What it's like to be young and in love in Southeast Asia

A new photography exhibition is casting light on youth culture across Southeast Asia. More than 150 images, tackling subjects such as online dating and mental health, capture the experiences of young people in a region undergoing unprecedented levels of change.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2ErmfZx

Dying teen marries high school sweetheart

19-year-old Dustin Synder only has a few weeks to live, and his dying wish was to marry his girlfriend.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2EopC3h

Children could get online grooming 'alerts' - NSPCC

Existing technology can be used to flag grooming behaviour to children and moderators, the NSPCC says.

from BBC News - Technology http://ift.tt/2EfUH9j

ColorFab: 3D printer can change colour of objects

MIT is making a new kind of 3D printer that can change the colour of the objects you print.

from BBC News - Technology http://ift.tt/2DOb2Fs

Five tips to keep your app data safe online

After a fitness app "heatmap" revealed military information, what are your devices saying about you?

from BBC News - Technology http://ift.tt/2nni2yE

How a boy from Belarus makes money from mining cryptocurrency

Meet the teenager making money with a computer on his mum's balcony

from BBC News - Technology http://ift.tt/2BDdLLV

Night Shift: Game aims to help doctors detect trauma

A doctor has designed a video game about treating patients with severe injuries.

from BBC News - Technology http://ift.tt/2FpYxvQ

Samsung topples Intel to become the world’s largest chipmaker

 Samsung has ended Intel’s 25-year run as the world’s biggest seller of chipsets after it posted its 2017 end of year financials. The Korean tech giant’s chipset division — which has long been its biggest hitter — grossed total revenue of $69 billion in 2017, eclipsing the $62.8 billion Intel reported for last year. That was a record year for Intel — and… Read More

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Spotify is testing a new playlist-based music app that’s a lot like Pandora

 Spotify is testing an app that sees it move firmly into Pandora’s territory. ‘Stations’ is a new Android-only app that is being piloted by the company in Australia — it was first noticed by app analytics firm Sensor Tower on Tuesday. This app offers a ‘lean-back’ option to listen to music based on genres and managed playlists. In the description, Spotify… Read More

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Crunch Report | Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company

Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company, Facebook is banning cryptocurrency ads and TrackR lays off 42 people. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

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At the State of the Union, Trump touts tax cuts and immigration deal

 With a president as mercurial as Trump, it was anyone’s guess what would happen during his first State of the Union address. The appearance is the president’s most high profile public speaking moment of the year and Trump was expected to touch on some of the issues of the moment, including funding for a border wall, infrastructure and an immigration deal. While less likely if… Read More

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Chat app Line announces plan for cryptocurrency services, loans and insurance

 Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company today announced the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment… Read More

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DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

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Appeals court rules that Tinder’s pricing violates age discrimination laws

 A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age. Read More

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Fools and their crypto

 I believe that the token sale economy will drive the next startup revolution. Just as sites like TechCrunch, organizations like Y Combinator and the men in Dockers and fleece sweaters who populate Sand Hill Road defined (and still define) the last startup revolution, crypto will define the next one. But, as it stands, we cannot trust the participants, nor can we trust the products. Read More

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Red Hat acquires CoreOS for $250 million in Kubernetes expansion

 Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. Read More

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TimeFlip is a time-tracking gadget simple enough that I might actually use it

 If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. TimeFlip is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2GvyUeH

Amazon is experimenting with its own QR code style ‘SmileCodes’

 QR code style markers — those lil’ barcode-looking boxes you’ll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the U.S. But that’s not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them “SmileCodes.” Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2EoddfQ

Imverse’s groundbreaking mixed reality renders you inside VR

 What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? Imverse’s team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. Now its real-time mixed reality engine is ready for public demos, debuting this month at Sundance Film Festival. Read More

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Getting to the root of the revenue multiple

 Valuation concerns are top of mind for many investors. For those in tech investing, this concern is perhaps most acute, given the generally high multiples assigned to the sector. There are good articles addressing how revenue multiples have moved over time or why this methodology even came to be, but I’m still curious as to how a revenue multiples ties to some fundamental unit of… Read More

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CVS, other health stocks down upon Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire healthcare co news

 Investors panicked this morning upon the news Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway were teaming up to launch a health insurance company for their U.S. employees. Healthcare is one of the biggest operating costs for Fortune 500 companies, and the three iconic companies have joined forces to build a new health insurance company for all U.S. employees in an effort to improve… Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2nqbG0T

You can now use Alexa to send SMS messages

 Amazon announced today it’s launching a new messaging feature for Alexa devices in the U.S. that will allow you to send texts – yes, SMS messages – to your friends and other contacts using your voice. Customers can now ask Alexa to send a message to a specific contact, and Alexa will figure out how to route it appropriately – using either the previously launched… Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2Eot12d

Google is launching a new digital store to sell cloud-based software

 Google is launching a digital store that will offer cloud-based software to companies and other organizations. Bloomberg, which reported the news a bit earlier, notes the move is just the juggernaut’s latest effort to ensure that cloud leaders, and specifically Amazon Web Services, don’t leave the company in the dust. Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2DNJ5cy

Amazon’s new healthcare company could give smaller healthtech players a boost

 JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a new healthcare company for all U.S. employees. Details are sparse; there’s not even a name associated with the new company. But this is big news for the industry, and it could have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but also smaller tech companies open to partnering with the company —… Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2Gw98qF

Apple reportedly under investigation by SEC and DOJ for phone slowdown

 The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple’s communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, Bloomberg is reporting. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company’s communications about the software update. The Bloomberg… Read More

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Contraception app still being probed by medical agency over unwanted pregnancies

 Is there such a thing as bad publicity? It’s an interesting and contested question. To wit: Self styled ‘digital contraception’ app, Natural Cycles — which relies on a set of proprietary algorithms and women inputting their morning body temperature to predict fertility levels each day — has claimed that negative headlines generated after a clinic reported a number… Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2FwYsa1

Details and solutions emerge for missile threat false alarm in Hawaii

 A preliminary report from the FCC has revealed additional details about the situation that caused a false missile threat alarm in Hawaii earlier this month. It really was human error, as initial reports indicated, but now the nature of that error (errors, really) is a bit clearer. Read More

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State of the Union: Trump hails 'new American moment'

The president speaks of "one American family", but Democrats say he has left the nation "fractured".

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2Gykn1A

Taliban threaten 70% of Afghanistan, BBC finds

The Islamist group's power and reach have surged since foreign combat troops left, the BBC finds.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GxHfyf

Pope to send envoy to investigate Chile sex abuse claims

The Vatican says it has been given new information about allegations of a bishop's alleged cover-up.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DOA6rH

Trump signs order to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open

The move reverses attempts by former President Barack Obama to close the controversial site.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GyqPpl

Hawaii false alarm: Officials quit over missile alert

Additionally the employee who sent the warning, who had a record of poor performance, is fired.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GwFtNV

Glee actor Mark Salling, 35, found dead

The actor, who had admitted possessing child sex abuse images, is believed to have killed himself.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DXW3b3

Skywatchers await 'super blue blood Moon'

A blue blood supermoon and lunar eclipse across Asia heralds a year of lunar science milestones, say scientists.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DNjDYM

Diane Keaton defends Woody Allen over abuse allegations

The actress says she "continues to believe" the director after claims against him resurfaced.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2Gu0XuS

Yemen separatists capture most of Aden, residents say

Yemeni cabinet ministers are reported to be holed up inside the presidential palace in Aden.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GxRIdk

France jogger death: Husband admits killing Alexia Daval

Three months after Alexia Daval's body was found, her husband tells police he killed her by mistake.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2Frace3

Pierre Agnes: Boardriders boss goes missing at sea in France

Pierre Agnes' boat was discovered washed ashore near Biarritz on France's Atlantic coast.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2rQAhkF

The killer whale that can say 'hello' and 'bye bye'

A killer whale that can mimic words such as "hello" is thought to be the first of its kind to copy human speech.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2nqKlfJ

State of the Union: Congress divided on Trump speech

The contrasting reactions to the president's speech tell the tale of a deeply divided Congress.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2nozzH0

State of the Union: Kennedy delivers response to Trump

Joseph Kennedy III attacked the president and said Democrats were speaking for all Americans.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2BGLowb

Taliban 'threaten 70% of Afghanistan' BBC investigation finds

The Afghan Taliban, which US-led forces spent billions of dollars trying to defeat, are now openly active in 70% of the country, a BBC study has found.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2rQlZRb

Super blue blood moon: Get ready for a rare celestial show

A lunar eclipse, supermoon and blue moon are about to happen at once. Here's what you need to know.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DQmXOX

Why did Kenya's Raila Odinga 'inaugurate' himself as president?

Kenya's main opposition leader stages his own "swearing-in" after two disputed elections. We explain.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2E0X0Q0

Stranded skiers' chairlift chopper rescue

Rescuers were lowered from a helicopter to help up to 150 skiers stuck on a mountain in Austria.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DNsFFr

Réunion island and the 'stolen children' of France

Marlène Morin was 15 when she was resettled from the island of Réunion to France. After 52 years, she finally returned.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2rQmV8l

Top-secret Australian files 'left at second-hand shop'

Bureaucrats say they will urgently investigate a breach that has sparked both amusement and concern.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2BFFhIG

'Emotional support peacock' barred from United Airlines plane

United Airlines refuses to let a woman in New Jersey board a plane with a peacock, citing its size.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2rVgVLc

South Koreans conquer fear of dining alone

Sales of meals-for-one are on the increase in South Korea despite the taboo of eating alone.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2neTIyd

Cow walks on wild side with Polish bison

A cow has spent the winter living with the wild bison of the Bialowieza Forest in eastern Poland.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2E3Oe1f

State of the Union: The North Korean defector at Trump's side

North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho waved his crutches to resounding applause when Trump called him up.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DZ8LX8

Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining?

As the worldwide demand for used and worn clothing plummets, what do we do with our unwanted clothes?

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EqeIKC

'I was 12 when I married a 35-year-old'

A campaign in several African countries wants to stop child brides and keep girls in education.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2nqZsF4

The tea boss with a thirst for global domination

How businessman Tran Qui Thanh built Vietnam's largest soft drinks firm, THP, and his plans to become a worldwide brand.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2FxKrc1

Trump pushes hardline immigration policies even as he urges unity

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump urged lawmakers on Tuesday to work toward bipartisan compromises, but pushed a hard line on immigration, insisting on a border wall and other concessions from Democrats as part of any deal to protect the children of illegal immigrants.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2FuHau6

Trump preaches cooperation, but can he follow through?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump spoke of unifying the country and delivering for the American people -- and he has the opportunity to back up his words with action almost immediately.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2ntVDPt

Trump orders Guantanamo detention center to stay open

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order on Tuesday to keep open the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay after his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, tried unsuccessfully to close the prison that has drawn international condemnation.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2GzE0GS

Trump fixes gaze on Republicans during speech to U.S. Congress

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said in his speech to Congress on Tuesday that he wanted to extend an "open hand" to work with both parties on issues like immigration but he spent most of the address facing Republicans while seldom glancing at Democrats.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2BFpZ6w

Justice Department warned White House about releasing memo: Washington Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senior Justice Department officials on Monday warned White House Chief of Staff John Kelly about the dangers of publicly releasing a memo that alleges abuses by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing people briefed on the meeting.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2DNNYXn

Hawaii civil defense employee mistook drill for actual missile attack

(Reuters) - The Hawaii civil defense employee who issued the false missile alarm that stirred panic across the state last month mistook an alert drill for an actual attack, confused by conflicting messages used in the simulation, investigators said on Tuesday.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2GuBXDI

Texas inmate executed for murder of ex-girlfriend

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Dallas man who was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend in 1999 while he was out on parole was executed on Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal, prison officials said.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2DPCJxJ

Governor seeks probe of Texas training site in gymnastics scandal

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas Governor Greg Abbott asked the state's top police agency on Tuesday to start an investigation into Karolyi Ranch, a training facility used by USA Gymnastics where young women athletes said they were sexually molested by the team's doctor.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2nmjgKK

As U.S. immigration debate rages, 'Dreamers' await their fate

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional leaders discuss the fate of some 700,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, the young people whose lives hang in the balance fret about their future.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2EmmhBT

CIA director expects Russia will try to target U.S. mid-term elections

LONDON (Reuters) - CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Russia will target U.S. mid-term elections later this year as part of the Kremlin's attempt to influence domestic politics across the West, and warned the world had to do more to push back against Chinese meddling.

from Reuters: U.S. http://ift.tt/2nqloQV

Göteborg: Finland’s MTV Group Joins Nordisk Film & TV Fond

GOTEBORG, Sweden — MTV, Finland’s largest commercial television group, owner of flagship channel MTV3, has joined the Oslo-based Nordisk Film & TV Fond (NFTVF) as its twelfth broadcasting partner. Connected to the foundation between 2011-2015, MTV will be the second Finnish member, joining pubcaster YLE. The announcement was made during Sweden’s 41st Göteborg Intl. Film […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2DZBlrl

Stephen Colbert Skewers Trump and Learns Definition of ‘Zaddy’ in Live ‘Late Show’

Stephen Colbert cruised through a live edition of CBS’ “The Late Show” on Tuesday, thanks to plenty of material from President Trump’s State of the Union address and a lively segment with “2 Dope Queens” hosts Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson. Colbert offered his annotated commentary on highlights from Trump’s 90-minute speech to Congress. Among […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2nn4d3k

Pinto Da Cunha Joins Pink Parrot, a New Canada-Spain International Distributor

MADRID  —  Spain-based sales executive Tania Pinto Da Cunha  has joined Pink Parrot Media, a new international distributor, primarily focused on handling CGI animated features. She will serve as its vice president. Created last fall by Marie-Claude Beauchamp, founder of Canadian production house CarpeDiem Film & TV (“Snowtime!,” “The Legend of Sarila”), Pink Parrot will operate […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2FvI5KV

Stormy Daniels Appears on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ After State of the Union Address

President Donald Trump’s reported paramour and adult film star Stormy Daniels appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Monday night just hours after Trump finished his first State of the Union speech. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, kicked off the segment by watching the State of the Union address with Kimmel. “Okay, enough of this,” […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2Fy5wDo

Ivanhoe Boards India’s ‘Unread Pages’

Prominent U.S. independent producer, Ivanhoe Pictures is to co-produce ‘Unseen Pages,” a multigenerational drama that will be directed by India’s Jahna Barua. Hailing from the Assam region, Barua is one of India’s top directors who has worked in the Assam and Hindi industries. His past films, including “Ayejo” and “Tora” have collected an unmatched 11 […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2GwQIGk

Trump’s First State of the Union: A Divisive President Delivers a Dictator’s Speech (Column)

With stilted, smug delivery, President Donald J. Trump delivered his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. It was an exceptionally cheap speech, one that relied repeatedly on the grief of parents who had lost their children, the appropriated trauma of soldiers and refugees, and flag-waving rhetoric […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2EraJgC

Joseph P. Kennedy III Delivers Official Democratic Party Response to SOTU

The Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union speech emphasized unity and the strength of the American people without once mentioning Trump by name. The response did not specifically target many of the remarks Trump made in his address, but did extent a hand specifically to Dreamers, the thousands of young immigrants whose […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2GxhMVT

Fox Poised to Win Rights to ‘Thursday Night Football’

Executives at Fox Sports believe they are close to winning the rights to show the National Football League’s “Thursday Night Football” for at least the next season, a deal that would illustrate the company’s need for live sports at a time when viewership for professional football games are eroding . The 21st Century Fox unit […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2FuGmFr

Inside the Chamber: Top Moments from Trump’s State of the Union

WASHINGTON — President Trump tried to spread a message of unity at points in his State of the Union address, but from inside the House chamber, what was very apparent was discord and division. Dozens of female Democratic House members wore black to honor victims of sexual harassment and assault. Members of the Congressional Black […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2GuVEeC

Celebrities Deride Trump’s State of the Union: ‘Not All Immigrants Are in Gangs’

President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union speech Tuesday night, addressing infrastructure and immigration and touting the economy. Much of Hollywood was not a fan of Trump’s speech, however, or elected not to watch it at all, and took to Twitter to express their contempt for the event or encourage their followers to […]

from Variety http://ift.tt/2EsqUdy

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Trump says honoring veterans is ‘why we proudly stand for the national anthem’

01/30/18 9:37 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Clinton, moments before SOTU, explains why she didn't fire campaign adviser

01/30/18 9:31 PM

Coronation Street to get a Co-op and Costa in product placement deal

But ITV insists Roy's Rolls won't come under threat.

from BBC News - Business http://ift.tt/2rSVxWX

Can cars be used as mini power stations?

A trial aims to determine the viability of electric vehicles feeding energy back into the grid.

from BBC News - Business http://ift.tt/2Ftt38t

Rescuing child brides

A campaign in several African countries wants to stop child brides and keep girls in education.

from BBC News - Business http://ift.tt/2nqZsF4

Global brew

How businessman Tran Qui Thanh built Vietnam's largest soft drinks firm, THP, and his plans to become a worldwide brand.

from BBC News - Business http://ift.tt/2FxKrc1

Things fall apart

As the worldwide demand for used and worn clothing plummets, what do we do with our unwanted clothes?

from BBC News - Business http://ift.tt/2EqeIKC

German police make arrests in nationwide raids on human traffickers

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police said on Wednesday they had raided properties and made arrests across the country in an operation to crack down on human traffickers.

from Reuters: World News http://ift.tt/2rU77kJ

Nonfiction: Jefferson’s Three Daughters — Two Free, One Enslaved

Catherine Kerrison’s book tells the story of the third president’s daughters, including Harriet Hemings, who was born a slave.

from NYT > Books http://ift.tt/2rEuK0L

America does export energy. It imports a lot more.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2FvOaH6

How much do corporate tax cuts help workers

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2DNz4jG

Facebook hit with lawsuit over murder posted online

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2rVCsn6

Bollywood's troubled relationship with women

Film critic Shubhra Gupta shines a spotlight on the history of sexism in Indian films.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2nsu0Xf

'Chemtrail' conspiracy theorists: The people who think governments control the weather

The first part of the BBC's series on online conspiracy theories: why some people think chemicals are dropping from the sky.

from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2DQkWX9

Liberian President George Weah cuts salary to confront 'broken economy'

In one of his first acts as President of Liberia, George Weah announced he will cut his salary by 25% as part of an effort to confront his country's "broken economy."

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2nkNAFw

Scientists grow new ears for children with defect

Using a combination of 3-D printing and cultured cells, scientists in China have grown new ears for five children born with a defect in one ear called microtia, which impacts the shape and function of the ear.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2GuJnH2

EasyJet CEO takes pay cut to match female predecessor

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2Em2SRH

Carmakers use monkeys to test diesel fumes

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2rMJRFv

4 dead in Kenya blaze as fire trucks 'run out of water'

A fire in the Lang'ata neighborhood of Nairobi on Sunday night killed four people and left an estimated 6,000 people homeless, according to the National Disaster Management Unit.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2GsglIk

US immigration deal may not get done

After months of rhetoric and negotiations on immigration with the parties barely any closer to each other, the reality is beginning to dawn that there may be no deal to be had.

from CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition http://ift.tt/2njuTSx

Inside Amazon’s Spheres

 Like most adventurous designs the Spheres are divisive: some call them an eyesore or attention-seeking behavior by Amazon, but others will admire the originality and intelligent use of space. Seattle is no stranger to odd architecture, and the Spheres seem to meld the mind-bending MoPop (formerly the EMP) with the multifaceted complexity of the Central Library. Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2Gv6WPY

Facebook nabs Google’s AR product director

 Facebook has stolen away Google’s director of Product for AR Nikhil Chandhok, who will be joining FB to lead product management of the Camera team working on augmented reality. Chandhok worked on Google’s ARCore smartphone augmented reality platform as well as its Daydream VR platform in his position there. Previously, Chandhok had co-founded AI startup Bento Labs, which raised… Read More

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GV leads $25M investment in Hover, a computer vision startup that digitizes your home

 As more and more startups aim to 3D-scan the world, the question of what consumers will actually care about enough to bring into the digital world is a tough one to answer. For most people, a home will be the biggest investment they make in their lives, so SF-based Hover is theorizing that’s the place to start. Read More

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The Grammys gave CBS All Access its second-biggest day for signups yet

 Sunday night’s airing of the 60th Annual Grammy Awards turned out to be a big boost for CBS’ streaming service, CBS All Access, which offered a live stream of the event on its service. According to the network, its subscription video on demand and live streaming service hit new records in terms of subscriber sign-ups and unique viewers for the awards show specifically, and was… Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2DX7f7L

DJI Mavic Air review

 The metal joysticks are safely nestled inside the flip-out arms of the controller, the landing gear safely nestled in the propeller arms. Not a millimeter is wasted, not even in the packaging. It’s the culmination of a dozen years of drone making experience — but really, it’s built directly on top of the company’s recent push to make the perfect consumer quadcopter.… Read More

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Facebook will start prioritizing local news in user feeds

 Facebook’s latest step in its on-going effort to fix its embattled news delivery offering involves prioritizing local sources. The social media giant announced today in a blog post that, along with efforts to elevate content from friends and outlets designated as “high quality,” the site will be working to push local news offerings to the top of users’ feeds. The… Read More

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Microsoft buys gaming services startup PlayFab to bolster its Azure platform

 In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired PlayFab, which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified back-end services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. Read More

from TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2BDxUkU

SuperPhone is building a Salesforce for texting

 The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Read More

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A Crack of Darkness: Myth-Making and Mob Culture in the City That Can’t Keep a Secret

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, Tod Goldberg wrote a short story about a mob-connected hit man from Chicago who goes undercover in Las Vegas as a rabbi. That story, “Mitzvah,” turned into the novel Gangsterland, and now with the publication of Gangster Nation has turned into a series and possibly a television show. I spoke with Tod via email about the evolution of the series and the development of its exceptionally conflicted protagonist, Sal Cupertine.

¤

JIM RULAND: You’ve said that when you wrote Gangsterland, you didn’t know you were beginning a series. Did your experience writing the Burn Notice books provide any guidance when picking up Gangster Nation where you left off?

TOD GOLDBERG: Not really, because my main job when I was writing Burn Notice was to make the books evergreen … well, not my main job, but a primary one, because when you’re writing books that are tied to a franchise like Burn Notice, you can’t do something in the books that will mess with the continuity of the show itself. So I couldn’t have Michael Westen lose a finger, or I couldn’t have Sam Axe suddenly become depressed and sullen and questioning all of the things he’d ever done, or Fiona couldn’t decide, screw it, I’m moving to Los Angeles and getting into improv comedy. Plus, I wanted the books to be comfort food — something that when the show was off the air for the break, or off the air permanently, fans could come back to for a taste of what gave them joy. It was an awful lot of fun to write those books and I could have kept writing them forever if I’d wanted to, but after five books in four years I felt pretty well cooked. However, what writing Burn Notice taught me was actually something far more profound, which was how to write commercial fiction. Realizing you’re servicing a franchise that already has millions of fans means you can’t be as precious with your work, but it also means understanding what a larger population expects, too. It was particularly enlightening.

One of the things the Gangsterland series does is address the mythology of Las Vegas. Its own brand of myth-making contributes to the sense that it’s not real, that it’s a fabrication, a mirage in the desert. In Gangster Nation you really drill down into issues of place and property. Why is that?

I’ve always been fascinated by place and property, perhaps because I’ve spent a lot of my life living in resort cities, which by definition requires a bit of magical realism to pull things off. Las Vegas takes it to the extreme, of course, when you look at the Strip or the Fremont Street Experience, but so too in the gated and master-planned communities that now make up the suburbs on both sides of the Strip. Summerlin, where the majority of the action takes place in the Las Vegas portion of the book, could be cut and pasted into Orange County and no one would blink — it’s a cookie-cutter idea of what a relaxed suburban lifestyle should look like, even though the people who live in the homes are largely employed in a vast con known as the “gaming industry.” But as it relates to the great crimes of our nation in the last 100 years or so, the mortgage fraud that destroyed our economy in 2008 was of course a pretty significant one … that went entirely unpunished, save for the people who lost their homes and lives and all that. And no place was more emblematic of this false hope than Las Vegas, which ended up with ghost-town neighborhoods after the collapse. When Gangster Nation takes place, in 2001, they were already way down deep in the subprime world and already people were getting conned in legit and illegitimate ways to get those homes. Turns out the mob was a better bet than Countrywide, in the long run.

You’ve embedded a very cogent critique of neoliberalism in these crime stories! But I especially love how your Las Vegas is one the tourists don’t come to Nevada to see. No showgirls or pit bosses or drifters in convertibles with heads full of LSD. How do the Gangsterland novels fit in the legacy of Vegas noir?

That’s the thing about Las Vegas: If you live there, you don’t really go to the Strip unless you’re going to work. It’s actually a pretty sleepy community that is surprisingly conservative and surprisingly religious — Hillary won Clark County by over 10 percent in the last election, though she took the state by a much smaller margin; but Nevada in general is pretty much a 50-50 state in terms of liberal versus conservative, going decisively to Bush in 2000 (which is when the book takes place) through 2004 and overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008 and 2012 — and conveniently both parties are notoriously corrupt in the state. So there’s a lot of false equivalencies of the American Dream being trotted out in the state on both sides, though they’re uniformly supportive of the elements that bring darkness to the place … which is to say, gambling and tourism. That said, normal people still live there and so if you’re writing crime fiction about Las Vegas, I think you have to talk about what happens away from the bright lights.

When I first wrote about these characters, it was in an anthology called Las Vegas Noir in 2008 and I was tasked with writing about Summerlin, where I used to live, and so that forced me to take the story off the Strip, to look at the normal people, at the commonplace crime that takes place. And when I wrote the first book, I told myself that I wasn’t going to set a single scene on the Strip, that everything was going to happen where the real deception was taking place — the suburbs, which were selling people an idea of paradise in the middle of the desert, everything manufactured to be hospitable — and then sort of forced my own hand by making it so Sal/Rabbi David Cohen was forbidden from going to the Strip to avoid the cameras and facial-recognition programs that were just starting to proliferate out there and grew all the more present since 9/11. None of which is sort of the expected ideal of Las Vegas noir stories in general, but I think part of what I am always trying to do with these characters is to also poke fun at the stereotypes of the genre. Mob stories in particular are filled with romantic notions and post-Puzo, they fall so easily into cliche, perhaps because Puzo also taught modern-day mobsters how to be mobsters, creating lore where there wasn’t before. To be perfectly honest, I’ve disliked a lot of crime fiction set in Las Vegas because the stories don’t go anywhere new. That’s changed in the last few years with books like Vu Tran’s excellent Dragonfish, which I think is one of the best novels about Las Vegas, ever, never mind crime fiction. So where do I fit in the legacy? I’m writing about the time period where it became popular to say that Las Vegas was better when the Mafia controlled it, when it became apparent that the corporations who took over the city from the crooks weren’t, in fact, a total improvement. Which is absolutely crazy. But that’s what Las Vegas does to people: it makes you put aside your normal values.

A lot of crime novels tend to be first-person affairs. Direct action driven by direct characters. You take a more circumspect approach with multiple points of view. Can you talk about this decision and how it influenced the kind of book you wanted to write?

Well, I think if I were writing a more traditional whodunit, I wouldn’t write from multiple points of view, but in this case the choice comes from both a plot necessity — I wanted to show the ripples of a crime, in this case how the people Sal Cupertine killed in the previous book, which caused him to disappear into the guise of Rabbi David Cohen, have materialized into bigger problems outside his own view — and a thematic necessity — which is that the book is about how the government, the crime families, and religious organizations end up gnawing on different parts of the same bone. But also there’s a functional character reason: the main character isn’t doing notable things every single day. Most of the time, Sal/Rabbi David Cohen is busy doing boring rabbi things. Likewise, the former FBI agent who is hunting him — Matthew Drew — is busy trying to earn a living on most days, the gangsters who are hoping to get rid of him are also busy trying to earn a living, and, on most days, Sal’s wife Jennifer is just trying to keep her shit together enough to raise her son. That’s part of what I wanted to also show, generally, that the life of a criminal, the life of an FBI agent, and the life of someone just trying to live in the shadow of those worlds are mostly a mundane affair, punctuated by action … not action punctuated by the mundane.

No one wants to read that, however. People want to read the parts where interesting things happen. So shifting point of view and engaging a few different characters while keeping Sal/Rabbi David Cohen as the focal point became my way of telling a more complex story without long chapters where the characters just kind of sit around thinking about going to Target (though, now that I think about it, I do have scene in a Target … and another in a Walmart…).

Sal Cupertine is a very bad man, yet he embraces some of the truths of the Jewish tradition that he is impersonating. One of these holds, “Meet all sorrow standing up.” That seems like great advice for a hit man.

It’s not bad life advice, really, no matter a person’s vocation. There’s a lot of Talmudic knowledge that can be used to justify almost any behavior, or to edify it. I get emails on occasion from readers who tell me that Rabbi David Cohen is misusing something from the Talmud or the Torah and I want to tell them that’s because he’s not a real rabbi, he’s a hit man, and that what he says the Talmud teaches is oftentimes a ruse because he knows the Jews he’s speaking to don’t know any better, which is why he can also sometimes get by merely using a line from a Bruce Springsteen song instead … and then I think, “Well, if I have to explain this joke, we both end up poorer from the experience.” So I usually just say something like, “Thanks, I’ll check it out.”

The larger thing, of course, is that the evolution of Sal Cupertine into the Rabbi David Cohen ends up making him a bit less predictable, because now this ruthless killer is beginning to feel pangs of empathy, to sense that his life has some spiritual worth, and also he’s beginning to feel, dare I say, good about helping people sometimes. He feels bad that he’s performing sham weddings. This allows me to take the character down some roads that aren’t usual in a crime novel, to examine things I find intellectually interesting, in additional to having a guy running around shooting people who piss him off, which I also find intellectually interesting, or at least emotionally satisfying on some days.

Without giving anything away, what’s next for Sal/Rabbi David Cohen and the Gangsterland series?

There will be another book, for sure, and we recently sold the books to the folks who make the TV show Peaky Blinders, which could mean great things are coming, or nothing ever gets made, of course. I don’t see me writing more than three books with Sal/Rabbi Cohen, at this point, but who knows? Maybe I’ll do a YA series! Picture books! I look at a writer like James Lee Burke and the great things he’s done with a character like Dave Robicheaux and inhabiting Louisiana so acutely and I try to imagine if I could write 20 books about Sal Cupertine and Las Vegas … and it doesn’t seem possible or plausible, but I know for sure I have another 400 pages, at least.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but have people said, “Well actually there are a lot of similarities between being a rabbi and a hit man?”

Yeah, but in particular I hear it from rabbis! I hear from a lot of rabbis, actually, to talk about their jobs — not many hit men contact me to discuss the finer points of their work, thankfully — and to tell me funny stories, or to tell me, “Hey, you might find this an interesting parallel,” and then tell me about some minor crime that took place in their shul. It’s not usually things that would involve a hit man, but there are certainly some clear lines to be drawn between organized crime and organized religion and their attendant hierarchal structures, but also in that each requires a certain amount of fealty. If you’re going to devote yourself to some Mafia don or a rabbi or a priest or cult leader or whatever, in the end it’s because you think your life will be better for it — that you’ll get some tangible payoff, in this life or the next. That means a level of devotion, of giving a part of yourself to someone else. I am innately drawn to that … in a mostly negative way.

Can you talk about your own faith? As you’ve gone on this journey with Sal/Rabbi David Cohen, what’s been the payoff for you?

I’ve never felt more Jewish in my life. I don’t know if that’s entirely about my immersion in the holy books in order to write this character or if it’s the rise in anti-Semitism I’ve seen subsequent to the election in 2016, the march of Nazis in Charlottesville, or merely that I’m now 47, my parents are dead, my grandparents are long dead, and I’m now at the top of the family tree, along with my siblings and cousins, which I think naturally makes you look back at how you got to this place in your life. It’s impossible to grow up with the last name Goldberg and not know you’re a Jew, of course, but the truth is that I didn’t know much about Judaism itself until about 10 years ago — which is true for a lot of cultural Jews, as it were, which is to say Jews who don’t go to temple, who eat bacon, and who only really take part in rituals on holidays. But of late, I find my thinking really influenced by the things I’ve learned in the Talmud, by the lessons, by the philosophy. It hasn’t made me more religious, but it has made me more spiritual, and also more socially active.

A weird thing happened to me a few months ago — a woman responded to something I’d said on Facebook by sending me a photo of Hitler. This was on a public forum hosted by the local newspaper ostensibly about local politics, but which had mostly devolved into a place where people argued national politics and lunatics posted conspiracy theories. Anyway, I was shocked by this, so I took a photo of it, and periodically people would ask me if it had happened, that they’d heard this person had done this thing — she was a local conservative political supporter and had once run for city council or some such thing herself — and was it true. And I would always say yes, of course it was true, and I’d show them the picture, because it was crazy! But she was not the first or the last person to send me a photo of Hitler. Well, eventually, this person ended up hosting an event in her home for local political candidates and I was asked, yet again, if it was true that she’d sent me a photo of Hitler and yet again I said yes, of course, here’s the photo. Except this time, it all ended up on the front page of the local newspaper.

So I had to go over to my mother-in-law’s house and sit down and explain to her this was a thing that was happening, that she was going to get the paper in the morning and I was going to be on the front page. She said to me, “Why would someone post a photo of Hitler in response to something you said?” And I said, “Because a crack of darkness has opened up in the world and all the hate has come flooding out of it. And now people feel like they can do such things to Jews or anyone else.” It was something my good friend, the poet Matthew Zapruder, had said in response to some other event of anti-Semitism in the United States and it had stuck with me. My mother-in-law is a devout Christian and she sat there for a long time, not speaking, and then she started to get teary eyed, and said, “I didn’t know such things still happened.” And I said, “This has never stopped happening.”

I tell you all of this because the truth is, it doesn’t matter how much faith I have, how much spirituality I possess, my last name will always be the marker of my heritage — the difference now is that I carry others’ heritage with it, by virtue of my job as a writer, people who would never speak up. That means something more in these times.

¤

Jim Ruland is the author of Forest of Fortune, co-author of My Damage with Keith Morris of Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, and curator of the Southern California based reading series Vermin on the Mount, now in its 14th year.

The post A Crack of Darkness: Myth-Making and Mob Culture in the City That Can’t Keep a Secret appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Identifying and Identifying with the Thin White Duke: David Bullock’s “David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music”

THE TITLE OF Darryl W. Bullock’s latest book, David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music, raises a few questions. Is this a memoir, detailing the author’s coming to terms with his own identity through the sexually protean Thin White Duke (or Ziggy Stardust or Major Tom or Aladdin Sane or, for the more cinematically minded queer babies of my generation, the Goblin King)? If so, how will this intimate and personal narrative intersect with the promised examination of a century of LGBT music? Spoiler alert: It won’t, really. Bowie is positioned at the beginning of the book both as an emblem of the monumental boomer music losses of 2016 (Prince, Maurice White, Glenn Frey, George Martin, Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns, and George Michael, to name a few), pointing out that, even when just one entry in the list of the previous year’s dearly departed, he elicited a staggering volume of grief from diverse audiences around the world. After the first chapters, he is never heard from again.

This is because Bullock doesn’t want to tell the story of how Bowie — someone with a complicated relationship to queer subcultures, who would in 1993 come out as a “closet heterosexual” and face accusations of cultural appropriation — “made him gay,” aside from a broad acknowledgment of the importance of celebrities coming out publicly. What he wants to do is write the contributions of LGBT people into pop music history (a worthwhile task, to be sure). But for Bullock’s reparative history, one can imagine a self-identifying LGBT musician serving just as well. Why is Bowie — white male androgynous space alien, coming out time and again to the press, as gay, as bisexual, as refusing sexual and gender conformity — Bullock’s emblem for queer influence in popular music? What exactly is “LGBT music” to Bullock? Is it music made by LGBT people? Music consumed by LGBT people? Music that, somehow, seems uniquely lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender in its themes, sounds, structures, or forms? This framing device raises a number of fascinating questions about the relationship between music and the development of sexual identity that the book fails to address at all. With the exception of the titular Bowie, Bullock confines his history mainly to the first category: music made by LGBT people. In this way, he robs the subject of some of its complexity (no more mention of the many hetero artists and/or normatively gendered genres and styles that have tended to draw queer audiences here, unless the draw was a queer performer).

It might be a little unfair to expect a book whose stated aim is to reclaim performers whose stories have been straight-washed and to celebrate those LGBT musical icons whose sexual identities and behaviors have been ripped to shreds in the public eye — to come to terms with a survey so expansive. In such a survey any music at all could be classified as “LGBT.” Instead, the author strives to catalog and honor the contributions of these individuals, so often, he argues, eclipsed by gossip and speculation about their sexuality. It would also be unfair to fault Bullock for not being as inclusive as he could’ve been; certainly Sylvester Made Me Gay or Dusty Springfield Made Me Gay would’ve been very different books than the one under discussion here. “This book is not intended as a fully comprehensive guide to every LGBT musician who has ever entered a recording studio,” Bullock offers by way of anticipatory apology, “but it is my hope that, through its pages, you will discover some of the people who spent their lives fighting for us to be heard.” I was still a little disappointed that instead of an intimate and personal narrative interwoven into a broader history, the survey of the “100 Years of LGBT Music” advertised in the second half of the title proceeds in a fairly traditional manner, and David Bowie represents not an opportunity to examine the complexities of music and sexual identity, but simply the cultural position of the author.

To begin, Bullock surveys a number of musicians, LGBT and otherwise (The Gun Club’s Kid Congo Powers, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, XTC’s Andy Partridge, Erasure’s Andy Bell, Culture Club’s Boy George, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond), who cite watching Bowie’s boundary-pushing 1972 performance of “Starman” on Top of the Pops as a central moment in imagining what they could be: as queer, as performers, as outsiders. Of course, as I’ve alluded to already, David Bowie may have made Bullock et al gay, but over the span of a multi-decade career, audiences were introduced to a variety of configurations of gender and sexuality through Bowie’s numerous performing personas and, just as importantly, his public statements in interviews. In 1972, months before the aforementioned Top of the Pops performance and two years after his first marriage (to the seldom-remembered Angie Bowie), he told Melody Maker journalist Michael Watts that he was gay. In 1976, he told Playboy that he was bisexual. Soon after, in 1979 — in a terse clapback during an interview with Mavis Nicholson — he expressed annoyance with the refutations and disbelief that accompanied his declaration of bisexuality, though, in a curious turn of the history of his public identity, he would ultimately acquiesce to those refutations. In 1983, he told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder that the Melody Maker interview, which inspired Bullock and countless others, was “the biggest mistake I ever made […] Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting …”

I groan along with a million bisexuals and queer people at this trajectory. We are used to designations of sexual fluidity as “experimentation” or “immaturity” or “provocation” or other artifice, but it’s clear that Bowie’s protracted and very public negotiations of his sexuality (and whatever identity might hold thereto) are part of what gives him a wider, queerer appeal. As Bullock explains in the first chapter: “Gay, straight or bisexual: whatever word Bowie chose to define his sexuality, this particular cat was out of the bag — or rather the closet. He’d said it, in print, and for thousands of young LGBT people across the world, life was suddenly a little less suffocating.” It is this kind of influence that Bullock tries to document in David Bowie Made Me Gay, though again, he does this mainly through an exploration of LGBT artists, not artists who have inspired LGBT people.

Drawing predominantly on primary periodical sources and interviews (again, a lot of third- to fourth- to fifth-hand stories that could be classified as “gossip”), Bullock’s freewheeling survey moves more or less chronologically through various genres of music (the blues, jazz, cabaret and night club music, “blue” novelty records, early experimental electronic music, country, folk, disco, punk, protest music, dance music, et cetera), using influential figures and significant records to orient the reader in this vast sea of names. The first 80 pages cover the first half of the 20th century, taking us from jazz and the blues around the turn of the 20th century through the “Pansy Craze” and the vogue for gender non-conforming performers that petered out around World War II. Bullock surveys these fêted pansies, as well as male and female impersonators popular throughout the 1930s in the United States, jumping across the pond to consider the concurrent embrace of similar performers in UK music halls and treating the reader to brief forays into musical life in France and Germany. The next 200 pages tackle the second half of the 20th century, with chapters on queer progenitors of — or early and/or exceptional participants in — well-known genres of music. These chapters are rooted in the post-Stonewall musical developments of the 1970s, but open out into discussions of artists making music in later decades, moving away from the straightforwardly chronological organization of the preceding chapters.

Even in the chapters on more contemporary music, an elegiac, memorial tone persists in Bullock’s prose: an attempt to counter the usual gossipy narratives of LGBT musical icons’ lives, which he argues eclipses a full consideration of their musical and cultural influence. In this endeavor, Bullock sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails; gossip can be both a historian’s most tangible source of information where sexuality is concerned and one of the most limited vantage points for interrogating a life and its cultural ripples. Bullock brings attention to an impressive number of LGBT performers, composers, technicians, and producers, and it is shocking such a guide doesn’t exist already. Over the course of its 350 pages — crammed with probably as many, if not more, names — David Bowie Made Me Gay certainly succeeds at being the kind of survey Bullock sets out to provide in the introduction, and many will be very excited at the existence of such a capacious reference.

David Bowie Made Me Gay is, indeed, impressively capacious in this regard, but as a result, the book is uneven in both tone and treatment. It lists heavily toward gay and British examples and concentrates, unsurprisingly, on the period between the ’60s and the ’80s. Non-Anglo examples (Jamaica, Kenya, Russia) are grouped together unfortunately in a chapter called “Hope and Homophobia,” along with the only segment on queer hip-hop (a genre which I would think demands its own chapter). Engaging narratives tracking the development of particular albums, performers, and record labels are interrupted by tedious sections that contain long lists of names and little else, and some sections — such as the discussion of Liberace, which transitions clumsily from a gloss of Billie Holiday’s career and purported romance with Tallulah Bankhead to a retelling of Liberace’s rise to fame and libel case — are arranged seemingly at random. Scanning the table of contents before I jumped in filled me with the same vertiginous feeling I got picking up Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (University of California Press, 2005) for the first time. Listening to the Sirens also considers the ways in which music helps queer subjects make sense of themselves, though she, even more ambitiously than Bullock, does so over a period of 30 centuries instead of just one and doesn’t limit herself to popular music. As a result, it’s just as all-over-the-place as David Bowie Made Me Gay, in spite of its professed linear chronology. Is this, one wonders, ever the fate of historical studies that attempt to chart the harmonies and dissonances between queerness and music? The grasp perpetually exceeding the reach in an attempt to account for the “LGBT community” as some kind of monolithic whole?

The main challenge for any book like Bullock’s or Peraino’s is one of scope and scale for organizing so much material. These problems are particularly acute when studying sexuality, an area of identity and experience inflected by gender, race, class, and nation — separable components that form unique constellations of behavior, self-identity, social identity, gender presentation, and so on and so forth that differ from individual to individual and have the slippery tendency to change over time. These problems are further complicated by the fact that individuals who we might want to claim as queer forebears actively hid their sexual behavior or identity, or may have had understandings of sexuality that differ drastically from our own, eschewing the verbal confirmations or denials Bullock’s book favors. The historian in me cringed at several anachronistic uses of language, as when Bullock refers to 17th-century composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli as “gay,” a word that refers to a category of identity that neither existed nor would have held any meaning for the, respectively, French and Italian court-employed composers.

The impulse to identify and honor historical figures, musical or otherwise, who reflect our identities, desires, and struggles back to us can be very powerful, especially in non-generational communities like the expansive “LGBT,” and I’m glad Bullock’s survey is out there in the world. As I’m sure has been made clear throughout this review, I think a much more interesting approach, one that would honor the complexity of the kinds of influence popular music exercises in our lives as queer people, would have been the intimate, the autobiographical. It is my secret hope that every LGBT reader of this book will mad-lib the title and think about which pop music icons, LGBT and otherwise, played a role in shaping their sexualities (alas, the likely mortifying but highly entertaining Fiona Apple Made Me Queer and Misanthropic, will unfortunately have to wait till I finish my dissertation). But there are as many unwritten hundred-year surveys of LGBT music out there as there are LGBT people, and honestly, I’d probably love to read each and every one of them, in all their uneven, flawed, and exuberant glory.

¤

Morgan Woolsey’s work focuses on issues of music and identity, and the use of music in disreputable genres of film.

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