Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 858

February 20, 2016

“Hey, I’m Peter”: On living with a gay voice

As a child I remember watching a movie and thinking, of a man’s voice: Jesus Christ, you sound gay. I remember thinking, tone it down. Shut the hell up. You’re doing it for attention, and it’s annoying. Everything you say sounds bitchy and rude. Just stop.

A decade and a half later, I am the man in the television. I know that people are listening. I have tried to tone it down. I know they are thinking: Jesus Christ, you sound gay. Shut the hell up.

Stop.

This essay is the mediating voice, the talk I need talked about.

You don’t have to listen to me.

You just have to hear me.

We rarely hear our own voices, and when we do, it is often by brief and unwelcome accident: feedback from a phone put on speaker, recordings others have covertly taken of us. I am not interested in why most of us usually do not like to hear our own voices. That seems apparent enough in why we typically do not like the rest of ourselves. I am interested in what it means to have a voice that releases information—when the sound of your body itself carries on it a wrapped gift of facts that you have not yet even admitted to the world are true—and that there is no changing any of this.

My first month living alone and my electric bill was unreasonably high—some few hundred dollars for a temperate September—so I called the company and was put on hold.

Eventually a woman answered and apologized for the wait. I gave her my account information and she confirmed that the charge seemed high.

“Ms. Kispert?” she asked, and then I lost my focus.

I made a point to lower and stiffen my voice for the rest of the call. My payment was reduced to some $60. She apologized, generally, and made sure to end with “Thank you very much, Mr. Kispert.”

I was not especially angry about the error, but I detected in myself the desire not to have been so obvious. I placed the phone on the coffee table and felt my throat with two fingers, as if checking for a pulse. I wondered what it was, which part of my throat or mouth transmits this signal, filters my speech. There is a difference. High register, low register.

So. What is the difference?

When you have a “gay voice” you cannot hide, even if you want to, and no one is talking about this because hiding is always, without question, seen as a problem. If I complain about the “gayness” of my voice, people will invariably ask the question, why would you want to hide who you are? But as a gay man the decision to “come out” to a particular person—a quietly offensive phrase for its suggestion others were rightly born into the room— is not the same as the decision to accept yourself. People often confuse a willingness to be known as gay with a self-acceptance of this gayness when these things exist on different poles.

Just because I’m openly gay to those I wish to be does not mean I want to forfeit my right to privacy. Someone in a cubicle in Tennessee knows that I am gay because she heard me detail a problem with my electric meter. The letter "S" communicated my desire to be with a man. This is information no one is entitled to. I think. My voice says otherwise.

But then: Isn’t it presumptive of me to think this information has been communicated at all? Who is to say I know what she thought?

I know that there is at least the potential for this. When I “came out” to my friend Allie junior year of high school, she said one of the worst things you can say to someone doing this thing, opening themselves up.

“Oh,” she said, “I already knew.”

“How?” The telephone was slippery with sweat in my hand, and I feared my mother was listening from another receiver.

She laughed.

“Peter,” she said. “Darling. Listen to yourself.”

We are entitled to the privacy our bodies afford us. And yet we are entitled to far more than this.

The week before I left for college, I was given my first laptop. It was black and thick, a new model that matched my briefly attempted new wardrobe—mostly black, because I read in a magazine somewhere this is a color that is flattering on everybody and I was newly doing my best to try, for the first time, to care about how I look.

I spent the night in my bedroom with the door closed, the windows open, a cool August breeze making a ghost of the curtains. Most of the family was out getting ice cream, which I had decided against both because I was trying to cut out dairy completely and because I took a rebellious teen pleasure in not thinking any members of my family cool enough to be seen with publicly.

I closed the bedroom door, sat down on my bed and pulled the comforter over my legs. I practiced saying into the recording app on the computer: "Hey, I’m Peter," lowering at intervals, expelling from my voice any intonation or cadence that might incriminate me as gay.

It worked, sort of, but it didn’t last. It took a surprising amount of energy to fake a deeper voice, and even then, the almost-baritone bordered on parody.

The next night when I tried once more, I was back to where I was, that awful voice—me—and I descended the steps again to that lower register.

There are two times I have been brought to tears by things I cannot change about myself: when I had disfiguring nodule acne and when I first heard myself introduce myself: "Hey," I said—a curl on every word, a lilt lifting like a whistle. "I’m Peter."

We may be most ourselves when we cannot hide, but we are not always ready for this sort of skinless vulnerability. We are least ready for it before we know what is being judged as the world judges us, feels it knows us before we know who we truly are.

Another problem arrives when you have the choice, when you have always had the choice and will all your life: this me or that me. To evade the judgment by prioritizing concealment and desire.

Listen to yourself.

“Use your normal voice,” said my aunt, a flight attendant entering her mid-50s who on several occasions mentioned that Feminism is something men made up to get women to do work for them. She likes jokes—this request is not a joke. I was in the kitchen pantry, gathering ingredients for pumpkin bread. “Your normal voice,” she said again, in a whisper. I was in the eighth grade and I did not know how I sounded.

“God gave you such a wonderful voice,” she said. “Use it.” So I looked at her as if to say, what?, and she summoned her best gay lisp and said, “Don’t talk like this.”

I made my pumpkin bread, and it turned out well—it’s a good recipe passed down through generations. All of this meant nothing to me at the time.

Years later, when I think of that bread, that day, I can bring myself to tears.

So what if someone knows I’m gay without my telling them. Who cares?

It turns out that a lot of gay men do. Some fashion lives around fragile exteriors that present as typically “masculine,” perform an interest in beer and sports. Masc 4 masc. No fems. There can be serious hostility within the gay community that is largely unknown to those who do not directly experience it, but it is often a live and growing tumor of a thing. “Coming out” can be a stand-in for a real fight. Mere visibility as a homosexual man is not enough, though we are often willing to say that it is. To some, defying the stereotype of the lisping, weak gay man at all costs is power. For someone like me, it can also be a problem. Coveting a voice I cannot have or sustain only provides constant reaffirmation that I am not who I think I want to be.

There is a certain look I’ve come to recognize as a sort of homophobic lack of interest that I find when I meet or encounter some people. I become the same gay man they met years ago. And so defying the stereotype becomes a way to be heard, to break through. Not having the “gay voice” becomes one less barrier to reaching people who do not want to concern themselves with gayness in any of its forms. It is in some way how to best touch the communities and people that attempt to oppress us. That is part of the power in not having an identifiably gay voice: in not being suspected, you are afforded the chance to be known to people who would otherwise not desire to know you. This permits—even encourages—the essential reckoning of their bigoted views.

For a long time this frustration about my voice came down to no more than the intractable fact that I am, like most people, an occasionally jealous person wondering why I don’t get the choice, why I am identifiably gay and am not afforded the option of being sooner seen as something else, as someone else: a person.

I came into this world unable to hide my gayness and deeply ashamed of it. Sure, I grew up in a Catholic household; humility and shame seemed at times to transform into one another. But this is not about the church, or religion. This is about living in a society, in a world, that is often quietly and deeply homophobic. Though it is becoming less acceptable to publicly admit to this homophobia, it is often just as acceptable to possess and wield and teach it, to neither listen nor to hear past the introduction, to conflate a voice with any number of voices, of people. My gay voice is in this way silencing in a way I cannot change, though I refuse to be silenced.

So what can I do? I can listen to myself—really.

And in listening to myself I have learned how to love myself despite those who would prefer that I not sound the way I do. I am not my voice, though I move through the world with it and through it. I will always face the judgment and rejection of some people because of my voice and what some feel it speaks about or perhaps for me.

Gay voice or not, what it all seems to come down to is this: Most people who expend energy shaming others, trying to turn off their sound, are people who have most sadly never come to love themselves, and are often simply and loudly projecting their own long-held insecurities in their own quiet and empty rooms, unable to introduce themselves to themselves.

A decade and a half later, I am the man in the television. I know that people are listening. I have tried to tone it down. I know they are thinking: Jesus Christ, you sound gay. Shut the hell up.

Stop.

This essay is the mediating voice, the talk I need talked about.

You don’t have to listen to me.

You just have to hear me.

My first month living alone and my electric bill was unreasonably high—some few hundred dollars for a temperate September—so I called the company and was put on hold.

Eventually a woman answered and apologized for the wait. I gave her my account information and she confirmed that the charge seemed high.

“Ms. Kispert?” she asked, and then I lost my focus.

I made a point to lower and stiffen my voice for the rest of the call. My payment was reduced to some $60. She apologized, generally, and made sure to end with “Thank you very much, Mr. Kispert.”

So. What is the difference?

But then: Isn’t it presumptive of me to think this information has been communicated at all? Who is to say I know what she thought?

“Oh,” she said, “I already knew.”

“How?” The telephone was slippery with sweat in my hand, and I feared my mother was listening from another receiver.

She laughed.

“Peter,” she said. “Darling. Listen to yourself.”

We are entitled to the privacy our bodies afford us. And yet we are entitled to far more than this.

It worked, sort of, but it didn’t last. It took a surprising amount of energy to fake a deeper voice, and even then, the almost-baritone bordered on parody.

The next night when I tried once more, I was back to where I was, that awful voice—me—and I descended the steps again to that lower register.

Another problem arrives when you have the choice, when you have always had the choice and will all your life: this me or that me. To evade the judgment by prioritizing concealment and desire.

Listen to yourself.

“God gave you such a wonderful voice,” she said. “Use it.” So I looked at her as if to say, what?, and she summoned her best gay lisp and said, “Don’t talk like this.”

I made my pumpkin bread, and it turned out well—it’s a good recipe passed down through generations. All of this meant nothing to me at the time.

Years later, when I think of that bread, that day, I can bring myself to tears.

So what if someone knows I’m gay without my telling them. Who cares?

So what can I do? I can listen to myself—really.

A decade and a half later, I am the man in the television. I know that people are listening. I have tried to tone it down. I know they are thinking: Jesus Christ, you sound gay. Shut the hell up.

Stop.

This essay is the mediating voice, the talk I need talked about.

You don’t have to listen to me.

You just have to hear me.

My first month living alone and my electric bill was unreasonably high—some few hundred dollars for a temperate September—so I called the company and was put on hold.

Eventually a woman answered and apologized for the wait. I gave her my account information and she confirmed that the charge seemed high.

“Ms. Kispert?” she asked, and then I lost my focus.

I made a point to lower and stiffen my voice for the rest of the call. My payment was reduced to some $60. She apologized, generally, and made sure to end with “Thank you very much, Mr. Kispert.”

So. What is the difference?

But then: Isn’t it presumptive of me to think this information has been communicated at all? Who is to say I know what she thought?

“Oh,” she said, “I already knew.”

“How?” The telephone was slippery with sweat in my hand, and I feared my mother was listening from another receiver.

She laughed.

“Peter,” she said. “Darling. Listen to yourself.”

We are entitled to the privacy our bodies afford us. And yet we are entitled to far more than this.

It worked, sort of, but it didn’t last. It took a surprising amount of energy to fake a deeper voice, and even then, the almost-baritone bordered on parody.

The next night when I tried once more, I was back to where I was, that awful voice—me—and I descended the steps again to that lower register.

Another problem arrives when you have the choice, when you have always had the choice and will all your life: this me or that me. To evade the judgment by prioritizing concealment and desire.

Listen to yourself.

“God gave you such a wonderful voice,” she said. “Use it.” So I looked at her as if to say, what?, and she summoned her best gay lisp and said, “Don’t talk like this.”

I made my pumpkin bread, and it turned out well—it’s a good recipe passed down through generations. All of this meant nothing to me at the time.

Years later, when I think of that bread, that day, I can bring myself to tears.

So what if someone knows I’m gay without my telling them. Who cares?

So what can I do? I can listen to myself—really.

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Published on February 20, 2016 15:00

John Cale’s new society: “There’s much more sophistication in hip-hop than in regular rock ‘n’ roll”

John Cale is probably still best known as a co-founder of the Velvet Underground despite many decades as a solo artist. His own music has ranged in style significantly while holding onto an identifiable mix of chilly reserve, sonic experiment, simple tunefulness and musical curiosity. He's also produced albums by Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers and the Stooges. One of the high points of his career is “Music for a New Society,” a 1982 album that combined keyboards with open space and dark, morbid lyrics. It’s ambient, at times, without being at all restful. In Rolling Stone, Will Hermes calls it “one of the grimmest, loneliest LPs ever made. There are songs about shame and death, about violent longing, with melodies sometimes fragile, sometimes shattered.” Domino has released the original “Music for a New Society” alongside “M:FANS,” which reworks the album with new instrumentation. Some of it is even harsher than the original. Salon spoke to Cale from Los Angeles, where he lives. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Hey, John. How you doing, Scott? Wow -- you’ve lost some of your Welsh accent living in the States so long. Most of my friends tell me that. They’re happy about it because at least they can understand what I’m saying now. Ha. Let’s talk about the new version of “Music for a New Society.” What made you want to go back to an album from several decades ago? It was a tough album. I knew it was going to be hard. I thought it was time to reissue it – it needed a remaster, and I checked to see if there were any outtakes I wanted to add, et cetera. So the opportunity came because I got called for a festival – they have these festivals in Europe now and again where they say, “Can you do one of your albums?” And they wanted to do either “Fear” or “Music for...” I thought it was an excellent opportunity to see if I could stretch the arrangements. It went down fine, but I was still using too much of the sensibility of the old one, and smoothing it out with strings and voices. So I said, let’s put it back in the box where it was, and give it a little edge. Some of it has a lot of edge: Songs like “Taking Your Life in Your Hands” and “Thoughtless Kind” are a lot more tense and abrasive than the originals. Is that because your mood has changed, or because you have different musical interests? Different musical interests. Or, you could say, both of them. But I’d just spent a lot of time in the studio, there was a lot of stuff I’d done in the studio – I wanted to put it on the album. And so it has new textures and all that. You’ve always been very eclectic, with an interest in avant-garde, classical, rock ‘n’ roll. What kind of music do you listen to these days? Mainly hip-hop. Who do you like best? Andre 3000, that new Erykah Badu record – “But You Caint Use My Phone” -- that’s one of the most sophisticated records I’ve heard in a long time. There’s Donnie Trumpet and Chance the Rapper. And there’s always Eminem. The idea of writing songs has changed. It used to be you had a verse, a bridge, a chorus – you don’t have that anymore. It’s much more interesting [now.] Vince Staples doesn’t do that. [Earl] Sweatshirt doesn’t do that. Sweatshirt is the most abstract of all of them, and it’s really interesting. You like the focus on production that you hear in hip-hop? I learned that a long time ago – that there’s much more sophistication, and better production, in hip-hop than in regular rock ‘n’ roll records. Do you listen to it for the beats, too? Yeah – the beats and the textures, because you don’t know what they’re doing. When Pharrell [Williams] did “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” he had that spraycan sound in it, it suddenly became clean that somebody was thinking outside the box here. When they make a great, groovy record, they’re gonna use anything that’s there. That’s fabulous. That’s sort of where music started – a dude with a tin can and a rope. It sounds like you’re much more interested in new stuff than thinking about your Velvet Underground days or John Cage or that kind of music. I went through that period. Now I enjoy stretching it, making the drama different. The song “If You Were Still Around” is now a tribute to Lou Reed, I think? It’s a tribute to him and all the people who were in the Factory. In the video you see all their faces. It was done at the anniversary of his death – it was meant as a pretty honest appraisal, and a pretty dignified appraisal of his position in the music that we did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln77F... A really important musician, and known as being difficult to get along with. What are your memories of him like? A mix of good and bad? Yes – sometimes very, very funny. Other times, very, very abrasive. Sad to say we’ve also lost David Bowie recently. What do you remember about him? What do you miss the most about him? Just that [our friendship] never got any further. We were running around New York, in the clubs, and that ended. Since then, we never picked it up again. I didn’t know where he was. And then he got involved with Lou and it became something else entirely. It was the ‘60s and ‘70s when you hung out with Bowie? The ‘70s and ‘80s. Do you have a favorite period of Bowie? Do you like the Berlin records? The stuff he did with Brian [Eno] is like building a house around you – it’s a construction job. What’s next for you? Are you going back to other old albums to rethink them, or pushing in new directions? I’ve got a bunch of songs I want to finish – I want to have that done so I can get them out as soon as possible. And a lot of touring. These days you’re less interested in song structure, more interested in overall texture. We'll hear that in what comes next from you? Yeah – how do you tell the story without verses and choruses. So going back to hip-hop: Is what gives you a sense of possibilities. Yeah. When you listen to [some of it], it’s very street-savvy stuff… And what you have is what you get: It’s not like someone here can play an instrument, necessarily. And on the other hand you have someone like Andre – that’s outstanding. Do you follow Kanye West at all? Yeah I do. There’s a lot of energy and a lot of good musical ideas. But I don’t know, the proselytizing gets in the way of it sometimes. I mean, when I saw Kanye on “SNL,” when his record “Yeezus” came out, that band sounded great! But then I got the record and it wasn’t as strong. It worked live but apparently when he came to L.A. and did it downtown, somebody was playing a computer track. I don’t know if he takes his live work as seriously as Eminem does. Eminem is ferocious wherever he goes.John Cale is probably still best known as a co-founder of the Velvet Underground despite many decades as a solo artist. His own music has ranged in style significantly while holding onto an identifiable mix of chilly reserve, sonic experiment, simple tunefulness and musical curiosity. He's also produced albums by Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers and the Stooges. One of the high points of his career is “Music for a New Society,” a 1982 album that combined keyboards with open space and dark, morbid lyrics. It’s ambient, at times, without being at all restful. In Rolling Stone, Will Hermes calls it “one of the grimmest, loneliest LPs ever made. There are songs about shame and death, about violent longing, with melodies sometimes fragile, sometimes shattered.” Domino has released the original “Music for a New Society” alongside “M:FANS,” which reworks the album with new instrumentation. Some of it is even harsher than the original. Salon spoke to Cale from Los Angeles, where he lives. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Hey, John. How you doing, Scott? Wow -- you’ve lost some of your Welsh accent living in the States so long. Most of my friends tell me that. They’re happy about it because at least they can understand what I’m saying now. Ha. Let’s talk about the new version of “Music for a New Society.” What made you want to go back to an album from several decades ago? It was a tough album. I knew it was going to be hard. I thought it was time to reissue it – it needed a remaster, and I checked to see if there were any outtakes I wanted to add, et cetera. So the opportunity came because I got called for a festival – they have these festivals in Europe now and again where they say, “Can you do one of your albums?” And they wanted to do either “Fear” or “Music for...” I thought it was an excellent opportunity to see if I could stretch the arrangements. It went down fine, but I was still using too much of the sensibility of the old one, and smoothing it out with strings and voices. So I said, let’s put it back in the box where it was, and give it a little edge. Some of it has a lot of edge: Songs like “Taking Your Life in Your Hands” and “Thoughtless Kind” are a lot more tense and abrasive than the originals. Is that because your mood has changed, or because you have different musical interests? Different musical interests. Or, you could say, both of them. But I’d just spent a lot of time in the studio, there was a lot of stuff I’d done in the studio – I wanted to put it on the album. And so it has new textures and all that. You’ve always been very eclectic, with an interest in avant-garde, classical, rock ‘n’ roll. What kind of music do you listen to these days? Mainly hip-hop. Who do you like best? Andre 3000, that new Erykah Badu record – “But You Caint Use My Phone” -- that’s one of the most sophisticated records I’ve heard in a long time. There’s Donnie Trumpet and Chance the Rapper. And there’s always Eminem. The idea of writing songs has changed. It used to be you had a verse, a bridge, a chorus – you don’t have that anymore. It’s much more interesting [now.] Vince Staples doesn’t do that. [Earl] Sweatshirt doesn’t do that. Sweatshirt is the most abstract of all of them, and it’s really interesting. You like the focus on production that you hear in hip-hop? I learned that a long time ago – that there’s much more sophistication, and better production, in hip-hop than in regular rock ‘n’ roll records. Do you listen to it for the beats, too? Yeah – the beats and the textures, because you don’t know what they’re doing. When Pharrell [Williams] did “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” he had that spraycan sound in it, it suddenly became clean that somebody was thinking outside the box here. When they make a great, groovy record, they’re gonna use anything that’s there. That’s fabulous. That’s sort of where music started – a dude with a tin can and a rope. It sounds like you’re much more interested in new stuff than thinking about your Velvet Underground days or John Cage or that kind of music. I went through that period. Now I enjoy stretching it, making the drama different. The song “If You Were Still Around” is now a tribute to Lou Reed, I think? It’s a tribute to him and all the people who were in the Factory. In the video you see all their faces. It was done at the anniversary of his death – it was meant as a pretty honest appraisal, and a pretty dignified appraisal of his position in the music that we did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln77F... A really important musician, and known as being difficult to get along with. What are your memories of him like? A mix of good and bad? Yes – sometimes very, very funny. Other times, very, very abrasive. Sad to say we’ve also lost David Bowie recently. What do you remember about him? What do you miss the most about him? Just that [our friendship] never got any further. We were running around New York, in the clubs, and that ended. Since then, we never picked it up again. I didn’t know where he was. And then he got involved with Lou and it became something else entirely. It was the ‘60s and ‘70s when you hung out with Bowie? The ‘70s and ‘80s. Do you have a favorite period of Bowie? Do you like the Berlin records? The stuff he did with Brian [Eno] is like building a house around you – it’s a construction job. What’s next for you? Are you going back to other old albums to rethink them, or pushing in new directions? I’ve got a bunch of songs I want to finish – I want to have that done so I can get them out as soon as possible. And a lot of touring. These days you’re less interested in song structure, more interested in overall texture. We'll hear that in what comes next from you? Yeah – how do you tell the story without verses and choruses. So going back to hip-hop: Is what gives you a sense of possibilities. Yeah. When you listen to [some of it], it’s very street-savvy stuff… And what you have is what you get: It’s not like someone here can play an instrument, necessarily. And on the other hand you have someone like Andre – that’s outstanding. Do you follow Kanye West at all? Yeah I do. There’s a lot of energy and a lot of good musical ideas. But I don’t know, the proselytizing gets in the way of it sometimes. I mean, when I saw Kanye on “SNL,” when his record “Yeezus” came out, that band sounded great! But then I got the record and it wasn’t as strong. It worked live but apparently when he came to L.A. and did it downtown, somebody was playing a computer track. I don’t know if he takes his live work as seriously as Eminem does. Eminem is ferocious wherever he goes.

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Published on February 20, 2016 14:00

What can we learn from translations of the Bible?

Aviya Kushner’s book The Grammar of God: A Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bibleis profoundly personal. Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking, scholarly household in which the Bible—read in the original Hebrew—was often the center of conversation and debate.

She didn’t read the Bible in translation until her second year at the Iowa Writers Workshop, when she took a yearlong class with Marilynne Robinson that required reading the Old Testament in English. Kushner was surprised at the differences between the Hebrew original she knew almost by heart and the nearly unfamiliar English translation she encountered. From this experience grew an obsession. Kushner embarked on a ten-year project of reading and collecting different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world retracing the steps of the great biblical translators, searching for their motivations. It was a dangerous undertaking, considered heretical by some. When Robinson read Kushner’s MFA thesis, which had grown out of notes taken in the Old Testament class, she told her: “this will be a book.” And so it is. The Grammar of God is part memoir, part treatise. Kushner’s careful attention to historical, linguistic, and personal detail paints a story of universal importance, one realized through the sum of countless small, significant parts. Q: Can you start by describing your first experiences reading the Bible in an Orthodox Jewish, Hebrew-speaking household? My first experience with the Bible was hearing it. My mother used to recite the Psalms as she bathed my sister, and I remember listening in and wondering about the “king of glory” and the “gates of the world,” trying to understand what it all meant, and trying to figure out who the king was. I am pretty sure my mother bathed me to the Psalms, too, when I was a baby. Individual lines from the Bible were always part of my family’s conversation, but before I learned to read, I didn’t realize these were Biblical verses. I thought they were just speech, or songs. Q: How do the technical and the personal coexist in The Grammar of God? How did you strike a balance between the two—and how did you manage to make grammar a personal issue? I’m so glad you asked this question. I wanted to show English readers why ancient Hebrew grammar matters, and this meant I had to include some of the nitty-gritty; incredibly detailed passages about sentence structure, word structure, or grammatical structures like the cohortative mode—which exists in Hebrew but not in English. But at the same time, I thought it was essential to show how ancient Hebrew is alive, how it’s talked about and argued about and laughed about, and how it is as deeply personal for me and for my family as the English is for so many others. It wasn’t easy to balance the grammatical and the personal, but I felt both were essential, so I wove grammar and memoir together, sentence by sentence. Q: In what ways does biblical translation differ from the translation of secular texts? Translation is always a matter of interpretation, and it’s always controversial. But when a book is viewed by so many as holy, and when millions of people consider it the word of God, the stakes are much higher. Acknowledging that there is a translation issue, and that an alternative reading is possible, or that you may be reading a mistranslation, means the reader has to think deeply about what he or she actually believes. Q: What do we lose with constant re-translation of the Bible? What do we gain? I think one major thing we lose is the idea that this is a Hebrew text. I was amazed at how many people asked me what language the Bible was written in. People asked me if it was in Aramaic or Latin fairly often. Educated people are so used to reading the Hebrew Bible in translation that the “Hebrew” isn’t thought about. This strikes me as a shame. One interesting thing to consider is that there are direct translations of the Bible, from the Hebrew (for the Old Testament) and the Greek (New Testament), and then there is a long tradition of translations of translations. We should discuss what a translation of a translation—and sometimes a translation of a translation of a translation—actually means. I became a lot more empathetic toward translators and a lot more appreciative of translations as time went on. What translations do is keep a book alive. Good or bad, scholarly or deeply flawed, all the translations of the Bible have helped bring it to us. Last but not least, some towering scholars have worked on translations of the Bible, and these are great gifts to us. I don’t think anyone is sorry that Martin Buber, for instance, left us a translation—a record of how he read the Bible. Q: You quote Derek Walcott’s What the Twilight Says in your epigraph: “Grammar is a form of history.” Why did you choose this quote to begin the book? The quote is from a beautiful essay on Joseph Brodsky. I thought Derek Walcott’s line perfectly captured why grammar matters. Language is a way of structuring thought, of ordering the world. For all translation can do, we often lose this structure, the way a civilization sees itself and the wider world. When grammar gives us ideas like gender, or the respected form, it is saying something about society; it is recording history. And when grammar evaporates in translation, as it often does, what we lose is this “form of history.” Q: You’ve collected Bibles for years—what do you feel is the most interesting Bible in your collection and why? I think the most interesting Bible I have is a set of the Five Books of Moses I bought at Tuvia’s, a Jewish bookstore in Monsey, N.Y. It includes introductory essays by the Hebrew commentators to the Bible; some of these essays are a thousand years old. This set has a far more extensive selection of introductions than any other Bible I have ever seen, and it gives some lesser-known writers an opportunity to explain how they read. One thing I found charming is that a medieval commentator began his essay with a poem—an acrostic of his name. He was trying hard to be remembered as an author. Q: What can we gain from reading the Bible in a secular context? I think of the Bible as a rare bridge between secular and religious people. It’s the only book I can think of that is widely read among both groups, and that’s an opportunity. Even if you have no interest in religion at all, the Bible is still fascinating and important because it has had such a deep influence on literature and history. It’s an ancient text that is still very much alive in contemporary society, and that’s an intriguing thing. So many writers are rooted in the Bible, and this includes extremely secular authors. Similarly, the history of art is steeped in the Bible, and we can better understand Michelangelo or Raphael if we have read the Bible. The advantage of reading it in a secular context is that the idea of the Bible as literature is accepted. The Bible can be appreciated as a magnificent piece of writing. No matter how you feel about God, or if you have no feelings whatsoever, the Bible’s intimate portrayals of parents, children, and siblings are rich and moving, and above all deeply human. Q: Can you give an example of an untranslatable word/phrase in the Hebrew Bible—or a specific example of a translation problem that exemplifies divergent understandings of the Bible across religions, languages and cultures? There are some words in the Hebrew that simply have no English equivalent, such as et, which introduces a definite direct object. I was giving a reading in Texas when I was asked about et, which is a two-letter word containing the first letter of the alphabet, aleph, and the last letter, taf. An audience member asked about this word and Jesus; it seems that because the word et does not translate, and because there is the line in Revelation 1:8 of “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,” there had been an interpretation of this simple common Hebrew word et as in fact being a word for God. Clearly, this kind of reading solution for an untranslatable word can create a divergent understanding! While this is a dramatic example, what I noticed more often was translators reading a noun as a verb, or vice versa. An infamous example is the depiction of Moses. In the Hebrew, Moses is beaming with light, and the verb is karan; some English translations seem to have understood the verb as a noun, in this case, keren, which is spelled the same except for the vowels. In Hebrew, keren is both a ray of light and the horn of an animal. Some translators therefore rendered a “horned Moses” instead of a Moses with skin beaming. This disturbing depiction can be seen in the stained-glass windows of many European churches. Whenever I read something on “Jews with horns” or “Jews as the devil” I think of the major effect of the translation of that one word. Q: How much of a role does the specific translator (or translators) play in the final translated text? I think the translator has a huge role. What we are reading is the translator’s understanding; it is the translator, not the author, who is writing the exact words we are actually reading. The translator has great power, and many translations I read added or subtracted to the text. Amazingly, some even changed the versification. I spent an hour searching for a line in Job, thinking I was losing my mind, when I realized the translator had relocated the verse to another chapter. Of course, some translators have helped us understand, and have enriched our reading experience. H.L. Ginsberg’s translation of Isaiah, for instance, is an education in itself. It’s unfortunate that translation is not discussed often in our culture and in our universities. A translator is probably the most important reader we have. Reviewers and critics can shape our reactions to a book, but what a translator does is even more intimate—a translator shapes the actual book. When we read a book in the original language, only the author and the reader are in the room. A translation is different; the author, the translator, and the reader are all there. Q: How do the principles of translation apply to writing itself? In what way is translation writing, and in what way is writing translation? All communication is translation; when we speak, we are translating feelings or thoughts into language. When we write, we are translating our thoughts—our own private language—into something the reader can understand, into public language. So I think translation and writing are certainly close to each other, and many translators view themselves as writers. Certainly it’s almost impossible to be a good translator without being a strong writer in the target language. I think translation is a special form of writing. It is really a state of the soul, a suspension between two tongues, and it requires a deep engagement with the text and thought process of another person. But writing also demands transcendence; the writer has to straddle an unnamed middle state between present and past or present and future. Writers and translators are both trying to transcend time, and to bring something important and beautiful to us.

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Published on February 20, 2016 13:00

The digging never ends: It’s not just what ExxonMobil did, it’s what it’s doing

Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now -- entirely legally -- is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story. Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate. As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News , the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: "In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future. The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion." Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered... Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.” So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed outin 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable. But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming. Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full steam ahead in developing a fossil fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. "It is highly unlikely," he said, "that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now." Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong -- as wrong as a man could be. Sins of Omission In fact, Exxon’s deceit -- its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years -- may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, “hottest year ever recorded” has become a tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work. But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch Brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country. The company’s sins -- of omission and commission -- may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to investigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that's illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman's got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and maybe -- if activists continue to apply pressure -- from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence. Here’s the thing: all that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal -- dangerous, stupid, and immoral, but legal. On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years. For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact.” Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate, and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around -- we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math, and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.” Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States, when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah, and just before Hurricane Sandy. He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.” In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right, and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend -- somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton -- wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry. But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon -- which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice. Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money , organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax, and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet. The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite, and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon. The Never-Ending Big Dig Even that’s not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12% in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25% in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons -- $4 million a day, every day. As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola, and Nigeria. “The strengthof our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion. But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet -- an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius, and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years. At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now. That's why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn. We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying preciselythe kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up, and -- what do you know -- an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn. Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas -- other than what Tillerson once called “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire” -- is this: in recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil. Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the Earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market, and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas. In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5% of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17%. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices, and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors. That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the twentieth century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future, that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough, and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens. Can Exxon Be Pressured? Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem... well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell, and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6%of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through... oh, never mind. What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath. But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too. At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate Newspublishedsome revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event -- a reckoning for the crime of the millennium. But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels -- everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his state of the state address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions. “This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.” The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-Earth-anymore would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now -- entirely legally -- is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story. Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate. As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News , the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: "In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future. The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion." Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered... Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.” So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed outin 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable. But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming. Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full steam ahead in developing a fossil fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. "It is highly unlikely," he said, "that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now." Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong -- as wrong as a man could be. Sins of Omission In fact, Exxon’s deceit -- its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years -- may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, “hottest year ever recorded” has become a tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work. But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch Brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country. The company’s sins -- of omission and commission -- may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to investigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that's illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman's got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and maybe -- if activists continue to apply pressure -- from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence. Here’s the thing: all that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal -- dangerous, stupid, and immoral, but legal. On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years. For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact.” Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate, and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around -- we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math, and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.” Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States, when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah, and just before Hurricane Sandy. He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.” In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right, and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend -- somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton -- wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry. But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon -- which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice. Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money , organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax, and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet. The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite, and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon. The Never-Ending Big Dig Even that’s not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12% in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25% in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons -- $4 million a day, every day. As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola, and Nigeria. “The strengthof our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion. But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet -- an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius, and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years. At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now. That's why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn. We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying preciselythe kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up, and -- what do you know -- an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn. Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas -- other than what Tillerson once called “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire” -- is this: in recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil. Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the Earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market, and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas. In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5% of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17%. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices, and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors. That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the twentieth century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future, that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough, and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens. Can Exxon Be Pressured? Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem... well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell, and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6%of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through... oh, never mind. What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath. But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too. At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate Newspublishedsome revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event -- a reckoning for the crime of the millennium. But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels -- everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his state of the state address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions. “This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.” The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-Earth-anymore would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?

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Published on February 20, 2016 12:30

February 19, 2016

A solosexual’s guide to “me-time”: “A masturbation session should ideally last a minimum of 3 hours or I won’t even bother”

Through the date-night anxieties of New Year’s Eve, “engagement season” and Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is looking for “the one”—or maybe they’ve already found it much closer to home. For masturbation enthusiasts, it can also be a time to celebrate a topic that’s too often kept hidden. Earlier this month, Nicholas Tana’s documentary “Sticky: A (Self) Love Story” shed light on how masturbation’s been treated largely as taboo by our culture. Now, self-love is getting another powerful advocate with the publication of Jason Armstrong’s memoir/manifesto, “Solosexual: Portrait of a Masturbator.” In the book, the 40-year-old Toronto-based pseudonymous author, who’s blogged about his sex life since 2012 at Hunting for Sex: Cautionary Tales from the Quest, explores the roots of his love of masturbation, the profound effect masturbation has had on his life, what it’s like to masturbate with other men, and his dual coming out processes (as gay and as a masturbator). For Armstrong, masturbation is a core part of his identity, and is so meaningful to him he even does it online at the decidedly NSFW Xtube.com. Armstrong makes the case for treating solosexuality with as much seriousness as we treat any other sexual orientation, and writes about “bating” with reverence, calling it “a way of life and the conduit through which you connect to you inner divinity and your inner pig” and stating that “The first cataclysmic crotch grab is the equivalent of a bong hit. The effect is instantaneous.” Here, he reveals what “bate fuel” is, why he’s posted his own masturbation videos online, and why the online world of “bators” might be less prejudiced than the gay male dating world. How long have you identified as a solosexual? I had not even heard of the term “solosexual” until about three years ago when a friend sent me a link to BateWorld.com, a site devoted to all things regarding male masturbation. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that masturbation was a poor substitute for “real sex,” but on BateWorld, I discovered a community of men who saw masturbation as the best sex of their lives. I saw this and it reflected my true sexuality and from there on in, I began to identify as solosexual. This is not to say that I don’t have partnered penetrative sex; I still do, and I certainly love to masturbate with others. But I am so content to be alone at home, masturbating my little heart out, free to be as uninhibited and exploratory with myself as I want to be. How often do you masturbate, and what factors go into deciding how often you will? I masturbate every night after work and on weekends, as much as time allows. However, I’m also very busy with life. I have friends and family that I love, and I love this writing life I’ve created. But I won’t lie: I make lots of me-time. A masturbation session should ideally last a minimum of three hours or I won’t even bother. It’s a journey that I go on with myself, both transcendent but also celebrating the grit and grime of a horny man. It’s a trip that no travel agent can compete with for pure thrills of both the carnal and spiritual kind, all through the power of the penis. Is there such a thing as a good vs. bad bate session for you? My impression is that the longer the session, the better it is. A bate sesh is always unique. That is why it never gets old. I like to have at least three hours to fully enter the zone, that place where your body and spirit are so connected that you feel like you’re flying. The things that get a man there are called “bate fuel.” Bate fuel comes in many forms. It may be chatting online or camming with another bator. It may be through watching porn. It may be through watching yourself masturbate in the mirror, you yourself becoming your own porn. And all this takes time. You don't just masturbate in private, but for the world to see on Xtube. How is masturbation connected to exhibition for you? Masturbation is no longer necessarily the lonely endeavor it might have once been. Masturbators love to share their bate experience. But I grappled long and hard with whether I had the balls to post those videos of me masturbating onto Xtube. But if I wanted to write about dismantling shame around sexuality, I felt I needed to put my money where my mouth was. In the song “Justify My Love,” Madonna sings a line that goes “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” If I felt too ashamed to reveal my own, how could I expect anyone else to? Masturbation has helped you find a community of fellow bators, and even a bate mentor. That struck me as ironic, that something we consider so individual is actually a point of connecting with other people. How has masturbation helped foster community in your life? Masturbation would seem to be the domain of the solosexual, a seemingly solitary figure. But the heightened masturbatory experiences that men have achieved as solosexuals are largely possible because of the strange combination of privacy and social interaction that the Internet permits. It’s hard to imagine men masturbating daily for three, four or five hours at a stretch without online porn, cam or chat to fuel their descent in what we might call the batehole, that place where you completely lose yourself to the experience and broach another consciousness. There is also something really unique about the community of bators that has formed. On other dating sites, where a man might be trying to get into another man’s pants, there is a competitive element to it, a cat-and-mouse game. But on a site like BateWorld, where each man is just trying to get you to get into your own pants, a camaraderie develops. In the book, you contrast your process of coming out as gay, where people understand and accept you, versus the challenges of coming out as solosexual. Can you elaborate on why it's harder to come out as solosexual? Coming out as a gay man 20 years ago was relatively easy because the culture was already familiar with homosexuality: Oprah was talking about it! But solosexuality is still a rather new term in the sexual vernacular. Even harder is coming out as a sexual being. It might be okay to be gay, but heaven forbid we should openly discuss what we do in the bedroom. I see sexuality as this huge gift that need not be hidden under a bushel, but celebrated. Where there is silence, there is shame. I’m not suggesting we go out and start fucking in the streets, but simply that we can have a discourse about sexuality that affirms us. This is my utopia. You suggest in the book that the online world of masturbation is more inclusive than the gay male dating world, writing, "I have yet to see a profile on BateWorld like I've seen on numerous hook-up sites where the writer proclaims haughtily 'No fats or fems' or 'No Asians.'" Why do you think that is? BateWorld is unique in that it caters to all men, regardless of sexual orientation. The site is a place where men celebrate their sexuality, their manhood, their cocks, regardless of who you are, your orientation, your skin color, your weight. We are a brotherhood of men who simply want to celebrate being horny guys with dicks. Other sites are about getting laid, full stop. Men on BateWorld may indeed hook up, but first and foremost is celebrating manhood. At one point, you write that masturbation can be an art form. What does that mean? I think for many men, a quick wank in the shower before work is all they need. But for true Bators with a capital B, we will take time to set the scene: get the lighting in the room just right, turn on some music to get you in the mood, open up BateWorld and see if there are messages in the inbox, open up a porn site or three. If you’re like me, you’ll pour yourself a drink, adjust the full-length mirror into which you are going to defile yourself in the most horny of ways. Some men create shrines to the phallus, dildos and pictures of the cock that they will orgasm onto. For us, a quick wank in the shower just won’t do. February brings us Valentine's Day; the idea that we should all want to be in a couple is omnipresent. Is this an especially challenging time to be solosexual? Absolutely, yes. Every Hollywood romantic comedy is going to tell us that being coupled is the only answer. The idea of being your own lover would never pass for many. There is also the opposite issue at play: There are men who are likely solosexual and don’t quite understand it, as I didn’t at one time, and are in relationships that aren’t working. Their partners may feel the man pulling away into a world of masturbation and are left hurt, which hurts the man too. Like gay men who marry women out of societal pressure, there are solosexuals in relationships due to the same pressures.Through the date-night anxieties of New Year’s Eve, “engagement season” and Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is looking for “the one”—or maybe they’ve already found it much closer to home. For masturbation enthusiasts, it can also be a time to celebrate a topic that’s too often kept hidden. Earlier this month, Nicholas Tana’s documentary “Sticky: A (Self) Love Story” shed light on how masturbation’s been treated largely as taboo by our culture. Now, self-love is getting another powerful advocate with the publication of Jason Armstrong’s memoir/manifesto, “Solosexual: Portrait of a Masturbator.” In the book, the 40-year-old Toronto-based pseudonymous author, who’s blogged about his sex life since 2012 at Hunting for Sex: Cautionary Tales from the Quest, explores the roots of his love of masturbation, the profound effect masturbation has had on his life, what it’s like to masturbate with other men, and his dual coming out processes (as gay and as a masturbator). For Armstrong, masturbation is a core part of his identity, and is so meaningful to him he even does it online at the decidedly NSFW Xtube.com. Armstrong makes the case for treating solosexuality with as much seriousness as we treat any other sexual orientation, and writes about “bating” with reverence, calling it “a way of life and the conduit through which you connect to you inner divinity and your inner pig” and stating that “The first cataclysmic crotch grab is the equivalent of a bong hit. The effect is instantaneous.” Here, he reveals what “bate fuel” is, why he’s posted his own masturbation videos online, and why the online world of “bators” might be less prejudiced than the gay male dating world. How long have you identified as a solosexual? I had not even heard of the term “solosexual” until about three years ago when a friend sent me a link to BateWorld.com, a site devoted to all things regarding male masturbation. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that masturbation was a poor substitute for “real sex,” but on BateWorld, I discovered a community of men who saw masturbation as the best sex of their lives. I saw this and it reflected my true sexuality and from there on in, I began to identify as solosexual. This is not to say that I don’t have partnered penetrative sex; I still do, and I certainly love to masturbate with others. But I am so content to be alone at home, masturbating my little heart out, free to be as uninhibited and exploratory with myself as I want to be. How often do you masturbate, and what factors go into deciding how often you will? I masturbate every night after work and on weekends, as much as time allows. However, I’m also very busy with life. I have friends and family that I love, and I love this writing life I’ve created. But I won’t lie: I make lots of me-time. A masturbation session should ideally last a minimum of three hours or I won’t even bother. It’s a journey that I go on with myself, both transcendent but also celebrating the grit and grime of a horny man. It’s a trip that no travel agent can compete with for pure thrills of both the carnal and spiritual kind, all through the power of the penis. Is there such a thing as a good vs. bad bate session for you? My impression is that the longer the session, the better it is. A bate sesh is always unique. That is why it never gets old. I like to have at least three hours to fully enter the zone, that place where your body and spirit are so connected that you feel like you’re flying. The things that get a man there are called “bate fuel.” Bate fuel comes in many forms. It may be chatting online or camming with another bator. It may be through watching porn. It may be through watching yourself masturbate in the mirror, you yourself becoming your own porn. And all this takes time. You don't just masturbate in private, but for the world to see on Xtube. How is masturbation connected to exhibition for you? Masturbation is no longer necessarily the lonely endeavor it might have once been. Masturbators love to share their bate experience. But I grappled long and hard with whether I had the balls to post those videos of me masturbating onto Xtube. But if I wanted to write about dismantling shame around sexuality, I felt I needed to put my money where my mouth was. In the song “Justify My Love,” Madonna sings a line that goes “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” If I felt too ashamed to reveal my own, how could I expect anyone else to? Masturbation has helped you find a community of fellow bators, and even a bate mentor. That struck me as ironic, that something we consider so individual is actually a point of connecting with other people. How has masturbation helped foster community in your life? Masturbation would seem to be the domain of the solosexual, a seemingly solitary figure. But the heightened masturbatory experiences that men have achieved as solosexuals are largely possible because of the strange combination of privacy and social interaction that the Internet permits. It’s hard to imagine men masturbating daily for three, four or five hours at a stretch without online porn, cam or chat to fuel their descent in what we might call the batehole, that place where you completely lose yourself to the experience and broach another consciousness. There is also something really unique about the community of bators that has formed. On other dating sites, where a man might be trying to get into another man’s pants, there is a competitive element to it, a cat-and-mouse game. But on a site like BateWorld, where each man is just trying to get you to get into your own pants, a camaraderie develops. In the book, you contrast your process of coming out as gay, where people understand and accept you, versus the challenges of coming out as solosexual. Can you elaborate on why it's harder to come out as solosexual? Coming out as a gay man 20 years ago was relatively easy because the culture was already familiar with homosexuality: Oprah was talking about it! But solosexuality is still a rather new term in the sexual vernacular. Even harder is coming out as a sexual being. It might be okay to be gay, but heaven forbid we should openly discuss what we do in the bedroom. I see sexuality as this huge gift that need not be hidden under a bushel, but celebrated. Where there is silence, there is shame. I’m not suggesting we go out and start fucking in the streets, but simply that we can have a discourse about sexuality that affirms us. This is my utopia. You suggest in the book that the online world of masturbation is more inclusive than the gay male dating world, writing, "I have yet to see a profile on BateWorld like I've seen on numerous hook-up sites where the writer proclaims haughtily 'No fats or fems' or 'No Asians.'" Why do you think that is? BateWorld is unique in that it caters to all men, regardless of sexual orientation. The site is a place where men celebrate their sexuality, their manhood, their cocks, regardless of who you are, your orientation, your skin color, your weight. We are a brotherhood of men who simply want to celebrate being horny guys with dicks. Other sites are about getting laid, full stop. Men on BateWorld may indeed hook up, but first and foremost is celebrating manhood. At one point, you write that masturbation can be an art form. What does that mean? I think for many men, a quick wank in the shower before work is all they need. But for true Bators with a capital B, we will take time to set the scene: get the lighting in the room just right, turn on some music to get you in the mood, open up BateWorld and see if there are messages in the inbox, open up a porn site or three. If you’re like me, you’ll pour yourself a drink, adjust the full-length mirror into which you are going to defile yourself in the most horny of ways. Some men create shrines to the phallus, dildos and pictures of the cock that they will orgasm onto. For us, a quick wank in the shower just won’t do. February brings us Valentine's Day; the idea that we should all want to be in a couple is omnipresent. Is this an especially challenging time to be solosexual? Absolutely, yes. Every Hollywood romantic comedy is going to tell us that being coupled is the only answer. The idea of being your own lover would never pass for many. There is also the opposite issue at play: There are men who are likely solosexual and don’t quite understand it, as I didn’t at one time, and are in relationships that aren’t working. Their partners may feel the man pulling away into a world of masturbation and are left hurt, which hurts the man too. Like gay men who marry women out of societal pressure, there are solosexuals in relationships due to the same pressures.

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Published on February 19, 2016 16:00

Stop buying old Bob Dylan albums: “Every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians”

A few years ago Jim Fusilli, the pop music critic at the Wall Street Journal, was at a bar in New York with his wife, and he was finding it difficult not to eavesdrop on a conversation at the next table. A man was telling his date that no one was writing good songs anymore. The music of the ’60s and ’70s had been real and good, but today so-called artists were only interested in frivolity. His date seemed bored by the topic, but it piqued Fusilli’s interest. He’s heard countless similar arguments throughout his career, but chalks it up to what he calls a generational bias. That phrase stuck in his head, to the extent that he began referring to the unadventurous listeners who believe today’s music is only dregs as the Gee-Bees. In early 2012, Fusilli wrote about the Gee-Bees in a column for the Journal and started a website called ReNewMusic.net, devoted to introducing out-of-touch listeners to some of the best new music being made today—from Bon Iver to D’Angelo, Frank Ocean to the Arctic Monkeys, Janelle Monae to St. Germain. And the idea led to his new book, “Catching Up: Connecting with Great 21st Century Music,” which compiles 50 of his columns with short essays on the generational bias that too often passes for deep insight or sturdy critical thinking. “We’re surrounded by people who, despite a narrow perspective, insist the music of their youth is superior to the sounds of any other period,” he writes. “Most people who prefer old music mean no harm and it’s often a pleasure to listen to them talk about their favorite artists of the distant past. But others are bullies who intend to harangue is into submission, as if their bluster can conceal their ignorance. They ignore what seems to me something that’s self-evident: rock and pop today is as good as it’s ever been.” This is an important idea, especially in 2016, when pop music seems like a uniquely apt medium for a range of expression. Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, among others, are addressing African-American identity and police brutality in stirring songs like “Alright” and “Formation.” Adele and Taylor Swift are writing eloquently about female desire, while Sturgill Simpson and Kacey Musgraves are helping to overturn the gloss-country establishment in Nashville. And if guitar rock is your thing, look to Australia, where acts like Courtney Barnett, Royal Headache and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are producing some of the most exciting indie-rock anthems of the decade. The idea that these young artists should be considered alongside the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan might be easily dismissed as another form of generational bias if it came from a millennial or even a Gen-Xer. But Fusilli is a Baby Boomer who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and has been writing about music for most of his life. He has a deep knowledge of pop history and even penned an excellent book on the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” (as part of the 33 1/3 series), but more crucially he possesses a driving curiosity about the new music. That makes “Catching Up” a galvanizing read even for those listeners who can name every jazz artist on “To Pimp a Butterfly” or every sample on Kanye’s “The Life of Pablo.” But Fusilli says he wrote the book for “people who are the opposite of the Gee-Bees—that is, secure in their status and welcoming of new ideas.” What was the reaction when you first wrote about the Gee-Bees? The reaction was really harsh from some people. Over the years I’ve written pieces that got some brief response, but this was really beyond anything I had seen. When you write that kind of story and you get that kind of reaction, you know you’ve struck a nerve. The idea had begun with conversations I would have at parties or in bars or any place where rock wasn’t being consumed at the moment. Some place away from music, but usually with people who knew I was a critic. Inevitably someone would say They don’t make music like they used to, and I would ask, How do you know that? If you’re listening, you know that this is really a wonderful period for music. I did a lot of thinking about it and finally wrote a piece about it for the Journal. The responses typically fell into three camps. One was, “Yes, I know today’s music is great. I love it.” The other, “I don’t care about today’s new music because I only listen to the music of my youth.” I knew there had to be a mass of people in the middle, who would probably be open to new music if they knew more about it. My sense was that these people really would like to know what’s going on. They’re not intentionally ignoring today’s artists, but nobody talks to them about it very much—certainly not the recording industry. How do you mean? I don’t think the industry knows how to market music to grown-ups. When you reach a certain plateau in life and you have family and a career, when you’re involved in your community, you measure things in a different way and your affiliation with pop culture doesn’t matter as much anymore. So music ceases to be a part of your identity. It’s just music. You’re not looking for heroes at a certain stage in life. You’re just looking to hear something that excites and stimulates you. And I don’t know that the industry knows how to talk to those people. I don’t think the industry knows how to hand a grown-up a piece of music and say, This is really good for the following reasons, and none of those reasons has anything to do with clothes or hair or who they’re dating or whatever. It’s easier to sell them another Beatles box set or a new Dylan bootleg. The industry seems to market old music to old people, so to speak. Right. In other words, the industry keeps people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago. You go down a dead end with some people, who say to you, Where’s the new Bob Dylan? Where’s the new Beatles? Well, there is no new Bob Dylan. There is no new Beatles. There is no new Thelonious Monk. There’s no new Duke Ellington. These people and their achievements are beyond the reach of anyone, so maybe it is interesting to empty the vaults and study how they got to be who they are. But for most artists, they had something to say in their own times, and that’s really where it belongs. My feeling is that every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians. They’re thwarting the growth of rock and pop. I understand the grown-ups’ instinct to do that, because it’s easier. It’s a comfortable place. You will be welcome there. But it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things. Maybe this is an unfair example. I don’t know the guy, so I’m not picking on him. But Don Henley put out that album last year, and it got a lot of buzz. Why did it get a lot of buzz? Because he used to be in the Eagles. Anybody who follows Americana and traditional country can tell you that there are 50 better albums than “Cass County.” Totally accessible work, with traditional storytelling, great vocals, great arrangements, absolutely proving that the art of songwriting is still alive. But then there’s Don Henley everywhere. Maybe this is harsh, but maybe the industry thinks it should throw a bone to grown-ups. Rather than saying this is an excellent album by a new artist, they just say, Here’s the new Don Henley. So they’re selling a new chapter in a familiar narrative rather than a new album. Right. A real example I can give is Chris Stapleton. I wrote about him when he was in the Steeldrivers. The second that guy opens his mouth, you know he’s for real. He writes great songs. And he’s about the nicest guy you could imagine. There are no downsides to Chris Stapleton. His album comes out last year, and it’s fantastic. But then what happens? It just sits there. A few months later, he’s on the CMAs with Justin Timberlake and suddenly everybody wants to know who Chris Stapleton is. [Note: Stapleton just performed on Monday’s Grammy Awards after winning best country album, too.] Why was there a gap? Why didn’t grown-ups hear about him when he was in the Steeldrivers? Why didn’t they hear about him when he was with his other bands? Why didn’t they hear about him when “Traveller” first came out? What do you make of Adele, who certainly seems to have crossed over to a much wider—and older—market? I guess the Adele album crossed over into the place where grown-ups live. But every week there are about five or six new albums coming out that would be totally in tune with the kind of music that people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s would enjoy. Let’s be honest. Is the Adele album the best album of 2015? Is it the best album of the month it was released? The week? But it’s the one album that everybody has heard about. That isn’t to suggest that every album should get that level of exposure, but it is possible to get a message to grown-ups. Trust the fans a little more. You wouldn’t believe how many artists you know really well that people have just never heard of. And these are people who are all connected in some way to the culture at large. They can tell you what movies are coming out this Friday. They can tell you what the hot new TV shows are. They probably stream Amazon and binge-watch Netflix. But the new albums coming out… they have no idea. It does seem like music is a medium that is marketed very differently than TV or movies or even books. Music is marketed very conservatively, as though stoking a fear of the new and the innovative. The more you drive down on this, the more you become absolutely convinced that it’s not the consumer. People are hungry for art, and they’re not afraid of what’s new. I’m a fan of old television programs, so I’m always watching old shows on YouTube. So when I step out of that world and watch a new television show with new techniques and new modes of storytelling, I find it to be really invigorating. In the 1960s it would have taken 15 minutes to get certain information across, and today you can reveal character in new ways. You don’t hear anybody complaining about that. If people were exposed to new music, I think we could trust them to say, I don’t like that. It doesn’t work for me. Or, That’s a really interesting way to do a rock song. I’m a big believer that open-minded people can be trusted to make good decisions when it comes to music. I wish I was as optimistic as you are, but I keep hearing variations of the same tired argument—that electronic music is somehow inauthentic, that AutoTune renders music illegitimate, that white guys playing blues-derived licks on guitars is the most honest music possible. I don’t think it’s the critic’s job to disabuse people of their fantasies, but the truth is, if they only knew how records are made… It’s not like the Beatles woke up one morning, went into the studio, cut “Norwegian Wood,” then went to lunch. It’s never as linear as it sounds. Studio musicians came in on some of the greatest albums of the ’60s and ’70s and overdubbed parts in secret. Songs were repaired with the latest technology back then, just as songs are now repaired with the latest technology we have today. Technology has always been applied in its own time when it was necessary. And you know as well as I do that many electronic artists are very competent musicians. They could sit down at a piano and play that tune for you. They’re not just sitting down and pressing buttons to see what happens. I remember talking to Deadmau5 a few years ago, and I said to him, I know you play piano. And he said, Yeah but don’t tell anybody. He said the idea that electronic artists are producers makes the fans feel closer to them, because there’s a sense that they could do it, too. Now that attitude has changed. Lots of electronic artists talk about their capabilities as traditional instrumentalists. So if the idea of authenticity is keeping grown-ups from listening to new music, they’re going to be very disappointed if they ever found out how their favorite albums were made. If you listen to “Electric Ladyland,” you don’t complain that Jimi Hendrix was a master of the studio. He and Eddie Kramer were making soundscapes that still sound great today. He didn’t just walk in, plug in, and get that sound. Today, he could do all that stuff by himself in his bedroom. Can you imagine him with the kind of equipment that’s available today? Given his penchant for experimentation? Now, can you imagine him saying, I don’t want to do that because it’s not authentic? You argue that the industry is not marketing to grown-ups. Do you feel that is part of your duty as a critic? I do, but I also no longer believe in the gatekeeper concept. A few months ago I had a piece on Babyface. I went out to meet with him and had a very lovely meeting. I studied his history to make sure I had it. By the time the piece ran, his album had been up on Spotify for five days. I don’t think it’s reasonable anymore to think you could coerce people into following what you think, especially if it’s in conflict with their own tastes. I think our job now is to guide or accompany people toward music we think is worthy of their time and hopefully their money. We sit at the table together now, the critic and the fans. I’m 62 years old. Back when I first started doing concert reviews, only the people [who were there] would know if what I wrote was an accurate reflection of the experience. Now, by the time people get home, the show is up on YouTube, the playlist is up, opinions have already formed. So even though I may have a platform, I’m just another voice. What I can offer as a critic is reliability and consistency, which translates into trust. Some people claim that increased accessibility and acceleration of opinion are making the music critic redundant, but really it’s just changing the critic’s responsibilities. Right. When I started at the “Wall Street Journal,” we were reluctant even to accept tickets to concerts. The only albums we would accept were the ones we intended to review. We didn’t want to have a relationship with the industry that went beyond what the customer might have. It sounds strange, but many times I bought a ticket to the show I reviewed. If it was at Madison Square Garden, I might be up all the way in the last row. But that was great, because that was what the fan was experiencing. My perspective was exactly the same as the fan’s, and I’ve never really forgotten that. Today, when I go to a festival, okay, I admit I might get a good parking spot. But I don’t hang out backstage. I want to have the same experience as the listener does. I just want to be part of the crowd. Because I’ve been doing it for so long, I think my body of work shows a consistent perspective on what makes music good. I hope that would make someone listen to me, but I’m just as likely to listen to them. Any critic who isn’t doing that is terribly mistaken. There seem to be a lot of music critics whose work reads like it was written for other music critics. It creates an echo chamber effect that I think alienates a general reader who might just want to discover an album or a new approach to an old one. I respect a lot of critics, but I never read anybody until I’ve written my column. If I pick up a newspaper or I’m on the Internet and I see somebody has written about an artist that I’m writing about, I don’t read it. I only read it after the fact. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I’ll read something and wonder why it’s important. Is it really germane to the relationship between the listener and the work. It strikes me as critical showboating. We all have access, but we have access because we’re doing a story. We’re not pals with the artists. Sometimes I’ll read critics who’ll go meet an artist in their homes, and they report as if they’re just hanging out. You know as well as I do that that’s not it at all. You’re not friends with the artist, and that idea deceives the reader. It’s really troublesome, because what are you doing? You’re not aligning with the reader. You’re trying to make people think you’re a rock star. But you’re not. One of the points of “Catching Up” that I didn’t realize needed to be made until I got several drafts into it—then I realized that it was crucial—is that if you grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, the recording industry completely dominated what you were listening to. They gave you very few tracks, if you listened to AM radio. If you listened to FM radio, they gave you a little bit more. And most of the music came from England or the U.S. Occasionally some track from a non-Anglo country would slip in, but by and large there wasn’t much diversity. When I was growing up, it was very rare to see an integrated band, and you never saw a woman in a dominant position in the band, unless they were the singer. You never saw a woman bass player, and you rarely saw a band where the woman was clearly running things. It was such a narrow world. Exactly. You had fewer radio stations, fewer means of discovery, fewer options. And now, of course, anything goes. If you want to listen to a radio station in Mali, no problem. If you want to listen to a band from Iceland, no problem. You can probably listen to a radio station in Mali that plays only bands from Iceland. So how’s a music fan who grew up in a very controlled environment expected to work their way through the new system? When you can listen to anything you want any time you want, it must seem like a remarkable and incredibly daunting thing. Back in the day your local AM station had a 10-song playlist, and all of those songs came from the same places. And now what do you have? Everything. And nobody has to give you permission to listen to it. There are no rules. You’ve gone from solitary confinement to the world’s largest oasis. It has to be intimidating. Who’s going to help somebody sift through all that? Is it going to be the guy who says, I was hanging out with Kendrick Lamar, we’re riding around in his Lamborghini and blah blah blah. Or, is it going to be somebody who says, You should try this. Here’s a guy who’s putting a very penetrating and revealing narrative to free jazz. Once you step into this young man’s head, you will be changed. That’s the overarching goal I’m trying to reach both in the book and my Journal columns: to say to grown-ups, You don’t know what you’re missing. Come along. You’ll have a great time, and your life will be enriched.A few years ago Jim Fusilli, the pop music critic at the Wall Street Journal, was at a bar in New York with his wife, and he was finding it difficult not to eavesdrop on a conversation at the next table. A man was telling his date that no one was writing good songs anymore. The music of the ’60s and ’70s had been real and good, but today so-called artists were only interested in frivolity. His date seemed bored by the topic, but it piqued Fusilli’s interest. He’s heard countless similar arguments throughout his career, but chalks it up to what he calls a generational bias. That phrase stuck in his head, to the extent that he began referring to the unadventurous listeners who believe today’s music is only dregs as the Gee-Bees. In early 2012, Fusilli wrote about the Gee-Bees in a column for the Journal and started a website called ReNewMusic.net, devoted to introducing out-of-touch listeners to some of the best new music being made today—from Bon Iver to D’Angelo, Frank Ocean to the Arctic Monkeys, Janelle Monae to St. Germain. And the idea led to his new book, “Catching Up: Connecting with Great 21st Century Music,” which compiles 50 of his columns with short essays on the generational bias that too often passes for deep insight or sturdy critical thinking. “We’re surrounded by people who, despite a narrow perspective, insist the music of their youth is superior to the sounds of any other period,” he writes. “Most people who prefer old music mean no harm and it’s often a pleasure to listen to them talk about their favorite artists of the distant past. But others are bullies who intend to harangue is into submission, as if their bluster can conceal their ignorance. They ignore what seems to me something that’s self-evident: rock and pop today is as good as it’s ever been.” This is an important idea, especially in 2016, when pop music seems like a uniquely apt medium for a range of expression. Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, among others, are addressing African-American identity and police brutality in stirring songs like “Alright” and “Formation.” Adele and Taylor Swift are writing eloquently about female desire, while Sturgill Simpson and Kacey Musgraves are helping to overturn the gloss-country establishment in Nashville. And if guitar rock is your thing, look to Australia, where acts like Courtney Barnett, Royal Headache and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are producing some of the most exciting indie-rock anthems of the decade. The idea that these young artists should be considered alongside the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan might be easily dismissed as another form of generational bias if it came from a millennial or even a Gen-Xer. But Fusilli is a Baby Boomer who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and has been writing about music for most of his life. He has a deep knowledge of pop history and even penned an excellent book on the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” (as part of the 33 1/3 series), but more crucially he possesses a driving curiosity about the new music. That makes “Catching Up” a galvanizing read even for those listeners who can name every jazz artist on “To Pimp a Butterfly” or every sample on Kanye’s “The Life of Pablo.” But Fusilli says he wrote the book for “people who are the opposite of the Gee-Bees—that is, secure in their status and welcoming of new ideas.” What was the reaction when you first wrote about the Gee-Bees? The reaction was really harsh from some people. Over the years I’ve written pieces that got some brief response, but this was really beyond anything I had seen. When you write that kind of story and you get that kind of reaction, you know you’ve struck a nerve. The idea had begun with conversations I would have at parties or in bars or any place where rock wasn’t being consumed at the moment. Some place away from music, but usually with people who knew I was a critic. Inevitably someone would say They don’t make music like they used to, and I would ask, How do you know that? If you’re listening, you know that this is really a wonderful period for music. I did a lot of thinking about it and finally wrote a piece about it for the Journal. The responses typically fell into three camps. One was, “Yes, I know today’s music is great. I love it.” The other, “I don’t care about today’s new music because I only listen to the music of my youth.” I knew there had to be a mass of people in the middle, who would probably be open to new music if they knew more about it. My sense was that these people really would like to know what’s going on. They’re not intentionally ignoring today’s artists, but nobody talks to them about it very much—certainly not the recording industry. How do you mean? I don’t think the industry knows how to market music to grown-ups. When you reach a certain plateau in life and you have family and a career, when you’re involved in your community, you measure things in a different way and your affiliation with pop culture doesn’t matter as much anymore. So music ceases to be a part of your identity. It’s just music. You’re not looking for heroes at a certain stage in life. You’re just looking to hear something that excites and stimulates you. And I don’t know that the industry knows how to talk to those people. I don’t think the industry knows how to hand a grown-up a piece of music and say, This is really good for the following reasons, and none of those reasons has anything to do with clothes or hair or who they’re dating or whatever. It’s easier to sell them another Beatles box set or a new Dylan bootleg. The industry seems to market old music to old people, so to speak. Right. In other words, the industry keeps people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago. You go down a dead end with some people, who say to you, Where’s the new Bob Dylan? Where’s the new Beatles? Well, there is no new Bob Dylan. There is no new Beatles. There is no new Thelonious Monk. There’s no new Duke Ellington. These people and their achievements are beyond the reach of anyone, so maybe it is interesting to empty the vaults and study how they got to be who they are. But for most artists, they had something to say in their own times, and that’s really where it belongs. My feeling is that every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians. They’re thwarting the growth of rock and pop. I understand the grown-ups’ instinct to do that, because it’s easier. It’s a comfortable place. You will be welcome there. But it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things. Maybe this is an unfair example. I don’t know the guy, so I’m not picking on him. But Don Henley put out that album last year, and it got a lot of buzz. Why did it get a lot of buzz? Because he used to be in the Eagles. Anybody who follows Americana and traditional country can tell you that there are 50 better albums than “Cass County.” Totally accessible work, with traditional storytelling, great vocals, great arrangements, absolutely proving that the art of songwriting is still alive. But then there’s Don Henley everywhere. Maybe this is harsh, but maybe the industry thinks it should throw a bone to grown-ups. Rather than saying this is an excellent album by a new artist, they just say, Here’s the new Don Henley. So they’re selling a new chapter in a familiar narrative rather than a new album. Right. A real example I can give is Chris Stapleton. I wrote about him when he was in the Steeldrivers. The second that guy opens his mouth, you know he’s for real. He writes great songs. And he’s about the nicest guy you could imagine. There are no downsides to Chris Stapleton. His album comes out last year, and it’s fantastic. But then what happens? It just sits there. A few months later, he’s on the CMAs with Justin Timberlake and suddenly everybody wants to know who Chris Stapleton is. [Note: Stapleton just performed on Monday’s Grammy Awards after winning best country album, too.] Why was there a gap? Why didn’t grown-ups hear about him when he was in the Steeldrivers? Why didn’t they hear about him when he was with his other bands? Why didn’t they hear about him when “Traveller” first came out? What do you make of Adele, who certainly seems to have crossed over to a much wider—and older—market? I guess the Adele album crossed over into the place where grown-ups live. But every week there are about five or six new albums coming out that would be totally in tune with the kind of music that people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s would enjoy. Let’s be honest. Is the Adele album the best album of 2015? Is it the best album of the month it was released? The week? But it’s the one album that everybody has heard about. That isn’t to suggest that every album should get that level of exposure, but it is possible to get a message to grown-ups. Trust the fans a little more. You wouldn’t believe how many artists you know really well that people have just never heard of. And these are people who are all connected in some way to the culture at large. They can tell you what movies are coming out this Friday. They can tell you what the hot new TV shows are. They probably stream Amazon and binge-watch Netflix. But the new albums coming out… they have no idea. It does seem like music is a medium that is marketed very differently than TV or movies or even books. Music is marketed very conservatively, as though stoking a fear of the new and the innovative. The more you drive down on this, the more you become absolutely convinced that it’s not the consumer. People are hungry for art, and they’re not afraid of what’s new. I’m a fan of old television programs, so I’m always watching old shows on YouTube. So when I step out of that world and watch a new television show with new techniques and new modes of storytelling, I find it to be really invigorating. In the 1960s it would have taken 15 minutes to get certain information across, and today you can reveal character in new ways. You don’t hear anybody complaining about that. If people were exposed to new music, I think we could trust them to say, I don’t like that. It doesn’t work for me. Or, That’s a really interesting way to do a rock song. I’m a big believer that open-minded people can be trusted to make good decisions when it comes to music. I wish I was as optimistic as you are, but I keep hearing variations of the same tired argument—that electronic music is somehow inauthentic, that AutoTune renders music illegitimate, that white guys playing blues-derived licks on guitars is the most honest music possible. I don’t think it’s the critic’s job to disabuse people of their fantasies, but the truth is, if they only knew how records are made… It’s not like the Beatles woke up one morning, went into the studio, cut “Norwegian Wood,” then went to lunch. It’s never as linear as it sounds. Studio musicians came in on some of the greatest albums of the ’60s and ’70s and overdubbed parts in secret. Songs were repaired with the latest technology back then, just as songs are now repaired with the latest technology we have today. Technology has always been applied in its own time when it was necessary. And you know as well as I do that many electronic artists are very competent musicians. They could sit down at a piano and play that tune for you. They’re not just sitting down and pressing buttons to see what happens. I remember talking to Deadmau5 a few years ago, and I said to him, I know you play piano. And he said, Yeah but don’t tell anybody. He said the idea that electronic artists are producers makes the fans feel closer to them, because there’s a sense that they could do it, too. Now that attitude has changed. Lots of electronic artists talk about their capabilities as traditional instrumentalists. So if the idea of authenticity is keeping grown-ups from listening to new music, they’re going to be very disappointed if they ever found out how their favorite albums were made. If you listen to “Electric Ladyland,” you don’t complain that Jimi Hendrix was a master of the studio. He and Eddie Kramer were making soundscapes that still sound great today. He didn’t just walk in, plug in, and get that sound. Today, he could do all that stuff by himself in his bedroom. Can you imagine him with the kind of equipment that’s available today? Given his penchant for experimentation? Now, can you imagine him saying, I don’t want to do that because it’s not authentic? You argue that the industry is not marketing to grown-ups. Do you feel that is part of your duty as a critic? I do, but I also no longer believe in the gatekeeper concept. A few months ago I had a piece on Babyface. I went out to meet with him and had a very lovely meeting. I studied his history to make sure I had it. By the time the piece ran, his album had been up on Spotify for five days. I don’t think it’s reasonable anymore to think you could coerce people into following what you think, especially if it’s in conflict with their own tastes. I think our job now is to guide or accompany people toward music we think is worthy of their time and hopefully their money. We sit at the table together now, the critic and the fans. I’m 62 years old. Back when I first started doing concert reviews, only the people [who were there] would know if what I wrote was an accurate reflection of the experience. Now, by the time people get home, the show is up on YouTube, the playlist is up, opinions have already formed. So even though I may have a platform, I’m just another voice. What I can offer as a critic is reliability and consistency, which translates into trust. Some people claim that increased accessibility and acceleration of opinion are making the music critic redundant, but really it’s just changing the critic’s responsibilities. Right. When I started at the “Wall Street Journal,” we were reluctant even to accept tickets to concerts. The only albums we would accept were the ones we intended to review. We didn’t want to have a relationship with the industry that went beyond what the customer might have. It sounds strange, but many times I bought a ticket to the show I reviewed. If it was at Madison Square Garden, I might be up all the way in the last row. But that was great, because that was what the fan was experiencing. My perspective was exactly the same as the fan’s, and I’ve never really forgotten that. Today, when I go to a festival, okay, I admit I might get a good parking spot. But I don’t hang out backstage. I want to have the same experience as the listener does. I just want to be part of the crowd. Because I’ve been doing it for so long, I think my body of work shows a consistent perspective on what makes music good. I hope that would make someone listen to me, but I’m just as likely to listen to them. Any critic who isn’t doing that is terribly mistaken. There seem to be a lot of music critics whose work reads like it was written for other music critics. It creates an echo chamber effect that I think alienates a general reader who might just want to discover an album or a new approach to an old one. I respect a lot of critics, but I never read anybody until I’ve written my column. If I pick up a newspaper or I’m on the Internet and I see somebody has written about an artist that I’m writing about, I don’t read it. I only read it after the fact. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I’ll read something and wonder why it’s important. Is it really germane to the relationship between the listener and the work. It strikes me as critical showboating. We all have access, but we have access because we’re doing a story. We’re not pals with the artists. Sometimes I’ll read critics who’ll go meet an artist in their homes, and they report as if they’re just hanging out. You know as well as I do that that’s not it at all. You’re not friends with the artist, and that idea deceives the reader. It’s really troublesome, because what are you doing? You’re not aligning with the reader. You’re trying to make people think you’re a rock star. But you’re not. One of the points of “Catching Up” that I didn’t realize needed to be made until I got several drafts into it—then I realized that it was crucial—is that if you grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, the recording industry completely dominated what you were listening to. They gave you very few tracks, if you listened to AM radio. If you listened to FM radio, they gave you a little bit more. And most of the music came from England or the U.S. Occasionally some track from a non-Anglo country would slip in, but by and large there wasn’t much diversity. When I was growing up, it was very rare to see an integrated band, and you never saw a woman in a dominant position in the band, unless they were the singer. You never saw a woman bass player, and you rarely saw a band where the woman was clearly running things. It was such a narrow world. Exactly. You had fewer radio stations, fewer means of discovery, fewer options. And now, of course, anything goes. If you want to listen to a radio station in Mali, no problem. If you want to listen to a band from Iceland, no problem. You can probably listen to a radio station in Mali that plays only bands from Iceland. So how’s a music fan who grew up in a very controlled environment expected to work their way through the new system? When you can listen to anything you want any time you want, it must seem like a remarkable and incredibly daunting thing. Back in the day your local AM station had a 10-song playlist, and all of those songs came from the same places. And now what do you have? Everything. And nobody has to give you permission to listen to it. There are no rules. You’ve gone from solitary confinement to the world’s largest oasis. It has to be intimidating. Who’s going to help somebody sift through all that? Is it going to be the guy who says, I was hanging out with Kendrick Lamar, we’re riding around in his Lamborghini and blah blah blah. Or, is it going to be somebody who says, You should try this. Here’s a guy who’s putting a very penetrating and revealing narrative to free jazz. Once you step into this young man’s head, you will be changed. That’s the overarching goal I’m trying to reach both in the book and my Journal columns: to say to grown-ups, You don’t know what you’re missing. Come along. You’ll have a great time, and your life will be enriched.

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Published on February 19, 2016 16:00

Save yourself! Leave Los Angeles now: TV’s prestige comedies say living in the City of Angels will destroy you

“Love” is theoretically supposed to be funny. The edgy comedy from Netflix, which debuted Friday morning, comes from prolific producer Judd Apatow, comedian Paul Rust, and “Girls” writer Lesley Arfin (best known for this idiotic tweet). Through dating mishaps and work indignities, the two leads, Gus (Paul Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) meet each other and then do their best to sabotage their initial chemistry, leaning hard on the old vices that got them this far. The third episode of “Love,” following the initial (stoned) meet-cute, is when the show starts to reveal its tone, and it is breathtakingly, almost repulsively dark. Mickey’s boss starts flirting with her, and Mickey—through some combination of fear and delusion—decides to handle it by manipulating him into having sex with her so that he can’t fire her. She has no romantic or sexual interest in him; it’s purely a cagey move for survival. It is a horrifying scene to watch, both because it’s an awful thing to have to do and because it turns out to have been at least partly in Mickey’s head. He yells at her and then leaves. The show never revisits the tragedy of that moment. Meanwhile, over at the TV set where Gus works—as the unglamorous tutor for the bored child actors—an attempt to push a pupil into diligence results in the 12-year-old girl breaking down into tears. “I’m under so much pressure right now. I don’t even want to work here. I hate this place so much. Everyone is old! … I want to go to a real school with real friends! You’re my best friend! You’re my best friend.” Gus has the opportunity to remove the actor, whimsically named Arya (Iris Apatow), from the set for 30 days. But, as he argues, if he makes the showrunner unhappy, she’ll never read his spec script. So instead of doing anything remotely resembling the “right” thing, he fabricates Arya’s responses to a standardized test, effectively keeping her in the prison of life on set for his own self-interest. In the landscape of young, hip, and edgy comedies—which are cropping up in droves on new networks Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and FXX, as well as old standbys like Showtime and HBO—a certain deep-seated bleakness toward life has become de rigueur. I hesitate to call this crop of comedies “indie,” because they are financed by some of the biggest budgets in television; a better term is prestige comedy, the counterpart to prestige drama. These have existed for some time, in the form of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO and “Weeds” on Showtime, and they have always tended toward the dark and deeply ironic, drawing from the much more cynical British tradition of comedy and catering to a smaller but socioeconomically powerful demographic. But what’s more interesting—perhaps through mere correlation, perhaps not—is that these prestige comedies are making the case for Los Angeles to be a pretty awful place. So much of television’s existential despair today is centered on the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, home of the film and television industry, 4 million people, gridlocked traffic and the Kardashian clan. Meta-commentary on Hollywood’s grind is rife, but many of these shows also feature Los Angeles in rich, multifaceted ways—through sad, bad, or messed-up people. I’m not sure if I actually believe that living in Los Angeles corrupts your soul and makes you want to die—the Mexican food alone is worth living for—but it’s rather surprising how easy it is to conclude that based solely on watching some of the latest comedies to flood the market. These do not construe a love letter to the City of Angels; instead it’s more like an emo Livejournal post, with no comments. You can see it in the geographical divide within the four comedy debuts or season premieres this past week: “Love,” “Togetherness,” “Girls” and “Broad City.” Just as “Girls” and “Broad City” are emphatically New York City shows—that other media metropolis—“Love” and “Togetherness” are quintessentially Angeleno. In both "Togetherness" and "Love," half of the lead cast works in “the industry”—Brett (Mark Duplass) and Alex (Steve Zissis) in “Togetherness,” Gus in “Love.” All three suffer from frustrated ambition and deep-seated cynicism about their creative process. In a nod to the city’s highway culture, the type of car a character has is made to be significant. (There are a lot of Priuses.) And the eternal summer of Southern California tinges both sets of characters’ existential angst with melancholy irony; in the pilot of “Togetherness,” Brett faces a beautiful Pacific Ocean view and finds himself dissatisfied, while in the second episode of “Love,” Mickey and Gus climb onto the hood of her car and eat fast food while high, in an expression of high-school rebellion and bone-deep boredom. Meanwhile, “Broad City” is appealing precisely for its unstoppable buoyancy; and though “Girls” has had its share of incredibly dark moments—“On All Fours” comes to mind—its hallmark is that the show’s deluded characters at least believe themselves to be happy, even if they clearly aren’t. Looking at the other prestige comedies of the past few years, the trend becomes more and more pronounced. Some of New York City’s newer comedies currently include “Master of None,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Inside Amy Schumer,” along with veterans “Louie” and “Archer.” With the exception of “Louie,” all are characterized with a surprising amount of levity, and I’d argue that even “Louie” is less depressive than ironic. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, we have “BoJack Horseman,” “You’re the Worst,” “Casual,” “The Comeback,” “Transparent,” “House Of Lies,” and “Review.” At minimum, all are pretty dark; several deal directly with addiction, depression and loss. Comedy Central’s “Review,” for example, features a man dismantling his life because of an inescapable contract with a television production studio in which he is compelled to “review” real-life instances others would shy away from. This has included divorce, racism and being buried alive. “Casual,” on Hulu, twines a story of lost promise and childhood trauma with a contemporary story of post-divorce dating and a strange undercurrent of incest. “The Comeback” has a middle-aged woman navigating Hollywood in a series of humiliating pitfalls; “You’re the Worst” put one of its lead characters through paralyzing depression this season; “BoJack Horseman's" lead character is a depressed alcoholic. And season two of “Transparent” is about the Holocaust. The cheerfully upbeat “Arrested Development,” one of the most brilliant L.A. comedies from just a decade ago, feels like it is from a different universe. These dark prestige comedies are altogether some of the best television on the air at present, often both funny and horrific in the same terrible swoop. But damn, what is happening in Los Angeles? The filter through which the city is viewed is often through habitual, unglamorous substance abuse or warping mental illness. “Love” features a terrible date at Hollywood’s infamous Magic Castle and a long drug trip on the L.A. subway; neither comes off too well. In the first episode, Mickey wanders into a religious society preaching peace, love and tithing—a little more faux-Eastern than Scientology—while high on a couple of Ambien. “Togetherness” is so disenchanted with its neighborhood’s public school options that the lead characters all band together to start a charter school; and by the end of the first season, nearly every character has been driven from the city to solve their problems, whether that is Sacramento or New Orleans. In the second, Michelle (Melanie Lynskey) ends up sparring with entitled mansion-owning moms and Tina (Amanda Peet) learns to navigate the metaphorical cage-fight that is parenting in the greater Los Angeles area—struggling to find a separate peace in a mass of other SUV drivers, all drinking Starbucks coffee or sucking on marijuana lollipops. And seemingly every other show has a subplot about amateur comedy, which is apparently a blight on the city. Ironically, I suppose, what’s fantastic about “Togetherness,” written and directed by the Duplass brothers, is how beautiful and unique Los Angeles is filtered through their lens. The song “Black and Gold” is featured prominently at the end of this second season’s episode five, and though this isn’t explicit in the show, to my mind the colors refer to not the stars in the sky, as the lyrics read, but the golden glow of pairs of headlights weaving their way down darkened freeways. It’s beautiful; it’s also melancholy, a narrative of isolation despite the bright lights. And in fits and starts, this type of beauty is visible throughout all of these dark-as-night comedies; “BoJack Horseman's" production designer, Lisa Hanawalt, creates a gorgeous, vividly colored “Hollywoo” for the animated show, while “You’re the Worst's" “Sunday Funday” brings the viewer through a carnival of Los Angeles’ many quirky attractions, even if most of the characters can barely bring themselves to enjoy them. (This season’s Sunday Funday episode put Lindsay (Kether Donohue) naked and yelled-at in a pit in a haunted house, being emotionally devastated while a few random visitors debated the golden age of television. Fun for the audience, but not so pleasant for her.) “Transparent” is a transportingly beautiful show, making the most of California’s golden light and stretches of ocean. And the houses of these series are gorgeous, making the best of Los Angeles’ propensity for glittering vistas and multi-tiered mansions. What does it all mean for Los Angeles? As a New Yorker, I’m tempted to take the moral or cultural high ground; but as someone who also loves Los Angeles, I’m compelled to question further. In 2012, my former colleague Todd VanDerWerff (who is a proud Angeleno) dubbed that year “the year of the half-hour TV show,” noting the proliferation of tonally complex half-hour shows such as “Girls,” “Enlightened, “Louie,” “Veep” and even “Archer,” which were breaking new ground in the shorter format. These shows are technically comedies, in the tradition of television categorization, but VanDerWerff noted a lot of range in what these shows were producing. There’s been so much innovation in television, most of it based in Los Angeles, that this proliferation of very dark comedies might just be the next step in evolution for these genre-bending half-hour shows. After all, more TV shows means more opportunity for culty, niche comedians, who are more willing or more likely to push the envelope of what is safe or expected humor. Many comedians decamp from New York to Los Angeles to work in TV and film, bringing their own fresh perspectives (while others refuse to make the move). “Love” pushes the envelope too much for me, but “Togetherness,” on the other hand, doesn’t quite push it enough; there is something humanizing about watching the culture of this city extract its pound of flesh from the characters, even as they struggle to find the beauty and meaning that appears to flourish in abundance around them. Or, Los Angeles destroys people. You know. One of those.

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Published on February 19, 2016 15:59

Bully victim turned fashion designer: This 10-year-old is taking the world by storm with her clothing line

Egypt Ufele, a ten-year-old from Queens, is turning her negative experience with bullying into something positive. As a young fashion designer, Ufele is inspiring young people all around the world to love themselves inside and out. Her clothing line ChubbiiLine is turning heads in the fashion world and also impacting younger kids in a huge way. Take a look.Egypt Ufele, a ten-year-old from Queens, is turning her negative experience with bullying into something positive. As a young fashion designer, Ufele is inspiring young people all around the world to love themselves inside and out. Her clothing line ChubbiiLine is turning heads in the fashion world and also impacting younger kids in a huge way. Take a look.

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Published on February 19, 2016 13:04

After taking on the Pope, Donald Trump calls for a boycott of Apple

As the closing South Carolina polls show Donald Trump's dominant lead collapsing, the blustery billionaire finds himself, once again, chasing the headlines, this time calling for a boycott of Apple one day before the South Carolina primary and one day after getting into a public spat with Pope Francis. "We have to open it up,” the Republican frontrunner said this week, calling on the technology giant to follow a court order to design software to hack into the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. “To think that Apple won't allow us to get into her cell phone -- who do they think they are?” Trump said on "Fox and Friends" Thursday morning. After being sidetracked by his astonishing back-and-forth with the leader of the Catholic church Thursday afternoon, Trump got back to slamming America's most beloved company. Making his criticism of Apple more personal, Trump went after CEO Tim Cook during a campaign stop in South Carolina where he argued that Cook was defying the government's order not out of a concern for privacy but out of a desire to "show how liberal he is." "Boycott Apple until such time as they give that information, Trump told the crowd. "How about that?" No word yet on wether Trump plans to give up his own Apple iPhone from which he is fond of tweeting:

BREAKING: Trump calls for Apple boycott until $AAPL turns over info requested by FBI in the San Bernardino case.https://t.co/NBek87Ob6J
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) February 19, 2016

Vatican Walls Loom Over Pope Vs Trump Controversy

BREAKING: Trump calls for Apple boycott until $AAPL turns over info requested by FBI in the San Bernardino case.https://t.co/NBek87Ob6J
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) February 19, 2016

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Published on February 19, 2016 12:58

Police unions across the country are boycotting Beyoncé

Nearly two weeks after taking the stage during the half-time of Super Bowl 50, Beyoncé is still receiving flack for her homage to the Black Panthers from police groups across the country who claim the superstar's new hit "Formation" is an anti-police ode. What started off as ridiculous, if not entirely predictable, faux outrage expressed by right-wing media outlets like Fox News (guest and Former New York City mayor Rudy Guilianni ripped Beyoncé's performance as an "outrageous attack on police") and The Blaze (a host compared the Black Panthers to the KKK), was quickly picked up by police officer groups and unions across the country this week. Although a larger, highly publicized effort to boycott the NFL in New York City the day tickets for Beyonce's world tour went on sale was a bust this week (only three people bothered to show up), police groups have seen their complaints amplified as some officers reportedly refuse to provide police protection for the global superstar's tour, while others blame her "Formation" video for a spike in violence against cops. The music video for "Formation" features provocative images referencing Hurricane Katrina and the Black Lives Matter movement and her Super Bowl back-up dancers wore afros and black berets: Miami As Miami New Times reports, the Miami Police union president is calling for law enforcement officers to boycott the kickoff date to her forthcoming Formation World Tour in the city on April 27 at Marlins Park. President of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, Javier Ortiz, accused the singer of using her Super Bowl performance "to divide Americans by promoting the Black Panthers and her anti-police message." Ortiz admitted that he did not watch the half-time show "out of respect for our profession," but he did "mistakenly" watch and took issue with the singer's "Formation" video. Ortiz particularly complained of the artistic depiction of police in riot gear with their hands up while a young black boy in a hoodie dances in front. "Hands up, don't shoot was built on a lie," Ortiz insisted, challenging Beyoncé to read the Justice Department report on Michael Brown's shooting. The union represents about 11,000 officers and was one of several police unions across the country that called for a boycott of Oscar-winning Quentin Tarantino's latest film, "Hateful Eight," after he dared to speak out against police brutality last fall. Tampa In Tampa, after Union President Vincent Gericitano said that several officers were so upset by Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance that the department had a shortage of officers to work the singer's stop in the city, the Department was forced to tweet that their officers had actually been in "formation" for days: https://twitter.com/TampaPD/status/70... Tampa PBA eventually said it has no plans to boycott Beyonce as a union even if individual officers decide to. New York City The New York Police Department's Sergeants Benevolent Association was quick to jump aboard the Beyoncé boycott bandwagon, however. President Ed Mullins said that "law enforcement across the country has to make a statement that we're not bad guys and she's got to stop portraying us as bad guys," announcing plans to boycott her June performances. Houston Houston Police Officers' Union president Ray Hunt told CNN that the union is allowing its officers to decide if they would like to boycott Beyoncé's, a Houston native, tour or not on their own. Hunt said that he was unsure of the message in the "Formation" video an hoped Beyoncé would explain further. Tennessee A Tennessee sheriff suggested this week that an alleged rise in violence against police officers is directly related to Beyoncé's controversial Super Bowl half-time performance and new music video. On Monday, there were reports of eight shots fired outside the home of Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold. During a news conference on Tuesday, Arnold floated the possibility that Beyoncé's performance may have instigated the shooter. "With everything that's happened since the Super Bowl, and with law enforcement as a whole. I think we've lost five to seven officers, five deputies, sheriffs since the Super Bowl," Arnold told reporters. "Here's another target on law enforcement." When pressed to clarify what he meant by his reference to the Super Bowl, Arnold replied: "Well you have Beyoncé's video and how that's kind of bled over into other things it seems like about law enforcement." Milwaukee Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark, a frequent Fox News regular, denounced the half-time show in an interview with the Fox Business Network, comparing the Black Panthers to the KKK. "Would it be acceptable if a white band came out in hoods and white sheets in the same sort of fashion?" he asked. "We would be appalled and outraged. The Black Panthers are a subversive hate group in America. I think she could have done a better job." Detroit A Detroit police sergeant's Facebook post following suit sparked so much outraged the Detroit police were forced to launch an internal investigation. The post read: "If the dance troupe at the top is okay for this year's half-time show, then the one at a bottom should be okay for next year, right?" Pictures comparing Beyonce's back up dancers to the Ku Klux Klan followed beneath, according to WJBK. The Detroit police sergeant later retracted his post and replaced it with an apology, according to local news reports. And according to the Washington Examiner, Members of the National Sheriffs’ Association meeting in Washington, D.C. collectively turned their backs during the halftime performance to protest Beyoncé. The group’s president, Sheriff Danny Glick of Laramie County, Wyoming, “called on the NFL to choose less controversial half time entertainment in the future.” “At this point, I think the NFL had a serious error in judgment,” National Sheriffs’ Association Executive Director Jonathan Thompson told The Washington Post Bill Johnson, Executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said Friday that "We fully support individual officers' and their unions' call for the boycott. Why would any group of working men and women support a rich celebrity who openly glorifies murderers? Why would anybody?" The National Sheriffs' Association eventually amplified the baseless accusations of sheriffs across the country, blaming Beyonce's "anti-police entertainment" for "inciting bad behavior”:

The Washington Post wrote an article about how Beyoncé Super Bowl show — watched by nearly 120 million Americans —... Posted by National Sheriffs' Association on Thursday, February 18, 2016

The Washington Post wrote an article about how Beyoncé Super Bowl show — watched by nearly 120 million Americans —... Posted by National Sheriffs' Association on Thursday, February 18, 2016