“The scores indicate that this was not Obama at his best, especially when attempting to make an emotional connection to the American people.”
-Paul J.J. Payack, president of a company that analyzes word usage, was disappointed with President Obama’s Oval Office address on Monday. The speech was written at a 10th grade level, and its 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience.”

It’s a candy-colored world this morning! There is a remarkable article in the Times about three new Ring Pop-inspired fragrances that are coming out under the auspices of Mariah Carey. But they are far more sophisticated than one might imagine.

“We think it will bring an even younger customer into the Mariah Carey franchise,” Ms. Dodge said. The Lollipop Bling line will be advertised in youth-oriented publications where ads for the celebrity’s fragrances had not previously appeared, like Seventeen and Teen Vogue. But Ms. Dodge emphasized that these “are not your typical teeny-bopper fragrances.”

While the scents “take a candy element as a thread to be woven in a fragrance,” they do so in a way that “elevates candy into a prestige environment,” she said.

Laurent Le Guernec, a perfumer at International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. who designed the fragrances, said that while typical candy flavors like grape and banana have “cheap and very common” scents, he was able to build on the Blue Raspberry Ring Pop flavor for one fragrance, Ribbon. Into the “juiciness and sweetness notes” of that flavor Mr. Le Guernec said he layered floral notes.

Read that one again. Still amazing, right?

“Those are definitely not Trolli Gummi Bears in the video because Trolli Gummi Bears would never be that rude. Trolli bears would extend their chubby little arms and give Katy a big old bear hug and whisper, ‘Everything is going to be alright.’”
-Senior brand manager John Leonardo tells MTV that the Gummi Bears in Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” video, one of whom appears to flip the singer off, are not at all representative of the brand.

Gail Collins is my favorite op-ed columnist at the New York Times. As much as I admire her, I’ll never forgive her for describing House Republicans as a “herd of rabid otters” in a column earlier this year. (Only because there’s no such thing as a “herd” of otters. The analogical image itself is impressively accurate.) So I was very happy today when she again went zoological in her writing, but this time got her terms straight.

“At the ritual Congressional lashing of C.E.O.’s this week, we learned that none of the major oil companies have any idea how to control a spill like this, and that their faux plans for handling one in the gulf were made up of boilerplate so undigested that several had sections on protecting walruses — mammals that have not been seen in the area since the Ice Age. “It’s unfortunate that walruses were included,” admitted Exxon Mobil’s chief. The way things have been going, you can’t be too careful. If the portents keep piling up, it’s easy to envision a headline like: ‘Lone Tourist in Pensacola Eaten by Visiting Walrus Herd.’”

Yes: walruses are indeed collected in a herd! (They can also be collected in a “pod” or a “huddle.”) Thank you, Gail Collins! And also thank you for the line about a “man-eating pterodactyl” crashing through the windows in the oval office that made me smile and, most of all, for the point at the end of the piece: That while Obama may have won the presidency through rousing oratorical flare, his tone in governing is much more deliberative, even “boring,” and that while this often has the hysterical media calling for his head, his achievements thus far prove it to be a good thing.

More importantly, here’s some video from National Geographic of walruses (the narrator calls the group a “pack,” which sounds okay to me, though it is not listed on Webster’s animal group/collective names styleguide page) fighting for space on a melting ice floe.

According to “Proud to Buy BP,” a strange Tumblr that supports the “bravery” of folks filling up their cars at BP pumps, today’s Miami Herald claims that BP franchises have “no closer relationship to the crude oil company than” they do “to Coca-Cola.” (Which means… the franchises… buy BP’s product and resell it, just like Cokes, we’re pretty sure!) So, you protesters and boycotters? You’re just destroying one franchisee’s American dream, not actually hurting BP, according to the media. BP gas stations just buy their gas from “a distributor,” and then only pay “some money” back to BP. All over the country, the media is explaining this! Okay so, sarcasm aside… over the last couple years, BP closed down all its company-owned stations, laying off nearly 12,000 people in 2009 alone across the organization in total. Their annual report phrased this as “the transfer of our US convenience retail sites to a franchise model.” So all of the 11,000 or so BP stations in the U.S. are essentially franchises now-and they actually do represent a not-at-all-huge part of the company’s income. But things get tricky when you let CNN explain this to you, in the very small words they like to use.

Their story goes like this:

Moreover, BP doesn’t solely provide gasoline to its franchises.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, purchasing gasoline from a given company does not mean the gasoline was produced by that particular company’s refineries.

After oil companies such as BP extract crude oil from the ground, it is sent to the company’s refineries to be refined into gasoline. The gasoline is then sent through shared pipelines or shipped in batches to storage terminals.

Anyone who wants to retail gasoline, such as grocery chains, can purchase this gasoline from BP’s terminals as “unbranded” gasoline. It only becomes “branded” when BP injects its own additives into the gasoline, which is then sold to retailers

So it doesn’t solely provide the gasoline, and then, oh, wait, their branded gasoline is actually “sold to retailers.” Boy is that not helpful.

Also franchisees pay a 5 to 6 % royalty fee to BP during their 20-year contracts.

In the end, what do you do? I dunno? But, no matter what the real-world math is, I could no sooner bring myself to buy gas from a BP pump these days than I could fill up my car from crude floating up the beach.

Dear Jen,

I’m sorry for telling you that your allergies were psychosomatic.

We were visiting San Francisco in 1997, staying with my old college roommates Drew, Pete and Scott. We’d slept at our friend Becca’s place the night before, but left because you were allergic to her cat. You hadn’t slept well and you were cranky. We both were. It had been a long day, and we’d been arguing all through it. We were often arguing back then. We are still often arguing, actually. This has always been the nature of our relationship: we are close, arguing friends. “It’s too hot out,” I’ll say. “Oh, I like this weather,” you’ll say.

I was spreading a futon mattress on the living room floor when your sneezing started up again. And coughing and sniffling and wheezing. “Ughh,” you said, your nose all red. “The dust. I’m allergic to this whole city.”

“You know it’s all in your mind,” I said.

You dropped the pillow you were holding and looked at me like I’d slapped you.

“What?!”

“I think allergies are largely psychosomatic. Like, a manifestation of stress or something.”

“No,” you said, patiently, as if you were talking to a five-year-old. “There are tiny particles in the air that I am actually allergic to. And when I breathe them in, they trigger a physical reaction.”

I said something that included the phrase “mind over matter.”

“Fuck you!” you said, straining to keep your voice low. It was late, we guests. “Here I am suffering and miserable and you’re going to tell me it’s my fault?!”

You were right to be angry. I was being a dick. Though to a certain extant, I honestly thought I was trying to help. My father was a psychologist who specialized in pain management through hypnosis. He’d taught me some visualization techniques that were pretty effective at getting rid of headaches and stuff. This, combined with the part I always remembered from Stephen King’s It (that important medical manual) where one of the kids realizes that his asthma is a symptom of anxiety and cures himself by throwing away his inhaler; and also a general and unfortunate mistrust of science I developed through an overzealous critique of Descartes in a modern philosophy course; and also finding more meaning than there actually is in a line from a Van Morrison song called “Enlightenment” about how we create our own reality-all of this informed what I now believe was an excessive adherence to the notion of mind over matter. And skepticism about allergies.

But regardless, it’s just not very nice to blame someone for their own suffering while that suffering is going on. I should have offered you nothing by sympathy that night and brought up my stupid ideas about the power of positive thinking or whatever the next day.

I’ve been reminded of this a lot this spring, whenever I’ve walked past the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets on the way back from picking my kid up at school and been seized by a mysterious coughing fit. I have apparently developed an allergic reaction to the trees growing around there. (Highly allergenic Mulberries, maybe, or Box Elders, and probably a preponderance of males.) I swear I can actually feel the tiny particles of pollen in the air, going down my throat, catching to the soft tissue there, forcing the involuntary response. It’s miserable.

Dave

Look at canny future Senator Sharron Angle avoiding the liberal media bear trap by not putting her foot in that trap! Or talking at all! These recordings of reporters in D.C. getting snubbed by Our Lady of Tea from Nevada are so great. She knows that the liberal media will just twist her lying words! I cannot wait until she is second in command of the Terran Confederation government to Sarah Palin, who by then will be named Aunty Entity. Whether you love tea most or love oil most, we can all agree that reporters are scum, because reporting is not how you ensure a fair and reliable “mass media.” That’s what Facebook and Twitter are for: PUTTING OUT THE FACTS.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have concluded that attitudes about drug use are prompted by attitudes toward sexual fidelity, with those who favor monogamy being more likely to condemn drug use, while those who prefer casual sex tend to be okay with whatever you’re snorting or smoking. Not exactly a shock, but why should that be the case? The study suggests that it comes down the way you’re trying to pass your genes along.

According to the researchers’ evolutionary model, people develop complex differences in their sexual and reproductive strategies. One key difference that creates strategic conflict arises in people’s orientations towards casual sexual activity. The relationships of people following a more committed, monogamous reproductive strategy are put at greater risk when casual sex is prevalent. On the other hand, people pursuing a less committed lifestyle seek to avoid having their choices moralized, forbidden and punished.

The researchers cite prior work showing that recreational drug usage is often associated with promiscuity. The results of the study imply that attitudes against recreational drugs are part of a larger attempt to advance the cause of committed, monogamous reproductive strategies.

Basically, then, all of our drug laws are really aimed at preventing the more fuck-happy members of society from carrying out their happy-fucking ways. I don’t know a ton about evolutionary psychology, but, you know what? I buy it.

by Zachary Woolfe

Soprano Renee Fleming, “one of the most beloved and celebrated musical ambassadors of our time,” according to her website, has just released Dark Hope, a collection of pop covers of songs by groups such as Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie and Leonard Cohen. How is it? Seth Colter Walls and Zachary Woolfe discuss the album and the artist, who it might appeal to and what it means for opera.

Zack: I’m hungover, and “Dark Hope” is not helping.

Seth: The diction is strange!

Zack: Yeah, it has that Renee Fleming way of sort of melting into your ear and then immediately hardening there.

Seth: Well-explain for the readers what it is about Renee that bothers some in the opera set. And do those objections also apply here? Or is it a totally different kettle of beans, etc.?

Zack: Well I should preface by saying that there are many in the opera world who have deep respect and love for Renee. But yes, there is also a large class of those who love to h8: Boring! Terrible diction! Awful mannerisms! Scooping up to notes, consistently singing flat… This is one sample review from a website in the late 90s: “Renee Fleming is a MESS. Yes, ‘Depuis le jour’ is about remembering your first sexual encounter, but it shouldn’t sound as if you still have a throatful of cum.”

Seth: Hahah.

Zack: People view her as, like, the June Cleaver of opera.

Seth: A June Cleaver who wants to also be a Vogue cover girl, weirdly?

Zack: Right. She is now going for June-Cleaver-As-MILF.

Seth: Which… I’m not immune to? I thought she was convincingly sexy as the Marschallin earlier this season?

Zack: Right, we had some disagreement about that performance, but no one is disputing that she is an attractive stage presence. for a-GASP!-50 year old.

Seth: Right. Not that old, exactly.

Zack: No. But older, for instance, than the Arcade Fire.

Seth: Haha, right!

Zack: So people dislike Renee.

Seth: But then there are people for whom she is the ONLY point of reference in American opera. Like, if they know anyone, it’s her. She’s been on billboards. On TV. Lounging on jazz recordings with Brad Mehldau. She’s been very well marketed to the lay audience.

Zack: Yes, and I think she resonates with the kind of opera that appeals to a lot of people-very professional, very smooth, nothing’s going to trouble your sleep, nothing is going to come across as weird or intense. It films well, it travels well.

Seth: Exactly. And there’s a corollary lesson here with the “indie rock” songs she’s elected to perform on “Dark Hope.” They’re all very NPR-safe. It’s not like she’s singing Pissed Jeans here. (A TICKET I WOULD PURCHASE, BY THE WAY.)

Zack: (YOU AND ME BOTH, SISTER)

Seth: Which points to the essential conservatism of this material, in a weird way.
Despite its supposed street cred.

Zack: Right! I mean, there is more craziness, both dramatic and musical, in literally any opera than there is on this album.

Seth: What were the dullest moments for you?

Zack: The Mars Volta cover (I can’t believe I just typed that), “With Twilight As My Guide,” is pretty deadly. And I was shocked that “Hallelujah” was just seven and a half minutes long -it feels at least double that. A lot of the record is just soo effing lugubrious.

Seth: HAH. I will rep for two songs on this, and two songs only.

Zack: Yes, the Band of Horses moment is really lovely.

Seth: It’s her most … unfussy vocal take on the whole record?

Zack: And there’s a straightforwardness to the “Intervention” cover that works well.

Seth: That’s just such a diva song anyway. “Working for the church while your family dies”? Come on. You’re turning the Bruce pastoral signifiers up to 11 with that lyric.

Zack: Yes. Because to go back to what we were saying before, just because she’s not doing opera doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have the affectations and the mannerisms.

Seth: So when she sings “Who’s gonna re-set the bone,” and throws a little vibrato into that last word-it actually makes sense. Like my voice would tremble too, if you were re-setting my bone!

Zack: TREMBLE!

Seth: Or waver or whatever. Shut up, my voice would TOTALLY TREMBLE.

Zack: It’s the most honest vocal performance, in that it’s the closest to what she, um, actually is.

Seth: “Drop out the bass, son.” (Sorry.)

Zack: (Haha.) It is also the only song on the album where it seems like she actually enjoyed a second of recording it.

Seth: Yeah!

Zack: Though she seems to have something approaching fun with her Feist-imitation moment on that awful song “Oxygen.” (“I wanna speak louder than Ritalin”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SCREAM)

Seth: Yeah, I don’t understand the world sometimes.

Zack: We can speak louder than ignorance, Seth!!!! We can!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seth: I’m not sure I can actually. It’s pretty loud from over here.

Zack: Um, here too.

Seth: Why did the Times give this a pretty-good review?

Zack: Well, Tony Tommasini kinda skirted the issue. he was like, “SHE’S NOT SINGING LIKE HER. I DON’T GOTTA SAY NUFFIN!”

Seth: But then they gave it to Pareles.

Zack: And he was like “METICULOUS”! “9 STARS”! I guess that panning it would just be panning a dead horse? Or something?

Seth: Well, it wasn’t that glowing.

Zack: No, but it reflected the fact that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I actually think that the lame arrangements were worse than Renee herself. Though she keeps on doing the whole INFURIATING faux-plush thing.

Seth: Which arrangements pissed you off the most? Or made you feel condescended to?

Zack: The arrangement of “Endlessly”, the Muse song, is pretty awful. It is very ‘Sex and the City 2,’ with the whole middle eastern, overwrought sensuality thing.

Seth: Yes

Zack: (I worked in a ‘Sex and the City 2,’ reference!!!) And that’s, crazily, the first single off the album. Which brings me to the question of who is buying this thing??

Seth: Maybe no one! Or maybe the crazy Renee fans in the opera world. The ones who like to defend her on the blog posts where everyone else is (going over the top in) ripping her apart. Also: maybe some of the NPR-dad set. The set that likes Arcade Fire but not Pissed Jeans.

Zack: Right. I was explaining to my friend yesterday that if Sleigh Bells is for dancing, and Justin Bieber is for having sex, this Renee album is for going through menopause.

Seth: Oh man.

Zack: Comforting! Empowering! Vaguely melancholy! Vaguely hopeful! (“DARK HOPE”!) It’s the album equivalent of “The Lovely Bones.”

Seth: I also wonder if Renee thinks she is doing “advocacy” on behalf of opera by being a well-known person in the general famous-sphere. Like: “This is good for the art.”

Zack: Right, and as much as the reviews are emphasizing how much THIS IS NOT OPERA, the experience of listening to it is, for me, very much akin to a Fleming opera performance. For better or for worse. I mean, do you think this is good for opera? (As if that is the criterion of Goodness.)

Seth: Hm. I think it’s not bad. I’m not sure it’s “good.” I think people who are “not into” opera are pretty suspicious of crossover marketing entreaties at this point. It’s not like kids on the blogz are going to say, “Huh, an opera singer did something by Death Cab, I guess let’s snap up tix to ‘Thaïs’?”

Zack: right. Yeah, I think like so many of the “outreach” programs of operas these days, the youths are not the targets. The targets are just a wider swath of the olds. They are trying to get vaguely culturally-aware moms and dads. ‘cause if you’re dealing with moms who are seeking out Arcade Fire covers, you’re dealing with moms who are somehow culturally aspirational, who might very well feel like entering an opera house if it has this promise of plushness and “safe” emotion.

Seth: That seems right. So it could be good, in a very narrow sense, for a local opera house.

Zack: Right, I think so. Though I am always inherently wary of not being honest about what people are going to get in an opera house, which is, um, opera.

Seth: True. Also, I think the velvet-rope, plush-cushion approach has mostly drawn in all the people that it can draw in. What’s left, really, is fronting the jagged stuff and trying to attract an edgier crowd as a result. Which this doesn’t contribute to at all.

Zack: I agree. This is much more conservative than any CD that, say, Dawn Upshaw has ever put out. Also, it’s really crucial to believe in, and do vibrant performances of, the less jagged stuff.

Seth: Is it your sense that the less jagged stuff is not believed in?

Zack: Yes! I still think that younger, cool, hip audiences can like ‘Traviata’ as well as ‘The Nose.’ but they have to be shown that ‘Traviata’ is as powerful, as affecting. There’s so much… stuff that builds up around these pieces

Seth: Oh, don’t “stuff” me. Tell me all about the plaque that’s really building up alongside traditional rep’s gumline. Creating all kinds of terrible gingivitis.

Zack: I mean, I think a lot of operas are taken for granted. And not really thought about even when they’re given a new production. Like, the new Met ‘Carmen’ was screaming “BOLD THEATRICALITY”, but then it had a lot of the same tired shit.

Seth: That’s why you loved ‘Don G’ at City Opera so much last year. (I loved it too.)

Zack: Right. there are infinite ways to do ‘Don G,’ but I loved that Chris Alden’s direction had a specific point of view, and that everyone was on board, and that it respected the music and really thought about what the piece might mean.

Seth: Anyway, just cuz we’ve been a little hard on Renee… what’s your favorite recording/performance of hers? If people want to get the best Renee experience possible, they would go to…

Zack: Well! I was really hard on her performance in Rossini’s ‘Armida’ at the Met a couple of months ago, but when she did that in 1993 (there’s a recording) it was pretty thrilling. Her voice was in good shape, and even if she was never the most specific actress, there was a passion that was great. AND. You can go on YouTube and get a clip of the very end of a concert ‘Armida’ at Carnegie Hall from 1996. She interpolates this arpeggio to a high E flat at the very end.

Seth: Huh!

Zack: It is the kind of risky exciting singing that Renee NEVER does.

Seth: Do you think she lacks confidence now? Or technique? Or is she just bored?

Zack: Mix of all three, with maybe a boredom most of all. She has only added 3 new roles in all of the last decade. (I checked this morning!)

Seth: Right-this is my major problem with her. She has what PASSES for star power in the opera world. People will BUILD new productions around her She should use her powers for GOOD. What should she be leading companies to try out that they otherwise wouldn’t?

Zack: I mean, ‘Armida,’ which had never been seen at the Met, was a great opportunity to hear a masterpiece, but the production sucked and her voice just isn’t up to it anymore. I would have loved to have her make them do Donizetti’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia.’ Rossini’s ‘Semiramide.’ She could be a force for the early 19th century!

Seth: I think that’s right, Apparently she has also sung the big aria from ‘Das Wunder der Heliane’ at a BBC Proms concert? I wouldn’t mind a production of that built around her-if she could handle the role today.

Zack: I think she is a case of a singer who no director has ever been really able to access. She is always SO safe onstage.

Seth: Hmm. Calling Peter Sellars, I guess? “We’ll put you in a neon jacket and MAKE YOU EMOTE.”

Zack: Hahaha. Whatever it takes! But that is the similarity to this “Dark Hope” nonsense. The emotion is so vague.

Seth: Oh, that video. That European ad. With her gang of “toughs” ambling down the avenue. I was laughing nearly uncontrollably.

Zack: I mean, that is such camp. Which the album, for better or worse, is really not.

Seth: So it’s supposed to be funny. I almost always miss the point with camp.

Zack: I don’t think so! I don’t think camp is supposed to be trying to be funny. (I should know this! This is on the Homo 101 test!)

Seth: Yeah, don’t give me shoddy notes here!

Zack: Susan is dead! Long live Susan!

Zachary Woolfe writes about culture here and for the New York Observer. Seth Colter Walls does something similar at Newsweek

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“After n+1 snuck through three more runs in the third, we knew we had to respond,” writes Christopher Cox on The Paris Review’s blog, in an account of that publication’s recent loss to all the sporty young men of n+1 on the softball field. *HISSES* *THROWS FIT* For this transgression of English I HOLD THE ENTIRE MASTHEAD ACCOUNTABLE, but must single out (ha, sports pun, sorry!) new editor Lorin Stein and managing editor Caitlin Roper. You’re dead to us now.