Lily Salter's Blog, page 70

Identifying with others who control themselves could strengthen your own self-control

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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Is self-control something you can acquire, like a new language or a taste for opera? Or is it one of those things you either have or don’t, like fashion sense or a knack for telling a good joke?

Psychologist Walter Mischel’s famous results from the “marshmallow test” seem to suggest self-control is relatively stable and not easily learned. In this test, children sit at a table in an otherwise empty room and are given a choice: They can have one marshmallow right away, or, if they can wait for the experimenter to get more marshmallows from another room, they can have two instead. Most children see this as a no-brainer and opt to wait for two marshmallows.

Kids trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow.

The real test is waiting. Children are left alone in the room for up to 15 minutes or until they taste the marshmallow. Children vary in how long they can last without sampling the delectable treat in front of them, and it turns out that the longer they wait, the better they will fare later in life — socially, emotionally and academically. Other tests find similar patterns. People who demonstrate more self-control in childhood are, as adults, healthier, wealthier and more law-abiding.

Mischel himself has emphasized that children who showed more self-control used a variety of strategies that could be learned — like distracting themselves by singing and turning away from the marshmallow or distancing themselves from the marshmallow by imagining it as an inedible, fluffy cloud.

A less optimistic view holds that children who were good at distracting themselves had more self-control to begin with, which helped them activate self-distracting thoughts and behaviors rather than fixating on the sweet treat in front of them. And although Mischel found that children could be induced to wait longer if they were taught these kinds of strategies, there’s no evidence that such experimental interventions alter children’s spontaneous self-control behavior outside of the lab.

But don’t throw your hands up in resignation and reach for that second slice of chocolate cake just yet. A new wave of studies suggests that maybe self-control can be learned, provided that social forces encourage this learning. In a new study, my colleague and I found that children will use self-control if they believe others they identify with do.

Everybody’s doing it

Despite enormous interest in improving self-control, researchers have had limited success (so far) in figuring out how to train for it. The general approach has been to target the cognitive processes — called executive functions — that support self-control.

Researchers have children practice activities that activate these processes. Training can lead to some improvements on similar tasks, but typically does not generalize to other untrained tasks or outcomes. This is a real problem because a key goal of self-control training is to be able to transfer strengthened skills to real-world situations.

My colleague and I wondered if group influences might be key. Maybe capitalizing on social processes like group values and norms could have a broader influence on self-control skill development. So we designed a study to test whether group behavior influences children’s self-control.

We randomly assigned American preschoolers to a group — for example, telling them they were in “the green group” and giving them a green T-shirt to wear. Then we told them that their group waited or didn’t wait for two marshmallows. We also told them about another group (the “out-group”) that did the opposite of their group (the “in-group”). This step was designed to enhance their identification with their own group. Other studies have shown that this kind of procedure leads to in-group favoritism in preschoolers and adults alike.

We found that children waited longer for two marshmallows if they were told their in-group members waited and that out-group members did not versus if they were told that their in-group members didn’t wait and out-group members did. Kids who were told their in-group members waited also lasted longer than other kids who didn’t learn anything about their group’s behavior.

Why did children follow their group? In a follow-up experiment, we found that children whose group members waited subsequently preferred other nongroup individuals who waited for things like stickers, candy and money. This suggests children weren’t simply copying what their group members did. Rather, it seems that the group’s behavior influenced the value the child subsequently placed on self-control.

We’ve since replicated these findings in another culture, finding that Japanese children will choose to wait for more stickers if they believe in-group members wait and out-group members don’t. Impressively, Japanese children still follow their group even if they are given reason to identify with the out-group.

Outside influences on internal control

This research is the first to show that group behavior motivates young children’s own actions that involve self-control. Identifying with a group can help kids use and even value self-control when they otherwise would not have.

These findings converge with other recent and classic findings that social forces influence self-control in children. Children will wait longer for two marshmallows if they believe the person dispensing them is reliable and trustworthy. Children also model other people’s self-control behavior. Even infants will work longer to achieve a goal if they see an adult try to achieve their own goal repeatedly.

How do these findings of social influences on self-control square with the fact that the marshmallow test and others are so reliably predictive of later life outcomes? Do they mean that self-control actually isn’t stable? Not necessarily.

You could just be someone who likes to wait for or save things (there are 3-year-olds like this, believe it or not), but this doesn’t mean your behavior in a given moment isn’t subject to social influences. Even young children will adjust their baseline self-control tendencies depending on the context, saving less when saving turns out to be disadvantageous.

And social influences could, over time, play a role in shaping how much a person tends to use self-control generally. For instance, imagine a child grows up among peers who really value doing well in school and use self-control to complete homework before running off to play. Exposure to this group norm could influence the child to do the same. The idea is that the more you practice self-control, the easier it gets to use it. Repetition will strengthen the underlying neurocognitive systems that support these skills.

So can self-control be learned? My answer is yes — what can seem like an inborn trait may actually be substantially influenced by social forces. Parents may be able to help kids build this skill by exposing them to role models (in real life or stories) who demonstrate and value self-control. Adults may be able to increase self-control by spending time around friends who use it. Ultimately, cultivating self-control as a personal value and norm may be critical to using and developing it, whether you are young or old. With a little help from your friends, resisting that second piece of cake may be easier than you think.

Sabine Doebel, Postdoctoral Researcher in Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado

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Fleeing the suburbs for farm life: How walking away from our dream house saved us

Bennett Schmitt

The acid-washed van idled at the curb, its exterior mostly rust dotted with duct tape.

“Are you giving all that away?” The woman inside gestured to the junk now piled waist-high, taking up more than our fair share of “curbside pickup.”

It was all household debris: a sewing machine missing critical parts, a brass lamp now bald without a lampshade, a black houndstooth sofa bed split in two by a Dewalt sawzall; we had to destroy it to pull the damn thing out of a third floor bedroom we never used.

We’d been stacking junk over the past three days, sifting through memories we needed to keep and clutter we didn’t, as we prepared for our grand exodus from metro Detroit.

“Yeah,” I replied, turning to walk back into the house. The woman jumped from the van and began sorting through the pointless things that had littered our lives.

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, when we bought this house on the cusp of America’s housing market collapse — a sprawling, crumbling 1922 Tudor in one of the old money neighborhoods surrounding Detroit — we thought we wanted antique tables, fancy wallpaper and Kate Spade bedding. We thought we’d stay in that house forever. Or at least, for longer than a handful of years — years where we progressed from newlyweds to expecting parents and then exhausted ones. Our house was enviable from the outside but left us close to bankrupt when we finally left it, the value dropping every day as we packed our coffee machine and our breakables in the green Jeep Wrangler hitched to the U-Haul truck.

Instead, that house cost us our savings — how meager they were to begin with — and our sanity.

Once we unloaded our Money Pit onto another family, we were able to make a break for the hills . . . the Green Mountains of Vermont, to be exact. And while we toiled away in the country for four years, barely scraping by as we tried to regain our financial footing, even when the dirt road that led to our house washed away completely — not once, but twice — we knew we were finally on the right path, however treacherous it sometimes seemed to be.

I won’t lie. Our first winter in Vermont took us by surprise: the amount of snow that fell — 16 inches in a single day that stuck around in muddy piles until May — the number of weekends we had to continually cut trees (often losing whole trees until spring thaw as they sank beneath the hip-deep snow drifts), splitting wood until our gloved hands, already numb from working in -20 degrees, re-warmed themselves from stacking countless armfuls of split wood in order to keep the black-bellied wood stove that was our sole source of heat filled. And I complained, especially when the heat hovered at 55 degrees inside no matter how much wood we burned. I worried about our chickens, whose water froze daily. We spent nights curled under blankets, our daughter wedged between us, and I wondered if we’d made the right choice. But when I thought back to the $800 monthly heating bills we paid back in the suburbs (when we were still going to bed wearing multiple layers under multiple blankets), feeling how tangible our heat source could be, how connected our home’s warmth was to our own sweat equity, was the first step in our new focus on self-reliance.

When we abandoned our old life of sidewalks and traffic lights, we did it consciously, even though family and friends couldn’t comprehend why. Why would we leave everything we knew and had been raised to value: the fancy house with curb appeal, the nice cars, the corporate job? But what they didn’t see was the constant stream of bills, the inability to pay them all and have much left over, especially considering our monthly daycare costs and $16,000 property tax bill. Our relationship became strained; we focused on home improvements and our daughter, but the constant pressure made maintaining this existence impossible. We felt far from privileged. Once we decided to walk away and try another path, the stress of our previous existence seemed to evaporate as city life fell away and dirt roads, general stores and the cackle of hooded mergansers replaced the cacophony of our lives.

*

Subconsciously, we’d been prepping for months before we escaped our suburban life, stockpiling weekends at Wolcott Mills Metro Park in Michigan, squirreling away face time with the resident chickens, ducks and goats. We visited weekly, packing sandwiches before driving the hour or so north, watching the city fall away and fields line the blacktopped highway. Our daughter was two years old then and able to appreciate the fresh air and farm animals while we could both feel the tension, the tightening from a week filled with my tedious desk job and his eight college courses to teach as an adjunct professor slowly unwinding. It became the happy reset to our lives, and, even when it grew colder, we went there as often as we could.

For several years, we had spent countless hours working on renovations to our house, chipping away at old lathe board, always a few steps and a few thousand dollars behind in our estimations. It was fun when we discovered the hidden staircase that led nowhere and the secret fireplace that was never finished with firebrick, but not when we had to patch over uneven ceilings with drywall or rework old wiring or figure out how to pump water out of the basement every time it rained. We’d planned to make money on the house, buying it from a family whose widowed father had lived alone for 40 years and turned the once-grand Tudor into 3,100 square feet of blue and white kitsch, but our timing was off. A short two years after we bought, before our renovations were even close to complete, the housing market crashed. The purchase had been a financial stretch, padded with bank loans, and once we realized that there was no way we’d get our money back, let alone make a profit, home projects became another point of contention between us. We had to finish the house to sell it, and our now-tense relationship didn’t help things at all.

The stress made us crave less stuff, less money and less work, which I didn’t think was possible. So we decided to move 14 hours away from everything we knew and start over. We filled a 26-foot U-Haul with our Michigan lives, unloading the contents of our existence in the dirt driveway of a 1,200 square foot ranch home in Vermont surrounded by miles of forest, the last house at the end of a long dirt road that puttered out into a winding path through the woods. In Michigan, we had five bedrooms and five bathrooms. Our Vermont home consisted of three closet-sized bedrooms and one full bathroom. Our daughter thought it was great: she could peek into our room across the short hallway from her twin bed. But my husband and I soon ran out of space trying to unpack even the reduced possessions we brought to our new tiny home. Eventually we gave up and stacked unopened boxes filled with books, china, wineglasses and the few items I didn’t want to part with from our old life (vases, throw pillows, an antique globe), but now had no place for, in a shed outside.

While the house was small, it sat on eight acres, and the land was both exciting and overwhelming. There were mature blackberry and blueberry bushes — some wild and some planted — and fresh bear tracks along the dirt path through the woods that made me nervous. An 11-acre pond, which we shared with a seasonal neighbor, was filled with wood ducks, mallards and Canada geese. The forest cadence was loud without any automotive traffic; coyote howls rippling through the night air seemed both close by and far away at the same time.

The adjustment left me uneasy at first. I no longer had a desk job. I no longer had to put on high heels and sit pretty while sipping coffee and planning events for 40 hours a week. Instead, I woke up to spend each day with my daughter while my husband traded his adjunct professor life for a full-time assistant professor gig at a small liberal arts college. I was used to being almost a part-time parent during my mornings and evenings back in Michigan. Daycare — and occasionally my in-laws — filled in during the afternoons since I worked. In the country, I focused on establishing a freelance writing career while also figuring out how to hang out with my preschool-age daughter, whom I adored but felt like I was spending real time with for the first time since she was born. I never realized how hard it would be to go from a 9-to-5 job to being a stay-at-home parent.

But that wasn’t my only adjustment.

We figured out how to garden and had a 50 x 60 section of the yard tilled up by a local farmer. We planted corn, zucchini, snap peas, tomatoes, kale, lettuce, carrots and pumpkins, hopeful that the plants would grow. That first spring, we purchased a dozen chicks from the local Tractor Supply for about $2 a piece. Twelve lemon yellow, taupe and black and white fluffy chicks lived in a cardboard box in our living room for nine weeks under a heat lamp until it was warm enough for them to move outside. As a kid, I spent as little time as possible in the outdoors; I was raised in a suburb, our yard surrounded by chain link fence. So it was a big change for me to be outside nearly all day now, working in the garden or gathering eggs from our first flock of chickens, stacking firewood my husband split or even just walking a bit more confidently down the winding forest path with my husband and daughter each evening. By consciously taking on these self reliant tasks, we were unchaining ourselves from the financial ballast that had been weighing us down for years.

Now, six years into the country life, I can see that our move was inevitable. The only way to salvage anything was to leave it all behind: the expensive house, the shitty jobs, the concrete and traffic lights. We traded connectivity for landlines and high speed internet for slow connections. But we’d also gained something in return.

We both realized that the Michigan house had been the root of our relationship problems. Removing that from the equation eliminated our previous friction; our marriage became stronger after giving up everything that everyone told us we should want and instead carving a different path that allowed us to choose our own adventures.

It took a while for my writing career to unfold. I found myself refocusing my priorities even further. While I wanted to write, this move was about our daughter, too, and I only worked while she was in preschool and later kindergarten, and kept our afternoons free for picking blackberries or looking for frogs. Then after countless rejections, my first major story in National Geographic went viral, and I realized that I could maybe write and work for myself. Things might just work out how we’d imagined them after all.

*

The turquoise and white gingham pattern of my gardening gloves is hidden by the thick layer of dirt caked to each one; I’m elbow deep, digging potatoes out one by one, feeling each lump and bump deep within the ground. My daughter stands behind me, piling the uneven orbs and elongated spheres into different buckets, sorting between Adirondack Reds, Purple Majesties, and Lehigh Russets — three varieties selected for cold hardiness and color. Our garden is at peak; fall settling a bit closer each evening as my husband and I sit outside after a full day, sipping wine and watching our daughter run between the garden and the apple trees.

We’ve moved on from the dirt and mud of Vermont, swapping a house in the forest for a Northern New York Amish farmhouse complete with Amish-built red barn that is home to my cluster of 30 chickens and ducks. Maybe, one day, a flock of sheep.

Whenever someone asks me if I miss the city or the suburbs, I think about the experiences we’ve gathered over the course of only a few short years. We’ve learned how to heat our own house with wood chopped, split and stacked by hand. We’ve learned the beauty of planting seeds and harvesting food from our land. We’ve watched fluffy chicks blossom into laying hens that peck cracked corn from our hands. We’ve also reclaimed our lives for ourselves and each other, focusing on our own priorities and values rather than those we were told were important.

It’s not that I miss the proximity to great shopping or sidewalks; it’s that these other experiences override everything else. Moving away and starting fresh gave us the freedom to make other substantial life changes that have proven to be positive ones. I’m making a living writing full-time, no longer beholden to a corporation to fill a chair behind a desk all day for a minimal professional salary. Instead, I work for myself, which has given me a sense of accomplishment and achievement I didn’t have before. My articles have appeared in national magazines and major newspapers. My husband has career stability — he’s no longer juggling three different colleges and eight different courses as an adjunct professor. He recently earned tenure, chairs his department and will have his first documentary premiere later this summer at the United Nations in New York City.

Our daughter doesn’t realize quite yet what she’s gained from our move, but she will. She’s growing up in the country now with parents who not only love what they do for a living, but also each other, and who realize that material items, curb appeal and fancy clothes don’t mean as much as fresh air, family time and personal happiness. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we’d never discovered Wolcott Mills Metropark back in Michigan, our little country sanctuary in the middle of the most stressful time of our lives. It makes me wonder if there’s another family, wandering among the turkeys, chickens and goats, slowly gaining courage to do the same thing.

I hope there is.

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The entrepreneur making healthy food accessible to her Brooklyn neighborhood

Photo courtesy of Sol Sips

When she was 19, Francesca Chaney wrote in her journal that she wanted to open a vegan café. It would be a place, she imagined, where her friends and family could gather and eat plant-based food. For young people who are surrounded by organic grocers, boutique cafés, and fancy restaurants, that type of dream may seem easily within reach. But for Chaney, a native of East New York, Brooklyn, it meant envisioning a business unlike any of the bodegas and corner stores that occupied her community.

Two years later, her vision became a reality and Chaney opened her pop-up shop, Sol Sips, in the nearby neighborhood of Bushwick. But the community she hoped to serve didn’t show up. While there was rarely an empty seat in her café, she was frustrated by the lack of old-timers, families, and people of color like herself passing through the shop. “By the third week of the pop-up,” she says, “it was like a hipster spot. No one from the neighborhood was coming in.”

And so, one Saturday she tested out a brunch menu with sliding scale prices. And it worked; folks from the neighborhood started showing up.

“It just felt like a really, really good day,” she remembers of the first brunch, for which she created a special menu featuring a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, her friends’ old before-school favorite, but with modified ingredients—the bacon was tempeh, the eggs were made of chickpeas, and the cheese was dairy-free. “So many different people were coming through,” she says. “More indigenous people, more Latinx people, more Black people.”

In April, Chaney made the popup location permanent, and the brunch has become so popular that she advises customers to call for a table before they arrive. After a wait at the register, the cashier asks, “How much would you like to pay?” For anywhere between $7 and $15, you can enjoy a main dish and drink that might otherwise have cost $20. Her goal for the weekly brunch? Making vegan food something that everyone can take part in.

“The work [Chaney] is doing should serve as an inspiration to all East New Yorkers and Brooklyn folks,” says Rafael L. Espinal, Jr., a New York City Councilmember representing Brooklyn’s 37th district. “It shows that no matter where you’re from, you are able to succeed.”

Changing a neighborhood

Getting Sol Sips off the ground was no easy task. With a yellow and green window sign that reads “Vegan Bevs & Bites,” the tiny café offers healthy food and drink at affordable prices and serves a community that has been largely ignored by the mainstream wellness movement. Chaney relies on two waffle irons and a hot plate with four burners to make all of the items on her menu. An array of herbs and roots in glass jars sit on shelves above a small prep space where Chaney chops vegetables.

While it serves drinks similar to those on other juice-bar menus, the space is completely its own. The cover of a children’s picture book propped prominently against one of the café’s exposed brick walls features a young Black girl dressed as a queen. A revolving array of Chaney’s friends’ artwork hang above the two-person tables squeezed into the long room.

In Bushwick, where nearly 90 percent of residents are people of color, one in five people are food insecure, meaning they face significant challenges in accessing enough healthy food. While shoppers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan enjoy 230 square feet of retail food space per 100 people, Bushwick residents have access to only half that amount.

There are also far fewer supermarkets there than in wealthier New York neighborhoods. To buy groceries, most Bushwick residents must travel to other neighborhoods reach stores with fresh produce. Even as grocers and food retailers come into neighborhoods like this, they often cater to the desires of the new residents who can afford expensive food. And while a new Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s in the neighborhood might mean more healthy options, a home’s proximity to those stores often raises property rates and prices out longtime residents.

Chaney wants her café to run counter to that trend.

“Chaney’s space plays an important role in demonstrating that businesses can succeed if they choose to run a socially conscious space that is sensitive to the demographics of the community,” Councilmember Espinal says. “It should serve as a model for how all new businesses operate in communities with a diverse population.”

Chaney is not the only one who is fighting to make vegan, health-conscious food more accessible. In Maryland, former engineer Jerri Evans quit her job and launched Turning Natural, an affordable juice bar in an area otherwise devoid of healthy options. Dell’z on the Macon in Charleston, South Carolina puts a price range next to each of their dishes. A note sprawled across the bottom of their large blackboard menu reads: “Pay what works for you!”

Closer to home, a range of businesses served as inspiration for Chaney as she envisioned her café. At the intersection of farming and activism, Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York, subsidizes the cost of their produce and delivers CSA boxes to SNAP recipients, with the intent of ensuring that “no one is denied access to life-giving food due to their economic status.” Chaney credits Playground Coffee Shop—a Bed-Stuy establishment that hosts events by artists, poets, and activists—for helping her understand what an unconventional café could do with its space.

“I’m surrounded by these organizations and these people who are doing the groundwork to shift the narrative of representation,” Chaney says. “That type of energy has been a huge reaffirmation to me.”

Connecting with the intended clientele

In January, Chaney launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign to help pay for supplies and renovations. Thanks to media buzz including an article in Essence, and support from her friends and family, she raised $4,000 of the $50,000 goal, and donations ranging from $5 to $500 continue to roll in.

For now, Chaney wants to make sure the new café is running smoothly. But she’s already thinking about next steps. “Before the end of the year, I would really love to have another space like this in East New York,” closer to her home. From there, she imagines opening shop in Brownsville, and maybe even expanding her operation outside of New York. “Apparently we’re trending [on social media] in Berlin,” she says with a laugh.

Does Chaney ever feel overwhelmed by what she’s trying to accomplish? The truth is — yes. “I’m 21. I’m Black. I’m a woman. I’m also from a neighborhood that’s low-income, high-poverty,” she says. “There are times when those identities can become obstacles.”

But most of the time, Chaney doesn’t question herself. At Sol Sips’ recent ribbon cutting ceremony, a wave of supporters came to try the food. But, as Chaney was most excited to see, there were crowds of old-timers, families, and neighbors, chatting and enjoying the vegan bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches.

Chaney’s goal, she says, was never to be the spokesperson for a movement. “I’m just creating a space where people can chill, not have to pay too much money, and enhance their quality of life a little,” she says. But on Saturdays, as a line of people winds out the door, it’s clear just how many people have been waiting for the space to exist.

The diseased amplifiers and sweet, lethal feedback of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation”

Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon

Excerpted from “Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation” by Matthew Stearns (Continuum, 2007). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

Armed to the teeth with song-structures, lyric ideas, and raw creative energy, Sonic Youth entered the studios at Greene Street in the cast-iron, loft-ghetto canyons of Manhattan's Soho district to begin recording "Daydream Nation" in the oppressive late-July heat of 1988: A truly troublesome year, even by modern American standards. Having ushered in a new age of social and political conservatism, Ronald Reagan–that docile, lethal cowpoke–was on his way out of office, soon to be succeeded by the ruthless, patriarchal George H.W. Bush. Meanwhile, the dual calamities of crack addiction and AIDS had reached full-blown epidemic proportions in most major metro areas. Consequently, people were dying/being klled at unspeakable rates with little (any?) mature national attention being paid at all. In a grisly, ironic twist—which in the end comes as no surprise—some of the top-selling albums that year, according to Billboard, included Tiffany's eponymous debut, the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, and George Michael's "Faith." All of which stand as textbook examples of meant-for-mass-consumption eighties-era pop in all of its paralyzing inanity.

But, thanks to Greene Street, all was not culturally lost. Greene Street studios were responsible for generating some of the most vital music of the contemporary New York scene. By some estimations a cultural-historic landmark, Greene Street (closed and gone gallery now) facilitated recordings essential to the nurturing of early NYC hip-hop (Kurtis Blow, Run DMC, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys all spent time in production there). Avant-gardery was in the air at Greene Street as well. The studios, in their previous incarnation, served as Philip Glass's headquarters; and the likes of Nico and Kurt Munkacsi, if only as apparitions in 1988, were present too.

While the experimentalism of the more avant-garde work done at Greene Street has an obvious parallel in Sonic Youth's sound, the sweeping presence of hip-hop, if somewhat indirectly, also figured into the making of "Daydream Nation." In New York at that time, the culture-quakes caused by developments in the burgeoning hip-hop scene were as inescapable as they were electrifying. When they arrived at Greene Street to give the studio an initial once-over, Sonic Youth was introduced to Nicholas Sansano, who was to handle recording and engineering duties during their sessions. Sansano's previous credits at Greene Street included production work on Public Enemy's seminal, thermonuclear mind-bomb "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back." As he explains it, "I remember when Sonic Youth first came to the studio to check it out and meet me. I played Public Enemy for them. Which is odd, in a way—they were this noise-rock band—but I felt like Public Enemy was the most important work that I had done and that it was representative of the studio and me. I always felt like [with Sonic Youth and Public Enemy] it was basically the same approach; this aggressive, multilayered sound, this density" These records share more than a thickness in sound mass. Telling also is how each makes reference to some form of a nation in their tides. Part of the grandeur of these albums inheres in the scale of their ambitions. In the face of the repugnant social and political realities of the late-eighties (read: Reagan/ Bush), these outfits were ready, each in their own particular way, and with the help of a committed, sympathetic studio engineer, to take on entire nations with their respective arsenals of sound.

Given Sonic Youth's propensity for unhinged experimentalism and Sansano's background with the groundbreaking ear-assaults of Public Enemy, the pairing would ultimately prove to be a fruitful one. When asked if it was a challenge to achieve what they were after sonically, given how adamant Sonic Youth is about tearing up standard audio blueprints, Sansano confirms; "You can't tell them what to do. You really can't. And at that point, I did NOT at all. When the project first started out, my job was to just get them on tape, just record them and have it sound as good as possible. But as our relationship developed, we started to trust each other more, it became more collegial, and more creative."

Eventually, as one would expect during a Sonic Youth recording session, established physical thresholds were breached, mechanical failures were induced, things got out of hand, and, finally, shit blew up. "We tried lots of different, unconventional things," reports Sansano, "like: 'let's see how much signal we can put on the tape machine before we blow a fuse!' At some point, we blew a fuse and the whole studio went down. I think Thurston did it. We had some sort of noise—I think a tube had gone—anyway, this noise was being generated and it turned into one big feedback loop and eventually the whole studio just shut down completely." Such (legendary) destructive anomalies have always been interpreted as fertile creative opportunities by Sonic Youth. In their naughty hands, the sound of a diseased amplifier may contain an embryonic groove or a warped tonal progression sent like encrypted sonic manna from feedback heaven. On "Daydream Nation," there are fascinating examples of this wide-open availability to all possible sound permutations, regardless of their coarseness or the wreckage from which they were derived. As Sansano explains: "At the end of 'Providence' everything kind of melts down. Well, that's the sound of the amp blowing up! When amp tubes go they make some really interesting sounds. Whenever something was going we would let the tape roll. I remember doing lots of tape-speed manipulation, as things were recording, or when we were mixing things back. We'd vary the speed on the multitrack machine, slowing things way down or speeding them way up, altering the whole harmonic structure and allowing for feedback. Sometimes we slowed down the tape machine during performances. There would be some sort of feedback thing happening or some sort of blowout sound: I would be at the dials as we were recording—slowing things down or speeding things up. When you played it back, you'd get these modulations that created very unnatural overtones."

Unnatural overtones, blowout sounds, exploded amp tubes. To listen to Sansano talk about a recording session with Sonic Youth is like listening to a soldier talk about the experience of frontline warfare.

After less than two weeks of recording, Sonic Youth emerged from the sessions at Greene Street in August of '88 with the master tapes of what is now commonly considered—let's just go ahead and say it already (I'm tired of skirting the issue)—one of the first genuine album masterpieces of modern rock.

 

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Right-wing thought leader Jordan Peterson endorses “enforced monogamy”

Toronto Star Via Getty Images

Jordan Peterson, the clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor who was recently canonized as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, is a serious person. Peterson said as much in a lengthy New York Times profile dubbing him "Custodian of the Patriarchy." Times reporter Nellie Bowles penned the piece, which has since been labeled a "hit job" and an "assassination attempt" on Peterson's character.

The article was a followup of sorts to Times opinion editor Bari Weiss' story on the Intellectual Dark Web, an informal collective of anti-left lecturers and podcasters who have gained notoriety for amassing a significant following on YouTube and Reddit. Peterson, like many of his IDW cohorts, is of the opinion that the progressive liberal agenda of equal opportunity and tolerance contradicts human nature and the Western ideal of individual responsibility. It comes to no surprise that most of Peterson's audience is made up of young, white males who feel subjugated in a society that is trying to prop up women and racial minorities.

A self-help guru, Peterson has spent a lot of time pondering the source of youthful-male rage, which manifested last month in a terrorist attack in Toronto perpetuated by a man who described himself as an incel--short for involuntary celibacy--a term representing a group of men and an online culture that blames women for their poor sex life.

Over the course of Peterson's two-day-long interview with the Times, the academic offered his insights on the relationship between man and woman and how feminism has polluted the natural order.

“The masculine spirit is under assault,” Peterson told the Times. “It’s obvious.”

One of Peterson's most controversial opinions in the profile is his recommended remedy for the virus plaguing the masculine spirit.

“The cure for that is enforced monogamy," Peterson said.

It was the type of assertion that usually precedes a laugh and a clarification that it was a joke. But Peterson did not say this in jest.

"Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this," Bowles wrote of this specific interaction. "Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end."

For readers of the Times, it was the second time in as many weeks that a social conservative had suggested a model for the redistribution of sex. Op-ed columnist Ross Douthat wrote earlier in May that American society may soon consider sex as an inalienable right for all, that a right to sex exists, "and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it."

The idea of enforced monogamy caused quite a bit of debate on Twitter. Right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro, also a member of the IDW, defended his colleague in a scathing article denouncing Bowles profile on Peterson.

According to Shapiro, Bowles couldn't "hold back her obvious antipathy for her subject; instead, she lets her sneering condescension drop from every comma. She never lets Peterson spell out an argument; she satisfies her id with every snide aside. It’s an extraordinary performance by a person deliberately attempting to misunderstand her subject."

Shapiro's main gripe with the piece is that Bowles misrepresented what Peterson meant when he proposed enforced monogamy. Shapiro explains that enforced monogamy does not mean government-enforced monogamy; rather, enforced monogamy means "socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated monogamy, as opposed to genetic monogamy – evolutionarily-dictated monogamy, which does exist in some species (but does not exist in humans). This distinction has been present in anthropological and scientific literature for decades," Shapiro writes.

It's a distinction without a difference. Peterson may not be clamoring for immediate state intervention on the issue of the redistribution of sex, but he does advocate for, and what would undoubtedly be, a non-consensual reshaping of American society.

(To be fair to Shapiro, Ben does write that "while society would benefit from promotion of monogamy, the solution for incels is to become better potential partners, not to whine about breakdown in the monogamous standard (few incels are complaining that they can’t find women to marry; they’re mostly claiming they can’t find women to have sex with)."

Regardless, even if one were to give a charitable reading to Peterson's enforced monogamy concept, the academic failed, overall, to prove to his doubters that he was indeed a serious thinker. The Times profile quoted many of Peterson's inane ramblings, thoughts that were more appropriate of an acid tripper than a celebrated lecturer. Suffice it to say, critics of Peterson did not come away impressed.

Many readers of the profile took to Twitter to mock Peterson's absurd worldview.

jordan peterson's business model of reframing childlike angst into something appearing vaguely academic is like catnip for guys who have a poster on the wall listing logical fallacies and get mad when women on okcupid dont get their neil degrasse tyson references

— jon hendren (@fart) May 18, 2018

I reject the claim that Jordan Peterson is just fulfilling a need for poor, lost men searching for meaning, and that he just hit at the right time.

I think, instead, he is stimulating their rage and longing first and THEN fulfilling the need he has created or exacerbated.

— Conner Habib (@ConnerHabib) May 19, 2018

in that jordan peterson profile he says he’s ‘a very serious person’ and also witches are real and exist — raandy (@randygdub) May 19, 2018

Jordan Peterson thinks that the feminine = chaos, and the masculine = order, even as he reminds us that men are crazed baboons who can only be stopped from violent rampages if they get to own women ‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/Rpao8zIFiB — Natalia Antonova (@NataliaAntonova) May 19, 2018

My mom: Clean your room

Me, a 22-year-old: Shut UP you just don't UNDERSTAND ME JESUS CHRIST I don't have TIME for your BULLSHIT

Jordan Petersen: Your mom, a woman, is crazy. But totally separately, it is probably true you should clean your room

Me: YES SIR DR. PETERSON

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 19, 2018

i am a jordan peterson fan & i demand journalists translate the ridiculous things he says into things that make sense & sound smart, like i do — Shaun (@shaun_jen) May 19, 2018

Grow up, clean your room, and take some gosh darn responsibility by blaming your problems on slutty women who cluster around high status men.

— Brandt (@UrbanAchievr) May 19, 2018

The consensus on Twitter would appear to be a crippling indictment on Peterson's status as a serious thought leader. But that's the thing with cult followings, fans remain devout despite more sensible alternatives.

The simple joys of the early morning wine bar

Getty/da-kuk

There are very few downsides to staying in a two-room suite at the JW Marriott Venice, but if, like me, you’re a traveler who wakes before dawn to troll local food markets in search of exotic ingredients to cook, not having a kitchen is one of them. Still, on the very first day, propelled by the swoon-worthy descriptions of the fish at the Rialto Market in the late, great English food writer Elizabeth David's “Italian Food,” I rise early to pay my respects.

Cutting through the Piazza San Marco — blissfully empty before 8 a.m. — I head north through the arch of the Torre dell’Orologio, a Renaissance clock tower completed in 1499, zig-zagging my way toward the Rialto Bridge. Along the way I cross smaller bridges over the canals that would be streets in every other city, dodging tradesmen moving goods and workers removing refuse, all of them on foot, pushing and pulling hand-trucks.

Across the Rialto I search for the Campo San Giacomo di Rialto, a Gothic arcaded square with faded crimson walls, to find the venerable Caffè Vergnano, established in 1882, where the thick, delicious, perfectly pulled espresso is served in iconic matte-black cups.

Wandering through an unassuming portico at the northeast side of the piazza, I find the first of the two Rialto markets — the Erboria — or vegetable market, a riot of gorgeous greens, reds and yellows. While it’s always a treat to see zucchini with their flowers still attached, the veggie of the moment at practically every stand is the plum-colored baby artichoke, called castraure di Sant’Erasmo, a delicacy from a nearby island. There are several other sizes of classic green artichokes, too, but what I find most impressive are the already-cleaned ‘fondi di carciofi,’ thick, white, saucer-sized discs of artichoke bottoms floating in acidulated water (to keep them from turning brown).

Further ahead is the second Rialto market, the covered fish market, Pescheria, about which Elizabeth David wrote:

"In other markets, on other shores, the unfamiliar fishes may be vivid, mysterious, repellant, fascinating and bright with splendid color; only in Venice do they look good enough to eat. In Venice even ordinary sole and ugly great skate are striped with delicate lilac lights, the sardines shine like newly-minted silver coins, pink Venetian scampi are fat and fresh, infinitely enticing in the early dawn." — “Italian Food” (Knopf, 1954)

Entering the Rialto Pescheria my eyes keep going to the clams — I’m suddenly dying to cook spaghetti with clams! — there are so many beautifully diverse shapes and sizes, including golden-hued Vongola o Lupino, shiny, triangular Tellina with a shell that has Saturn-like gray rings, and, my favorite, thumb-sized Caparozzoli (which I later have for lunch, steamed in white wine, at Corte Sconta).

Since I can’t buy anything to cook, Simone, a local friend who walked over from the hotel with me, suggests we take a left at the end of the market and head to his favorite bàcaro, Cantina do Mori, one of the many small, local bars hiding in plain sight throughout the city. At these fabulous bàcari they serve a myriad of cicchetti (chee-KEHT-tee), Venice’s version of tapas — small plates of savory snacks, best nibbled over glasses of wine — yes, even at 8 a.m. There’s even a local phrase for bar-hopping (making the rounds tasting cicchetti with ombre, or small glasses of wine) from bàcaro to bàcaro: “giro di ombre.”

Among the best-known bàcari are All’Arco, Bancogiro, Do Spade and Merca. But we head to Cantina do Mori because it is thought to be the oldest bàcaro in Venice — dating back to 1462, it was Rudolph Valentino’s favorite and because ‘do Mori’ is the least touristed, thanks to its dark, brooding atmosphere, absence of seating and, well, its perfunctory staff.

When we enter we have to excuse ourselves through a group of well-dressed men of leisure. The ceiling is covered in every direction with antique copper pots. The wooden counter that runs the length of the room is richly worn, and the walls are covered in neighborhood memorabilia. Up high, toward the back, is what looks like an illuminated bird-house that turns out to be a shrine to a very small Madonna.  

At one end of the counter are dozens of bottles of wine, some lined up for display, others chilling in a small, wooden half-barrel and four giant, straw-bottomed demijohns filled with local fermented juice, including Bardolino ‘Rosato,’ and Moscato Giallo. A glass display showcases an assortment of tramezzini, those tiny, crustless white bread sandwiches. Here they call them francobolli (postage stamps). I order a couple of the ones filled with what look like those plump, red shrimp I saw at the Market, accompanied by a glaze of delicate aioli.

At the other end of the bar are the rest of the cicchetti, including two types of baccalà mantecato (whipped salt cod) — with or without parsley and garlic — served atop rectangular slabs of white polenta. As the solemn barman holds a white plate to be filled, we point to marinated baby octopus the size of ping-pong balls; boiled egg-halves topped with anchovies; squares of ubriaco, the local cheese coated with Prosecco must; polpette in umido (meatballs cooked in broth); and — yes! — fondi di carciofi, the artichoke slices I saw at the market, served carmelized on the stove top with olive oil.

We order two glasses of local Tai — the Italian name for what used to be known as Tocai or Tocai Friulano, until a legal battle with the country of Hungary over its provenance stripped it away. A couple of other guys walk in and their friends shout their names in unison. I could stay here all day, every day.

How this foodie became a wine enthusiast
"Cork Dork" author gives her tips for learning how to taste wine and developing your palate.

8 things every new (or nervous) cook should know

Getty/MarianVejcik

This story first appeared on Food 52, an online community that gives you everything you need for a happier kitchen and home – that means tested recipes, a shop full of beautiful products, a cooking hotline, and everything in between!

Dorie Greenspan has written a dozen or so cookbooks, plus her latest, "Everyday Dorie," which will be out in October. She has baked countless dozens of cookies, including the double-chocolate World Peace Cookies that truly live up to their name. She is, to put it lightly, a food world legend.

I got to spend an afternoon with her in Paris, where she made us a gorgeous summer vegetable tian using the Emile Henry ceramic pie dish we carry in our Shop. (Recipe video coming this summer, when you, too, can buy your eggplants at the outdoor market.) Hunched under the window of her small, humble Paris kitchen, hot sun on the back of my neck, I chatted with her about everything from olive oil to Japanese denim, and realized I can no longer blame my reluctance to make pie crust on my small humble Brooklyn kitchen. I know, I know; I'm not Dorie, and neither are you. But she makes cooking the most magnificent-looking dishes seem doable, and more importantly, fun.

Today we spent a magical day shopping and cooking with the one and only @doriegreenspan , whom I now know is not only a brilliant cook but also a style icon. Her generosity and JDV (that’s joie de vivre, y’all) is infectious. This @emilehenryfrance pie dish is fresh from Burgundy, by way of a carry-on bag; I’m surprised I didn’t break it (the way I did with a different pan at the factory!). This week I saw dishes go from nothingness to plaster to ceramics to lunch. C’est tian—a simple bake of summer vegetables with garlic, herbs, lots of olive oil, and salt. Recipe coming soon in #everydaydorie & sooner @food52 (pie dish lives in our Shop!).

A post shared by Nikkitha Bakshani (@nikkitaha) on Apr 19, 2018 at 8:41am PDT

So I had to ask her: What advice do you have for new — or shy! or underconfident! — cooks? What she said will stay with me long after I conquer my pie crust anxiety.

(As told to Nikkitha Bakshani)

1. Read the recipe. Twice. This is good advice whether you’re just getting started in the kitchen, or whether you’re an old hand. Knowing the recipe and getting a handle on what you’re going to have to do, when and how quickly—or slowly—sets you up for success. Knowledge is power, even (maybe especially) in the kitchen.

2. Don’t skip the mise en place. Doing a mise en place is the follow-up to reading the recipe. Mise en place is French for "putting in place." It might as well be translated as "timesaver," and "dinner-saver" to boot. Measure out all of the recipe’s ingredients and have them laid out on the counter in the order in which you’re going to use them, like in a cooking show. A mise, as chefs call this, will save you from that panicky moment when the recipe calls for buttermilk and you discover that you don’t have any. Once, I was buttering a cake pan and preheating the oven when the phone rang. I took the call, and when I went back to my un-mised recipe, I forgot to add the sugar. Had it been on the prep tray, the (disastrous) mistake could have been avoided.

3. Be fearless. Or, at least, don’t be afraid. Being a beginner cook doesn’t mean that you should cook only the basics. I think you become a better cook, faster, if you cook the foods you’re craving and the ones you’re excited about learning to make. Just remember #1 and #2 before you set out fearlessly. Here’s the thing: Most mistakes are edible. Some are even really tasty. A lot of times, what looks like a mistake is really about appearance. Focus on flavor. And speaking of flavor...

4. Season, season, season. I love this quote attributed to an anonymous chef: “The only difference between my food and yours is that I use more salt than you do.” Seasoning your food as you cook is really important. Taste as you go and season as you taste. Keep salt and a pepper mill at hand. Use fresh herbs for extra depth in a dish: For example, in a stew, cook the herbs, and then add fresh herbs on top when you’re ready to serve. Always have a lemon or three in the house—the freshly grated zest and juice add pop to so many dishes, like pasta, fish, grilled chicken, beans, and green vegetables, especially if you add these boosters at the end. I even season the pan. When I’m roasting or baking vegetables, fish, chicken, or meat, I start by building a layer of aromatics in the bottom of the pan. I’ll pour in a little olive oil, season it with salt and pepper and then scatter over some pieces of garlic and fresh herbs. Everything that goes on top of this will have more flavor because of this little landscape you created at the start. Remember, cooking is a construction project. You start with nothing and end up with dinner.

5. Take pleasure in every step of the process. Give yourself the time to enjoy every part of cooking — the prep, the sizzle and bake, the plating, the serving, and the sharing. I love that when I’m cooking, and especially when I’m baking, I’m creating something with my hands, and that very basic ingredients are being transformed into something delicious. It’s magic and I’ve never lost the wonder of it. There’s pleasure to be found in every step. Well, maybe not the dishes — but the good news is that my husband finds it kind of zen. It's not the only reason I married him.

6. Have a party — but keep it simple. I got married (to the dishwasher) when I was 19, and my only previous culinary experience involved burning down my parents’ kitchen. I had a lot to learn and I was excited about learning—so excited that within a month of getting into the kitchen, I had my first dinner party, hors d’oeuvres, starter, main course with two sides, homemade dessert, and all. The food wasn’t so bad. People forgave the kind-of-tough London broil that I was trying to get ready at the same time as the (frozen) peas, but I was a wreck. Sometime in the middle of the first course, I found myself wishing that everyone would go home so that I could go to bed. The moral of this tale is simple: Go easy on yourself. Remember, no matter how good a cook you are, the most important thing about a dinner party is the conversation around the table. Keep it simple so that you can be part of that conversation.

7. Gear up. Good tools are a big help in the kitchen. Slowly build up your kitchen tool chest. Gear can be expensive, but when it comes to things like pots and pans, big machines (stand mixers, blenders, processors) and knives, if you buy good stuff, you’ll have it forever. (I’ve still got knives from my early days; a stand mixer, too.) Make sure you’ve got the basics and then have a little fun. I like to shop for tools at the hardware store. It’s where I got paint brushes to use for basting. It’s also where I got three of my most unusual tools: a rubber mallet (for banging on a knife so that I can cut through tough things); a pair of pliers for pulling pin bones out of fish; and a screwdriver for handling big blocks of chocolate. I put the chocolate on a cutting board, position the screwdriver against the block, give it a bash with the mallet and presto, chocolate chunks!

8. Don’t forget the music. The rule in our house is, whoever is doing the cooking has control of the sound system. Since I’m the cook in the family, I get to choose what I listen to while I work. I don't use headphones, because hearing burbles and snaps is a part of cooking. Since I love classical music, I bake to Bach. Whatever kind of music you like, make it part of your process. You’re going to be in the kitchen for a while, so set the beat and enjoy every bit of it.

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The true art of John Mellencamp: “Grotesquely beautiful” and “never too far from the garage”

Getty/Adam Bettcher

“I want, I want / I need, I need / To live and see it all / Laugh, and touch it all,” John Mellencamp sings on, “To Live,” a rollicking exhibition of what he called “gypsy rock” from one of his best records, “Big Daddy.” Even before its release in 1989, at the peak of his popularity, Mellencamp had stopped playing music publicly. It would be three years before he would step on stage again.

“Everyone thought I was a fucking lunatic,” Mellencamp told me during a recent phone conversation. “I could have made much more money and had many more hits if I kept going, but I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

He remembered that he played more than 130 arena shows in 1987, and excited promoters, practically making cash register sounds between the words of their sentences, presented him with a plan to play stadiums.

“I found myself in competition for who sold the most records, who could sell out the most shows, and the people around me were all talking about competition. And suddenly I thought, ‘competition with who? Competition for what?’ It was so far disconnected from the reason why I wrote songs,” Mellencamp said, “I just felt like I was being whored out, as a monkey on a string, for people to make money.”

He added with a laugh, “I have a big ego, but I don’t need the applause of twenty thousand people to know who I am.”

During his unannounced hiatus from recording music, Mellencamp returned to his primary artistic impulse. As a child, he watched his mother paint in her few free moments between working and raising children, and in adolescence, he picked up the brush himself. Immediately after his graduation from Vincennes University, he made a journey nearly universal to American artists and adventurers. On the streets of New York, pulsating with the hum of electric dreams, he submitted an application to the New York Student Art League and also dropped off demo tapes to several record companies and music management agencies.

The New York Student Art League demanded more money than he could afford, and a music management agency offered to pay him more money than he had ever seen. He pursued the passion he developed with a cheap acoustic guitar over Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan records, while allowing another to rest.

He made the same trade, only in reverse, in 1988 — painting for hours on end every day. In the years that have passed, his paintings have adorned the walls of galleries, universities and museums. His current exhibition, "Life, Death, Love and Freedom," is at ACA Galleries in New York.

“Painting offers me solitude, which I prefer,” Mellencamp told me when I asked about his personal difference of experience between the creation of visual art and music.

“The similarity is that with painting you start with big, broad strokes and you have a slight idea of what you are making,” Mellencamp explained, “and that runs in unison with song, because songs begin with such simplicity, but then arranging parts for the band and going through the tedious process of record and mixing, it becomes something else.”

Mellencamp then offered a criterion for the evaluation of “true art”: “It should surprise everyone involved, most especially the creator. Art, if you can even call it that, that happens according to plan, where everyone is working off a blueprint, is corporate. It is a product.”

Few American artists have engineered the transformation of John Mellencamp, whose own aspiration to authenticity has the signposts of his previous stage names: From Johnny Cougar to John Mellencamp, he has managed to accomplish the rare reversal of fame’s effect. Rather than becoming a brand, he began as one, and immediately commenced a fight to become a man.

From that story emerges a metaphor for the power of creativity, and the committee marketing mentality that threatens to empty its energy into slick advertisement campaigns.

“It took me many years to discover that,” Mellencamp said, referring to the necessity of spontaneity and surrender when composing music or painting a canvas. “I worked on paintings for months, even years – the same with songs – because I would not get out of my own way. I was trying to make it into something I wanted instead of just letting it be what it is. Creation comes in many shapes, forms and colorations, and you have to just allow it to happen.”

The consistency that emerges in an artist’s work should function as the result of aesthetic priority and philosophy. Mellencamp bristled when I used the word “dark” to describe his paintings. Even after explaining that he avoids “bright colors” in his visual art, he prefers the same terms he would hope describes his music: “primitive,” “grotesquely beautiful” and “never too far from the garage.”

Mellencamp uses the color palette of Rembrandt, which includes only yellow ocher, burnt sienna, burnt umber, white, black and a brownish orange. “I see paintings with many colors, and I often find them beautiful, but it isn’t what I want to do,” he said.

“It is akin to my desire to write a song like Woody Guthrie instead of a pop song,” Mellencamp said. “The way Woody played his guitar was very rough. It was like strumming barbed wire.”

He then recalled when he performed “Oklahoma Hills” with Arlo Guthrie, who preferred playing the song with passing chords between the original chords of his father’s composition. They had a “fun argument” over how they should play the song that ended with Arlo’s concession.

“I would compare that to my refusal to have purple on my palette,” Mellencamp said. “So, if I want to paint something purple, I have to make a blend, which means what to your eye, you see as ‘dark,’ it is really just the consistency of all the colors coming together.”

While his colors are few, his tools are not always conventional. In order to retain as primitive a style and quality as possible, he will often use house paint and antiquated materials, such as corrugated tin and the surfaces painters once used to decorate barns with advertisements for chewing tobacco.

If there is an image more fit for depiction through song or visual art than “strumming barbed wire,” it is difficult to imagine. The phrase offers insight into the subtle subversion of Mellencamp’s creative approach — the fidelity to artistic savagery in an era of spectacle.

When I criticized the excessive production of contemporary entertainment, Mellencamp was quick to agree. “You see it in the mainstream movies that are being made, the mainstream music being made. Songs and films now are – I hate to be condescending and cynical – but it’s all, ‘Trix are for kids.’”

John Mellencamp, the writer and performer of lyrically complex and socially conscious folk-rock songs such as “Rain on the Scarecrow” and “Jackie Brown,” seems uniquely qualified to comment on why it is nearly impossible to imagine similar songs on the radio, or going viral, just a couple of decades after he scored major hits singing about the plight of the family farmer and the pain of poverty.

“I can answer real quick,” he said when I asked for his interpretation of cultural decline as visible in arts and entertainment: “The lowest common denominator brings in the most revenue.”

“When you are dealing with the general public,” he continued, “You have to keep it really simple, basic — that’s what I did with ‘Hurts So Good’ — and that, by the way, is why our president is popular with so many people. They can understand what he is saying.”

Mellencamp made the distinction between political rhetoric and policy as a means to further his analysis of the horrific appeal Trump holds with millions of Americans: “Just because they understand the words of the sentence, they think they understand what he is doing. What they do not see is the subtext, and how what he claims to promise is actually put into practice.”

The force and frailty of individual initiative is all that remains for Mellencamp to use as resistance. “I don’t like any of it,” he said. “But all I can do is just keep doing what I’m doing.”

His new exhibition of paintings includes some of his most political work, in song or visual art. One painting depicts a child nursing a gunshot wound over the words, “This is the second amendment.” Another shows a multiethnic variety of working class Americans, all of whom have empty eyes. Below them is the caption, “Used people.”

There are also several twisted and haunted takes on icons of Americana. James Dean, Ernest Hemingway and Elvis Presley appear on canvases, transmogrified into specters of a lost age, their eyes serving as looking-glass stations into not only an underside of American life but a spirit, perhaps, extinguished.

Reference to Elvis provokes Mellencamp to defend the rock and roll pioneer against accusations of “cultural appropriation” but also indict the hypocrisy and oddity of selective outrage in American culture.

“He certainly was inspired by black music, but I don’t get it. I don’t get why people are going after Elvis,” Mellencamp said. “If you are going to take the stick out on him, you better take it out on the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, everybody. If you are going to vilify Elvis, or anyone who maybe didn’t give black people the respect and credit they deserve, then why don’t you just tear down the whole f**king United States?”

As a solitary citizen executing the commitment of “creating something every day,” Mellencamp acts in defiance against a romance between greed and stupidity. He delineates his interpretation of that courtship, and all the mediocrity it conceives, when he argues that the “intellect of the general public” has not changed since earlier eras of greater artistic variety and integrity, but that corporate managers of product now focus all of their attention and investment on “tentpole films and records.” Satisfaction with moderate success is no longer permissible. Everything must shatter records.

The high stakes commercial achievement and cutthroat competition of American culture is the predictable result of the process that would have had Mellencamp simplifying his songs to make them fit for stadiums in the late ‘80s, or as he put with sarcasm bleeding through the phone, “I didn’t want my entire career to be about doing another rousing chorus of ‘Small Town.’”

Having made wise decisions, Mellencamp’s songs, and likely his paintings, will remain resonant, and maintain presence in the imagination and emotional terrain of many people for many years. “I never want one of my paintings to be a static image,” he said. “I never want my songs to become static.”

“Theo and Weird Henry” is such a song, like “To Live,” from the 1989 record, “Big Daddy.” One of the most beautiful songs of American rock and roll, it masterfully tells the story of two close friends who exist as happy outsiders in a small town. It is almost as if Larry McMurtry wrote the lyrics, but Mellencamp’s narrative style, turn of phrase and gravel voice are unmistakable.

When I first heard the song, it filled with me joy. “Theo” and “Weird Henry” were emblematic of my best friend and me. Our mischievous battle against boredom enjoyed spiritual alignment with Mellencamp’s song.

Now, the song breaks my heart. It is a reminder of what I’ve lost – a friendship failing to escape the inevitable damage of life.

I told Mellencamp about my visceral connection with “Theo and Weird Henry,” and he explained that his reaction to the song is the same. The two men who inspired it are now dead.

Art that transcends the trends of a time period, and elevates itself above the petty political disputes of the moment, must have the ability to shapeshift, and it seems that ability arises out of the element of surprise Mellencamp identified as essential to creativity.

I cannot help but wonder and worry if in a culture with the “lowest common denominator” as dictator, and an increasingly popular model of consumption reliant upon sophisticated digital curation, if there is still an audience prepared to accept the challenge of surprise.

“There's a very dangerous downside to what I do,” Mellencamp offered, “and it is that people hate to be surprised.”

“There are a lot of pretenders out there,” he said in another moment of our conversation. “People who present only the shadow sides of themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that and I’m not even putting it down. But it’s not me.”

Most critics would likely call Mellencamp’s songs and paintings “representational art.” In song and on the canvas, he gives representation of working class triumph and trauma, small town inhabitance, America’s search for a soul, the interlocking of joy and melancholy in every life, and the political war for liberty and justice for all. It is also presentational. Great art not only represents its subject, but presents an alternative vision of the world and a means of living within the world.

At the end of “To Live,” Mellencamp sings, “I’d rather fight with you than lay down and die.”

Salon Stage: Victory Boyd
Performing her version of Nina Simone's “Feeling Good.”

Donald Glover and the state of “black genius”

Chris Pizzello/invision/ap

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Donald Glover, under his hip-hop pseudonym Childish Gambino, recently released a provocative music video for his single, “This Is America.”

The video, with its violent imagery and references to blackface minstrels, came as a surprise for Childish Gambino fans previously accustomed to his witty, sardonic style. As a result, it has been the subject of much analysis by fans and scholars alike.

As a black popular culture scholar, I find the most intriguing conversations have been about Glover’s creative genius. The focus on Glover’s creativity shifts us away from discussions of his black nerd persona, about which I have previously written. Music has been one of the few arenas in which African-Americans have been afforded genius status. The locus for this shift is hip-hop. Hip-hop, however, historically has been subject to criticism, not acclaim.

Hip-hop and black genius

These proclamations of Glover’s genius coincide not only with the hip-hop’s coming of age, but also with Glover’s creative growth.

Recently, the genre has been receiving its genius bona fides, with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical “Hamilton” receiving the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in drama and rapper Kendrick Lamar receiving the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in music for his album, “DAMN.” These events coincide with hip-hop surpassing rock as the most-purchased music genre in the United States.

Glover is no stranger to being hailed as a genius, though it mostly has been for his work on his FX series “Atlanta.” “This Is America,” however, represents Glover’s maturation as a recording artist. Though also praised for Childish Gambino’s 2016 funk album “Awaken, My Love!” he faced concerns about whether it was an ode to or mere imitation of soul and funk legend George Clinton.

Nonetheless, “This Is America,” like “Atlanta,” mostly has been lauded for its authenticity and originality, both of which historically have served as hallmarks of genius. Both use hip-hop as the means for, and subject of, Glover’s interrogation of race and representation and suggest that he has shed the frivolity for which Childish Gambino previously had been known.

Who gets to be a "black genius"?

Genius is often contested and granted to a rare few. Indeed, though Glover and hip-hop gradually have been afforded genius status, black women in hip-hop have not.

Who grants genius status? Much of Glover’s critical acclaim has come from white critics, which explains why some black listeners approach Glover and “This Is America” with trepidation.

That said, rising filmmaker and Glover’s contemporary Lena Waithe — known best for her work on “Master of None” — heralded “This Is America” as the “truth dipped in chocolate brilliance.” “This Is America” indicates that Glover may be reaching his prime.

Phillip L. Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Quinnipiac University

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What parents need to know about social media and anxiety

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This post originally appeared on Common Sense Media.

From cyberbullying to FOMO to cruel comments, social media can be a land mine for kids. Issues we parents never had to worry about, such as an intimate photo texted to the entire school or Instagram videos of a birthday party we weren't invited to, are now a risk for many tweens and teens. With kids' digital well-being a concern, researchers are exploring potential links between social media and the rise in teen suicide rates, tech addiction, and loss of real-life social skills. And many parents are wondering: Is social media causing my kid to have anxiety?

It's an important question — and one that makes for compelling headlines for worried parents. While it's too early to say with certainty (this is, after all, the first generation of "digital natives"), the reality is somewhat nuanced. Some research has observed a relationship between social media use and anxiety in kids, but it's difficult to know if and when social media is causing anxiety or whether kids who are anxious are turning to social media as a way to soothe themselves or seek support. How kids use social media matters, too: Social comparison and feedback-seeking behaviors have been associated with depressive symptoms, which often co-occur with anxiety.

Of course, it's common for kids to feel anxious sometimes. But there's a big difference between occasional anxiety and an anxiety disorder that requires professional care. If your kid is overly self-conscious, has uncontrollable and unrealistic anxiety, is unable to make it go away, and avoids things, you may want to seek help. (Learn more about anxiety in kids at the Child Mind Institute.) For these kids, social media may act as a trigger for — though not the root cause of — their anxious feelings. There are also kids, who, for a variety of reasons, may be more sensitive to the anxiety-producing effects of social media. For example, kids with social anxiety disorder may prefer online interactions over face-to-face interactions. Bottom line: You may not know the impact of social media on your kid until issues surface.

Unfortunately, simply cutting off social media isn't necessarily the answer. It's such a huge part of many kids' lives that not having access to social media could take a toll. In fact, being connected to friends through social media may counterbalance some of its negative effects.

Without conclusive research to back up claims that social media causes — and some evidence to show it's — it's up to you to keep tabs on how your kid's doing. Though it adds an extra layer to your parenting duties, it's a good idea to get a good sense of your kid's online life. Ask kids to give you a tour of their social media world. As they're showing you around, you might hear some of the positive stuff you weren't expecting, as well as some of the problem areas your kid could use help with. Also, add social media to the "wellness checks" that you already do. For example, when you ask how they slept and what they ate, ask how they're feeling about social media. Is it mostly positive, helpful, and supportive, or do they want to step back but aren't sure how? Here are some more tips for keeping social media a positive for kids:

Encourage self-care. Seeing photos of a trip to the beach your friends didn't invite you to can really sting. If your kid is super bummed or tired of digital drama, suggest they take a break from social media for a while. In fact, if they post a status update that they're taking a break, their friends might be very accepting because they've had similar feelings.

Help kids put social media in perspective. People post stuff that makes their lives look perfect — not the homework struggles, or the fight they had with their dad, or the hours it took to look as good as possible for the camera. Remind kids that social media leaves the messy stuff out — and that everyone has ups and downs.

Encourage offline activities. In a world where kids could spend their days lying around looking at Instagram, it's doubly important for them to feel as though they're cultivating their inner lives. Prompt them to balance social media with soul-nourishing activities such as hobbies, exercise, reading, and helping others. Otherwise, what are they going to brag about on social media?

Talk about their feelings. Ask them what it feels like to look at other kids' feeds. Is there a tipping point from when they feel OK to when they start to feel bad about their own lives? Encourage them to stop before that feeling sets in and do something good for themselves instead.

Let them know you're there for them. You may not understand everything about your kid's online social life. But recognizing it's important to them makes your kid feel — and more likely to come to you when they encounter problems.

Get help. If you see any cause for concern, including mood swings that seem to result from social media, not taking pleasure in activities he or she used to enjoy, and having accompanying symptoms such as headaches and stomachaches, visit your kid's pediatrician for a professional opinion.

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