Hysterical Literature

The black-and-white video begins with a woman sitting at a table with a book in front of her. She looks into the camera and states her name, the name of the book, and begins to read. It seems she’s overwhelmed by the words — there’s a slight twitch, a smirk, a straightening of the back, a desperate breath in — and she struggles to continue reading.

Eventually you realize there is more to this scene than it at first seems — maybe when you notice the ever-so-slight buzzing sound in the background, or maybe not until the moans begin. Either way, before the end of the video there is the unmistakable appearance of an orgasm. But you never see just what has produced it: Is there someone or something under that table? Was it just the words that produced those paroxysms of pleasure?

This is the setup of art photographer Clayton Cubitt’s new video series, “Hysterical Literature.” So far, there have been two installments: one starring porn performer Stoya reading “Necrophilia Variations” by Supervert, the other featuring a woman identified simply as Alicia reading Walt Whitman’s sensual “Leaves of Grass.”But frankly, they could read their grocery lists and I’d still hang on their every word, every breath, every squirming movement during their vulnerable, resistant build to orgasm.

I talked to Cubitt, also known as Siege, by email about his fascinating new project, the line between high and low art, and authentic portraiture in the age of self-branding.

by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon | Read more:

The New Art of Underbragging

If you're unusually insightful and perceptive, like me, you may have noticed that boastfulness is increasingly socially acceptable these days. Perhaps this helps explain the unhinged gusto with which Usain Bolt declared himself a living legend last week at the Olympics: in a world where every other Facebook status update is a veiled act of self-aggrandisement, the only way to make an impact with your bragging is to push it to the limit. The more everyday kind of bragging – the mock-shy mention of your latest professional achievement, the smartphone photographs of your current holiday idyll, the drive-by name-dropping – is the fuel that powers social media.

Laughing at others' clunky efforts at self-promotion used to be a strictly annual pleasure, confined to the opening of round-robin Christmas letters; now it's a daily chore. This is why, speaking for myself, I try not to add to the problem by engaging in too much boastfulness in public forums. But then I have often been complimented on my restraint – once, indeed, by a rather prominent celebrity, whose name I probably ought not to mention here.

Technology is partly to blame: with so many more channels through which to manipulate one's public image, it's not especially surprising that we are tempted to present ourselves as positively as possible. The filters of social media make things worse. A network such as Twitter is designed precisely to connect you with exactly the kinds of people who don't mind your boasts, while those who might keep you in check won't follow you in the first place: your audience thus serves as an army of enablers, applauding your self-applause. Writing recently in Slate, the literary critic Jacob Silverman complained that this self-reinforcing niceness was damaging his trade, by dissuading people from criticising books they disliked. "It's not only shallow, it's untrue," he wrote, "and it's having a chilling effect on literary culture."

But, as the Wall Street Journal noted this week, in a worried piece headlined Are We All Braggarts Now?, the causes may be economic, too. In the most competitive job market in recent memory, the pressure to portray yourself as better than everyone else is intense. Predictably, there's neuroscientific evidence to undergird all this: self-disclosure activates the same brain regions as eating or sex, according to research by Harvard neuroscientists published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, though you can bet they mentioned it on their Facebook pages too.

And as bragging grows ubiquitous, it evolves, the better to penetrate the defences of those who would otherwise be too embarrassed to engage in it. Hence the "humblebrag", that staple of Twitter-boasting that deploys self-deprecation in order surreptitiously to draw attention to the bragger's brilliance or privilege. Here's Cheryl Cole: "How can I still be nervous about red carpets after 10 years. Eeek!" And a classic from George Bush's former press secretary Ari Fleischer: "They just announced my flight at LaGuardia is number 15 for takeoff. I miss Air Force One!!"

By now, though, even the humblebrag is growing easy to spot, thereby defeating its purpose, and so it is giving way to a new mutation, spotted and named by blogger Jen Doll: the "underbrag".

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: McClatchy-Tribune/Getty Images

The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy

Reviews by ordinary people have become an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique.

But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic.

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal and there has been a lot of confusion in the blogosphere over how this affects traditional book reviews.

The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages bursting with ardor arise overnight. At the same time, it shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing.

For decades a largely stagnant industry controlled from New York, book publishing is fragmenting and changing at high speed. Twenty percent of Amazon’s top-selling e-books are self-published. They do not get to the top without adulation, lots and lots of it.

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Nick Oxford

via:

Nicolas de Staël [+]
Abstract Figure
mk107 1954 Oil painting 60x81cm  here

via:

Neil Armstrong (August 1930 - August 2012)

[ed. Of all the people I've admired in my life, Neil Armstrong would rank near the top of that list. Not only for what he accomplished, but for how he handled the fame that came with it. Imagine being the first (and perhaps last) representative of all mankind.]

Neil Armstrong, the Moon’s Mystery Man

via:

100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock and Roll)

h/t 3 Quarks

Jean-François Jonvelle
Untitled 1983

via:

Fingertips

via:

The Demise of the Car

Like other dying industries of the past century, the global auto industry has entered decline after having fully embedded itself in the political complex. Regardless of political leaning, federal governments from Europe, to Japan, to the United States have and will continue to do everything possible to save the industry.

US automakers received their first bailout in late 2008 from the Bush Administration. The bailouts continued in the Obama Administration. (Both presidencies that could hardly be more dissimilar, but were united in their assumption of an enduring future for cars). For Republicans — a party that claims to adhere to free-market principles — releasing a first payment of over $13 billion to the industry was a classic foxhole-conversion in the midst of the financial crisis. For Democrats — a party that claims to be concerned with climate change, the environment, and public transport — the enormous financial support to the industry was only one part of the current administration’s continued embrace of the auto-highway complex.

More broadly, however, global governments are captured by sunk-cost decision making as the past 60-70 years of highway infrastructure investment is now a legacy just too painful to leave behind. Interestingly, whether citizens and governments want to face this reality or not, features of the oil economy are already going away as infrastructure is increasingly stranded. Moreover, there are cultural shifts now coming into play as young people are no longer buying cars – in the first instance because they can’t afford them, and in the second instance because it’s increasingly no longer necessary to own a car to be part of one’s group. See this piece from Atlantic Cities:

Young People Aren’t Buying Cars Because They’re Buying Smart Phones Instead

Youth culture was once car culture. Teens cruised their Thunderbirds to the local drive-in, Springsteen fantasized about racing down Thunder Road, and Ferris Bueller staged a jailbreak from the ‘burbs in a red Ferrari. Cars were Friday night. Cars were Hollywood. Yet these days, they can’t even compete with an iPhone – or so car makers, and the people who analyze them for a living, seem to fear. As Bloomberg reported this morning, many in the auto industry “are concerned that financially pressed young people who connect online instead of in person could hold down peak demand by 2 million units each year.” In other words, Generation Y may be happy to give up their wheels as long as they have the web. And in the long term, that could mean Americans will buy just 15 million cars and trucks each year, instead of around 17 million.

If future car sales in the US will be limited by the loss of 2 million purchases just from young people alone, then the US can hardly expect to return to even 15 million car and truck sales per year. US sales have only recovered to 14 million. (And that looks very much like the peak for the reflationary 2009-2012 period)

Indeed, the migration from suburbs back to the cities, the resurrection of rail, and the fact that oil will never be cheap again puts economies – and culture – on a newly defined path to other forms of transport and other ways of working. (...)

Obsolete Infrastructure

For half a century, the auto-highway complex has been a conduit for political power, and myriad players have self-interested reasons to maintain the system. However, the contraction of motorized transport in the West – a natural outcome of high oil prices and debt saturation – will gain further strength as various states (or countries) simply run out of money to build new roads.

As discussed in California: Bellwether for the Rest of America, the highway-rich landscape of the Golden State (for example) sucks up 90% of its transport budget. But California roads are now among the worst in the nation, costing drivers some of the highest on-road expenses merely as a result of poor surface conditions.

To the extent that states can no longer maintain roads to an adequate standard, infrastructure will become stranded.

We see the same related effects in US airport infrastructure as many regional airports have either seen a huge reduction in traffic or have shut down completely. (The US Postal Service and its current financial difficulties also reflect the emerging trend, as the USPS is obligated to deliver mail to remote locations even as postal revenues drop on the higher cost of – you guessed it – energy and gasoline.)

by Gregor McDonald, Gregor.us |  Read more:

Image via:

Are You Worth More Dead Than Alive?

‘Do you see lights?” Ruben Robles asked his brother, Mark, in 2007. Bright, star-shaped and white, they flashed before Ruben’s eyes while he was driving, shopping at Costco, feeding the cats. Mark didn’t see anything, so Robles went to a doctor, who thought that the visions might be stress-induced. Robles ran a collection agency in Los Angeles, and the hours were long, the debtors argumentative. Several weeks later, Ruben began suffering seizures. He went to see another doctor, and this one ordered an M.R.I., which revealed a ghostly white orb on his left frontal lobe. The diagnosis was brain cancer. Only 36 years old, Ruben was told that he might not live to see his 38th birthday.

Horrified, Robles says he thought constantly about God. But his crisis was practical as well as existential. Over the next year and a half, surgeons operated on his brain three times, excising as much of the cancer as they safely could. The side effects of the operations left Robles barely able to walk and unable to speak more than a word or two at a time. He shuttered the collection agency. His wife left him, and Robles, needing daily help, squeezed into his mother’s Chihuahua-filled apartment. The medical bills were mounting, and Robles was worried: though he believed God would provide for him in the afterlife, what he desperately needed until then was money.

Ron Escobar, a close friend of Robles’s, went to Carole Fiedler, an insurance expert, for help. Fiedler saw that there was no vacation home or Google stock to unload. But Robles did have a life-insurance policy for half a million dollars. Life insurance is designed to benefit the living, a spouse or heirs, not those who perish. But Fiedler, who owns a firm called Innovative Settlements, knew that a life-insurance policy is an asset that can be resold to a friend or stranger just as a car, boat or house can. In a transaction known as a viatical settlement (for terminally ill patients) or a life settlement (for everyone else), the person selling his insurance gets an immediate cash payment. The buyer, in exchange, is named as the beneficiary and pays the premiums until the insured person dies. Life no longer afforded Robles a traditional way to make money, but to the right investor, Fiedler advised, his imminent death was worth a great deal.

Selling your life and selling a house have more in common than you’d think. The seller puts a listing on the market. Prospective buyers do research and get inspections; there are offers and counteroffers until the seller accepts a bid. The seller doesn’t literally peddle his own life, of course, but his life-insurance policy. The distinction is in many ways moot, however, as the sales value is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed estimation of how much longer the seller has to live. In the case of Robles’s policy, a life-settlement company in Georgia, Habersham Funding, expressed interest. Escobar shipped off six boxes’ worth of Robles’s medical records, thousands of pages in all, to Habersham. The firm, in turn, analyzed the records and also had them scrutinized by an external company specializing in life-expectancy analysis. Fiedler’s recollection is that the reports confirmed the grim prognosis and that Robles had less than two years left to live.

Fiedler, for her part, tried to convince Habersham that Robles was knocking on death’s door. The sooner Robles died, the fewer premiums the buyer would have to pay and the greater the potential value of his policy. “I would never lie, but my job is to make my clients look as bad as possible,” Fiedler says. Habersham opened its bidding at $250,000. “You’ve got to give us more money than that,” Fiedler recalls yelling during a phone negotiation. “This guy is really sick!” The company bumped its offer to $305,000. Fiedler accepted, and the stakes were set. The buyer’s profit would be the $500,000 insurance payout upon Robles’s death minus the $305,000 settlement and whatever the company had paid in premiums. Escobar, meanwhile, was hoping that his friend could beat the grim odds. “I told Ruben, ‘Look, they’re betting that you’re going to die,’ ” Escobar says. “ ‘You’re betting that you’ll live.’ ”

by James Vlahos, NY Times |  Read more:

hoto illustration by Katherine Wolkoff. Models: COACD; FunnyFace Today

My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin

In the late 17th century, a “panel of experts” answered reader queries submitted to the The Athenian Mercury, on topics ranging from literature to epistemology; the magazine’s spin-off, The Ladies Mercury, was devoted solely to advising “virgins, wives, or widows.” A hundred years later, the Ladies Monthly Museum, a periodical devoted to the “Amusement and Instruction” of polite females, would provide what’s probably the template for the contemporary advice column. Since then, “agony aunts” (and “uncles”) have become staples across media—print (Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Dan Savage), radio (Dr. Drew), online (Cary Tennis)—and the most distinctive voices among them have become iconic.

But why do complete strangers seek advice from people they hardly know? And likewise, how do advice columnists—who are rarely psychologists or ethicists by training—justify their answers?

Hazlitt recently gathered four of our favourite columnists for a round of shoptalk on the ethics and challenges of the advice game. Cheryl Strayed, otherwise known as ‘Dear Sugar’ at The Rumpus, has published two books this year: the New York Times bestseller Wild, a heartrending memoir about her arduous solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of a marriage break-up and her mother’s death; and a collection of her ‘Dear Sugar’ columns titled Tiny Beautiful Things. Cary Tennis writes the ‘Since You Asked’ column at Salon, where his existential musings have offered comfort to readers since 2001. Emily Yoffe is Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’, while her other writing has appeared in the New York Times and Esquire. Lynn Coady is a former advice columnist for The Globe and Mail and her novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, “Move forward.” The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of “My husband looks at porn.”

Lynn: With 'Group Therapy,' because of the nature of the column, I got a lot of emotional etiquette questions. It had a jury effect. A lot of people wrote in about some relationship they had, and both parties were hurt and insulted by something the other had done, and the over arching question was “Which one of us is the asshole here?”

Emily: Another thing I’ve learned from the column is write the damn thank you note! This feeling of “I haven’t been sufficiently acknowledged” is really deep. Read the Bible. Cain and Abel. What was that over? God liked this gift better than that gift. They seem trivial, but they’re big.

Cheryl: That’s funny. I hardly get etiquette or work-related stuff. I get a lot of sex and love questions. There are far more 28-year-old virgins out there then I ever would have imagined.

Emily: Don’t you want to put them together?

Cheryl: Introduce them to each other? Yeah. There are several questions from virgins that stump us. I’ve gotten questions from virgins that ask, “How do you get to the point where you have sex with someone else?” I don’t know how to explain that. I always had the opposite problem, like how do you get to a place where you don’t have sex with someone?It’s funny.

Emily: I agree. There’s something heartbreaking about that. I get a lot of “I’m 25, 27, 28. Everyone says I’m attractive. I have a good job, but no one from the opposite sex has ever touched me.” And you wonder. There are some people who miss the boat in high school and they think there’s some kind of magical thing that happened that they missed. And they get older and older and they’re heading toward becoming a 40-year-old virgin.

Cheryl: Well maybe that’s a part of it. They missed that moment where they were supposed to do that thing. And then now they’re on the other side of it and it becomes an issue. Cary, how have you answered this?

Cary: The introversion/extroversion thing is hard sometimes. Some people are deeply introverted and it’s hard to fathom. As my detractors will be happy to note, I don’t always provide answers. Sometimes I’m just writing a thing. I answer a lot of questions that are unanswerable, because I’m not really answering them. I’m like singing a song. I’m trying to say something comforting.

Emily: I think Cary gets to the heart of what makes each of our columns different. What you describe is very different from what I do. I’ve had people say, “I don’t know how you answered that.” I say I only answer the ones I think I can answer! People are looking at these columns for different things.

by Britt Harvey, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Illustration by Andrew Kolb

My Drunk Kitchen: Onion Rings

via:

via:

Guns 'R Us

Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague's Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. "Any of these you can get today—or these over here," he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47's.

"You have to admit this is pretty badass," the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty perched on his hip, Stallone-style.

"I don't know," the woman said. "To me, it looks mean."

"It's supposed to look mean."

"They should make it in pink," she said. "Wouldn't that be cute?"

"You're shitting me."

"They should make it in Hello Kitty!" she said. "I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty."

"Sweet holy crap," the other man said. "That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto."

It was difficult to tell if Ron was listening in on any of this; both of us had our lips pulled back in pretend smiles. "Now, what can I show you?" he asked me while the one guy went on faking his bad death and the woman continued her torture with something about rainbow-colored bullets.

I didn't really want to buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying one felt like, how the purchase worked, what-all was involved. Nobody in my circle back east had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them, it was in cartoon terms: Guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I come from thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them.

I had come to Arizona, the most gun-friendly state, to listen to the conversation the rest of America was apparently having. One in three Americans owns a gun. About 59 million handguns, 46 million rifles, and 28 million shotguns—nearly 135 million new firearms for sale in the U.S. since 1986. We are the most heavily armed society in the world. If an armed citizenry is a piece of our national identity, how is it that I'd never even met it?

In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere. The IHOP was said to be the only restaurant in Yuma that prohibited you from bringing your gun in. "Needless to say, most of us won't eat there," Ron said. On the rack behind him, assault rifles stood stupid as pool cues, black and blocky, with long magazines protruding erotically this way and that.

"I'm kind of surprised you carry assault rifles," I said to Ron.

"There's no such thing as an assault rifle," he said. "These are 'military-style rifles' or 'modern sporting rifles.' "

"But they're assault rifles," I noted. I knew that much from TV.

"Assault is one of the worst things the media has ever done to us," he said. "Have any of these rifles ever assaulted anyone?"

He went on to say I could buy as many of them as I wanted and walk out with my arsenal today. "These guns have helped our industry tremendously," he said. "They've attracted a whole new generation.... Is there one you want to try?" He brought down a Colt AR15-A3 tactical carbine, slammed in an empty magazine, and handed it to me. It felt disappointingly fake, an awesome water pistol, perhaps, or a Halloween prop. I asked if I would need to tell him why I wanted to buy a gun like that or what I intended to do with it. He squinted and smiled and appeared politely speechless. "Would you have to do what, now?" he asked.

It was difficult for us to find a comfortable, common starting place, but the reach was certainly genuine.

by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ |  Read more:

Photographs by David Graham

Sue Different

[ed. Jury rules in favor of Apple (and against consumers). Read: A Verdict That Alters the Industry.]

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, in 2007, he strode across the stage in his black turtleneck, praising the device’s interface and announcing, poignantly, “boy, have we patented it.” In the Samsung case, Apple asserts that its Korean competitor blatantly copied the iPhone—and Apple is probably right. The highlight of the recent trial was the release of a hundred-and-thirty-two page document, from 2010, in which Samsung employees laid out, in great detail, Apple’s superiority. The document is like a primer on phone-interface design. (See, for example, the discussion of why Apple’s system for entering long telephone numbers is clearer than Samsung’s). Gradually some of Samsung’s phones began to look like cousins of an iPhone; then they began to look like brothers. The Galaxy S could now pass as the iPhone’s unshaven twin. (...)

In general, we should want good ideas to be copied. If you’ve got a Samsung phone, be grateful that the engineers at Apple helped design the dialer. Yes, inventors need incentives to invent. They need to know that their ideas can make them money and that building something brilliant can make them rich. And in some industries—particularly ones, like pharma, with huge research costs—you do need strong patent protection. But technology doesn’t work like drug development. The industry evolves quickly, and you need to try to be first, whether you get patent protection or not. Enforcing patents can help you lock in profits; but patents won’t change your approach to research.

The prime example of this phenomenon is, of course, Apple. It invented the iPhone and the iPad, and locked in huge profits and brand loyalty before anyone could catch up. Apple, on Monday, became the most valuable company in the history of mankind—and its most valuable product is the iPhone. The company is worth six hundred and twenty-five billion dollars, roughly four times as much as Samsung.

Furthermore, software patents (and even some hardware patents) are notoriously confusing. Last summer, “This American Life” ran an extraordinary segment on the muck of software patents, which included one engineer admitting that he didn’t understand even the patents he himself had filed. They were just “mungo mumbo jumbo.” It’s hard for the patent office to evaluate code; it’s even harder for juries. Given the complexity and confusion, a good general principle would be to first do no harm. This summer, Judge Richard Posner dismissed a case between Motorola and Apple, and then proclaimed in an interview that the fighting between technology companies shouldn’t be surprising. “As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem.” He then added, “It’s not clear that we really need patents in most industries.”

by Nicholas Thompson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Vicki Behringer/Reuters

Talking With Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones has been recording other people’s songs almost as long as she’s been recording her own. The EP “Girl At Her Volcano,” back in 1983, collected her versions of torch songs and jazz standards, and she has repeatedly returned to similar projects. “Pop Pop,” released in 1991, was recorded with jazz players such as Charlie Haden and Joe Henderson and contained, along with a clutch of jazz standards, her take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From The Sky.” On “It’s Like This,” in 2000, she sang songs by Marvin Gaye (“Trouble Man”), Steely Dan (“Show Biz Kids”), Traffic (“The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys”), among others.

Her new record, “The Devil You Know,” due September 18th from Concord, returns her to interpretive territory, with a set of intimate, sometimes stark, versions of songs that she loves—and, consequently, that she loves to sing. The album kicks off with Jones’s take on the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and moves through Van Morrison’s “Comfort You” and Donovan’s “Catch the Wind,” Rod Stewart’s “Seems Like a Long Time” and Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.”

Jones agreed to discuss the album, its predecessors, and the art of the cover song.

You’ve come back to these interpretive projects throughout your career. Are they all motivated by the same impulse, or do you think of them each very differently?

They are part of the same overall project. When my career started in 1979, the division between singer-songwriter-dom and singer-dom was a wide abyss, and singer-songwriters were not allowed to cover songs. Before I got signed, when I played live, I would do some of my own songs and also songs that I loved, like “Makin’ Whoopee” and “My Funny Valentine.” All those songs, the originals and the others, were part of me. And I got lots of flak. I’m not sure why, exactly, but there was a strong belief that singers should only sing their own songs.

Why do you think that was?

Singing other people’s material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two. There was a moment when I was doing jazz, with “Something Cool,” from “Girl At Her Volcano.” But I didn’t follow up on it right away. I went back and recorded originals, other albums. Then Linda Ronstadt released those records arranged by Nelson Riddle. So, when I decided to return to it, I was talking it over with Don Was, who was my producer, and I wanted to do a guitar-based record. He suggested the bandoneón, which is how that record, “Pop Pop,” ended up with this Left Bank, café sound. I thought if I did a piano record it would bury me. It almost buried me anyway. The L.A. Times did a review with two journalists on the same page, a pop writer and a jazz writer, and the jazz writer tore me apart. What was happening? Was I being punished?

Part of the dynamic with recording other people’s songs, though, is that a listener is automatically going to compare your version to what’s already known, and it can either seem like you’re revealing something new or tampering with a treasured memory. Take “Sympathy for the Devil,” which is an iconic Rolling Stones song. You open this record with your version of it, which is completely different in arrangement and feel.

In my mind, I guess, I see a group on the right side: those are the die-hards with their hands folded who see any interpretation as tampering. On the left side there are the people who say, “Hooray, whatever you do is great.” I have to say that I am hardly aware of the people on the right side. They feel that they are holding a line, I guess. I am not sure why. Mick Jagger already recorded that song. What would be the point of doing it the same way, with the same drums and the chanting? There’s no point in competing with that. It’s definitive and it exists and it was a long, long time ago. The only point in singing it, for me, is that the way I’m singing it now is new. In this case, I was part of a tribute to the Stones at Carnegie Hall, and I got to play “Sympathy For the Devil” before I recorded it. I walked out and sat in a chair and started to play rhythm guitar and I felt the audience gasp. Their reaction was like sucking in air. They held their breath and then, about eight seconds later, most of them were totally with me.

by Ben Greenman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Myriam Santos

Boys on the Side: The Hookup Culture

Girl Land, like so much writing about young women and sexuality, concentrates on what has been lost. The central argument holds that women have effectively been duped by a sexual revolution that persuaded them to trade away the protections of (and from) young men. In return, they were left even more vulnerable and exploited than before. Sexual liberation, goes the argument, primarily liberated men—to act as cads, using women for their own pleasures and taking no responsibility for the emotional wreckage that their behavior created. The men hold all the cards, and the women put up with it because now it’s too late to zip it back up, so they don’t have a choice.

But this analysis downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation. Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-­school party—are for the first time in history more success­ful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

The business-­school women I met were in an extreme situation. Wall Street culture had socialized them to tolerate high degrees of sexual crudeness, and they were also a decade past the tentative explorations of their freshman year. But they are merely the most purified sample of a much larger group of empowered college-age women. Even freshmen and sophomores are not nearly as vulnerable as we imagine them to be.
“Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong reported, college women “had to work to avoid them.”  (...)

At Yale I heard stories like the ones I had read in many journalistic accounts of the hookup culture. One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.” But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relation­ships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chival­rous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-­yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.

But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”

by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Emiliano Granado