I saw if it would allow me to smoke again. I doubt I’d even feel all that bad about it.
Now, no one is saying that screen addiction – if it even is a true addiction – is just like heroin addiction or even smoking. In one case, you are getting hooked on your own internal reward chemicals and in the other you are hooked on a chemical that is tailor made to hook you. Certainly being hooked on screen time is healthier for your liver and lungs than alcohol, drugs, or tobacco.
“We don’t think that every child that is given lots of screen time will show ADHD or will become a screen time addict,” says Susan Ferguson, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, who was involved in the mouse work. “We just don’t know how addictive it is.”
Screen time may not be as addictive as traditional drugs, but measuring addictiveness is notoriously hard to do. Indeed, gambling, running, and sex can all be addictive. And tobacco addiction is arguably more powerful than harder drugs, without considering any other factors.
Man, I could really use a smoke. Anyone want to split one with me?
Anyway, the real test of addiction is how it affects your life. Does it negatively impact you? Experts disagree over the particulars on this, which sounds like petty bickering at first, but then you realize that how you define addiction vastly changes the scale of the problem. One definition puts it at half a percent of the population while another puts it at ten percent. That’s tens of millions of people in the United States.
Mark Griffiths, a British addiction expert at the University of Nottingham Trent University (which is very different from their rivals, Nottingham University, fact I only learned about after I had gotten it wrong, sadly), had one of my favorite lists. He says addiction a) becomes the most – or almost the most – important thing in your life, b) changes your mood considerably, c) pushes you to get ever more of it, d) triggers withdrawal if you don’t, e) often triggers relapses into addictive cycles, and, most importantly, f) causes conflict.
That last one can be between you and loved ones or you and yourself. It can also be terrifying. I heard stories of families ripped apart and lives ruined by something as stupid as a smart phone. Though, I suppose it’s no more stupid than online poker, methamphetamines, or some weird leaf that’s dried out, crushed up, lit on fire, and inhaled through a filter.
God, I would kill for a cigarette right now.
Anyway, Griffiths’ list isn’t too strange, but he is unusual in that he insists that all criteria be met before using the label “addiction,” ensuring that very few people cross that threshold. And it’s interesting. Take my smoking – only b), c), maybe d), and e) really applied. I guess I have friends who experienced a) and that’s why quitting was so much harder for them.
But f) is the one that really catches my eye, because there was really only conflict later in my life, once I realized how bad it was for me. That’s when I felt conflicted about it. So, paradoxically, it was only when I saw it as an addiction that it might have actually become an addiction.
There is another reason to have such a strict criteria for addiction. It cordons off a few people who really need to focus on this as a truly life-destroying problem, ideally with professional help. It’s hard to know how many people fit into this category, but it’s likely to be less than one percent of users (given that gambling addiction, which is better studied, hovers around one percent and screen addiction does not seem to have risen to that level yet).
This creates a wide, crucial space for those who have a problem but aren’t technically addicted. Those of us who sense that maybe screens have crept a little too far into our lives but snort derisively when someone calls us an addict. It kind of frees screen addiction from the controversy of “addiction.”
Like me and my smoking. I wasn’t addicted, according to Griffith’s list, but it was a problem. And, while I would go months without a smoke, it was always there in the back of my mind as something I’d like to do. And if I had a stressful day or was out with buddies – bang! – I was smoking as soon as I could.
According to experts I talked to, this is where many people are with screen addiction. They like it a lot, do it too much, kinda know it, but manage their lives just fine. And like me and cigarettes, they will have to make a choice. Independent of labels and stigma, is this something that is lessening our quality of life? Is this causing damage to us?
by Erik Vance, The Last Word on Nothing | Read more:
Image: Brian Moore, Mister Guy 11
What I Learned About Life at My 30th College Reunion
On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.
I loved my four years at Harvard, largely because of the diversity of its student body. I don’t love the fact—now made public through the trial but previously understood by all of us to be true—that the kids whose parents donate buildings are given preferential treatment over those whose parents don’t. But I understand why the development office, which allows the university to give a free ride to any student whose family makes less than $65,000 a year, might encourage such a practice, which is hardly unique to Harvard. I also don’t love the fact that the Harvard fight song is still “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,” in a school populated by at least as many women as men, and yet hearing its opening notes can still make me deeply nostalgic. Moreover, I am appalled that all-male final clubs—fraternity-like eating clubs in which the sons of America’s privileged class have traditionally gathered—still exist on campus (albeit with sanctions) without commensurate opportunities, with rare exceptions, for women, minorities, and others, but I also call some of their alumni members my closest friends.
Intelligence, it has been said, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still function, and if universities could be said to have one overriding goal as institutions of higher learning, it is to teach its students this critical skill, Harvard no more than others. Seeing the coin from either of its two sides has never been more important, particularly now, in this nuance-lacking era of divisiveness and nationalism. It’s no wonder that in fascist regimes, the intellectuals are always the first to be silenced.
I believe in the benefits of diversity, even if it means choosing an immigrant kid with a lower-than-usual SAT score (for Harvard) but other stellar qualities, like Thang Q. Diep, Harvard class of ’19, whose application has been trotted out by the lawsuit for all to see. And I’m also aware, as a Jew, that Harvard’s diversity initiative was first put into motion as a way to keep the university’s burgeoning Jewish population in check. I can hold both of these truths—diversity is good; the roots of diversity in the admissions process were prejudiced against my own people—and not only still be able to function but also to see that sometimes good results can come from less-than-good intentions.
Because the point of diversity on a college campus, no matter its less-than-honorable roots, is not to count how many brown faces versus how many white and black faces a school has. It is to provide a rainbow of politics and upbringings and thought processes and understandings that might teach us, through our differences, how similar we are.
Though we all went to the same school, and Harvard’s name likely opened doors for many of us, at the end of the day—or at the end of 30 years since graduation, in this case—what was so fascinating about meeting up with my own richly diverse class during reunion was that no matter our original background, no matter our current income or skin color or struggles or religion or health or career path or family structure, the common threads running through our lives had less to do with Harvard and more with the pressing issues of being human.
Life does this. To everyone. No matter if or where they go to college. At a certain point midway on the timeline of one’s finite existence, the differences between people that stood out in youth take a backseat to similarities, with that mother of all universal themes—a sudden coming to grips with mortality—being the most salient. Not that this is an exhaustive list, but here are 30 simple shared truths I discovered at my 30th reunion of Harvard’s class of 1988.
I loved my four years at Harvard, largely because of the diversity of its student body. I don’t love the fact—now made public through the trial but previously understood by all of us to be true—that the kids whose parents donate buildings are given preferential treatment over those whose parents don’t. But I understand why the development office, which allows the university to give a free ride to any student whose family makes less than $65,000 a year, might encourage such a practice, which is hardly unique to Harvard. I also don’t love the fact that the Harvard fight song is still “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,” in a school populated by at least as many women as men, and yet hearing its opening notes can still make me deeply nostalgic. Moreover, I am appalled that all-male final clubs—fraternity-like eating clubs in which the sons of America’s privileged class have traditionally gathered—still exist on campus (albeit with sanctions) without commensurate opportunities, with rare exceptions, for women, minorities, and others, but I also call some of their alumni members my closest friends.Intelligence, it has been said, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still function, and if universities could be said to have one overriding goal as institutions of higher learning, it is to teach its students this critical skill, Harvard no more than others. Seeing the coin from either of its two sides has never been more important, particularly now, in this nuance-lacking era of divisiveness and nationalism. It’s no wonder that in fascist regimes, the intellectuals are always the first to be silenced.
I believe in the benefits of diversity, even if it means choosing an immigrant kid with a lower-than-usual SAT score (for Harvard) but other stellar qualities, like Thang Q. Diep, Harvard class of ’19, whose application has been trotted out by the lawsuit for all to see. And I’m also aware, as a Jew, that Harvard’s diversity initiative was first put into motion as a way to keep the university’s burgeoning Jewish population in check. I can hold both of these truths—diversity is good; the roots of diversity in the admissions process were prejudiced against my own people—and not only still be able to function but also to see that sometimes good results can come from less-than-good intentions.
Because the point of diversity on a college campus, no matter its less-than-honorable roots, is not to count how many brown faces versus how many white and black faces a school has. It is to provide a rainbow of politics and upbringings and thought processes and understandings that might teach us, through our differences, how similar we are.
Though we all went to the same school, and Harvard’s name likely opened doors for many of us, at the end of the day—or at the end of 30 years since graduation, in this case—what was so fascinating about meeting up with my own richly diverse class during reunion was that no matter our original background, no matter our current income or skin color or struggles or religion or health or career path or family structure, the common threads running through our lives had less to do with Harvard and more with the pressing issues of being human.
Life does this. To everyone. No matter if or where they go to college. At a certain point midway on the timeline of one’s finite existence, the differences between people that stood out in youth take a backseat to similarities, with that mother of all universal themes—a sudden coming to grips with mortality—being the most salient. Not that this is an exhaustive list, but here are 30 simple shared truths I discovered at my 30th reunion of Harvard’s class of 1988.
- No one’s life turned out exactly as anticipated, not even for the most ardent planner.
- Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy with the choice of career.
- Many lawyers seemed either unhappy or itching for a change, with the exception of those who became law professors. (See No. 2 above.)
- Nearly every single banker or fund manager wanted to find a way to use accrued wealth to give back (some had concrete plans, some didn’t), and many, at this point, seemed to want to leave Wall Street as soon as possible to take up some sort of art.
- Speaking of art, those who went into it as a career were mostly happy and often successful, but they had all, in some way, struggled financially.
- They say money can’t buy happiness, but in an online survey of our class just prior to the reunion, those of us with more of it self-reported a higher level of happiness than those with less.
- Our strongest desire, in that same pre-reunion class survey—over more sex and more money—was to get more sleep.
- “Burning Down the House,” our class’s favorite song, by the Talking Heads, is still as good and as relevant in 2018 as it was blasting out of our freshman dorms.
- Many of our class’s shyest freshmen have now become our alumni class leaders, helping to organize this reunion and others.
- Those who chose to get divorced seemed happier, post-divorce.
- Those who got an unwanted divorce seemed unhappier, post-divorce.
- Many classmates who are in long-lasting marriages said they experienced a turning point, when their early marriage suddenly transformed into a mature relationship. “I’m doing the best I can!” one classmate told me she said to her husband in the middle of a particularly stressful couples’-therapy session. From that moment on, she said, he understood: Her imperfections were not an insult to him, and her actions were not an extension of him. She was her own person, and her imperfections were what made her her. Sometimes people forget this, in the thick of marriage.
by Deborah Copaken, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Dave Kotinsky/Getty
Monday, October 29, 2018
Around the Clock at Pike Place Market
The Morning Rollout
On Pike Place Market time, 8:45 isn’t exactly early. The fish market guys were here at 5:30 to break down halibut; the flower stalls had their buckets filled with peonies and irises by 7. The main arcade is mostly empty, save the strains of a busker’s morning warmup on her violin. But at the farthest reach of the North Arcade, the swarm of vendors is seven people deep and spreading. Still more have climbed on the worn concrete slab countertops for a better view. There’s a slight fizz of anticipation in the cool morning air as everyone trains their gaze on a whiteboard that’s clearly been tacked up for ages.
Beyond the permanent produce stands known as high stalls are the flat tables for farmers who claim their specific turf via reservation the day before. The rest are for the day-stall vendors, who make anything from cheese boards to bongs to liners for rubber boots. Every morning for half a century they report for roll call, a ritual jockeying for the most desirable stall their seniority will allow, an old-school Wall Street trading floor reimagined with more flowing beards and fleece. But also a genuine sense of community; some of these men and women have spent decades side by side at these tables.
Posted over the board are the 230 people eligible to sell crafts in Pike Place Market. They’re listed in seniority from Bob Crew of Metamorphosis Leathers, who has been here 40 years, down to the handful of newcomers approved a few weeks ago. Technically guys like Crew have the market’s equivalent of tenure; other senior vendors can dart up and lay claim to their preferred location with blue dry-erase marker—provided they do it before Zack Cook rings the bell at 9am sharp to start the day’s roll call.
Cook, bearded and baby faced beneath his Pike Place Market cap, usually works with the farmers (he even visits their fields to confirm they actually grow their own wares). Today it’s his turn as designated market master, ready to rattle off the names of the vendors assembled before him, in order of seniority, and record their requested location. The faster this goes, the more time everyone has to set up before Cook does his compliance rounds at 11.
Munko? Two sixteen!
Seppa? Bridge sixty-three!
Parriott? Fourteen out, please.
Yocco? Two twenty-four dogleg.
The covered arcade spots go first, then the bridge; given the sunny forecast, outside berths go fast, too. At last, Cook hits the final name on his list. He counts down from five, a last call for anyone who wants to change their spot. His blue marker records the time on the board: 9:18am. Roll call over, the vendors scatter to bring their part of the market to life. Racks of art and textiles start to bloom in the gray spaces almost instantly.
Roughly 40,000 people will pass through Pike Place Market today. Most of them will never know about roll call, or the 49-page rulebook that shapes who sells what here, and where. By 11am, the arcade fills up. A remarkably tanned couple in shorts and matching San Francisco sweatshirts break their resolute stride to browse Stone City Farm’s goat-milk soaps; two girls in Boise State softball team gear examine the felt Donut Cats at the MarninSaylor booth. A display of art photographs nearly covers the all-powerful whiteboard, hiding in plain sight until the day is done.
Afternoons and Busker Tunes
At the corner of First and Stewart, just a block from Pike Place Market, a woman in the lavender sweatshirt and leggings turns to me with a sheepish expression as we await the green light. She knows locals must roll their eyes at what she’s about to ask. “Am I close to the first Starbucks?”
The man in a mint green button-down next to us turns as we step into the crosswalk—“Don’t feel bad; I just moved here yesterday.”
Just head down to that brick street right there, I told her, and you can’t miss all the Starbucks groupies taking photos. Except, it’s lunch hour: Crowds clog every sidewalk.
At Corner Produce, a vendor who’s a dead ringer for Zach Galifianakis hews off a chunk of a red Jazz apple and offers it to a young woman, along with his finely honed sales pitch: “It’s the jazziest of apples.” Beyond them, and beyond the wall of Instagrammers, is the institution that’s both ambassador and bellwether for the entire market. Once upon a time the vendors here spoke an assortment of languages; now it’s the visitors. Two guys chattering in German weave past a slow-moving tour group whose leader narrates in Japanese. A new slate of musicians takes its turn at the market’s designated busking sites; lively bluegrass permeates the air.
Simply follow the lodestar of the Public Market Center clock, and you can’t miss the Pike Place Fish Market guys. If a big convention of lawyers is in town, they know it. If a cruise ship just docked at Pier 66, its passengers will soon proliferate around the counter. When they do, Jaison Scott is ready.
He and his comrades in aprons are the Flying Wallendas of fishmongering, walking a daily high-wire of salmon-throwing showmanship and legitimate commerce, conducted quickly, and with knives, in very close quarters. “Love the people,” is the mantra they repeat among themselves, a reminder how seriously they take their role as most visitors’ introduction to Seattle. Scott knows how to say assorted phrases in Italian or Tagalog—“most of them ‘I love you,’ to little old ladies”—to break the ice, and hopefully turn audience members into actual customers. He can also spot the regulars, with their canvas bags and “I need something, then I want to get the hell out” look in their eye.
Scott’s mother worked here for longtime owner Johnny Yokoyama in her youth, then ran the counter at the old Wonder Freeze just down the arcade up until the day Scott was born in 1972. When he was an infant, Yokoyama’s mom, Helen, would babysit Scott, tucked in a banana box while his mom worked nearby. That was kind of a thing here, thanks to the market’s particular combination of multiple generations and a preponderance of empty fruit crates. It would be another decade before the day care opened on the lower level.
Down the arcade, Lina C. Fronda arranges tomatoes at high stall no. 7, across from Lowell’s. She emigrated from the Philippines in 1963 for an arranged marriage at age 23; he was 59 and brought her to work here the day after her flight touched down in Seattle. “He commanded me like a little kid,” she recalls. “When he address me, he say, ‘Hey kid—do this.’ ” The next year, her infant son Donnie joined her, tucked in a banana box. Now Lina’s 78 and she’s still here, bustling around the stand in patterned yoga pants, washing heads of cabbage. So is Donnie; he handles customers.
Just across the bricks of Pike Place, Mila Apostol’s daughter Joy helps her into one of the high counter seats at Oriental Mart. Apostol also came here from the Philippines and first rented this space in 1971; the market reminded her of the one in her hometown. Originally she sold round, flat baskets while her youngest son dozed in, yes, a banana box. Now her children—and their children—work here. Joy runs the shop; Apostol’s other daughter, Leila, holds court over the six-burner range, beneath an unruly assortment of handwritten house rules—“We do not accept difficult customers, so know your role!”—designed to manage crowds, but also put diners on notice that the hospitality here is as home style as the food.
Leila makes whatever she feels like each day, in summer often the dinuguan stew that’s a hit with Filipino cruise ship workers and flight crews, but pretty much always the sinigang, the brisk tamarind soup she’s adapted with salmon collars. She goes through so many collars that she has to get them from two nearby markets—Pure Fish and Jaison Scott and his crew at Pike Place Fish.
Scott cruises past on breaks, sometimes just to say hi to the women he’s known since he was a kid and peek at the pans of adobo and pancit. “I’m always snacking there, just rice and whatever she has.”
At high noon, when it can take an eternity to traverse a single block, it’s easy to mistake tourists for the dominant narrative of this place. But even amid the crowds, you can see evidence of a generations-old community from the corner of your eye: The day stall vendors who chat between customers; the fishmonger who dashes in on a break to kiss Mila on the cheek.
“We like to support each other here,” says Leila, as she attends to a pan of plump longanisa sausages. “I buy from them; they eat over here. It all kind of works out.” She looks up and spies the trio of twentysomethings directly in front of her display of food. “You have any questions? Oh, not right now?” Even the most oblivious loiterer can’t miss the tinge of reproach in her voice.
by Allecia Vermillion , Seattle Met | Read more:
Image: Amber Fouts
On Pike Place Market time, 8:45 isn’t exactly early. The fish market guys were here at 5:30 to break down halibut; the flower stalls had their buckets filled with peonies and irises by 7. The main arcade is mostly empty, save the strains of a busker’s morning warmup on her violin. But at the farthest reach of the North Arcade, the swarm of vendors is seven people deep and spreading. Still more have climbed on the worn concrete slab countertops for a better view. There’s a slight fizz of anticipation in the cool morning air as everyone trains their gaze on a whiteboard that’s clearly been tacked up for ages.
Beyond the permanent produce stands known as high stalls are the flat tables for farmers who claim their specific turf via reservation the day before. The rest are for the day-stall vendors, who make anything from cheese boards to bongs to liners for rubber boots. Every morning for half a century they report for roll call, a ritual jockeying for the most desirable stall their seniority will allow, an old-school Wall Street trading floor reimagined with more flowing beards and fleece. But also a genuine sense of community; some of these men and women have spent decades side by side at these tables.Posted over the board are the 230 people eligible to sell crafts in Pike Place Market. They’re listed in seniority from Bob Crew of Metamorphosis Leathers, who has been here 40 years, down to the handful of newcomers approved a few weeks ago. Technically guys like Crew have the market’s equivalent of tenure; other senior vendors can dart up and lay claim to their preferred location with blue dry-erase marker—provided they do it before Zack Cook rings the bell at 9am sharp to start the day’s roll call.
Cook, bearded and baby faced beneath his Pike Place Market cap, usually works with the farmers (he even visits their fields to confirm they actually grow their own wares). Today it’s his turn as designated market master, ready to rattle off the names of the vendors assembled before him, in order of seniority, and record their requested location. The faster this goes, the more time everyone has to set up before Cook does his compliance rounds at 11.
Munko? Two sixteen!
Seppa? Bridge sixty-three!
Parriott? Fourteen out, please.
Yocco? Two twenty-four dogleg.
The covered arcade spots go first, then the bridge; given the sunny forecast, outside berths go fast, too. At last, Cook hits the final name on his list. He counts down from five, a last call for anyone who wants to change their spot. His blue marker records the time on the board: 9:18am. Roll call over, the vendors scatter to bring their part of the market to life. Racks of art and textiles start to bloom in the gray spaces almost instantly.
Roughly 40,000 people will pass through Pike Place Market today. Most of them will never know about roll call, or the 49-page rulebook that shapes who sells what here, and where. By 11am, the arcade fills up. A remarkably tanned couple in shorts and matching San Francisco sweatshirts break their resolute stride to browse Stone City Farm’s goat-milk soaps; two girls in Boise State softball team gear examine the felt Donut Cats at the MarninSaylor booth. A display of art photographs nearly covers the all-powerful whiteboard, hiding in plain sight until the day is done.
Afternoons and Busker Tunes
At the corner of First and Stewart, just a block from Pike Place Market, a woman in the lavender sweatshirt and leggings turns to me with a sheepish expression as we await the green light. She knows locals must roll their eyes at what she’s about to ask. “Am I close to the first Starbucks?”
The man in a mint green button-down next to us turns as we step into the crosswalk—“Don’t feel bad; I just moved here yesterday.”
Just head down to that brick street right there, I told her, and you can’t miss all the Starbucks groupies taking photos. Except, it’s lunch hour: Crowds clog every sidewalk.
At Corner Produce, a vendor who’s a dead ringer for Zach Galifianakis hews off a chunk of a red Jazz apple and offers it to a young woman, along with his finely honed sales pitch: “It’s the jazziest of apples.” Beyond them, and beyond the wall of Instagrammers, is the institution that’s both ambassador and bellwether for the entire market. Once upon a time the vendors here spoke an assortment of languages; now it’s the visitors. Two guys chattering in German weave past a slow-moving tour group whose leader narrates in Japanese. A new slate of musicians takes its turn at the market’s designated busking sites; lively bluegrass permeates the air.
Simply follow the lodestar of the Public Market Center clock, and you can’t miss the Pike Place Fish Market guys. If a big convention of lawyers is in town, they know it. If a cruise ship just docked at Pier 66, its passengers will soon proliferate around the counter. When they do, Jaison Scott is ready.
He and his comrades in aprons are the Flying Wallendas of fishmongering, walking a daily high-wire of salmon-throwing showmanship and legitimate commerce, conducted quickly, and with knives, in very close quarters. “Love the people,” is the mantra they repeat among themselves, a reminder how seriously they take their role as most visitors’ introduction to Seattle. Scott knows how to say assorted phrases in Italian or Tagalog—“most of them ‘I love you,’ to little old ladies”—to break the ice, and hopefully turn audience members into actual customers. He can also spot the regulars, with their canvas bags and “I need something, then I want to get the hell out” look in their eye.
Scott’s mother worked here for longtime owner Johnny Yokoyama in her youth, then ran the counter at the old Wonder Freeze just down the arcade up until the day Scott was born in 1972. When he was an infant, Yokoyama’s mom, Helen, would babysit Scott, tucked in a banana box while his mom worked nearby. That was kind of a thing here, thanks to the market’s particular combination of multiple generations and a preponderance of empty fruit crates. It would be another decade before the day care opened on the lower level.
Down the arcade, Lina C. Fronda arranges tomatoes at high stall no. 7, across from Lowell’s. She emigrated from the Philippines in 1963 for an arranged marriage at age 23; he was 59 and brought her to work here the day after her flight touched down in Seattle. “He commanded me like a little kid,” she recalls. “When he address me, he say, ‘Hey kid—do this.’ ” The next year, her infant son Donnie joined her, tucked in a banana box. Now Lina’s 78 and she’s still here, bustling around the stand in patterned yoga pants, washing heads of cabbage. So is Donnie; he handles customers.
Just across the bricks of Pike Place, Mila Apostol’s daughter Joy helps her into one of the high counter seats at Oriental Mart. Apostol also came here from the Philippines and first rented this space in 1971; the market reminded her of the one in her hometown. Originally she sold round, flat baskets while her youngest son dozed in, yes, a banana box. Now her children—and their children—work here. Joy runs the shop; Apostol’s other daughter, Leila, holds court over the six-burner range, beneath an unruly assortment of handwritten house rules—“We do not accept difficult customers, so know your role!”—designed to manage crowds, but also put diners on notice that the hospitality here is as home style as the food.
Leila makes whatever she feels like each day, in summer often the dinuguan stew that’s a hit with Filipino cruise ship workers and flight crews, but pretty much always the sinigang, the brisk tamarind soup she’s adapted with salmon collars. She goes through so many collars that she has to get them from two nearby markets—Pure Fish and Jaison Scott and his crew at Pike Place Fish.
Scott cruises past on breaks, sometimes just to say hi to the women he’s known since he was a kid and peek at the pans of adobo and pancit. “I’m always snacking there, just rice and whatever she has.”
At high noon, when it can take an eternity to traverse a single block, it’s easy to mistake tourists for the dominant narrative of this place. But even amid the crowds, you can see evidence of a generations-old community from the corner of your eye: The day stall vendors who chat between customers; the fishmonger who dashes in on a break to kiss Mila on the cheek.
“We like to support each other here,” says Leila, as she attends to a pan of plump longanisa sausages. “I buy from them; they eat over here. It all kind of works out.” She looks up and spies the trio of twentysomethings directly in front of her display of food. “You have any questions? Oh, not right now?” Even the most oblivious loiterer can’t miss the tinge of reproach in her voice.
by Allecia Vermillion , Seattle Met | Read more:
Image: Amber Fouts
"Preferences", My Ass
A coffee shop near my office recently went out of business. No surprise: It was across the street from a Starbucks. But it reminded me that the idea of the Free Market satisfying consumer “preferences” is nonsense.
When Big Box stores or corporate chains show up in town, and the “mom and pop” stores disappear, many people will lament the arrival of the chain. But they will be informed that what has happened is a gain in economic efficiency. Yes, Wal Mart is gigantic and can undercut the “mom and pop” stores’ prices. But the people of the town had a choice: They could have had higher prices and “small business” or lower prices and “big business.” The people chose lower prices. Criticizing what happened means criticizing the freely-made choice of consumers. Should they have been forced to pay higher prices and go to a store they clearly didn’t prefer?
Now, I want to leave all issues about whether big business Creates Jobs and whether those jobs are better or worse. Here I want to focus on a narrow contention: the idea that if Starbucks comes to town and puts another coffee shop out of business, it necessarily reflects the preferences of coffee-drinkers in the community and whatever price-coffee combination Starbucks was offering was more appealing to more people.
This isn’t necessarily so, though. When Starbucks moves in, it could charge exactly the same prices as Friendly Neighborhood Coffee. And perhaps, with prices the same, Starbucks coffee being garbage, and the company surviving solely on branding and convenience, only a fraction of the coffee-drinkers would switch to Starbucks. The majority of them stick with FNC. Starbucks may still put FNC out of business! As we know, it’s far cheaper for Starbucks to produce each individual cup of coffee than it is for FNC, thanks to economies of scale. They order greater quantities of ingredients and paper cups and such, so each one is far, far cheaper. Starbucks will make far more money charging $5 for a latte than FNC will. If FNC’s marginal profits are quite low, even a small amount of defection of its customer base to Starbucks could kill it. Every day, more people in the community choose FNC over Starbucks. The Starbucks is half-empty, the FNC is three-quarters full. It doesn’t matter. FNC’s going down, and then its customers are left with Starbucks from then on.
Here’s the implication: Given two options, A and B, most people in a town may choose B, yet end up getting stuck with A. The story we’re told to justify the effect of chains on small businesses is that they end up satisfying a community more. But they can easily result in the opposite. Thanks to the concentration of corporate power, we get an undemocratic result. Now, in the example I used, the chain didn’t even need to undercut prices in order to massacre the competition. It’s enough just to peel away a few of their customers who have some minor preference for the chain for other reasons. (Although theoretically, zero people could favor the chain over the small business, and the small business still goes broke. If there is a sufficient proportion of the population that basically chooses where they go at random, and half of those people end up going to A and half to B, then the entire population could be comprised of People Who Don’t Care One Way Or The Other and People Who Prefer B, and the town ends up with A.) (...)
The idea of “letting the market decide” is that businesses compete for customers, and people choose the products or services they like the most, and those products or services win. It seems very logical at first. But differential amounts of wealth and power will mean it doesn’t happen that way. The Amazon bookstore can come to town and shut down the little community bookshop even if most people still shopped local. In fact, Amazon can ruin pretty much any small business it wants! All it needs to do is lure enough people away. It will win every competition. Once you have concentrated corporate power, it may no longer be true that the triumphant business offers the best “quality of deal.” (And of course, once it has killed every small business, it can always start offering a substantially worse quality of deal than those others offered, but people are stuck with it forever, because nobody can possibly hope to compete. Amazon is on its way to being virtually monopolistic, and once it succeeds, there will be no such thing whatsoever as “free choice” among competing products. This is one of the reasons people are talking about reviving strong anti-trust enforcement!)
Most defenses of the existing concentrations of economic power rest on fables. They treat the market as if it were a world of lemonade stands rather than gigantic behemoths that will eat you alive the moment you compete with them. If you invent a nifty new type of coffee that most people like better, they can threaten you with a carrot/stick approach: Sell the rights to it to us, or we will ruin you. Then, they may not even sell the device, even if everyone wants one! (This forms the plot of the charming 1950s British film The Man In The White Suit, in which a chemist invents a suit that never gets dirty, and both soap manufacturers and labor unions—people had unions back then—stop the thing from reaching the public. The usual reply here is that if there was a market for it, some venture capitalist would obviously invest, but nine-dozen millionaires won’t be able to stop an extremely determined Jeff Bezos.)
For the purposes of this example, I have completely accepted the foundational premises of mainstream economics, which I actually totally reject. (The concept of “rationality,” the lack of distinction between price and value, etc.) But even if we pretend to be strict utilitarians, and care only about “the maximization of well-being units,” Starbucks coming to town can clearly make your community worse off.
When Big Box stores or corporate chains show up in town, and the “mom and pop” stores disappear, many people will lament the arrival of the chain. But they will be informed that what has happened is a gain in economic efficiency. Yes, Wal Mart is gigantic and can undercut the “mom and pop” stores’ prices. But the people of the town had a choice: They could have had higher prices and “small business” or lower prices and “big business.” The people chose lower prices. Criticizing what happened means criticizing the freely-made choice of consumers. Should they have been forced to pay higher prices and go to a store they clearly didn’t prefer?
Now, I want to leave all issues about whether big business Creates Jobs and whether those jobs are better or worse. Here I want to focus on a narrow contention: the idea that if Starbucks comes to town and puts another coffee shop out of business, it necessarily reflects the preferences of coffee-drinkers in the community and whatever price-coffee combination Starbucks was offering was more appealing to more people.This isn’t necessarily so, though. When Starbucks moves in, it could charge exactly the same prices as Friendly Neighborhood Coffee. And perhaps, with prices the same, Starbucks coffee being garbage, and the company surviving solely on branding and convenience, only a fraction of the coffee-drinkers would switch to Starbucks. The majority of them stick with FNC. Starbucks may still put FNC out of business! As we know, it’s far cheaper for Starbucks to produce each individual cup of coffee than it is for FNC, thanks to economies of scale. They order greater quantities of ingredients and paper cups and such, so each one is far, far cheaper. Starbucks will make far more money charging $5 for a latte than FNC will. If FNC’s marginal profits are quite low, even a small amount of defection of its customer base to Starbucks could kill it. Every day, more people in the community choose FNC over Starbucks. The Starbucks is half-empty, the FNC is three-quarters full. It doesn’t matter. FNC’s going down, and then its customers are left with Starbucks from then on.
Here’s the implication: Given two options, A and B, most people in a town may choose B, yet end up getting stuck with A. The story we’re told to justify the effect of chains on small businesses is that they end up satisfying a community more. But they can easily result in the opposite. Thanks to the concentration of corporate power, we get an undemocratic result. Now, in the example I used, the chain didn’t even need to undercut prices in order to massacre the competition. It’s enough just to peel away a few of their customers who have some minor preference for the chain for other reasons. (Although theoretically, zero people could favor the chain over the small business, and the small business still goes broke. If there is a sufficient proportion of the population that basically chooses where they go at random, and half of those people end up going to A and half to B, then the entire population could be comprised of People Who Don’t Care One Way Or The Other and People Who Prefer B, and the town ends up with A.) (...)
The idea of “letting the market decide” is that businesses compete for customers, and people choose the products or services they like the most, and those products or services win. It seems very logical at first. But differential amounts of wealth and power will mean it doesn’t happen that way. The Amazon bookstore can come to town and shut down the little community bookshop even if most people still shopped local. In fact, Amazon can ruin pretty much any small business it wants! All it needs to do is lure enough people away. It will win every competition. Once you have concentrated corporate power, it may no longer be true that the triumphant business offers the best “quality of deal.” (And of course, once it has killed every small business, it can always start offering a substantially worse quality of deal than those others offered, but people are stuck with it forever, because nobody can possibly hope to compete. Amazon is on its way to being virtually monopolistic, and once it succeeds, there will be no such thing whatsoever as “free choice” among competing products. This is one of the reasons people are talking about reviving strong anti-trust enforcement!)
Most defenses of the existing concentrations of economic power rest on fables. They treat the market as if it were a world of lemonade stands rather than gigantic behemoths that will eat you alive the moment you compete with them. If you invent a nifty new type of coffee that most people like better, they can threaten you with a carrot/stick approach: Sell the rights to it to us, or we will ruin you. Then, they may not even sell the device, even if everyone wants one! (This forms the plot of the charming 1950s British film The Man In The White Suit, in which a chemist invents a suit that never gets dirty, and both soap manufacturers and labor unions—people had unions back then—stop the thing from reaching the public. The usual reply here is that if there was a market for it, some venture capitalist would obviously invest, but nine-dozen millionaires won’t be able to stop an extremely determined Jeff Bezos.)
For the purposes of this example, I have completely accepted the foundational premises of mainstream economics, which I actually totally reject. (The concept of “rationality,” the lack of distinction between price and value, etc.) But even if we pretend to be strict utilitarians, and care only about “the maximization of well-being units,” Starbucks coming to town can clearly make your community worse off.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Zhang Peng—LightRocket/Getty Images via
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Defensible Space
“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.
In the Pacific Northwest, people are beginning to refer to the month of August as “smoke season.” For most of this past August, for example, the Methow Valley in Washington State was choked with smoke from the Crescent Mountain fire to the southwest and from the McLeod Fire to the north. The Okanogan County post offices and community centers were offering free particulate respirator masks, and fire progression maps were updated daily and posted outside the town halls. Local businesses offered 10 percent off to all firefighting personnel, who were camped in tents on the sprawling rodeo grounds outside of town. Helicopters with drop buckets of water and red fire retardant were constantly overhead. And at dinner, everyone’s cell phone rang at once with fire updates from the county.
The irony is that, when I was growing up there, August was the month that could be most relied upon for sunny weather. But in August of 2014, during the massive Carlton Complex wildfire, nearly 260,000 acres of Okanogan County burned and destroyed 363 homes, the largest single fire in state history. In August of 2015, the Okanogan Complex fires burned over 300,000 acres, killed three U.S. Forest Service firefighters, and forced the evacuation of several towns. My parents were evacuated for several days in 2015, and this summer, I helped them dust ashes from the vegetables in the garden. On particularly bad days, the sun shone red and the air smelled like campfires and hurt your lungs. Not being able to see the mountains hurt your heart.
Smoke season is not exactly new, for the forests of the West have always burned. But the scale of these huge wildfires—“megafires,” they are called—have grown, due to a complex interplay of increased human habitation in and near the forests, the multifaceted effects of climate change, and the long practice of fire suppression rather than fire management by the U.S. Forest Service. While wildfires are a constant of the forests’ ecology, the once-exceptional burns have now become routine.
So routine, in fact, that researchers now study the mental health effects of prolonged exposure to the “smoke apocalypse.” Last summer, New York Times contributing opinion writer (and, like me, a Pacific Northwesterner) Lindy West described smoke-blanketed Seattle, four hours southwest of Okanogan County, as filled with “the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air,” and rightly pointed to it as a phenomenon exacerbated by climate change. “In Seattle, in a week or so, a big wind will come and give us our blue sky back,” she wrote. “Someday, though, it won’t.”
Indeed, friends of my parents are talking about moving away. Those who stay long for the smoke to clear and for the summer sky to be as blue as it once was. But this nostalgia is worth attending to, for how we talk about the wildfires is also how we talk about the West. The idea of the West—as region, ideology, national mythos—is all about desiring the authentic in a landscape of inauthenticity, about safely yearning for something never there in the first place, about obscuring violence with romance.
Since the landscape of the West is indelibly shaped by its own story, talking about land in the West always contains a moral. How we talk about the wildfires illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself, one that will need to collapse from its own weight if we ever hope to see the sky for what it truly is. And each summer now, that sky is on fire.
Forest fires are an intrinsic part of our world’s carbon-rich ecology. Ecosystems such as Washington’s thick central and eastern forests are reliant on fire to help liberate nutrients in the soil, open the tree cones that need heat to release their seeds, clear out unwanted underbrush, and produce a healthily shifting mosaic of micro-ecologies on the forest floor. Fire is also one of the oldest—and perhaps the most determinative—parts of the human world, and native economies used it to transform the North American landscape well before Europeans arrived. Native peoples turned forests into grassland and savannah, cleared and carefully curated forest vegetation and fauna to better hunt and gather, and even practiced fire prevention and, when necessary, fought wildfires.
Living among wildfire smoke is also not new, especially in the Northwest as settlements formed in the drainages and valleys of mountains where smoke tends to pool. During the big fires—1865, when a million acres burned from the Olympics to the Sierras, the Tillamook cycle, which burned from 1933 until 1951 in a series of reburns—smoke was endemic to the Pacific Northwest. In the 1880s, smoke was reportedly so thick through the summer and fall seasons that geological survey crews in the Cascades had to abandon their work.
Yet today Washington State has more homes in fire-prone wildland areas—known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—than anywhere else in the country. There is estimated to be a 40 percent increase in homes in the WUI between 2001 and 2030, with no sign of such development abating, despite the megafires. New developments have no mandatory review procedures to assess wildfire risk. The Okanogan County Comprehensive Plan on managing growth, for example, released just after the Carlton Complex fires in 2014, didn’t include a single concrete guideline or requirement. Instead, it is up to each individual property owner to reduce risk on their own land.
As a result, state and federal firefighters have to actively suppress fires—not merely manage them—in order to save homes (which they do with remarkable and laudable precision). This suppression leaves forests overly dense and ready to burn while the increased presence of people also makes fires much more likely: in the dry tinderbox of southern California, for instance, 95 percent of fires are started by human activity.
The reigning ethos of development is, of course, private property: let people do what they like on their own land. There is a byzantine patchwork of environmental regulations and land usage laws at the county, state, and federal level, but these are largely geared toward managing growth rather than suppressing it. “I’m not real big on over-regulating people,” Andy Hover, one of the current Okanogan County Commissioners, said in the middle of this year’s fire season. “Rules and regulations are kind of like—well, is that really what we want?”
Whether or not “we” really want rules and regulations in the West is the historically vexed question that has driven the development of the West since colonial settlement. Despite its mythic ethos of self-reliance, independence, and rugged autonomy, a massive influx of federal funds and intervention has always been necessary for non-Native settlers to live in the West. The federal government funded decades of military campaigns and genocidal wars against indigenous people to clear the land. Federal land grants of over 100 million acres, tax incentives, and government loans all helped build the transcontinental railroads, which both opened the West to increased settlement and built the power of banks and finance on Wall Street. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to white farmers if they agreed to “improve” it for five years; and the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887 broke up the grants of reservation land initially sanctioned for Native Americans. One name for this, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is the frontier thesis; another is manifest destiny. Yet another is imperialism. Its legacy continues in the approach to western housing developments today: what was once held in common is nominally and culturally understood as the preserve of the individual yet underwritten by the federal government.
Today, more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting wildfires and, increasingly, keeping them away from people’s private property.
So while fire season is not new, it still feels new to many of us who are used to seeing summer mountain skies where the blue was so vast it humbled even the mountains at its edge. It feels new when the hills you’ve driven through for years are lined with blackened, charred trunks, and the old and chipping Smokey Bear sign, just across the street from the tiny U.S. Forest Service office in the Methow Valley, continually points to the color-coded scale of today’s fire danger: red for EXTREME. (...)
I was reading a book about wildfires in a local bakery in Winthrop when a contractor who rents firefighting equipment to the Forest Service gamely tried to pick me up. But because this is a western story, instead of offering me his phone number, he offered me a pamphlet on how to defend my home from wildfire.
“Defensible space,” I learned, is the goal behind any wildfire preparedness campaign. It denotes the area between a house and an oncoming fire that has been managed by the homeowner to reduce wildfire risk and provide firefighters with a clear space of operations. Defensible space has become the watchword of private programs such as Firewise USA®, a partnership between a nonprofit organization and federal agencies that teaches property owners how to “adapt to living with wildfire” and prepare their homes for fire risk.
Creating defensible space involves reducing excessive vegetation (shrubs, dense clusters of trees, dried grass) from around the house, and replacing them with well-irrigated lawn or flowerbeds, as well as surrounding your home with inflammable materials to deflect burning embers. Depending on your particular vegetation type and the percent of slope on which your house rests, you will need between 30 to 200 feet of defensible space surrounding your home.
The idea of defensible space strikes me as an intrinsically western one. It has taken a tremendous amount of government money, environmental engineering, and colonial violence for there to be such a thing as “private property” in the West, and for people to live out their—historically speaking—absurd fantasies of independence and self-reliance, to create their own western defensible space. And yet still, for the one third of the United States that lives in the wildland-urban interface, each house in each subdivision attempts to surround itself by its own barrier of self-created defensible space, each pretending to be self-reliant yet in need of massive federal funds for power, water, roads, and firefighting.
In the Pacific Northwest, people are beginning to refer to the month of August as “smoke season.” For most of this past August, for example, the Methow Valley in Washington State was choked with smoke from the Crescent Mountain fire to the southwest and from the McLeod Fire to the north. The Okanogan County post offices and community centers were offering free particulate respirator masks, and fire progression maps were updated daily and posted outside the town halls. Local businesses offered 10 percent off to all firefighting personnel, who were camped in tents on the sprawling rodeo grounds outside of town. Helicopters with drop buckets of water and red fire retardant were constantly overhead. And at dinner, everyone’s cell phone rang at once with fire updates from the county.
The irony is that, when I was growing up there, August was the month that could be most relied upon for sunny weather. But in August of 2014, during the massive Carlton Complex wildfire, nearly 260,000 acres of Okanogan County burned and destroyed 363 homes, the largest single fire in state history. In August of 2015, the Okanogan Complex fires burned over 300,000 acres, killed three U.S. Forest Service firefighters, and forced the evacuation of several towns. My parents were evacuated for several days in 2015, and this summer, I helped them dust ashes from the vegetables in the garden. On particularly bad days, the sun shone red and the air smelled like campfires and hurt your lungs. Not being able to see the mountains hurt your heart.Smoke season is not exactly new, for the forests of the West have always burned. But the scale of these huge wildfires—“megafires,” they are called—have grown, due to a complex interplay of increased human habitation in and near the forests, the multifaceted effects of climate change, and the long practice of fire suppression rather than fire management by the U.S. Forest Service. While wildfires are a constant of the forests’ ecology, the once-exceptional burns have now become routine.
So routine, in fact, that researchers now study the mental health effects of prolonged exposure to the “smoke apocalypse.” Last summer, New York Times contributing opinion writer (and, like me, a Pacific Northwesterner) Lindy West described smoke-blanketed Seattle, four hours southwest of Okanogan County, as filled with “the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air,” and rightly pointed to it as a phenomenon exacerbated by climate change. “In Seattle, in a week or so, a big wind will come and give us our blue sky back,” she wrote. “Someday, though, it won’t.”
Indeed, friends of my parents are talking about moving away. Those who stay long for the smoke to clear and for the summer sky to be as blue as it once was. But this nostalgia is worth attending to, for how we talk about the wildfires is also how we talk about the West. The idea of the West—as region, ideology, national mythos—is all about desiring the authentic in a landscape of inauthenticity, about safely yearning for something never there in the first place, about obscuring violence with romance.
Since the landscape of the West is indelibly shaped by its own story, talking about land in the West always contains a moral. How we talk about the wildfires illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself, one that will need to collapse from its own weight if we ever hope to see the sky for what it truly is. And each summer now, that sky is on fire.
Forest fires are an intrinsic part of our world’s carbon-rich ecology. Ecosystems such as Washington’s thick central and eastern forests are reliant on fire to help liberate nutrients in the soil, open the tree cones that need heat to release their seeds, clear out unwanted underbrush, and produce a healthily shifting mosaic of micro-ecologies on the forest floor. Fire is also one of the oldest—and perhaps the most determinative—parts of the human world, and native economies used it to transform the North American landscape well before Europeans arrived. Native peoples turned forests into grassland and savannah, cleared and carefully curated forest vegetation and fauna to better hunt and gather, and even practiced fire prevention and, when necessary, fought wildfires.
Living among wildfire smoke is also not new, especially in the Northwest as settlements formed in the drainages and valleys of mountains where smoke tends to pool. During the big fires—1865, when a million acres burned from the Olympics to the Sierras, the Tillamook cycle, which burned from 1933 until 1951 in a series of reburns—smoke was endemic to the Pacific Northwest. In the 1880s, smoke was reportedly so thick through the summer and fall seasons that geological survey crews in the Cascades had to abandon their work.
Yet today Washington State has more homes in fire-prone wildland areas—known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—than anywhere else in the country. There is estimated to be a 40 percent increase in homes in the WUI between 2001 and 2030, with no sign of such development abating, despite the megafires. New developments have no mandatory review procedures to assess wildfire risk. The Okanogan County Comprehensive Plan on managing growth, for example, released just after the Carlton Complex fires in 2014, didn’t include a single concrete guideline or requirement. Instead, it is up to each individual property owner to reduce risk on their own land.
As a result, state and federal firefighters have to actively suppress fires—not merely manage them—in order to save homes (which they do with remarkable and laudable precision). This suppression leaves forests overly dense and ready to burn while the increased presence of people also makes fires much more likely: in the dry tinderbox of southern California, for instance, 95 percent of fires are started by human activity.
The reigning ethos of development is, of course, private property: let people do what they like on their own land. There is a byzantine patchwork of environmental regulations and land usage laws at the county, state, and federal level, but these are largely geared toward managing growth rather than suppressing it. “I’m not real big on over-regulating people,” Andy Hover, one of the current Okanogan County Commissioners, said in the middle of this year’s fire season. “Rules and regulations are kind of like—well, is that really what we want?”
Whether or not “we” really want rules and regulations in the West is the historically vexed question that has driven the development of the West since colonial settlement. Despite its mythic ethos of self-reliance, independence, and rugged autonomy, a massive influx of federal funds and intervention has always been necessary for non-Native settlers to live in the West. The federal government funded decades of military campaigns and genocidal wars against indigenous people to clear the land. Federal land grants of over 100 million acres, tax incentives, and government loans all helped build the transcontinental railroads, which both opened the West to increased settlement and built the power of banks and finance on Wall Street. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to white farmers if they agreed to “improve” it for five years; and the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887 broke up the grants of reservation land initially sanctioned for Native Americans. One name for this, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is the frontier thesis; another is manifest destiny. Yet another is imperialism. Its legacy continues in the approach to western housing developments today: what was once held in common is nominally and culturally understood as the preserve of the individual yet underwritten by the federal government.
Today, more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting wildfires and, increasingly, keeping them away from people’s private property.
So while fire season is not new, it still feels new to many of us who are used to seeing summer mountain skies where the blue was so vast it humbled even the mountains at its edge. It feels new when the hills you’ve driven through for years are lined with blackened, charred trunks, and the old and chipping Smokey Bear sign, just across the street from the tiny U.S. Forest Service office in the Methow Valley, continually points to the color-coded scale of today’s fire danger: red for EXTREME. (...)
I was reading a book about wildfires in a local bakery in Winthrop when a contractor who rents firefighting equipment to the Forest Service gamely tried to pick me up. But because this is a western story, instead of offering me his phone number, he offered me a pamphlet on how to defend my home from wildfire.
“Defensible space,” I learned, is the goal behind any wildfire preparedness campaign. It denotes the area between a house and an oncoming fire that has been managed by the homeowner to reduce wildfire risk and provide firefighters with a clear space of operations. Defensible space has become the watchword of private programs such as Firewise USA®, a partnership between a nonprofit organization and federal agencies that teaches property owners how to “adapt to living with wildfire” and prepare their homes for fire risk.
Creating defensible space involves reducing excessive vegetation (shrubs, dense clusters of trees, dried grass) from around the house, and replacing them with well-irrigated lawn or flowerbeds, as well as surrounding your home with inflammable materials to deflect burning embers. Depending on your particular vegetation type and the percent of slope on which your house rests, you will need between 30 to 200 feet of defensible space surrounding your home.
The idea of defensible space strikes me as an intrinsically western one. It has taken a tremendous amount of government money, environmental engineering, and colonial violence for there to be such a thing as “private property” in the West, and for people to live out their—historically speaking—absurd fantasies of independence and self-reliance, to create their own western defensible space. And yet still, for the one third of the United States that lives in the wildland-urban interface, each house in each subdivision attempts to surround itself by its own barrier of self-created defensible space, each pretending to be self-reliant yet in need of massive federal funds for power, water, roads, and firefighting.
by Jessie Kindig, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Ashley Siple
Who Shot the Sheriff?
Goings-on in the Tivoli Gardens: A Brief History of Seven Killings
Bob Marley had called a break during a band rehearsal at his house on the evening of 3 December 1976 when two cars pulled up and seven or more gunmen got out. One found his way to the kitchen, where Marley was eating a grapefruit, and opened fire. A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover behind a flight case. The bass player and others – accounts vary as to how many – dived into a metal bathtub. Marley’s wife, Rita, was hit in the driveway while trying to get their children out and went down with a bullet fragment in her scalp. There were shouts: ‘Did you get him?’ ‘Yeah! I shot him!’ Then police arrived to investigate the gunfire and the attackers took off.
The manager had to be flown to Miami for surgery, but all the victims survived, and while each of the gunmen gets killed in A Brief History of Seven Killings, the novel restages the assault on Marley’s house with eight shooters, most of whom get given names: Josey Wales, Weeper, Bam-Bam, Demus, Heckle and Funky Chicken, plus ‘two man from Jungle, one fat, one skinny’. (‘Jungle’ is a nickname for one of the many social housing developments that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after hundreds of pages, to be modelled on a massacre carried out years later in an American crack house, allegedly by Lester Coke, a Kingston gang boss who burned to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around.
James begins his story with the build-up to Marley’s shooting and ends with the burning of Josey Wales, the character corresponding to Lester Coke, with a Dudus-like figure ready in the wings. (A sequel was projected early on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got slowed down by James’s work on a script for HBO, which bought the screen rights to the novel in April.) He has no trouble constructing a plausible narrative connecting the attack to many aspects of Jamaican history, and in outline his plot sticks closely, especially in its opening stages, to the facts and testimony and rumours gathered up by Timothy White, an American music journalist who periodically updated his 1983 biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, until his death in 2002. The characters are all freely imagined even when they’re filling the roles of real people, with the exception of Marley, who’s seen only through the eyes of a range of first-person narrators, and whose stage time is judiciously rationed. He’s referred to throughout as ‘the Singer’, though James doesn’t tie himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’.
Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are far out, man, got any gawn-ja?’ – or fulminate about Eric Clapton, who drunkenly shared his views on ‘wogs’ and ‘fucking Jamaicans’ with an audience in Birmingham in August 1976, two years after he had his first American number one with a cover of Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. (‘He think naigger boy never going read the Melody Maker.’) But animating a pre-mythic Marley, ‘outside of him being in every frat boy’s dorm room’, as James put it in an interview last year, isn’t the first order of business. ‘The people around him, the ones who come and go,’ Alex the journalist muses, ‘might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja. Damn if I’m not fooling myself I’m Gay Talese again.’
‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican parliamentary politics. Marley’s shooting is a good device for getting at that, because no one seriously disputes that it was triggered by the 1976 election campaign, then the most violent in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by the 1970s, with Tivoli Gardens, a pet project of Seaga’s and his electoral power base, as exhibit A. The novel reimagines it as ‘Copenhagen City’, perhaps to emphasise the contrast between the name’s promise of Scandinavian sleekness and the reality of votes delivered by armed enforcers.
Marley wasn’t faking it when he sang about his memories of a similarly downtrodden ‘government yard’, and didn’t need instruction on the dons’ multiple roles as providers of stuff the state wasn’t supplying, such as arbitration and policing of sorts, on top of their function as political goons and in workaday criminal enterprises. After he’d become a national celebrity in the 1960s, he sometimes played host to Claudie Massop, the JLP gang boss of Tivoli Gardens, whom he’d known as a child. Massop’s counterpart in the novel is called Papa-Lo. James casts him as an enforcer of the old school, still capable of murdering a schoolboy when necessary but sick at heart and out of his depth in an increasingly vicious electoral struggle. Papa-Lo’s younger ally, who calls himself Josey Wales after the Clint Eastwood character (Lester Coke himself operated as ‘Jim Brown’ in tribute to the only African-American star of The Dirty Dozen), is better adapted to the shifting state of affairs. Josey is made to seem dangerous not so much because he’s irretrievably damaged by previous rounds of slum clearance, gang warfare and police brutality – so is everyone around him – as because he’s attuned to goings-on in the wider world.
The opportunities Josey sees come from the external pressures that made the 1976 election, in the eyes of many participants, a Cold War proxy conflict. Manley’s PNP government, in power since 1972, had annoyed the bauxite companies, Washington and large swathes of local elite opinion with its leftish reforms and friendliness to Cuba. Manley blamed a rise in political shootouts and some of the country’s economic setbacks on a covert destabilisation campaign, and the Americans were widely understood – thanks partly to the writings of Philip Agee, a CIA whistleblower – to be shipping arms and money to Seaga’s JLP. Seaga’s supporters countered by putting it about that Castro was training the other side’s gunmen, and portrayed the sweeping police powers introduced by Manley’s government as a step towards a one-party state. Either way, no one was badly off for guns and grievances when Manley offered himself for re-election. ‘The world,’ Papa-Lo says, ‘now feeling like the seven seals breaking one after the other. Hataclaps’ – from ‘apocalypse’ – ‘in the air.’
Marley dropped a hint about his stance towards all this in one of the less cryptic lines on Rastaman Vibration, released eight months before the election: ‘Rasta don’t work for no CIA.’ Formal politics, he felt, belonged to Babylon, the modern materialist society, and he tried to keep his distance from it. But he was suspected, with some reason, of supporting the PNP. Both party leaders took an interest in the kinds of constituency Marley spoke for, and kept an ear to the ground when it came to popular culture. Seaga, early on in his career, had produced a few ska recordings in West Kingston, some of them featuring Marley’s mentor Joe Higgs. Manley, not to be outdone, had visited Ethiopia and returned with – in White’s words – ‘an elaborate miniature walking stick’, a gift from Haile Selassie, to show Rasta voters. Back in 1971 he had also pressed Marley into joining an explicitly PNP-oriented Carnival of Stars tour to warm up his first campaign. And in 1976 his people issued Marley with a pressing invitation to play a free concert in the name of national unity. It was to take place shortly before the election with an eye to overshadowing a JLP campaign event, and it’s what Marley was rehearsing for when, two days before the concert, the shooters arrived.
by Christopher Tayler, LRB | Read more:Bob Marley had called a break during a band rehearsal at his house on the evening of 3 December 1976 when two cars pulled up and seven or more gunmen got out. One found his way to the kitchen, where Marley was eating a grapefruit, and opened fire. A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover behind a flight case. The bass player and others – accounts vary as to how many – dived into a metal bathtub. Marley’s wife, Rita, was hit in the driveway while trying to get their children out and went down with a bullet fragment in her scalp. There were shouts: ‘Did you get him?’ ‘Yeah! I shot him!’ Then police arrived to investigate the gunfire and the attackers took off.
The manager had to be flown to Miami for surgery, but all the victims survived, and while each of the gunmen gets killed in A Brief History of Seven Killings, the novel restages the assault on Marley’s house with eight shooters, most of whom get given names: Josey Wales, Weeper, Bam-Bam, Demus, Heckle and Funky Chicken, plus ‘two man from Jungle, one fat, one skinny’. (‘Jungle’ is a nickname for one of the many social housing developments that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after hundreds of pages, to be modelled on a massacre carried out years later in an American crack house, allegedly by Lester Coke, a Kingston gang boss who burned to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around.James begins his story with the build-up to Marley’s shooting and ends with the burning of Josey Wales, the character corresponding to Lester Coke, with a Dudus-like figure ready in the wings. (A sequel was projected early on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got slowed down by James’s work on a script for HBO, which bought the screen rights to the novel in April.) He has no trouble constructing a plausible narrative connecting the attack to many aspects of Jamaican history, and in outline his plot sticks closely, especially in its opening stages, to the facts and testimony and rumours gathered up by Timothy White, an American music journalist who periodically updated his 1983 biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, until his death in 2002. The characters are all freely imagined even when they’re filling the roles of real people, with the exception of Marley, who’s seen only through the eyes of a range of first-person narrators, and whose stage time is judiciously rationed. He’s referred to throughout as ‘the Singer’, though James doesn’t tie himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’.
Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are far out, man, got any gawn-ja?’ – or fulminate about Eric Clapton, who drunkenly shared his views on ‘wogs’ and ‘fucking Jamaicans’ with an audience in Birmingham in August 1976, two years after he had his first American number one with a cover of Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. (‘He think naigger boy never going read the Melody Maker.’) But animating a pre-mythic Marley, ‘outside of him being in every frat boy’s dorm room’, as James put it in an interview last year, isn’t the first order of business. ‘The people around him, the ones who come and go,’ Alex the journalist muses, ‘might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja. Damn if I’m not fooling myself I’m Gay Talese again.’
‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican parliamentary politics. Marley’s shooting is a good device for getting at that, because no one seriously disputes that it was triggered by the 1976 election campaign, then the most violent in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by the 1970s, with Tivoli Gardens, a pet project of Seaga’s and his electoral power base, as exhibit A. The novel reimagines it as ‘Copenhagen City’, perhaps to emphasise the contrast between the name’s promise of Scandinavian sleekness and the reality of votes delivered by armed enforcers.
Marley wasn’t faking it when he sang about his memories of a similarly downtrodden ‘government yard’, and didn’t need instruction on the dons’ multiple roles as providers of stuff the state wasn’t supplying, such as arbitration and policing of sorts, on top of their function as political goons and in workaday criminal enterprises. After he’d become a national celebrity in the 1960s, he sometimes played host to Claudie Massop, the JLP gang boss of Tivoli Gardens, whom he’d known as a child. Massop’s counterpart in the novel is called Papa-Lo. James casts him as an enforcer of the old school, still capable of murdering a schoolboy when necessary but sick at heart and out of his depth in an increasingly vicious electoral struggle. Papa-Lo’s younger ally, who calls himself Josey Wales after the Clint Eastwood character (Lester Coke himself operated as ‘Jim Brown’ in tribute to the only African-American star of The Dirty Dozen), is better adapted to the shifting state of affairs. Josey is made to seem dangerous not so much because he’s irretrievably damaged by previous rounds of slum clearance, gang warfare and police brutality – so is everyone around him – as because he’s attuned to goings-on in the wider world.
The opportunities Josey sees come from the external pressures that made the 1976 election, in the eyes of many participants, a Cold War proxy conflict. Manley’s PNP government, in power since 1972, had annoyed the bauxite companies, Washington and large swathes of local elite opinion with its leftish reforms and friendliness to Cuba. Manley blamed a rise in political shootouts and some of the country’s economic setbacks on a covert destabilisation campaign, and the Americans were widely understood – thanks partly to the writings of Philip Agee, a CIA whistleblower – to be shipping arms and money to Seaga’s JLP. Seaga’s supporters countered by putting it about that Castro was training the other side’s gunmen, and portrayed the sweeping police powers introduced by Manley’s government as a step towards a one-party state. Either way, no one was badly off for guns and grievances when Manley offered himself for re-election. ‘The world,’ Papa-Lo says, ‘now feeling like the seven seals breaking one after the other. Hataclaps’ – from ‘apocalypse’ – ‘in the air.’
Marley dropped a hint about his stance towards all this in one of the less cryptic lines on Rastaman Vibration, released eight months before the election: ‘Rasta don’t work for no CIA.’ Formal politics, he felt, belonged to Babylon, the modern materialist society, and he tried to keep his distance from it. But he was suspected, with some reason, of supporting the PNP. Both party leaders took an interest in the kinds of constituency Marley spoke for, and kept an ear to the ground when it came to popular culture. Seaga, early on in his career, had produced a few ska recordings in West Kingston, some of them featuring Marley’s mentor Joe Higgs. Manley, not to be outdone, had visited Ethiopia and returned with – in White’s words – ‘an elaborate miniature walking stick’, a gift from Haile Selassie, to show Rasta voters. Back in 1971 he had also pressed Marley into joining an explicitly PNP-oriented Carnival of Stars tour to warm up his first campaign. And in 1976 his people issued Marley with a pressing invitation to play a free concert in the name of national unity. It was to take place shortly before the election with an eye to overshadowing a JLP campaign event, and it’s what Marley was rehearsing for when, two days before the concert, the shooters arrived.
Image: Jonathan Player/Shutterstock via Rolling Stone
[ed. Netflix apparently has a new "docuseries" out about the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley - Who Shot the Sheriff? (the subject of Marlon James' Booker Prize winning fictional novel A Brief History of Seven Killings... one of the most violent novels I've read since Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Bolano's 2066). A tough read.]
“Bohemian Rhapsody” Is the Least Orgiastic Rock Bio-Pic
Extra teeth. That was the secret of Freddie Mercury, or, at any rate, of the singular sound he made. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a new bio-pic about him, Mercury (Rami Malek) reveals all: “I was born with four more incisors. More space in my mouth, and more range.” Basically, he’s walking around with an opera house in his head. That explains the diva-like throb of his singing, and we are left to ponder the other crowd-wooing rockers of his generation; do they, too, rely upon oral eccentricity? Is it true that Rod Stewart’s vocal cords are lined with cinders, and that Mick Jagger has a red carpet instead of a tongue? What happens inside Elton John’s mouth, Lord knows, although “Rocketman,” next year’s bio-pic about him, will presumably spill the beans.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” starts with the Live Aid concert, in 1985. That was the talent-heavy occasion on which Queen, fronted by Mercury, took complete command of Wembley Stadium and, it is generally agreed, destroyed the competition. We then flip back to 1970, and to the younger Freddie—born Farrokh Bulsara, in Zanzibar, and educated partly at a boarding school in India, but now dwelling in the London suburbs. This being a rock movie, his parents are required to be conservative and stiff, and he is required to vex them by going out at night to see bands.
If the film is to be trusted (and one instinctively feels that it isn’t), the birth of Queen was smooth and unproblematic. Mercury approaches two musicians, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and Brian May (Gwilym Lee), in a parking lot, having enjoyed their gig; learns that their group’s lead singer has defected; and, then and there, launches into an impromptu audition for the job. Bingo! The resulting lineup, now graced with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) on bass, lets rip onstage, with Freddie tearing the microphone from its base to create the long-handled-lollipop look that will stay with him forever. Queen already sounds like Queen, and, before you know it, the boys have a manager, a contract, an album, and a cascade of wealth. It’s that easy. As for their first global tour, it is illustrated by the names of cities flashing up on the screen—“Tokyo,” “Rio,” and so forth, in one of those excitable montages which were starting to seem old-fashioned by 1940.
As a film, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is all over the place. So is “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a song, yet somehow, by dint of shameless alchemy and professional stamina, it coheres; the movie shows poor Roger Taylor doing take after take of the dreaded “Galileo!” shrieks, bravely risking a falsetto-related injury in the cause of art. Anyone hoping to be let in on Queen’s trade secrets will feel frustrated, although I liked the coins that rattled and bounced on the skin of Taylor’s drum, and it’s good to watch Deacon noodle a new bass riff—for “Another One Bites the Dust”—purely to stop the other band members squabbling. The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody. When Mercury tries out the plangent “Love of My Life” on the piano, it’s impossible not to recall the great Nigel Tufnel, in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), playing something similar in D minor, “the saddest of all keys,” and adding that it’s called “Lick My Love Pump.”
The funniest thing about the new film is that its creation was clearly more rocklike than anything to be found in the end product. Bryan Singer, who is credited as the director, was fired from the production last year and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, although some scenes appear to have been directed by no one at all, or perhaps by a pizza delivery guy who strayed onto the set. The lead role was originally assigned to Sacha Baron Cohen (a performance of which we can but dream), although Malek, mixing shyness with muscularity, and sporting a set of false teeth that would make Bela Lugosi climb back into his casket, spares nothing in his devotion to the Mercurial. The character’s carnal wants, by all accounts prodigious, are reduced to the pinching of a waiter’s backside, plus the laughable glance that Freddie receives from a bearded American truck driver at a gas station as he enters the bathroom. With its PG-13 rating, and its solemn statements of faith in the band as a family, “Bohemian Rhapsody” may be the least orgiastic tribute ever paid to the world of rock. Is this the real life? Nope. Is this just fantasy? Not entirely, for the climax, quite rightly, returns us to Live Aid—to a majestic restaging of Queen’s contribution, with Malek displaying his perfect peacock strut in front of the mob. If only for twenty minutes, Freddie Mercury is the champion of the world.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” starts with the Live Aid concert, in 1985. That was the talent-heavy occasion on which Queen, fronted by Mercury, took complete command of Wembley Stadium and, it is generally agreed, destroyed the competition. We then flip back to 1970, and to the younger Freddie—born Farrokh Bulsara, in Zanzibar, and educated partly at a boarding school in India, but now dwelling in the London suburbs. This being a rock movie, his parents are required to be conservative and stiff, and he is required to vex them by going out at night to see bands.If the film is to be trusted (and one instinctively feels that it isn’t), the birth of Queen was smooth and unproblematic. Mercury approaches two musicians, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and Brian May (Gwilym Lee), in a parking lot, having enjoyed their gig; learns that their group’s lead singer has defected; and, then and there, launches into an impromptu audition for the job. Bingo! The resulting lineup, now graced with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) on bass, lets rip onstage, with Freddie tearing the microphone from its base to create the long-handled-lollipop look that will stay with him forever. Queen already sounds like Queen, and, before you know it, the boys have a manager, a contract, an album, and a cascade of wealth. It’s that easy. As for their first global tour, it is illustrated by the names of cities flashing up on the screen—“Tokyo,” “Rio,” and so forth, in one of those excitable montages which were starting to seem old-fashioned by 1940.
As a film, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is all over the place. So is “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a song, yet somehow, by dint of shameless alchemy and professional stamina, it coheres; the movie shows poor Roger Taylor doing take after take of the dreaded “Galileo!” shrieks, bravely risking a falsetto-related injury in the cause of art. Anyone hoping to be let in on Queen’s trade secrets will feel frustrated, although I liked the coins that rattled and bounced on the skin of Taylor’s drum, and it’s good to watch Deacon noodle a new bass riff—for “Another One Bites the Dust”—purely to stop the other band members squabbling. The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody. When Mercury tries out the plangent “Love of My Life” on the piano, it’s impossible not to recall the great Nigel Tufnel, in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), playing something similar in D minor, “the saddest of all keys,” and adding that it’s called “Lick My Love Pump.”
The funniest thing about the new film is that its creation was clearly more rocklike than anything to be found in the end product. Bryan Singer, who is credited as the director, was fired from the production last year and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, although some scenes appear to have been directed by no one at all, or perhaps by a pizza delivery guy who strayed onto the set. The lead role was originally assigned to Sacha Baron Cohen (a performance of which we can but dream), although Malek, mixing shyness with muscularity, and sporting a set of false teeth that would make Bela Lugosi climb back into his casket, spares nothing in his devotion to the Mercurial. The character’s carnal wants, by all accounts prodigious, are reduced to the pinching of a waiter’s backside, plus the laughable glance that Freddie receives from a bearded American truck driver at a gas station as he enters the bathroom. With its PG-13 rating, and its solemn statements of faith in the band as a family, “Bohemian Rhapsody” may be the least orgiastic tribute ever paid to the world of rock. Is this the real life? Nope. Is this just fantasy? Not entirely, for the climax, quite rightly, returns us to Live Aid—to a majestic restaging of Queen’s contribution, with Malek displaying his perfect peacock strut in front of the mob. If only for twenty minutes, Freddie Mercury is the champion of the world.
by Anthony Lane, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Zohar Lazar
Friday, October 26, 2018
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