“In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”
David Brooks mourns the death of god and homogeneous culture and frets over the implications of independent thought in today’s Times. Like a lot of people have been doing for a while now. Yes, finding a new way forward is difficult, but in the end, I’m with the protagonist in the wonderful video for Beirut’s new single, “Sante Fe.” The guy has had a rough couple days. All things considered, he makes the right choice. Let’s give him a break, huh?

“You can’t blame Kentucky distillery Maker’s Mark for wanting to pile on the superlatives in an ad for Maker’s 46, the company’s first new bourbon in more than half a century. ‘Bigger, ‘bolder,’ ‘spicier’ — sure. But ‘Maker’s-er’? Er … what’s up with that?”
 — Who cares? HOOK IT TO MY VEINS! [Via]

Today marks the 75th birthday of television legend Joe E. Tata and the 50th birthday of Dave Mustaine, the Joe E. Tata of hair metal, but most importantly today marks the 100th birthday of William Smith Monroe, the father of bluegrass and a complete American original. Here’s “The Wayfaring Stranger.”

“At the time, it didn’t sound like anything else around and, to my youthful ears, it wiped away all that had come before it. If this sounds a little dramatic, you have to understand that at the time Guns’N’Roses were the biggest rock band in the world. If you didn’t have a hotline to the underground, and were looking for a soundtrack for your teenage rebellion, they, along with their hard-rocking peers Anthrax, Mötley Crüe and Metallica, were pretty much all that was on offer. These bands might have had the volume, but they were singing about things to which the average tortured teen could never relate. They were, for the most part, cartoon bands pedalling clichéd fantasies of sex, drugs ’n’ rock’n’roll. Nevermind, in contrast, was teenage agony distilled.”
 — Do you remember your first Nirvana experience?

The latest non-scandal that will not be catching on is “NYPD CAUGHT BOOTY-DANCING” — at the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn, over Labor Day Weekend. (Or as World Star Hip Hop put it, “Daggering on the Parkway,” LOL.) The best is the Post describing the videos: “The women then back up into the officers’ crotches and rub their buttocks up against them as the cops grind in return, gleefully waving their arms in the air.” (The Post confirms “an investigation,” which, again, I say LOL.) I’m sorry, white people, have you ever been outside? I personally performed this move as recently as Saturday. Have you ever been to a wedding where this dance move isn’t executed??? And if you watch that video, you see a bunch of people laughing their heads off and high-fiving — you can see grandmas and kids alike cracking up. This is the probably the most friendly interaction white cops and some ladies from St. Lucia have had in Brooklyn all summer. (Also, officers: it is time to take those Livestrong bracelets off! It is 2011! Lance Armstrong has retired twice since those came out!) Media Takeout at least makes a good point: “This is the SAME parade where police SHOT AND KILLED one man . . . and they RACIALLY PROFILED and FORCIBLY detained a Black legislator.” Sure, sure, but apart from that, everyone had a good time! Except the killjoy New York Post.

“Men take note: If you want women to remember, speak to them in a low pitch voice. Then, depending on what they remember about you, they may or may not rate you as a potential mate. That’s according to a new study by David Smith and colleagues from the University of Aberdeen in the UK. Their work shows for the first time that a low masculine voice is important for both mate choice and the accuracy of women’s memory.”
 — But that is not the only news on the maleness front this morning! Once you get the girl and settle down, watch out: “Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading ‘Goodnight Moon’ for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops.” Some dude who teaches evolutionary biology at Harvard worries that “’American males have been brainwashed’ to believe lower testosterone means that ‘maybe you’re a wimp, that it’s because you’re not really a man,’” which is pretty much really the only conclusion you can draw from this study.

“He said there had been 50 other similar incidents across the country that day.”
 — That’s the most striking sentence in this account of being detained by Homeland Security on a plane on Sunday, written by a woman who sat next to two Indian dudes who needed to pee. According to one FBI officer, at least 50 flights had passengers who saw something stupid and said something stupid, so some Americans got handcuffed and detained. We only even hear about a few of them.

There’s Something About Kerry

by Emma Garman

A column dedicated to explaining Britain’s manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

The people of Great Britain, as they valiantly try to heal from the manifold traumas this past season has wrought — the sudden death of Amy Winehouse, the devastating break-up of Alexa Chung and Alex Turner, Kate Winslet’s unfortunate survival of Richard Branson’s house fire, the merciless destruction of marauding mobs — are, quite understandably, seeking solace in time-honored fashion: by documenting, dissecting, and debating the riveting antics of one Kerry Jayne Elizabeth Katona, an author, TV personality and mother of four. The 31-year-old, who on Thursday won second place on cultural flagship “Celebrity Big Brother” — prompting optimistic speculation that she’s “the nation’s sweetheart again” — has been one of her country’s most scrutinized and divisive public figures for more than a decade. To stalwart commentator Julie Burchill, Kerry is “sweet, silly, extraordinarily adorable.” To fellow “Big Brother” contestant and “model” Bobby Sabel, she’s “a complete fucking moron.”

Yet Kerry Katona, I’m given to understand, completely lacks the international repute of, for instance, those arriviste Middleton girls, a situation this column seeks to urgently remedy. America, and indeed the world, would surely enjoy — even grow from — exposure to this special young woman who last year beat out the likes of Kate Moss, Angelina Jolie and Dina Lohan to be awarded the coveted title of Worst Celebrity Mum. Kerry’s brand of fame may be peculiarly British, independent as her livelihood is from talent, intellect, inherited wealth or pedigree, beauty and (one can but surmise) hard work, but her fascinating draw is, in its essence, universal.

So what is it about Kerry? We don’t look to her for guidance (unless we’re reading her 2007 self-help book, Survive the Worst and Aim for the Best, and frankly even then), nor for direction in matters sartorial (despite talk last year of a fashion line, she’s often featured on “worst dressed” lists). Furthermore, her position in the spotlight isn’t reliant on the reflected glory of other pop-culture icons — her most recent husband was a cab driver named Mark and she currently lives in her home town of Warrington, Cheshire, many miles from the capital’s bright lights. Evidently, Kerry’s perennial appeal transcends the usual criteria; its wellspring is, I submit, her positively Piaf-level of triumph over adversity. In her short tenure on earth, she has careened from penury to stardom and back again, all while very publicly surviving cocaine and alcohol addictions, two divorces, bankruptcy, acrimonious child-custody battles, capture by sledgehammer-wielding robbers and multiple liposuctions/breast operations. As such Kerry represents, perhaps like none other, the intersecting fault-lines of our historical moment: she is, if you will, the Forrest Gump of the tabloid universe or, as journalist Liz Jones once eloquently put it, “a modern-day Tess of the d’Urbervilles, endlessly taken advantage of by predatory men, and then executed publicly for her dramatic fall from grace.”

But while Hardy’s Tess at least enjoyed an idyllic and healthy childhood before being annihilated by the patriarchy, Kerry survived an upbringing of almost unfathomable brutality. As she reveals in her mega-bestselling autobiography, Too Much Too Young, her mother Sue was a drug addict and alcoholic who frequently attempted suicide in front of Kerry, whom she subjected to a chaotic, violent existence spent mostly in pubs with criminals. When Kerry was 13, she had to pull a knife out of Sue’s leg after a gangster boyfriend stabbed her; the psychopath then informed Kerry, “I’m going to cut off your tits and chop you into pieces which I’ll put in the fridge so no one can find you.” Sue, considering this forgivable behavior, chose to stay in the relationship, leaving Kerry no choice but to throw herself onto the mercy of the authorities. After living with a series of foster families, she left school at 16 to toil as a lap dancer and pose for topless photos. Not long after, showbiz fate stepped in and Kerry was recruited into a band by Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Atomic Kitten was a bubblegum all-girl threesome whose first single, “Right Now,” reached number 10 in the charts. The group’s biggest hits, though, would come when Kerry had been replaced in the line-up; she quit after just a couple of years of performing (she would later claim that she never actually sang on the records), when she was having a baby with her boyfriend, Bryan McFadden of Irish boyband Westlife. While the US had Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, we had Kerry and Bryan, and, actually, the parallels between Britney and Kerry are quite remarkable, beginning with the poignant fact that a youthful romance with a prancing pop idol marked the PR highpoint of both of their respective careers. From there, both women became chubby, vulnerable chain-smokers who lived every moment under the omnipresent gaze of paparazzi and, by common consensus, were unfit young mothers. In 2007, both were diagnosed with bipolar disorder and heavily medicated.

They’ve each published novels: Brit collaborated with her mom Lynne on the rags-to-riches story A Mother’s Gift, while Kerry’s acclaimed first novel, Tough Love, a semi-autobiographical tale about a topless model, was followed by the equally successful The Footballer’s Wife. Discussing her creative process, she confided to interviewer Lynn Barber that a ghostwriter “did all the research and put in things like commas and brackets and paragraphs which was a great help.” No doubt. Still, readers apparently don’t care who does what: Tough Love sold 100,000 copies. (For the benefit of those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the intricacies of book publishing, if a first novel sells 5,000 copies it’s considered an unreserved success. Also, in the event of a celestial tribunal charged with apportioning blame for the looming apocalypse, please don’t shoot the messenger.)

In between literary endeavors, Kerry has featured on many TV shows, often documentary series about her life such as MTV’s “Kerry Katona: What’s the Problem?”, which, in the analysis of Times critic Andrew Billen, “may just have something redeeming to tell us about mental illness but its real achievement is to forge another step in the pathway to hell being dug by reality television.” Quite. In common with so many of her celebrity ilk who are paid to simply be themselves in front of cameras (that Kerry Katona shares initials with the leading US exemplar of this phenomenon is an eerie coincidence on which we probably shouldn’t dwell), her most accurate job description is ‘media fodder.’ In an endless symbiotic cycle, the more she’s photographed and written about, the higher the value placed on every wince-inducing personal revelation, every onscreen meltdown, every ex’s kiss and tell, every surgery scar-revealing bikini shot.

Kerry clearly feels ambivalent about this Faustian pact. A recent conversation on “Big Brother” beautifully illustrated the slipperiness of a central, unanswerable question: Is she predator or prey? Talking to housemate Darryn Lyons, a hugely successful paparazzo, Kerry revealed how she’d been phone-hacked, along with her mother, ex-husband and drug-dealer, by The News of the World. Lyons pointed out that, as a result of her privacy being violated, she’d made “a tremendous amount of cash,” simply by dint of the sheer intensity of fame all those salacious exposés had bestowed upon her. While Kerry conceded that the exposure had brought fame, she could not or would not acknowledge a direct causal relationship between her notoriety and her bankability, retorting that it was thanks to TNOTW that she was fired from her £250,000-a-year gig with frozen-food chain Iceland. (She appeared in the company’s commercials for four years until 2009, when she was fired after News of the World published video footage of her snorting cocaine, allegedly with her young children in the house.)

What’s next, then, for Kerry? Coming in as runner-up on “Big Brother” will doubtless be a much-needed shot in the arm for her career, not to mention the £300,000 fee will surely come in handy — she’s reportedly still deep in debt after declaring bankruptcy in 2008, a state of affairs for which she blamed her former accountant. (On the plus side, she did manage to escape criminal prosecution for physically assaulting him in his office.) She’s expressed interest in acting, although it’s hard to imagine her taking Hollywood by storm. For one thing, her Warrington accent is likely to confound; it certainly posed a problem for her “Big Brother” housemate Tara Reid, who couldn’t even decipher Kerry’s pronunciation of her own name. Really, what one wishes most for Kerry is retirement from the media circus whose cruelties, as we’ve witnessed time and time again, she’s too fragile to withstand. Not that another way of making a living seems feasible, wherein lies the rub: of all today’s damaged starlets, it’s for Kerry that Christopher Marlowe’s Latin maxim/Angelina Jolie’s tattoo seems most fitting: quod me nutrit me destruit — what nourishes me destroys me. Kerry is, of course, only too aware of this bleak paradox, as she betrayed in a rare moment of introspection: “I thought life would be different when I became famous, but fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes a hundred photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages.”

Emma Garman no longer lives in her native UK, but she still watches lots of its TV.

“When test scores become the goal of education by which students and schools are measured, then students in the bottom half — who will inevitably include disproportionate numbers of children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who barely speak English — will be left far behind, stigmatized by their low scores. If we were to focus on the needs of children, we would make sure that every pregnant woman got good medical care and nutrition, since many children born to women without them tend to have learning disabilities. We would make sure that children in poor communities have high-quality early childhood education so that they arrive in school ready to learn. We would insist that their teachers be trained to support their social, emotional, and intellectual development and to engage local communities on behalf of their children, as Dr. James Comer of Yale University has insisted for many years. And we would have national policies whose goal is to reduce poverty by expanding economic opportunity.”
 — Diane Ravitch lists a bunch of things that are never going to happen.

At first I thought it was just a coincidence — or that I was perhaps operating under an exaggerated sense of self-importance (as is my wont) and maybe a bit of paranoia. I know it’s not exactly a great sign when you start seeing signs everywhere, messages directed at you. (That was one of the important messages in A Beautiful Mind.) It’s been a stressful month, I figured, what with the earthquake (which I at first thought was someone coming to get me, by driving a tank through the walls of my house) and the hurricane and all. (The hurricane, I didn’t take personally. I don’t believe in God.) And I also know it’s not wise to obsess over celebrities and our mostly imaginary relationships to them. (That was one of the important messages in A Fan’s Notes and The King of Comedy.) And yet I’m pretty sure that Stephen Malkmus is trying to communicate with me through the videos for the songs from his new album, Mirror Traffic.

I have not yet bought Mirror Traffic. Though it has gotten good reviews, and I pretty much buy all of the music Stephen Malkmus makes and sells, because he is one of my favorite musicians, I haven’t yet been able to pull the trigger on this one. I don’t find myself listening to Malkmus’ solo records as much those he made with his old band, Pavement. I like the new records, but not as much as I do the old ones. (And it seems, actually, that I’m finding less and less time to actually sit and listen to records these days. Which is a whole different sad conversation, of course.) This situation, the preference for the old stuff, has maybe been exasperated by how fantastically super-awesome the Pavement reunion concert that I saw in Central Park last summer was. I have been listening to the old records a lot this past year.

A couple weeks ago, around the time the new album came out, a video came out for a song called “No One Is (As I Are Be).” The song is very pretty, and reminiscent of “Range Life,” the even prettier, if a bit more shambling, song from 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album wherein Malkmus expressed a wistful hope that he could one day settle down. (He wanted to find a nice quiet home on the range, it seemed, after he’d finished his ranging around; one of the better double entendres I’ve ever heard in the lyrics to a rock song.) But I don’t know that Malkmus was thinking about “Range Life” when he recorded “No One Is (As I Are Be).” And I don’t think he was thinking about that when he made the video. I think was thinking about me.

For the past few years, I’ve had a small fear — more of a worry, really — that I might have creeped Malkmus out a little bit upon meeting him and his young daughter in my old neighborhood, which was also his neighborhood at the time. Because we got into a friendly conversation that led to me telling him that I had sort of named my own young child after one of his songs. And I was sweating a lot.

So when I watched the video for “No One Is (As I Are Be),” I was really pleased to see Malkmus there, hanging out all relaxed with his wife and daughters — they have had another daughter since we met — and a bunch of other families at what looks to be a nice picnic or birthday party in a park or someone’s large backyard in Portland, Oregon. (Malkmus moved his family across the country to Portland shortly after we met. I’m pretty sure he had already planned the move. At least I like to believe that.) There’s a really sweaty guy in the video, too, who appears to be a friend. This seemed to indicate that Malkmus was not, in fact, hiding his family from creepy, stalkerish superfans. The fact that he would make such a video, and put it out for public view on the Internet, almost seemed to be saying, “Hey, Dave, give yourself a break. I wasn’t creeped out by you at all.” It made me feel better.

And then! A second video for a song from Mirror Traffic came out. It’s for the song “Tigers,” and it’s a video all about tigers that presents a lot of interesting factual information: how tigers are the heaviest species of the family felidae, and adaptable to a great variety of environments, and how they are “good swimmers, able to carry prey over water,” and how everyone loves tigers and puts pictures of tigers on their flags and makes them the mascots of their sports teams and stuff.

The video reads as a visual argument lobbying for the awesomeness of tigers. It’s as if someone were very angry about people who think tigers don’t rank that high in the cat family.

Look, I know tigers are awesome. I’m not a total idiot. All big cats are awesome. And I will take the hint and purchase Mirror Traffic on iTunes today. But no, Stephen Malkmus, I will not listen to your tiger-lobbying messages. Not everything is always about you, dude.