The YMCA of Pawtucket decided to merge with Lincoln and Woonsocket YMCA 10 years ago. Now they've decided ditch Woonsocket the only urban Y in the chain. The pool which is a jewel is on the verge of complete shutdown. It's a kick in the shins and a tragedy. Life goes on and we will all adapt but what does this mean for the urban kids of our beloved city who will not grow up learning how to swim. What would be fantastic is if the City of Woonsocket could claim the pool and run it as the Woonsocket Municipal Pool and have no affiliation with the YMCA at all. This would be a blessing and in my opinion, progress because at the moment we are caught in the middle and it's a mess.
New slogan for RI is ALL THAT and my brain completes the sentence All that glitters is not gold. They paid a lot of money to get it wrong once again. Just like when they named FLEET BANK after an enema. Didn't anybody have the guts to speak up?
"All that glitters is not gold" is an aphorism stating that not everything that looks precious or true turns out to be so.
While early expressions of the idea are known from at least the
12th–13th century, the current saying is derived from a 16th-century
line by William Shakespeare, "All that glisters is not gold".
Putin’s Playbook
is urgently essential reading. A former U.S. intelligence specialist
who was born and raised in the Soviet Union explains what Vladimir Putin
wants and how he plans to get it. Russia’s ruler is following a
carefully devised plan to defeat the United States.
Rebekah Koffler came to America as a young woman. After 9/11, she
joined the Defense Intelligence Agency, devoting her career to
protecting her new country. Now she reveals in chilling detail Putin’s
long-range plan—his “playbook”—to weaken and subdue the United States,
preparing for the war that he believes is inevitable.
With the
insight of a native, Koffler explains how Russians, formed by centuries
of war-torn history, understand the world and their national destiny.
The collapse of the Soviet empire, which Putin experienced as a
vulnerable KGB agent in East Germany, was a catastrophic humiliation.
Seeing himself as the modern “Czar Vladimir” of a unique Slavic nation
at war with the West, he is determined to restore Russia to its place as
a great power.
Koffler’s analysis is enriched by her deeply
personal account of her life in the Soviet Union. Devoted to her adopted
homeland but concerned about the complacency of her fellow citizens,
she appreciates American freedoms as only a survivor of totalitarianism
can. An opportunity to view ourselves and the world through the eyes of
our adversary, Putin’s Playbook is a rare and compelling testimony that we ignore at our peril.
NEWPORT, Vt. — Plunging into
a frozen lake and swimming laps may not be everyone's good time but for
winter swimmers who return year after year to a northern Vermont lake
near the Canadian border, there's nothing better.
The
10th annual Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival kicked off Friday
with the 200-meter (218-yard) freestyle race in a narrow pool cut from
the ice. But the festivities started Thursday and on Friday morning some
of the 180 participants swam a lap wearing a decorated hat.
“It
was amazing. It's the highlight of my year," said Andie Nelson, of
Arlington, Virginia, after swimming 25 meters (27 yards) in the hat
competition. “It makes me happy."
She planned to compete in all events over the three days and said it's more about the people and comradery than the icy water.
Ted
Hirsch, 63, of Boston, and Ed Gabriels, 62, of Germantown, New York,
have been competing against each other for about seven years This year,
Gabriels beat Hirsh in the 200-meter freestyle.
A
group of women from Canton, Ohio, called the Buckeye Bluetits range in
age from 40 to about 80 years old and returned for their fourth year.
They swim year-round at Meyers Lake at home but wouldn't miss the chance
to swim in Vermont in what organizers say is some of the coldest winter
swimming in the world.
“It's the vibe. We have so much fun here and we're amongst friends,” Margaret Gadzic said.
Winter
and ice swimming is defined as swimming in water at 41 Fahrenheit (5
Celsius) or below, according to organizers. The International Winter
Swimming Association lists nine such events around the world this season
on its website, with Memphremagog being the only one in the U.S. Other
competitions happened in Sweden, Poland, Switzerland and Belgium with
one coming up in March in Estonia.
"Our
water temperature is 30.5 degrees (negative 0.8 Celsius). It’s
microscopic slushy. We call it ‘totally cold’ and it is the coldest —
some of the coldest water, coldest swim in the world," said Phil White,
the director of Kingdom Games, who added it's the only competitive,
25-meter ice pool in all of the Americas.
Swimmers
were escorted out onto the frozen lake in robes and stripped down into
their suits just before plunging in. Once they finished, escorts handed
them towels and robes before they were walked to a nearby warming
building.
This
year, swimmers came from as far away as Mexico and England as well as
from California, Arizona, Texas, the Northeastern U.S. and British
Columbia.
Nelson, of Virginia, was so excited
she didn't get much sleep Thursday night before the 200-meter swim. She
said she inhaled some water and felt nauseous after eating lunch an hour
earlier so she had to slow down her pace.
By tapping into your body’s innate ability to calm itself, you can ward off stress symptoms before they strike
Advice by Jenny Taitz
February 23, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EST
The Washington Post
During
times of stress, we often sense our heart racing, jaw tightening or
stomach churning — feelings that end up heightening our negative
emotions. Soon, it becomes a vicious cycle where your body and your
thoughts magnify each other.
The
good news is that you don’t have to let that happen. By tapping into
your body’s innate ability to calm itself, often within minutes, you can
improve how you feel and get better at warding off stress symptoms
before they strike.
As
a clinical psychologist, I work with many patients who struggle with
panic and other anxiety disorders. I teach them some of my favorite
strategies for easing the physical signs of stress so they can face
challenging situations more effectively. Here are five to try:
Relax your face with a half-smile
If
stressful moments trigger tension in your face and jaw, you may be used
to clenching your facial muscles when you feel stressed. Your facial
expression can also influence your emotional experience. For instance, studies have shown that Botox injections, which erase stressed brow and foreheadlines, ease tension headaches and help blunt negative emotions.
In
lieu of Botox, try a technique known as half-smiling, often used in
dialectical behavioral therapy, which improves people’s ability to
accept and cope with distress. Raise the upper corners of your lips
slightly, which automatically releases tension in the brows.
Mindfully
relaxing your face and adopting a serene expression brings on calm from
the outside in, paving the way for accepting what you are facing.
Comfort yourself with touch
From the moment we are born, touch is a source of comfort, for instance, holding the hand of a loved one.
You can replicate that ease by placing your right hand above your heart
and your left hand on your belly, which reduces levels of cortisol,
your body’s main stress hormone.
In one study,
participants who used the hand-on-heart technique after giving a short
speech or counting backward from 2,043 in increments of 17, both
stressful situations, showed a faster reduction in cortisol than those
who didn’t use the strategy. Psychologically, this subtle
self-compassionate gesture is also a nice reminder to bring kindness to
yourself in hard moments.
Expand your gaze
When
the body’s fight-or-flight response to stress kicks in, your pupils
dilate, narrowing your field of vision and making it hard to find
perspective, literally and figuratively. But if you can intentionally
adopt a more panoramic view, for instance, by noticing three sights in
the distance, it’s easier to feel less sucked into what seems
challenging.
Improving your point of view, among other reasons, may explain why brief walks in nature
can boost your mood. Looking beyond your stress (or your phone) to find
a broader view can also free you from ruminating on all that’s wrong
and even pave the way for more gratitude for what is in front of you and
your senses. One study found that brief visual distractions such as looking at colorful slides can free people from getting stuck in distressing mental loops.
Breathe through your nose
Gently
closing your lips to breathe through your nose has surprisingly rich
physiological benefits. While stress is associated with high blood pressure, nasal breathing lowers blood pressure and improves heart rate variability.
When
you breathe through your nose, your lungs extract oxygen more
efficiently so you can take deeper breaths. Your nose is also a powerful
filter, purifying the air you are ingesting, which can lead to better
immunity. Breathing though your nose also improves sleep apnea and sleep quality, a boon since fatigue makes everything feel more stressful.
If
you need extra help remembering to nose-breathe, James Nestor, author
of “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art,” recommends applying a
postage stamp-size square of surgical tape to the center of your lips as
a reminder, whether at your desk by day or when going to bed at night.
Practice welcoming panic
Instead of succumbing to stress-fueled symptoms, you can prepare for challenging situations in advance and reduce stress.
Take
a few minutes to brainstorm the most common sensations you feel when
you are stressed — butterflies before a work presentation,
breathlessness when you are flying or shakiness because you are
overwhelmed. Then try recreating some of these sensations when you are
in a safe environment. For instance, you might bring on sensations of
breathlessness and panic by slowly spinning in a circle for a minute,
then intentionally hyperventilating, rapidly inhaling and exhaling for a
minute. Let yourself feel the sensations for a few minutes, then repeat
the next day for several days in a row.
By
intentionally recreating your body’s usual stress response, you will
come to see that even unpleasant sensations, while distressing, are
temporary, which robs them of their power to rattle you. Then, when
physical symptoms of stress show up in higher-stakes situations, you
will find it easier to uncouple them from catastrophic interpretations.
Many
of my patients who have struggled with stressful sensations have found
that, with the right strategies and some practice, they can approach
their life with more courage than they imagined.
If you know how to lean on it, your body can be your best pharmacy.
In 2022, the researchers Lauren Brubaker and Monique Udell recruited 48 parents and their children for a study
on the behavioral effects of different parenting styles. The adult
subjects were given a survey about their expectations for their
children, and how they typically respond to their needs; the children
were tested to determine their attachment style, sociability, and
problem-solving skills. I should probably mention that the children
involved were dogs.
The
dogs who were cared for by owners with an “authoritative” style,
meaning one where high expectations matched a high responsiveness toward
their dog’s needs, were secure, highly social, and more successful at
problem solving. They bested those with “authoritarian” owners (high
expectations but low responsiveness) and “permissive” owners (low
expectations, low responsiveness). These results mirrored those in
similar studies done on human children. “This is an important finding,” Udell said,
“because it suggests that dog owners who take the time to understand
and meet their dog’s needs are more likely to end up with secure,
resilient dogs.”
The language might sound familiar to those acquainted with the concept of “gentle parenting,” a philosophy that’s become popular
in recent years. Tenets of gentle parenting, including a focus on
empathy in parent-child interactions, and avoiding punishment in favor
of helping the child understand the reasons behind their actions and
emotions, have been linked to positive outcomes for kids.
And
although children are obviously very different from dogs, a parallel
shift in approach has been happening in humans’ relationships with their
canine kids. Recent science shows that the best way to change a dog’s
behavior is not through aversive techniques, such as prong collars or
scolding, but through positive reinforcement and curiosity about the
root of behaviors. It requires working in partnership with a dog’s
nature, rather than trying to get it to suppress that nature to more
easily conform to a human world. This way, change can come from a place
of mutual understanding and comfort, rather than from a place of fear.
The idea is now gaining traction, a fact that Susan Friedman,
a psychology professor emeritus at Utah State University, attributes to
a “long-standing march towards more humane and effective interaction”
between parents and children, and between animals and their caregivers.
This march sees society “moving away from the ‘do it or else’ model that
is the legacy of most of us,” she told me, “to ‘How can we have a
dialogue about what you do, and can I provide reasons for you doing it
that matter to you?’”
In dog training, this “do it or else” model has its roots in the concept of the “alpha wolf,” a long-debunked theory
that originated in the 1940s with the Swiss researcher Rudolph
Schenkel. In his study, Schenkel placed unrelated wolves in a small
enclosure; they fought, and he erroneously interpreted this fighting as a
battle for dominance. (It has since been proved that wolf packs are not led by an “alpha” and instead comprise a set of adults, called “parents,” and their children.)
The dominance-focused model is rife with physical punishment, deprivation, and, perhaps most bizarre, the idea that humans must eat dinner first.
Its influence is such that even people who would never physically
punish their pets may still assume that the most important quality in a
dog is obedience. This might lead them to, for example, discourage
pausing and sniffing on walks to try to keep the dog matching their
pace. This desire for control undermines the dog’s natural need for
scent; dogs depend on their sense of smell to communicate and assess
their surroundings. (Research has shown that dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors, whereas humans have only 6 million; most of us primarily perceive the world through sight, but they use smell.)
Beyond that need, sniffing offers other benefits: Studies have shown it
to mentally stimulate dogs, help them de-stress, and maybe even make
them more optimistic.
Despite the mounting evidence against it, the dominance model persists, perhaps pushed most famously by the celebrity trainer Cesar Millan
but also by many others working in the largely unregulated field of dog
training today. This is due in part to the fact that coercive training,
which uses fear and pain avoidance, can indeed appear to be an
effective shortcut to so-called good behavior. But the results are often
short-term, the product of the dog merely suppressing a behavior rather than modifying it, and they can come at the cost of the dog’s mental and physical well-being. Coercive training also fails to take into account the possibility that an unwanted behavior is an expression of pain.
Accepting that these techniques are misguided can be uncomfortable for
those who have used them, which may be another reason they persist. Most
people want to do right by their pets, and learning that you inflicted
unnecessary pain, panic, and suffering on an innocent creature can be
hard to accept. It requires admitting that you made a mistake.
The
best way to shift people toward a kinder and scientifically backed
approach to dog-human relationships might be—as, by now, you could have
guessed—through gentle methods. If you want to talk to someone about
their use of physical punishment or their apparent need to be the alpha,
Friedman said it’s not particularly helpful to ask, How could you punish your dog like that? She suggests instead something like Are you willing to let me show you that there’s another way that does not compromise your goals?
Though
the parallels between the rise of gentle human parenting and the
movement for gentle pet parenting show a widespread reordering of how
people think about caretaking generally, an obvious difference is that
human children will grow up into a world built for humans. The project
of dog ownership is to help dogs exist happily and safely in a world not
made for them. How fortunate, then, for both sides, that the most
effective method is kindness.
Kelly Conaboy is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Gawker, The Awl, and The New Yorker.
Today I was thinking about the day I went to cross the street but a car pulled up to the intersection with black windows so I was hesitant to cross. The driver buzzed down his window ten inches. He had a gold front tooth and a ring on every finger. There was a wad of paper money in his left hand. The same hand he used to wave me to cross the street.
Nick Cave Lost Two Sons. His Fans Then Saved His Life.
By David Marchese
“I try to write from the point of view,” the musician and writer
Nick Cave says, “that something can happen to your life that is
absolutely shattering that can also be redemptive and beautiful.” He
came to this perspective through fire. In 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, England.
Afterward, over time, Cave managed to achieve a newfound appreciation
of life’s fragile grace. His art reflected the change. Cave had been one
of music’s dark princes, a revered songwriter and performer unafraid of
sonic and lyrical abrasion and provocation, an eager dweller in the
shadows of the soul. Gradually, though, he has become a transmitter of
gloriously cathartic, heartening and empathetic — though no less
unflinching — albums and live performances. Outside music, Cave’s need
to further inhabit his new way of being grew to include The Red Hand Files,
a recurring online column in which he, a formerly somewhat intimidating
figure, answers with moving care and moral clarity the frequently
soul-searching questions submitted by readers. The 63-year-old
Australian’s metamorphosis is much the focus of “Faith, Hope and
Carnage,” a book-length series of exploratory interviews between Cave
and the journalist Seán O’Hagan, which will be published on Sept. 20.
Sadly, in May, after the interviews for it were completed, Cave’s oldest
son, Jethro, died unexpectedly at age 31.
“I think grieving people are conscious of the sell-by date of their own
misery,” Cave says about the prospect of continuing to publicly explore
his losses. “But in respect to Arthur and Jethro, I can’t wipe my hands
and say, ‘OK, now I’m moving on.’”
For me, the single most devastating sentence in your
book is from Seán’s afterword. It’s when he writes that since the
interviews for the book were finished, you lost another son.
This is after 250 or however many pages that are fundamentally about
how you’ve found a way to find meaning and move back toward life after
Arthur died. Maybe things are still too fresh for you to be able to
answer this, or maybe there is no answer, but how do you think about
trying to move forward again after suffering a second loss like that? I
don’t know how to say this, really, but I do know there’s a way out.
The terrifying thing about when Arthur died was that it felt like, How
could this feeling ever be any different? I don’t want everything I talk
about and everything I am to revolve around these losses, but I feel
compelled to let people in the same situation of grief know — and there
are hundreds of people like that writing in to The Red Hand Files — that
there is a way out. Most people who write in, especially early on in
their grieving, simply cannot understand what I’m talking about in that
regard. I know exactly how they feel. I understand it around Jethro.
Arthur’s death did ultimately lead you to a place where
life has taken on a kind of religious luminosity that wasn’t there
before. I’ve felt something similar in my own life when I’ve dealt with
loss, but I’ve also worried about whether that feeling will fade over
time, which would be a loss of another kind. Do you worry about that
too? You know, in addiction terms,
you’ll be addicted to drugs and then you’ve stopped taking them and you
have what’s known as the pink cloud. You’re walking around, and
everything dazzles. Then eventually you go back down and have to deal
with life on its own terms. Maybe there’s an aspect of that, but my
religious temperament, which has always been there, was ignited after
Arthur died. Sometimes I feel more spiritually activated than others,
but there’s always been this struggle between religious belief and my
rational self’s skepticism of that, which I saw as a religious failing
on some level. Something turned around in me so that I can now see that
not as a failing but rather that the whole energy of my creativity was
within this struggle. That struggle is perhaps the religious experience
itself.
Your father died in a car crash when you were 19.
Back then, how was the effect of grief on your music different from the
effect it has on the music you make as a middle-aged man? I
was unconscious of the effect of grief entirely when my father died. I
don’t think I had any understanding of what was going on in my life. I
was extraordinarily un-self-aware about anything except my own
appetites. When Arthur died, I was thrust into the darkest place
imaginable, where it was almost impossible to be able to see outside of
despair. Susie and I
somehow managed to pull ourselves out of that, and — I know this sounds
corny — that did have something to do with the response I started to get
from people who kept writing to me and saying, mostly, This happened to
me, and this is what’s happening to you, and this is what can happen.
This was extremely affecting for me. The concerts that I did following
that, too — the care from the audience saved me. I was helped hugely by
my audience, and when I play now, I feel like that’s giving something
back. What I’m doing artistically is entirely repaying a debt. It’s — my
other son has died. It’s difficult to talk about, but the concerts
themselves and this act of mutual support saves me. People say, How can
you go on tour? But for me it’s the other way around. How could I not?
You talk about a feeling of mutual support between you
and your audience. I’ve seen you play live before, and I thought it was
interesting to look in the eyes of other people in the crowd because I
felt I was seeing a lot of different things: joy, fear, lust, envy. What
do you see in their eyes? Is it something new? I just see them
in a different way than I used to, like the scales have fallen off my
own eyes in respect to what they are both as a community and as
individuals. In the past, I’ve gone onstage and done shows and they’re
good or they’re bad, but I’d never experienced being deeply moved by the
audience themselves and their own joys and sufferings and insecurities
and all the stuff that you see when you actually look at the eyes of the
people. I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but to now see an
audience moved by what you’re doing — it’s an enormous privilege. I know
all musicians say that, but it actually is. That feeling is extremely
infectious with an audience. As is the opposite, complacency, when you
see a band phoning it in. That’s the sinful squandering of an
opportunity to improve things. The way to do that is to commit yourself
to the song. Everyone gets sucked in, and there’s this incoming and
outpouring of love between you and the audience. I used to revel in the
divide between the band and the audience. Whether we liked it or not, in
the early days, people came along and basically hated us. That friction
between the band and the audience was the real anarchic energy of the Birthday Party. Things couldn’t be more different now.
The periods when you were reveling in that friction were
also periods of addiction. Did you ever find that drugs were a source
of creative meaning? Amphetamine, in regard to sheer
pathological application to the job, is amazing. But you tend to have an
overinflated regard for what you’re creating. I don’t think heroin has
much value. It certainly gets in the way, after a while, of being
creatively responsible, because you’re living your life at the whim of
the drug. I don’t think that has any true creative application. You
know, the thing I liked about heroin was the structure that it imposed
on your life, to some degree. Your choices are very limited. You get up,
you have to score or you get sick, so you score, and later on in the
evening you need to take some more. Provided you have some money and a
supply, it’s a structured life. If you don’t have money, it’s pure
chaos, and I don’t advise it. I’m sure for all drugs but certainly for
heroin I would advocate the legalization in the way that you can go
somewhere and take it safely and come back in the evening and take it
again safely. It’s the chaos around that particular drug that’s
unbelievably destructive and dangerous. The illegality is why there are
so many people dying from using this drug.
In the new book, you say that your experiences over the
last few years, and particularly your work on The Red Hand Files, have
made you more empathetic, which you also say is not in your nature to
be. That’s interesting to me, because empathy is often thought of as
being one of artists’ great gifts, even almost a kind of prerequisite.
Is that a false or overly romantic notion? God help us if art
is simply done by virtuous, empathetic people. Our compulsion toward
making art is to get to the better end of our nature. That’s certainly
the case for me. We often come up against “How can I listen to or read
these people who are revealed to be bad?” To me, sometimes the poignancy
of their art is the distance traveled from it and their worst selves.
That’s the thrilling thing about art, and also about reading and then
responding to the letters I get in The Red Hand Files.
They reveal something about myself that I didn’t even know existed. The
Red Hand Files became a way of articulating the journey toward my
better nature.
But does being more empathetic change how you relate to
the morally challenging corners of your work? I’m thinking of a newer
song of yours like “White Elephant.”
When you perform it live and get to the lines “I’m going to shoot you
in the [expletive] face,” is the connection to that sentiment different
than it was in the old days when you would sing about violence and cruelty?When
we talk about empathetic art, we’re talking about understanding the
nature of ourselves as human beings. That understanding — even that
understanding of the worser aspects of our nature — is a virtue. There’s
beauty in that, and beauty in itself has a moral value. I would say
that there’s great beauty in “White Elephant.” The effect that song has
on the audience — it’s extraordinary, regardless of what the song might
be about. There are books that are horrendous to read but remain
beautiful things. I mean, “American Psycho” is a beautiful thing on some
level. The moral value of art is not predicated upon what the art is
about.Some art that I see that is simply stating the morally
obvious is not, in my view, edifying. It’s often barely worth looking
at. It’s the push and pull of the good and the bad that exists within
art that makes it beautiful to me.
In the book, you also describe yourself as
temperamentally a conservative. To me that connotes someone maybe less
compelled by the moral push-and-pull and more of a steadfast believer in
certain truths. So when is it edifying to have one’s beliefs challenged
and when is it an affront? I’m culturally conservative in the
sense that I value the wisdom of the ages. I think that has inherent
value and needs to be challenged — but to some degree conserved. So
going back to problematic artists: Certainly within music there seems to
be some correlation between creativity and transgression. It’s not an
accident that the greatest musicians are so often problematic
characters. I understand that people have different views on this and
that I come from a generation of musicians where it was our moral duty
to offend people. It’s why we did anything: to cause dissonance and
disruption. To me, there seems to be self-evident value in that. When
you look at people who often make extraordinary music, it feels that the
journey from the person to the thing they made might have something to
do with stepping into this creative realm that is itself valuable and
good, regardless of the faulty human that has the courage to make it. I
get a little tired of this casting around for bad actors and exposing
them. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It feels like the ideal of it is
justice and mercy, but the weaponry being used is injustice and
mercilessness. That is very uncomfortable to watch, and quite obviously
it’s creating a lot of boring, self-important and morally obvious art.
This is semi-random but did you see the Elvis movie from this year? Yeah.
I was confused by it. Elvis is my hero. There was an aspect to the
story of his later years that is almost religious to me. The final Las
Vegas concerts were the Passion of crucifixion and redemption and
resurrection. In the film, the later years didn’t work in that way. I
felt there was a missed opportunity. You see it in the bit of footage
that they show of Elvis in the end.
There is a man who’s suffering on such an epic level to be onstage and
to perform and to live. I found that incredibly inspiring. They
shouldn’t have had to have shown that footage. They should have got
there on their own. The end was saved by that piece of footage. That’s
not even the best footage from that period. There’s the end of “This Is Elvis.”
The last 20 minutes of that film, starting with him doing “Are You
Lonesome Tonight?” where he [expletive] up the lyrics and the camera
gets closer and closer to his face and you see that he’s [expletive] up
on every level. His eyes are terrified. It’s an unbelievably painful
piece of footage. Then it goes on to the footage of the motorcade when
he died, and the song “American Trilogy,”
which maps out, as far as I’m concerned, the crucifixion and the
resurrection. That changed my life as an artist. It was the most
stirring thing that I’ve ever seen musically. There was something that
was happening at those shows that I’ve never seen anywhere else. When
you think you don’t want to do it, you don’t really feel like it tonight
or whatever feelings go on when you’re on tour, I often think of
Elvis’s commitment to his act. It’s extraordinary. I wonder if the
director loved that period of Elvis or whether he was afraid of showing
it for the tragic splendor that it was. That’s what I felt he missed.
In terms of commitment, you’ve expressed elsewhere that
you’re more focused on being a citizen, a neighbor, a father, a husband,
than on being an artist. Why? Well, there’s something about
the self-interested nature of the artist that after a while becomes
extremely uncomfortable. To have told my 30-year-old, 40-year-old,
50-year-old self that my artistic output wasn’t the fundamental and most
valuable aspect of my life, I would have thought you didn’t understand.
These days I don’t feel that way. That’s not to say that I’ve stopped
working as much, but it just feels, self-evidently, that other stuff
needs your attention. Like tending to the people around you. You’re part
of a larger community and part of the world. This is going to sound sad
and extreme, but there’s that description of Satan in Dante’s “Inferno”
trapped up to his waist in ice and self-absorbed in his own misery and
waving his batlike wings and gnawing on his resentments with his three
mouths. It’s this terrible picture of your self-interest, fanning your
coldness onto other people. There’s something about that idea that I see
all the time with people, especially young people, in regard to their
work. I’m happy to have let that go. All the love songs that you write,
all of this stuff that you manufacture — how little tending of that part
of your life actually goes on? When you think of yourself on your
deathbed, you generally feel there’s someone next to you. Maybe that’s
just me. I’m not going to hold my wife’s hand and say, “Darling, I wrote
‘The Mercy Seat.’” Do you know what I mean?
I do, but the way you put it — Sorry to go back
to Arthur again, but one of the first things I did after he died was
get rid of my office where I wrote. I went in there one day, and it
signified this unbelievable self-absorption. This manic self-interest
was the first thing to go.
You don’t have to apologize for going back to Arthur.
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Everywhere you go, there you are. We can’t
get away from ourselves and what matters to us. That’s right.
As an artist, I was never able to sit down and write a song where there
was a sense of remove. A lot of my songs, I suppose, the success of them
is predicated on the fact that Nick Cave is singing them. If someone
else had a crack at it, it might not work. I don’t know if that’s a
strength or a failing. But the thing about it is, you write a line, and
it is overwhelming sometimes. It means something. There’s other
lines that you write that actually don’t mean anything. They live in
the songs as little lies. But I think people know when something is true
and when it’s not. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re watching
Elvis sing. It’s all there. It’s not a washed-up performer. It’s the
truth. That’s what you’re looking for.
My muses have left me and I have lost all motivation to create as a
film and music maker. Have you ever felt alien to yourself and your
identity as an artist?
TAM, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
Every time I set foot in my studio, intentions
blazing, I crumble with pathetic and flaccid paralysis. Do it, paint.
No. Fuck. Why not? I can’t get my brain right in that space anymore, and
I thought my whole life was going to be devoted to my art. I don’t know
how to reconnect or reconcile making art in a world made of war and
cruelty, how would painting a fucking picture ever help. How do you
create in this environment?
DAN, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Dear Tam and Dan,
What makes our particular job so
exceptional that it requires inspiration or a muse to do it? We are
artists and we labour in the service of others. It is not something we
do only if and when we feel motivated – we create because it is our
responsibility to do so. In this respect our occupation is no different
than that of most people. Does an ordinary adult go to work only if they
feel in the mood? Do doctors? Do labourers? Do teachers? Do taxi drivers? We are duty-bound to do our job, like everyone else, because the space we occupy depends upon our participation and breaks down if we don’t.
A committed artist cannot afford the luxury of revelation. Inspiration
is the indolent indulgence of the dabbler. Muses, Tam, are for losers!
The idea that you can’t paint because the world is ‘made of war and cruelty’ has
to be the lamest and most faint-hearted excuse not to work I have ever
heard, Dan. How will painting a fucking picture help? — it will help
because art is the noble and necessary rejoinder to the sins of the
world. When the world rushes toward us with all its streaming wounds –
wanting, needing – do we cover our eyes and shrink away, do we sit and
wring our hands in despair, do we run and hide, or do we hasten toward
it, like we hasten toward an injured child, with our arms outstretched?
If we are to call ourselves artists
then we must avoid the myriad excuses that present themselves and do our
job. Yes, the world is sick, and yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters and filmmakers and songwriters – the beauty-makers – wading through the blood and muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.
These are perilous and urgent times. This is not the hour to sit around moaning about the condition of the world — leave that to the posturing inhabitants
of that most morbidly neurotic of spaces, social media — and nor is it
the moment to fruitlessly wait for inspiration to find us. It’s time to
get to work, to reach up and tear the divine idea from its heavenly
cradle and proffer it to the world. Create, Tam! Create, Dan! Create
like your life depends on it, because, of course, of course, it does!
Last night we walked ROMEO up at the North End and the sun was setting and the turkey vultures swarmed onto the tallest trees. We were under them and heard the rustling sound of their wings. It was amazing.
Ikea is giving away the recipe for its iconic Swedish meatballs to help people get through their time at home during the coronavirus pandemic — and you don’t need an Allen key to put them together yourself.
The Swedish furniture retailer published the recipe for its meatballs
and gravy on Monday so fans of the iconic morsels can enjoy them even
while Ikea stores remain closed due to the COVID-19 threat.
“We
know that some people might be missing our meatballs, which is why
we’ve released an at-home alternative which, using easily accessible
ingredients, will help those looking for some inspiration in the
kitchen,” Lorena Lourido, country food manager at Ikea, said in a news
release.
Ikea is just the latest corporate giant to release one of
its beloved recipes to the public. The Doubletree hotel chain released
its recipe for chocolate chip cookies earlier this month, and Canada’s Wonderland has also published the instructions for making its funnel cake dessert.
Global
News has not conducted a taste test with the meatballs yet, but early
reports on social media suggest they’re pretty gööd.
The recipe was released in classic Ikea-style diagrams,
but if those drive you crazy, we’ve got you covered with simple,
step-by-step directions. We’ve also converted some of the British
measurements in case you’re used to working with cups and teaspoons.
So, without further ado, here’s how to make about 16 to 20 meatballs and sauce:
Swedish meatball ingredients
500 grams (about 1 pound) of ground beef
250 grams (about 0.5 pounds) of ground pork
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, crushed or minced
100 grams (1/2 cup) of bread crumbs
1 egg
5 tablespoons of whole milk
generous amounts of salt and pepper
Cream sauce ingredients
Dash of olive oil
40 grams (3 tablespoons) of butter
40 grams (3 tablespoons) of plain flour
150 millilitres (2/3 cup) of vegetable stock
150 millilitres (2/3 cup) of beef stock
150 millilitres (2/3 cup) of thick double cream
2 teaspoons of soy sauce
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
Directions
Meatballs
Combine ground beef and ground pork in a bowl and break it up with your fingers to get rid of lumps.
Add chopped onion, garlic, breadcrumbs, egg and mix together.
Add milk and season with salt and pepper.
Roll mixture into small meatballs. Place on a clean plate, cover and refrigerate for two hours.
Heat oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Add meatballs and brown on all sides.
Heat oven to 180 C (350 F). Add browned meatballs to an ovenproof dish, cover and cook in the oven for 30 minutes.
Cream sauce
Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a pan.
Whisk in 3 tablespoons of flour and stir for two minutes.
Add 2/3 cup of vegetable stock and 2/3 cup of beef stock, stirring continuously.
Add 2/3 cup of double cream, 2 teaspoons of soy sauce and 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard.
My
landlord recently installed a fence around the shared front yard of our
building in Upstate New York. Each of her tenants has a dog, and she
thought it would be nice to provide a safe off-leash space where they
can run around and chase a ball. But this act of kindness has introduced
an unfortunate new temptation. When it’s time for one of my dog’s three
daily walks and the weather is bad, or I’m particularly busy (or
particularly lazy), I now sometimes think: “Maybe I’ll just let him into
the yard?”
Of
course, I’m happy to have a place to let him out for quick pee breaks.
But I fear falling into a pattern of regularly skipping walks. Research
indicates that many humans do: A 2011 study
from Michigan State University on the benefits of dog-walking found
only two-thirds of its subjects routinely walked their dogs. According
to experts, this forgoing of walks doesn’t only make neurotic dog
guardians like myself feel guilty. It can significantly affect your
dog’s emotional and physical well-being.
“First of all, dogs don’t exercise by themselves, for the most part,” says Stephanie Borns-Weil,
an assistant clinical professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary
Medicine at Tufts University. The amount of exercise a dog needs varies
based on age, breed and health — it can be as little as 30 minutes a day
or as much as a few hours — but virtually all dogs need exercise in
some form.
The
typical yard, Borns-Weil says, just doesn’t offer enough stimulation to
prompt an adequate amount of movement. Unless you’re spending time
playing with your dog, “they’re just going to sit there,” she says,
“because the space is familiar.” She compared it to reading the same
book over and over again, or seeking enrichment by hanging out in your
bathroom.
This
need for exercise, while crucial, isn’t even the most important reason
to walk your dog. They may or may not get some exercise in the yard,
Borns-Weil says, “but they’re not getting companionship [from their human],
and they’re not getting the mental stimulation that comes from seeing
new things, or, from the point of view of a dog, sniffing new things.”
Dogs who don’t have these needs met “are subjected to some of the same effects of long-term chronic stress on their health that people are,” she says, ranging from depression and anxiety, to problems with the immune system. (Studies have found that dogs in shelters, too, benefit from direct human interaction, which reduces stress and stress-related behaviors.)
To help your dog get the most out of her walk, let her explore. “Sniffing is the way that dogs experience the world,” says Valli Fraser-Celin, a humane dog training advocate. Where humans have 6 million olfactory receptors, research shows dogs can have up to 300 million; it’s how they acquire information about their environment
and communicate. Dogs can tell which animals have been nearby —
including sniffing out their gender and information about their health. A
friend’s dog walker used to equate the act of sniffing to a dog
“checking their email.”
But
so often, humans hurry them along, prioritizing exercise (or their own
schedule) over their dog’s interest in the world around them. “It would
be like taking me to the Smithsonian Institute,” Borns-Weil says, “and
I’m wanting to stop and look at the exhibits, and somebody says, hey,
hurry up, we’re just exercising, keep walking.”
Allowing a dog to pull off to the side and sniff whenever he wants can feel wrong to those accustomed to outdated, dominance-focused training methods, which prioritize obedience above all else (and which are based on a long-debunked, but still persistent theory). Fraser-Celin warns against getting wrapped up in that mind-set.
It
isn’t necessary that your dog walk obediently behind or beside you, or
that they only stop to sniff when you grant permission. What’s important
is that you pay attention to what they’re communicating, and help them
meet their needs. “If your dog wants to sniff every blade of grass,”
Fraser-Celin says, “then that’s what they want to do on their walk.”
After
some amount of time, you can usher them to a new area to sniff, or you
might even designate a portion of the walk for sniffing and a portion
for exercise. But, above all, guardians need to take the animals’ lead,
Fraser-Celin says, “rather than focusing on what our intentions are for
the walk.” And if your dog isn’t into meeting strangers, canine or
human, don’t feel pressured to acquiesce to those who insist their dog
“is friendly!” or “all dogs love me!”
“Whenever
you’re out in the world, it’s important to be an advocate for your
dog’s needs,” Borns-Weil says. “Your dog is not public property.”
For
dogs just learning leash skills, Fraser-Celin recommends starting in
the house, or another area free from distractions, and using a
well-fitted harness to take the pressure off their neck. (A fanny pack
full of treats also comes in handy, I can tell you from experience.) If
more help is needed, you might consider working with a positive
reinforcement trainer. And if you feel your dog is uncomfortable
walking, or has developed what seem like new fears or behavioral issues,
Borns-Weil recommends a checkup to rule out medical problems. If your
dog has a significant amount of anxiety around walking, it may be an
issue for a veterinary behaviorist.
As
for my dog, I can barely get one-third of the way into the question “Do
you want to go for a walk?” before he’s jumping with excitement.
Whenever I’m tempted to flake out on him, I try to remind myself of
that. Plus, he’s not the only one to whom I’d be doing a disservice.
Spending this time with me is important for his health and well-being,
yes, but it’s just as important for mine. Studies have shown what many
dog lovers likely already know — that canine companionship and dog
walking can reduce stress, benefit health, lower medical costs and decrease depression and anxiety. It’s a gift we can give each other. Fenced-in yard be damned.
Kelly Conaboy is a writer in New York who covers dogs, culture and dog culture.
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