Friday, April 19, 2019
Making American Schools Less Great Again
Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35 million budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.
Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative -- will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.
This is the third time in my 14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval, disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I classroom studio -- built to fit a maximum of 35 students -- had more than 50 of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to draw, so we worked in the halls.
During that semester I taught six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful parts of the job -- connecting with students, providing one-on-one support, helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs, not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community -- simply fell by the wayside.
I couldn’t remember my students’ names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments we’re supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I normally try to give my students. I couldn’t listen because there wasn’t time.
On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America’s supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school.
And keep in mind that what’s happening in my school and in Oregon’s schools more generally is anything but unique. According to the American Federation of Teachers, divestment in education is occurring in every single state in the nation, with 25 states spending less on education than they did before the recession of 2008. The refusal of individual states to prioritize spending on education coupled with the Trump administration’s proposed $7 billion in cuts to the Department of Education are already beginning to make the situation in our nation’s public schools untenable -- for both students and teachers.
Sitting in that conference room, listening to my capable and dedicated boss describe our potential return to a distorted reality I remembered well made me recoil. Bracing myself for the soul-crushing grind of trying to convince students to buy into a system that will almost by definition fail to address, no less meet, their needs -- to get them to show up each day even though there aren’t enough seats, supplies, or teachers to do the job -- is an exercise in futility.
The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.
Teachers as First Responders
Schools are loud, vital, chaotic places, unlike any other public space in America. Comprehensive public high schools reflect the socioeconomic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup of the population they serve. Each school has its own particular culture and ecosystem of rules, structures, core beliefs, and values. Each also has its own set of problems, specific to the population that walks through its doors each day. Coping with the complexity and magnitude of those problems makes the job of creating a thriving, equitable, and productive space for learning something akin to magical thinking.
The reflexive blame now regularly heaped on schools, teachers, and students in this country is a misrepresentation of reality. The real reason we are being left behind our global peers when it comes to student achievement has to do with so much more than the failure to perform well on standardized tests. Our kids are struggling not because we’ve forgotten how to teach them or they’ve forgotten how to learn, but because the adults who run this society have largely decided that their collective future is not a priority. In reality, the tattered and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure of our national system of social services leaves schools and teachers as front-line first responders in what I’d call a national crisis of the soul.
So it’s no surprise to me that teachers, even in the reddest of states, have been walking out of their classrooms and demanding change. Such walkouts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia have reflected grievances more all-encompassing than the pleas for higher pay that have made the headlines. (And in so many states, they are still being paid less than a living wage.) Demands for just compensation are symbolic and easy for the public to grasp. The higher pay won through some of those walkouts represents an acknowledgement that teachers are being asked to do a seemingly impossible job in a society whose priorities are increasingly out of whack, amid the crumbling infrastructure of the public-school system itself.
The idea that the real world is somehow separate from the world inside our schools and that issues of inequality, poverty, mental health, addiction, and racism won’t impact the capacity of our students to thrive academically sets a dangerous precedent for measuring success. Assuming that the student living in a car, not a home, should be able to stay awake during a lecture, that the one returning from a week in a psychiatric ward should be able to instantly tackle a difficult math test, and that the one whose undocumented father was just picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should have no problem concentrating as her teacher diagrams sentences in English is a grand delusion.
Why Prioritizing School Funding Matters
There is a large disconnect between the lip service paid to supporting public schools and teachers and a visible reticence to adequately fund them. Ask almost anyone -- save Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- if they support teachers and schools and the answer is probably “yes.” Bring up the question of how to actually provide adequate financial support for education, however, and you’ll quickly find yourself mired in arguments about wasteful school spending, pension funds that drain resources, sub-par teachers, and bureaucratic bloat, as well as claims that you can’t just continue to throw money at a problem, that money is not the solution.
I’d argue that money certainly is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning. Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.
The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on a staggering tax cut for the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the well-being of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?
However, since federal school contributions add up to only a small percentage of local and state education budgets, all blame can’t go there. In Oregon, for instance, restrictions placed on property taxes in the 1990s artificially limited such revenue, forcing the state to start relying heavily on income taxes to keep schools afloat. Corporations are an important source of income for states. Yet, though corporate profits in the U.S. rose by $69.3 billion to an all-time high of more than $2 trillion in the third quarter of 2018, over the last 40 years the states’ share of income-tax revenue has fallen to half what it was in the 1970s.
Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative -- will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.
This is the third time in my 14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval, disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I classroom studio -- built to fit a maximum of 35 students -- had more than 50 of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to draw, so we worked in the halls. During that semester I taught six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful parts of the job -- connecting with students, providing one-on-one support, helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs, not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community -- simply fell by the wayside.
I couldn’t remember my students’ names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments we’re supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I normally try to give my students. I couldn’t listen because there wasn’t time.
On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America’s supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school.
And keep in mind that what’s happening in my school and in Oregon’s schools more generally is anything but unique. According to the American Federation of Teachers, divestment in education is occurring in every single state in the nation, with 25 states spending less on education than they did before the recession of 2008. The refusal of individual states to prioritize spending on education coupled with the Trump administration’s proposed $7 billion in cuts to the Department of Education are already beginning to make the situation in our nation’s public schools untenable -- for both students and teachers.
Sitting in that conference room, listening to my capable and dedicated boss describe our potential return to a distorted reality I remembered well made me recoil. Bracing myself for the soul-crushing grind of trying to convince students to buy into a system that will almost by definition fail to address, no less meet, their needs -- to get them to show up each day even though there aren’t enough seats, supplies, or teachers to do the job -- is an exercise in futility.
The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.
Teachers as First Responders
Schools are loud, vital, chaotic places, unlike any other public space in America. Comprehensive public high schools reflect the socioeconomic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup of the population they serve. Each school has its own particular culture and ecosystem of rules, structures, core beliefs, and values. Each also has its own set of problems, specific to the population that walks through its doors each day. Coping with the complexity and magnitude of those problems makes the job of creating a thriving, equitable, and productive space for learning something akin to magical thinking.
The reflexive blame now regularly heaped on schools, teachers, and students in this country is a misrepresentation of reality. The real reason we are being left behind our global peers when it comes to student achievement has to do with so much more than the failure to perform well on standardized tests. Our kids are struggling not because we’ve forgotten how to teach them or they’ve forgotten how to learn, but because the adults who run this society have largely decided that their collective future is not a priority. In reality, the tattered and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure of our national system of social services leaves schools and teachers as front-line first responders in what I’d call a national crisis of the soul.
So it’s no surprise to me that teachers, even in the reddest of states, have been walking out of their classrooms and demanding change. Such walkouts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia have reflected grievances more all-encompassing than the pleas for higher pay that have made the headlines. (And in so many states, they are still being paid less than a living wage.) Demands for just compensation are symbolic and easy for the public to grasp. The higher pay won through some of those walkouts represents an acknowledgement that teachers are being asked to do a seemingly impossible job in a society whose priorities are increasingly out of whack, amid the crumbling infrastructure of the public-school system itself.
The idea that the real world is somehow separate from the world inside our schools and that issues of inequality, poverty, mental health, addiction, and racism won’t impact the capacity of our students to thrive academically sets a dangerous precedent for measuring success. Assuming that the student living in a car, not a home, should be able to stay awake during a lecture, that the one returning from a week in a psychiatric ward should be able to instantly tackle a difficult math test, and that the one whose undocumented father was just picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should have no problem concentrating as her teacher diagrams sentences in English is a grand delusion.
Why Prioritizing School Funding Matters
There is a large disconnect between the lip service paid to supporting public schools and teachers and a visible reticence to adequately fund them. Ask almost anyone -- save Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- if they support teachers and schools and the answer is probably “yes.” Bring up the question of how to actually provide adequate financial support for education, however, and you’ll quickly find yourself mired in arguments about wasteful school spending, pension funds that drain resources, sub-par teachers, and bureaucratic bloat, as well as claims that you can’t just continue to throw money at a problem, that money is not the solution.
I’d argue that money certainly is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning. Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.
The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on a staggering tax cut for the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the well-being of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?
However, since federal school contributions add up to only a small percentage of local and state education budgets, all blame can’t go there. In Oregon, for instance, restrictions placed on property taxes in the 1990s artificially limited such revenue, forcing the state to start relying heavily on income taxes to keep schools afloat. Corporations are an important source of income for states. Yet, though corporate profits in the U.S. rose by $69.3 billion to an all-time high of more than $2 trillion in the third quarter of 2018, over the last 40 years the states’ share of income-tax revenue has fallen to half what it was in the 1970s.
by Belle Chesler, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via
How to Help Someone With Depression
"I've started cutting my wrists,” my friend said on the phone one night. “I’m not eating. I don’t want to be alive.” We’d had many phone calls about her depression at this point; her parents knew, I had talked for hours on the phone with her childhood friend to compare notes, and she was on medication and seeing a therapist. We had been through so much together, but on this one particular call, I didn’t know what else to tell her. “That’s not good, and I don’t want you to do that,” is all I could think to say, and I felt a void in my lungs — as if all the air had been sucked out of my chest. “I’m so sorry, I want you to get better.” I left for college a few weeks later and found myself texting rather than calling her back, waiting days and then weeks to respond to her texts so that our friendship slowly melted away. We were, by the time she tried to commit suicide, out of touch except for birthdays: She always remembered mine. I always forgot hers.
Now I’ve experienced depression myself, and I have a handful of friends in various stages of depression, including one who has repeatedly called late at night asking me to “talk her off the ledge.” So many people around me are stressed out or on antidepressants, and I’ve wondered: How do you actually help someone with depression while remaining calm and grounded yourself? What should the follow-up texts and phone calls and agonizing weeks or months of recovery look like so you make the person feel better and not worse? What, in short, would a therapist advise here?
What follows is an exhaustive guide with evidence-based strategies and word-for-word scripts sourced from depression experts: things you can say and do if someone tells you they’re struggling or that they want to hurt themselves.
If you’re depressed: Send this story to people who care about you so they can know how to really help you. If you’re a friend (or family member, spouse, or co-worker) of someone who is depressed: Know it’s not entirely up to you to help them get better. But there is so much you can do, say, and know about depression to keep the relationship and your own well-being intact.
Depression, Defined
What is depression? What are the signs and symptoms?
Major depression is a mood disorder that causes someone to feel persistently sad for a long time (at least two weeks), and of the many symptoms, the most common signs you’ll recognize in friends are their being less social or less interested in things they usually like to do. A depressed friend might decline your invitations to meet up, cancel plans again and again, or ignore calls or texts. In person, that friend might snap at you, drink excessively, get upset about the smallest things, or seem more anxious, irritable, flat, and just really negative and down.
“Friends can sometimes take that personally and feel very impatient and frustrated, like, I don’t want to hang out with this person so much anymore,” says Dr. Laura Rosen, a clinical psychologist and the author of When Someone You Love Is Depressed. “That’s something people need to notice. If you feel different when you’re with them, depression might be going on.”
“Hey, I’m Worried About You”
How should you ask if someone is depressed? What should you say?
The wrong way to start the conversation is by focusing vaguely on how the person seems emotionally, which can sound accusatory, such as: “You’ve been so down/stressed/anxious/irritable lately … what’s going on? Are you okay?”
Open-ended questions are better, experts say, such as:
“How are you doing lately?”
“Are you struggling with anything? Can I help you?”
“You just don’t seem like yourself lately. Is everything okay?”
“Focus on specific behaviors so your friend doesn’t feel judged,” says Valerie Cordero, co-executive director of Families for Depression Awareness. “You want to try as much as possible to not put them on the defensive, and give them an opportunity to respond.”
Examples include:
“You used to love our nights out, but it seems like you’re not interested in coming anymore. Is something going on? Do you want to talk about it?”
“I know you got a raise recently, which probably came with a bunch of new responsibilities, and I’ve noticed you seem stressed out. Do you think you might be depressed?”
See what your friend is willing to share. If they don’t want to talk about it, or if they brush you off, just say, “I’m here for you,” and move on to another topic. (...)
What to Say to Someone Who Is Depressed
Image: Head of a Woman, 1911, Alexej von Jawlensky
Now I’ve experienced depression myself, and I have a handful of friends in various stages of depression, including one who has repeatedly called late at night asking me to “talk her off the ledge.” So many people around me are stressed out or on antidepressants, and I’ve wondered: How do you actually help someone with depression while remaining calm and grounded yourself? What should the follow-up texts and phone calls and agonizing weeks or months of recovery look like so you make the person feel better and not worse? What, in short, would a therapist advise here?What follows is an exhaustive guide with evidence-based strategies and word-for-word scripts sourced from depression experts: things you can say and do if someone tells you they’re struggling or that they want to hurt themselves.
If you’re depressed: Send this story to people who care about you so they can know how to really help you. If you’re a friend (or family member, spouse, or co-worker) of someone who is depressed: Know it’s not entirely up to you to help them get better. But there is so much you can do, say, and know about depression to keep the relationship and your own well-being intact.
Depression, Defined
What is depression? What are the signs and symptoms?
Major depression is a mood disorder that causes someone to feel persistently sad for a long time (at least two weeks), and of the many symptoms, the most common signs you’ll recognize in friends are their being less social or less interested in things they usually like to do. A depressed friend might decline your invitations to meet up, cancel plans again and again, or ignore calls or texts. In person, that friend might snap at you, drink excessively, get upset about the smallest things, or seem more anxious, irritable, flat, and just really negative and down.
“Friends can sometimes take that personally and feel very impatient and frustrated, like, I don’t want to hang out with this person so much anymore,” says Dr. Laura Rosen, a clinical psychologist and the author of When Someone You Love Is Depressed. “That’s something people need to notice. If you feel different when you’re with them, depression might be going on.”
“Hey, I’m Worried About You”
How should you ask if someone is depressed? What should you say?
The wrong way to start the conversation is by focusing vaguely on how the person seems emotionally, which can sound accusatory, such as: “You’ve been so down/stressed/anxious/irritable lately … what’s going on? Are you okay?”
Open-ended questions are better, experts say, such as:
“How are you doing lately?”
“Are you struggling with anything? Can I help you?”
“You just don’t seem like yourself lately. Is everything okay?”
“Focus on specific behaviors so your friend doesn’t feel judged,” says Valerie Cordero, co-executive director of Families for Depression Awareness. “You want to try as much as possible to not put them on the defensive, and give them an opportunity to respond.”
Examples include:
“You used to love our nights out, but it seems like you’re not interested in coming anymore. Is something going on? Do you want to talk about it?”
“I know you got a raise recently, which probably came with a bunch of new responsibilities, and I’ve noticed you seem stressed out. Do you think you might be depressed?”
See what your friend is willing to share. If they don’t want to talk about it, or if they brush you off, just say, “I’m here for you,” and move on to another topic. (...)
What to Say to Someone Who Is Depressed
How do you tell the person that things will get better?
Don’t say:
“You have so much going for you.”
“Just know that I care about you.”
“Come on, stop being so down.”
“Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t drink so much or sleep all day?”
The first example suggests you know more about their situation than the depressed friend does. The others instill guilt and shame. In general, it’s better to avoid giving advice that suggests specific ways a friend should change thoughts or behavior — the only true advice you can give is that the friend should talk to a doctor and therapist, and you can encourage your friend to continue reaching out to you and other friends and family when that person needs someone to listen. Instead, say something like:
Do say:
“It makes sense to me that you’re just really not feeling like yourself.”
“You feel really miserable right now, but you have to remember it will get better. I know that. I can promise you that.”
Rather than giving the person a pep talk, these examples reflect back what you’re hearing and offer specific ways you might help. “What I hear from depressed people is that to have somebody say get over it is not very helpful and actually really annoying,” says Rosen. “It’s more helpful to say, ‘I can see what a hard time you’re having, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to see you through this. You probably don’t believe this, but it will pass. I know it feels really bad.’”
by Catie L'Heureux, The Cut | Read more:Don’t say:
“You have so much going for you.”
“Just know that I care about you.”
“Come on, stop being so down.”
“Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t drink so much or sleep all day?”
The first example suggests you know more about their situation than the depressed friend does. The others instill guilt and shame. In general, it’s better to avoid giving advice that suggests specific ways a friend should change thoughts or behavior — the only true advice you can give is that the friend should talk to a doctor and therapist, and you can encourage your friend to continue reaching out to you and other friends and family when that person needs someone to listen. Instead, say something like:
Do say:
“It makes sense to me that you’re just really not feeling like yourself.”
“You feel really miserable right now, but you have to remember it will get better. I know that. I can promise you that.”
Rather than giving the person a pep talk, these examples reflect back what you’re hearing and offer specific ways you might help. “What I hear from depressed people is that to have somebody say get over it is not very helpful and actually really annoying,” says Rosen. “It’s more helpful to say, ‘I can see what a hard time you’re having, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to see you through this. You probably don’t believe this, but it will pass. I know it feels really bad.’”
Image: Head of a Woman, 1911, Alexej von Jawlensky
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Bill Evans
Bill Evans (Miles, Charlie, McCoy, Duke, Monk, Art, Sonny, Trane, Bud... my favorite was always Bill).
Unplugged: Is the Guitar Solo Dead?
About two minutes into “Outta My Head,” from the new album Free Spirit by pop-R&B star Khalid, a strange, foreign sound bubbles to the song’s shiny disco-pop surface. It’s a squiggly, pitchy thing that echoes the melody for about 15 seconds before receding into the background.
Could it be … yes, it’s a guitar solo!
The solo on Khalid’s album, played by John Mayer, is a way for the genre-hopping Khalid to show off his omni-directional vision. But in 2019, there’s no denying that the flashy guitar-breakout moment, one of the most prominent and primal components of rock & roll, is an increasingly endangered species. On the most recent releases by the leading mainstream rock and/or rock-adjacent groups of our era—Imagine Dragons, the 1975, Twenty One Pilots—you’ll hear plenty of rubbery beats and programming but barely any guitar, much less anything close to traditional shredding. And while elements of rap-rock, Nineties alt-rock and emo occasionally show up in modern pop, hip-hop and R&B, guitars rarely do. When you do hear a break on a pop record—Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” for instance—you’re more likely hearing some type of synthesizer or keyboard.
Tellingly, the few recent guitar-hero moments that have made a mark in the culture have been on film, not record. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury pushes Gwilym Lee’s Brian May to improve on his original guitar break in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” urging him to put his “body into it.” The sight of a man standing in front of his amps, perfecting every note of his solo, feels even older than rock itself; it’s like you’ve watching a ritual from ancient Egypt.
Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born is set in today’s musical world, but Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine may as well be operating in the ’70s alongside Queen. With his self-serious, man-of-the-wilderness air, Maine already feels like a ghost from rock past, especially compared to the music and look of Lady Gaga’s more stylized Ally. Maine’s increasing irrelevance is rammed home when he and his band play some sort of outdoor festival and launch into their metallic rocker, “Black Eyes.” Bloated and oozing flop sweat, Maine drops his head and breaks into a guitar solo, pulling angry, sputtering notes out of his strings. One supposes such violent manhandling of his instrument is meant to symbolize his inner pain, but the scene also screams out: This dude is so over that he’s even playing a guitar solo.
For much of the previous sixty-plus years, starting with moments like Scotty Moore’s piercing twang on Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel,” the guitar has been part of rock’s DNA. Some of the instruments responsible for those sounds can be seen up close in “Play It Loud,” a newly opened rock-instruments exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On display are the guitar Jimi Hendrix used for his beautifully ravaged shredding of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, the red-painted one Eddie Van Halen employed for “Eruption,” and the various instruments Jimmy Page used for part on “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” Yet the mere fact that those instruments are behind glass in a museum exhibit only reinforces the sense that the guitar solo as a musical or cultural force has peaked.
In the realm of mainstream rock and pop (and not metal, where the solo still reigns, and country, where guitar players are allowed to show off now and then), it’s hard to pinpoint when guitar breaks began to spiral downward. For a while, it felt as it every pop hit (most notably “Beat It”) had a solo, which lent it a certain cred. Certainly the alt rock scene of the ’90s thrust the first stake in its body. Kurt Cobain allowed himself a solo in “Come as You Are,” and Billy Corgan made plenty of rock critics employ the phrase “peels off a solo.” But textures and splattery, unshowy moves were more prominent than the plastic flashiness of the hair metal scene grunge and alt-rock had supplanted, mirroring the often messy, complicated emotions in the lyrics of artists like Cobain and Corgan. (From what I remember during the few times I saw Nirvana, Kurt would never even walk to the front of the stage during his individual part.) The guitar parts on records by bands like Pavement added a new level of irony to the solo, and when hard-rock came back during the early ’00s in the form of nu-metal, the riffs on songs by Korn or Deftones were often even more damaged and mangled than Cobain’s playing.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the guitar solo would outlive its usefulness. After all these years and innovations, what can it offer? What hasn’t already been done, from Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan? But the rise of hip hop, dance music and modern pop cemented the solo’s irrelevance. In those genres, guitars are often sampled or used for rhythmic patterns, but solos are largely non-existent. (...)
Beyond sonics, it’s hard not to think that the tradition is a cultural relic, as well as a musical one: Is there anything more male and (largely) white than a guitar solo? Then again, at this year’s Grammys, two women staked their claim to the tradition with genuine guitar-hero moments. During their live performances, both Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and R&B artist H.E.R. let fly with solos that were succinct and tasteful, the opposite of garish or macho.
Clark’s approach to guitar is less ostentatious and more textural; her lead lines and occasional solos don’t announce themselves so much as blend into the arrangements, fitting for someone whose guitar influences include the more subtle likes of Robert Fripp and Marc Ribot. “Every few years someone says guitar is dead,” she said last year. “… And it’s just simply not the case. It’s going to get reinvented and the cycles are going to continue. The guitar is never going to die or anything.” The solo may never dominate the way it once did, just like rock itself, but with the aid of people like Clark, it may yet escape a premature burial.
Could it be … yes, it’s a guitar solo!
The solo on Khalid’s album, played by John Mayer, is a way for the genre-hopping Khalid to show off his omni-directional vision. But in 2019, there’s no denying that the flashy guitar-breakout moment, one of the most prominent and primal components of rock & roll, is an increasingly endangered species. On the most recent releases by the leading mainstream rock and/or rock-adjacent groups of our era—Imagine Dragons, the 1975, Twenty One Pilots—you’ll hear plenty of rubbery beats and programming but barely any guitar, much less anything close to traditional shredding. And while elements of rap-rock, Nineties alt-rock and emo occasionally show up in modern pop, hip-hop and R&B, guitars rarely do. When you do hear a break on a pop record—Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” for instance—you’re more likely hearing some type of synthesizer or keyboard.
Tellingly, the few recent guitar-hero moments that have made a mark in the culture have been on film, not record. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury pushes Gwilym Lee’s Brian May to improve on his original guitar break in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” urging him to put his “body into it.” The sight of a man standing in front of his amps, perfecting every note of his solo, feels even older than rock itself; it’s like you’ve watching a ritual from ancient Egypt.Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born is set in today’s musical world, but Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine may as well be operating in the ’70s alongside Queen. With his self-serious, man-of-the-wilderness air, Maine already feels like a ghost from rock past, especially compared to the music and look of Lady Gaga’s more stylized Ally. Maine’s increasing irrelevance is rammed home when he and his band play some sort of outdoor festival and launch into their metallic rocker, “Black Eyes.” Bloated and oozing flop sweat, Maine drops his head and breaks into a guitar solo, pulling angry, sputtering notes out of his strings. One supposes such violent manhandling of his instrument is meant to symbolize his inner pain, but the scene also screams out: This dude is so over that he’s even playing a guitar solo.
For much of the previous sixty-plus years, starting with moments like Scotty Moore’s piercing twang on Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel,” the guitar has been part of rock’s DNA. Some of the instruments responsible for those sounds can be seen up close in “Play It Loud,” a newly opened rock-instruments exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On display are the guitar Jimi Hendrix used for his beautifully ravaged shredding of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, the red-painted one Eddie Van Halen employed for “Eruption,” and the various instruments Jimmy Page used for part on “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” Yet the mere fact that those instruments are behind glass in a museum exhibit only reinforces the sense that the guitar solo as a musical or cultural force has peaked.
In the realm of mainstream rock and pop (and not metal, where the solo still reigns, and country, where guitar players are allowed to show off now and then), it’s hard to pinpoint when guitar breaks began to spiral downward. For a while, it felt as it every pop hit (most notably “Beat It”) had a solo, which lent it a certain cred. Certainly the alt rock scene of the ’90s thrust the first stake in its body. Kurt Cobain allowed himself a solo in “Come as You Are,” and Billy Corgan made plenty of rock critics employ the phrase “peels off a solo.” But textures and splattery, unshowy moves were more prominent than the plastic flashiness of the hair metal scene grunge and alt-rock had supplanted, mirroring the often messy, complicated emotions in the lyrics of artists like Cobain and Corgan. (From what I remember during the few times I saw Nirvana, Kurt would never even walk to the front of the stage during his individual part.) The guitar parts on records by bands like Pavement added a new level of irony to the solo, and when hard-rock came back during the early ’00s in the form of nu-metal, the riffs on songs by Korn or Deftones were often even more damaged and mangled than Cobain’s playing.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the guitar solo would outlive its usefulness. After all these years and innovations, what can it offer? What hasn’t already been done, from Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan? But the rise of hip hop, dance music and modern pop cemented the solo’s irrelevance. In those genres, guitars are often sampled or used for rhythmic patterns, but solos are largely non-existent. (...)
Beyond sonics, it’s hard not to think that the tradition is a cultural relic, as well as a musical one: Is there anything more male and (largely) white than a guitar solo? Then again, at this year’s Grammys, two women staked their claim to the tradition with genuine guitar-hero moments. During their live performances, both Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and R&B artist H.E.R. let fly with solos that were succinct and tasteful, the opposite of garish or macho.
Clark’s approach to guitar is less ostentatious and more textural; her lead lines and occasional solos don’t announce themselves so much as blend into the arrangements, fitting for someone whose guitar influences include the more subtle likes of Robert Fripp and Marc Ribot. “Every few years someone says guitar is dead,” she said last year. “… And it’s just simply not the case. It’s going to get reinvented and the cycles are going to continue. The guitar is never going to die or anything.” The solo may never dominate the way it once did, just like rock itself, but with the aid of people like Clark, it may yet escape a premature burial.
by David Browne, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Personally, I think it might be the quality of the music these days more than the instrument.]
[ed. Personally, I think it might be the quality of the music these days more than the instrument.]
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Amazon’s Slow Retreat From Seattle
Long before Amazon erected gleaming glass domes in downtown Seattle—and before Amazon was even named Amazon—Bellevue, Washington, was the site of the company’s headquarters. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, lived in the small King County city, and, in typical tech-leader fashion, laid the groundwork for what would become the largest e-commerce company in the world right there in his garage.
After its 1994 launch, Amazon got out of the garage quickly, moving across the lake to fill 630,000 square feet of office space in Seattle by 2001. Since then, the company has rapidly expanded downtown, growing to occupy 19 percent of all prime Seattle office space, according to a 2017 analysis by the Seattle Times. Today, according to company figures, its campus spans 8.1 million square feet.
But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for this cost with higher taxes, the company’s eyes have been wandering. In February, Amazon announced that it would back out of a downtown Seattle office tower it had once planned to fill with 3,500 to 5,000 employees. And this month, Geekwire reported that the company would be relocating an entire division from Seattle back to where it all started: Bellevue.
The move comes shortly after Amazon announced it would abandon plans to build another headquarters in New York City, while moving forward with its 25,000-employee campus outside Washington, D.C. in the smaller enclave of Crystal City, Virginia.
Amazon has long fancied itself an urban enterprise. Unlike Apple or Google, whose original corporate campuses cling to the emptier outskirts of big cities, Amazon’s downtown campus has only grown more integrated into Seattle’s cityscape. “I think it’s pretty much indisputable that urban campuses relative to suburban campuses are better,” Bezos said in a 2014 shareholder meeting. “Because there’s much less commuting and much less fuel burned.” Besides, he added, Amazon employees “appreciate the energy and dynamism of an urban environment.”
In a confluence of recent moves, however, Amazon is spreading out, and shrinking away from the biggest downtowns. Bellevue is hardly the suburb it used to be—Expedia and T-Mobile are both headquartered there, and Amazon itself employs 700 Bellevue workers, to Seattle’s 45,000. Still, it boasts a “small-town” feel, per its tourism website, and its population is only 140,000 to Seattle’s 700,000-plus.
Amazon’s pivot may simply reflect practical considerations. But it also has profound political implications.
Seattle’s downtown has evolved dramatically in the years since Amazon moved in, gripped today by an exorbitantly expensive housing market and a growing homelessness crisis. But Bellevue isn’t much better: With median home prices of about $922,000, according to Zillow, it’s pricier than Seattle’s median of $730,000 and Crystal City’s, which is closer to $680,000.
And the urban problems Amazon would escape outside of Seattle are ones that citizens have blamed Amazon for creating, worsening, and refusing to help correct.
Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. Amazon opposed the bill, threatening to stall expansion into one downtown office building and stop construction on another if it passed. The city managed to push through a shrunken version of the tax last May, which would have collected $47 million, only to reverse it a month later after a campaign of resistance from Amazon and other business interests. (...)
In Bellevue, Amazon may find less of the political opposition that’s mounting in Seattle, and that followed it into New York. “I think Amazon has been looking for opportunities where they wouldn’t be under the control of Seattle city council anymore,” said Redfin’s Fairweather.
Indeed, Amazon highlighted Bellevue’s agreeable business climate in its statement on the move. “It’s a city with great amenities, a high quality of life for our employees, and fantastic talent—and it’s recognized for its business-friendly environment,” said a spokesperson. King County submitted its own application to win HQ2 in 2017, signaling its desire to take on more Amazon employees even then.
Now, Bellevue’s mayor, John Chelminiak, is ready to welcome them with open arms. “As a community we’ve worked hard to anticipate this type of positive growth downtown, and Amazon is a natural fit,” he said in a statement.
That it’s so easy for Amazon to move to another location instead of reckoning with its home base may be part of the reason it felt so empowered to spar with the Seattle council, says Sawant.
“The logic of capitalism will follow it to the last dollar,” she said. “As long as there is another city, another state, another country where people are less empowered—more desperate for jobs on any terms—the corporations will do what they need to do for their bottom line, which is to maximize as much profit as possible for the major shareholders.” (...)
After its 1994 launch, Amazon got out of the garage quickly, moving across the lake to fill 630,000 square feet of office space in Seattle by 2001. Since then, the company has rapidly expanded downtown, growing to occupy 19 percent of all prime Seattle office space, according to a 2017 analysis by the Seattle Times. Today, according to company figures, its campus spans 8.1 million square feet.
But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for this cost with higher taxes, the company’s eyes have been wandering. In February, Amazon announced that it would back out of a downtown Seattle office tower it had once planned to fill with 3,500 to 5,000 employees. And this month, Geekwire reported that the company would be relocating an entire division from Seattle back to where it all started: Bellevue.The move comes shortly after Amazon announced it would abandon plans to build another headquarters in New York City, while moving forward with its 25,000-employee campus outside Washington, D.C. in the smaller enclave of Crystal City, Virginia.
Amazon has long fancied itself an urban enterprise. Unlike Apple or Google, whose original corporate campuses cling to the emptier outskirts of big cities, Amazon’s downtown campus has only grown more integrated into Seattle’s cityscape. “I think it’s pretty much indisputable that urban campuses relative to suburban campuses are better,” Bezos said in a 2014 shareholder meeting. “Because there’s much less commuting and much less fuel burned.” Besides, he added, Amazon employees “appreciate the energy and dynamism of an urban environment.”
In a confluence of recent moves, however, Amazon is spreading out, and shrinking away from the biggest downtowns. Bellevue is hardly the suburb it used to be—Expedia and T-Mobile are both headquartered there, and Amazon itself employs 700 Bellevue workers, to Seattle’s 45,000. Still, it boasts a “small-town” feel, per its tourism website, and its population is only 140,000 to Seattle’s 700,000-plus.
Amazon’s pivot may simply reflect practical considerations. But it also has profound political implications.
Seattle’s downtown has evolved dramatically in the years since Amazon moved in, gripped today by an exorbitantly expensive housing market and a growing homelessness crisis. But Bellevue isn’t much better: With median home prices of about $922,000, according to Zillow, it’s pricier than Seattle’s median of $730,000 and Crystal City’s, which is closer to $680,000.
And the urban problems Amazon would escape outside of Seattle are ones that citizens have blamed Amazon for creating, worsening, and refusing to help correct.
Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. Amazon opposed the bill, threatening to stall expansion into one downtown office building and stop construction on another if it passed. The city managed to push through a shrunken version of the tax last May, which would have collected $47 million, only to reverse it a month later after a campaign of resistance from Amazon and other business interests. (...)
In Bellevue, Amazon may find less of the political opposition that’s mounting in Seattle, and that followed it into New York. “I think Amazon has been looking for opportunities where they wouldn’t be under the control of Seattle city council anymore,” said Redfin’s Fairweather.
Indeed, Amazon highlighted Bellevue’s agreeable business climate in its statement on the move. “It’s a city with great amenities, a high quality of life for our employees, and fantastic talent—and it’s recognized for its business-friendly environment,” said a spokesperson. King County submitted its own application to win HQ2 in 2017, signaling its desire to take on more Amazon employees even then.
Now, Bellevue’s mayor, John Chelminiak, is ready to welcome them with open arms. “As a community we’ve worked hard to anticipate this type of positive growth downtown, and Amazon is a natural fit,” he said in a statement.
That it’s so easy for Amazon to move to another location instead of reckoning with its home base may be part of the reason it felt so empowered to spar with the Seattle council, says Sawant.
“The logic of capitalism will follow it to the last dollar,” she said. “As long as there is another city, another state, another country where people are less empowered—more desperate for jobs on any terms—the corporations will do what they need to do for their bottom line, which is to maximize as much profit as possible for the major shareholders.” (...)
A spokesperson for Amazon said that there are “several thousand” employees on the worldwide operations team that’s scheduled to move starting this month, and fully relocate by 2023. One of the major concerns residents express when faced with an influx of tech jobs to smaller cities like Bellevue—and one of the fears some New Yorkers expressed when Amazon was slated to move in—is that housing prices will rise, displacing current residents. Bellevue’s housing prices are already high, and with “a big chunk of [Amazon’s] Seattle corporate footprint” relocating, Fairweather says, they are likely to get higher.
But Amazon’s move comes as Microsoft plans to invest $500 million in grants and loans for affordable housing assistance in the region. Some of it will target homeless residents, and $250 million of it will incentivize developers to build low-income housing. Another $225 million will go towards building housing for families in suburbs like Redmond and cities like Bellevue, earning $62,000 to $124,000 a year. While Microsoft’s goal may have been to create workforce housing for its own employees, says Fairweather, those starter-home loans could be the sweet spot for Amazon employees, too.
“What might happen is that these housing units that Microsoft initially intended to be for teachers or police officers or more middle-income earners is actually going to end up being bought up and bid up by more tech workers in the area,” said Fairweather. “I don’t know if Bellevue is going to be on a largely different trajectory than Seattle.”
[ed. Virus in a petri dish.]
But Amazon’s move comes as Microsoft plans to invest $500 million in grants and loans for affordable housing assistance in the region. Some of it will target homeless residents, and $250 million of it will incentivize developers to build low-income housing. Another $225 million will go towards building housing for families in suburbs like Redmond and cities like Bellevue, earning $62,000 to $124,000 a year. While Microsoft’s goal may have been to create workforce housing for its own employees, says Fairweather, those starter-home loans could be the sweet spot for Amazon employees, too.
“What might happen is that these housing units that Microsoft initially intended to be for teachers or police officers or more middle-income earners is actually going to end up being bought up and bid up by more tech workers in the area,” said Fairweather. “I don’t know if Bellevue is going to be on a largely different trajectory than Seattle.”
by Sarah Holder, CityLab | Read more:
Image: Ted S. Warren/AP[ed. Virus in a petri dish.]
Five Lies Our Culture Tells
Four years ago, in the midst of the Obama presidency, I published a book called “The Road to Character.” American culture seemed to be in decent shape and my focus was on how individuals can deepen their inner lives. This week, in the midst of the Trump presidency, I’ve got another book, “The Second Mountain.” It’s become clear in the interim that things are not in good shape, that our problems are societal. The whole country is going through some sort of spiritual and emotional crisis.
College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.
Here are some of them:
Career success is fulfilling. This is the lie we foist on the young. In their tender years we put the most privileged of them inside a college admissions process that puts achievement and status anxiety at the center of their lives. That begins advertising’s lifelong mantra — if you make it, life will be good.
Everybody who has actually tasted success can tell you that’s not true. I remember when the editor of my first book called to tell me it had made the best-seller list. It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.
The truth is, success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.
I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment. If I can have just one more victory, lose 15 pounds or get better at meditation, then I will be happy.
But people looking back on their lives from their deathbeds tell us that happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. It is found by defeating self-sufficiency for a state of mutual dependence. It is found in the giving and receiving of care.
It’s easy to say you live for relationships, but it’s very hard to do. It’s hard to see other people in all their complexity. It’s hard to communicate from your depths, not your shallows. It’s hard to stop performing! No one teaches us these skills.
Life is an individual journey. This is the lie books like Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” tell. In adulthood, each person goes on a personal trip and racks up a bunch of experiences, and whoever has the most experiences wins. This lie encourages people to believe freedom is the absence of restraint. Be unattached. Stay on the move. Keep your options open.
In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don’t ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here? They respond to some problem or get called out of themselves by a deep love.
By planting themselves in one neighborhood, one organization or one mission, they earn trust. They have the freedom to make a lasting difference. It’s the chains we choose that set us free.
College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.
Here are some of them:
Career success is fulfilling. This is the lie we foist on the young. In their tender years we put the most privileged of them inside a college admissions process that puts achievement and status anxiety at the center of their lives. That begins advertising’s lifelong mantra — if you make it, life will be good.Everybody who has actually tasted success can tell you that’s not true. I remember when the editor of my first book called to tell me it had made the best-seller list. It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.
The truth is, success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.
I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment. If I can have just one more victory, lose 15 pounds or get better at meditation, then I will be happy.
But people looking back on their lives from their deathbeds tell us that happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. It is found by defeating self-sufficiency for a state of mutual dependence. It is found in the giving and receiving of care.
It’s easy to say you live for relationships, but it’s very hard to do. It’s hard to see other people in all their complexity. It’s hard to communicate from your depths, not your shallows. It’s hard to stop performing! No one teaches us these skills.
Life is an individual journey. This is the lie books like Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” tell. In adulthood, each person goes on a personal trip and racks up a bunch of experiences, and whoever has the most experiences wins. This lie encourages people to believe freedom is the absence of restraint. Be unattached. Stay on the move. Keep your options open.
In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don’t ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here? They respond to some problem or get called out of themselves by a deep love.
By planting themselves in one neighborhood, one organization or one mission, they earn trust. They have the freedom to make a lasting difference. It’s the chains we choose that set us free.
by David Brooks, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Disney and the Future of TV
Yesterday started with a truly remarkable piece of TV broadcasting: Tiger Woods capped an incredible comeback from personal (self-inflicted) turmoil and physical injury with his first major championship win in twelve years at The Masters:
The moment was incredible on its own; that the CBS announcers saw fit to stay silent for two minutes and forty seconds and let the pictures and sounds from Augusta National’s 18th green tell the story spoke not only to their judgment but also to the unmatched drama that makes television the most valuable medium there is.
A few hours later the season premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones brought drama of a different type: scripted, and expensive. The episode is expected to draw around 14 million viewers (and many millions more in pirated streams), and is already a cultural phenomenon.
The greatest drama of all in the television world, though, was on the surface far more banal: on Thursday Disney webcast its Investors Day 2019, where it not only gave details on its upcoming Disney+ streaming service specifically, but also clarified the future of TV generally. And, like any great drama, what is happening it not only a compelling story in its own right, but a lens with which to understand far more than the subject matter at hand.
A Brief History of TV
In 2013, I posited that TV did multiple jobs for people: it informed, it educated, it provided a live view on sports and other breaking events, it told stories, and it offered an escape, from boredom if nothing else.
All of these jobs had the same business model: advertising. Consumers tuned in to watch programming, and native ads — that is, ads in the same format as the content they accompanied — were interspersed. Everything was aligned: consumers liked TV, they got it for free over the air, and advertisers wanted to reach as many people as possible with the most persuasive of mediums.
The picture began to change in the 1970s: communities across the country, particularly those whose remoteness or geography made it difficult for households to get a reliable broadcast signal, had for a couple of decades banded together to build a single large antenna to capture broadcast signals and then ran cable from that antenna to homes. It turned out, though, that those cables had both extra bandwidth and, even more importantly, no requirement for spectrum licenses, and first community access TV (i.e. TV that could only be accessed by the community attached to the community antenna network) and later, cable-only channels that leveraged satellite transmission to reach those community cable networks began to proliferate.
Then, with new technology and a new means of distribution came a new business model: affiliate fees. Now cable company were not simply collecting money from customers for access to ad-supported broadcast channels, but were also collecting money on behalf of cable channels themselves. This shift was led by ESPN, which introduced the concept of affiliate fees in 1982, made them nationwide by leveraging Sunday Night Football in 1987, and inspired countless imitators and transformed the TV industry along the way. I explained in 2015’s The Changing — and Unchanging — Structure of TV:
I just mentioned, though, the elephant in the room: broadband Internet service. (...)
Disney+ and the Disney Universe
The best way to understand Disney+, meanwhile, starts with the name: this is a service that is not really about television, at least not directly, but rather about Disney itself. This famous chart created by Walt Disney himself remains as pertinent as ever:
I first posted that chart on Stratechery when Disney first announced it was starting a streaming service in 2017, and said at the time:
By controlling distribution of its content and going direct-to-consumer, Disney can deepen its already strong connections with customers in a way that benefits all parts of the business: movies can beget original content on Disney+ which begets new attractions at theme parks which begets merchandising opportunities which begets new movies, all building on each other like a cinematic universe in real life. Indeed, it is a testament to just how lucrative the traditional TV model is that it took so long for Disney to shift to this approach: it is a far better fit for their business in the long run than simply spreading content around to the highest bidder.
This is also why Disney is comfortable being so aggressive in price: the company could have easily tried charging $9.99/month or Netflix’s $13.99/month — the road to profitability for Disney+ would have surely been shorter. The outcome for Disney as a whole, though, would be worse: a higher price means fewer customers, and given the multitude of ways that Disney has to monetize customers throughout their entire lives that would have been a poor trade-off to make.
The moment was incredible on its own; that the CBS announcers saw fit to stay silent for two minutes and forty seconds and let the pictures and sounds from Augusta National’s 18th green tell the story spoke not only to their judgment but also to the unmatched drama that makes television the most valuable medium there is.
A few hours later the season premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones brought drama of a different type: scripted, and expensive. The episode is expected to draw around 14 million viewers (and many millions more in pirated streams), and is already a cultural phenomenon.
The greatest drama of all in the television world, though, was on the surface far more banal: on Thursday Disney webcast its Investors Day 2019, where it not only gave details on its upcoming Disney+ streaming service specifically, but also clarified the future of TV generally. And, like any great drama, what is happening it not only a compelling story in its own right, but a lens with which to understand far more than the subject matter at hand.
A Brief History of TV
In 2013, I posited that TV did multiple jobs for people: it informed, it educated, it provided a live view on sports and other breaking events, it told stories, and it offered an escape, from boredom if nothing else.
All of these jobs had the same business model: advertising. Consumers tuned in to watch programming, and native ads — that is, ads in the same format as the content they accompanied — were interspersed. Everything was aligned: consumers liked TV, they got it for free over the air, and advertisers wanted to reach as many people as possible with the most persuasive of mediums.
The picture began to change in the 1970s: communities across the country, particularly those whose remoteness or geography made it difficult for households to get a reliable broadcast signal, had for a couple of decades banded together to build a single large antenna to capture broadcast signals and then ran cable from that antenna to homes. It turned out, though, that those cables had both extra bandwidth and, even more importantly, no requirement for spectrum licenses, and first community access TV (i.e. TV that could only be accessed by the community attached to the community antenna network) and later, cable-only channels that leveraged satellite transmission to reach those community cable networks began to proliferate.
Then, with new technology and a new means of distribution came a new business model: affiliate fees. Now cable company were not simply collecting money from customers for access to ad-supported broadcast channels, but were also collecting money on behalf of cable channels themselves. This shift was led by ESPN, which introduced the concept of affiliate fees in 1982, made them nationwide by leveraging Sunday Night Football in 1987, and inspired countless imitators and transformed the TV industry along the way. I explained in 2015’s The Changing — and Unchanging — Structure of TV:
Over the ensuing years content companies realized that the reason consumers paid cable companies was because they wanted access to the creator’s content (like the aforementioned NFL deal); that meant content companies could make the cable companies pay them ever increasing affiliate fees for that content. Even better, if multiple channels banded together, the resultant conglomerates — Viacom, NBCUniversal, Disney, etc. — could compel the cable companies to pay affiliate fees for all their channels, popular or not. And best of all, it was the cable companies who had to deal with consumers angry that their (TV-only) cable bills were rising from around $22 in 1995 to $54 in 2010.It’s difficult to overstate how lucrative this model was for everyone involved: content companies had guaranteed revenue and a dial to increase profits that seemed as if it could be turned endlessly; cable companies had natural monopolies that they soon augmented with broadband Internet service; and while consumers griped about their cable bill the truth is that bundles are a great deal.
I just mentioned, though, the elephant in the room: broadband Internet service. (...)
Disney+ and the Disney Universe
The best way to understand Disney+, meanwhile, starts with the name: this is a service that is not really about television, at least not directly, but rather about Disney itself. This famous chart created by Walt Disney himself remains as pertinent as ever:
I first posted that chart on Stratechery when Disney first announced it was starting a streaming service in 2017, and said at the time:
At the center, of course, are the Disney Studios, and rightly so. Not only does differentiated content drive movie theater revenue, it creates the universes and characters that earn TV licensing revenue, music recording revenue, and merchandise sales.
What has always made Disney unique, though, is Disneyland: there the differentiated content comes to life, and, given the lack of an arrow, I suspect not even Walt Disney himself appreciated the extent to which theme parks and the connection with the customer they engendered drive the rest of the business. “Disney” is just as much of a brand as it Mickey Mouse or Buzz Lightyear, with stores, a cable channel, and a reason to watch a movie even if you know nothing about it.This is the only appropriate context in which to think about Disney+. While obviously Disney+ will compete with Netflix for consumer attention, the goals of the two services are very different: for Netflix, streaming is its entire business, the sole driver of revenue and profit. Disney, meanwhile, obviously plans for Disney+ to be profitable — the company projects that the service will achieve profitability in 2024, and that includes transfer payments to Disney’s studios — but the larger project is Disney itself.
By controlling distribution of its content and going direct-to-consumer, Disney can deepen its already strong connections with customers in a way that benefits all parts of the business: movies can beget original content on Disney+ which begets new attractions at theme parks which begets merchandising opportunities which begets new movies, all building on each other like a cinematic universe in real life. Indeed, it is a testament to just how lucrative the traditional TV model is that it took so long for Disney to shift to this approach: it is a far better fit for their business in the long run than simply spreading content around to the highest bidder.
This is also why Disney is comfortable being so aggressive in price: the company could have easily tried charging $9.99/month or Netflix’s $13.99/month — the road to profitability for Disney+ would have surely been shorter. The outcome for Disney as a whole, though, would be worse: a higher price means fewer customers, and given the multitude of ways that Disney has to monetize customers throughout their entire lives that would have been a poor trade-off to make.
by Ben Thompson, Stratechery | Read more:
Image: Stratechery
Steely Dan
via: Tumblr
[ed. Denny Dias, Skunk Baxter... who could've imagined what they'd be doing now. (Wikipedia)]
Mourning Notre Dame
No doubt there will be many articles and personal testimonies about the massive fire that has gutted Notre Dame. Even if the bones of the building survive, essential elements, some and perhaps many of its stained glass windows are almost certainly gone or terribly damaged. The reports are uncertain, with an awful heavy use of words like “may”. For instance, the Telegraph says the organ survived but is damaged. Other accounts say that at least one of the great rose windows is intact.
Even if Notre Dame can be restored, the project is likely to take more than a generation, meaning even in best-case scenario, many people will never be able to see it properly again in their lives.
Others who know Notre Dame more intimately, particularly Parisians, architects and historians, will be better able to provide elegies. I nevertheless feel compelled to write about this loss because it lays bare contradictions we manage to navigate in our daily lives and that have become more acute as humans are destroying the biosphere.
The great medieval cathedrals, through their enormous scale and soaring vaults, with their narrow stained glass windows that help pull the eye upward, tell worshipers and later visitors of how small they are compared to God and his works. Yet their seeming solidity and scale also suggests the faithful can find refuge. All of our technological prowess hasn’t found a way to create spaces that inspire the same sort of awe of these centuries-old houses of worship. Modern visitors were further humbled by the audaciousness of its accomplishment: a project executed across generations, reaching heights that seem daunting even now, marshaling the skills and hard work of many artisans and laborers.
In other words, Notre Dame provided comfort and hope against that gnawing knowledge in the back of our heads of the certainty of death and the impermanence of human action. Even though all those who built Notre Dame were long dead, something of them lived on through the cathedral….or did at least till yesterday.
Human existence is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that we stare down inevitable defeat every day of our existence.
I sometimes refer to a story in the Mahabharata, in which Yudhisthira and his brothers have been tasked to find a deer with mystical powers. They camp but are thirsty. Yudhisthira sends one of his siblings to find some water. When he does not return, another brother is dispatched, and again does not return. This process repeats until Yudhisthira himself goes looking for his missing brothers.
He finds them all dead next to a pond.
In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. They are all metaphysical in nature. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”
Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”
The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death. After some further discussion, he revives the brothers.
Most of us won’t get off so well from an encounter with the Lord of Death. But on a daily basis, we derive comfort from our routines: our schedules, our interactions with familiar people, like family, co-workers, and other we see in our rounds, and the stability of our physical surroundings. I for one feel a sense of loss when buildings are torn down, even small groupings of modest old walks-ups that sat next to each other as gracefully as snaggle teeth.
Even if Notre Dame can be restored, the project is likely to take more than a generation, meaning even in best-case scenario, many people will never be able to see it properly again in their lives.
Others who know Notre Dame more intimately, particularly Parisians, architects and historians, will be better able to provide elegies. I nevertheless feel compelled to write about this loss because it lays bare contradictions we manage to navigate in our daily lives and that have become more acute as humans are destroying the biosphere.The great medieval cathedrals, through their enormous scale and soaring vaults, with their narrow stained glass windows that help pull the eye upward, tell worshipers and later visitors of how small they are compared to God and his works. Yet their seeming solidity and scale also suggests the faithful can find refuge. All of our technological prowess hasn’t found a way to create spaces that inspire the same sort of awe of these centuries-old houses of worship. Modern visitors were further humbled by the audaciousness of its accomplishment: a project executed across generations, reaching heights that seem daunting even now, marshaling the skills and hard work of many artisans and laborers.
In other words, Notre Dame provided comfort and hope against that gnawing knowledge in the back of our heads of the certainty of death and the impermanence of human action. Even though all those who built Notre Dame were long dead, something of them lived on through the cathedral….or did at least till yesterday.
Human existence is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that we stare down inevitable defeat every day of our existence.
I sometimes refer to a story in the Mahabharata, in which Yudhisthira and his brothers have been tasked to find a deer with mystical powers. They camp but are thirsty. Yudhisthira sends one of his siblings to find some water. When he does not return, another brother is dispatched, and again does not return. This process repeats until Yudhisthira himself goes looking for his missing brothers.
He finds them all dead next to a pond.
In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. They are all metaphysical in nature. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”
Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”
The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death. After some further discussion, he revives the brothers.
Most of us won’t get off so well from an encounter with the Lord of Death. But on a daily basis, we derive comfort from our routines: our schedules, our interactions with familiar people, like family, co-workers, and other we see in our rounds, and the stability of our physical surroundings. I for one feel a sense of loss when buildings are torn down, even small groupings of modest old walks-ups that sat next to each other as gracefully as snaggle teeth.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Shiv Malik
[ed. See also: Notre Dame was built to last until the end of the world (New Statesman).]
[ed. See also: Notre Dame was built to last until the end of the world (New Statesman).]
The Future of the Smartphone Camera is Here
Tech2 says the Huawei P30 Pro “makes the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus look redundant.” The Verge hails it as “the best camera you can’t buy in the U.S.” Others take out the qualifier altogether. Why? It’s all about zoom.
The future of the smartphone camera is here, it’s not Apple and it’s disturbing (Marketwatch).
Image: Getty
[ed. Wow.]
[ed. Wow.]
Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel
For centuries, China has treated its cuisine with a reverence and delight that is only just starting to emerge with Western “foodie” culture. No one understands this better than Fuchsia Dunlop, who has spent her career learning about the fantastic diversity in Chinese food, and who is one of Tyler’s favorite writers on any subject.
She joined Tyler over dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in DC to talk about all aspects of how to truly enjoy Chinese food, including where to visit, how to order, the few key ingredients to keep in your pantry, her favorite regional dishes, what Chinese chefs think about Western food, and why you should really learn to love sea cucumbers. (...)
You can watch a video of the full dinner here.
TYLER COWEN: If I think of how to present Fuchsia, there are two passages that spring immediately to mind. One is from her 1999 notebook entry, and I quote, “In the last three days I have eaten snails, frogs, snakes, sparrow gizzard, duck tongues, fish heads, duck hearts, tripe.
“Also, half a duck, most of a carp, duck’s blood, at least five eggs, smoked bacon, and stewed aromatic beef.” Of course, we had Fuchsia do the ordering for our lunch, as you might expect.
[laughter]
COWEN: One of my readers wrote to me, they summed up who she is. Again, I quote, “What a fantastic and exciting guest. I agree wholeheartedly that Fuchsia Dunlop is an absolute iconoclast, and that her achievements in examining and teaching Chinese cookery cannot possibly be overstated.
“I can say with all sincerity that my life has been absolutely enriched by her work. Her books are simply perfect models for others to follow.” Fuchsia, welcome. Everyone else, welcome as well.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: [laughs] Thank you.
On food tours
COWEN: Now, I’ll just start in on the questions while our guests eat, and they will later on become the questioners themselves. Let me start with this idea of a food tour.
Food tours are more and more popular today. People will go to Mexico, to France, Italy, even Thailand, but the China food tour is not always so popular with Americans or Westerners.
If you were to try to sell someone on a version of a 12-day China food tour, what would your case for that sound like?
DUNLOP: China has the world’s preeminent cuisine, absolutely unparalleled in its diversity and its sophistication. You can find practically everything you could possibly desire in terms of food in China.
From exquisite banquet cookery, exciting street food, bold spicy flavors, honest farmhouse cooking, delicate soups, just everything, apart perhaps from cheese, although they do actually have a couple of kinds of cheese [laughs] in Yunnan province.
Also, because China is such a food-orientated culture, and it has been since the beginnings of history, that if you want to understand China, almost more than anywhere else, food is a really good window into the culture, into the way people live, into history, everything. (...)
COWEN: Now let’s think through this idea of a food tour a little more analytically. Let’s say you’ve talked me into this food tour, which actually you’ve done indirectly through your books.
You’ve sent me to Shanghai. Your latest book, Land of Fish and Rice, in fact focuses on Shanghai and the surrounding region, which is quite diverse.
Here am I, Tyler Cowen, I’m in Shanghai. I don’t know Chinese and let’s say I don’t have Chinese friends. And I’m simply lost. How do I figure out where to actually eat in Shanghai? What do I do? What’s the heuristic?
DUNLOP: You could look for recommendations of authentic restaurants, articles by people who perhaps live in Shanghai or who understand the food.
COWEN: Say I’m just on the street. I’m walking. I don’t have my iPad. I’m away from WiFi. There’s Shanghai, there’s me confronting the alien. How do I think about finding what’s good?
DUNLOP: Use your nose, use your eyes. If you’re interested in street food, you’ll find lots of little stalls and shops where they’re cooking in full view. Use your judgment and see what looks exciting.
It’s very difficult in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, to perhaps know exactly what is local Shanghainese, what is from other parts of China because it’s always been a melting pot of different Chinese regional cuisines.
Also, if you want to taste the more refined cooking, then just going around the streets is not really going to help. You do need to do a little bit of research and have a few dishes, perhaps have the names on your phone in Chinese. That would help.
COWEN: Three dishes one absolutely has to try are what?
DUNLOP: In Shanghai?
COWEN: In Shanghai. The city, not the region.
DUNLOP: I think you should have hong shao rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking. Delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes.
I would recommend some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd’s purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghainese cooking.
Then, perhaps, if we’re talking Shanghai, you might one to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures. There’s a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghainese restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.
COWEN: As you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants three, two, one star. There’s cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? To the extent they don’t, what are they missing?
DUNLOP: If you look at the restaurants they’ve selected, there’s a bit of a Cantonese bias. They do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that’s very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants, which are missing from that list, in my opinion.
The reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. Of course in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we’re doing now with a large group and a table full of dishes.
These restaurants that I was surprised not to see on the list, you have to book a private room with a group. If you do, you’ll be able to taste some of the most wonderful renditions of Shanghainese food, and food from the broader region, with a contemporary spirit but a real reverence for traditional technique. You can’t do that really if you just go with one or two people.
She joined Tyler over dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in DC to talk about all aspects of how to truly enjoy Chinese food, including where to visit, how to order, the few key ingredients to keep in your pantry, her favorite regional dishes, what Chinese chefs think about Western food, and why you should really learn to love sea cucumbers. (...)
You can watch a video of the full dinner here.
TYLER COWEN: If I think of how to present Fuchsia, there are two passages that spring immediately to mind. One is from her 1999 notebook entry, and I quote, “In the last three days I have eaten snails, frogs, snakes, sparrow gizzard, duck tongues, fish heads, duck hearts, tripe.“Also, half a duck, most of a carp, duck’s blood, at least five eggs, smoked bacon, and stewed aromatic beef.” Of course, we had Fuchsia do the ordering for our lunch, as you might expect.
[laughter]
COWEN: One of my readers wrote to me, they summed up who she is. Again, I quote, “What a fantastic and exciting guest. I agree wholeheartedly that Fuchsia Dunlop is an absolute iconoclast, and that her achievements in examining and teaching Chinese cookery cannot possibly be overstated.
“I can say with all sincerity that my life has been absolutely enriched by her work. Her books are simply perfect models for others to follow.” Fuchsia, welcome. Everyone else, welcome as well.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: [laughs] Thank you.
On food tours
COWEN: Now, I’ll just start in on the questions while our guests eat, and they will later on become the questioners themselves. Let me start with this idea of a food tour.
Food tours are more and more popular today. People will go to Mexico, to France, Italy, even Thailand, but the China food tour is not always so popular with Americans or Westerners.
If you were to try to sell someone on a version of a 12-day China food tour, what would your case for that sound like?
DUNLOP: China has the world’s preeminent cuisine, absolutely unparalleled in its diversity and its sophistication. You can find practically everything you could possibly desire in terms of food in China.
From exquisite banquet cookery, exciting street food, bold spicy flavors, honest farmhouse cooking, delicate soups, just everything, apart perhaps from cheese, although they do actually have a couple of kinds of cheese [laughs] in Yunnan province.
Also, because China is such a food-orientated culture, and it has been since the beginnings of history, that if you want to understand China, almost more than anywhere else, food is a really good window into the culture, into the way people live, into history, everything. (...)
COWEN: Now let’s think through this idea of a food tour a little more analytically. Let’s say you’ve talked me into this food tour, which actually you’ve done indirectly through your books.
You’ve sent me to Shanghai. Your latest book, Land of Fish and Rice, in fact focuses on Shanghai and the surrounding region, which is quite diverse.
Here am I, Tyler Cowen, I’m in Shanghai. I don’t know Chinese and let’s say I don’t have Chinese friends. And I’m simply lost. How do I figure out where to actually eat in Shanghai? What do I do? What’s the heuristic?
DUNLOP: You could look for recommendations of authentic restaurants, articles by people who perhaps live in Shanghai or who understand the food.
COWEN: Say I’m just on the street. I’m walking. I don’t have my iPad. I’m away from WiFi. There’s Shanghai, there’s me confronting the alien. How do I think about finding what’s good?
DUNLOP: Use your nose, use your eyes. If you’re interested in street food, you’ll find lots of little stalls and shops where they’re cooking in full view. Use your judgment and see what looks exciting.
It’s very difficult in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, to perhaps know exactly what is local Shanghainese, what is from other parts of China because it’s always been a melting pot of different Chinese regional cuisines.
Also, if you want to taste the more refined cooking, then just going around the streets is not really going to help. You do need to do a little bit of research and have a few dishes, perhaps have the names on your phone in Chinese. That would help.
COWEN: Three dishes one absolutely has to try are what?
DUNLOP: In Shanghai?
COWEN: In Shanghai. The city, not the region.
DUNLOP: I think you should have hong shao rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking. Delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes.
I would recommend some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd’s purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghainese cooking.
Then, perhaps, if we’re talking Shanghai, you might one to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures. There’s a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghainese restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.
COWEN: As you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants three, two, one star. There’s cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? To the extent they don’t, what are they missing?
DUNLOP: If you look at the restaurants they’ve selected, there’s a bit of a Cantonese bias. They do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that’s very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants, which are missing from that list, in my opinion.
The reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. Of course in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we’re doing now with a large group and a table full of dishes.
These restaurants that I was surprised not to see on the list, you have to book a private room with a group. If you do, you’ll be able to taste some of the most wonderful renditions of Shanghainese food, and food from the broader region, with a contemporary spirit but a real reverence for traditional technique. You can’t do that really if you just go with one or two people.
by Tyler Cowen with Fuscia Dunlop, Marginal Utility | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Transcript of a 2016 podcast. Ms Dunlop has a new book coming out in October titled: The Food of Sichuan.]
Monday, April 15, 2019
The Legend of Keanu Reeves
Here, before you're quite ready for him, is Keanu Reeves: At the top of the driveway of the Chateau Marmont, smoking a cigarette on a low couch, like he's on his front porch.
He's been coming here since the early '90s. The Chateau was run-down and empty then—a seedier, pre-André Balazs version of itself. The faucets didn't always work. The carpets were dicey. “You didn't want to take your shoes off,” Reeves says.
It felt like anything could happen. Usually it did.
“You could have a conversation,” Reeves says. “You could have a tryst. You could fucking do drugs. You could hang out. For me, there's still that pulse here.”
He basically moved in for a while there. Could be found splashing in the pool with the likes of Sharon Stone or hiding in a corner “playing chess with his computer and smoking compulsively to fight stress,” depending which tabloid tall tale you bought.
Now he lives in a house, not far from here, up in the Hills. He's owned it for about 12 years. Sometimes he sits up there and wonders if it's the house he's going to die in. It's not a preoccupation—he's just curious, if this is going to be it, this place in the Hills. “I didn't think about that,” he says, “when I was 40.” (...)
Today the real Keanu Reeves has that same patchy beard. That same curtain of hair falling into his eyes. He's wearing those same chunky Merrell hiking boots he was wearing pretty much regardless of context long before normcore made The New York Times. You have to look close at the gray flyaways in his eyebrows to remember what year it is.
He's 54 and getting over a cold. His cough sounds like somebody punching their way out of a paper grocery bag. He zips his shaggy black fleece up to the neck. But then a Chateau guy wheels over a heat lamp for Keanu. Another Chateau guy wheels over another heat lamp for the other side of the table. Then the sun comes out, as if it, too, wants to make sure Keanu is warm enough. The sun bounces off the tabletop and up into Keanu's face. It's a nice, low fill light.
Keanu orders a BLT and a Coca-Cola. Fries, not salad. When it comes, the BLT, it'll be on ciabatta bread. Keanu will find himself missing the crispness of toast. Keanu isn't sure a BLT shouldn't leave your soft palate ground up, a little. That a BLT shouldn't have consequences. Soft bread is for soft-bread sandwiches. “Peanut butter and jelly,” Keanu says. Then, more dreamily, like Homer Simpson in reverie: “Peanut butter and honey.”
In his new movie, Reeves again plays John Wick, widowed master assassin and warrior with a broken heart. The first John Wick was shot for $20 million, without real expectations, by Reeves's old Matrix stunt double Chad Stahelski and Stahelski's co-director, David Leitch, who had been longtime stunt coordinators and second-unit directors but had never directed a feature before. And even with Reeves attached, the first Wick was not exactly a hot property at first.
“You have this over-the-hill assassin whose wife dies of natural causes, gives him a puppy, some Russian punk kills his puppy, and he kills 84 people,” Stahelski says. “How many studios do you think said no to that picture? The answer is all of them.”
Stahelski spent years doubling Reeves on three Matrix movies and knew exactly what he was capable of. “I don't know anyone that puts more into the game, collaboratively, physically, intellectually,” he says. “I've never experienced anyone that could have survived [The Matrix]. It just took a different type of person. To be open to that. To allow yourself to be constantly soaking wet, sore, tired, beaten up, for years.” (...)
The Wick films have since become a $140 million franchise, something that no one, including the people involved with them, can quite believe. Starz is making a TV series set in the John Wick universe, further leveraging the series' elaborately detailed underworld-building.
Meanwhile there's John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, which finds John excommunicado—assassins' guild parlance for CANCELED—and on the run from a $14 million bounty after killing a guy in a no-killing zone. But the true stakes are the same as they've always been. John's psychic struggle is what Reeves loves about these ludicrous, gun-crazy movies.
“He's got this beautiful, tragic conundrum—these two selves,” says Reeves. “The John who was married, and John Wick, the assassin. John wants to be free. But the only way he knows how is through John Wick. And John Wick keeps fucking killing people and breaking rules. We're really watching a person fight for their life and their soul.”
Plus in this one he rides around the streets of New York on a fucking horse. Leaked images and videos from the day he shot this scene had half the Internet screaming at John Wick: Chapter 3 to just take their money. Not since Eadweard Muybridge filmed one in the 1870s has a moving picture of a guy riding a horse made people so excited. (...)
He's determined to act like a normal person, even though his mere presence creates an atmosphere of unreality, and it's helped him pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.
You remember. He headlined the Matrix trilogy to the tune of something like $3 billion. Changed the way action movies looked and felt and moved, changed the culture. People come up to him, say it turned them on to cinema, made them question the power structures shaping their perceptions of reality, inspired them to go to grad school.
You'd think he'd have his choice of projects. But you'd be surprised. “Movie jail” is real. He's been there. He was excommunicado at Fox for a decade after turning down Speed 2 to go play Hamlet onstage in fucking Winnipeg: “I didn't work with [Fox] again until The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
He is not in jail now, as far as he knows. But he hasn't done a studio movie since 47 Ronin, another pricey bomb. Sometimes the fan base that remains so grateful for his continued existence does not remember to vote with its dollars. Reeves's name can still help secure financing for action movies of a certain size, and sometimes those turn into a John Wick. He's not unhappy playing John, says he'll make more of these things if the demand is there. “As far as my legs can take me,” he says. “As far as the audience wants to go.”
He's been coming here since the early '90s. The Chateau was run-down and empty then—a seedier, pre-André Balazs version of itself. The faucets didn't always work. The carpets were dicey. “You didn't want to take your shoes off,” Reeves says.
It felt like anything could happen. Usually it did.
“You could have a conversation,” Reeves says. “You could have a tryst. You could fucking do drugs. You could hang out. For me, there's still that pulse here.”
He basically moved in for a while there. Could be found splashing in the pool with the likes of Sharon Stone or hiding in a corner “playing chess with his computer and smoking compulsively to fight stress,” depending which tabloid tall tale you bought.Now he lives in a house, not far from here, up in the Hills. He's owned it for about 12 years. Sometimes he sits up there and wonders if it's the house he's going to die in. It's not a preoccupation—he's just curious, if this is going to be it, this place in the Hills. “I didn't think about that,” he says, “when I was 40.” (...)
Today the real Keanu Reeves has that same patchy beard. That same curtain of hair falling into his eyes. He's wearing those same chunky Merrell hiking boots he was wearing pretty much regardless of context long before normcore made The New York Times. You have to look close at the gray flyaways in his eyebrows to remember what year it is.
He's 54 and getting over a cold. His cough sounds like somebody punching their way out of a paper grocery bag. He zips his shaggy black fleece up to the neck. But then a Chateau guy wheels over a heat lamp for Keanu. Another Chateau guy wheels over another heat lamp for the other side of the table. Then the sun comes out, as if it, too, wants to make sure Keanu is warm enough. The sun bounces off the tabletop and up into Keanu's face. It's a nice, low fill light.
Keanu orders a BLT and a Coca-Cola. Fries, not salad. When it comes, the BLT, it'll be on ciabatta bread. Keanu will find himself missing the crispness of toast. Keanu isn't sure a BLT shouldn't leave your soft palate ground up, a little. That a BLT shouldn't have consequences. Soft bread is for soft-bread sandwiches. “Peanut butter and jelly,” Keanu says. Then, more dreamily, like Homer Simpson in reverie: “Peanut butter and honey.”
In his new movie, Reeves again plays John Wick, widowed master assassin and warrior with a broken heart. The first John Wick was shot for $20 million, without real expectations, by Reeves's old Matrix stunt double Chad Stahelski and Stahelski's co-director, David Leitch, who had been longtime stunt coordinators and second-unit directors but had never directed a feature before. And even with Reeves attached, the first Wick was not exactly a hot property at first.
“You have this over-the-hill assassin whose wife dies of natural causes, gives him a puppy, some Russian punk kills his puppy, and he kills 84 people,” Stahelski says. “How many studios do you think said no to that picture? The answer is all of them.”
Stahelski spent years doubling Reeves on three Matrix movies and knew exactly what he was capable of. “I don't know anyone that puts more into the game, collaboratively, physically, intellectually,” he says. “I've never experienced anyone that could have survived [The Matrix]. It just took a different type of person. To be open to that. To allow yourself to be constantly soaking wet, sore, tired, beaten up, for years.” (...)
The Wick films have since become a $140 million franchise, something that no one, including the people involved with them, can quite believe. Starz is making a TV series set in the John Wick universe, further leveraging the series' elaborately detailed underworld-building.
Meanwhile there's John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, which finds John excommunicado—assassins' guild parlance for CANCELED—and on the run from a $14 million bounty after killing a guy in a no-killing zone. But the true stakes are the same as they've always been. John's psychic struggle is what Reeves loves about these ludicrous, gun-crazy movies.
“He's got this beautiful, tragic conundrum—these two selves,” says Reeves. “The John who was married, and John Wick, the assassin. John wants to be free. But the only way he knows how is through John Wick. And John Wick keeps fucking killing people and breaking rules. We're really watching a person fight for their life and their soul.”
Plus in this one he rides around the streets of New York on a fucking horse. Leaked images and videos from the day he shot this scene had half the Internet screaming at John Wick: Chapter 3 to just take their money. Not since Eadweard Muybridge filmed one in the 1870s has a moving picture of a guy riding a horse made people so excited. (...)
He's determined to act like a normal person, even though his mere presence creates an atmosphere of unreality, and it's helped him pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.
You remember. He headlined the Matrix trilogy to the tune of something like $3 billion. Changed the way action movies looked and felt and moved, changed the culture. People come up to him, say it turned them on to cinema, made them question the power structures shaping their perceptions of reality, inspired them to go to grad school.
You'd think he'd have his choice of projects. But you'd be surprised. “Movie jail” is real. He's been there. He was excommunicado at Fox for a decade after turning down Speed 2 to go play Hamlet onstage in fucking Winnipeg: “I didn't work with [Fox] again until The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
He is not in jail now, as far as he knows. But he hasn't done a studio movie since 47 Ronin, another pricey bomb. Sometimes the fan base that remains so grateful for his continued existence does not remember to vote with its dollars. Reeves's name can still help secure financing for action movies of a certain size, and sometimes those turn into a John Wick. He's not unhappy playing John, says he'll make more of these things if the demand is there. “As far as my legs can take me,” he says. “As far as the audience wants to go.”
by Alex Pappademas GQ | Read more:
Image: Daniel Jackson
Uber IPO: Not for the Squeamish
Uber Technologies’ IPO filing was made public today. The 330-page or so S-1 filing disclosed all kinds of goodies, including detailed but still unaudited pro-forma financial statements as of December 31, 2018, huge losses from operations, big tax benefits, large gains from the sale of some operations, stagnating rideshare revenues, and an enormous list of chilling “Risk Factors” that go beyond the usual CYA.
The filing, however, didn’t disclose the share price, the IPO valuation, and how much money the IPO will raise for Uber. On Tuesday, “people familiar with the matter” had told Reuters that Uber plans to raise $10 billion in the IPO. Most of the IPO shares would be sold by the company to raise funds, and a smaller amount would be sold by investors cashing out, the sources said.
The filing did not confirm this and instead left blanks or used placeholder amounts. But if true, $10 billion in shares sold would make this IPO one of the biggest tech IPOs. And the rumored $90 billion to $100 billion valuation would make it the biggest since Alibaba’s $169 billion IPO.
Uber will need every dime it raises in the IPO going forward because it’s got a little cash-burn situation in its operations that persists going forward, as it admitted in its “Risk Factors,” and it will need to raise more money, and if it cannot raise more money, it might not make it. Uber is upfront about this.
The company has already raised – and mostly burned through – over $20 billion so far in its 10 years of existence. This includes $15 billion in equity funding and over $6 billion in debt. (...)
The huge section of about 50 densely filled pages of “Risk Factors” contains the usual warnings about the things that might happen to the company that are typical in IPO filings. These items are a CYA exercise. If you get wiped out and sue the company or the underwriters, they will point you to the correct paragraph and tell you that you should have read this, and that if you had read this you would have known that you’d get wiped out, or something.
But Uber’s list contains all kinds of other stuff that is unique to the scandal-infested company that is defending itself in court on numerous life-threatening issues.
The filing, however, didn’t disclose the share price, the IPO valuation, and how much money the IPO will raise for Uber. On Tuesday, “people familiar with the matter” had told Reuters that Uber plans to raise $10 billion in the IPO. Most of the IPO shares would be sold by the company to raise funds, and a smaller amount would be sold by investors cashing out, the sources said.The filing did not confirm this and instead left blanks or used placeholder amounts. But if true, $10 billion in shares sold would make this IPO one of the biggest tech IPOs. And the rumored $90 billion to $100 billion valuation would make it the biggest since Alibaba’s $169 billion IPO.
Uber will need every dime it raises in the IPO going forward because it’s got a little cash-burn situation in its operations that persists going forward, as it admitted in its “Risk Factors,” and it will need to raise more money, and if it cannot raise more money, it might not make it. Uber is upfront about this.
The company has already raised – and mostly burned through – over $20 billion so far in its 10 years of existence. This includes $15 billion in equity funding and over $6 billion in debt. (...)
The huge section of about 50 densely filled pages of “Risk Factors” contains the usual warnings about the things that might happen to the company that are typical in IPO filings. These items are a CYA exercise. If you get wiped out and sue the company or the underwriters, they will point you to the correct paragraph and tell you that you should have read this, and that if you had read this you would have known that you’d get wiped out, or something.
But Uber’s list contains all kinds of other stuff that is unique to the scandal-infested company that is defending itself in court on numerous life-threatening issues.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Tiger Woods Wins the 2019 Masters in a Triumph for the Ages
Tiger Woods’s comeback from personal and professional adversity is complete: He captured his fifth Masters title and his 15th major tournament on Sunday, snapping a championship drought of nearly 11 years.
It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a magical, come-from-behind win for a player who had not won a major championship since his personal life began to unravel on Thanksgiving night in 2009, when a marital dispute led to a car accident and a succession of lurid tabloid headlines. On the golf course, he had a series of back and leg injuries that led to an addiction to painkillers and culminated in pain so searing that, before surgery in 2017, he had questioned whether he could play professionally again.
Woods, who at 43 became the second-oldest winner of the Masters at Augusta National, after the then 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus in 1986, last achieved major success in one of golf’s four major tournaments at the 2008 United States Open.
“It’s overwhelming just because of what has transpired,” Woods said in a television interview after it was over. “To now be the champion — 22 years between wins is a long time — it’s unreal for me to experience this. It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”
He had come close on some Sundays to winning his 15th major over the years but could not get it done. Yet after the surgery in 2017, a spinal-fusion procedure he called a “last resort,” he began a new lease on his career. (...)
Woods, in his 22nd Masters appearance, closed with a final round of 70 and finished 13 under par at 275, one stroke better than Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele. He took the lead with just three holes to play after a birdie putt on the par-5 15th hole and held on from there. With thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, organizers of the Masters moved up the start times by five hours. Players were also placed players into groups of three, rather than the traditional two, in hopes of speeding up play.
But by the time the tournament leaders went into the second half of their rounds on Sunday, the wind picked up and it briefly began to rain.
Both of the players with whom Woods was grouped in the final threesome, Francesco Molinari, 36, and Tony Finau, 29, described Woods as their childhood idols. Both eventually succumbed to the pressure of the final round, but Woods did not.
“I was just trying to plod my way along the golf course all day,” Woods said in the televised interview. “All of a sudden I had a lead. Coming up to 18 it was just trying to make a 5. When I tapped the putt in — I don’t know what I did, I know I screamed.”
Now, after more than a decade of being stuck in place, Woods suddenly seems to have a full head of steam moving forward. The next two majors, the P.G.A. Championship at Bethpage Black on Long Island in May and the United States Open at Pebble Beach in California in June, are at courses where Woods has won before. He seems primed to do so again.
Those events seem far off, though. The glow from Sunday will surely last for weeks and months, and will be discussed for years as one of the pivotal moments in the career of an athlete who has been more than a golfer ever since he burst on the scene in 1996.
by Karen Crouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills
[ed. What a Masters. Hats off to Francesco Molinari, Brooks Koepka, DJ, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, and everyone else who played truly great golf this week. See also: He Did It! (Golf Digest). And, The Best Woman Golfer in America (YouTube). Ouch!]
It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a magical, come-from-behind win for a player who had not won a major championship since his personal life began to unravel on Thanksgiving night in 2009, when a marital dispute led to a car accident and a succession of lurid tabloid headlines. On the golf course, he had a series of back and leg injuries that led to an addiction to painkillers and culminated in pain so searing that, before surgery in 2017, he had questioned whether he could play professionally again.
Woods, who at 43 became the second-oldest winner of the Masters at Augusta National, after the then 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus in 1986, last achieved major success in one of golf’s four major tournaments at the 2008 United States Open.“It’s overwhelming just because of what has transpired,” Woods said in a television interview after it was over. “To now be the champion — 22 years between wins is a long time — it’s unreal for me to experience this. It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”
He had come close on some Sundays to winning his 15th major over the years but could not get it done. Yet after the surgery in 2017, a spinal-fusion procedure he called a “last resort,” he began a new lease on his career. (...)
Woods, in his 22nd Masters appearance, closed with a final round of 70 and finished 13 under par at 275, one stroke better than Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele. He took the lead with just three holes to play after a birdie putt on the par-5 15th hole and held on from there. With thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, organizers of the Masters moved up the start times by five hours. Players were also placed players into groups of three, rather than the traditional two, in hopes of speeding up play.
But by the time the tournament leaders went into the second half of their rounds on Sunday, the wind picked up and it briefly began to rain.
Both of the players with whom Woods was grouped in the final threesome, Francesco Molinari, 36, and Tony Finau, 29, described Woods as their childhood idols. Both eventually succumbed to the pressure of the final round, but Woods did not.
“I was just trying to plod my way along the golf course all day,” Woods said in the televised interview. “All of a sudden I had a lead. Coming up to 18 it was just trying to make a 5. When I tapped the putt in — I don’t know what I did, I know I screamed.”
Now, after more than a decade of being stuck in place, Woods suddenly seems to have a full head of steam moving forward. The next two majors, the P.G.A. Championship at Bethpage Black on Long Island in May and the United States Open at Pebble Beach in California in June, are at courses where Woods has won before. He seems primed to do so again.
Those events seem far off, though. The glow from Sunday will surely last for weeks and months, and will be discussed for years as one of the pivotal moments in the career of an athlete who has been more than a golfer ever since he burst on the scene in 1996.
by Karen Crouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills
[ed. What a Masters. Hats off to Francesco Molinari, Brooks Koepka, DJ, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, and everyone else who played truly great golf this week. See also: He Did It! (Golf Digest). And, The Best Woman Golfer in America (YouTube). Ouch!]
Saturday, April 13, 2019
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