via:
Saturday, October 7, 2023
Telegraph Avenue
Michael Chabon, wunderkind of pop-culture-savvy asides and youthful nostalgia, began his first novel while still an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed the manuscript, which he called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and turned it in as his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine, where one of Chabon’s advisors, MacDonald Harris, sent the manuscript (unbeknownst to its author) to a literary agent. It put $155,000 in Chabon’s pocket and thrust him into the blistering heat of the limelight.
Chabon’s colorful endeavors in writing the novel are explored in several of his personal essays (one of which is now published in the P.S. section at the end of Mysteries): in an attic no bigger than a crawlspace in his mother’s house, Chabon balanced on a dangerously feeble chair under the dim glow of a single dangling light bulb and pounded away on a primitive word processor, all of 64 kb of memory at his fingertips, the words scrolling along a screen just five inches wide, with barely enough room to extend his arms. That the novel, a bildungsroman of a recent college grad and his motley crew of friends and acquaintances (bikers, homosexuals, old rich white men, a beautiful but detached young girl named Phlox), has a back-story almost as interesting as the novel itself is the stuff of literary stardom.
It’s this stardom that Chabon has been rebelling against for 25 years.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out in 1988 and was an instant critical and commercial hit. Chabon’s rapid literary ascendancy catalyzed at the peak of the Brat Pack, a group of recent college grads (all of whom honed their prose in workshops, like Chabon) who tackled difficult subject matter—drugs, sex, violence, living in Los Angeles—and favored sparse, minimalist prose. The two archetypes of the movement, Brett Easton Ellis and Jay Mclnerney, drew notoriety with their debuts: Easton’s cocaine-laced Less Than Zero, a pseudo-existentialist depiction of L.A. youth driving on freeways and snorting this and that, came out in 1985, when Easton was only 22; Mclnerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, known for its second-person narration, came out one year earlier and similarly portrays high-brow intellectuals with a penchant for the good snuff.
Together, these two novels marked the beginning of the Brat Pack, and collegiate would-be novelists who sought instant success consequently unleashed a deluge of derivative transgressive slop. (Chabon pokes slightly bitter fun at the mess that was ‘80s workshops in his second novel, Wonder Boys.) (...)
It must have been tempting for critics to lump Chabon in with the Brat Pack. He was young, a workshop survivor, his fiction steeped in sexual yearning and adolescent experimentation. But Chabon had different aspirations. His writing, sometimes dazzling and sometimes flowery, was (and is) voice-dominant. Every page offered sentence after sentence of wonderfully overwrought descriptions of young lust, ambitions outweighed by apathy, youth enveloped by the sultry allure of lazy afternoons spent drinking, smoking, fucking. And his prose exhibited wit, whereas the Brat Pack preferred gloomy brashness. He wrote with empathy, with earnest reflection and self-consciousness, pervaded by sepia-daubed nostalgia. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a lens through which we can view his career, his rise to stardom and his aversion to that stardom, his similar origins to the Brat Pack and all the ways in which he differs from them—in his prose, his life, his fame, his ongoing legacy.
Along with Ellis and Mclerney and, a few years later, Donna Tartt (whose debut, The Secret History, is unquestionably the most ambitious and gorgeously-written of all the writers associated with the Brat Pack), Chabon was held up as the future of American literature; and only Chabon has grown as a writer, has earned a Pulitzer, had one of his novels included in Time’s 100 Novels of the Century. Ellis may have the most notorious Twitter account in America, but only Chabon is still debated and discussed in journals and magazines, his literary worth fought over by esteemed scholars and casual readers. Only Chabon has a reputation to uphold. (...)
Chabon wouldn’t ditch the first-person narrative until 2001, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize. (Not to discredit him, but the competition wasn’t very stiff that year.) More ambitious in scope and subject than his previous efforts, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells a sprawling, decades-spanning tale of two Jewish New Yorker boys, one an escapee of Hitler’s Germany, who collaborate on comics during World War Two. It strives for deep-seeded cultural issues, an attempt to capture the fears and anxieties and proclivities and lusts of a time and place, a dissection of Jewishness and sexual identity and nationalism, of art as escapism and as life support.
In Chabon’s hands, comics, “low art”, become more profound than eight square panels on a page. Like his friend and contemporary Jonathan Lethem, Chabon uses pop-culture as a vessel to explore gentrification and racial and generational schisms, with New York acting as a microcosm. His prose is at its most succinct in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay though still long and verbiage-heavy, each and every sentence has a task, illustrates a theme or develops a character or details the time and place. It’s a long but lean novel, moving quickly and captivatingly. Though in comparison to the preceding 500 pages, the ending feels a little—discounted? unearned? light? This was the novel that established Chabon as a “Great” American Author, not just a wordsmith. (Brett Easton Ellis called it one of the two or three best novels of his generation, whatever that means.) (...)
Transcending Nostalgia
Then came 2012. The world hasn’t yet ended, but Chabon’s reputation began teetering dangerously close to post-Pulitzer self-destruction, like F. Murray Abraham or Adrian Brody or Halle Berry or Cuba Gooding, Jr. after their Oscar wins. He penned the script for the über-expensive mega-flop John Carter, an almost-$300 million disaster, directed by Pixar guru Andrew Stanton in his live-action debut. Though it boasts some impressive visual effects, John Carter earned overwhelmingly mediocre reviews, with particular antipathy directed towards its failure to transcend or improve upon the countless sci-fi serials and epics Burroughs’ work inspired (chief among them Star Wars, and how odd for a film adapted from a seminal work to feel derivative of the other works it inspired) and, in the world of pulp art, mediocrity fares far worse than horridness. (...)
So Telegraph Avenue arrives in the wake of a very bad year for Chabon. Will it redeem him, boost him back to the ranks of the Letter Elite? Or will it convince those on the fence that his best years are indeed behind him?
It would take the entire length of this essay to describe the novel’s plot with any coherent thoroughness, as it’s as contrived and labyrinthine and purposefully dense as the title track on Bitches Brew. Characters flow in and out of the story, which is as non-linear and inconsequential as a Tarantino flick (QT and Miles both act as motif and metaphor here, with numerous references to their albums/ films coming from all sides), with little-to-no back story offered. There’s Archy Stallings (who is black) and Nat Jaffe (who is white), the co-owners of Brokeland Records, a small independent used record store. Archy and Nat struggle to keep Brokeland afloat as vinyl aficionados seem an endangered species, and those who survived the advent of digitalization and P2P piracy, the Great Vinyl Genocide as initiated by Napster and its spawn, now flock to larger, cheaper outlets.
Thence the conflict of the story: the fifth-richest black man in the country, Gibson Goode, former NFL star, is preparing to build one of his string of large, black-oriented malls, called Dogpile Thang, a few blocks from Brokeland, which doesn’t have a prayer of competing with Goode’s immense selection of jazz and funk and soul, his selection deeper, his copies more bountiful, his prices four or five dollars less per disc.
Goode has some sort of history with Archy’s father, Luther, a washed-up would-be icon of ‘70s blaxploitation kung fu films, sometimes drug-user, and full-time disappointment of a father. Chan Flowers, a one-time partner of Luther during Chan’s days of rolling with the Black Panthers (he botches a murder in our first encounter with him, a shotgun and a target no more than five or ten feet away and he somehow misses every vital body part, blowing the guy’s hand off, instead), also has some kind of beef with Luther. Flowers is now a congressman and turncoat to Brokeland as he suddenly switches his position against Dogpile and becomes a proponent of Goode’s monster.
Then there’s Gwen (Archy’s pregnant wife) and Aviva (Nat’s wife and mother of his son), midwives facing the swelling monsoon of a lawsuit that may unravel their friendship. Gwen, four weeks from her due date, is reeling from a brief affair Archy had with the girl who makes Gwen’s smoothies. And Archy’s illegitimate 12-year-old child, the smart-ass and aspiring filmmaker Titus, pops up unexpectedly, his mother dead, nowhere to go. And Nat’s son develops a crush on Titus, who may or may not reciprocate the feelings (he doesn’t say much).
Almost all of this is revealed on the book flap, perhaps in an attempt to clarify readers’ confusion: it’s up to the reader to figure out how someone is related to someone else and what everyone’s motivation is, and it’s often an ordeal. Characters are sketched slowly, and there’s not a whole lot of exposition. No one says, “I hate so and so because of this and that”; Chabon will give us a scene of the characters interacting and we have to decipher what’s going on. It doesn’t sound very complex or earth-shatteringly revelatory, but this is the most subtle Chabon has ever been.
Though it’s concerned with nostalgia (true to form), the prose is written with an of-the-moment intimacy. As loudly as he writes (his comparison of a bald man’s head to a “porn star’s testicle” is one of his less-audacious analogies, and he even reuses that “cup of foaming regret” metaphor, possibly as self-deprecating meta-humor), Chabon whispers about character details and themes more than he bellows. His subtlety is subtly lurking beneath the sheen of five-syllable words and fragmented sentences.
Nothing and no one is above or below Chabon’s prodigious prose. He describes all with equal opportunity opulence. Here, he colors a supporting character who you may or may not forget several pages later: “Rob Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical worker’s union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked in the malefactor thumbs of life.” (...)
The long sentences, ramblings, and seemingly irrelevant details aren’t Chabon unhinged or the author’s mind spraying like a fire hose but the consciousness of an avenue and its inhabitants. When you finally penetrate its glitzy façade, Telegraph Avenue is, ultimately and essentially, Chabon’s Chaboniest novel.
Chabon’s colorful endeavors in writing the novel are explored in several of his personal essays (one of which is now published in the P.S. section at the end of Mysteries): in an attic no bigger than a crawlspace in his mother’s house, Chabon balanced on a dangerously feeble chair under the dim glow of a single dangling light bulb and pounded away on a primitive word processor, all of 64 kb of memory at his fingertips, the words scrolling along a screen just five inches wide, with barely enough room to extend his arms. That the novel, a bildungsroman of a recent college grad and his motley crew of friends and acquaintances (bikers, homosexuals, old rich white men, a beautiful but detached young girl named Phlox), has a back-story almost as interesting as the novel itself is the stuff of literary stardom.
It’s this stardom that Chabon has been rebelling against for 25 years.
Together, these two novels marked the beginning of the Brat Pack, and collegiate would-be novelists who sought instant success consequently unleashed a deluge of derivative transgressive slop. (Chabon pokes slightly bitter fun at the mess that was ‘80s workshops in his second novel, Wonder Boys.) (...)
It must have been tempting for critics to lump Chabon in with the Brat Pack. He was young, a workshop survivor, his fiction steeped in sexual yearning and adolescent experimentation. But Chabon had different aspirations. His writing, sometimes dazzling and sometimes flowery, was (and is) voice-dominant. Every page offered sentence after sentence of wonderfully overwrought descriptions of young lust, ambitions outweighed by apathy, youth enveloped by the sultry allure of lazy afternoons spent drinking, smoking, fucking. And his prose exhibited wit, whereas the Brat Pack preferred gloomy brashness. He wrote with empathy, with earnest reflection and self-consciousness, pervaded by sepia-daubed nostalgia. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a lens through which we can view his career, his rise to stardom and his aversion to that stardom, his similar origins to the Brat Pack and all the ways in which he differs from them—in his prose, his life, his fame, his ongoing legacy.
Along with Ellis and Mclerney and, a few years later, Donna Tartt (whose debut, The Secret History, is unquestionably the most ambitious and gorgeously-written of all the writers associated with the Brat Pack), Chabon was held up as the future of American literature; and only Chabon has grown as a writer, has earned a Pulitzer, had one of his novels included in Time’s 100 Novels of the Century. Ellis may have the most notorious Twitter account in America, but only Chabon is still debated and discussed in journals and magazines, his literary worth fought over by esteemed scholars and casual readers. Only Chabon has a reputation to uphold. (...)
Chabon wouldn’t ditch the first-person narrative until 2001, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize. (Not to discredit him, but the competition wasn’t very stiff that year.) More ambitious in scope and subject than his previous efforts, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells a sprawling, decades-spanning tale of two Jewish New Yorker boys, one an escapee of Hitler’s Germany, who collaborate on comics during World War Two. It strives for deep-seeded cultural issues, an attempt to capture the fears and anxieties and proclivities and lusts of a time and place, a dissection of Jewishness and sexual identity and nationalism, of art as escapism and as life support.
In Chabon’s hands, comics, “low art”, become more profound than eight square panels on a page. Like his friend and contemporary Jonathan Lethem, Chabon uses pop-culture as a vessel to explore gentrification and racial and generational schisms, with New York acting as a microcosm. His prose is at its most succinct in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay though still long and verbiage-heavy, each and every sentence has a task, illustrates a theme or develops a character or details the time and place. It’s a long but lean novel, moving quickly and captivatingly. Though in comparison to the preceding 500 pages, the ending feels a little—discounted? unearned? light? This was the novel that established Chabon as a “Great” American Author, not just a wordsmith. (Brett Easton Ellis called it one of the two or three best novels of his generation, whatever that means.) (...)
Transcending Nostalgia
Then came 2012. The world hasn’t yet ended, but Chabon’s reputation began teetering dangerously close to post-Pulitzer self-destruction, like F. Murray Abraham or Adrian Brody or Halle Berry or Cuba Gooding, Jr. after their Oscar wins. He penned the script for the über-expensive mega-flop John Carter, an almost-$300 million disaster, directed by Pixar guru Andrew Stanton in his live-action debut. Though it boasts some impressive visual effects, John Carter earned overwhelmingly mediocre reviews, with particular antipathy directed towards its failure to transcend or improve upon the countless sci-fi serials and epics Burroughs’ work inspired (chief among them Star Wars, and how odd for a film adapted from a seminal work to feel derivative of the other works it inspired) and, in the world of pulp art, mediocrity fares far worse than horridness. (...)
So Telegraph Avenue arrives in the wake of a very bad year for Chabon. Will it redeem him, boost him back to the ranks of the Letter Elite? Or will it convince those on the fence that his best years are indeed behind him?
It would take the entire length of this essay to describe the novel’s plot with any coherent thoroughness, as it’s as contrived and labyrinthine and purposefully dense as the title track on Bitches Brew. Characters flow in and out of the story, which is as non-linear and inconsequential as a Tarantino flick (QT and Miles both act as motif and metaphor here, with numerous references to their albums/ films coming from all sides), with little-to-no back story offered. There’s Archy Stallings (who is black) and Nat Jaffe (who is white), the co-owners of Brokeland Records, a small independent used record store. Archy and Nat struggle to keep Brokeland afloat as vinyl aficionados seem an endangered species, and those who survived the advent of digitalization and P2P piracy, the Great Vinyl Genocide as initiated by Napster and its spawn, now flock to larger, cheaper outlets.
Thence the conflict of the story: the fifth-richest black man in the country, Gibson Goode, former NFL star, is preparing to build one of his string of large, black-oriented malls, called Dogpile Thang, a few blocks from Brokeland, which doesn’t have a prayer of competing with Goode’s immense selection of jazz and funk and soul, his selection deeper, his copies more bountiful, his prices four or five dollars less per disc.
Goode has some sort of history with Archy’s father, Luther, a washed-up would-be icon of ‘70s blaxploitation kung fu films, sometimes drug-user, and full-time disappointment of a father. Chan Flowers, a one-time partner of Luther during Chan’s days of rolling with the Black Panthers (he botches a murder in our first encounter with him, a shotgun and a target no more than five or ten feet away and he somehow misses every vital body part, blowing the guy’s hand off, instead), also has some kind of beef with Luther. Flowers is now a congressman and turncoat to Brokeland as he suddenly switches his position against Dogpile and becomes a proponent of Goode’s monster.
Then there’s Gwen (Archy’s pregnant wife) and Aviva (Nat’s wife and mother of his son), midwives facing the swelling monsoon of a lawsuit that may unravel their friendship. Gwen, four weeks from her due date, is reeling from a brief affair Archy had with the girl who makes Gwen’s smoothies. And Archy’s illegitimate 12-year-old child, the smart-ass and aspiring filmmaker Titus, pops up unexpectedly, his mother dead, nowhere to go. And Nat’s son develops a crush on Titus, who may or may not reciprocate the feelings (he doesn’t say much).
Almost all of this is revealed on the book flap, perhaps in an attempt to clarify readers’ confusion: it’s up to the reader to figure out how someone is related to someone else and what everyone’s motivation is, and it’s often an ordeal. Characters are sketched slowly, and there’s not a whole lot of exposition. No one says, “I hate so and so because of this and that”; Chabon will give us a scene of the characters interacting and we have to decipher what’s going on. It doesn’t sound very complex or earth-shatteringly revelatory, but this is the most subtle Chabon has ever been.
Though it’s concerned with nostalgia (true to form), the prose is written with an of-the-moment intimacy. As loudly as he writes (his comparison of a bald man’s head to a “porn star’s testicle” is one of his less-audacious analogies, and he even reuses that “cup of foaming regret” metaphor, possibly as self-deprecating meta-humor), Chabon whispers about character details and themes more than he bellows. His subtlety is subtly lurking beneath the sheen of five-syllable words and fragmented sentences.
Nothing and no one is above or below Chabon’s prodigious prose. He describes all with equal opportunity opulence. Here, he colors a supporting character who you may or may not forget several pages later: “Rob Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical worker’s union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked in the malefactor thumbs of life.” (...)
This makes the novel a difficult read for the first two-hundred pages or so, as you have to keep flipping back to remind yourself of minute characters who are often referred to by several names and monikers (Who the hell is Gary? Oh, Mr. Singletary, aka the King of Bling, aka Brokeland’s landlord, aka friend of Archy and Nat, aka Aisha’s father). This really gets disconcerting where race is concerned: ethnicity and racial heritage weave through the novel, a serpentine theme coiled around every character and every page, slithering through every conversation, not overtly manifested like nostalgia in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but intangible, ethereal; imperceptible and eternal to nostalgia’s ephemeral avowal; race as a culture and ethnicity as persona, music and movies and lexicon and fashion and sexual tendencies all rooted in one’s genetic make-up, the countries from whence one’s lineage stems.
Chabon doesn’t reveal the race of his characters to us, and only sometimes mentions it in passing (Gwen calls a doctor racist, says something like “my black ass,” etc.). It’s a little uncomfortable trying to decipher a character’s ethnicity, the average reader not wanting to concede to stereotyping, but this is all part of Chabon’s brilliance: he doesn’t bring direct attention to race (though it eventually feels like the main thread connecting the events and characters). He treats it naturally, almost casually. It’s frustrating for a long while, but when you start to get it, the novel falls into place brilliantly. (...)
Chabon doesn’t reveal the race of his characters to us, and only sometimes mentions it in passing (Gwen calls a doctor racist, says something like “my black ass,” etc.). It’s a little uncomfortable trying to decipher a character’s ethnicity, the average reader not wanting to concede to stereotyping, but this is all part of Chabon’s brilliance: he doesn’t bring direct attention to race (though it eventually feels like the main thread connecting the events and characters). He treats it naturally, almost casually. It’s frustrating for a long while, but when you start to get it, the novel falls into place brilliantly. (...)
The long sentences, ramblings, and seemingly irrelevant details aren’t Chabon unhinged or the author’s mind spraying like a fire hose but the consciousness of an avenue and its inhabitants. When you finally penetrate its glitzy façade, Telegraph Avenue is, ultimately and essentially, Chabon’s Chaboniest novel.
by Greg Cwik, Pop Matters | Read more:
Image: Telegraph Avenue via
[ed. Just finished reading Hernan Diaz's Trust today (excellent) and picked up Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I've been meaning to get to for a while. Then wondered if I should re-read Telegraph Avenue, since it's been so long. A lot of people don't get it for reasons well articulated here, but I thought it was great. Also great: Kavalier and Clay.]
The Harrowing Heat Hump
According to a new report from Berkeley Earth, August 2023 was the planet’s hottest August since written records began in 1850, with temperatures hovering 1.7 °C above the historical baseline.
Image: Berkeley Earth
What the Heck Happened in 2012?
Image: via
[ed. Wierd. I've felt for a long time that 2012 was a watershed year too, but just assumed it was me. I lost my mother, my partner, and the place I'd been living in for most of my adult life (Alaska - relocating to Washington state). Apparently there were other significant things happening around that time too.]
Friday, October 6, 2023
Swiftology
July 7 has arrived, the sun has risen, and Kansas City is waking to the Taypocalypse.
The economic and cultural juggernaut that is Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has thundered into town for two long-awaited shows at Arrowhead Stadium. My 14-year-old daughter is out of bed shockingly early for a high school student on summer break—especially considering that last night, at 11 p.m., Swift dropped her latest album, the rerecorded Taylor’s Version of her 2010 LP “Speak Now,” the most recent flex in the 33-year-old global pop star’s ongoing power move to reclaim control of her back catalog by releasing note-for-note reconstructions of early albums whose master tapes were sold against her wishes. Any new music release—even new old music—is a major happening for millions of Swifties (as the worldwide community of hardcore Taylor Swift fans call themselves) who analyze and debate every song lyric, Instagram photo, tweet and snippet of stage patter like scripture.
The buzz this morning, my daughter tells me, is that Swift changed a lyric in one of her “Speak Now” songs that some fans and critics had deemed sexist. This development is not entirely surprising, but still thrilling for the Swiftie legions who stayed up half the night playing, deconstructing and discussing the new release. This is the first of what will be many news flashes today. My daughter, against all odds, has landed tickets to one of the Kansas City shows, defying scalper bots and Ticketmaster’s meltdown, thanks to the help of her mother, aunt and cousin, who spent hours online during the Nov. 15 presale. It takes a village to raise a Swiftie.
The economic and cultural juggernaut that is Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has thundered into town for two long-awaited shows at Arrowhead Stadium. My 14-year-old daughter is out of bed shockingly early for a high school student on summer break—especially considering that last night, at 11 p.m., Swift dropped her latest album, the rerecorded Taylor’s Version of her 2010 LP “Speak Now,” the most recent flex in the 33-year-old global pop star’s ongoing power move to reclaim control of her back catalog by releasing note-for-note reconstructions of early albums whose master tapes were sold against her wishes. Any new music release—even new old music—is a major happening for millions of Swifties (as the worldwide community of hardcore Taylor Swift fans call themselves) who analyze and debate every song lyric, Instagram photo, tweet and snippet of stage patter like scripture.
The Eras Tour will inject around $4.6 billion into the U.S. economy and is expected to propel Swift herself to billionaire status. More than 110,000 ticket holders will pack Arrowhead for the Friday and Saturday night concerts, and many of them will be screaming teenage girls. But not all. Also out in force will be Taylor mamas introducing their daughters to Swiftie culture, Swiftie dads gamely sporting themed T-shirts emblazoned with song lyrics, college students attending their third or fourth show in the retrospective journey through the singer’s 17-year career, plus Gaylors, OG Swifties and a host of other subgroups that defy the common stereotype that the obsession with all things Taylor is exclusively a teen mania.
Among them will be a 51-year-old KU sociology professor whose scholarship and award-winning teaching focus largely on cultural sociology, which is concerned with the study of societal institutions, norms and practices. The author of three books that have peered into popular culture’s seedier corners, Brian Donovan will bring to his first Taylor Swift show the dual interests of a social scientist and a fan. Thanks to a research pivot that has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, the professor and self-described Swiftie is now concentrating his teaching and scholarship on the entertainment icon—in particular, on a product of her music and the community around it that is more difficult to quantify than tax revenue and other economic boosts, but that is essential for human well-being:
Joy.
Donovan joined the KU sociology faculty in 2001 and for two decades has taught the department’s class in cultural sociology. The class explores popular culture, and in the past few years the professor noticed that students often mentioned Taylor Swift in class discussions. Those references increased during the pandemic, which coincided with an uptick in Donovan’s own interest in Swift’s music.
He has considered himself a “low-key” fan since 2014, having bought Swift’s fifth album when it came out.
“I was really late to the party, but I fell in love with ‘1989,’” Donovan says. “I thought it was a perfect pop album. But I didn’t consider myself a Swiftie.”
He listened to her next album, “Reputation,” and followed the celebrity news about her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. A documentary on Swift, “Miss Americana,” provided a glimpse into her private life and hinted at a greater depth lurking behind her public persona.
But it was the pandemic that moved Donovan from casual fan to Swiftie. In 2020, while presumably on lockdown like many of her fans, Swift made two spare, folk-influenced albums. As families coped with isolation and schoolchildren’s relationships with friends and teachers suddenly narrowed to computer screens, Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” arrived like a double shot of hope. Hearing her music ringing out during breaks from Zoom school offered consolation that at least some of the traditional delights of childhood were still there for the taking.
“When she released those two albums and I heard the song ‘The Last Great American Dynasty,’ something just clicked,” Donovan says. “That song seemed so brilliant to me that I just fell down the rabbit hole. I was listening to her back catalog and realizing I’d had a lot of preconceptions about her as a musician. I realized what a genius she was.
“I can claim that I was a fan during the ‘1989’ era, which is true, but like a lot of men my age, I only started to identify as a Swiftie in the ‘Folklore’ era.” (...)
Thus was born The Sociology of Taylor Swift, an honors seminar that (according to the syllabus) uses the pop supernova’s life and career “as a mirrorball to reflect on large-scale processes like the culture industry, celebrity, fandom, and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American life.” The class, new this fall, will explore many of the cultural sociology topics Donovan normally teaches, such as the construction of authenticity, symbolic boundaries and gatekeeping, fandom and fan labor, and celebrity politics. “We will also use recent controversies and legal conflicts involving Swift,” the syllabus continues, “to examine questions about intellectual property, copyright, and the economics of creative industries.”
by Steven Hill, Kansas Alumni | Read more:
Among them will be a 51-year-old KU sociology professor whose scholarship and award-winning teaching focus largely on cultural sociology, which is concerned with the study of societal institutions, norms and practices. The author of three books that have peered into popular culture’s seedier corners, Brian Donovan will bring to his first Taylor Swift show the dual interests of a social scientist and a fan. Thanks to a research pivot that has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, the professor and self-described Swiftie is now concentrating his teaching and scholarship on the entertainment icon—in particular, on a product of her music and the community around it that is more difficult to quantify than tax revenue and other economic boosts, but that is essential for human well-being:
Joy.
Donovan joined the KU sociology faculty in 2001 and for two decades has taught the department’s class in cultural sociology. The class explores popular culture, and in the past few years the professor noticed that students often mentioned Taylor Swift in class discussions. Those references increased during the pandemic, which coincided with an uptick in Donovan’s own interest in Swift’s music.
He has considered himself a “low-key” fan since 2014, having bought Swift’s fifth album when it came out.
“I was really late to the party, but I fell in love with ‘1989,’” Donovan says. “I thought it was a perfect pop album. But I didn’t consider myself a Swiftie.”
He listened to her next album, “Reputation,” and followed the celebrity news about her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. A documentary on Swift, “Miss Americana,” provided a glimpse into her private life and hinted at a greater depth lurking behind her public persona.
But it was the pandemic that moved Donovan from casual fan to Swiftie. In 2020, while presumably on lockdown like many of her fans, Swift made two spare, folk-influenced albums. As families coped with isolation and schoolchildren’s relationships with friends and teachers suddenly narrowed to computer screens, Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” arrived like a double shot of hope. Hearing her music ringing out during breaks from Zoom school offered consolation that at least some of the traditional delights of childhood were still there for the taking.
“When she released those two albums and I heard the song ‘The Last Great American Dynasty,’ something just clicked,” Donovan says. “That song seemed so brilliant to me that I just fell down the rabbit hole. I was listening to her back catalog and realizing I’d had a lot of preconceptions about her as a musician. I realized what a genius she was.
“I can claim that I was a fan during the ‘1989’ era, which is true, but like a lot of men my age, I only started to identify as a Swiftie in the ‘Folklore’ era.” (...)
Thus was born The Sociology of Taylor Swift, an honors seminar that (according to the syllabus) uses the pop supernova’s life and career “as a mirrorball to reflect on large-scale processes like the culture industry, celebrity, fandom, and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American life.” The class, new this fall, will explore many of the cultural sociology topics Donovan normally teaches, such as the construction of authenticity, symbolic boundaries and gatekeeping, fandom and fan labor, and celebrity politics. “We will also use recent controversies and legal conflicts involving Swift,” the syllabus continues, “to examine questions about intellectual property, copyright, and the economics of creative industries.”
by Steven Hill, Kansas Alumni | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Same with me, when I heard The Last Great American Dynasty I became a believer - just the casual and matter of fact statement "... then it was bought by me". Wow. As evocative a story as Eleanor Rigby.]
Thursday, October 5, 2023
David (Foster) Wallace's Syllabus
etc.
by Sophia, À LA SOPHIA | Read more: (pdf)
Images: DFW/Pomona College 2005
[ed. Now this is how you write a course syllabus (and I'd be suitably terrified). It also says a lot about the instructor.]
via:
These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
Do (Some) Women See More Colors Than Men?
Based on Dr. Neitz's estimates, there could be 99 million women in the world with true four-color vision. However, before they pat themselves on the back for their superior evolution, he said, it is important to note that humans are just getting back to where birds, amphibians and reptiles have been for eons.
Do Women see More Colors than Men? (Sciplanet)Those creatures have long had four-color vision, but a main difference is that their fourth type of color detector is in the high-frequency ultraviolet range, beyond where humans can see. In fact, that conclusion allowed scientists to figure out recently why the males of some species of birds did not appear to have brighter plumage than the females, Dr. Neitz said.
The problem was in the observers, not the birds, he said. When those species were viewed through ultraviolet detectors, the males had markedly different feathers than the females.
Fear not men! For despite being excluded from the beautiful colors the rest of the animal kingdom has access to, you can see (again, on average) motion better than your opposite sex. This is why it is the fate of all men to march about oblivious, existing solely in a gray world without color, sensitive only to motion, lumbering around like the Tyrannosauruses in Jurassic Park as our faces become distended, our skin scaly and rough, our arms becoming tinier as our legs and bellies grow huge, and all the while we glare beadily out of our cavernous eye sockets so we can catch, at a glimmer, the smallest of movements. It is only when activated by such a tick of motion that we come alive and can speedily shift our bulk into a killing blow dealt with lethal grace. An athleticism now mostly reserved for flies that get into the house. (via)
Image: Tetrachromacy/Wikipedia
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Nothing Is Better Than This
The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’
“A normal floor lamp is meant to go alongside a chair,” he says, springing up and placing his hand on an imaginary object level with his seat. “So it would be about that high off the ground, which, if you’re standing, that’s not a good place for illumination of your face.” Then he points above his head. “We want it to be about here. So we had to artificially extend the lamp to still have it look like a floor lamp.”
Byrne’s Fred Astaire–esque, extra-tall light fixture routine, scored by “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” is still understandably fresh in his memory. Four decades later, it’s one of the many surreal moments in Stop Making Sense that are impossible to shake. Shot over the course of a handful of Talking Heads concerts at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, the late Jonathan Demme’s film is as transfixingly propulsive today as it was when it came out in 1984.
There are no interviews, no breaks, and no fooling around. It’s pure performance. But the way Byrne sees it, the show isn’t just a show. It’s a journey toward selflessness. “As the show builds, the music becomes funkier, and it becomes harder to maintain this self that’s outside of that,” he says. “You just have to surrender to it.”
The frontman starts out on a bare stage, alone with an acoustic guitar and a boom box, and ends up as part of a collective. “As a musician, you strive for that,” Harrison says. “You’re entirely in the moment of that music. You stop being self-conscious because you’re just all there.”
This month, Byrne is back jiggling around in his big suit on the big screen. Thanks to the discovery of the movie’s original negative, A24 is releasing a restored version of Stop Making Sense in 4K in IMAX and standard theaters. Years of tension led Byrne to officially break up the band in 1991, but the members of Talking Heads know that their film will always be around to bring the party. “We’re very proud that this is our legacy, that we have this,” says bassist Tina Weymouth, who’s been married to drummer Chris Frantz since 1977. “And we’re so grateful that Jonathan Demme was the one to approach us and say, ‘Hey, this needs to be shot.’”
Part 1: “What Is This Guy On?”
In the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme was still a decade out from receiving an Academy Award for directing The Silence of the Lambs, but he had already earned a reputation as an artful filmmaker. After his dramatic comedy Melvin and Howard won two Oscars, he was hired to make Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, and Ed Harris. The production was a disaster: frustrated stars, rewrites, reshoots, and one miserable director. Demme needed a palate cleanser.
Around the same time, Talking Heads was preparing to go on the road to support its new album, Speaking in Tongues. The conceptual tour, which featured a series of slides and images on projection screens and an expanded lineup—including singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Alex Weir, and percussionist Steve Scales—reflected Byrne and the band’s art school roots.
Adelle Lutz (creative consultant and Byrne’s former wife): The show had been on tour for quite a while. I’d been going to Lincoln Center, the Library for the Performing Arts, quite a bit. I said to Dave then, “Even if it’s only for our records, even if it’s only me with a VHS machine at the back of the theater, it should be documented for the library.” And so he said, “Well, let me talk to our manager.” Gary Kurfirst was everyone’s manager—the Clash, the Eurythmics, Ramones—and so David mentioned to Gary the possibility of filming this. And one of his ideas was “Let me talk to MTV.”
And so David said, “Before you talk to them, I have to watch concert movies on TV.” And so he watched everything. All we had was this little Sony Trinitron. And it had my sticker on it that said, “Kill Your TV.” It was seriously puny. And nothing looked good. Altamont didn’t look good. The Last Waltz didn’t look good. And then he saw Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. All of a sudden, he knew that it was possible to do a show and film it and project it.
Sandy McLeod (visual consultant): David actually made a concert tour that had a narrative to it, which was pretty unusual. (...)
Byrne: I’m surprised that a lot of people don’t realize this, that the film is basically a document of the tour that we were doing but with a few songs cut out to streamline it a bit. So it’s not like Jonathan came in with the concept. It was there. That’s not to take anything away from what he did, but what you see is what we were doing, and what he did was to bring out the relationships and interactions between all the band members throughout the show and the characters of each, as if it was acting, as if it was a story.
McLeod: Even though it’s very subtle and not a narrative in any traditional sense, it still has this story that evolves with the lighting effects, the music, and the stories that David tells of the songs. I think Jonathan really got that, loved it, appreciated it, and helped bring that forward.
Byrne: That’s what he saw, and I thought, “That’s not something I would’ve seen.”
Jerry Harrison (guitar and keys): It brought an intimacy to it. The camera blows up interactions that you wouldn’t see. (...)
Ednah Holt (backing vocals): I can tell you that I’m getting chills as I talk to you. This is years later, and I still get the chills.
Lynn Mabry (backing vocals): It was really a collective, of course. David being front and center—I think his take on his own style and music and the way he delivered it, or at least shared it with the audience, was very unique and very entertaining. Then you had the band, you had the musicians, and us, the singers, and we added a new flavor. It was a mixture of retro pop and rock ’n’ roll, and then you had R&B in there. It was soulful. (...)
Steve Scales (percussion): We rehearsed, and we rehearsed, and we rehearsed, but nobody inside quite could get what the heck the picture was in David’s head.
Mabry: At rehearsal I would be watching David performing, and then watch him in front of a mirror, coming up with all of those crazy moves. That was weird. It was like, “What is this guy on?” And he was completely straight. He never drank. He never smoked. Water and clean food.
Scales: He would be in my room at night, or somebody else’s room, doing these crazy little things. We said, “Man, you should do that in the show.” And he would do that in the show. He put it in. (...)
Scales: When we did Forest Hills, Mick Jagger changed his seat five times trying to figure out what the hell we were doing.
Weymouth: This stuff does make you scratch your head. Why choose this? And it’s just sort of like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just part of the entertainment factor.” And so we just thought, “The people who are working with us, they liked it. The crew liked it. We liked it. Hopefully the fans will like it.”
Scales: The first show we did was in Hampton, Virginia. When we finished playing, we were in the dressing room for at least an hour, and the crew said, “You got to come out and see this.” The upper deck of this arena, one side of it was still there, still singing.
Holt: We had fun every night. Every night. It was so much fun that I actually said, “We’re going to die. This is it. This is our last gig.” (...)
Harrison: David was in the challenging position of having to not only be the performer and play his own parts, but also having to run out all the time and see what it looked like.
McLeod: One of the backup singers decided to get her hair cut for the show, and, of course, their hair was really important in the movement in the show.
Holt: I don’t even know what I was thinking. I had no idea that would be important for the movie.
Lisa Day (editor): David was so beside himself.
Holt: David was real nice. He never showed me that side, but he said, “I think it’d be best if you put your hair back. Because it really worked.” I said, “OK.” He had Lynn find a hairdresser to match what we had.
McLeod: That’s an incredibly laborious situation, to replace the missing locs. It didn’t seem to impair her energy at all. She was incredibly vivacious on stage.
McLeod: One of the backup singers decided to get her hair cut for the show, and, of course, their hair was really important in the movement in the show.
Holt: I don’t even know what I was thinking. I had no idea that would be important for the movie.
Lisa Day (editor): David was so beside himself.
Holt: David was real nice. He never showed me that side, but he said, “I think it’d be best if you put your hair back. Because it really worked.” I said, “OK.” He had Lynn find a hairdresser to match what we had.
McLeod: That’s an incredibly laborious situation, to replace the missing locs. It didn’t seem to impair her energy at all. She was incredibly vivacious on stage.
by Alan Siegel, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Stop Making Sense via
Lou Reed
Lou Reed: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Erased’ (Vulture)
[ed. As one commenter puts it, there's a reason this song never gets covered... it can't be improved. Dick Wagner & Steve Hunter on guitars.]
Why We’ll Never Live in Space
"Human bodies really can't handle space. Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head, which may be pathological for the brain over the long term—among other things. (...)
Perhaps the most significant concern about bodies in space, though, is radiation, something that is manageable for today's astronauts flying in low-Earth orbit but would be a bigger deal for people traveling farther and for longer. Some of it comes from the sun, which spews naked protons that can damage DNA, particularly during solar storms. (...)
Even if most of the body's issues can be fixed, the brain remains a problem. A 2021 review paper in Clinical Neuropsychiatry laid out the psychological risks that astronauts face on their journey, according to existing research on spacefarers and analog astronauts: poor emotional regulation, reduced resilience, increased anxiety and depression, communication problems within the team, sleep disturbances, and decreased cognitive and motor functioning brought on by stress. To imagine why these issues arise, picture yourself in a tin can with a small crew, a deadly environment outside, a monotonous schedule, an unnatural daytime-nighttime cycle and mission controllers constantly on your case.
Physical and mental health problems—though dire—aren't even necessarily the most immediate hurdles to making a space settlement happen. The larger issue is the cost. And who's going to pay for it?"
Perhaps the most significant concern about bodies in space, though, is radiation, something that is manageable for today's astronauts flying in low-Earth orbit but would be a bigger deal for people traveling farther and for longer. Some of it comes from the sun, which spews naked protons that can damage DNA, particularly during solar storms. (...)
Even if most of the body's issues can be fixed, the brain remains a problem. A 2021 review paper in Clinical Neuropsychiatry laid out the psychological risks that astronauts face on their journey, according to existing research on spacefarers and analog astronauts: poor emotional regulation, reduced resilience, increased anxiety and depression, communication problems within the team, sleep disturbances, and decreased cognitive and motor functioning brought on by stress. To imagine why these issues arise, picture yourself in a tin can with a small crew, a deadly environment outside, a monotonous schedule, an unnatural daytime-nighttime cycle and mission controllers constantly on your case.
Physical and mental health problems—though dire—aren't even necessarily the most immediate hurdles to making a space settlement happen. The larger issue is the cost. And who's going to pay for it?"
by Sarah Scoles, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Tavis Coburn[ed. Maybe not physically, but perhaps something something something combined... AI, transhumanism, robotics, metaverse, time and evolution? No idea.]
The College Backlash Is Going Too Far
Americans are losing their faith in higher education. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, more than half of respondents said that a bachelor’s degree isn’t worth the cost. Young people were the most skeptical. As a recent New York Times Magazine cover story put it, “For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.” The article drew heavily on research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which found that rising student-loan burdens have lowered the value proposition of a four-year degree.
American higher education certainly has its problems. But the bad vibes around college threaten to obscure an important economic reality: Most young people are still far better off with a four-year college degree than without one.
Historically, analysis of higher education’s value tends to focus on the so-called college wage premium. That premium has always been massive—college graduates earn much more than people without a degree, on average—but it doesn’t take into account the cost of getting a degree. So the St. Louis Fed researchers devised a new metric, the college wealth premium, to try to get a more complete picture. They compared the wealth premium of people born in the 1980s with that enjoyed by earlier cohorts. Because those earlier generations have been alive longer and thus have had more time to build wealth, the researchers projected out the future earnings of the younger cohort. They found that the lifetime wealth premium will be lower for people born in the 1980s than for any previous generation.
That analysis, however, suffers from a key oversight. In estimating the lifetime earnings for people who are now in their 30s and early 40s, the researchers assumed that the college wage premium will stay constant throughout their life. In fact, it almost surely will not. For Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and older Millennials, the college wage premium has more than doubled between the ages of 25 and 50, from less than 40 percent to nearly 80 percent. Likewise, the college wealth premium for past generations was initially very small but grew rapidly after age 40. History tells us that the best is yet to come for today’s recent graduates.
Wages grow faster for more-educated workers because college is a gateway to professional occupations, such as business and engineering, in which workers learn new skills, get promoted, and gain managerial experience. Most noncollege workers, in contrast, end up in personal services and blue-collar occupations, for which wages tend to stagnate over time.
For example, truck drivers in the U.S. earn an average annual salary of about $48,700, according to my analysis of data from the American Community Survey. (Full-time unionized drivers can make much more, but they’re in the minority.) That’s close to the average annual income for four-year college graduates working full-time at age 24. It’s easy to see why some young people might look at those numbers and opt against borrowing money to attend a four-year college. Yet the math will be very different a decade later. For example, average earnings in business occupations, where almost everyone has a four-year degree, are about $50,000 at age 24, but double to $100,000 by age 50. Average earnings for truck drivers grow from about $36,000 to only about $51,000 over the same period. The earnings advantage for college graduates increases steadily with work experience, until eventually they are earning nearly twice as much as workers with only a high-school degree.
The debt timeline is basically the reverse. Most federal student loans have a repayment period of only 10 years, which begins shortly after graduation. (The exception is income-based and income-driven repayment loans, which charge a share of borrowers’ discretionary income for 20 to 25 years. These are about a quarter of all loans today and were less common several years ago. Private loans vary in term length, but most are about 10 years.) This means that the typical college graduate must completely repay their loans by their mid-30s. In other words, the earnings premium from a bachelor’s degree is smallest in the years when graduates are also paying down their debts. We are effectively asking a 17-year-old high-school student to delay gratification until age 35 or later—longer than they have been alive. But the rewards are worth it. (...)
American higher education certainly has its problems. But the bad vibes around college threaten to obscure an important economic reality: Most young people are still far better off with a four-year college degree than without one.
That analysis, however, suffers from a key oversight. In estimating the lifetime earnings for people who are now in their 30s and early 40s, the researchers assumed that the college wage premium will stay constant throughout their life. In fact, it almost surely will not. For Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and older Millennials, the college wage premium has more than doubled between the ages of 25 and 50, from less than 40 percent to nearly 80 percent. Likewise, the college wealth premium for past generations was initially very small but grew rapidly after age 40. History tells us that the best is yet to come for today’s recent graduates.
Wages grow faster for more-educated workers because college is a gateway to professional occupations, such as business and engineering, in which workers learn new skills, get promoted, and gain managerial experience. Most noncollege workers, in contrast, end up in personal services and blue-collar occupations, for which wages tend to stagnate over time.
For example, truck drivers in the U.S. earn an average annual salary of about $48,700, according to my analysis of data from the American Community Survey. (Full-time unionized drivers can make much more, but they’re in the minority.) That’s close to the average annual income for four-year college graduates working full-time at age 24. It’s easy to see why some young people might look at those numbers and opt against borrowing money to attend a four-year college. Yet the math will be very different a decade later. For example, average earnings in business occupations, where almost everyone has a four-year degree, are about $50,000 at age 24, but double to $100,000 by age 50. Average earnings for truck drivers grow from about $36,000 to only about $51,000 over the same period. The earnings advantage for college graduates increases steadily with work experience, until eventually they are earning nearly twice as much as workers with only a high-school degree.
The debt timeline is basically the reverse. Most federal student loans have a repayment period of only 10 years, which begins shortly after graduation. (The exception is income-based and income-driven repayment loans, which charge a share of borrowers’ discretionary income for 20 to 25 years. These are about a quarter of all loans today and were less common several years ago. Private loans vary in term length, but most are about 10 years.) This means that the typical college graduate must completely repay their loans by their mid-30s. In other words, the earnings premium from a bachelor’s degree is smallest in the years when graduates are also paying down their debts. We are effectively asking a 17-year-old high-school student to delay gratification until age 35 or later—longer than they have been alive. But the rewards are worth it. (...)
Negative public sentiment might dissuade some people from going to college when it is in their long-run interest to do so. The potential harm is greatest for low- and middle-income students, for whom college costs are most salient. Wealthy families will continue to send their kids to four-year colleges, footing the bill and setting their children up for long-term success.
Indeed, highly educated elites in journalism, business, and academia are among those most likely to question the value of a four-year degree, even if their life choices don’t reflect that skepticism. In a recent New America poll, only 38 percent of respondents with household incomes greater than $100,000 said a bachelor’s degree was necessary for adults in the U.S to be financially secure. When asked about their own family members, however, that number jumped to 58 percent.
Indeed, highly educated elites in journalism, business, and academia are among those most likely to question the value of a four-year degree, even if their life choices don’t reflect that skepticism. In a recent New America poll, only 38 percent of respondents with household incomes greater than $100,000 said a bachelor’s degree was necessary for adults in the U.S to be financially secure. When asked about their own family members, however, that number jumped to 58 percent.
[ed. And, of course, the benefits of being surrounded by people who, like you, are all experiencing a critical time in their transition to adulthood with different life strategies and perspectives.]
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
What Was In It For Them?
John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president in an exclusive statement to CNN.
Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”
CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story. An updated statement from a Trump campaign spokesperson on Tuesday said, “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.
And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”
“Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in Arlington.”
“I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”
CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story. An updated statement from a Trump campaign spokesperson on Tuesday said, “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.
And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”
“Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in Arlington.”
“I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
by Jake Tapper, CNN | Read more:
Image: Aaron P. Bernstein /Getty/ via People[ed. The title of this essay could be addressed to anyone who went to work in the Trump administration. Kelly was an enabler who hardly covered himself in glory while working there (even while listening to all this). Too late now. But hey Trump "patriots" (ha!), always nice to know what your leader is 'thinking' (yeah... fake news).]
Monday, October 2, 2023
Inside the Cult of Buc-ee’s
How a Texas gas station became the people’s pump.
A trip to the gas station usually warrants more of a hurried waddle to the bathroom than a commemorative TikTok. But most gas stations are not Buc-ee’s.
The Texas-based (and Texas-supersized) gas and convenience store chain offers much more than a place to fuel up and grab a bag of chips. Its devoted fans make regular pilgrimages, sometimes driving hundreds of miles, to stock up on Beaver Nuggets and brisket and merch with its bucktoothed mascot’s smiling face. Even its restrooms are award-winning.
Dylan and Shelby Reese, a husband-and-wife TikTok team, have been loyal Buc-ee’s customers since the chain first arrived in Alabama in 2019, opening its first location outside of Texas. In a June video that’s been viewed more than 6.7 million times, Shelby filmed her delighted husband nearly skipping into Buc-ee’s, fawning over its famous brisket — “meat for days!” — and a beaver-branded leopard print swimsuit while juggling coffee and sandwiches in both hands.
“Florida has Disney World — we have Buc-ee’s,” Dylan said, with deep conviction, in the video. (Florida also has two Buc-ee’s locations.)
Less than 24 hours after their filmed visit, they returned to do it all over again.
There are other regional convenience chains that inspire similar fervor among fans: Wawa has its hoagie enthusiasts, Maverik its Western-inspired architecture and in-house restaurant. But Buc-ee’s is the biggest of them all — world-record-breakingly big — and it’s regularly named one of the cleanest, tastiest and overall best places to stop for gas in the country. And now, its fanbase is surging among non-Texans and young people who’ve discovered the spot on TikTok and document their first visits for hundreds of millions of viewers.
How does a gas station cultivate such a devoted following? Buc-ee’s spokesman and general counsel Jeff Nadalo said the brand keeps it simple: “Buc-ee’s has remained committed to providing award-winning clean restrooms, freshly prepared food, cheap gas, and outstanding customer service.”
It’s a simple-enough recipe for success, and yet Buc-ee’s is still one-of-a-kind among competitors. Here’s what experts, some of whom are Buc-ee’s regulars themselves, say sets the Texas chain apart and turned it into a phenomenon.
Buc-ee’s turns a necessity into an adventure
Buc-ee’s turns what would be a quick trip anywhere else into mid-road trip adventure, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
Buc-ee’s provides those necessities — food, fuel, restrooms — in such overwhelming quantities that a trip might extend a drive by 30 minutes to an hour, Lenard said. Its biggest store in Sevierville, Tennessee, is also the world’s largest convenience store at 74,707 square feet — almost 30 times the size of the industry average of 2,500 square feet, per NACS. It advertises its pristine bathrooms for hundreds of miles along interstates and delivers, too — Buc-ee’s bathrooms have won awards for their otherworldly cleanliness. And its food selection is more comparable to a Trader Joe’s than a vending machine, with a bakery, an entire wall of bagged jerky of varying flavors and a brisket station manned by employees in straw hats who holler every time a new hot slab of beef is ready for chopping.
“That’s the great innovation of Buc-ee’s,” said Eric Benson, a journalist and Texas transplant who wrote about Buc-ee’s path to “world domination” for Texas Monthly in 2019. “It took this thing people have to do, which is stop on these 200-mile car trips between cities, and make it into just a little bit of an experience.”
The evolution of Buc-ee’s into a Texas-sized gas station superstore with a cult following started off slowly, Benson wrote. Arch “Beaver” Aplin opened the first Buc-ee’s in 1982, in the small town of Lake Jackson, Texas. That first store was only 3,000 square feet and offered a few gas pumps and a modest selection of snacks, though it was built with brass ceiling fans and cedar wall accents for a slightly more upscale feel on the inside, wrote Benson. It wasn’t until 2012, when Aplin opened a 56,000-square-foot Buc-ee’s in Bastrop, a small city 30-plus miles outside of Austin, that the chain became known for its massive highway stops.
And in the 11 years since, as it’s expanded beyond the largest state in the lower 48, Buc-ee’s has become a must-stop, one-stop-shop for road trippers who want to do their business and grab a meal with the promise of quality.
“Buc-ee’s is a place where you get to see a real cross-section of society,” Benson told CNN. “Everyone drives. And everyone who’s driving has to stop somewhere to fill up their gas, go to the bathroom and get something to eat. Buc-ee’s is kind of the best place to do it.”
Don’t underestimate the power of a clean bathroom
Convenience stores across the country may tout their toilets’ cleanliness on billboards. But most of them don’t have dozens of stalls like Buc-ee’s does, nor do they advertise their facilities as “world famous.”
But the bathrooms at Buc-ee’s are the real deal, fans say. The Reeses told CNN that from the outside, it’s easy to assume based on the line of dozens of cars waiting for their chance to explore Buc-ee’s, one might expect the wait for a bathroom stall to be interminable. But one would be wrong, they said — “there are almost more stalls than gas pumps!”
Bathrooms are the “most important” component of the convenience store experience to nail if a business wants repeat customers, Lenard said. They’re often a customer’s first stop, and if the restroom is filthy, that customer is more likely to run back to the comfort of their car than wander the store for a few minutes afterwards. But if they’re pristine, like Buc-ee’s claims its bathrooms are, then that impressed patron’s curiosity is piqued, and they might spend more time perusing.
“They are so clean you could eat a sliced brisket sandwich off of them,” the Reeses told CNN, though they wouldn’t exactly recommend noshing on brisket in the bathroom.
At the biggest Buc-ee’s stores, there are countless aisles for customers to get lost in. There’s seasonal merchandise that dresses the Buc-ee’s beaver in a Santa costume or throws his gaping maw on a tie-dye T-shirt, along with far more expensive fare — Lenard said he’s spotted a gas grill worth more than $1,400 on sale at Buc-ee’s.
“It starts with the bathroom,” Lenard said. “Stellar bathrooms can sell an awful lot of product.”
The Texas-based (and Texas-supersized) gas and convenience store chain offers much more than a place to fuel up and grab a bag of chips. Its devoted fans make regular pilgrimages, sometimes driving hundreds of miles, to stock up on Beaver Nuggets and brisket and merch with its bucktoothed mascot’s smiling face. Even its restrooms are award-winning.
Dylan and Shelby Reese, a husband-and-wife TikTok team, have been loyal Buc-ee’s customers since the chain first arrived in Alabama in 2019, opening its first location outside of Texas. In a June video that’s been viewed more than 6.7 million times, Shelby filmed her delighted husband nearly skipping into Buc-ee’s, fawning over its famous brisket — “meat for days!” — and a beaver-branded leopard print swimsuit while juggling coffee and sandwiches in both hands.
“Florida has Disney World — we have Buc-ee’s,” Dylan said, with deep conviction, in the video. (Florida also has two Buc-ee’s locations.)
Less than 24 hours after their filmed visit, they returned to do it all over again.
There are other regional convenience chains that inspire similar fervor among fans: Wawa has its hoagie enthusiasts, Maverik its Western-inspired architecture and in-house restaurant. But Buc-ee’s is the biggest of them all — world-record-breakingly big — and it’s regularly named one of the cleanest, tastiest and overall best places to stop for gas in the country. And now, its fanbase is surging among non-Texans and young people who’ve discovered the spot on TikTok and document their first visits for hundreds of millions of viewers.
How does a gas station cultivate such a devoted following? Buc-ee’s spokesman and general counsel Jeff Nadalo said the brand keeps it simple: “Buc-ee’s has remained committed to providing award-winning clean restrooms, freshly prepared food, cheap gas, and outstanding customer service.”
It’s a simple-enough recipe for success, and yet Buc-ee’s is still one-of-a-kind among competitors. Here’s what experts, some of whom are Buc-ee’s regulars themselves, say sets the Texas chain apart and turned it into a phenomenon.
Buc-ee’s turns a necessity into an adventure
Buc-ee’s turns what would be a quick trip anywhere else into mid-road trip adventure, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
Buc-ee’s provides those necessities — food, fuel, restrooms — in such overwhelming quantities that a trip might extend a drive by 30 minutes to an hour, Lenard said. Its biggest store in Sevierville, Tennessee, is also the world’s largest convenience store at 74,707 square feet — almost 30 times the size of the industry average of 2,500 square feet, per NACS. It advertises its pristine bathrooms for hundreds of miles along interstates and delivers, too — Buc-ee’s bathrooms have won awards for their otherworldly cleanliness. And its food selection is more comparable to a Trader Joe’s than a vending machine, with a bakery, an entire wall of bagged jerky of varying flavors and a brisket station manned by employees in straw hats who holler every time a new hot slab of beef is ready for chopping.
The evolution of Buc-ee’s into a Texas-sized gas station superstore with a cult following started off slowly, Benson wrote. Arch “Beaver” Aplin opened the first Buc-ee’s in 1982, in the small town of Lake Jackson, Texas. That first store was only 3,000 square feet and offered a few gas pumps and a modest selection of snacks, though it was built with brass ceiling fans and cedar wall accents for a slightly more upscale feel on the inside, wrote Benson. It wasn’t until 2012, when Aplin opened a 56,000-square-foot Buc-ee’s in Bastrop, a small city 30-plus miles outside of Austin, that the chain became known for its massive highway stops.
And in the 11 years since, as it’s expanded beyond the largest state in the lower 48, Buc-ee’s has become a must-stop, one-stop-shop for road trippers who want to do their business and grab a meal with the promise of quality.
“Buc-ee’s is a place where you get to see a real cross-section of society,” Benson told CNN. “Everyone drives. And everyone who’s driving has to stop somewhere to fill up their gas, go to the bathroom and get something to eat. Buc-ee’s is kind of the best place to do it.”
Don’t underestimate the power of a clean bathroom
Convenience stores across the country may tout their toilets’ cleanliness on billboards. But most of them don’t have dozens of stalls like Buc-ee’s does, nor do they advertise their facilities as “world famous.”
But the bathrooms at Buc-ee’s are the real deal, fans say. The Reeses told CNN that from the outside, it’s easy to assume based on the line of dozens of cars waiting for their chance to explore Buc-ee’s, one might expect the wait for a bathroom stall to be interminable. But one would be wrong, they said — “there are almost more stalls than gas pumps!”
Bathrooms are the “most important” component of the convenience store experience to nail if a business wants repeat customers, Lenard said. They’re often a customer’s first stop, and if the restroom is filthy, that customer is more likely to run back to the comfort of their car than wander the store for a few minutes afterwards. But if they’re pristine, like Buc-ee’s claims its bathrooms are, then that impressed patron’s curiosity is piqued, and they might spend more time perusing.
“They are so clean you could eat a sliced brisket sandwich off of them,” the Reeses told CNN, though they wouldn’t exactly recommend noshing on brisket in the bathroom.
At the biggest Buc-ee’s stores, there are countless aisles for customers to get lost in. There’s seasonal merchandise that dresses the Buc-ee’s beaver in a Santa costume or throws his gaping maw on a tie-dye T-shirt, along with far more expensive fare — Lenard said he’s spotted a gas grill worth more than $1,400 on sale at Buc-ee’s.
“It starts with the bathroom,” Lenard said. “Stellar bathrooms can sell an awful lot of product.”
by Scottie Andrew, CNN | Read more:
Image: Buc-ee's[ed. For my Texas friend Jerry, who loves Buc-ee's. See also: Buc-ee’s: The Path to World Domination (Texas Monthly):]
"Buc-ee’s pays its employees well above market rate; cashiers start at $14 per hour in most locations and get three weeks’ paid vacation and a 401(k) plan, in an industry where it’s common for cashiers to make minimum wage, about half as much. Aplin expects smiles and attentive service in exchange. There’s no sitting on the job and no using cellphones. Like cast members in an elaborate theatrical production, employees also must adhere to certain wardrobe and grooming standards. They are not allowed to display visible tattoos or body piercings. Men are prohibited from having long hair; nobody can have unnaturally colored hair. There are no open-toed shoes, no torn or faded clothing.
Buc-ee’s employees who buy into this don’t just love their jobs, they tend to become evangelists. (...)
Still, Buc-ee’s has a tiny footprint in the national convenience-store landscape. The industry leader, 7-Eleven, has more than 9,000 locations nationwide. Circle K, running a close second, has nearly 8,500. Buc-ee’s has 34 stores total.
But Buc-ee’s has a reputation far greater than its store count. It has become the rare brand—like Apple and Costco—that inspires loyalty that goes well beyond rational consumer calculations. People love Buc-ee’s, and they like to talk about how much they love Buc-ee’s."
"Buc-ee’s pays its employees well above market rate; cashiers start at $14 per hour in most locations and get three weeks’ paid vacation and a 401(k) plan, in an industry where it’s common for cashiers to make minimum wage, about half as much. Aplin expects smiles and attentive service in exchange. There’s no sitting on the job and no using cellphones. Like cast members in an elaborate theatrical production, employees also must adhere to certain wardrobe and grooming standards. They are not allowed to display visible tattoos or body piercings. Men are prohibited from having long hair; nobody can have unnaturally colored hair. There are no open-toed shoes, no torn or faded clothing.
Buc-ee’s employees who buy into this don’t just love their jobs, they tend to become evangelists. (...)
Still, Buc-ee’s has a tiny footprint in the national convenience-store landscape. The industry leader, 7-Eleven, has more than 9,000 locations nationwide. Circle K, running a close second, has nearly 8,500. Buc-ee’s has 34 stores total.
But Buc-ee’s has a reputation far greater than its store count. It has become the rare brand—like Apple and Costco—that inspires loyalty that goes well beyond rational consumer calculations. People love Buc-ee’s, and they like to talk about how much they love Buc-ee’s."
The Illegal French Delicacy: Ortolan
If you saw a group of people with napkins on their head at the dinner table, what might you think? You’d be forgiven to think it was some strange Hollywood ritual. But the real reason is, they’re eating a french delicacy called Ortolan.
Hannibal, Billions, Succession, American Dad — all feature this absurd, and illegal practice. I shared a video about this on my TikTok account and this practice clearly struck a nerve, garnering close to 400K views. One of the most common comments I got was, “I saw this on American Dad — but thought this was a joke?”
No my friends, consuming Ortolan is not a joke — in fact the practice is said to date back to ancient Romans living in the South of France who would breed calling birds to attract and bait unsuspecting wild Ortolan into their traps.
In modern preperations, the small bird is caught at night in nets during their migratory period as they head south towards Africa. They’re then kept in covered cages. The dark encourages them to gorge themselves, fattening them up on grains like Hansel and Gretel until they’re nice and plump (nearly two times their size!) Once they’re sitting fat and pretty, they are thrown into a container of Armagnac liquor where they drowned and marinate.
The birds are roasted for eight minutes until they quote “sing” and are plucked before service. The diner places the napkin over their head and eats the bird whole, feet first, tiny bones and all.
“I bring my molars down and through my bird’s rib cage with a wet crunch and am rewarded with a scalding hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat. Rarely have pain and delight combined so well. I’m giddily uncomfortable, breathing in short, controlled gasps as I continue slowly — ever so slowly — to chew. With every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs compact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors: figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. As I swallow, I draw in the head and beak, which, until now, have been hanging from my lips, and blithely crush the skull.”
Like a kid who has been told legendary tales of a unicorn his whole life and the mystical creature finally appears — his reaction is giddy at the opportunity and rarity of the moment, but also feels a tinge of guilt.
There is another famous reference to ortolan in the HBO show Succession. Where the ritual serves as a way for the wealthy 1%ers to set themselves apart from the rest of the world. Sure, maybe there’s some good flavor with the Ortolan but can crunching bones and spurting juices really be better than say some smoked brisket, a nice burger, or steak? Or is it really about the rarity and privilege of the opportunity? The social capital that comes with being of means to obtain the forbidden fruit? (...)
Okay, but why the napkin over the head? There are several possibilities a diner might choose to do this.
The first is shame.
Historically they would put the napkin over their head to protect their sins from god, with the napkin on, they believed god couldn’t witness their sin.
The second is sensory.
By putting the napkin over the diner’s head, they are able to trap and continually inhale the rich aromas.
Lastly, is decorum (if you can call it such).
With all of the crunching of bones and beak, spurting, and removal of the larger bones — the scene can be quite unsavory and appetite suppressing.
Today, eating of Ortolan is now outlawed — it was so widely consumed at one point its population dropped by an estimated 40% and in 1999 France put a stop to its consumption and again in 2007 with even stronger legal measures.
But where there’s demand, there’s supply — and the practice still continues underground with each bird fetching nearly 200 euros. It’s estimated some 30,000 birds are still eaten annually.
by Austin Miller, Medium | Read more:Images: uncredited/MaxPPP/Roger Tidman/Corbis/Guardian
[ed. What a world. See also: Why French chefs want us to eat this bird – head, bones, beak and all. (Telegraph); and, A French delicacy being eaten to death (Cosmos).]
Hannibal, Billions, Succession, American Dad — all feature this absurd, and illegal practice. I shared a video about this on my TikTok account and this practice clearly struck a nerve, garnering close to 400K views. One of the most common comments I got was, “I saw this on American Dad — but thought this was a joke?”
In modern preperations, the small bird is caught at night in nets during their migratory period as they head south towards Africa. They’re then kept in covered cages. The dark encourages them to gorge themselves, fattening them up on grains like Hansel and Gretel until they’re nice and plump (nearly two times their size!) Once they’re sitting fat and pretty, they are thrown into a container of Armagnac liquor where they drowned and marinate.
The birds are roasted for eight minutes until they quote “sing” and are plucked before service. The diner places the napkin over their head and eats the bird whole, feet first, tiny bones and all.
Crunch Crunch.
The bigger bones are removed and placed neatly on the plate.
Chef (and personal hero) Anthony Bourdain had a secret night of dining with other chefs where he partook in this ritual. In his book, Medium Raw, he writes:
The bigger bones are removed and placed neatly on the plate.
Chef (and personal hero) Anthony Bourdain had a secret night of dining with other chefs where he partook in this ritual. In his book, Medium Raw, he writes:
Like a kid who has been told legendary tales of a unicorn his whole life and the mystical creature finally appears — his reaction is giddy at the opportunity and rarity of the moment, but also feels a tinge of guilt.
Okay, but why the napkin over the head? There are several possibilities a diner might choose to do this.
The first is shame.
Historically they would put the napkin over their head to protect their sins from god, with the napkin on, they believed god couldn’t witness their sin.
The second is sensory.
By putting the napkin over the diner’s head, they are able to trap and continually inhale the rich aromas.
Lastly, is decorum (if you can call it such).
With all of the crunching of bones and beak, spurting, and removal of the larger bones — the scene can be quite unsavory and appetite suppressing.
Today, eating of Ortolan is now outlawed — it was so widely consumed at one point its population dropped by an estimated 40% and in 1999 France put a stop to its consumption and again in 2007 with even stronger legal measures.
But where there’s demand, there’s supply — and the practice still continues underground with each bird fetching nearly 200 euros. It’s estimated some 30,000 birds are still eaten annually.
by Austin Miller, Medium | Read more:
[ed. What a world. See also: Why French chefs want us to eat this bird – head, bones, beak and all. (Telegraph); and, A French delicacy being eaten to death (Cosmos).]
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