Nothing will detect and respond to the reality of fear as swiftly as a market
Posted: December 20, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
On The Interview, Stephen Carter’s take worth reading:
Despite all the calls for Sony to stand up to the blackmail in the name of artistic freedom, it seems to me that the criticism is misdirected. Nothing will detect and respond to the reality of fear as swiftly as a market, and here the market has spoken. The relevant market actors are moviegoers. Theater owners are guessing that with “The Interview” in their multiplexes, holiday audiences will stay away in droves. From everything.
I’d like to think the owners are mistaken. I’d like to think that were “The Interview” in the theaters, millions of us would flock to the mutiplex and watch a movie — any movie — as an act of protest, to show the world we aren’t afraid. But I can’t say that in predicting the opposite the theater owners have made a wrong call. And if they’re right, so is Sony.
(ht Andrew Sullivan, where the guest editors are doing a great job imo. Journalistic bias: guy who wrote The Interview Dan Stirling is former co-worker/friend, I root for him to get rich from this funny movie.)
Wild
Posted: December 20, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, movies, nature, screenwriting, the California Condition, women, writing Leave a comment
Contains WILD spoilers!
1) This movie has a high degree of difficulty.
I read 2/3s of the book Wild – abandoned it before I finished, but I did the same thing with Eat Pray Love and then years later started over and found it very impressive. Perhaps a similar fate awaits Wild & me.
At least two top-notch women I know swear by Tiny Beautiful Things. I like reading interviews with Cheryl Strayed, she seems like the real deal.
In books you can get into somebody’s head. That is their killer advantage, and why I don’t think books are going anywhere anytime soon. You just can’t do that in a movie. Wild the movie does a pretty good job of this, but it’s sort of just doomed, imo. This is a story about a person’s journey from one mental state to another, with most of the work done internally. Very hard to dramatize.
While there are good tricks towards doing that in this movie, it comes up a little short on the radical innovations needed to tell that story in a movie. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay: a dude who is good at this kind of thing, his books make excellent movies, but maybe a true writer-director could’ve worked the solutions even tighter?
[One particular note: it seemed to me like all the cutaways should’ve cut a few beats earlier. You’re always like, “ok, here we go, we’re about to cutaway to Cheryl’s childhood.”]
2) The story has a motivation problem.
Cheryl decided to do this, herself. No one made her, asked her, even cares if she accomplishes her goal. So when she faces difficulty or problems, it easy to think “well, you’re the one who decided to hike the PCT, dumdum. Why should I care about this?”
In a story, a person sets out to do something and arrives at a win/lose/draw (thanks to John Gardner for articulating that for me). What would count as a win in this story? Getting to Ashland? No, who cares about Ashland, nothing but hippies in Ashland. The goal of this story is: Cheryl restoring herself (whether or not she knows that’s the goal at the start).
But: that’s an internal goal, how will you show it in a movie? It’s easier to answer these questions in a book, where Cheryl can articulate her reasons and get you with her and make you see that this particular journey is important even if nothing tangible’s at stake.
3) Still, pretty good movie.
Despite all that I thought the ending was pretty satisfying. It’s hard to make a pretty good movie. When Reese Witherspoon yells “FUCK YOU BITCH!” I thought that was good acting.
Sometimes I think all the hugely successful actresses [Reese, Anne Hathaway, etc.] are such intense people that when they act like normal people their instinct is to be way too intense. I would argue Julianne Moore might be the best at not doing this. Think how hard that must be: to act intense but not at your full-bore intense because you somehow intuitively understand that your own “full bore” is too strong for the screen. Acting is crazy hard.
Like all criticism should, let this come with a disclaimer: it’s easy to be a critic hard to make a thing, makers > critics x1000!
4) Interesting sex stuff in this movie.
I do remember in the book being jarred by the period of sexual degradation and heroin, hadn’t realized that was part of the tale. It was new territory, I felt, in exploring a woman’s sexual… could we call it addiction? self-punishment? Cheryl’s not not in control at that point, right? But she also isn’t having a great time. It’s fucked up, she knows it’s fucked up. But it’s not fucked up because she’s a slut, it’s fucked up because she’s not being the woman she wants to be (right?).
Whatever, it made me think/was also slightly titillating/made me feel kind of bad for the husband she was compulsively cheating on. What are the nice guy husbands of America to make of Eat Pray Love and Wild, two biggest women’s memoirs of the last ten years, that both start with a woman leaving her nice guy husband for sexual adventuring?
How often in a movie do you see sex that is intended to be not rape but also not fun?
5) The music in this movie is kind of good but also kind of sucks.
That’s my take anyway. What if I told you that in 2014 we were making an epic movie about a woman’s adventure across America? Would you say that scattered samples of Simon & Garfunkel is the best we could do? Fuck no! Why didn’t they get some awesome woman to make a badass score like Eddie Vedder did for the man-equivalent, Into The Wild?
6) There’s a weird shoutout to REI in this movie.
Where Reese calls them to get new boots and is like “you’re my favorite company ever.” Maybe Cheryl really felt that way. I have a bunch of stuff from REI, but sometimes I think their business model is based on making you think going outdoors is more expensive and complicated than it really is to sell you more junk. Which, weirdly: in the same scene where Cheryl learns about REI’s return policy, the dude is like “you don’t need all this shit.”
Former REI CEO Sally Jewell is Secretary of the Interior.
Strikes me as a very Obama kind of pick: on the one hand, kind of hip and modern and innovative, but on the other hand she was still the CEO of a huge corporation.
7) Wild and Eat Pray Love are in long American literary tradition of spiritual narrative.
If I were a grad student at Yale I’d write my Ph. D. on this, trace it all back through Emerson and Puritan religious narratives and captive narratives of 18th century New England and I’d be the smartest boy in the seminar. Since I’m not in grad school though I can make my point in one sentence which is that things that seem radical and new are often just new versions of an old tradition, we’re not so different from the past or as wildly inventive as we think we are, etc.
8) Is this how women go through life? Constantly having to wonder if a random dude is a rapist?
Damn, that might be the most important aspect of Wild, seeing the world through a woman’s eyes, showing that tension of life. When I walk around at 11pm or so in my neighborhood and I see women walking their dogs it always feels very tense. My instinct to somehow indicate I am not a rapist usually just seems to make the problem worse.
ANYWAY: one reason I was excited to see Wild is I’ve been to many of the settings along the Pacific Crest Trail on fishing trips. Here, for example, is a photo of Kennedy Meadows:
Kennedy Meadows is like a plateau high up in the Sierras. To get there you drive up a crazy 27-mile twisty road up from the 395. If you find yourself there, be sure to stop at The Grumpy Bear:
They’re happy to teach you about jerking meat:
Don’t get it confused with the other Kennedy Meadows up in Sonora.
While I was up there I crossed the PCT and wondered if it would be interesting to film a couple seconds of walking on it:
If you’d like to see Wild, but only have ten seconds, my film gets at similar themes but with more nauseating camerawork.
Australia forever
Posted: December 18, 2014 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
From Vulture’s* timeline of “How The Interview Got Made”:
October 27, 2014
Clark sends an even-more-toned-down version of the ending to the film’s international distributors. Most take the softer cut, but the Australian distributor requests the unedited version, saying it would prefer to “sock it to ’em.”
* yes in general I agree it’s wrong to read these private emails
“What Happened When Marissa Mayers Tried To Be Steve Jobs”
Posted: December 18, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, writing Leave a comment
This article, by Nicholas Carlson in the upcoming NY Times magazine, is one of the best business articles I’ve ever read (note: I don’t read that many business articles).
Here’s where the story really begins:
But as Alibaba’s stock soared, Yahoo’s dropped, an indication that the market seemed to concur with Jackson’s analysis: Yahoo’s core business was worth less than zero dollars.
That’s bad. Next sentences:
A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to divest itself of its Alibaba assets, return the money to its shareholders and then merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity that sold ads against its collective online properties — news, blogs and Web products like email, maps and weather. “We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity,” Smith wrote.
(Note that “could be fired” — non-business readers like me often gotta remind themselves that in business articles it’s often assumed that firing people is positive.)
The article goes on with punchy, succinct, clear explanations the challenges of tech companies, and specifically the challenge Mayers faced, and I don’t envy her:
Previous Yahoo C.E.O.s had underinvested in mobile-app development, plowing money into advertising technology and web tools instead. A couple of days into the job, Mayer was having lunch at URL’s when an employee walked up to her and introduced himself as Tony. “I’m a mobile engineer,” Tony said. “I’m on the mobile team.”
Mayer responded to Tony, “Great, how big is our mobile team?” After some back and forth, Tony replied that there were “maybe 60” engineers. Mayer was dumbfounded. Facebook, for instance, had a couple of thousand people working on mobile. When she queried the engineering management department, it responded that Yahoo had roughly 100. “Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60.
But then it starts to unravel:
Mayer subsequently immersed herself in the redesign. Months into her tenure, she was meeting with Sharma’s team regularly in a conference room that started to look more like a design studio: projectors hung from the ceiling, rendering screens displayed on the wall. All around, dozens of foam core boards were pinned with ideas. Mayer would regularly interrogate designers about the minutest details of display and user experience. By early December, one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
Well, see, purple sucks? More great detail:
During a breakfast with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Mayer asked if there might be any partnership opportunities between the magazine and Shine, Yahoo’s site for women. According to Mayer’s own telling of the story to top Yahoo executives, Wintour lookedappalled.
I bet she did!
Reuters photo stolen from NY Post article “Anna Wintour Has A Sense Of Humor Over Drag Parody Show” http://pagesix.com/2014/08/12/anna-wintour-has-sense-of-humor-over-drag-parody-show-about-her/
Bad to worse:
Yahoo Tech would sometimes go weeks without running a single ad.
Don’t know much about this, but that sounds terrible.
This delinquency eventually became a problem outside Yahoo. At a major advertising event in the South of France, Mayer sat for an interview with Martin Sorrell, the C.E.O. of WPP, one of the world’s largest agencies. In front of a filled auditorium, Sorrell asked Mayer why she did not return his emails. Sheryl Sandberg, he said, always got back to him. Later, Mayer was scheduled for dinner with executives from the ad agency IPG. The 8:30 p.m. meal was inconvenient for the firm’s C.E.O., Michael Roth, but he shuffled his calendar so he could accommodate it. Mayer didn’t show up until 10.
Fuck that. Worse:
Mayer’s largest management problem, however, related to the start-up culture she had tried to instill. Early on, she banned working from home. This policy affected only 164 employees, but it was initiated months after she constructed an elaborate nursery in her office suite so that her son, Macallister, and his nanny could accompany her to work each day. Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.
This got ugly:
During the revamping of Yahoo Mail, for instance, Kathy Savitt, the C.M.O., noted that Vivek Sharma was bothering her. “He just annoys me,” she said during the meeting. “I don’t want to be around him.” Sharma’s rating was reduced. Shortly after Yahoo Mail went live, he departed for Disney. (Savitt disputes this account.)
Then this part is deeply weird:
As concerns with Q.P.R.s escalated, employees asked if an entire F.Y.I. could be devoted to anonymous questions on the topic. One November afternoon, Mayer took the stage at URL’s as hundreds of Yahoo employees packed the cafeteria. Mayer explained that she had sifted through the various questions on the internal network, but she wanted to begin instead with something else. Mayer composed herself and began reading from a book, “Bobbie Had a Nickel,” about a little boy who gets a nickel and considers all the ways he can spend it.
“Bobbie had a nickel all his very own,” Mayer read. “Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?”
Mayer paused to show everyone the illustrations of a little boy in red hair and blue shorts choosing between ice cream and candy. “Should he buy a bubble pipe?” she continued. “Or a boat of wood?” At the end of the book, Bobby decides to spend his nickel on a carousel ride. Mayer would later explain that the book symbolized how much she valued her roving experiences thus far at Yahoo. But few in the room seemed to understand the connection.
Strange. But man, what great writing in this article.
Let’s give the last word to Aswath Damodaran:
Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.”
from New York University’s beautifully done website: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/
Friends
Posted: December 16, 2014 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Credit Suzanne Hanover/Columbia Pictures
Great detail from this NY Times interview with Franco and Rogen:
Did you know you’d be friends right away when you met on “Freaks and Geeks”?
FRANCO I was just writing some poems about it. It sounds silly, but I think they’re actually pretty good. There was a period where Seth, Jason [Segel] and I all went to Jason’s house, and they would sit at one end of the room and smoke weed.
ROGEN He literally would sit in the corner.
More:
Did that camaraderie continue after the show?
FRANCO There was a point where most people on the show didn’t like me, because I took myself too seriously. I thought I was Marlon Brando or something. Then I pushed Busy [Philipps, a co-star] over, by accident. So everybody didn’t like me, I think, except for Seth.
ROGEN When the show ended, I didn’t talk to you for years. We kind of went our separate ways, for a long time.
FRANCO I ran into Judd [Apatow] at this film festival in Austin. He’s like, “Why don’t you come back to the comedy world?” And I was like, “Yes. I need to change something, because I’m miserable.” I was not happy as an actor, and I went and did “Pineapple Express,” and it was like, Oh, it’s Seth, and I know Seth. I could take huge swings. That made all the difference
Fist City
Posted: December 16, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, music, women Leave a comment
Loretta has such an admirable way of getting right to the point.
Bulletproof
Posted: December 15, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, food, the California Condition, Tibet Leave a comment
NYTimes article about “Bulletproof,” a fad/product:
The recipe — a riff on the yak butter tea Mr. Asprey found restorative while hiking in Tibet — calls for low-mold coffee beans; at least two tablespoons of unsalted butter (grass-fed, which is higher in Omega 3s and vitamins); and one to two tablespoons of medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, a type of easily digestible fat.
and this sticks out:
Being Bulletproof means never traveling light. After a MacGyver attempt to make coffee in a Chicago hotel room, Brandon Routh, who plays the superhero The Atom on the CW show “Arrow,” now carries ground beans, containers of clarified butter, a silicone squeeze bottle of MCT oil, plus a hand blender and Aeropress filter.
“My energy levels are through the roof compared to what they used to be,” said Mr. Routh, who learned of the drink at a bachelor party, of all places. He added: “My lines just kind of sink in and they’re there when I need them.”
Here’s the thing about my human brain: Routh’s endorsement will end up “counting,” in my brain, certainly sticking way longer, than any carefully researched, cautiously presented bit of scientific evidence.
Already I’m like “well, who’s to argue with Routh? Why would he lie? Am I so arrogant as to not TRY butter coffee?”
(Separate thing: what is with our infatuation with the spiritual powers of Tibet? A strong case could be made that Tibet is a violent, backwards, cruel theocracy historically run by puppet child-monks under control of death-obsessed masters.)
© Joseph F. Rock / National Geographic Image Collection.
Pope News [updated]
Posted: December 12, 2014 Filed under: animals, Christianity, religion 1 Comment
photo found here by googling “cute dogs” http://pichost.me/1457531/
From USA Today:
Pope Francis continues to show he’s anything but traditional. During a recent public appearance, Francis comforted a boy whose dog had died, noting, “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”
Theologians say Francis—who took his papal name from the patron saint of animals, St. Francis of Assisi—was only speaking conversationally.
If that’s how the Pope speaks conversationally that’s rad.
** UPDATE **
Apparently, not true.
How great is the Washington Post’s photo for this story?:
In this photo provided by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis meets members of the Italian national council for the blind and visually impaired, at the Vatican on Saturday. (AP)
What?
Posted: December 11, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Not well informed on the torture report, so thanks to Andrew Sullivan for calling my attention to this NYT piece:
For all the publicity the Bush administration gave Mr. Padilla, the committee revealed that the government never took his dirty bomb plot seriously. It was based on a satirical Internet article titled “How to Make an H-Bomb,” and the plot involved swinging a bucket full of uranium over one’s head for 45 minutes. One internal C.I.A. email declared that such a plot would most likely kill Mr. Padilla but “would definitely not result in a nuclear explosive device.” Another called Mr. Padilla “a petty criminal” and described the dirty bomb plot as “lore.”
Easy to forget who you’re supposed to be rooting for as you read this thing. The goofy gang that can’t shoot straight or the fiendish torturers who’re hiding the pathetic results of their evil in a tedious bureaucratic report?
Possible to do this and still be an idiot.
Posted: December 10, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentFrom Dana Milibank in The Washington Post:
[TNR owner Chris] Hughes is no idiot (he reads Balzac in French)
Yo Monkeytrial!
Posted: December 10, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
This post is in response to my East Coast buddy Monkeytrial, who says:
We haven’t been to the moon in 42 years, and the richest 1 percent of humans own half the world’s assets.
…
I’d like to read a discussion of the psychological implications of growing up in a time of dramatic technological progress (my parents’ generation) versus consumer-focused incrementalism (my own). If any of my zero readers know and could link, much appreciated.
Hmm! Let’s think about the idea that technological progress has slowed from a rapid rate 1940-1970 to a stagnation now.
Is this true?
What does it mean?
I don’t have exactly what Monkeytrial is looking for. But through the glory of the Internet, we can converse via blog.
Some uncooked ideas inspired by him. First, a rec:
Check out Peter Thiel.
If not exactly this, he is obsessed with similar problems. He talks about ’em in his book which I recommend, thought-provoking to the max. Dude is thinking interesting thoughts at a rapid rate:
Even more on Monkeytrial’s theme is this essay, from National Review (I know, I know):
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.
Another roundup of Thiel pessimism. This one seems to really nag at him:
The Empire State Building was built in 15 months in 1932. It’s taken 12 years and counting to rebuild the World Trade Center.
(Well, was that an engineering problem, or a political one? I don’t know a ton about New York City politics in the ’30s, but from what I understand, between former governor Al Smith as president of Empire State Inc., FDR as governor, Jimmy Walker as mayor, and James Farley supplying the building materials there was more or less a semi-benevolent mafia running the city.)
Maybe: we work in levels, like an orbiting electron?
Like, maybe we humans make big jumps, and then plateau for awhile? Nothing happened in Europe between 5oo and 1300 AD (let’s say) and then there was the Renaissance. Maybe what DFW’s characters speculate about tennis applies?:
“‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other three. They’re on the floor indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’
‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’
Chu says ‘…that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’
‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the celing and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. ‘With an X. Plateaux.’
Maybe: we got scared by the speed of what we were doing.
Nukes, etc.
This caused us to pull back on investment/energy in areas like nuclear engineering where there may have been big if scary advances to make?
Maybe: we were really just plucking low hanging fruit.
The Tyler Cowen theory, that there was a lot of low-hanging economic fruit, esp. in the resource rich United States, and we ate it all up and now it’s gone.
Maybe: globalization happened in one big boom.
Like, it was a closer to a one-time event than an enduring process, and it already happened, between say 1960 and 1989, as China opened, containerization blasted international shipping forward. The revolution is over, we already got the major results in the form of Wal-Mart and so on, now it’s just a matter of economic water shifting across the world until all the glasses (countries) are level, and that’s gonna look like reverse progress from here in the US.
Maybe: it only looks bad here in the US.
Sure, it seems like technological progress has stalled out since 1970~ here in the US, but it sure as hell doesn’t look like that in China, India, dunno parts of Africa, where changes from 1970-now are as rapid as 1945-1970 in the US?
Maybe: tech “progress” isn’t necessarily good.
Maybe the jarring nature of it, the disorienting and alienating effects, level out the material gains? Maybe we’re feeling some kind of technological hangover and we’re all kinda cooling it?
What about social/cultural progress?
Food. I’m eating better every year. The food a person in Los Angeles or New York can access is insanely better than it was in 1970 in terms of variety and quality. Here’s literally the first pic I found when I googled “Food 1970:”
Sex. Sexual freedom is insane now.
Art. There’s pretty much no limit on what you can do artwise in the Western World – a guy inflated a buttplug in the middle of Paris and the President of France stuck up for him.
Drugs, alternative lifestyles, dressing weird – it’s becoming pretty much a field day. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” is another puzzle but we are “progressing” very rapidly in a direction.
In less ambiguous ways, there’s been massive social progress. We’re getting more inclusive. Here’s a clearly stated example Aisha happened to put on This. today: Shonda Rhimes putting racial/gender/representational progress in sharp terms she receives the Sherry Lansing Award:
Look around this room. It’s filled with women of all colors in Hollywood who are executives and heads of studios and VPs and show creators and directors. There are a lot of women in Hollywood in this room who have the game-changing ability to say yes or no to something.
15 years ago, that would not have been as true. There’d have been maybe a few women in Hollywood who could say yes or no. And a lot of D girls and assistants who were gritting their teeth and working really hard. And for someone like me, if I was very very VERY lucky, there’d have been maybe one small show. One small shot. And that shot would not have involved a leading actress of color, any three dimensional LGBT characters, any women characters with high powered jobs AND families, and no more than two characters of color in any scene at one time — because that only happened in sitcoms.
30 years ago, I’d think maybe there’d be a thousand secretaries fending off their handsy bosses back at the office and about two women in Hollywood in this room. And if I were here, I would serving those two women breakfast.
50 years ago, if women wanted to gather in a room, well it had better be about babies or charity work. And the brown women were in one room over there and the white women were in a room over here.
What if: technological progress – the speed of it, especially – itself aggravated the wealth inequality.
Twitter was created eight years ago. It’s now worth roughly $24 billion. Have people ever, in the history of the world, gotten that rich that fast?
Also: the last period of insane technological progress culminated in a horrifying cataclysm.
from this great website: http://madefromhistory.com/world-war-one/painting/
World War I, where all those terrific machines were turned to gassing and machine-gunning each other. Then, when they were done with that, they ramped up to the next one: twice as cataclysmic (but on the other hand, very fertile for creating more technological progress).
So, maybe we should just count our stars we’re lucky we dodged that and closed out a tech boom peacefully.
And: Why should we expect things to be linear?
Maybe this Thiel idea that technological progress has “stalled” is like the weird thinking of an Asberger’s robot, human history is chaotic and works in undiagnosable, epileptic fits and starts that can’t be rationally charted.
Did the rapidity of change make us (sanely enough) feel more unsettled about predicting the future?
Maybe that itself acted as some kind of check on technological progress? The optimism of a 1960s Popular Mechanics cover
feels dated today.
Anyway, I guess my point is: check out Monkeytrial.
reblog from bookbinderlocal455
Posted: December 7, 2014 Filed under: advice, Texas, writing 3 Commentsgotta remember this re: consuming internet.
stirs something within you
i think about this constantly in marfa, where there is a non-stop stream of performance and art, which sometimes rob one of time to pursue his/her own work. via pitchfork:
“One of the problems of our modern world is that there’s a lot of things to work through, but, at some point, everybody should take a pause from that and make something, so that it’s not just all one-way traffic. Human beings aren’t meant to be solely consumers—eventually, something has to come out. Otherwise, I don’t really see what the point of all that consumption is. The idea behind watching things and listening to things is that it stirs something within you, and hopefully that will stimulate you to then create your own thing.”
Photos from the Shackleton expedition
Posted: December 5, 2014 Filed under: adventures Leave a comment
Man. These are all pretty great. HT Jon Lee Anderson’s Twitter feed.
That is, apparently, Hubert Hudson. From here, I hope John F. Mann doesn’t mind:
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Two Videos
Posted: December 3, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a commentI always enjoy when friends and houseguests put me on to interesting videos. INSURANCE as these are old.
Ice Cube celebrates the Eames:
And a remix:
Amazing murals
Posted: December 2, 2014 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a commentMy dad, who deserves to be on the cover of Fantastic Man magazine, sends me a link to this Boston Globe story about WPA projects of the ’30s that live on, like this Ross Moffett mural in a Somerville, MA post office:
MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF
My dad’s fav is Coit Tower, in San Francisco, done by a ton of folks:
This map, from The Living New Deal, is awesome.
Me, I’m a murals guy, so that’s what I’m looking at. Orange Pickers, in the Fullerton CA post office by Paul Julian, is the sexiest one I can find:
The Oceanside post office has a good one by the wonderfully named Elise Seeds, here’s a detail:
Man, the coastal post offices of SoCal are truly blessed. In San Pedro, Fletcher Martin depicted “Mail Transportation”:
Down at Dana Middle School in San Pedro is “The Life And Travels Of Richard Henry Dana” by Adrien Machefort:
Let’s leave California for a moment and observe The Two Rivers in the Rome, GA post office by Peter Blume:
Alaskan Landscape in the (old) federal courthouse in Anchorage, AK by Arthur Kerrick:
Point Loma, at Balboa Park, San Diego, CA by Charles Reiffel:
How about the Lost Continents of Atlantis and Mu, at the Aquatic Park bathhouse in San Francisco, by Hilaire Hiler?:
Or Origin And Development of the Name Of California, by Lucile Lloyd?:
Here is the freakin’ motherlode, really: SDSU has a Flickr of the murals in California.
Let it all just drop.
Posted: December 1, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(can’t find the credit for this photo – the Sept. 25, 2008 meeting)
Incredible ideas in the Chris Rock interview from New York magazine:
When you mentioned Bush, I thought you were going to say something else, which is that he had this “good versus evil” manner of speaking — the Western sheriff who’s come to lay down the law. Obama’s been faulted for not showing anger in public, and for not speaking in simple, declarative Bushisms. Of course, the moment he does do that, he’s accused of being an angry black man.
There’s an advantage that Bush had that Obama doesn’t have. People thinking you’re dumb is an advantage. Obama started as a genius. It’s like,What? I’ve got to keep doing that? That’s hard to do! So it’s not that Obama’s disappointing. It’s just his best album might have been his first album.
What has Obama done wrong?
When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop.
Let what drop?
Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don’t bail anybody out. In sports, that’s what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don’t try to save old management’s mistakes.
That’s clever. You let it all go to hell.
Let it all go to hell knowing good and well this is on them. That way you can implement. You hire your own coach. You get your own players. He could have got way more done. You know, we’ve all been on planes that had tremendous turbulence, but we forget all about it. Now, if you live through a plane crash, you’ll never forget that. Maybe Obama should have let the plane crash. You get credit for bringing somebody back from the dead. You don’t really get credit for helping a sick person by administering antibiotics.
How about this?
We still have some white people taking the Sarah Palin line about blacks and immigrants alike. They want to “take back the country” — and we know from whom. I find it depressing. The increments of change seem to be so much tinier than we wanted to believe when the Civil Rights Act passed 50 years ago, or when Obama was elected in 2008.
Yeah. The stuff you’re talking about is pockets though. There’s always going to be people that don’t know that the war’s over. I’m more optimistic than you, but maybe it’s because I live the way I do. I just have a great life, so it’s easier for me to say things are great. But not even me. My brothers drive trucks and stock shelves. They live in a much better world than my father did. My mother tells stories of growing up in Andrews, South Carolina, and the black people had to go to the vet to get their teeth pulled out. And you still had to go to the back door, because if the white people knew the vet had used his instruments on black people, they wouldn’t take their pets to the vet. This is not some person I read about. This is my mother.
Or this?:
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, just came out as gay.
Which I think is actually bigger than the football player. Because the average person in that locker room is in his 20s. And it’s just not a big deal to be around a gay guy — if you’re in your 20s. Whereas Tim Cook is around these corporate guys. That is the epitome of a boys’ club. That is sexist, racist — the least inclusive group of people you’re ever going to find. Men who have no problem being called owners. Who actually wants to be called an owner, even if you owned a football team? Just the title owner is just so nasty and disgusting.
It does have a kind of antebellum ring.
So Tim Cook came out to those guys. He’s in that club. My God.
Holy fucking shit (?)
Posted: November 26, 2014 Filed under: writing Leave a commentThey discovered a first folio of Shakespeare in a library in France.
Denis Charlet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Is this like a big deal?
“This is huge,” said Eric Rasmussen, an American Shakespeare expert who traveled to France over the weekend to authenticate the volume.
Wow. How huge?
Mr. Rasmussen pointed out the name “Neville,” inscribed on the folio’s first surviving page — a possible indication, he said, that the book was brought to St.-Omer in the 1650s by Edward Scarisbrick, a member of a prominent English Catholic family who went by that alias and attended the Jesuit college, founded when Catholics were banned from England’s universities.
OK…
The St.-Omer folio, Mr. Rasmussen said, also contains handwritten notes that may illuminate how the plays were performed in Shakespeare’s time.
Like… Hamlet has a happy ending now?
In one scene in “Henry IV,” the word “hostess” is changed to “host” and “wench” to “fellow” — possibly reflecting an early performance where a female character was turned into a male. “I’ve never seen this kind of gender switch in a Shakespeare folio,” Mr. Rasmussen said.
I’m very happy for Mr. Rasmussen, and wish him happy hunting. But if you ask me, the better story is of the hunt for the things, not the things:
Today, first folios are tracked like rare black rhinoceroses, right down to their disappearances. One is known to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; another went down with the S.S. Arctic off Newfoundland in 1854.
New ones come to light every decade or so, Mr. Rasmussen said, most recently in the library of a London woman who died without a will. “It was a mess, with a bunch of second-folio bits mixed in,” Mr. Rasmussen said.
The disgust in his voice.
The quest for a word for “female masturbation” in Swedish
Posted: November 24, 2014 Filed under: Sweden Leave a comment
- TREMENDOUS respect for sex educator Kristina Ljungros agreeing to be the photo on this story. (Photo: RFSU)
There is no Swedish word for specifically female masturbation. (Is there an English word for it? What world language is richest in words for this practice I wonder?) Anyway now there’s a contest to come up with one:
The idea for the contest emerged after a member of RFSU – a national not-for-profit organization which aims to promote an “open, positive view of sex and relationship issues” – brought up the absence of a specific word for female masturbation in the Swedish language at a bi-annual meeting of the group in 2013.
“Rather than sit around amongst ourselves talking about it, we thought we would launch a nationwide competition,” Kristina Ljungros, a spokeswoman for the association told The Local.
Two girls discuss their entry into the contest along the Munkbroloden in Gamla Stan, Stockholm (photo by SC/Helytimes)
(ht the great Tyler Cowen):
“Klittra”, “pulla” and “selfa” are among the suggestions…
- And what does he think?
Why it’s crucial:
“But the absence of one commonly used word for female masturbation suggests that we still don’t have gender equality here in Sweden,” [sex education group spokeswoman Kristina Ljungros] added.
“Hopefully this is another step towards that”.
Wholeheartedly agree, and support this cause. I even have some nominees:
- purså
- murledunk
- burlisnuff
- klaam
- snurtlinattan
- självberöring
- nerelek
- hemligskratt
- fittabråkade
- kvinnlig glädje
- “kröna lucia”
Readers, I beg you to email helphely at gmail with further suggestions.
- What would Lotta på Bråkmakargatan make of all this? (photo courtesy the Lisa Larsson collection at the Wrenshall Archives Of Theatrical Posters)
My Swedish is so bad, I don’t even know the Swedish word for male masturbation. But I know who does:
Filip and Fredrik. Highly recommend their podcast. Their English is fascinating, articulate and technically flawless yet wonderfully strange. They’re also so intelligent and funny they must be at the far end of some kind of spectrum.
But boys, if you’re reading, you MUST update your wikipedia photo. I use this one instead:
What is going ON in DC?
Posted: November 22, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a commentI gotta say, I agree with Peggy Noonan that this article in the New York Times, “Reid Is Unapologetic as Aide Steps on Toes, even the President’s,” is upsetting. Here is Ms. Noonan’s summary of its contents:
Assuming the article is factually correct, and it certainly appears to be well reported, the president of the United States phoned the majority leader of the U.S. Senate during a legislative crisis to complain that one of the senator’s staffers is a leaker. Unbeknown to the president, the staffer was listening in on the call and broke in to rebut the president’s accusation.
Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
That’s the staffer there, David Krone.
(What should we make of Harry Reid’s portrait of Twain there? There’s no way Reid is so dumb it didn’t occur to him what Twain would think of that, and him. Is choosing that portrait a sage bit of humor and humility? Or a cheap show at sage humor and humility? Plus bloody bloody Andrew Jackson? anyway there’s no time to sort all that out.)
Says the Times:
For some on Capitol Hill, Mr. Krone is a manipulative megalomaniac. For others, he is a hero who has the financial independence to speak his mind. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that he is different.
(Krone is rich I guess from being a cable TV executive as a young man?). I’m not liking this dude’s tone as presented in the article:
“I don’t remember anything about that,” Mr. Reid said in his chandeliered office on Nov. 13, a few hours after being re-elected leader of the Senate Democrats. “Do you?” he asked, turning to Mr. Krone, who was seated beside him in the “leader’s chair.”
“Umm,” Mr. Krone, who is rarely at a loss for words, said through a frozen smile. A few minutes later, Mr. Krone, dressed impeccably in a bespoke suit, walked a reporter out of the office, and, referring to the president’s call, jocularly exclaimed, “I can’t believe that you know that story!”
Krone’s wife is Alyssa Mastromonaco, former Deputy Chief Of Staff for Operations at the White House:
photo of AM I found on Italian wikipedia.
One day, congressional leaders went to the White House to meet with the president. As they entered, Secret Service agents decided to screen staff members, who usually roll right onto the grounds with their bosses. According to a person familiar with the day’s events, Mr. Krone, incredulous, began shouting. He then called Ms. Mastromonaco, then his fiancée and the administration’s deputy chief of staff for operations, who arrived and apologized. (Mr. Krone said he did not recall the incident and suggested that he might have been misunderstood. “I have a sarcastic sense of humor,” he said.)
Adding to the tumult as the staff members and congressional leaders waited in the White House lobby, Mr. Boehner approached Mr. Reid and, upset by Mr. Reid’s attacks on him on the Senate floor, told him to “go [expletive] yourself.” Mr. Reid replied that he read only what Mr. Krone put in his speeches.
“He says, ‘Blame David,’ ” Mr. Krone recalled, chuckling. “And I was, like, ‘Don’t look at me!’ ”
There’s more weirdness. Apparently the President and First Lady threw a party in honor of Mr. Krone and Miss Mastromonaco’s upcoming wedding, and Krone didn’t go:
Even as his relationship with the administration deteriorated, Mr. Krone set a wedding date with Ms. Mastromonaco for last November. As the big day approached, Mr. Krone’s good friend George E. Norcross III, the Democratic political boss of South Jersey, suggested a golf outing at his Palm Beach, Fla., home before the nuptials. Mr. Krone said his fiancée endorsed the idea, but a week before the trip said, “Don’t get mad, but they are throwing a party for us.” The “they” in question was Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, but Mr. Krone kept his engagement with Mr. Norcross instead. “I’m exactly where I wanted,” he recalled thinking during the Florida trip.
At the White House engagement party, the president spoke of Ms. Mastromonaco’s indispensability and referred to her as a “little sister.” Michelle Obama declared her to be like “part of my family.” The absent groom later admired a photo of the cake served at the party, describing it as “like taller than me.”
(Pete Souza/The White House)
Mastromonaco now works at VICE. Reid, talking about Krone:
Mr. Reid fought back tears as he recalled the time he visited his wife, who had been injured in a car accident, and saw Mr. Krone at her hospital bedside. “David is someone I can say, and it doesn’t affect my manhood at all,” Mr. Reid said, “I love David Krone.”
This Times article has some unusually casual phrasing. For example:
It is hard to imagine now, but Mr. Krone used to have a good relationship with the White House. Smart and insanely hard-working, Mr. Krone, with his direct manner and total empowerment by Mr. Reid, proved a valuable ally in the administration’s early policy lifts.
Anyway: Peggy Noonan is disgusted with all this. She goes on to invoke The West Wing, on which she briefly worked:
The second thing the Horowitz story made me think of is this. I have remarked, and I think others have also, on the broad, deep impact of the television drama “The West Wing.” It spawned a generation of Washington-based television dramas. (Interestingly, they have become increasingly dark.) It also inspired a generation of young people to go to Washington and work in politics. I always thought the show gave young people a sense of the excitement of work, of being a professional and of being part of something that could make things better.
But it also gave them a sense of how things are done in Washington. And here the show’s impact was not entirely beneficial, because people do not—should not—relate to each other in Washington as they do on TV. “The West Wing” was a television show—it was show business—and it had to conform to the rules of drama and entertainment, building tension and inventing situations that wouldn’t really happen in real life.
Once when I briefly worked on the show, there was a scene in which the press secretary confronts the president and tells him off about some issue. Then she turned her back and walked out. I wrote a note to the creator, Aaron Sorkin, and said, Aaron, press secretaries don’t upbraid presidents in this way, and they don’t punctuate their point by turning their backs and storming out. I cannot remember his reply, but it was probably along the lines of, “In TV they do!”
“The West Wing” was so groundbreaking, and had in so many ways such a benign impact. But I wonder if it didn’t give an entire generation the impression that how you do it on a TV drama is how you do it in real life.
And so the president calls the senator and the aide listens in and cuts the president off. And things in Washington are more like a novel than life, but a cheap novel, and more like a TV show than life, but a poor and increasingly dark one.
Over at Gawker they love to call Peggy Noonan things like “doddering” and “an 800 year-old broken record” and “lunatic.” That is not helpful. It only reveals Gawker to be dummies who think they’re smarter than they are, Peggy Noonan is 10x more skillful at writing than anyone at Gawker.
She’s so good at writing/rhetoric/storytelling that she can slick you by assumptions that might not hold up. Here, in this same blog post, she tells the story of hearing of Monica Lewinsky:
At this point I said, “Whoa. Whoa.” Because my instinct was that it wasn’t true, presidents don’t do things like that, this sounds more like a novel than life. Maybe the girl is just someone with an extremely odd and active fantasy life.
But my friends believed the story, and I could tell that they felt a little sorry for me that I didn’t get it.
Which I didn’t. Because no president would act like that. It took days and weeks for me to fully absorb it. And then I got mad, because the people involved in the scandal were acting as vandals and tearing down things it took centuries to build.
My only personal experience of the White House was of two men, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, for whom such behavior would have been impossible.
If you work for American presidents who are good men, you will inevitably carry forward in your head the assumption that American presidents will be good men. Your expectations will be toward high personal standards and normality. If you started out working for leaders who are not good men, on the other hand, you can go forward with a cynicism and suspicion that are perhaps more appropriate to your era.
Well sure maybe they weren’t getting bjers but Reagan almost certainly was demented and both of them either didn’t know or lied about knowing how military officers in their White House were selling weapons to Islamist revolutionaries and using the money to fund right-wing murderers in Central America.
Maybe that’s worse?
That thing about tearing down things it took centuries to build, tho. I’m with her on that.
Thinking as I go here but: it’s cool and hip and really important sometimes to be “disruptive.”
But: perhaps in my dottage I’m becoming a grumpy old crank, but:
There’s also wisdom in a lower-c “conservative” respect and protective instinct for “things” it took centuries and great sacrifice to build. Things that preserve important, maybe even eternal values. Things like the American Presidency, which has a dignity earned for it by brilliant, inspired men, starting with George Washington, and yeah he owned slaves and that is extremely fucked as even he seems to have known but his greatness is undeniable because he was, seemingly at all times, thinking of something bigger than himself, offering his life to a larger vision that extends all the way to us and beyond.
Among the people that followed George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in that office there was not one who wasn’t deeply weird and full of puzzle and contradiction. There was at least one wicked criminal who deserved to be dumped in an open sewage canal. But taken together they built up and left behind a legacy, a “thing” of brilliance and endurance and dignity and honor and pride that benefits us, protects us, improves and broadens and enriches our lives. That deserves some kind of deep reverence.
Not worshipful reverence, not fanatical reverence. Even Reid knows he’s supposed to remember Twain too. Maybe reverence is the wrong word even. Maybe what it should inspire is humility.
That’s what’s missing here. A guy who interrupts the President and then brags about it to The New York Times isn’t being humble. He’s being an asshole.
Helytimes 
