★★★ The coolness must have been more welcoming than the gray sky was unwelcoming, because the balance was, by whatever narrow margin, appealing. People walked with their arms folded against the chill. The clouds weakened and blue appeared overhead; for a while, full sun seemed incipient or nearby, but all that followed were more passages of darkness and uncertainty. People sorted through laundry on a bench out in the forecourt. Fresh air came through the blinds at night without rattling them.

Deutschland über us.

When you think of German music, what comes to mind is probably:

…or, if you’re feeling classy:

…or, perhaps, if you want to be snarky, this; or, if you have excellent taste, this; or, alas, this.

However, what you probably don’t realize — because this is Germany’s best-kept (or at any rate least-translated) cultural secret — is that the most popular genre of homegrown music, in the most important country in the world, is the aural equivalent of nuclear war. It’s an oeuvre that makes Christian rock seem subversive. As Nico Roicke put it in the Guardian a few years ago, what I’m about to show you is “Germany’s most embarrassing musical genre” — and this is a country that brought us a phenomenally unnecessary reboot of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” (DON’T MESS WITH PERFECTION.)

Allow me to introduce a category called Schlager—pronounced SHLOG-uh (literally “hits”), but not to be confused with Goldschläger, (GOLT-schlay-guh), though the latter is, interestingly, what the former would both taste like and do to your brain if distilled into liquid form. Schlager is a form of pop so insipid and saccharine that it is possible the Communists built the Berlin Wall to keep it out.

I feel like you need to witness some right now, before we talk any more.

Don’t worry, there’s an unfathomable amount more where that came from.

As German columnist Teresa Fries writes in her latest on Young Person’s Blog jetzt (“now”), for reasons neither she nor I can fathom, far too many Germans of a Certain Age live their lives under schlager’s thrall. Of the current top five albums on the German charts, two are schlager records. To put it into perspective, that would be like if the number three and four albums on the US Billboard Hot 100 were Christian rock about cats. (To be fair, the current top two albums in Germany are German-language hip-hop, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Fries writes of her own young-Boomer-aged parents’ habit of watching several hours of schlager specials on TV every night before they go to bed — there’s the Spring Festival of Volksmusik, the Summer Festival of Volksmusik, the Great New Year’s Schlagin’ Eve Spectacular (my approximate and excellent translation); and on and on forever.

Judiciously, Fries describes her decision, as a grown adult, to sit with her parents on the couch while they enjoy this entertainment, as a “true test of love,” one whose extent she doubts they understand. When, in elementary school, she discovered she’d been slightly hard of hearing her whole life, she assumed she had “simply tried, while in the womb, to develop some sort of self-protection mechanism against the musical taste of my parents.”

Now, you may be asking: BUT HOW DO I KNOW I AM LISTENING TO SCHLAGER AND NOT NORMAL TERRIBLE POP MUSIC, REBECCA? Oh, you’ll know. But, on the extremely unlikely off-chance that you’re not sure, here’s a concrete blueprint.

One: Schlager contains lyrics that are maximally chirpy, predictable, simplistic and very, very, very, very rhyming. If your average terrible pop song rhymes ten times in thirty seconds, a schlager hit (REDUNDANT) rhymes fifty times in thirty seconds. Like if your Golden Retriever learned German and then wrote a song. Here’s an example Fries provides, by the schlager superstar Michelle (one name).

Du und die, das geht nie
(DOO oont DEE, DOSS gayt NEE)
Das geht nicht mal irgendwie
(DOSS gayt NISCHT mall EAR-goont-VEE)
Einen Mann zum Wahnsinn treiben
(AYE-nun MONN tsoom VONN-zinn TRIBE-un)
Das kann keine so wie sie
(DOSS konn KINE-uh ZO VEE ZEE)

Or, more or less:

You and she
will never be
Never, no way
no-how, gee
To drive a man
to be crazy
Is all from her
you’ll ever see

Two: You can recognize schlager by its subject matter, which is never, ever, ever political, risqué, or even too grumpy. (The latter is probably why so many Germans rightly find it offensive.) Schlager songs are usually, as the above demonstrates, about love as envisioned by an animate American Girl doll. But they can also, as Roicke pointed out in the Guardian, touch on such disparate subtopics as “being on holiday, country living, life on the Autobahn, living with animals and living with animals on the Autobahn;”

Three: Every schlager song climaxes in a particularly simplistic and soaring melody, reminiscent of what your 1980s keyboard’s “boogie” setting would write if it became sentient.

Though its roots trace back to the operettas of the late Weimar Republic, the true origin story of schlager involves the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (VURT-shofts-VOON-dur, or “economic miracle”) of West Germany, a period where, thanks to a bunch of important stuff that God invented history professors to explain to you, people in the Federal Republic got to enjoy all manner of Western consumer goods — including, of course, the Devil’s Music. So schlager really came into its own in the postwar years, meant as it was to lure Germans away from Rock ’n Roll’s unapologetic Americanness, sensuality, and (usually stolen) blackness. I’m not sure what the precise formula for OG schlager was, but I’m guessing Pat Boone + Lawrence Welk x fourth-grade German poetry project ^ just the tiniest hint of oompah.

The hits inexplicably kept chugging through the sixties, now in place as a stalwart against the so-called ’68 Group, harbingers of West Germany’s version of the cultural revolution:

And on and on schlager plodded, like the treacly chords of its own hooks, through the disco era, and then sharing radio space with actual greats of the German New Wave in the eighties (Nena 4Lyfe!), experiencing a dip during reunification and Germany’s total takeover by the baby Backstreet Boys in the mid-nineties, and on and on like the interminable repetition in Wofgang Petry’s seminal Verlieben, verloren, vergessen, verzeihn, to the present, where we can find schlager hits 24 hours a day on the dedicated German channel “Gute Laune TV” (GOOT-uh LOW-nuh, or “good mood,” which Fries points out is a misnomer of the highest order).

I feel sort of bad picking on schlager, because I suspect that Germans’ relationship to the alleged Music of the People is not unlike that of Teresa Fries and her own parents — or, for that matter, me and mine. I can make fun of my own mom as much as I want, but if someone else does it, I am legally obligated to kick their ass. So, even though schlager is categorically awful, do I as a non-German have any right to diss it? I’m not sure I do. In fact, I will totally understand if what I have coming to me for voicing this particular opinion is my very own Schlag to the face. If only there existed a violent cinnamon liqueur to dull the pain.

If you aren’t one, you probably know one

There are two types of people in this world: those who take their shirt off to shit and those who are now hearing about it for the first time. Last summer, I learned about shitting shirtless through a friend and reflexively I assumed I was being trolled with a Seinfeld reference. In one episode of season six George exits the bathroom at a party shirtless, inadvertently revealing his secret restroom ritual.

But a couple of weeks ago, reminded of my conversation with my friend, I began Googling,“is it normal to poop with your shirt off?”; “pros and cons of shitting without your shirt”; and “shirtless shitting, explained.” The first few pages were filled with discussions on various message boards. Closet shirtless shitters came out of the woodwork in predictable places like Reddit, IGN, and Newgrounds, but also on the forums of BodyBuilding.com and LipStickAlley.com. I reached to some of these Costanza-style shitters to find out more.

In a thread on Reddit titled, “Does anybody else take off their shirt when taking a real intense dump?,” Elchin Safarov, a long-time New York resident, replied, “I always take off my shirt, even in public restrooms. I don’t know why, but I just don’t feel good if i don’t.”

Over private messages, Safarov told me he’s been shitting shirtless for as long as he can remember. “Even when I was young I never particularly enjoyed the feeling of a shirt while I’m on the throne,” Safarov said. In describing the pleasures of shitting shirtless Safarov offered an analogy. “If you’re wearing flip flops or sandals or something and you’re walking in the park on some grass, you’ll probably take them off to enjoy.”

Although Safarov said he watched Seinfeld “pretty religiously” growing up, he couldn’t say if that’s where he got the inspiration. However, Safarov said, “That episode for sure reinforced and legitimized shirtless bathroom action.”

While the scene from Seinfeld may be the best known pop-culture reference to the act of shitting shirtless, it wasn’t the first. In Paul Theroux’s Millroy The Magician, a book published in 1993 about a traveling fair magician that gathers a cult like following for his opinions on food, a character named Dedrick extols the virtues of shitting au naturale.

“The best way is to get naked, no matter what anyone says,” Dedrick tells a gaggle of cackling children. “Always take your shoes off. Yo, even a shirt or a sweater can seriously inhibit your freedom of movement.” For Dedrick, shitting shirtless increases comfort and maximizes full range of motion, both of which Dedrick believes are necessary for a healthy bowel moment.

There aren’t official statistics on the number of people who shit shirtless. The best estimate so far may come from a Buzzfeed survey in 2014. After fielding responses from over 300,000 readers on their poop habits, Buzzfeed reported that nine percent of respondents said they removed their shirt while pooping at home. Even if the true population of shirtless shitters is a fraction of Buzzfeed’s estimate, we could be talking about millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people worldwide, which makes the lack of expert knowledge on the subject all the more noteworthy.

“In 25 years of full-time practice as a board-certified gastroenterologist,” said Dr. David Clarke, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology Emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University. “I never heard anyone mention that removing their shirt facilitated defecation.”

Admittedly, this did not surprise me. No one is talking to their physician about shitting shirtless. Questions about that are reserved for Dr. Google. Dr. Clarke did suggest that shitting shirtless could be linked to our “fight or flight” response. “Part of this response is to tighten the anorectal muscles since defecation is not something you want to be doing when fighting an adversary or running from danger,” said Dr. Clarke. He said it’s possible that for some people the act of removing their shirt reduces their stress levels, which in turn sends a signal to the anorectal muscles that conditions are safe for defecation. “Best I can do with this odd observation,” Dr. Clarke said.

“I have been studying coprolites (human crap) for over 50 years covering the habits of many cultures,” began an email from Vaughn Bryant, a professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. “Frankly I have never heard of this, but of course it could be possible.”

Although Professor Bryant couldn’t point to any cultural or historical references to the act of shitting shirtless, he was willing to offer a pair of hypotheses. “The only thing I could think is someone who either is afraid of messing up the tails of his shirt or has some type of cult belief in doing this,” Bryant said.

Elchin Safarov, the shirtless shitter I found via Reddit, rejected only the first of those two hypotheses. “Unless I’m taking a shit in a trench coat I just can’t possibly see a situation where I would shit on my shirt,” Safarov said. But at least one other person I spoke with said they shit shirtless out of fear of soiling their clothes.

Josh, who asked I only use his first name, started shitting shirtless after he had what he refereed to as an “incident” involving a greasy cheeseburger, a couple of Red Bulls, and a gas station bathroom. “It scarred me,” Josh said. “Ever since I haven’t been able to bring myself to dropping a deuce with clothes anywhere near me.”

The most pathological explanation for shitting shirtless I came across was on the website Post Grad Problems. In a blog post titled, “I Go Costanza Style In The Office Shitter, But Why?” Dillon Cheverere ran through a few possibilities:

“What’s the point of this? Am I afraid of getting shit on my shirt? Nah, that’s never happened to me before. Am I afraid my shirt will dip into the toilet water? No. That, too, has never occurred during my vast bathroom experience.”

Instead, Cheverere offered his own theory. Citing a desire to minimize contact with the germs from the strangers who have shit before him, Cheverere wrote, “I think I’ve turned to subconsciously removing the only detachable thing possible, ie. my shirt.” Cheverere believed that by removing his shirt he had reduced the threat of contaminating his clothes. “I’m a Costanza shitter,” Cheverere declared. “Not a proud one, but I’m pretty cool with it.”

In the end, the most plausible theory came from a French anthropologist and forensic pathologist. In 2012, Philippe Charlier and his colleagues published a paper in the British Medical Journal titled, “Toilet hygiene in the classical era,” which examined the techniques the Romans used to tidy up after themselves (one method involved affixing a sponge to the end of a stick). I reached out to Charlier to get his opinion on why someone might shit shirtless.

“Going to the toilet increases the heart rate, but also the temperature because there is an adrenaline discharge,” Charlier wrote to me in an email. “Especially when you push to expel the excrement.”

Charlier’s suggestion lined up perfectly with something Safarov, my Reddit contact, had mentioned to me. “I don’t enjoy being sweaty and bathrooms are tight crapped places that are rarely air conditioned directly,” Safarov explained. “I’m also a person who almost always runs hot so that surely must contribute.”

Let’s agree that there’s more than one reason for shitting shirtless. Still, a few questions remain. First, despite reading testimonies online from both men and women, I wonder if shitting shirtless skews one way or another, or if there’s any reporting bias. Second, is this ritual socially acquired or is it driven by a physical desire, like the need to regulate one’s body temperature? Lastly, and most importantly, where do you put your shirt if there isn’t a hook on the back of the stall door?

Notes on life

Liana Finck is living the dream.

It may be your last.

If you want to see the sun this week today could be your only chance. Although, given the way things are now, we could probably say that of more than just the week. Get every drop of sunshine you can, is what I mean, because who even knows anymore? Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★★ Between the lightness of the raindrops and the heaviness of the air, it made more sense at first, uptown, to carry the rain jacket than to wear it. The air in the subway was disgusting, made more disgusting by the knowledge of how stale it had to be to still be so hot. On Union Square a wind was pushing the rain, and soon it was pouring hard enough to send people sheltering against the buildings. When it was finally spent, the streets were disorientingly chilly. Here and there a current of warmth mixed in with the raw chill. The late afternoon was milder than the early afternoon had been, and occasional spells of direct sun came through the bright rifts opening in the west. Brightness spread in steely grays. Then color bloomed; the buildings were dark but the light swelled in the sky. The children’s beach tans glowed in it around the dinner table.

A radical idea, I know.

All good things must come to an end. Like classic restaurants, old New York neighborhoods, and the lives of our favorite entertainers. I’m sorry but it’s true, and it’s not very fun to admit because it means no one cares about your preachy tweets about how much someone or something meant to you, at least for the time during which you were aware of that thing, because ultimately, in the performance of your life, everything is about you.

Speaking of preachy tweets, you know what deserves to die? Twitter. It’s had a good run, Malcolm Gladwell got to make some thought-writering about whether tweets can or cannot do sociopolitical justice, and the service helped spread the news just like Fred Ebb imagined, I’m sure. I’m not even saying that Twitter hasn’t saved lives or made people’s careers or saved the day by making a small child laugh. But that doesn’t mean its time hasn’t come.

You know what I’d rather read than Twitter? Literally nothing, as in—I’d be much happier and more at peace staring into a blank wall than looking at everyone’s tweets. I’d also rather read a million Twitter obituaries, and then not feel bereft at all that I don’t have somewhere to argue about what this one misses versus what that one overlooks, screenshots and all. This is not entirely related to waking up each morning and loading up the app with great trepidation, “Oh God, what’s he saying today”—and worse—“what is everyone saying about what he’s saying?” But it’s not unrelated either.

Remember the gingers? The boys who used to work here? They’re tweet-deleters. Matt still creepfaves, which is just weak if you ask me, but I get it. I get the draw. It’s nice to laugh in between choking on your own spit. “Time is a privacy setting,” wrote Herrman:

Twitter is a massive rolling context experiment, its conversations and subjects and audiences materializing and disintegrating constantly; a single user’s Twitter archive is a series of permanent and public contributions to discussions that have long since ended. A user’s posts referencing the Oscars also reference other users’ posts from the same time, and are experienced first in full transcript. In the archives, however, each speaker is isolated to the point of incoherence.

Twitter is ultimately a giant chat transcript, and we all look like idiots. Don’t get me a wrong I’m not saying I’m not an idiot for participating in this, because I am. We all are. But I’m really curious about what it would look like if we just voluntarily stopped. We have other places we can chat now, like work Slacks, and friend Slacks, and secret gossip Slacks. If Twitter went away overnight, we would be fine. Trust me. You’d find somewhere else to be a self-aware impression of a bad standup comic, I promise. You could take it to Facebook.

But Twitter isn’t going away overnight, it’s just not. Let’s be real, Twitter probably isn’t just going to die right now when we need it to, and I don’t think it’s right to murder it either, and much as I dream about it at night, rogue hackers probably can’t deny the whole service in one fell swoop, at least not for long (please, God, even just, like, a summer blackout of 2003-type-situation would be good).

What is it that separates Twitter from Peach and Mastodon and Tik Tok and Vine all the other made-up social networks that are sort of but not quite iterations of the only thing online has ever wanted, a chat room (with bells/whistles/video)? Not the technology, that’s for sure. No, it’s the eyeballs and the size—the numbers, the audience, AKA the idiot people who use it. You and me, buddy. We are the problem. Just because we still go there. As always, Yogi Berra has the answer.

So what if we just stopped showing up?

Honestly, I think leaving Twitter is going to be the next big “stop eating meat”—an ethical and somewhat torturously difficult intellectual decision whose advantages are so painstakingly obvious and good for the planet that no one will do it because that would make too much sense and also it feels good (though of course it’s slowly killing you). You can bet that the early adopters of this strategy will lord it over the rest of us righteously, and you can bet I will laugh my head off when I see they never really left at all, they are just silently faving from a farm in Utah, still addicted as ever.

I have friends who’ve left Twitter and failed, repeatedly. Or they’ve come up with coping strategies, like unfollowing everyone, or only looking at Twitter at their desk and not on their phones. This apparently helps, but not enough. This is the equivalent of eating only ethically farmed meat that had a name and a hobby and eggs that were allowed to mature on their own terms. It’s nice for you and the other people who can afford the nouveau white flight Hudson lifestyle, but it’s not going to make a dent in the numbers. I used to use Twitter to see what was going on, but now everything is going on all the time and so much (h/t horse_ebooks) that it’s all just a jumble of sexpolitik and 👇🏼 (the emoji for “This.”).

But some people succeed at leaving Twitter (Hi, Mallory Ortberg). Am I bitter because I can’t leave because I’ve never really tried because it’s basically unthinkable, and my livelihood is basically chained to the traffic provided through social channels that depend in part on the wittiness of the capsule summary of a story provided on Twitter? Sure. Do I suspect that we would be just fine without Twitter and we would make do with the lesser imitations and substitutes, and that we might even look back fondly on that cyan logo that used to mean so much to us, even though in fact nothing would ever be the same and none of it would feel quite as good as a cigarette but it would still be technically better for us in the long run, like quitting drugs or red meat? You bet your ass.

Do I know for a fact that we can’t, we just can’t do it, because the smell of chicken nuggets on a subway car is just so irresistible, and our bodies are weak, and we just love the pull? Don’t ask me, I still eat meat.

At the Naturist Gathering with Jamie Lauren Keiles

in the week before I left, I was haunted by a nightmare of arriving at the camp only to be summoned as the first to undress. As I parked my car by a man-made pond, I worried that maybe I should have done more research. Who goes to a weeklong clothing-optional retreat: Burning Men? Doulas? Buyers of those shrink-wrapped bricks of German rye bread? In the catalog of libertines, some types are more tolerable than others. If I wasn’t going to struggle with nudity, then I was definitely going to struggle with organized nudity. I might be a nudist, but I’ve never been a joiner.

…

The following morning was cold and rainy. Most people at breakfast were wearing at least one article of clothing — a silk kimono or a terry-cloth bathrobe or a souvenir sweatshirt from a regional nude beach. One couple stepped out in matching tie-dye Snuggies. Only two well-insulated men remained nude, one very hairy and one very fat. The scene felt like the relief effort following a tragic YMCA locker room fire. In this state of collective dishabille, it was hard to say what the group had in common. Yesterday we were naturists; today, just a bunch of people in incoherent outfits. Everyone looked dispirited, watching the rain, drinking their coffee from Styrofoam cups. I felt glad to have the weight of a sweatshirt on my shoulders. It was nice to be naked while stretching or sleeping, but I couldn’t adjust to parading my naked body past the buffet line. I imagined myself as a giant pair of breasts, loading a plate with MorningStar sausage. It was hard to do anything without thinking about my boobs.

It’s very difficult for me to resist quoting from this excellent piece at length, but man, this is how you do experiential journalism! Awl pal Jamie Lauren Keiles was sent to a nudist retreat to write about the feeling of doing stuff without your clothes on in semi-public and she knocks it out of the park, from the lede right down to a meditation on the size of a penis relative to a ukulele. Read the whole thing here.

Spending a Week in the Nude

Another day, another “Oh God, another day”

At the end of the day yesterday I was like, “Even for the age in which we live, this was an especially stupid day.” But being the optimist I am I thought, “Well, maybe that means that tomorrow could in no way be worse or dumber than today was.” And yet, here we are, well before noon, and the day has already exceeded its predecessor in both reach and grasp. The two lessons I take from this are: optimism is for chumps and we’re on rocket ride to a world of absurdity so inconceivable that every previous prediction has already proven too sedate to take seriously. Strap in, I guess, or don’t, because there’s no way off. Anyhow, here’s another one from one of the only good things about 2017, Waxahatchee’s Out in the Storm. Enjoy.

★★ On inspection, the ugly sky had a few brighter or bluer spots in it. The city was gray and the river incongruously white. The gray got grayer and rain fell, inadequate to the long buildup. Then the dry gloom resumed. Just outside the windows, with a sudden flash of rust and blue, a kestrel turned in midair over the avenue. The air outside was not hot but thick. Too many dragonflies to count were crossing the pathway toward Mineral Springs in the Park. There were stagnant little puddles in the grooves of the outcropping rock, and midges seethed overhead. People were dancing on rollerskates to a loud PA. New drops fell from the low clouds. The outcropping emptied and filled up with new people. Down below on the open grass, a little black dog with white forequarters chased a tennis ball so furiously it kept tipping over and skidding out sideways.