Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 12:38:08 PDT Listings
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 12:38:08 PDT Listings
Question of the Day
Whose brain-slave are you?
Posted by dr*strange ( 875 ) on Jul-06-07 at 12:20:17 PDT Listings
Trans Global Comics A brain slave is a person who's head has been encased in a helmet which compels that person to obey every command of his or her captor. Mentallo and the Fixer strapped one of these helmets on Nick Fury in Issue #142 of Strange Tales and didn't take it off until page of Strange Tales #143. Of course before they took off his helmet they strapped him to a hydrogen bomb that would detonate if he tried to escape.
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 11:20:48 PDT Listings
I'm not shilling when I'm asking for a critique of what's wrong with my store makeover. I posted, "Is this auction confusing? Opinions?" And was immediately reported and deleted.. Let's see.
I need help.
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 11:16:44 PDT Listings
Any one got a pin-up of the Dark Subby? Sue Storms bad-boy/criminal ex-lover? Maybe they weren't bat-wings. Propably more and bigger fins under his arms. Y'know, armpit fins.
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 11:14:00 PDT Listings
If Namor ever gets a shot in the FF flix, should he be all beefcaked up or the slim Everett version? Maybe the Jae Lee version? I liked the Bat-Winged version.
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 11:07:24 PDT Listings
Strange, never seen that one. I love it.
"Brain-Slaves" WTF? What is that?
At first glance I thought someone's head was encased
in a "Brain Prison"
It's funny. Plus the ticking lit fuse.
http://members.aol.com/sciva69/strangetales143.jpg
Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 )    on Jul-06-07 at 12:38:08 PDT  | Listings |
| Question of the Day Whose brain-slave are you? |
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| Posted by trans_global_comics_and_magazines ( 1200 ) on Jul-06-07 at 11:07:24 PDT | Listings |
"Brain-Slaves" WTF? What is that?
At first glance I thought someone's head was encased
in a "Brain Prison"
It's funny. Plus the ticking lit fuse.
Trust me, the next Adams is NOT working in comics and is probably doing computer animation or movie/TV/video game CGI effects right now.
i have to disagree.
alot of artschool students that want to do storyboards for hollywood are trying to break into comics. using comics as a stepping stone.
but like most things on these boards, it is just my opinion.
==
Five "characters" to evict from the comics storytelling pantheon:
1) The Evil Conspiracy Guy
Dresses in black suits, skinny ties and sunglasses day and night; almost never speaks or answers questions; shadows baffled but frightened investigators of all stripes in long black limousines; functions as a road agent of mysterious, distant conspiratorial employers who wish all traces of their evil plans kept from public consciousness; and kills without emotion, except for that bit of supercilious satisfaction, usually evidenced by a pointless, obtuse wisecrack, at proving superior (via assassination) to their worthless, helpless prey. Has no past and no future, and needs none, because he's a prop of jeopardy, not a real character. (Can sometimes be female, and in such cases will almost always prove physical superiority to male target via hand-to-hand combat before killing.) Works almost constantly; has earned a permanent vacation.
2) The Grizzled Old Cop
Pudgy and gruff, this stubble-chinned mainstay slouches and grumbles with world-weary bitterness about how he's "too old for this." He's at least too old to not know how to use a steam iron or where any dry cleaners are, but his clothes always look like he's been sleeping in them for five days. He wears fedoras, off-the-rack suits and frequently trenchcoats, and prefers greasy food. He complains about his bosses, courts coddling street criminals, regulations tying his hands, the press, and women's sentimental expectations, but he's always willing to show his old-school toughness. His pension will never amount to enough, but it's time he took it anyway.
3) The Greedy Idiot Genius
The classic generic "scientist," he has enough understanding of technology to build fantastic weaponry based on highly suspect scientific principle, but not enough understanding of patents, commerce or basic arithmetic to figure out that mass marketing peaceful or military uses of his invention will net him infinitely more than using it to rob banks will. Fortunately, he's not seen much anymore, but even once is too much.
4) The Ramrod
Ain't it strange how there's always one? The guy who has to tell the rest of the group/team/random collection of strangers coping with a crisis "Let's move it, people!" like he's Sgt. Fury and they don't have to brains to figure it out for themselves. Leave him behind.
5) The Subjugated SuperAlien
Often female, they are representatives of slave races bred to have amazing powers, usually in the service of some alien conqueror, but on encountering brave, freedom-loving denizens of Earth, rebel against their masters, join forces with the Earthlings, then spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Variation: bred to be a service race, they are unable to comprehend when their masters tell them to stop fighting brave but outclassed Earth heroes, but come to appreciate that what the Earthling emotions they believed were "weak" were true strength after all. Then they spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Isn't there some planet somewhere they can have for their very own?
Got any others? Send 'em in!
A couple interesting letters in recently:
"Can I bring up my pet peeve, when I walk into my local comic shop (its an hour away, buts that's local to me) and scan the racks looking for something interesting, I have no idea what to pick up! There is never anything to tell me what the comic is about, you always have to go in blind. When you buy a novel, the back cover or inside flap gives you a idea of what it's about, but comics nothing. Just this weekend picked up about a half dozen comics, and put them back. The covers looked interesting, the interior art was ok, but just flipping through I got no sense of the story. There was no spandex or zombies or cowboys, just a lot of talking heads in a contemporary setting. How about it guys give us a clue, we will take a chance if you give us a reason to?"
Maybe I ought to change the column name back to Master Of The Obvious, because that one's so obvious I can't imagine why publishers aren't doing it, especially since manga is increasingly training readers to look for cover blurbs. I can understand not having them in comics that sell the back cover for advertising, but most don't. Some summary of concept and story were considered de rigueur not too long ago, usually on the inside front cover, though companies have also demanded they appear on the splash or (usually very clumsily) be incorporated into the first few pages of each story. On the other hand, a good, concise attention-getting blurb is one of the hardest things in the world to write. (The trick is to write brisk story concept synopses with a drop of plot development rather than extended plot summaries, but comics fans and marketing departments alike seem madly in love with the latter.) In any case, yes, a well-crafted, easily found summary/blurb might go a long way toward increasing casual sales, and the back cover's as good a place to put one as any.
My dad gave me these two sage bits of advice....
"You can't go broke making a profit"
"Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered"
He was a commodities broker. Comics are commodities.
Best advice I ever got.
My mom once said:
'Dammit John, not in the freakin' house! Put the pipe, down, open the windows and let all the smell out before your dad gets home!'
I've always remembered those wise words.
--------------------
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint.
Give me two and they'll fall in love.
Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'.
Give me four and they'll build a pyramid.
Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice.
Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare.
Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home." - Glen Bateman, The Stand
Oddly, most of the people I've spoken to were in the same boat in 2006, suffering through a year long accruing gauntlet of pointless and meaningless time-consuming crap rather than any sort of catastrophes.
And the ones without the talent to make it, stay in comics.
Comics are no longer mainstream, and these days, get left with the dredges. Failed screenwriters (like Bendis), failed animators, failed storyboard artists, etc.
Books of The Times
Growing Up Hippie, and Going Down the Up Escalator With Dad
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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 3, 2007
Coming-of-age literature is filled with characters who experience themselves as outsiders — as loners, nerds, misunderstood artists or uncool, uptight geeks. In her keenly observed novel “Flower Children,” Maxine Swann depicts four children who worry that their hippie parents’ unconventional lifestyle has put them outside the mainstream of ordinary life.
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Marisela La Grave
Maxine Swann
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FLOWER CHILDREN
By Maxine Swann
211 pages.
Riverhead Books.
$21.95.
Their parents’ laissez-faire approach to raising children; their skinny-dipping parties and free talk about sex; the trapeze in the living room; the shabby, eccentric clothes they wear — all make Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde yearn to fit in. At school, they’re surprised at first by all the rules but quickly embrace them:
“They learn not to swear. They get prizes for obedience, for following the rules down to the last detail. They’re delighted by these rules, these arbitrary lines that regulate behavior and mark off forbidden things.”
At home, they become the responsible ones, the parental ones: They goad their father into cleaning up the house, worry about him falling asleep when he drives and wish their mother would “clean herself up, wear some decent clothes.”
Writing in lucid, crystalline prose that shifts back and forth from the first person to the third, Ms. Swann has expanded a short story that scooped up a handful of prizes (the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and Ploughshares’ Cohen Award) and turned it into a small gem of a novel, a novel that showcases her eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time.
She captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.
The four children — ranging in age, at the start of the novel, from 3 to 9 — grow up in Pennsylvania farm country without supervision: They are “free to run anywhere they like whenever they like.” They all sleep in one room in the house their parents built, and they “take baths with their father, five bodies in one tub.”
They travel with their parents to demonstrations across the country, they listen to their father expound on subjects ranging from Vietnam to EST to thermal energy, and they listen to their mother’s boyfriends and their father’s girlfriends talk about relationships.
Their mother has rebelled against her mother’s privileged country-club life on Long Island, while their Harvard-educated father, who hails from a family of New England eccentrics, seems to regard petty trouble-making as a philosophical stance toward the world. He takes the children running down the up escalators in stores, gets speeding tickets left and right, and delights in upsetting his girlfriends by wearing outrageous clothes to family gatherings.
He is fond of denouncing the hypocrisies of the “grown-up” world, and exults in his children “who will be like no children ever were,” brought up not on petty lessons “about how a fork is held or a hand shaken or what is best to be said and what shouldn’t be spoken of or seen.”
Maeve and her older sister, Lu, try to order their chaotic childhoods by excelling at school: “To combat any weird rumors about our house, we tried to act as normal as we could. We carried combs in our back pockets, flipped our hair back, trying to imitate the cooler girls. The rewards for us were in getting A’s. We got A’s. But we were also torn about it. We had always been debilitated by this penchant of ours to get A’s because getting A’s wasn’t cool. We tried to stop but couldn’t.”
As the two girls get older, they take to hanging out with two ne’er-do-well brothers from school, who initiate them into the complexities of adolescence, but Maeve realizes that she and her sister “were going one way, the Kalowski boys the other.” At the same time, she realizes that her and her siblings’ obsession with their parents — their divorce, their affairs, their unorthodox habits and bizarre theories — has magically receded, that their parents no longer dominate the landscape of their lives.
Years later, when the children, now grown themselves, return home for visits, they feel a kind of nostalgia for the things that once vexed and perplexed them. Toward the end of this slender but resonant novel, Ms. Swann writes:
“They feel a great tenderness for certain things. That was where the goats gathered. That’s where the cider press still stands, unused for years. Suddenly they feel enraged. How could things go unused like that for years? They should move back here, settle in, make it all work again, make it all as it was again exactly, replicate that world — but why? It seems to have suddenly slipped their minds that they have whole other worlds and even people waiting for them to return. And even so, why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was. Perfect because it was the world before the world changed.”
podcast
microphone
Does my d-drive work?
NOTORIOUS child killer Karl Tonner was found dead in his cell at the State Hospital at Carstairs in Lanarkshire, it was confirmed yesterday.
Carstairs State Hospital about to be demolished
THE maximum-security hospital which houses Scotland's most dangerous criminals is set to be demolished.
Wed, 24 Jan 2007
==+++===++++
fri. july 13 07
“Journalist and the Murderer.”
You don’t need to buy Ms. Malcolm’s take on the reporter-subject relationship (“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”) or, for that matter, Joan Didion’s (“Writers are always selling somebody out”) to grasp the more unsavory aspects of this kind of exchange. No matter how principled, journalists use other people — for information, inspiration, personal gain and the greater good — which means they’re like anyone else who navigates social relationships for a living, including, of course, actors.
François Coste is a Paris antique dealer with a handsome gallery, an elegant apartment, a loyal business partner, a lover and a semi- estranged daughter. What he lacks — and what it turns out he needs most — is a friend. His personal relations are all organized around business or obligation, his manner is gracious but distant, and he finds himself, in middle age, lacking the kind of sustaining, easy connection with another person that can make life genuinely fulfilling.
François is played by Daniel Auteuil, one of the most effortlessly ingratiating of French actors and also one of the best at portraying outwardly well-adjusted men who are also loners and misfits. François’s alienation
François has an interesting, obdurate individuality,
But Bruno is the paradoxical mirror image of his would-be pal. He is friendly — helpful to strangers, chatty with customers, kind to his parents — but also friendless. A trivia buff with dreams of appearing on a television quiz show, he is if anything more of a misfit than François.
Op-Ed Contributor
Who Killed Ashraf Marwan?
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By HOWARD BLUM
Published: July 13, 2007
London
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David Suter
THE billionaire’s body tumbled over the railing of his apartment’s fourth-floor balcony and landed hard on the London sidewalk. And like so much in the complicated life of Ashraf Marwan — a 62-year-old Egyptian who had been the most effective spy in the history of the Middle East — the mysterious circumstances of his death two weeks ago provoked further speculation.
As Scotland Yard investigates the suspicious fall, and as newspapers and bloggers throughout the world wonder whether any of several intelligence services played a role in his death, a debate continues over whether Mr. Marwan was a well-connected and resourceful Israeli spy or a brilliantly manipulative Egyptian double agent.
Mr. Marwan’s death has also brought a new and chilling significance to a long-running legal battle in Israel involving the unauthorized leaking of his name to journalists. And in the aftermath of the discovery of his broken body on a sidewalk in the St. James neighborhood on June 27, I cannot help but wonder if I had a small part in the events that led to Ashraf Marwan’s death.
Mr. Marwan’s story — a tale overflowing with the suspense and ruthless duplicity of a spy novel — began to take shape in the spring of 1969. He had come to London, ostensibly to consult a Harley Street doctor about a stomach ailment. He chose to be examined by a doctor whose offices had been used previously for a covert meeting between King Hussein of Jordan and the general director of the Israeli prime minister’s office.
Along with his X-rays, Mr. Marwan handed the doctor a file crammed with official Egyptian state documents. He wanted them delivered to the Israeli Embassy in London.
The Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, determined the documents to be genuine. Still, a rapidly formed working group of Mossad wise men debated the risk in dealing with a walk-in, a volunteer who shows up bearing gifts. If he’s not a double — an agent spreading disinformation — then he’s uncontrollable. It was decided, however, that this walk-in’s credentials were worth the gamble.
Mr. Marwan, the excited vetters discovered, was married to a daughter of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was also President Nasser’s liaison to the intelligence services. Not even 30, he was an intimate of the leaders who determined Egypt’s future.
Three days after meeting with the doctor, Mr. Marwan was contacted by the Mossad as he walked through Harrods, the London department store. His operational life as a spy began.
From the start, Mr. Marwan delivered. He yielded so many top secret Egyptian documents it was as if, as one Mossad agent put it, “we had someone sleeping in Nasser’s bed.” Based on this trove of secrets, Israel developed what became an article of faith for the nation’s political and military leaders: “the Concept.” With biblical certainty, the Concept held that until (1) Egypt possessed missiles and long-range bombers and (2) the Arab states united in a genuine coalition, a new war with Israel would not take place.
Running the agent, who was given code names including “Angel,” “Babylon” and most frequently “the In-Law,” grew into a small industry. For face-to-face meetings with his handler and often the head of the Mossad, a safe house was purchased in London not far from the Dorchester Hotel. It was wired to record every conversation, every aside. A special team of clerks turned the tapes into transcripts for the prime minister, the army chief of staff and a handful of other top Israeli officials. Mr. Marwan received £50,000 at each meeting, but this was only a minor expense compared to the estimated $20 million spent over the first four years of Mr. Marwan’s operational life.
Israel’s leaders felt this was money well spent: They knew what their enemies were thinking.
Then in April 1973, the In-Law sent a flash message to his case agent using the word “radish.” This was the code for an imminent war. Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad, rushed from Tel Aviv to the London safe house. The In-Law revealed that on May 15, Egypt and Syria would launch a surprise attack.
Israel called up tens of thousands of reservists and deployed additional brigades and support equipment in the Sinai and the north. The alert dragged on for three months and cost $35 million. But it was a false alarm. The In-Law had been wrong.
Six months later, on Oct. 5, 1973, the In-Law sent another flash message with the code word “radish.” Mr. Zamir was awoken at 2:30 a.m. with the news. The next morning, he took the first El Al flight to London.
Syria was massing tanks and missiles in the north. Egypt was conducting military maneuvers near the Suez Canal. Russia had begun evacuating families from the region. Yet that afternoon Gen. Eli Zeira, the head of Israeli military intelligence, announced at a staff meeting that a coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria was “low probability — even lower than low.”
Only jbefore midnight, London time, the In-Law appeared at the safe house. He spoke to Mr. Zamir for less than an hour and then left.
Mr. Zamir phoned an aide at 3:40 a.m. on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish religious calendar. The Egyptians and Syrians, he said, will attack simultaneously on both fronts at sunset.
At an Israeli cabinet meeting that morning, the In-Law’s warning was not considered persuasive. The last time he had promised war would break out, nothing happened except the expenditure of $35 million. Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense, lectured the army chief of staff, “On the basis of messages from Zvika you do not mobilize a whole army.”
Nevertheless, it was decided that at 4 p.m. — two hours before the In-Law said the attack would be launched — armored brigades would move into position along the Suez Canal. Until then, there would be only three tanks in position to hold off any invasion.
At 2 p.m., the Arab armies went to war. Egypt crossed the Suez Canal in the south and Syrian tanks charged from the north. Their armies overwhelmed the surprised and unprepared enemy. After three days of fighting, General Dayan worried openly about the “destruction of the third Temple,” the state of Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir was given a bottle of suicide pills; she preferred to die rather than witness the destruction of the Jewish state.
Israel’s outnumbered forces fought back and recovered their key positions. After being rearmed by airlifts of weapons and supplies from the United States, they attacked. Before the month’s end, Israel won the war.
Still, the Yom Kippur War was an Israeli intelligence disaster. Decades later, the Mossad and military intelligence continued to argue over who was to blame. General Zeira, who lost both his job as head of military intelligence and a good deal of his reputation, spent years sifting through the events leading up to the attacks.
He wondered: Who had spread the false Concept? Who had “cried wolf” in May 1973 and persuaded Israel to call up its reserves? Who had been wrong about the time of the invasion? The answer, General Zeira was certain, was that Israel had been deliberately and artfully misled. From the start, the In-Law had been a double agent.
The Mossad formed a special committee to examine the In-Law’s role. Its conclusion: Mr. Marwan was not a double.
But General Zeira was unconvinced. He began to talk to journalists about his theory. I was one of those he spoke to. He never told me the spy’s name, but he pointed me in a direction that made it easy — less than a half hour of searching the Internet — for me to deduce his identity. I used Mr. Marwan’s name in a 2003 book about the Yom Kippur War.
Not long after its publication, Zvi Zamir called General Zeira a “traitor” for divulging Mr. Marwan’s identity. Mr. Zamir petitioned the attorney general for an investigation. But there was no official inquiry, and General Zeira sued for slander. Last month, an Israeli Supreme Court justice ruled in arbitration that General Zeira had in fact revealed Mr. Marwan’s identity.
Now with his unexplained death, the many enigmas of Ashraf Marwan’s complex life have grown even murkier. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son and possible successor, and Omar Suleiman, the head of the Egyptian intelligence service, attended Mr. Marwan’s funeral. Sheik Mohammad Seyed Tantawi, Egypt’s highest-ranking imam, led the prayers over the coffin, covered with an Egyptian flag. On the following day, in response to reporters’ questions, President Hosni Mubarak called Mr. Marwan “a patriot,” according to Egypt’s official Middle East News Agency. “He carried out patriotic acts which it is not yet time to reveal,” the president added.
In Israel, an angry Mr. Zamir told the newspaper Haaretz, “I have no doubt that reports published about him in Israel caused his death.” The former Mossad chief again called on the attorney general to indict General Zeira.
In London, Mr. Marwan’s sister was described as saying she saw him in good spirits only hours before his death. But another unidentified friend said Mr. Marwan, in declining health, lost his balance and fell. And there were reports that he made many enemies through his activities in selling armaments. A coroner’s inquest is expected to announce its findings in mid-August.
And now I am reminded of my last telephone conversation with Ashraf Marwan.
“Are you afraid?” I asked.
“Why should I be afraid?” he replied. “I was a soldier.”
Mr. Marwan promised to reveal more about which country he was fighting for when we were to appear together on a news program in the United States. But two days before the taping, he called to tell me he would not speak in public until he had finished a book about the war.
I never heard from him again. Now Scotland Yard — and, I suspect, other agencies — is trying to find the manuscript he said was writing at the time of his death.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Media Equation
How the Grid Is Changing the Village
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By DAVID CARR
Published: July 2, 2007
Deborah Stollery apologized through the screen window of the ice cream stand she runs in Corinth, N.Y., for being in a bit of a tizzy.
“The wireless is down and I’ve been trying to fix it in between serving customers,” she said. “Our tenant moved and took the router with him.”
She and her husband, Craig, run the Mallery Street Marketplace, a two-building collection of businesses that includes a beauty salon, a gift shop and the ice cream stand called the Barn because it resides in one.
Ms. Stollery has lived in Corinth (population 6,000) all her life, but she carries the same expectation of a free-floating, ambient Web as the most wired city slicker. In between making batches of a signature drink — coffee mixed with soft serve ice cream — she is checking in on a laptop, finishing correspondence or tweaking the Web site she built for the couple’s businesses.
“People probably think we are just country bumpkins — ‘What do we need the Internet for?’ — but we probably need it more than anyone,” she said.
Corinth would seem to be just the kind of digitally bygone place the writer William Gibson was thinking of when he said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Tucked behind the first bump of the Adirondacks, it is about halfway between Saratoga Springs and Lake George, which is not to say the middle of nowhere, but it has always been its own little place, insular and isolated by choice and geography.
International Paper pulled out a few years ago, but most people hung in, making do by doing a lot of different things. Corinth has three convenience stores, no video store and no bowling alley. There is also no movie theater, but the town’s perch, just above a dam on the Hudson, is plenty cinematic.
My family owns a cabin up the mountain, the kind of place city dwellers come to get off the grid. But the grid keeps finding me. Apart from the Barn, there is a good wireless connection at the public library, and if you don’t mind latching onto someone else’s signal, just everywhere else around town.
Cell towers have stretched this way from Saratoga, and Time Warner took over the franchise from Adelphia and has been aggressively marketing a package with cable television, broadband Internet and digital phone. There’s a lot of talk in the gas stations and beauty parlors — some of it on cellphones while waiting in line — about who is scheduled to get hooked up next.
“You can do wonderful stuff in terms of building Web sites these days, and so people do exactly that,” said Rebecca Fasulo, the librarian at the Corinth Free Library. “But what that means is that dial-up is almost unusable. You have to have a good connection to use the Web the way it is now.”
Everyone I talked to agreed it was a mixed blessing. Teenagers at the high school can participate in distance learning, and people who lost their jobs at the mill in the old economy can conjure a new one right where they are.
Places like Corinth have never been short on “community,” so the addition of some pages on MySpace, Facebook, or a goofy video on YouTube is not going to knit the place together in some bold new paradigm. The picnic table outside Stewart’s will still be the best place to pick up local gossip.
But a broader popular culture that many have rejected by leaving big cities now rides back toward them on a big fat pipe. If you live in Corinth and are jacked in, you could watch the final episode of “The Sopranos” along with the rest of the country and click onto TMZ’s continuing ballad of Lindsay, Paris and Britney, there for the plucking. Indigenous culture is being supplanted by one where everybody is in on the same joke.
A few years ago, Corinth was the kind of place where you would see the same youngster on a bicycle several times, just sort of riding lazy circles. He is still there, but he might be talking on a cellphone while he rides or on his way over to a friend’s for some online Halo 2.
“You can’t go to a public event here without there being an announcement to turn off the cellphones,” Richard B. Lucia, the town supervisor, said. “In that sense, I guess it sort of became like everywhere else.”
It is worth remembering that the cable business has roots in the sticks, that it was first conceived by an appliance salesman named John Walson in a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s. Today, the rural hunger for digital service represents a business opportunity for a mature industry that is going to run out of customers at some point.
Time Warner’s digital phone service, which came to Corinth six months ago, now has 11 percent penetration. And 1,700 people in both the town and village of Corinth (don’t ask) now get some type of service from the company.
In the course of calling around, I learned that Time Warner was headed up the mountain. Up there, towering campfires made of abundant deadfall have always been the premier viewing event. But there is already fiber-optic cable going past my house and soon enough, there will be nodes for the likes of me — Mr. Off-the-Grid — to jack in.
When that happens, we can take care of business amid the towering pines. But how will that be different from the place we drove three and a half hours to get away from?
=========================
What’s Online
Lots of Froth but No Bubble
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By DAN MITCHELL
Published: June 9, 2007
MARC ANDREESSEN, the inventor of the first commercially viable Web browser and the co-creator of Netscape, finally has a blog. And he started this week with a splash: in his third post, he offered a harsh (for him) rebuttal of the spreading notion that there is a new Internet bubble forming, that Silicon Valley is overexuberant about “Web 2.0,” and that soon it will all come crashing down (blog.pmarca.com).
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Alex Eben Meyer
Related
Bubbles on the Brain (blog.pmarca.com) Why the Bubble-Mania? (markevanstech.com) FTC Seeks to Block Whole Foods Market’s Acquisition of Wild Oats Markets (ftc.gov) Whole Foods -- Wild Oats: Has the FTC Been at the Nutmeg? (portfolio.com) The Heist (charkinblog.macmillan.com) Book publisher steals Google laptops (www.theregister.co.uk)
He offers this caveat: “I’d be the last person to say that I never roll my eyes at the next start-up that’s doing online Wiki-based, popularity-ranked, video-podcast, mobile, social, dating widgets for the dog and cat owner market.”
But buzzwords alone do not a bubble make, and Mr. Andreessen offers plenty of support for his argument that while there might be some froth there is always some froth — that’s the nature of innovative industries.
“If you’re going to call a bubble on the basis of lots of bad start-ups getting funded and failing,” he writes, “then you have to conclude that the industry is in a perpetual bubble, and has been for 40 years.”
For the most part, he argues, the companies that are getting the most money and attention are those that deserve it. “People laughed when Fox bought MySpace for $580 million,” he wrote, but now, given its revenue growth, “MySpace would probably be valued at between $3 billion and $5 billion.”
Also setting the climate apart from the late 1990s bubble, he notes, is that there are not many Internet companies going public. “For a theoretical bubble, that is just plain odd.”
So why are there so many doomsayers? Mr. Andreessen blames evolutionary psychology. “The human psyche seems to have a powerful underlying need to predict doom and gloom,” he wrote.
The blogger Mark Evans posits another reason for the pessimism: weariness (markevanstech.com). “It’s been such a good time for so long in Silicon Valley,” he writes, “that people are tired — tired of attending events night after night, tired of writing about the latest V. C. financing and Google acquisition, tired of being inundated with press releases and public relations campaigns.”
Food for Thought The Federal Trade Commission’s decision this week to try to block the acquisition of Wild Oats Markets by its larger rival, Whole Foods Market, sent bloggers into speculation mode. Why, many of them wondered, would the F.T.C., which has green-flagged so many deals that seem more questionable, object to a relatively small merger in a highly competitive industry?
The F.T.C. defines “market” in this case narrowly — limiting it to “premium natural and organic supermarkets” and leaving out huge chains like Safeway and Wal-Mart, even though those stores are increasingly offering so-called natural and organic products (ftc.gov).
Given such competition, “the whole thing makes very little sense,” wrote Felix Salmon on Portfolio magazine’s Market Movers blog (portfolio.com).
Perhaps. Or perhaps it makes perfect sense if the grocery lobby had something to do with it, or, as has been suggested, the F.T.C. is reacting to pressure from Congress. “If so,” Mr. Salmon wrote, “this move could destroy quite a lot of shareholder value in the service of massaging a few political egos.”
Steal This Laptop The chief executive of a major book publisher swiped a couple of computers from Google’s booth at a recent trade show. Really. And he not only admitted it, he bragged about it on his blog (charkinblog.macmillan.com).
There was “no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers,’ ” Richard Charkin of Macmillan Publishers wrote. He contends that the “theft” was no worse than Google’s Book Search Library Project, in which the company means to digitize the book collections of big libraries around the world to make them searchable online.
Publishers have protested, but never quite like this. Mr. Charkin stayed near the booth until Google’s employees returned and noticed their laptops were missing, whereupon he returned them.
“With our heist, we were merely doing to Google what they’re doing to us,” he told the Register (theregister.co.uk)
Social Networking’s Next Phase
Social networks are sprouting on the Internet these days like wild mushrooms.
They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.
Ning users choose the features they want to include, like videos, photos, discussion forums or blogs. Their sites can appear like MySpace, YouTube or the photo sharing site Flickr — or something singular.
Tribe.net, which developed the technology that Cisco is now acquiring, almost led this new social networking phase. In 2004, the U2 singer Bono approached the company and asked it to create a separate network for his antipoverty campaign, One.org, according to several former employees. Tribe.net, founded by Mark Pincus, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor, decided to remain focused on building a destination site, like Friendster and MySpace.
Bono went on to create the One.org network with Yahoo. Mr. Pincus left Tribe.net in 2005 but repurchased the company from lenders last summer when it was nearly out of money. Today, Tribe.net is primarily used by artists who attend the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.
Several former employees have left Tribe.net to start their own firms offering social network tools. Alexander Mouldovan, who had been a product manager there, started a company called Crowd Factory to design social networks for large companies. He is now building services for several telecommunications customers and says the new model makes more sense for Internet users.
“I think this will work for certain kinds of brands, and other brands are just barking up the wrong tree,” said Paul Martino, a former Tribe.net chief technology officer who is now the chief executive of Aggregate Knowledge, a service that taps the online behavior of other users to provide shopping advice.
Marc Canter, a former Tribe.net consultant who has created his own social networking firm, People Aggregator, was an early supporter of OpenID.
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The Media Equation
Business Casual
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By DAVID CARR
Published: July 13, 2007
As an environment for access to business information, Allen & Company’s annual summit meeting this week in Sun Valley, Idaho, leaves a little to be desired.
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Rupert Murdoch attended the Allen & Company conference with his wife, Wendi Deng.
Yes, high-net-worth individuals, many of whom have their hands on the levers of the media and entertainment economy, gather in one place, and business is undoubtedly being conducted. But anything noteworthy takes place out of view.
In fact, much is out of view. There is a significant presence on the part of journalists. But we are not invited to the social gatherings or the gold-plate presentations — a media and technology event with old and new royalty — Sergey Brin of Google, Howard Stringer of Sony, Barry Diller of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon — sitting side by side.
Reporters here — The New York Times sent a reporter to blog for DealBook — are far overmatched by the burly, owly security crew. We are tolerated, but more or less invited to stand in the bushes and observe. The ground rules in place bring to mind a presidential campaign: Significant adjacency to important events and people but little in the way of access or insight.
Still, there are a lot of press at a nonpress event, and it all takes place in Sun Valley, the kind of toy town where wealth is part of the civic culture. Everybody, it seems, is rich and happy here, and the temporary addition of a few hundred people at the vanguard of business has only elevated the median income.
But the ambient business and political wattage, some arrayed in shorts and flip-flops like the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, make it too tantalizing to miss. News has been known to have been made here — the marriage of ABC and Capital Cities was arranged in Sun Valley and the courting of YouTube last year ended with Google stepping up to the plate a few months later — but there is a huge emphasis on informality and a sincere effort to include the families of those attending.
The programming is hardly onerous — a couple of hours in the morning and then it’s off for golf or whitewater kayaking. But while moguls may come to frolic, there is very little profiling or preening, in part because of Allen & Company’s mellow management of the event.
“You could randomly pick any event and it would be far more pretentious than this one,” said Blake Krikorian, a founder of Sling Media, which makes a device that allows consumers to shift content from home to wherever they are, and one of this year’s potential beanie babies in terms of acquisitions.
The informality hides a kabuki where business and finance folks pivot from table to table, and reporters, standing at a distance, try and conjure something, anything out of juxtapositions. Most of the speed dating about potential deals takes place out on the paths, away from prying eyes. Reporters are tolerated as optional amenities.
Harvey Weinstein, normally a garrulous type had little to say to reporters.
A few of those in attendance will stop and drop an aphorism or two about the proceedings, mostly it seems, out of pity. Rupert Murdoch, who is here with his wife, Wendi Deng, will have none of it, smiling in glee as he slipped out while reporters were busy listening to Mr. Brin.
Still, there Mr. Murdoch stood yesterday afternoon, far out in the parking lot near the Inn with David F. DeVoe, the chief financial officer of his company, the News Corporation. Given the drama over his company’s possible purchase of Dow Jones & Company — Mr. Murdoch told The Associated Press that the Bancoft family “keep changing their minds” — it was striking to see the two men in khakis, their tennis shoes bumping the asphalt as they spoke. Their conversation was probably as significant as it is unknowable. The Sun Valley conference has been like that: full of portent and empty of current content. Here’s a few peeks from a distance:
The media, an asymmetric threat that will worm into any available space, have overtaken the bar at the Inn, one of the few places that is not cordoned off with a full-stop sign, one that says, “Private Event.” Yesterday, Mr. Stringer ambled in with a clutch of newspapers for a quiet afternoon read, seemingly unaware that he had stepped into a den of hungry jackals. Most left him alone. With a deadline looming, I did not feel I had that luxury.
In general, Sony is well situated at a time when deals have given way to efforts to remain relevant on all types of platforms. With its hands in content, devices and software, Sony is one of the more converged companies in the game and has the share price to show for it.
Mr. Stringer said that there was no question that this conference, with its blend of the old and the new, the young and the old, represented a new kind of melting pot for technology and business.
“The events of the last two years have gotten everyone’s attention so that no one is complacent,” he said. “I think the overlaps between software, hardware and content are now so significant, that people are rushing to understand the new distributions forms.”
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Let’s Talk. Let Me Outline the Ways.
Fernanda Cohen
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By LISA BELKIN
Published: July 12, 2007
AT a planning meeting I attended earlier this summer, a legal pad was passed and we were each asked to write our name and our “communication preference.”
Some people prefer e-mail, some prefer cellphones, some want to be sent a text message on their cellphones,” the leader of the meeting said. “We want to reach you the way you want to be reached.”
Time was when making contact meant finding someone’s phone number and dialing. You might connect with your party; you might leave a message. But you had done all you could.
Now contact means decoding the quirks of the person in question, the better to predict how to actually get your message through. And if you misread your target, it means the risk of a frosty response, or sometimes deafening silence.
Does he or she hate e-mail, letting it build up in the inbox, but quick to answer the cellphone on the first ring? Does the person refuse to carry a cellphone, but grab the office line through the Bluetooth that is literally attached to one ear? Is it solicitous or stalkerish to send an e-mail message, then leave an office message, then try the cellphone just to be sure?
Would it be better just to text the person’s assistant instead?
“It’s reached the point of absurdity,” said Olivia Fox Cabane of Spitfire Communications, an executive coaching business in New York. “We have become a culture where we expect everything to be done our way. We go to Starbucks and order the half caff, two shots, extra hot, low foam, whatever, and that makes us feel entitled to leave a message on our voice mail saying, ‘You can call between 8 a.m. and 8:05 a.m., but only if you speak in a soothing tone of voice.’ ”
There are no shortage of pushy messages out there stating exactly what the caller should do.
“I typically check this voice mail less frequently than I do my office number,” says the cellphone message of David Goldsmith, president of the MetaMatrix Consulting Group, who refuses to give out the number to clients and is piqued when they lift it from caller ID. The message instructs callers to try his office.
The office line of Ellen Kassoff Gray, an owner of the Equinox restaurant in Washington, D.C., in turn warns callers, “I don’t check messages here too often, so if you want to reach me in a timely fashion please e-mail me.”
While such messages may be gauche, at least they provide clues. The alternative is a game of communication concentration — trying to keep track of all your contacts as well as how they wish to be reached.
“I prefer to be contacted on my cellphone,” said Jeni Hatter, the director of media relations for Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. “It is immediate, and it is always with me.”
Then again, not everybody packs a cellphone. “Don’t have one, don’t want one,” said Trudy Schuett, a librarian in Yuma, Ariz. “I would do everything by e-mail if I could.”
E-mail “can be blocked by spam filters,” countered Jon Mazzocchi, a partner in the New York office of the Winter, Wyman Companies, a staffing firm. “Phone is the only way to go.”
The phone works only if you don’t “allow yourself to be interrupted,” said Alan Weiss, president of the Summit Consulting Group in East Greenwich, R.I. So he does not actually answer the device when it rings, but has a message promising he will return all calls within 90 minutes “during regular business hours, Eastern time, in the United States.”
A game once limited to cellphone versus office line versus e-mail has exploded exponentially as texting has gone mainstream. And while cellphones are at least experientially related to the land line, and e-mail feels tangentially related to the fax, texting is simultaneously a throwback to the telegraph and a harbinger of a new age.
In other words, you either love it or hate it.
Ms. Gray, on the one hand, sees texting as the purest form of communication: “short, sweet sentences, just business,” she cooed. Ms. Schuett, on the other, sees it as a threat to civilization: “Sentences should have punctuation and rules of grammar,” she said.
Texting also seems above and beyond in its ability to offend. Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark, learned this firsthand. Apparently thinking that instant access would please his constituents, he gave out his number fairly freely, only to learn that one critic took the offering as a slap. The previous mayor could be reached with a phone call, the critic complained to a newspaper reporter, so what was this texting about?
I too learned how a preference can ruffle feathers. My office voice mail explains: “I only check this voice mail sporadically. The best way to actually contact me is by sending an e-mail to belkin@nytimes.com.”
I do this for the efficiency. And yet, like drivers parked under the No Parking sign, callers regularly leave me messages on the same tape that asks them not to.
Most sound diligent, or perhaps apologetic, but a good number sound cranky. A percentage of the annoyed say they don’t have easy access to e-mail, and to that I am sympathetic; in fact they are the reason I make it a point to check my voice mail in the first place. Many others, though, are just plain insulted by my taped advice.
“That is so rude,” one caller said. “Who do you think you are?”
He failed to leave a name or a phone number, which means I can’t call to tell him that I am thinking of rerecording my message. Not only because I really hate being seen as impolite, but also because I am weary of e-mail. There are 118 messages sitting in my inbox as I write this. If I had just picked up the phone when it rang, many of these bits of business would have been finished within moments.
That is another unpredictable factor in the what’s-the-best-way-to-reach-you game: we all tend to change our minds.
“It used to be e-mail,” said Shel Horowitz, an author who writes books about business marketing. But thanks to spam filters, e-mail “has gotten so unreliable.” He has to follow each message with a phone call to make sure it arrived.
“I’m back to the phone,” he said.
At least for now.
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Called “Flipped,” the Webisodes challenge students to leave the comfort of their self-assigned cliques and join an unlikely social circle for a few days. A jock is paired with the black-clad skaters, a fashion-obsessed diva with the retro-dressing girls. Conflict is kept to a minimum and everyone seems poised to learn from the experience. (The company provided only two preview episodes, in which various cliques are introduced. One retro girl derides the dress worn by a diva as “so bright — I don’t like it.”)
print ads with the tagline “Mix it up” (that is, mix and match expensive and cheap, retro and modern and so on)
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“Slogans are everything. All else is illusion.”
About Screens
With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. "Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.
“Charm School,” VH1’s huge hit with black women, check out Alyson, a k a Bronxy B., a k a Miss Chievous
If you want to understand “Charm School,” VH1’s huge hit with black women, check out Alyson, a k a Bronxy B., a k a Miss Chievous, a fiction writer, book critic and sometime blogger who also does makeup tutorials on YouTube. She’s got a great look for online video, a cool, funny, understated style of delivery and a beautiful cosmetics technique.
Alyson also really understands the mind-blowing series that was “Charm School.” (For now, you can watch the whole reunion special here.)
So “Charm School,” the latest spin-off of the VH1 “Flavor of Love” epic, ended Sunday, with the the reunion of the contestants. I have been completely infatuated with this show, which I reviewed in May. I sat either squealing or dumbstruck through each of its episodes, often more than once.
But the reunion was off the charts. Saaphyri, the winner, looked regal. God, was she the right choice. Becky’s still got charm. Brook’s claims that white girls are raunchier than black girls were interesting. Leilene was fine.
But what about Larissa, that tough cookie? I must say, when I wrote about “Charm School,” on which the street-fighting girls who once competed for the favor of Flavor Flav go to a finishing school overseen by Mo’Nique, I got some mail to the effect that Mo’Nique was an unpersuasive role model. Letter-writers said she was a phony mentor. She was inconsistent. She was a screen hog. She wasn’t funny.
And it’s true that when she dismissed Brooke as “the whore of Charm School,” it’s hard to imagine her pedagogical purpose. That was just mean. The truth is, Mo’Nique seemed a little out of control.
So I wasn’t quite surprised when Larissa, who had gotten the brunt of Mo’Nique’s temper on the series, just showed her the hand when the lecture started. And then, when Mo’Nique tried to get all black-woman-to-black-woman to Larissa’s pale-complected red-haired mother (?), I wasn’t surprised that the mother, too, was like, “Don’t step to my daughter.” And they both were like, “We don’t care who you are.”
Three big lessons of “Charm School”: Saaphyri is great. Celebrities can’t tell us what to do. And only Oprah is Oprah.
3 comments so far...
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1.
July 13th,
2007
8:16 am
Alyson-Girl…have you made it or what!? I am so proud of you. Yeah girl…only Oprah is Oprah. Charm school was interesting. But you can see who was really the devil through that whole lesson. Hmmm! I’d give a few girls there a piece of my mind if I got the chance.
Keep doing your thing Alyson. You coming up.
— Posted by Kay
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2.
July 13th,
2007
8:38 am
this should have been called “reform school” as opposed to “charm school” as the ones who got kicked off were the least reformed and the ones that stayed were the most real, although i still have my doubts about whether Saaphyri didn’t have a home or whether Leilene’s mother’s rings actually came from a dead person but no matter. I think the most memorable characters were not the ones like Saaphyri and Leilene but the ones like Becky Buckwild and Courtney who didn’t. Monique seemed to like them the best, with good reason.
— Posted by cd
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3.
July 13th,
2007
9:02 am
Her mother clearly was an albino. Albinism is more common in African-Americans than it is in Caucasians.
— Posted by Not Clueless
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/feeds/ruletheweb
Nuts and BlogBolts Business Mar 25, 8:00PM
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A conversation in Social Media Tools. This month we cover copywriting with 5 of the top copywriters on the web. Hosting is Mike Sansone, a copywriter himself, and Wayne Hurlbert.
Business and Name Branding Business Feb 27, 11:30PM
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Business and Name Branding and the line up includes, John Koopman from Mokum Marketing, Derrick Daye from Branding Strategy Insider, John Moore from Brand Autopsy, Mike Wagner from The White Rabbit Group, Drew McLellan from The Marketing Minute, and Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Hosts Mike Sansone and Wayne Hurlbert
Nut's and BlogBolts ‘A Conversation on Social Media Tools’ Blogs Jan 29, 9:00PM
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2 hour special roundtable discussion with leading members in the blogosphere. Jim Kukral from ReveNews, Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit , Scott Baradell from Media Orchard, Kami Huyse from Communication Overtones and Mandie Crawford from Roaring Women. Hosted by Mike Sansone from Conversations and Wayne Hurlbert from Blog Business World
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Breaking Away
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By DANA SPIOTTA
Published: July 14, 2007
Cherry Valley, N.Y.
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Laura Carlin
MY parents were not hippies. We were a deeply conventional, middle-class American family, but my clean-cut mother and father tried to embrace, in a haphazard and innocent way, the values of the counterculture — at least enough to send me, their moody 14-year-old daughter, alone on a four-week bike trip through Greece.
My parents always approached my sister and me with an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence. So even when we were tiny, they let us stay up with the adults. We drifted off to sleep on various laps amid the murmur of late-night conversation. We attended an experimental school that, in sixth grade, gave us the option of studying math or doing book reports. (To this day, I don’t really understand fractions.) We were the only ones in our suburban neighborhood who ate brown bread and made yogurt.
My housewife mother was never without makeup and high heels, but she wanted to be sure I was raised with the hard-won feminist insistence on limitless possibility. So we listened to Marlo Thomas’s record “Free to Be You and Me,” her effort to instill women’s lib in the coming generation.
Later, we sang along to Carole King and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” My sister and I would perform the entire rock opera during car rides on our summer vacations.
Those vacations consisted exclusively of visits to our relatives, often at a rented house at the Jersey Shore. There I would tag along after my older sister and my older cousins as they discussed boyfriends and rock ’n’ roll. They wore gauze blouses and tousled Stevie Nicks perms.
And then my cousins became teenagers and they began to go on bike trips, with others their own age, to exotic places like France or the Netherlands. And whichever cousin went off would come back transformed: fit, tan, smoking clove cigarettes, carrying tooled-leather items and wearing a seen-it-all continental daze that never appeared in suburbia.
These trips were organized by hippies who believed discomfort led to enlightenment. Among their precepts were that the children shouldn’t know one another in advance — it was good to be thrust head-on into the unfamiliar — and that everyone had to pull her own weight, carrying all her stuff in her own pack. The biking was long and tough. At night they all slept in hostels.
Occasionally a cousin would call, a week or so into a trip, tearful with exhaustion and begging to come home. My uncle would talk her into staying, and then she wouldn’t be heard from again until she arrived at the airport, looking European and happy, dying to do it again.
I studied my cousins’ bike trip catalog obsessively until I was finally old enough, in the summer after eighth grade, to sign up for a monthlong “phantom” trip to Greece.
A phantom trip meant that, under the guidance of a group leader, we teenagers would make up the itinerary as we went along. In other words, we were going to do whatever we wanted. And in that pre-cellphone age, I would be entirely out of touch, except for the few times we called home from tourist centers.
Nonetheless, my parents didn’t hesitate to send me off. For my father, the countercultural promise of liberation was a perfect fit with his idea of the American dream. He believed in a teleology that started with the struggles of our Italian ancestors, continued through the sacrifices of his immigrant parents and his own rise from poverty to the corporate middle class, and reached completion in his children having the opportunity and desire to discover the world.
Equally important to my being allowed to go was the cultural moment. The ’70s, for all that decade’s cliché excesses, were a time of freedom and openness, a time before omnipresent fear. People felt an obligation to embrace new experiences: by going somewhere unknown you might discover who you were, or could be.
And for a young woman growing up in the wake of the women’s movement, it was a particularly special time. Even in the far reaches of suburbia, feminism insisted on not overprotecting girls.
Breaking Away
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Published: July 14, 2007
(Page 2 of 2)
Still, when I stepped off the plane in Greece, far removed from my American cul-de-sac life, with no one I knew to look out for me, I was terrified. Part of me wanted to make one of those tearful calls home, but instead I met up with the other teenagers on my trip and we immediately bonded in our dislocation.
The weeks passed quickly. We biked on dirt roads through tiny villages; into a valley where butterflies covered every surface; to ancient ruins, stopping along the way to eat salty cheese.
I never made that desperate phone call, despite some rough moments. At one point, I crashed and badly cut my leg. There were days when I couldn’t find a bathroom because some small village bars allowed only men. Once, I fell far behind and spent one long afternoon thinking I was truly lost.
Mostly, though, I had great fun doing things I wouldn’t do back home. We stayed up until dawn talking to other young travelers at the hostels. We ate grilled octopus and glorious tomatoes. I had my first espresso. I drank my first cocktail, a grasshopper (made from crème de menthe, crème de cacao and cream, it tasted like melted mint-chip ice cream — a drink seemingly designed for a child).
One night some of us decided to camp on a perfect white beach, and I lay my sleeping-bag right next to the boy on whom I had a mad, secret crush. During the night, our sleeping-bag-encased bodies nearly touched. And when, at 5 a.m., an angry man roughly awakened us and kicked us off the apparently private beach, we got on our bikes and rode away, laughing. We felt untouchable, in a way. Everything, good and bad, was part of the experience.
Our last days we spent swimming in clear, warm water off a rocky cove. I remember feeling happier swimming there than any time swimming near our home in California or at the Jersey Shore. Somehow, I looked and felt right on the Greek beach. I hadn’t just survived my bike trip; I felt profoundly myself for the first time.
These days, my parents’ willingness to send me off almost seems careless — American child-rearing has tipped away from curiosity and toward fear. It is too bad, because especially during adolescence, when we’re so trapped inside ourselves, there’s a perspective to be gained from seeing things from a distance.
When my family picked me up at the airport, I finally wore that worldly sophistication I had admired in my cousins. I felt independent and confident, although I knew this confidence was fleeting — I was going back to my home, to high school and to those beaches where I would never feel quite right — but at least I now knew something about myself I never had before. Something that would help gird me for September and the suburbs.
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Dana Spiotta is the author of “Eat the Document,” a novel.
ive homemade bombs and a bank robbery left 24 people dead in Baghdad on Tuesday as the level of violence here remained undiminished despite a buildup of American and Iraqi troops meant to restore a sense of order
$282 Million Stolen in Heist at Private Bank in Baghdad
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By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: July 12, 2007
BAGHDAD, July 11 — In an astonishing heist, guards at a bank here made off with more than a quarter-billion dollars on Wednesday, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.
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The Reach of War
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The robbery, of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam bank, a private financial institution, raised more questions than it answered, and officials were tight-lipped about the crime. The local police said two guards engineered the robbery, but an official at the Interior Ministry said three guards were involved.
Both confirmed that the stolen money was in American dollars, not Iraqi dinars. It was unclear why the bank had that much money on hand in dollars, or how the robbers managed to move such a large amount without being detected.
Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad.
Otherwise on Wednesday, there was only scattered violence in the city, although 18 bodies were found by the police in different neighborhoods, signaling that sectarian killing had not ebbed.
In a village just north of Falluja, however, extremists in two vehicles, possibly in an act of revenge, forced the residents of a house inside, locked the doors and blew up the building. Eleven people died, according to a report by United States marines who operate in the area. The house is owned by a member of the local provincial security forces, which are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes some foreigners.
In Mosul, an American helicopter returned fire after being shot at, but hit civilians, according to Brig. Gen. Abd al-Kareem Khalaf Juboori of the Mosul police. Two people were killed and 14 wounded, including two children.
The killing continued in Diyala Province, where American operations are under way to try to reduce the influence of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Three bodies were found with signs of torture near the town of Khalis; an army checkpoint was attacked with mortars; a local police station was attacked; and a roadside bomb killed an Iraqi Army soldier and wounded four others in Khan Beni Sa’ad, about 50 miles from Baghdad.
Iraqi solders at a checkpoint near the Syrian border seized a truck carrying 200 suicide vests. While the vests had not yet been loaded with explosives, a car filled with explosives was found nearby. The police suspect that the two were traveling together, said Maj. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, an official at the checkpoint.
The government announced several measures to help repair the damage from the enormous truck bomb earlier this week in Amirli in northern Diyala Province. Families who lost one or more relatives will receive a payout of $2,400, and families that had a relative wounded will be awarded $800, said Abbas al-Bayati, a member of Parliament designated by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to oversee the area’s reconstruction. Mr. Maliki also allocated $10 million to rebuild the remote village.
The Ministry of Trade announced it had begun a coordinated effort with the Defense and Interior Ministries to ship food to areas that insurgents had cut off, and was making Amirli a special priority, along with Rutba in western Iraq and Tal Afar in the north near Mosul.
The German Foreign Ministry announced the release of Hannelore Krause, who had been held hostage for 155 days by Iraqi insurgents calling themselves the Arrows of Righteousness. But her son, who is 20, was still being held, and in an interview on the Arabiya satellite television network she asked the German government to comply with the kidnappers’ demands that her country withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.
“If they do not withdraw, they will slaughter my son,” she said.
Meanwhile, the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said Wednesday that the number of refugees worldwide increased by almost two million in 2006, pushing the total to nearly 14 million, the highest level since 2001, The Associated Press reported. Iraqis accounted for more than a third of the increase.
The committee, a nongovernmental group in Washington, said that of the 790,000 people who left Iraq last year, 449,000 went to Syria and 250,000 to Jordan. About 80,000 went to Egypt and 202 to the United States.
Cleric Flees After Death Threats
BAGHDAD, July 11 (AP) — An Anglican vicar who may have received a cryptic warning about the recent failed car bombings in London and Glasgow has fled Iraq after threats against his life, an associate said Wednesday.
The vicar, Canon Andrew White, a Briton who ran Iraq’s only Anglican church, left Tuesday and returned to Britain, the associate said on condition of anonymity, saying the British Foreign Office had asked that it be the only source of information on the case.
The associate refused to elaborate on the threats. But the BBC Web site said pamphlets dropped in Shiite areas of Baghdad said Canon White was “no more than a spy.”
Canon White had been working to secure the release of five British hostages who were seized at the Iraqi Finance Ministry on May 29 by gunmen wearing police uniforms.
On July 4, he told The Associated Press that he had met a man in Amman, Jordan, in April who was identified by religious leaders as a leader of Al Qaeda. The man told him, “Those who cure you will kill you.”
Canon White said in retrospect that it might have been a warning of the plot to blow up car bombs in London and Glasgow. All the suspects worked in the medical professions.
Canon White had been visiting Iraq regularly since 1998 and remained here after the American invasion in 2003, holding services inside the Green Zone.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala, Mosul, Hilla and Falluja.
U.S. Troops Battle Iraqi Police in East Baghdad; Rogue Lieutenant Captured, Military Says
Chris Hondros/Getty Images
Pfc. Daniel Sims of Clemson, S.C., guarding a post taken from insurgents, while across town his comrades battled Iraqi police officers.
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By STEPHEN FARRELL
Published: July 14, 2007
BAGHDAD, July 13 — In a rare battle between American and uniformed Iraqi forces, United States troops backed by fighter jets killed six Iraqi policemen and seven gunmen during a predawn raid in which they captured a rogue police lieutenant, the military said Friday.
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The Reach of War
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American commanders said that during the raid, against an Iraqi police position in eastern Baghdad, their forces had come under “heavy and accurate fire” from a nearby police checkpoint as well as surrounding rooftops and a church.
They said the captured lieutenant was a “high ranking” leader of a cell they suspected of having links to the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Iraqi police had no comment.
The United States military has repeatedly accused the Quds Force of arming Iraqi militias with weapons and explosives. The Iranian government has denied those claims.
The Iraqi police are widely thought to be infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias, as well as by Sunni insurgent groups, all of whom are accused of using their positions to plan and carry out widespread sectarian killings.
In a briefing in Washington, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the fact that the police opened fire on American troops made them legitimate targets.
“The fact of the matter is that there are elements of the Iraqi police and elements of Iraqi Army that are infiltrated, and the Iraqi government is working very hard to work their way through that,” he said. “They’ve gotten rid of as much as 25 percent in some units, put in new recruits, retrained and put them back in the field.”
He added: “So the Iraq government and our coalition forces are doing all we can to ensure that we improve the quality. But the bottom line is going to be that we are going to defend ourselves, and we are going to go after those networks that are attacking our guys.”
Speaking after American criticism of the Iraqi government’s progress on performance benchmarks set by Congress, Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, insisted that there were “positive developments on the political level,” citing efforts within the government to create “a front of moderate forces committed to the political process and democracy.”
Mr. Talabani also claimed progress in intensive military operations carried out by American troops around Baghdad and central Iraq in recent months. “A successful campaign is on to eliminate terrorists, and so far large areas of Diyala and Anbar have been cleared,” he said late on Thursday.
A security official in the town of Muqdadiya in Diyala Province said seven men were killed Friday when gunmen attacked a house in the nearby village of Harbitila. The Iraqi Army also confirmed that a roadside bomb had killed a senior officer, Col. Abdul-Kareem Hameed, and three of his guards near Muqdadiya.
Farther south, in Wasit Province, the police found three unidentified bodies in the Tigris River. All were wearing civilian clothes, had been shot and showed signs of torture.
In eastern Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said five guards manning towers around the ministry had been killed in an insurgent attack with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. Nine guards were wounded. The compound is near the Finance Ministry headquarters, from which five Britons were abducted two months ago by kidnappers posing as government officials and police officers.
The body of Khalid W. Hassan, an Iraqi journalist working for The New York Times, was found in the Saydia district of southwest Baghdad on Friday.
Mr. Hassan was killed in the district while driving to work. A witness in a nearby line for fuel said a car had overtaken Mr. Hassan, and a gunman inside shot and wounded him. Gunfire from a second vehicle then killed him.
Two Iraqi employees of Reuters were killed the day before. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group, says more than 191 journalists and news media assistants have been killed in Iraq since 2003.
Also in Saydia, police officials said they had found about half a dozen bodies, including those of an 11-year-old girl and two women. All had been blindfolded, bound and shot in the head. A car bomb also exploded in the area, killing two civilians.
The Iraqi police reported finding 21 unidentified bodies in Baghdad on Friday. Although the body count in such suspected sectarian killings has dropped since the start of the latest Baghdad security plan in February, in recent days the police have reported finding 20 to 30 bodies daily.
Mortar shells fired yesterday afternoon at Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and American Embassy, killed a senior Iraqi military officer, according to Iraqi Army officials.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Baghdad, Diyala and Kut.
bombshells in the European movies they enjoyed: Ms. Loren, Anna Magnani, Anita Ekberg. “I’m not as beautiful as any of those people,” he said, “but I’m not unpleasant to look at, and I thought: ‘This is my library. Not grandmas or Aunt Bee from Mayberry, but the kind of person a blue-collar woman would aspire to be if she had money. What if that kind of woman had gone to flesh?’ ”
However he lives his life, his talent seems to exist in a world beyond such concerns.
Interpreting such choices is in any case a tricky business because there is something irregular about stars that made them stars in the first place. Even compared with lesser celebrities, they have a different way of being concerned about reputation, a concern that’s refracted through their roles and parceled out over time. They are less like the hothouse flowers they’re often compared to than like a volcano or an iceberg; whatever their particular temperature, they just do what they do, not thinking much of themselves or of you.
Watching the movie, you understand why, because John Travolta is utterly gone, as if Edna had swallowed him whole. All that’s left, peering out from her lunar face, are those famous blue eyes — bluer, even, than a cobalt blue shirt.
AVA GARDNER, I once read, pulled up loose skin on her face with hooks, and stuffed it under a wig. That was her makeshift face-lift. Joan Crawford is said to have smothered her acne with a mortician’s layer of makeup. Marilyn Monroe’s scalp was reportedly visible to intimates, shining scarlet from the scalding bleach she used. She was also, legend has it, going bald.
Like so many other 20th-century American institutions, Hollywood beauty is now regularly treated as a fairy tale only for dreamers and chumps. Readers with any sense are supposed to recognize its strategic function but otherwise acknowledge it as a lie. The availability of plastic surgery and the widespread use of tooth bleach and self-tanners and finally the photo manipulation that any grandma can do to brighten up her Canon PowerShot photos has somehow made even transcendent beauty manifestly suspect.
The Beautiful People, the Uglier the Better
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By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: July 15, 2007
AVA GARDNER, I once read, pulled up loose skin on her face with hooks, and stuffed it under a wig. That was her makeshift face-lift. Joan Crawford is said to have smothered her acne with a mortician’s layer of makeup. Marilyn Monroe’s scalp was reportedly visible to intimates, shining scarlet from the scalding bleach she used. She was also, legend has it, going bald.
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idon’tlikeyouinthatway.com
What is she drinking? Analyzing snapshots of Nicole Richie has become widespread sport in blogs and the tabloid press.
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A tearful Paris Hilton, en route to her traumatic incarceration.
America’s greatest beauties: they’d never get away with it these days. Those gorgeous Life magazine spreads of Gardner, the fresh-faced, green-eyed brunette: She was life’s crisp and sparkling perfection. Today we would never gaze placidly at those photos, dazzled as if by a Vermeer.
Instead, if Ava were still around, she’d appear on idontlikeyouinthatway.com or dlisted.com, and we wouldn’t ogle her face as much as her hairline, and the microscopic mysteries of the snagged skin, each hook tugging gruesomely at the flesh. And there would be a caption, angry, as if Gardner had intruded on us, and not we on her: What the hell is wrong with Ava’s face?!
Like so many other 20th-century American institutions, Hollywood beauty is now regularly treated as a fairy tale only for dreamers and chumps. Readers with any sense are supposed to recognize its strategic function but otherwise acknowledge it as a lie. The availability of plastic surgery and the widespread use of tooth bleach and self-tanners and finally the photo manipulation that any grandma can do to brighten up her Canon PowerShot photos has somehow made even transcendent beauty manifestly suspect.
Celebrity magazines that in earlier incarnations used to peddle a fantasy of loveliness now traffic in dismantling that same fantasy. In collusion with ever more Johnny-on-the-spot Web sites, tabloids have invited viewers first to evaluate photos of celebrities for evidence of normalcy (Stars: they’re just like us!) and now for evidence of monstrosity. (Nicole Richie: pregnant at 85 pounds and loaded on 73,000 pills!)
Certain celebrities lend themselves especially well to the new form of high-resolution scrutiny. Displaying weight loss and gain, unstable pigmentation, shadowy pregnancies, ocular dilations and erratic body language, figures like Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears have become favored specimens, inviting analysis and, like little Mona Lisas — repaying those who are willing to look and look and look.
In a recent tabloid photograph Ms. Richie, who in the last few years appears to have transformed from a jolly imp into a gaunt urchin, is shown leaving an office building in Los Angeles, a pink smoothie in hand, wearing a thigh-length, gathered T-shirt-dress. The image invites speculation on multiple fronts: Would that be a fetus-harming caffeinated drink? Or a calorie-laden one? In which case, does that mean Ms. Richie is eating again? And if so, is the pregnancy confirmed?
Similarly engrossing photos appear almost daily of Britney Spears, whose rather stockier and more off-balance figure in slovenly summerwear suggests master narratives about her maternal and filial shortcomings, as well as her fall from fit superstardom. Lindsay Lohan, who seems to have altered her ethnic inheritance entirely in becoming a suntanned blonde, appears in disguise even when barely dressed.
No question is too small or insignificant for Web sites like TMZ, X17online, PerezHilton, idontlikeyouinthatway, justjared, egotastic, wwtdd, dlisted and pinkisthenewblog, where the sites’ hosts post photos with commentary (“Parasite Hilton: Her Face Is Growing Stuff”), and invite others to do the same. “She has the weirdest stomach,” reads one comment on idontlikeyouinthatway. “I can see in his eyes that he’s not ‘perfectly normal,’ ” reads another, about a celebrity’s son, on x17online. Scrutinizing pixel after pixel of sharp clavicles or vulnerable underbellies, we have come to treat these bodies like Sanskrit manuscripts.
Why are we looking so hard? And what do we expect to find?
It’s almost hard to remember now, but the old frustration of entertainment news was that celebrities made almost no false moves: a phalanx of publicists and stylists monitored them so closely that they always seemed composed, styled, scripted and (in the bygone idiom) “airbrushed.”
Only five years ago I remember watching a taped David Frost interview with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in which everyone smoked, appeared drunk and insulted one another. I was sure nothing like that would appear on any screen ever again.
But little did I know. Us Weekly and its copycats quickly reinvented celebrity photography, eschewing production stills and party pictures in favor of snapshots. But they didn’t only go for red-carpet fashion photos, or the gotchas that come along once in a lifetime: Gary Hart with Donna Rice, Kate Moss with cocaine. Instead they focused on the mundane: stars in supermarkets, dog parks, parking lots. In all that natural light they looked indistinct, sometimes homely. At first I thought, who cares? But then the magazines taught me to care, and mistake the new unkempt images for intimacy, if intimacy is something I might achieve by rooming with a celebrity at a mental hospital.
Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine.
Over the following months there were other secrets her body betrayed, illuminated inside by shrinks (who had never treated or met her, I gathered): muscles meant a comeback, casual clothes suggested depression, party clothes meant desperation. A tan signaled a rebound, as did a nose job or haircut, unless either were too dramatic; un-made-up eyes indicated grief.
Perez Hilton, the screen name for Mario Lavandeira, the reigning online gossip maven who runs PerezHilton.com, prides himself on the sensitivity of his readings of photographs. “I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”
He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”
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Britney Spears.
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Lindsay Lohan.
I asked him why we like to examine our celebrities so closely these days. Do we just want them to be more human? “We like to look where we can’t or shouldn’t look,” he said, citing the photographs that seem to accidentally reveal the most vulnerable square inches on celebrities’ bodies. These draw the most traffic to PerezHilton. Forget the hourglass figures of stars of old; now fans and anti-fans simply seem to want small pink dots of light, partially obscured, that seems to represent human glands.
Mr. Lavandeira boasts that his site is the one that most frightens Hollywood, and nearly every celebrity site keeps up some pretense that it shines a bright light on the famous.
Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances. One possibility presented itself last summer when I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.
“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.
“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, referring first to the bloggers who questioned documents cited by Dan Rather about President Bush’s National Guard service, and then to a well-known falsified news picture. “But this is fascinating.”
And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.
Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites.
In any case the danse macabre that stars now do with the paparazzi, who appear to lurk everywhere, must be logistically maddening and emotionally draining. Every trip to the grocery store is a performance piece; every day at the beach is a soft-porn movie.
What’s more the consumers of the resulting plays, movies, video projects and photographs — that’s us — are not primarily looking to be entertained or transported. We’re just looking for data, more and more data, the more raw the better.
Someday we may need nothing but zeros and ones to give our prognostications. And then we really won’t need the star herself. But for now a young star is in a strange place. To become a specimen, a lab slide, a piece of data: surely this is not what people dream of when they quit high school, take singing lessons and move to Hollywood.
The Actualizer
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By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: July 15, 2007
Giovanni Ribisi called me. Burt Reynolds asked me to call him at home. The director Joel Schumacher called me from Romania between takes for his next movie. Anne Archer and I played phone tag for two weeks. A-list, B-list, stars of stage, stars of screen, they were all eager to talk. The Tony winners John Glover and Tyne Daly. Edie McClurg, the dippy secretary in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” David Carradine.
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Todd Hido
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Mark Oppenheimer's Interview with Rev. John Carmichael, President of the Church of Scientology in New York. (mp3)
Mark Oppenheimer's "Castway" podcast series for the New Haven Independent.
Stephanie Diani/Getty Images, for The New York Times
Whatever Works Katselas with a student in an advanced-acting class at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.
Put the word on the street that you’re writing about Milton Katselas, and every student he has ever had will want to tell you about the best acting teacher in the world, the man who took them from fresh-faced, straight-off-the-plane-at-LAX ingénues looking for work — commercials; God willing, someday a sitcom — to being real artists. They’ll tell you about how he saved them from the failings of the artist’s personality, like narcissism and drug addiction, and set them aright. They were born with the talent, but he gave them careers.
But there are dissenters too. Students have left Katselas’s school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. Nobody ever told them to join, but they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists. Or the fact that Milton Katselas, the master himself, credits Hubbard for much of his success in life. And the assorted weirdness: one of Katselas’s students works a day job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, where Tom Cruise and John Travolta study, and one zealous television star left the playhouse because she said she believed that Katselas wasn’t committed enough to Scientology.
Before trying to metabolize this strange cocktail of Hollywood, dreams both deferred and achieved, and Scientology, consider the very sincere professions of faith in a bearded, baritone septuagenarian with a Mediterranean temper who began as a student of Lee Strasberg and became the teacher of Ribisi, Daly and Carradine; of Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Selleck, Tony Danza, Priscilla Presley, Patrick Swayze, Cheryl Ladd and hundreds more.
Richard Lawson, a Katselas student and occasional Scientologist, who now teaches at the playhouse, says that Katselas’s teaching helped him cheat death in 1992 when his plane from LaGuardia crashed in Flushing Bay and he was submerged underwater. “I just got this inspiration to overcome it, to fight with everything I had to get out,” Lawson told a reporter in 1998. “One of the things I attribute that to is the teachings of Milton.” Anne Archer, who discovered Scientology at the playhouse nearly 30 years ago, says, “I have seen performances sometimes in that class that are so brilliant that they’re better than anything I have seen on the stage or film.” Her husband, the producer Terry Jastrow — also a Scientologist — says that Katselas changed the texture of his daily existence: “I go out in the world and look at human behavior now. I see a woman or man interacting with a saleslady, and I see the artistry in it. Life is an endless unspooling of art, of acting, of painting, of architecture. And where did I learn that? From Milton.”
Most people in the Los Angeles acting community believe that the Beverly Hills Playhouse is a serious conservatory where actors train with a master teacher, while others think it’s a recruitment center for Scientology. I wondered if it might be both. What if the playhouse was a serious conservatory, and Katselas a master teacher, not in spite of Scientology but because of it?
I first attended Katselas’s weekly master class on a Saturday morning in April. I took my seat in his small theater on South Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills well before the 9:30 start time. I was stargazing — Justina Machado from “Six Feet Under” was there; Beth Grant from “Little Miss Sunshine” was there — when promptly at 9:30 the class rose to its feet in a standing ovation. Katselas had entered by the door near stage left, and he was proceeding slowly, with the shuffle of a man vigorous but in his 70s, to his chair on a landing a few rows up from stage right, offering small, regal waves as he went. Nobody sat until he did.
“What is this, Easter?” he asked.
“Passover,” several students answered at once.
“What is this class, 82 percent Jewish — the rest goyim?” People laughed, and at that the lights dimmed, then came up, and a scene began.
And one thing very quickly became clear: Milton Katselas is an uncommonly good teacher.
In the first scene, Jack Betts, whom I later placed as the judge in “Office Space,” played the actor John Barrymore, from the one-man show “Barrymore,” made famous on Broadway by Christopher Plummer. I thought that Betts captured both the dissolution and the grandeur of a great man in his pickled decline, but after the scene, when Betts sat at the edge of the stage to receive his critique, Katselas made clear how much better the performance could have been.
A Katselas critique is a respectful dialogue; he is never mean, but he is challenging. Katselas wanted Betts to find the quieter notes in Barrymore. One place to start, he thought, might be in the song with which the scene begins: Barrymore singing “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo.” As Betts had sung it, the song was brassy, vaudevillelike: “A! B! C! D! E! F! G! H! I got a gal in KAL-amazoo!” Katselas had him sing it over again, several times, suggesting that he turn the final syllable, the zoo, into a drunken, slurred, tossed-off note of disdain. After several more takes of the song, Katselas wasn’t satisfied, but it seemed that Betts was getting there. The Barrymore that emerged at the end of 45 minutes was stranger, sadder, perhaps a bit louche, less of a stereotype and altogether more believable than what Betts had delivered at the beginning of class.
In many ways Katselas embodies what we expect from the acting pedagogue. He has a sexual, dangerous edge — I wasn’t shocked when he confessed that he had dated several of his students. He looks unkempt, but deliberately so, very bohemian. He swears a lot, as if perpetually burdened by his inability to wring better performances from his students. But although he believes in sex and danger and anger, Katselas never sounds like a Freudian in search of those emotions, and in this regard he breaks the stereotype.
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Mark Oppenheimer's Interview with Rev. John Carmichael, President of the Church of Scientology in New York. (mp3)
Mark Oppenheimer's "Castway" podcast series for the New Haven Independent.
The great American acting teachers, like Strasberg and Stella Adler, have typically insisted that there is a role for an actor’s emotional history in his or her performance. In various versions of Strasberg’s “Method,” the actor uses “sense memory” or “affective memory” to relive actual experiences — the death of a parent, an episode of sexual violence, the birth of a child — to summon tears, horror, elation or some other emotion for the character. Acting classes can thus resemble talk therapy, as actors, lost in the moment, weep, scream or cackle. But Katselas is adamant that he doesn’t care what his students have been through. Digging into the past might work for some students, and as an avowed pragmatist Katselas tells actors to use whatever works. But he mostly gives actors bits of physical direction rather than asking probing questions about their motivation. In one scene, he had two lovers touch their foreheads together, injecting a note of true intimacy into what had been pure farce; in another, he told an angry junkie to clench his hair in his fists and yank, and all of a sudden the actor found the rage that had been missing from his performance.
“The purpose of the acting art is not to bring about therapy,” Katselas told me later. “One taps their own experience of love or violence and tries to pull from it whatever is possible in terms of an association or understanding, but there is also the imagination and the character and the writing. The personal thing is always very strong and can be created, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you go into the traumas of your life in order to get it.”
Is this teaching Scientology? Not at all. But it happens to be quite consonant with Scientology, which is famous for its opposition to psychiatry and psychotherapy. (A group founded by the Church of Scientology operates a museum in Hollywood called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.) The only time I heard Katselas quote L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology founder, in class, he was oblique about it. Four students had just performed a scene in which two college students, about to have a one-night stand, are suddenly, in an absurdist, “Oleanna”-like twist, interrupted by lawyers who want them to agree in advance how far their petting may go. In his critique of the scene, Katselas railed against the legal profession: he wanted the actors to understand that this was more than a funny scene; it was also an indictment of how litigiousness, as well as the fear of it, separates us from our desires. Lawyers are just one group to whom Americans give over their autonomy, and these undergrads, having let the lawyers in, needed to push them back out and take responsibility for their own actions. It is not therapy that reunites us with our authentic selves but willpower, properly directed. “A cat that I study says you are responsible for the condition you are in,” Katselas told the room. “Period.”
That “cat” is Hubbard. But Katselas never says so, and it’s not clear that he ought to. In the context of the scene critique, Hubbard’s seems a germane aphorism, one that might help the actors get a better feel for the shifting alliances onstage. In other arts, it’s easy to gauge proficiency, if not genius. We know what technically correct music sounds like, and writers have rules of grammar and syntax to follow or to tactfully violate. But what makes a good acting performance? How do you disappear into a character? In addition to being the most ineffable of arts, acting depends on extraneous accidents of fate, like the right look. And it’s the only art that you can’t master alone; there’s not much market for soliloquies. With all those uncertainties, a fine performance, let alone a paycheck for it, can seem terrifyingly elusive. It must be the rare actor who can dismiss supernatural aids, whether Scientology or superstitious incantations like “Break a leg,” without a slight loss of nerve.
When David Carradine met Milton Katselas at an audition in the mid-1960s, there were 50 people sitting in the back rows of the theater, just watching Katselas watch actors. “He already had a cult fame, these followers who were like disciples,” Carradine says. “He was the hot young director. I read the play, and I really hated it, but I went to the audition anyway.” Katselas was barely 30 years old.
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Related
Mark Oppenheimer's Interview with Rev. John Carmichael, President of the Church of Scientology in New York. (mp3)
Mark Oppenheimer's "Castway" podcast series for the New Haven Independent.
Born to Greek immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1933, Katselas moved to New York straight after graduating from the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Mellon). There was no period of ignominy, no nights of waiting tables. He had seeded the town for his arrival. “I told the guy at Carnegie that within a week, I’d be working with Kazan and I’d be studying with Strasberg,” Katselas told me last spring when we met at his house in West Hollywood. “Prior to that, when I was still in university, I was walking in the streets of New York, just visiting over holiday, and I saw Kazan, and I said to a guy, ‘Is that Kazan?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ ” Elia Kazan was fast becoming a legend. He directed “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951; “On the Waterfront” would come in 1954 and “East of Eden” the year after. “I ran after him; I lost him; I found him; he went up in a building,” Katselas said. “I had my back to the building, looking away from the building. Then this guy taps me on the back, says, ‘What do you want?’ It’s Kazan. He went up, knew that I was chasing him. We spoke a little bit in Greek. I told him I was in university. He says: ‘When you come from university, look me up. I’ll give you a job.’ ” When Katselas arrived in New York, Kazan kept his promise and hired him as his gofer during the Broadway run of “Tea and Sympathy.”
The charmed life got more charmed. Strasberg let Katselas into his class at the Actors Studio. Kazan sent his young Turk — or, rather, Greek — to the stage director Joseph Anthony, who hired him. Katselas talked himself into a job with Joshua Logan, the great director of movies like “Picnic” and “Bus Stop.” Katselas began teaching and directing, and in 1960, at Edward Albee’s request, he directed the American premiere of “The Zoo Story” for the Provincetown Playhouse. His greatest success, though, was “Butterflies Are Free,” a timely play about a blind Manhattanite who falls for a free-spirited hippie, which opened in 1969 and ran for more than 1,000 performances. Blythe Danner won a Tony for her performance, and Katselas was nominated for his direction. In the early 1970s, Katselas moved to California to direct “40 Carats” with Liv Ullmann and the film version of “Butterflies Are Free,” in which Goldie Hawn took Danner’s role.
Katselas never made it back to New York to live. In his telling, his migration sounds like an inevitable progression: Hollywood beckoned; he began teaching in California; it agreed with him. The truth is somewhat more complicated: New York was where Katselas succumbed to, then defeated, an addiction to methamphetamines; it’s where his first marriage, to an alcoholic, began to fail. California must have represented an escape and a fresh start. In 1983, he returned East to direct “Private Lives” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton but was fired during the tryouts before the show reached New York. “I got along great with Burton, and he told me I was one of the few directors he ever accepted notes from,” Katselas says. “But I didn’t get along with Elizabeth, and I’d rather not go into why.” He never worked on the East Coast again.
+In California, Katselas met L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer and amateur scientist whose teachings form the basis of Scientology. Scientology promises its adherents the ability to become “clear,” ridding themselves of negative memories, or “engrams,” that retard their abilities. After becoming clear, they can proceed up “the bridge to total freedom,” realizing their full potential as “thetans,” spirits trapped in bodies. One mechanism of advancement is “auditing,” in which the Scientologist, in conversation with a church “auditor” and hooked up to a machine called an “E-meter,” deletes engrams; there are also church classes like “Personal Efficiency” and “Life Repair.” As a Scientologist proceeds “up the bridge,” he can gain access to esoteric knowledge, like how we thetans got here. Scientology, it has been widely reported, teaches that 75 million years ago the evil alien Xenu solved galactic overpopulation by dumping 13.5 trillion beings in volcanoes on Earth, where they were vaporized, scattering their souls. (John Carmichael, the president of the Church of Scientology of New York, told me, “That’s not what we believe.” He refused to discuss the church’s esoteric teachings, though he did claim that Scientology’s beliefs about the origins of the universe and mankind “follow the much older tradition of Eastern religion dating back to the Vedic hymns.”)
What most Americans know of Scientology is the alien myth, parodied on a famous “South Park” episode; or the German government’s view that Scientology is less a religion than a cult with totalitarian overtones; or the church’s winning fight for tax-exempt status despite the fees it charges, which for many courses are thousands of dollars; or reports in The Times and elsewhere that while battling with the I.R.S., church lawyers hired private investigators to find dirt on federal employees. Millions are also aware of the religion’s celebrity practitioners, like John Travolta, Isaac Hayes and Beck. But for most people who dabble in Scientology, including dozens of Beverly Hills Playhouse students, the religion boils down to two rather prosaic practices. There is the auditing, which, despite Scientologists’ angry denials, is a lot like the psychotherapy they abhor, and there are the classroom teachings. In class, Scientologists learn Hubbard wisdom like “What’s true is what’s true for you” and “Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication,” as well as practical advice about the importance of working hard, not blaming others and communicating clearly. Scientology is a quintessentially American mix of prosperity gospel, grandiose hopes for technology, bizarre New Age mythology and useful self-help nostrums.
Katselas was introduced to Scientology in 1965 and has been studying it, off and on, ever since. He has achieved the state of clear, and gone well beyond it; he is, he told me, an Operating Thetan, Level 5, or O.T. V. According to “What Is Scientology?” published by the church, being an Operating Thetan means that you “can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance. . . . It doesn’t mean one becomes God. It means one becomes wholly oneself.” But despite his advanced level of Scientology training, only “on five or six occasions,” Katselas says, has he urged a student to explore Scientology.
Others confirmed that Katselas does not proselytize. “I didn’t know he was a Scientologist until four days ago,” says Burt Reynolds, who has been a guest teacher at the playhouse. “The Scientologists I know, the actors I know, practically want to drag me there. He’s never brought it up.” Katselas’s devotion to Hubbard notwithstanding — he keeps a picture of L.R.H., as Scientologists call him, on a table in his office — he makes rather modest claims for Scientology. “It certainly helped me,” he says. “It helped me as a painter. I started doing a lot of painting, did the Scientology, and it opened up my visual sense. And it helped me in communication, endlessly, and that’s a vital thing in teaching or directing.”
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Related
Mark Oppenheimer's Interview with Rev. John Carmichael, President of the Church of Scientology in New York. (mp3)
Mark Oppenheimer's "Castway" podcast series for the New Haven Independent.
It was in precisely those two areas, painting and communication, in which I thought I could divine Scientology’s influence. Katselas thinks highly of himself as a visual artist. He maintains his own studio, employs a full-time assistant who helps with his sculpture and mixed-media works and has had a handful of shows (three in a gallery that he owns). And although he has no architectural training, he has collaborated with a local architect, offering ideas for the design of two houses in the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles; one of the houses, it so happens, was purchased by Apl.de.Ap, one of the singers for the Black Eyed Peas. Katselas does not do the blueprints for the houses he “designs,” just as he does not do all the technical work for his art. Katselas has no reputation among critics of painting or architecture. But he seems to have a strong belief in the multifarious nature of his genius — he eagerly showed me the houses he has helped build and gave me a long tour of his art studio — and that is typical of Scientologists, who are taught to think of their potential as limitless.
As for communication, Katselas is, like Hubbard, fairly obsessed with the idea that if only people communicated better, the world’s problems would disappear. Katselas told me that if he sat down the warring parties in Israel, he could broker a truce — a comment that nicely marries Scientology’s human-potential hubris and its faith in communication as the greatest virtue. Katselas also shares Scientologists’ admirable habit of looking words up in dictionaries. Every teacher at the playhouse has a dictionary handy and has actors learn words they don’t know, and Katselas uses numerous dictionary definitions in “Dreams Into Action,” the self-help book he published in 1996 and hawked on “Oprah.” The book acknowledges Hubbard “for his wisdom, writings and inspiration” and carries blurbs from, incongruously, Mario Cuomo and Molly Yard, the former president of the National Organization for Women.
It might seem odd, then, that Katselas and the Scientologists have been somewhat at odds. I asked Katselas if it was true that the actress Jenna Elfman left the playhouse because she found him insufficiently committed to the church. He confirmed the rumor, hesitantly. “In a certain way, yes,” he said. “I don’t know what really occurred there. She was going to be fully involved with Scientology at a certain point in her life. I don’t know if that crept back in.” (Gary Grossman, who has worked at the playhouse for more than 20 years, also said he thought that Elfman wanted to move Katselas “up the bridge” in Scientology, though he added that “the only ones that would know would be Milton and Jenna.” Elfman never returned calls that I made to her publicist.) “But I’ve got to do what I’m going to do,” Katselas continued, “and I’m not going to do it because somebody tells me I should do it, and it doesn’t matter what somebody else thinks is right.”
Katselas’s stubbornness, and his sheer ego, are the keys to understanding his relationship to Scientology. He takes what he can from the teachings, but he can be rather contemptuous of the church. “I know [Hubbard] made a statement once that Scientology is not the people in it,” Katselas said. “Scientology is a technology that he’s developed that is really powerful, and these artists respond to it because it cleans up certain things that they’ve looking to or that they’re dealing with, and that helps them in their quest or in their way, and there’s no doubt of that.” But, he added: “I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to Scientology events. I just don’t do it. And they’re not enthralled with me because of that.” Katselas agreed that some Scientologists were “zealots,” by which he might have meant that for them Scientology was primary, whereas for Katselas Scientology is instrumental. This is a man, after all, who had the chutzpah to chase down Elia Kazan on the street and ask for a job. Scientology didn’t convince Milton that he had unlimited potential; it just confirmed what he already suspected.
+Katselas was born with the ego and the talent, but Adam Donshik wasn’t. Donshik, who first told me about Katselas three summers ago, is an old high-school classmate of mine. We were part of the small theater crowd, and we acted together in “Guys and Dolls” and “Gypsy.” He had a lovely voice and was always cast in the musicals, but he was an indifferent actor. We hadn’t spoken for more than 10 years when in 2003 I flipped to the ABC drama “Threat Matrix” and saw him playing a terrorist. Eight months later, I was in Beverly Hills on an assignment, and we met for a drink. His hair was a little thinner, but he looked great, all tan and muscled. The West Coast suited him. The career was going great, he said. Life was going great. “You want to know why?” he asked. “Scientology. I’ve become a Scientologist!” He smiled as if to acknowledge the improbability of this Jewish kid from New England finding Scientology. He had gotten involved through friends at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where he studied.
Donshik now works for the playhouse as an admission interviewer, acting in TV series on the side. Of a total playhouse payroll of about a dozen teachers, interviewers and assistants, nearly all, I discovered, had at least dabbled in Scientology. Some, like Allen Barton, who is executive director of the school, are committed Scientologists; others, like Rick Podell and Gary Grossman (who starred with Tom Hanks in “Bachelor Party”), have taken just one class and do not consider themselves Scientologists. Jocelyn Jones and Gary Imhoff, former faculty members, are Scientologists, as is Jeffrey Tambor, an actor best known as the imprisoned patriarch George Bluth Sr. on “Arrested Development” and who was Katselas’s heir apparent until he abruptly quit the faculty several years ago. (Katselas blamed Tambor’s wife: “I think she felt there was a tension between her and me and the school, and I think Jeffrey was caught in the middle of it.”)
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Related
Mark Oppenheimer's Interview with Rev. John Carmichael, President of the Church of Scientology in New York. (mp3)
Mark Oppenheimer's "Castway" podcast series for the New Haven Independent.
Of the students, I easily located a dozen who are Scientologists, and based on interviews, I concluded there are probably several dozen more in the current student body of 500. Like their teachers, some students are devout while others indulge a mild curiosity and then drop off. “I went down and took a couple of classes,” David Carradine said. “I’m no kind of Scientologist, but I’ve been around it enough to know it’s a very intelligent thing.” This being Hollywood, some students, like Giovanni Ribisi, were Scientologists before they came to the playhouse.
Of course, other students worry less about how Scientology will help their acting than how it will help their careers; there’s a widespread perception in Hollywood that Scientology is a networking tool. People notice that, say, two stars of “My Name Is Earl,” Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee, are Scientologists; that the Scientologist Kirstie Alley did a guest appearance on Elfman’s “Dharma and Greg”; that Ribisi has popped up on “My Name Is Earl.” “I knew someone at the playhouse who joined Scientology because she thought it would help her career,” one agent told me. “She thought Jenna Elfman would be her best friend.” And actors who study at the Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue do bump into the stars, chat with them, even have lunch with them at the restaurant. How bad could that be for a career?
All religious communities can be networks for business contacts, but Scientology makes a special pitch to celebrities, and church literature is filled with testimonials from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and other stars. According to a pamphlet I was given at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood (there are eight Celebrity Centres, in cities from Paris to Munich to Nashville), the center was founded in 1969 “to take care of those who entertain, fashion and take care of the world . . . the artists, the leaders of industry, politicians, sports figures and the like.” As a very successful hack sci-fi writer, Hubbard was something of a junior-varsity celebrity himself, and he had great esteem for his betters. “Hollywood makes a picture which strikes the public fancy, and tomorrow we have girls made up like a star walking along the streets of the small towns of America,” Hubbard once wrote. “A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.”
Of course, the majority of those who study at Celebrity Centres are not actual celebrities, and for many of them the chance to be valued for their art alongside more successful peers, the Cruises and the Travoltas, must be salubrious for the ego. At the centers, the agent can join the same exclusive club as his client, the editor as his writer. And all of them can bask in a theology that holds, again to quote Hubbard, that “one of the greatest single moves which could be made to advance and vitalize a culture such as America would be to free, completely, the artist from all taxes and similar oppressions.”
But if a few students have appreciated the playhouse for its connections to Scientology, others have left alienated. “I have clients who left there because of all the Scientology,” one longtime Hollywood agent told me. Terrell Clayton, who had a recurring role on “Six Feet Under” and studied at the playhouse for five years, says that the pressure to study Scientology is subtle. “It’s not like while you’re being critiqued they say you need to join Scientology,” he says. “It’s small conversations you might have with colleagues or fellow students.” He now studies with Ivana Chubbuck, a highly regarded teacher who wrote “The Power of the Actor.” Chubbuck has kind words for Katselas. “It seems when people come from his studio to work with me, they seem to be pretty good actors, so he must be doing something right,” she says. “In terms of how he operates as a Scientologist or a human being, I would be remiss in saying something based on rumor or hearsay.”
And then Chubbuck told me something unexpected and clarifying: “If he’s putting something else he does in his teaching, if it works, it works.” In other words, even if he were dispensing Scientology-flavored pedagogy, even if his example did lead some young actors to the Celebrity Centre to spend their dollars — earned at union scale, working bit parts in Lifetime movies — on classes meant to bring about a state of clear, that might not be a bad thing, not if it helped their art.
Katselas is adamant that he does not want a cult around himself. “It worries me,” he said when I mentioned that his students seem to worship him. But he collects disciples. His personal chef, art assistant and longtime girlfriend are all students or former students (the latter two have studied Scientology). He knows what’s best for others too: he threatened to fire his art assistant, Richard Shirley, unless Shirley lost weight. (“He’s in my life; it’s very much my business,” Katselas said. “Everything is everybody’s business. Our fellows are our responsibility.”) And he cultivates the image of a man with almost magical powers. “Dreams Into Action,” his motivational book, is full of promises for future greatness, if only people would heed his words. He has style: he drove me around in a restored vintage Mercedes. He’s an entrepreneur, a real estate investor, even a partner in Skylight Books, one of L.A.’s best independent bookstores. He once got drunk with the sculptor David Smith. He has the wit of Thurber, the charm of Zorba. According to one Scientology text, man “is not only able to solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also to achieve new states of awareness he may never have dreamed possible.” Katselas seems to have achieved such a state — what student could be blamed for wanting to drink his elixir?
On my last day in Los Angeles, I saw Adam Donshik play Hamlet in class. It was the scene in which he kills Polonius and fights with his mother. Katselas wasn’t impressed — his critique was barbed — but Adam was worlds better than in high school. Even accounting for age and maturity, something else had intervened. An unusual teacher had given Adam both a religion and a talent for acting. If the two were somehow inseparable, it might not pay to try to pull them apart. I could mock Adam for following the man or for following the faith. But perhaps it would be wiser to simply watch him act.
Exhibition Inkie
So you’re getting into street art are you? You’ve forked out a few quid on some screen prints after you read about Santa’s Ghetto last Xmas in the Metro and think you’re pretty down with it. Why, you’re even pretty sure you drove passed a Banksy piece in your cab the other day. Well, ANOTHER Bristolian artist - going by the name of Inkie – will be exhibiting his work for the rest of the month at Notting Hill Arts Club. Starting out in 1983 amongst an astonishingly talented bunch including 3D of Massive Attack and Goldie, as well as collaborating with the aforementioned Banksy; Inkie is one of the pioneers of the British graf scene. Now a very successful designer for video games, he hasn’t stopped drawing on walls, and this show will feature new paintings on wood and canvas, as well as prints and a light box installation. Go on, go West my son… / Josh Jones
Influenced by punk rock album graphics and early New York wild style pioneers such as Dondi, Seen & T-Kid, Inkie started out 1983 alongside 3D of Massive Attack fame, Goldie, The Chrome Angels and Nick Walker.
In 1989 he came 2nd to LA in the World Street Art championships beating off fierce competition from New York and all major European countries. Later that year he hit national headlines, when he was arrested along with 72 other writers as the 'Kingpin' in the UK's largest ever graffiti bust 'Operation Anderson'. His arrest, court case and subsequent acquittal (!) was all documented by BBC2 in the programme 'Drawing The Line'.
In the late 1990s Inkie and fellow Bristolian and collaborator Banksy organised the largest ever UK graffiti event, 'Walls On Fire', which pulled together UK's finest street artists to create 1.4 km painting around Bristol's historic docks. Since moving to London, Inkie has become one of the leading graphic designers in the video game industry as well as continuing to contribute to the UK street art scene.
He was featured in and organised the launch exhibition for the Thames & Hudson book 'Graffiti World' and the LA produced worldwide graffiti film 'Bomb It' that premiered at this years Tribeca Film festival to unanimous critical acclaim. More recently he's produced work for Puma, Xbox, Adidas, Levis, Addict, Lovebox and Latitude Festivals. Inkie has also been an integral part of the Shoreditch based Secret Wars collective, soon to take their infamous street art battles to NYC, Europe and Tokyo.
Exposed To The Elements will run at Notting Hill Arts Club for a month starting on Monday 2nd July with a private view from 6-9pm. The show features new paintings on wood/canvas, prints and a light box installation.
www.inkie.co.uk
www.myspace.com/inkie70
Gig Jeru the Damaja
Back in ’96 Brooklyn-based MC Jeru the Damaja became an underground superhero when he hit the charts with the jiggy rap-dissing track ‘Ya Playin’ Yaself’ in a response to the growth of commercial gangsterism in hip hop. In a profound moment of rap contemplation, he challenged women to respect themselves and homeboys to stop slangin’ crack and busting gats. With Gangstarr’s producer extraordinaire DJ Premier putting up his now-legendary beats (which included head banger ‘Come Clean’) Jeru’s tunes have become fundamentals in true-school DJ bags worldwide. In spite of a falling out with Primo and crew, plus a minor beef with The Fugees, this self-proclaimed prophet’s gig at the Jazz Café is a must-see on the real and if you think anything else hun, you’re playin’ yaself. / Chloe McCloskey
Exhibition Redefining Bedlam
In the wake of the government’s recent rising interest in attitudes towards mental illness and its treatment, Novas Arts has launched an exhibition dealing with the topic. Novas’s profits fund the training and development of marginalised people who are conventionally left on the sidelines when it comes to cultural expression such as art. Redefining Bedlam showcases over thirty artists, all of whom have at some point experienced forms of mental distress. The exhibition will promote art as an important element in the healing and development process, as well as an awareness tool with which to square up to the stereotypes, misconceptions and prejudices which still haunt our communities today. Well worth a bit of your time, methinks.
Club Mobile Clubbing
Aw, they grow up so quick don't they? It seems like just yesterday that mobile clubbing was born. Remember its first faltering steps, the excited media coverage of hundreds of headphoned dancers at Liverpool Street Station, the sheer what-the-hell-is-going-on-ness of those heady days? Well now they're all grown up, and planning a simultaneous three-city mobile clubathon. If you've not been before then the drill is pretty simple. Turn up at St Pauls, loiter, and catch the eye of other likely looking types. At 6.46pm pull on your ipod/walkman/whatever, press play on your tune of the moment and dance like you mean it. Others will be there, passers-by will be confused, and then you will all go off to the pub and hope to see yourself on the news. Easy.
Launch How To Be a Social Diva
I know, I know. You think you already know how to be a Social Diva, but some things are best left to the professionals. Social Diva are crack team of party organisers, trend-spotters and advisers on all events luxurious and happening - think le cool if it had been relentlessly and professionally beautified...and had all its extremities buffed and shaped...with cocktails..and possibly one of those little dogs. Not content with making sure the residents of New York, Miami and Atlanta get their daily dose of cool stuff, they've also condensed their wisdom into a book. Why are we telling this you all this now, instead of the day of the launch? Cos the lovely Social Diva people have given us 50 free guestlist places for the party at Shoreditch House, and we wanted to make sure you had time to get yourself looking suitably gorgeous. So email us for an invite, and away you go.
SECRETS AND DREAMS: KAY VASEY
Kay Vasey is one of the co-founders of Mesh, a social networking site for creative professionals
One of my favourite places… Shoreditch House - the former tea warehouse has become my "home from home" where I can relax by the rooftop pool whilst running my business. It's a superb place for meetings with friends and business contacts. With the world's longest Chesterfield and amazing City views, it provides excellent inspiration for mashing art and business together. I also love the Hide Out - an underground jazz bar on Greek Street, opposite Jazz After Dark - a place to shuffle some cards and bask in the laid back vibes.
In the future... I look forward to a time when people are willing to share their experiences and knowledge so that we can harness the collective intelligence to find out about the things we are really interested in. Bring on the end to irritating adverts based on the scatter-gun approach and the birth of word-of-mouth recommendations.
Exhibition AudioVision
Of course round le cool way it's all film premieres, private views and PR companies biking us over rare Peruvian vodkas in a vain attempt to crumble our rigid journalistic integrity. Which is nice, but a little unfair on hard-working people who have to pay to get in to stuff. So three cheers for Dazed and Confused. There's no favouritism at their private views. Open to all, free Tiger beer for everyone, and a knack of getting work by the best young artists around. This week it's an exhibition on the theme of synthaesia (seeing sounds, hearing colours etc) featuring a gang of hot new St Martins grads, photography, textiles and a goldfish. Of course we're not going to go unless they send a car...
Gig Marnie Stern
Here they come - in the wake of Kate Nash hitting the top ten, record companies are rubbing their collective hands and polishing up an army of pleasant guitar-toting teenage girls with Mockney accents and tastefully off-kilter music. Believe you me you're going to need an antidote to all these dropped haitches and tales of London life. Enter spitting and snarling the wonderful and frankly totally barking Marnie Stern. She plays guitar like a teenage metalhead, chants gorgeous, scruffy songs over what can only accurately be described as 'a right racket' and the whole thing is a riotous, life-affirming blast. So that makes the score USA one, UK nil.
that’s West Coast as in LA not Brizzle ok? The subject of the recent film DiG! which documented the apocalyptic feud raging between them and fellow rockers the Dandy Warhols; who ‘sold out’ to big brands, part of the attraction of this band is they might just break down completely on stage once and for all. And who doesn’t want to say they were there for that? Everyone likes it when someone else finally loses the plot.
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This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)
Otto Steininger
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By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 22, 2007
For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.
YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”
Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.
During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.
In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.
“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.
Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.
They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.
“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.
Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.
In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.
“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.
Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.
Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.
He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”
After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”
Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.
Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.
And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.
The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”
Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.
The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.
But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”
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