The Guy Quote - Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer, 1923 - 2007. Novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism. Books like "The Fight", which covered Muhammed Ali vs George Foreman in 1975. Nothing if not bellicose, he was a political activist. His personal life was...well, he had six wives and nine children. In 1960 he stabbed his second wife Adele Morales with a penknife. As you'll see, there's not a lot of love lost between him and feminists. "Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough."

"I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses."

"In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell."

"What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil."

"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be."

"Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it."

"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul." This he said during an address on Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation at the University of California at Berkeley. Then at the end of his speech he invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."

Jeepers!

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[[ps - please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]

writingJack Dysonnorman mailer, quote, the guy quoteComment
Speed eating gets dirty

I've followed the rise of speed-eating with morbid (yet relatively distant) fascination. I first found out about it when someone sent me a few links showing Takeru Kobayashi (below), a skinny Japanese guy who held the world hotdog-eating record for over six years, and who once ate 100 roast pork buns in 12 minutes, demolishing hotdogs by the dozen.But earlier this week he was arrested. Couldn't quite work out what he'd done. Seems he'd stormed the stage at Nathan's Famous (the big eating competition - all the big guns go) and had to be hauled away by the cops. Turns out he was making a protest.

I'll hand over to William Saletan now. He has written this excellent article on the way a one-time game (who doesn't remember the barf-o-rama from Stand By Me with affection?) has turned into some thing much more serious:

"

Major League Eating, founded 13 years ago as the International Federation of Competitive Eating, began as a lark. The P.R. men who run it, brothers George and Rich Shea, gave it a comic Latin motto that meant "In gorging, truth." They called their members "Horsemen of the Esophagus" and "weapons of mass digestion." For this year's hot-dog contest, they outlawed vuvuzelas. But MLE is no longer a joke. In the last year, it has organized 85 contests with nearly $600,000 in prizes. It has secured sponsorships from Coca-Cola, Harrah's, Netflix, Orbitz, Pizza Hut, Smirnoff, and Waffle House. This year, it recruited Pepto-Bismol, Old Navy, and Heinz to sponsor the hot-dog contest. In addition to MLE's TV programming for Fox, SpikeTV, and other networks, ESPN now pays the league to broadcast the hot-dog contest, with 40,000 spectators on hand and another 1.5 million households watching.

Success has given MLE the swagger of a monopoly. It compares itself to the NFL and boasts exclusive representation of "the world's top competitive eating stars." On Monday, MLE President Rich Shea told CBS, "If you want to be in the Super Bowl, you have to be in the NFL. If you want to be in the Super Bowl of competitive eating, which is the Nathan's contest, you have to be a Major League Eater." Outside MLE, he scoffed, "I don't know where else you go."

Hence the contract dispute. Years ago, Kobayashi and others entered the hot-dog contest as amateurs. Then MLE introduced contracts. This year, MLE barred Kobayashi because he refused to sign its contract, which restricted his freedom to earn money from activities outside MLE, such as endorsing products. Kobayashi's description of the league's demands resembles a purported standard MLE (IFOCE) contract that has been posted online by a rival league, All Pro Eating. Under the posted contract, the "performer agrees to participate solely and exclusively in organized competitive eating events, exhibitions and appearances … which are sanctioned and approved by the IFOCE." Furthermore, "IFOCE shall also be Performer's sole and exclusive representative with regard to obtaining and/or negotiating on Performer's [behalf] for any revenue opportunities," including "personal appearances, merchandising, licensing, advertising, film, television, radio, internet and all other media." For this, the "performer agrees to pay IFOCE 20% of the gross amounts payable to performer under said agreements."

On Sunday, when Kobayashi stormed the stage, Rich Shea dealt him MLE's worst insult: "unprofessional."

But competitive eating has become more than professional. According to Kobayashi, it's now government-sanctioned. "I recently received a O-1 visa to work in the United States, a visa granted to athletes judged to have 'extraordinary ability,'" he reports. "In my case that ability was competitive eating." Such visas are officially reserved for people with "extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics."

In fact, U.S. political leaders seem divided. While the U.S. immigration service gave Kobayashi his special visa, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all but endorsed Kobayashi's chief rival at last week's "weighing-in ceremony" for the hot-dog contest. Standing beside MLE star Joey Chestnut, Bloomberg hailed the contest as "the World Cup of eating up," dismissed Kobayashi as a coward for not participating, and saluted Chestnut for "eating an amazing 68 dogs … in just 10 minutes."

This is the same Mayor Bloomberg who banned trans fats in New York restaurants and is now pressuring food companies, under the threat of legislation, to reduce their salt use. But 68 hot dogs? That's a feat worth celebrating. Perhaps the mayor is unaware that each Nathan's hot dog has 692 milligrams of sodium and 18.2 grams of fat, including 6.9 grams of saturated fat and half a gram of trans fat. This means that in the first 30 seconds of the hot-dog contest, Chestnut exceeded the U.S. government's prescribed "tolerable" daily intake of sodium, and within 45 seconds, he exceeded the limit of his recommended daily intake of fat. By the end of the 10 minutes, he had eaten 10 to 17 times his recommended fat intake (including 33 grams of trans fats) and 20 times his "tolerable" sodium intake. The mayor should have handed him a cigar—it would have done less damage.

Bloomberg isn't alone in glorifying eating contests. Scan the Congressional Record, and you'll find tributes from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc. These politicians, like countless others, stand foursquare against pornography, except when it involves deep-throating 68 wieners on ESPN.

If you've never seen the Nathan's contest, you can get your fill of it by watching ESPN's excerpt, a full-length video, or MLE's highlights from last year's show. It's an orgy of brown drool, flying debris, and masticated mush. You'll see fists and fingers pushing food down throats. You'll see contestants twisting their necks and shaking their bellies to make the food go down. "They work on their gag reflex," one ESPN announcer explains. Another praises a contestant: "He was blessed upon birth with an overactive gall bladder and not four but six first molars. He's a great eater." In case the frontal images aren't graphic enough, ESPN delivers close-ups through its "chew-view cam," along with a running "dogs per minute" stat.

Chestnut, who has won the contest for the past four years, explains his techniques to Esquire: "I drink massive amounts of water to make sure the muscles around my stomach are still loose and stretched. You can fool your body into accepting more—I'm jumping up and down to control my stomach and push the food through faster. It wants to settle in your stomach, but I'm getting the food to settle farther and farther down." He tells ESPN, "I've practiced ignoring the feelings of hunger and being full for so long, I don't even feel them anymore." Ten years ago, the record at the Nathan's contest was 25 hot dogs. Now it's 68, and Chestnut claims to have forced down 72 in a practice session.

The physical risks of this lifestyle are obvious. Three years ago in Slate, Jason Fagone, the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, recounted strokes, jaw injuries, choking deaths, fatal water intoxications, and other eating-contest tragedies. "Thanks to increasing prize money and media exposure, there's incentive now for competitive eaters to challenge the physical limits of the body," Fagone observed. They're "stretching their stomachs with huge volumes of chugged liquid," inducing digestive paralysis and risking "gastric rupture." A study published that year cautioned that "professional speed eaters eventually may develop morbid obesity, profound gastroparesis, intractable nausea and vomiting." Even MLE warns prospective contestants of the sport's "inherent dangers and risks."

But the contestants keep pouring in. Thanks to MLE, ESPN, and a growing stable of corporate sponsors, the fame and money become more attractive each year. One contestant has chugged 48 ounces of beer in less than six seconds. Another has wolfed down a 72-ounce steak in less than seven minutes. People weighing less than 100 pounds are eating one-eighth of their body weight in eight minutes. At the other end of the spectrum, more than a dozen elite competitors touted by MLE and All Pro Eating weigh over 300 pounds. One of them, 420-pound Eric "Badlands" Booker, crushed Slate's Emily Yoffe in a matzo-ball eating contest five years ago. Booker also makes rap CDs about competitive eating. You can buy them, of course, through the MLE Web site.

Fifty years from now, when historians are looking for a moment that captures the depravity of our age—the gluttony, the self-destruction, the craving for worthless fame—it won't be bathhouses, Big Love, or AdultFriendFinder. It'll be Joey Chestnut stuffing that 68th hot dog down his unresisting gullet, live on ESPN. Or, worse, it'll be the guy who broke his record.

"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STB4s7Qhf40]

writingJack Dysoncompetitive food eating, eating, food, speedComment
The man quote

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it – don't cheat with it."

Ernest Hemingway

writingJack Dysonernest hemingway, quotesComment
Born under punches - Talking Heads

Live in Rome, 1980. "That way of making music, with those rhythms and big ensemble of musicians that make up an Afro-funk band, was a way out of the psychological paranoia and personal torment of the stuff I'd been writing - and feeling - the paranoia of New York in the 70s, my age, my personal stuff, fitting in and not fitting in." David Byrne.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVIKF03KkVM&w=700]

Wish I'd been there. Just brilliant.

FYI, Wikipedia says: "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" is the opening track to the acclaimed Talking Heads album Remain in Light. The track has a prominent bassline and sets the funk tone of the album. A live rendition of the song was included with a long bass intro on the 2004 re-issue of the live album The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads.

"The song was included as the first track to Röyksopp's mix album Back to Mine. It was named as one of the best songs released between 1980 and 1983 in the 2008 book The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present."

ps - here's the opening song from that concert. Psycho Killer. Wicked font in the opening titles!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNAzXlDaHQU&w=700]

music, VideoJack Dysondavid byrne, moments in time, talking headsComment
Why do men (sometimes want to) cheat?

(from a piece by Paul Wachter on AolNews) Why do men, in particular middle-aged men, have affairs?

One's tempted to answer the question -- or a revision of it (why do men sleep with other women -- or men?) -- with Sir Edmund Hillary's response to someone who asked him why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. "Because it's there," he said. Sexual opportunities are out there, too.

And while there are myriad reasons one might stray, the authors have identified a biological one.

[O]ne factor we think deserves more attention is the role of testosterone (T) in middle-aged men's eroticism. In their twenties, men's T levels begin a long decline, often experienced as diminished passion and appetite for life. Suppressed T levels are associated with depression, heart attacks, dementia, and overall mortality rates from 88 to 250 percent higher. One of the few things that can reliably and immediately revive a man's sagging testosterone is exposure to a new woman. One researcher found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men's testosterone levels by fourteen percent within minutes.

Ryan writes that men may confuse this testosterone spike with "love" and make decisions they later come to regret. But that seems to be straying from the scientific into the moralistic. There's no reason to think this spike triggers feelings of "love." It may be simply feelings of titillation, which are sufficient drivers of action.

writingJack Dysoncheat, duh, men, no shit, obvious, testosteroneComment
Versions, by Oliver Laric

“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture. First half more interesting than the second half, where some of the commentary gets a bit obfuscatory. oliver laric versions 2010

As a post script to his essay though, I'd say it's important to remember that the "copy and paste" function, writ large like these examples, is not always a product of laziness. With some of it, it's an efficiency thing. Cutting corners in order to get things out to more people - a modern audience already understands the frame of the narrative, they just want to see it in a different framework, a different context, proving a different moral. The same is as true in Disney as it is in Grimm's fairy tales, Greek myth etc.

Watch the video here.

(link found on the indefatigable art blog BOOOOOOOOM!)

art, VideoJack Dysonart, copying, oliver laric, visual essay Comment
RZA made a movie. A kung fu movie.

Wu-Tang vs The Golden Phoenix Man I would LOVE to be the RZA. Not only does he make wicked hip-hope, but now he's gone and made his very own kung-fu movie. It is going to be DOPE. Serious cast too: Robert Tai of 5 Deadly Venoms fame (fight choreographer), some of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, a posse from the USA Shaolin Team, Chi Kua Chun (who dropped nails in loads of Shaw Bros. films), Shaolin monk Shi Yan Ming (34th generation? I thought monks were celibate...), and finally the legend that is Doctor King Ogun Ali Muhammad, founder of the Universal African Fighting System. YES! I'm going to learn the move that makes the ground blow up and then blood explode out of your acupuncture points.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d62oRG-ca0]
VideoJack DysonRZA, wu-tangComment
Norman Foster at 75

Jonathan Glancey interviews Norman Foster for the Guardian: Norman Foster at 75: Norman's conquests As the great British architect Norman Foster turns 75, he talks to Jonathan Glancey about flying cars, his new underground city – and how he beat bowel cancer

'The other day," says Norman Foster, "I was counting the number of aircraft I've flown: from sailplanes and a Spitfire to a Cessna Citation. By chance, it comes to 75." So Foster, who turned 75 this month, has decided to make models of all 75, to hang in his own personal museum, which he keeps at his Swiss home, an 18th-century chateau set in vineyards between Lausanne and Geneva.

These model aircraft will hover over his collection of some of the 20th-century's greatest machines, cherished for both their engineering brilliance and streamlined beauty; many of them look like winged or wheeled versions of Foster's most innovative buildings. "At the moment," says the architect, "I'm restoring a Citroën Sahara, designed to tackle north African dunes. I'm also thinking of getting a Bell 47 helicopter as a focal point. And I've had a model made of the Graf Zeppelin airship."

This last item puts me in mind of 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin, the Zeppelin-like London skyscraper that bears witness to Foster's passion for engineering marvels – a passion that began in childhood. Five years ago, I asked the architect if he had ever been a railway enthusiast. He replied by postcard, with a sketch of a Royal Scot class 4-6-0 thundering along, just as he would have seen it from his bedroom window, in the terraced house in Manchester where he grew up.

Foster has come a long way from those zinc-bath-in-front-of-the-fire days. The boy who left school at 16 to do his national service with the RAF is now – as his astronomical career shows, and as Deyan Sudjic writes in his new biography – "a phenomenon". But the lad from Levenshulme never forgot what he saw and learned as a working-class child brought up in an industrial Britain.

"There's a snobbery at work in architecture," says Foster, speaking at his riverside studio in Battersea, London. "The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics. Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings. Disciplines connect, from locomotive engineering to the design of a bridge, or from a study of the way raptors and gliders soar. The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination. "

(read the rest of the interview here)

art, design, writingJack Dysonjonathan glancey, norman foster, the guardianComment
Songs for whoever

First off, click below to listen to Seu Jorge covering the Roy Ayers/Quincy Jones classic, "Sunshine"Everybody Loves The Sunshine

Nice bit of classic hip-hop plus a fantastic MJ cover...finally a special treat in Nas and Marley, which just HAS to be BLASTED! Funny about 1.30 when Damien Marley suddenly goes a bit cockney...remixes will be better as the Nas verses a bit spoilt by the shouty chorus.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjsn9ifTwMg&feature=player_embedded]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DptqlP9PYXc&feature=player_embedded]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrlnGTG-vM&feature=player_embedded]
musicJack Dysondamien marley, michael jackson, music, nas, summer songsComment