{ During economic downturns, consumers usually spend less on what the Fed calls “discretionary services” — items like education, entertainment, restaurant meals and insurance. But in the chart above, it’s clear that consumers today are cutting back much more sharply. Part of the reason: In previous years, households often added debt to continue spending. Now the bill has come due. | NY Times | full story }
Earlier this year, Michael Stipe turned 51, and his band, R.E.M., released its 15th full-length album. In early March, we sat down at his kitchen counter in downtown New York City over sushi to talk about his career.
I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. I bought Quaaludes at the urinal for everyone and we all got stoned-I mean, totally fucked up-and we watched Klaus Nomi and Joe King Carrasco. I sat on a couch with Lester Bangs at this party someone threw for Pylon and the only thing to eat was jelly beans and cheesecake. (…)
What happened in 1983?
I stopped taking drugs. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn’t cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, “That’s it,” so I quit then. It was horrible. A bunch of people died around that time and she was one of them. I wrote a song about her-that was when I still did pull from autobiographical material. I didn’t really have my voice until after that. Also, AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the ’80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex. And this was the Reagan years, where they were talking about internment camps for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS. The straight community was freaking out because, in their minds, this was a “gay” disease, and bisexual people were passing AIDS from the gay community to the straight community.
Honey Space presents “Panties For Diamonds - A Psychodramatic Audition For Love In The Age Of Abandonment,” the New York debut of collaborative team INNER COURSE.
In this installation and three-act performance, Ms. Kleinpeter and Ms. Lopez flirt with antiquated methods of psychological inquiry within an environment generated by their analysis of the Other. Herein Actors/Audience become emotional accomplices in an unscripted narrative through role-play, interrogation and Softing. Participants will be guided through an assortment of exercises designed to cleanse the palate of perception - inviting new space to permeate.
INNER COURSE performs Tuesday through Saturday from 1-6 pm. Appointments may be booked at innercourse@honey-space.com.
related { Begging for change on Houston Street nude, browsing books at the NYU Library nude, buying a street hot dog nude – photographer Erica Simone created this series of self-portraits exposing herself all over New York City doing typical New York City things. | Animal NY | photos }
Every generation has its life-defining moments. (…) For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” (…)
“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages. Not ours.
According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We’re also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.
photo { Walker Evans, Torn Poster, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930 }
Where does psychological health end and mental illness begin? (…)
We are in the midst of a mental illness epidemic. Office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped forty-fold from 1994 to 2003. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly half of all Americans have suffered from mental illness—depression, anxiety, even psychosis—at some time in their lives. Is one out of every two Americans mentally ill, or could it be that the system of psychiatric diagnosis too often mistakes the emotional problems of everyday life for psychopathology?
This system is codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. Now in its fourth edition, the psychiatric bible, as it is sometimes called, spells out the criteria for over 360 different diagnoses. The DSM serves as the basic text for training practitioners, for insurance companies who rely on it to determine coverage, for social service agencies who use it to assess disabilities, and for the courts, which turn to it to resolve questions of criminal culpability, competence to stand trial, and insanity.
Despite the vast influence of DSM and the best efforts of its architects, the manual has failed to clear up the murky border between health and sickness.
Despite growing numbers of singles, the idealization of marriage and child rearing remains strong, pervasive, and largely unquestioned. Guided by life course perspective, the purpose of this article was to examine familial and societal messages women receive when not married by their late 20s to mid-30s. (…)
Women, when compared with men, experience more pronounced pressure to confirm to the “Standard North American Family” ideology and this may be especially true after 9/11, when mainstream messages strongly promoted tra- ditional ideologies of gender and families. Accepted notions of femininity remain based on women having a connection with a man to protect and care for her. Such constructions reflect Rich’s argument that “compulsory heterosexuality” is a controlling force in women’s lives. Compulsory heterosexuality positions the heterosexual romantic relationship within a patriarchal context as natural, normative, and the most desirable of all relationships. Furthermore, the dic- tate of motherhood and the coupling of marriage and motherhood further encourage women to enter into marriage.
Despite such ideologies, increasing proportions of women are single, with 41% of women aged 25 to 29 years and 24% of women aged 30 to 34 years having never married (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007).
related { Psychologists find link between ovulation and women’s ability to identify heterosexual men }
photo { Alonzo Jordan }
{ Death penalty costs California $184 million a year, study says. That’s more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then. | LA Times }
It was 1985. I was 12 and standing next to my mother in a police station in Greenwich Village. She was a pretty red-haired gal in her late 30s, but the three police officers she was talking to weren’t looking at her. They were looking at the bag of crack vials she had in her hands, confused about what they were. I wasn’t confused. We had a lot of crack vials in our apartment at that point. Hundreds of them. My brothers and I played with them in Washington Square Park. We carried them around in our pockets the way other kids carried marbles.
I didn’t know then that this encounter would inspire a movement; that a group of local mothers would decide to do what the befuddled police would not: reclaim Washington Square Park from the drug dealers. (…)
My parents moved into our apartment at 32 Washington Square West in 1975. Over the next decade we watched as an army of dealers and their customers took over the heart of Greenwich Village. As a kid, I knew you didn’t ride your bicycle into the park, because a junkie would take it from you. The park’s arch, built as an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, was covered in graffiti. When the city painted over it in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch applied the last stroke of white paint, then remarked, “That’ll last about an hour.”
artwork { Kathe Kollwitz, Death and a Woman Struggling for a Child, 1911 }
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash.
Is Pole Dancing Art? Court Rules No.
Nite Moves, a Latham, New York-based adult dancing club that features pole- and couch-dancing, had been seeking to argue that erotic dances counted as “dramatic or musical arts performances,” thereby qualifying for a tax exemption. A Tribunal had rejected that claim.
This means that Nite Moves must pay up on a $125,000 tax bill dating back to 2005 — though the club is appealing the ruling. (…)
To distinguish erotic dancing from, say, ballet, the court finds that real art requires you to go to school. In other words, stripping — or at least, the stripping that goes down at Nite Moves — doesn’t count as art because anyone can do it.
photo { Shomei Tomatsu }
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
image { via Create Build Destroy | Thanks Cole! }
Times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat. In fifteenth-century London a man could be hanged for eating meat on Friday. An ancient Roman was expected to wear a wreath to a banquet. The potato in sixteenth-century Europe was believed to cause leprosy and syphilis. As of two years ago, 19% of America’s meals were being eaten in cars.
photo { Holly Andres }
related { Biscuit Embossing }
In 1846, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart opened a store in New York City unlike any that Americans had seen before. Located downtown, on the east side of Broadway, what became known as the Marble Dry Goods Palace was a huge emporium that offered luxury and everyday items alike. Stewart’s innovations as a retailer were numerous: He introduced what are believed to have been the first in-store fashion shows in America. He lavishly appointed his interiors, in striking contrast to the merely functional look of shops up to that point. And he was the first in the nation to use the street-level plate-glass windows as a display for merchandise.
Then there was A. T. Stewart’s most important innovation: His products came with price tags. At that time, in most stores, prices were set by haggling. The result was a frustrating dance between customer and salesperson, who parried back and forth until they managed to arrive at (in the words of one retail historian) “a price which neither party to the transaction considered robbery.” Stewart saw that this experience left buyers feeling taken advantage of, and it encouraged salespeople to squeeze the most from every transaction rather than build long-term relationships with customers. So he marked each product with a fixed price.
Customers embraced the new “no haggling” policy, and the Marble Palace became an enormous success. Sixteen years after the store’s debut, Stewart opened an even bigger one, the Cast Iron Palace at Broadway and 10th Street, which occupied a full city block and at the time was reputedly the largest retail establishment in the world. Stewart’s success—and his idea—did not go unnoticed by other merchants, and soon a plethora of other large stores, from Gimbels to Macy’s to Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, abandoned haggling and adopted fixed prices. Within a generation, the price tag became ubiquitous; by the late 19th century, fixed prices seemed inseparable from the retail experience.
Almost a century and a half after Stewart’s innovation, a man named Pierre Omidyar opened another store unlike any that Americans had seen before: eBay.
{ Who Killed the Internet Auction? | Wired | Continue reading }
{ The newest Las Vegas Strip attraction isn’t another mega-resort or Cirque du Soleil show. Rather, it is a heavy equipment playground that lets visitors operate life-size Tonka toys. “Dig This” is a construction theme park developed by New Zealand-born Ed Mumm, who stumbled upon the idea while using a rented excavator to build his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo. After a couple of days of digging, he realized that operating machinery was a blast. | Engeenering News-Record | full story }
In the first years of the twenty-first century, New York City police officers had six different siren noises at their fingertips to alternate and overdub as they attempted to bore through stagnant traffic. The “Yelp” is a high-pitched, rapidly oscillating, jumpy sound that suggests a small dog with large teeth has hold of your thigh and is not about to let go. The “Wail” is the classic keening noise that the Furies might release while pursuing vengeance. The “Hi-Lo,” or “European,” is whiney, forlorn—prone to depression, but undeniably civilized. The “Air-Horn” is vulgarity incarnate—a burp, a rasp, an all-out bursty blast. The “Fast” or “Priority” resembles a hysteric who’s just mainlined crystal meth. The “Manual” is an outcast loner raising its rifle in a solitary low-to-high pulse.
The summer of 2007 saw the first broaching of the possibility that a seventh instrument might be added to the ensemble.
The Rumbler™.
{ Cabinet | Continue reading | NY Times | N.Y.P.D. Sirens | audio }
In recent years, nightlife has been increasingly recognized as an important resource for the enhancement of the post-industrial profile of the city and for the promotion of gentrification in derelict neighborhoods. It projects an image of a vibrant social and cultural life, considered particularly appealing to the young professional labour force of post-industrial sectors, the members of whom are particularly apt to consider moving to the city. However, the advocates of this ‘nightlife fix’ thesis ignore tensions that have emerged between residents in gentrifying neighborhoods and nightlife businesses due to the nuisance effects of the latter. Using the example of New York City, this paper examines how conflicts over nightlife in gentrifying neighborhoods have resulted in the gentrification of nightlife and have thus transformed the nature of the city’s nightlife itself.
video { Gil Scott-Heron died this afternoon in New York. He was 62. }
