In Which Michael Jackson and Diana Ross Become MiDiana

When I Think of Home

by REA MCNAMARA

The Wiz

dir. Sidney Lumet

Somewhere between moving its operations to Los Angeles (but definitely before that Motown 25 Tribute), Berry Gordy Jr. decided to re-assemble his Hitsville U.S.A. factory line into the motion pictures business. Motown had long established a reputation for deftly packaging blackness as mass entertainment, so a big budget adaptation of The Wiz, that 1975 Tony Award-winning "super soul" Wizard of Oz b-side, was a sure bet. (Especially if it were to be headlined by the only two Motown acts he ever managed, Diana Ross and the Jackson 5's Michael Jackson.)

Sidney Lumet directed the musical with typical Rotten Apple grit, long shooting the extremes between a hazy 'Poppy Love Perfume Co.' hootchified street corner, or green-tinting the then-gleaming World Trade Center plaza as an Emerald City louched out with Norma Kamali parchute dresses and Halston slim sarongs. But that, alongside Quincy Jones' Oscar-nominated original music scoring, wasn't enough: the musical's $30 million price tag was box office poison, and some critics reacted adversarially to either Diana Ross not being naif enough as Dorothy, or Joel Schumacher's est-ian script.

Yet perhaps Dorothy's plaintive 'Are You There God?' lyrical request in "Home" was too close to what the Sound of Young America had become for Diana and Michael: nothing more than a K-Tel Records Greatest Hits compilation. "In the film, Dorothy was facing her fear and that was the same thing I was going through that year in New York," Diana Ross told Elin Schoen in an intimate Good Housekeeping interview of that fall/winter of 1977. "I was really facing the fact that I was out there on my own for the first time in my life. It scared me, but I got a chance to face all of the fears." For Diana and Michael, Beverly Hills was "Kansas"; New York City was the Oz of disco-fied glitter chic, and a chance finally to grow up, together.

When the Jackson 5 first came to California in 1970, they all moved into Diana's Hollywood Hills home. Michael was 11; Diana, 26. "I remember that we used to go out to buy paints and easels and we did artwork together," said the mother, lover and sister of Michael, who inspired in him a lifelong interest in art. "I am pleased that I touched him in the early days of his life."

Black outs, block fires, bankruptcy: if Oz was New York City, then Studio 54 was Emerald City. For a brief moment in his life, Michael was a grown man. Him and his sister La Toya shared a downtown apartment free from Joseph and Katherine, and he "danced almost every night at 54 with Liza Minnelli," said Michael. "We'd talk about Judy Garland." Diana was there too, singing in the DJ booth.

"The two singers wear matching costumes: slacks, shirt, and tie," wrote Hilton Als of a live televised "Ease On Down The Road" crisscross kickstep special that replayed constantly on Paradise Garage's large video screen. "Jackson dances next to Ross, adding polish to her appealingly jerky moves; he does Ross better than Ross." 

Oh Mahogany Lady, how were you always "washed out in the bright light"? Michael must have slept on this question every night in the solitude of his candle-lit Diana Ross shrine.

The Wiz shot six days a week, so most nights were spent alone: at home in the Sherry Netherland co-op still reeling from the first "Mr. Diana Ross" divorce, or sitting in the boardroom at 19, wrestling post-breach from Philly International to Epic.

Did they find in each other the yellow brick road to self-actualization? Diana called Michael “an inspiration”; he declared his intentions to marry her in an Ebony interview. They both had grown up, and friend to friend, had finally loosened that Gordy-an knot.

"Michael will you come?" At the edge of the Forum Theatre stage, she gyrated in a clingy sequined white, waiting for her 'Muscle man'. He emerges to turn the pink spotlight, corkscrew kicking out the bottomline in tight blue jeans. They rock around and round until she passes the microphone; he leaps away to solo so she can finally dip down low.

But Michael was an Off The Wall supernova, a triplicate peak luminosity soon to be scaled by moonwalk. He moved mountains and charity singles; she however, was now the eclipsed light curve who flooded Central Park with her rain dance.

For the sparrow and crow who suffered everything and nothing, the twilight was interiors filled with mirrors and poses. Ross renovated a Tobacco Heiress fortress in Greenwich, Connecticut with gold records and Rembrandts. Michael retreated to Neverland's carnival rides and dollhouses, lining walls with his mortality.

The Wiz will always be the cellulite proof of their then-brand-new post-Motown world — nightlife, record sessions, sound stages and late night phone calls. The scarecrow's knock-kneed walk was an abridged farewell to Michael's ex-child stardom; Diana was Dorothy, and by the time the film wrapped in 1978, she had gone inside of her self, love overflowing the “long suffered-emptiness...I, like Dorothy, had found everything I was searching for was right there with me all along."

Rea McNamara is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Toronto. You can find her website here. She tumbls here.

"Ease on Down the Road" - Diana Ross & Michael Jackson (mp3)

"Go Bang 3" - Gang of Two (mp3)

"Friend to Friend (Original CHIC Mix)" - Diana Ross (mp3)

Credits

DOROTHY/DIANA Sarah Taylor

SCARECROW/MICHAEL Daniyah-Daniel Gordon

EMERALD CITY BUS BOYS The House of Monroe

DIRECTION Rea McNamara

PHOTOGRAPHY Alyssa Katherine Faoro

STYLING Filipe Ventena

MAKE-UP Roxanne DeNobrega

HAIR Israel Garcia of Salon Daniel

ASSISTANCE Jeba Bowers Murphy

SPECIAL THANKS: 69 Vintage, Chasse Gardée, Gadabout Vintage, Sian Llewelyn, Lost+Found, Rozaneh Vintage Clothing, Textile & Accessories, Todd-Rod Skimmins

Shot at Studio 107, Toronto

actual cast photo, 1978  

In Which The Universe Brought Us Keith Gessen

The Possessor

by ELENA SCHILDER

I went to see Elif Batuman read mostly because I wanted to know what Keith Gessen looked like. I guess I could have Google-image searched him, but I hate typing the names of people who are of my relative age and demographic into the Safari search field during work. It is an activity that seems, first of all, unprofessional, and second of all makes me feel like I am about to be caught. All of which is to say that I didn’t search for Keith Gessen’s image on the Internet, deciding instead to let the universe bring him to me at McNally Jackson Books.

That week I had been printing out Gessen’s archived New Yorker pieces and reading them on the subway. I read two long articles, one about the Ukrainian elections and one about the murder of a Russian journalist and the accompanying trial. I remember being genuinely charmed by Gessen’s writing, which seemed straightforwardly personal and, at certain moments, suffused with a wonderful cheekiness. I had seen Gessen’s novel All the Sad Young Literary Men in the Strand; for me, and I would assume for others, it was a book whose title promised content too close to home (my own gender notwithstanding) even to skim in a bookstore or using Amazon’s “Look Inside” function. I didn’t want to look inside.

ben kunkel, mark greif, keith gessen, marco roth

That same feeling, of intimacy mixed with claustrophobia, washed over, and over, and over me when I walked into McNally Jackson for the reading. I think it was in April. I was early; the kid who served me coffee and a cookie was surly. I walked around and noticed that the store categorizes its fiction by world region, which seemed like a good idea.

Men and women of a certain ilk – mostly alone, and therefore sort of somber – poured in. Because I, too, was unaccompanied, I began to feel prickly and oppressed by the crowd. I texted my sister: “Hell is bookish people.” Batuman’s book, The Possessed, which I hadn’t read and didn’t own at the time, but which I bought – like a sucker – at the reading, is as good as you have heard it is. Its seven essays, several of which have been published in n+1 – the publication which “discovered” her, hence Gessen’s involvement in the reading – focus on Russian literature (both classic and obscure) and its effects, explicit and implicit, on the author’s life.

The essays are set against an academic background. The relationships they explore deeply are those between teacher and pupil, grad student and grad student, and among attendees of academic conferences. They are autobiographical, but they intend to convey life as it is experienced by someone who is subsumed by texts. The book is kind of about reading one’s way through life – a trap that feels familiar to me, though I often wonder if, say, my kids will even know it was ever a possibility.

In the introduction to the book, Batuman talks about the deep ambivalence toward fiction writing that propelled her into the comp lit department at Stanford and, consequently, into the writing of a book of personal, yet analytic, essays. She describes her experience at a summer writing workshop in New England with all the sass we will come to expect of her:

I wanted to be a writer, not an academic. But that afternoon, standing under a noisy tin awning in a parking lot facing the ocean, eating the peanut-butter sandwiches I had made in the cafeteria at breakfast, I reached some conclusive state of disillusionment with the transcendentalist New England culture of “creative writing.” In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer’s formation. By what mechanism, I found myself wondering, was it bad?

Conversely, why was it automatically good for a writer to live in a barn, reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?

I think most of us who care about literature at all would agree that, with a few exceptions, those short stories derived from other short stories are unreadable, and if only for this reason, The Possessed is like an amazing cold shower. It feels at times like Batuman is washing the “craft” of writing – so exhaustively documented, taught, and debated – clean of the very idea of craft. I couldn’t think of a better answer to the New Yorker fiction section.

What results from Batuman’s inquiry into what would happen “if you went to Balzac’s house and Madame Hanska’s estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him—and then started writing,” is a web of connections between present-day human beings – American, Russian, Uzbek, and miscellaneous others – their historical antecedents, great writers, and the characters born of those writers’ works. It’s a web that Batuman builds carefully, with both a scholar’s touch and a novelist’s imaginative power, and there are moments at which the combination feels transcendent, and like a new kind of literary experience. I don’t think it’s too much of an oversimplification to say that the book operates according to a theory of – and with a deep faith in – coincidences.

timothy archibald In the book's strongest essay, “Babel in California,” we hear Batuman exclaim, in the midst of Babel research that has drifted all the way to Merian Cooper, director of the original King Kong, “’So there really is a path from [Nikolai] Fyodorov [a Russian philosopher] to Cooper!’” To which her companion retorts, “’If there wasn’t, you would find one anyway.’” Her detective’s streak – apparent in her many references to Arthur Conan Doyle, and even more in her attempt to prove that Tolstoy was murdered – is strong and very charming in its insistence.

It is, however, slightly unnerving to realize that, for Batuman, seeking out unity between ideas and causality among events may trump all other projects. At the beginning of the Q & A, Keith Gessen mentioned that one of the great things about Batuman’s work is its ability to paint “grotesque” portraits of minor characters; indeed, Batuman’s cast of translators, semioticians, and egomaniacal grad students is painted with an absurdist’s brush. Watching her at the reading, it was hard not to read an edge of incredulity in almost every one of her answers – she has that air of bafflement that I’ve seen before in academics who, so comfortable among their books, seem bemused by the mannerisms and speech of almost everybody else.

I don’t mean this with even an ounce of disparagement: The Possessed is a great book and in many ways a really hopeful one, as regards the future of both academic and creative writing. But there is something about the way they merge here that, on occasion, made me nervous about the degree of alienation you would have to feel to write so thorough and artful a book about your own experience.

For example, there are pages and pages of dialogue in the book that, I believe, must have been faithfully recorded by Batuman either during, or directly after, it was spoken in real time. There is something a little off-putting about the way in which real people are ripped from their contexts and made to mock themselves on Batuman’s page. Of course, she’s not the first writer to use the technique, nor will she be the last. Her project just makes the jump from life to page a little more self-conscious – which isn’t good or bad so much as it feels odd.

Keith Gessen, it turns out, looks like a writer. Had I been given the task of dressing him for the evening, I might not have paired jeans with a wool blazer and I might have given him a haircut. He asked Batuman whether her book was a novel; when she didn’t give a satisfactory answer (and I’m not sure many of her answers satisfied him that night), he said with quiet self-assurance that he thought it was a novel. A Russian woman in the audience loudly disagreed (in Russian), which led to a colorful argument that would have found an easy place in The Possessed and which, in the ensuing weeks, helped to remind me that I might want to write about it.

Elena Schilder is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Abu Dhabi. She last wrote in these pages about Richard Ford. She blogs here.

"Dragonfly" - M. Craft (mp3)

"Standing in the Way of Control" - Gossip (mp3)

"I've Been Lonely For So Long" - Frederick Knight (mp3)

In Which Science Corner Takes A Journey To The Center Of Your Mind

Science Corner: Motherfuckin' Psychedelic Frogfish Edition

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"When you're happy, known things, familiar things lose their appeal. Novelty, on the other hand, becomes more attractive."

A nursery for the extinct giant shark known as the megalodon — the largest shark that ever lived — has been unearthed in the Isthmus of Panama. 

meep meep morp morp psychedelic frogfish la la la la freaking out ur facespace

Creativity often goes hand-in-hand with mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Now scientists think they know why: The brain responds differently to the "feel good" chemical dopamine in both schizophrenics and the highly creative, a new study suggests. The results showed similarities between the brains in healthy, highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.

The findings suggest that creative types might not be able to filter information in their heads as well as "normal" folks, leaving them better able to make novel connections and generate unique ideas. "Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," said study researcher Fredrik Ullén, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

hey hey hey hey psychedelic frogfish blorp blorp blorp blorp eatin all ur cupcakes

Ultimate Neg: What do you do if you want more sex but your partner is about to leave? How about scaring the fucking shit out of her. The male topi antelope keeps his mate around by snorting deceptively, a pretense that makes her think leaving him will bring her face-to-face with danger, scientists now reveal.

Although justice is supposed to be "blind" a study finds that attractiveness influences conviction and sentence length. Cornell University researchers found that unattractive defendants are 22 percent more likely to be convicted, and tend to get hit with longer, harsher sentences – with an average of 22 months longer in prison.

A "dracula" fish with canine-like fangs, a worm that launches glow-in-the-dark bombs and a psychedelic frogfish are among the Top 10 new species discovered last year.

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality.  The study involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is a somewhat vague measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole."

Same Brain Spots Handle Sign Language and Speaking

World's Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death. The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, inspiring the world's greatest illustration (above).

When you have a "Eureka!" moment, not only does an answer seem to suddenly flash into your head, your brain neurons shift gears just as rapidly, a new study suggests. The results, found in rats, pinpoint these moments to an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, supporting the idea that learning can involve sudden changes in the brain, rather than a gradual process.

"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000." Compared with college students of the late 1970s, current students are less likely to agree with statements such as "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective," and "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me." HOW BOUT THAT ECONOMY FOLKS?

"Monitor lizards are fantastic creatures. They are agile, powerful, and the most intelligent lizards of the world."

Trusting women become more skeptical when they are given doses of the sex hormone testosterone, a new study suggests.

Drinking coffee could help to prevent the neural degeneration associated with brain disorders and aging, scientists say. I LOVE COFFEE!

A tubby dinosaur sporting horns each the length of a baseball bat roamed what is now Mexico some 72 million years ago. Horned dinosaurs may have hopped across islands to make their way into Europe, researchers now reveal.

"Brains don't kill people, people kill people"

Crop circle contains Euler's Identity, considered by many to be among the world's most beautiful and elegant theorems.

AND MOTHERFUCKERS ACT LIKE THEY FORGOT ABOUT DREN!!! (GO SEE SPLICE!!!)

A team of scientists says they have succeeded in creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome. 

The key to intelligence may be the ability to juggle multiple thoughts or memories.

New Test Reveals Good vs. Bad Sperm 

Human Mind 'Time Travels' When Pondering Movement: The ability to mentally meander through time by remembering the past or imagining the future sets humans apart from many other species, helping us to learn from what came before and plan for what lies ahead (wonder how this fits in with leaning while playing video games).

Remarkably little is known about how such mental time travel works. Thinking about moving forward prompted speculation about the future, while imagining moving backward triggered reflections on the past. Past research showed that our perceptions of time are tightly linked with space. For instance, pondering the future makes us lean forward, while recalling the past makes us lean back.

The dramatic rise in overall intermarriages has been partly driven by a large wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia over the past several decades, along with a breaking down of longstanding cultural taboos against interracial marriages and the publication of Neel Shah's "How To Date A White Bitch."

Teen Brains wired for risk taking, being embarrassed by parents, saying "whatever" a lot, reenacting Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's video for "1979." 

Researchers investigated brain changes that occur when humans act courageously — that is, when we feel fear, yet act in a manner that opposes this fear. The results show activity in a brain region called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) was associated with participants overcoming their fears

an earthquake moved the border city of Calexico 31 inches, shown above

An obscure compound known as pyrophosphite could have been a source of energy that allowed the first life on Earth to form, scientists now say.

In what urologists say is a growing phenomenon, adolescent boys are playing a game called sack tapping, in which the sole purpose is to strike someone in the testicles. The practice became national news after one victim, 14-year-old David Gibbons of Crosby, Minnesota, had to have his right testicle amputated from being sack tapped in the hallway between classes. Now he is the coolest kid in school.

Brain Quickly Remembers Complex Sounds. The study's results show that auditory memory is as impressive as visual memory, but in different ways, Pressnitzer said. While complex images can be remembered without repetition, audio memory seems to require that repetition take place in order to come into effect.

Naps Clear the Mind, Help You Learn

A girl diagnosed with ADHD as a child or teen suffers from major or clinical depression and anxiety disorders at much higher rates — 20-25 percent — than a boy with ADHD (3-8 percent). Professionals call this "co-morbidity" — when two disorders occur together. A girl with ADHD is far more likely to develop depression or anxiety than a girl without ADHD, or any boy in general. Hey who likes the internet.

About 10,000 gallons of water per minute gush up from the desert floor at an oasis near Death Valley, Nevada, but only after the water completes a slow 15,000-year underground journey,  

Personality Predicted by Size of Different Brain Regions. Those who scored high on neuroticism — which indicates a tendency to experience negative emotions, including anxiety and self-consciousness — was associated with a larger mid-cingulate cortex, a region thought to be involved in the detection of errors and response to emotional and physical pain. Neurotics also had a smaller dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in the regulation of emotions.

Extroverts, those who are sociable, outgoing and assertive, had a larger medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in processing rewards. This goes along with the idea that extroverts are sensitive to rewards, which in our society often involve social interactions and status. Conscientious people, who tend to be orderly, industrious and self-disciplined, had a larger middle frontal gyrus, involved in memory and planning.

What we consider "fair" changes as we age, a new study finds. Young children like all things to be equal, but older adolescents are more likely to consider merit when it comes to dividing up wealth, the researchers say. The shift from the "egalitarian" view of fairness to the more merit-based "meritocratic" view occurred largely between fifth and seventh grade, although it continued to change through high school, with seniors placing the most importance on achievement.

Habitual learning, as it's called, involves two brain circuits — one used for movement and the other for higher, cognitive thinking. As a task is learned, these circuits trade off in terms of their engagement. The movement circuit, which involves a part of the brain called the dorsolateral striatum, becomes more active, while the cognitive circuit, which involves a region called the dorsomedial striatum, takes a dip.

When the room was warmer, participants rated the character as more sociable compared with when it was colder. They also judged the experimenter in charge of instructing the task as more sociable when the heat was on.

Two previously unknown frog species have been identified from two sites in Panama, and they are already under threat from the deadly fungus that has wiped out many amphibian species and is poised to threaten many more. Researchers recognized that frogs (and other amphibians) around the world were dying off in large numbers in 1989. The cause: a deadly fungus called chytridiomycosis that is thought to kill its victims by clogging their skin, essentially suffocating them.

A new study found that homosexual men may be predisposed to nurture their nieces and nephews as a way of helping to ensure their own genes get passed down to the next generation.

A new class of man-made materials could hold the key to creating X-ray-like cameras that can see through walls and clothing. Called metamaterials, these substances could harness terahertz radiation, light with energies between infrared waves and microwaves. Terahertz waves are essentially low-level heat created by the movement of molecules.

46 percent of adults say they have used online searchers to find information about people from their past.

Older people in their mid- to late-50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry than young adults in their 20s.

Soft-bodied sea animals did not die off during a major extinction event during the Cambrian period, as previously thought.

Dads get post-partum depression too.

Scientists build living lungs in a lab. There is no language in them.

Normally when you see or imagine someone else in pain, your brain experiences a twinge of pain as well. Not so when race and bias come into play, scientists now find. People respond with empathy when pain is inflicted on others who don't fit into any preconceived racial category, such as those who appear to have violet-colored skin. When both white and black volunteers saw violet-colored hands get jabbed, they responded empathetically.

This suggests that people normally automatically feel the pain of others, and the lack of empathy that volunteers showed for people of other races was learned and not innate. (this is 4 my Na'vis who just lost somebody, ur best friend, ur baby)

"This default reactivity of human beings implies empathy with the pain of strangers," said researcher Alessio Avenanti. "However, racial bias may suppress this empathic reactivity, leading to a dehumanized perception of others' experience." It could make evolutionary sense that we feel less empathy for people who are different than us. "In case of war or even a friendly competition like a football game, it could be adaptive to feel less empathy for people we consider our opponents."

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording and resident science expert. She last wrote in these pages about Get Him to the Greek. She tumbls here.

"In the Flicker" - Sundowner (mp3)

"DLZ" - TV on the Radio (mp3)

"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" - The Black Crowes (mp3)