amiscellany

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“[…] it is better to be happy / for a moment / and be burned up with beauty / than to live a long time / and be bored all the while […]”

Don Marquis, “The lesson of the moth”, en Archy & Mehitabel, Faber, Londres, 1958, pp. 87-88.

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Last summer, I went to dinner at Guillaume’s, and he mentioned a restaurant, an all-you-can-eat buffet not far from his home town in the South of France. He had just celebrated his birthday there. There was talk of flaming duck and a chocolate fountain. Guillaume showed me a picture of the crystal-curtained lobster tower—seven layers of vermillion crustaceans, topped by an upright specimen thrusting its claws to the sky, as though it had just slayed a halftime show, amid a cloud of mist... Last year, more than three hundred and eighty thousand people paid fifty-two euros and ninety centimes for the pleasure of visiting Les Grands Buffets. Drinks cost extra, but they are sold at a minimal markup, so a bottle of Mercier champagne costs twenty-five euros, about the same as it does in the supermarket. Everything else is unlimited, from caviar to stewed tripe. There are nine kinds of foie gras on offer, and five pâtés en croûte, including one known as Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow, which involves a panoply of meats (chicken, duck, wild boar, hare, quail, sweetbreads, ground pork) and is considered by connoisseurs to be “charcuterie’s holy grail.” The chef Michel Guérard has called Les Grands Buffets “the greatest culinary theater in the world.” Guinness has certified its cheese platter, featuring a hundred and eleven varieties, as the largest known to restaurant-going man. It’s more of a cheese room.

Not my kind of restaurant, but certainly remarkable. The lobster tower topper certainly appears triumphant.

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You move to Williamsburg or Greenpoint because, unlike your less discerning peers who moved to Murray Hill, you like vinyl listening bars and have a New Yorker tote bag. As those early twenties tick by, an emptiness begins to seep into your body. You can’t place it. Why is this happening to you? You did what everyone said to do and more. You should be happy.  Several omakase first dates later, you start to realize that it’s not your lackluster love life. Actually, it’s your corporate job that might be the problem... You can now detect a hollowness with every Slack message sent, a numbness when the direct deposit hits your account every other Friday.  So, what do you do now? In your search of greater meaning in this Sweetgreenified life, you decide to go to the climbing gym. 

I have never ordered from Sweetgreen and have only dabbled in climbing, but nevertheless: I feel seen.

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About fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, which is named for a dilapidated nearby town. The detainees hail from more than fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and Russians and Swedes and Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. Many of the adults had either joined isis or been married to someone who’d joined. But many others have no links to the Islamic State and fled to the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Some were thrown into isis’s orbit by force: Yazidis enslaved by commanders, teen-age girls married off by their families. More than half the population are children, the majority of whom are younger than twelve. Dozens of babies are born each month. All the residents are under indefinite detention, as no plans have apparently been made to prosecute any of them—imagine if Guantánamo were the size of a city, and its inmates were mostly women and children. The United Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of humanity.”

I had never heard of Al-Hol before I read this article.

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Not until this last record did I really think about the fact that the human voice is the only instrument capable of lyrics. But if a trombone had lyrics, I'd give it lyrics.

– Dan Deacon

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I am a giant fan of "We thought this animal was extinct, but it's not" stories.

The expedition was part of The Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between BirdLife International, Re:wild, and American Bird Conservancy, which funded the trip. The initiative aims to rediscover more than 150 avian species that haven’t been declared extinct but also have not been seen for at least a decade.  A chicken-size, ground-dwelling pigeon, the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon was among around 20 “lost” birds that have not been documented for more than a century.

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Going into boxing and later joining the army were both part of the warrior training I got the benefits from as an artist. It transformed my confidence and aura, and I believe I could have gone far because I was a natural. One of my last fights was with a young man and the more I hit him, the more I heard his mother cheering him on. I was emotionally moved, had an epiphany in that moment and realised I was not on this earth to punch other people’s sons in the face.

Very few of us are put on this earth to punch other people in the face. Also a good next line:

I knocked the kid out to end her misery but it bothered me.

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The medical-mystery column doesn’t usually dwell on how slowly the inquiry goes in our fractured health-care system. How the highly recommended pulmonologist doesn’t return the first phone call and only has an opening five months away, and how the major-medical center does have an appointment but isn’t in network with the major-medical insurer. How the chest X-ray is over by the East River and the breathing booth is in the West 160s and the phlebotomist is by Columbia, and how each one has its own online portal for billing and results... Two different realities or images stood superimposed in my mind. There was the body I’d occupied two months ago — my body, as I understood it — walking over to Broadway for pizza, taking the younger boy to the basketball courts, ducking into Central Park to climb the Great Hill. And then there was Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, a gaunt figure dragging her useless legs along the ground. If this was histrionic or self-pitying, it seemed less so on the days when I couldn’t raise my hips up off the floor.

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.

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I’m a man of a certain age and size. An XL Fred Perry shirt fits me, physically and culturally. It’s as stylish as I can get without feeling stifled, it locates me temporally in the 2 Tone/post-punk era that shaped me as an impressionable teenager and it’s smart enough to sport on stage but casual enough for me to wear around the house in just my pants. My clothes rail has a dozen identical Fred Perrys and I especially used to favour the black ones with yellow trim. But apparently, according to a pink-haired hipster girl in the merch queue at one of my Leicester Square theatre shows five years back, this has now been adopted as a covert uniform by the far right in Europe and the US. So I quickly took six neo-Nazi black and yellow Fred Perry shirts to the local People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals charity shop, where hopefully they were snapped up by a delighted cat-loving north London racist.

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Most of Freud’s failed paintings never left the studio. “Lucian was an avid destroyer of works that went wrong,” Feaver wrote me, in an e-mail. “I can remember many awaiting the cull. Generally, these—portraits especially—would be stiff and, more often, disproportionate.” Freud also kept an eye on paintings long after he made them. Throughout his career, he became angry when substandard works found their way to the market or forgotten canvases resurfaced. In the early fifties, the house of Gerald Gardiner, Freud’s lawyer at the time, was broken into and a single picture was taken: a portrait of Carol, Gardiner’s daughter, which Freud had painted but didn’t think much of. The story gave rise to a legend, encouraged by Freud, that he paid criminals to get hold of paintings that displeased him or that he regretted seeing out in the world. Late in his life, one of Freud’s daughters, Rose Boyt, hesitated to send him a painting for authentication, for fear that he would punch a hole in it instead. “Everything had to be remarkable,” Greig said. Freud was drawn to extremes, and to fights. In the early seventies, John Craxton, an artist and an intimate friend of Freud’s, sold some of his drawings to a collector. When a dealer asked Freud to sign the sketches, he was furious, writing, “John Craxton is a cunt” on one of them. 

Famous artist skullduggery! Plus mysteries, stonewalling, and erratic behaviour.

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For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd... Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hadly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.

An ascerbic ramble through the point of hipsterism, why they died out, the rise of nerd culture, its intrinsic emptiness, and why it's dying.

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As the owner of a bird feeder, I am 100% certain the squirrels are waiting for me to let my guard down.

Feeling Squirrely? A fear submitted by Alex to Deep Dark Fears - thanks!

Looking for a gift for that thing that lives in your hat? You can find original paintings in my shop!

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Dream of Antonoffication

With Bleachers, Antonoff hit on what would become one of his default modes. Strange Desire and the records that followed it deal in a kind of anonymous retro maximalism. They proceed by stripping not only ’80s arena rock but also 2000s indie rock — the yelping vocals of a Modest Mouse, the “surfy” guitars of a Real Estate — for only their most melodramatic parts. It is like Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love on a histrionic sugar high — or like cutting into what you thought was Tunnel of Love, expecting to find a substantive work of pop craftsmanship and introspection, only to find cake. Unlike the Fun. records, Strange Desire deals in a strangely hollow maximalism. You might call it, as many critics have, “cinematic” pop. In other words: pop made to serve as a soundtrack. And at the center of the swirl of sound that often doesn’t register as music so much as undifferentiated yearning, there is an empty space for you, the main character. Appropriately enough, Antonoff’s fans often describe his music as a kind of catharsis machine; a soundtrack to which you can, in the words of one YouTube commenter, “drive and cry and vent and go trough every emotion humanly possible.”

A look at the role of music producer in the pop landscape, and how some modern pop can sound like it means something but often rings hollow.

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Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company... Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

As always: it's less about the technologies, and more about what people do with the technologies.

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STUART ALLISON: [Ivana Miličevic as Dasha], Mical never wanted her to do sexy takes. Like, overplay the double entendres. She was always, always pushing for them.  IVANA MILIČEVIĆ (“Dasha,” Red Alert 3): I mean, look at how I was dressed. STUART ALLISON: I could tell it just gave her joy to tease Mical. But he wouldn’t let me use those. Which is a shame because she was funny. IVANA MILIČEVIĆ: I felt like I could be pretty ridiculous. I kept wanting to make it seem like if the player does well, we can have a drink together. 

A lovely look at how a wonderful 10 second video clip came to be.

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I had never seen or heard this video until recently. I had never heard of this video until recently. I can't believe society would just let it slip beneath the cultural waters.

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You could tell Pete was a star within five minutes of meeting him. “Life and soul of the party” doesn’t begin to describe him. He was crazy, mouthy but funny, bouncing off the walls... When he fell and broke his back and the fire brigade asked his name, he told them: “You should know my fucking name.”