Salon.com > Carlene Bauer http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 No sex in the city http://www.salon.com/2009/08/03/carlene_bauer/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/03/carlene_bauer/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//excerpt/2009/08/03/carlene_bauer As a seven-year-old in the New Jersey suburbs, I accepted Jesus as my savior. I grew up attending evangelical schools, churches and youth groups, but I never felt quite at home in any of them. Evangelical Christianity preached a suspicion of the world I did not believe; I was pretty sure I could have my Morrissey and Jesus, too.

I kept thoughts like that to myself, however, and continued praying that one day I'd find a church that didn't mind if you read writers other than C.S. Lewis, a church that didn't mind if you wanted to enjoy life in a big city rather than drag its inhabitants toward repentance. In college, after reading Walker Percy and Dorothy Day, I got the idea that the Catholic Church could be that church.

But it was only when I started to feel a little bit lost in the biggest of cities -- New York, where I had begun a job in the publishing industry -- that I submitted myself to the process. And so, at the age of 27, in a city known for sex and sin, I decided to convert.

------

Spring came, and I visited my friend Eric in Baltimore. Eric did not believe, but was sympathetic to those who did, although his sympathy could also take the form of gentle mockery.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/03/carlene_bauer/feed/ 86 The riot quiets http://www.salon.com/2006/07/17/sleater_kinney_2/ http://www.salon.com/2006/07/17/sleater_kinney_2/#comments Mon, 17 Jul 2006 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2006/07/17/sleater_kinney After 11 years, Sleater-Kinney -- arguably the only band born out of the Pacific Northwest's '90s rock boom that is still extant and relevant -- announced they were going on indefinite hiatus last week. When I heard the news, I felt a burning need to see them one last time, though I was mindful of the fact that one must be circumspect when one is 33 and about to utter the phrase "burning need." Surely, one is being ironic. Surely, one has confused the feeling with heartburn. And yet, that feeling just won't quit.

I've been listening to music and going to shows for more than half a lifetime now, watching indie rock devolve into backward-looking, fashion-damaged pop, while the culture grows ever more unwilling to admit feminism did anything but give women delusion, heartbreak and resentment. In this blue moment for indie rock fans and feminists alike, I need to pay my respects to three women whose noise never sounded like anyone else's and kept getting louder and larger the older they got. I need to see that, like vocalist Corin Tucker, you can be a 30-something mother -- a 30-something woman -- and still jump around onstage and smile and yell and unleash a thunder, that you can also exude joy while being tethered to a partner and a child, because increasingly, women seem to think marriage and parenthood mean you agree to bury yourself alive under a mountain of stuff -- state-of-the-art strollers, art-directed diaper bags, and 12-packs of toilet paper. I need to be reminded that my peers and friends are living correctives to those who believe that it's useless to free yourself from the bonds of biology, history and society, and that you can indeed live a life according to principles that pundits with nannies want to make you believe are quaint unworkable utopian relics of the '60s and '70s. I need to watch three women issue a billowing cloud of noise and in doing so defiantly redefine what it means to be female and an adult.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/07/17/sleater_kinney_2/feed/ 57 God? Sure, whatever http://www.salon.com/2005/04/30/religion_teens/ http://www.salon.com/2005/04/30/religion_teens/#comments Sat, 30 Apr 2005 02:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2005/04/29/religion_teens Between the real-life stories of lonely kids shooting their way out of despair, and culture makers who can't stop fetishizing teen disaffection, it's hard to imagine adolescence as anything other than a time of surly skepticism. But according to the National Study of Youth and Religion, a random survey of nearly 3,300 American teens aged 13 to 17 from all across the country and from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, most kids aren't quarreling with the cosmos -- 80 percent of them believe in God, and only 3 percent of them don't. More than six in 10 kids say they'd attend church several times a month if it were entirely up to them. They like their congregations -- but they don't want to be confused with Ned Flanders.

The survey was conducted over the phone and in person in 2002 and 2003 by a team of sociologists headed by Christian Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Their findings can be found in the book "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers," which Smith coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/04/30/religion_teens/feed/ 0 Being black and British http://www.salon.com/2005/04/15/levy_3/ http://www.salon.com/2005/04/15/levy_3/#comments Fri, 15 Apr 2005 14:12:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/04/15/levy Readers whose pulse quickens at the mention of the names Eliot or Trollope or Hardy - and who have delighted in post-colonial updates on condition-of-England novels by Zadie Smith and Monica Ali -- should get themselves a copy of Andrea Levy's "Small Island." Born in England to Jamaican parents -- her father came over on the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought the first wave of postwar West Indian immigrants to England -- Levy's been acclaimed in her native country for her sharp-eyed take on being black and British. With "Small Island," her fourth novel, and her first to be published in America, the 48-year-old's star only continues to rise. Her bestselling book beat Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" for the Orange Prize and trumped Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" for the Whitbread novel of the year; last month she was honored with the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. (Still, the Booker long list eluded her; according to one judge, the book was "implausible and schematic.") While "Small Island" may have two love children too many for some readers, it's a mesmerizing concert of four voices caught in questions of class, race and empire. Levy can convincingly, often hilariously, pass herself off as a mouthy butcher's daughter and a stiff-necked Jamaican schoolteacher who loves Shirley Temple.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/04/15/levy_3/feed/ 0 The sunny side of life http://www.salon.com/2004/10/11/exuberance/ http://www.salon.com/2004/10/11/exuberance/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:51:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/10/11/exuberance Over the last decade, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has become perhaps our foremost chronicler of the mind's darkest weather. In 1993 she published "Touched with Fire," her exploration of the relation between creative genius and manic depression, and followed that up in 1995 with "An Unquiet Mind," a memoir of her own struggle with the illness. "Night Falls Fast," her most recent book, studied suicide. So it might come as a bit of a shock to find her cavorting with the likes of Tigger, rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt, and other exceptionally irrepressible characters in her latest book, "Exuberance," which attempts to define what it's like to be touched with another, more joyful, sort of fire.

Exuberance, Jamison writes, "denotes a mood or temperament of joyfulness, ebullience, and high spirits, a state of overflowing energy and delight. It is more energetic than joy and enthusiasm but less intense, although of longer duration, than ecstasy." It's got the dynamism that marks the manic half of manic depression -- but without the danger of falling into psychosis or debilitating lows. If you've got it -- and it's probably hereditary -- you're most likely one of those people who rolls out of bed in the morning trilling that line from Longfellow "Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate." Even though it might be tiresome for the Eeyores among us, Jamison demonstrates that such positive thinking and doing is necessary for creativity and discovery. It's exuberance, Jamison says, that buoyed James Watson to discover the double helix, that drove John Muir to preserve the wilderness, and that fueled Americans' pioneer spirit.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/10/11/exuberance/feed/ 0 Readin’, writin’ and killin’ http://www.salon.com/2004/02/25/rampage_2/ http://www.salon.com/2004/02/25/rampage_2/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/02/25/rampage Just a few years ago, it seemed that the only sort of terrorist threat Americans had to worry about was disenfranchised young men from small-town America plotting to blow up their schools -- not disenfranchised young men from the Middle East plotting to blow up national landmarks. But elaborate schemes to take revenge against fellow students are still, depressingly, one of our national realities. In recent weeks, two such plots in California and one in Louisiana were foiled. We may be getting better at defusing potential massacres, but according to Katherine Newman, a Harvard sociologist who analyzed the causes and effects of two pre-Columbine shootings in rural communities in Kentucky and Arkansas, the real work lies in preventing kids from viewing mass murder as the answer to their problems in the first place.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/02/25/rampage_2/feed/ 0 The hot naked tattooed guy next door http://www.salon.com/2004/02/19/sweet_action/ http://www.salon.com/2004/02/19/sweet_action/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2004 20:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2004/02/19/sweet_action Robin Adams, co-founder of Sweet Action, a just-launched magazine that offers, as the cover says, "porn for girls," has called to set up an interview and is apologizing for her scratchy voice. "I was out late last night and had only two cigarettes," she says, sighing. "It's so retarded." You'd expect an aspiring porn mogul to be capable of a lot more debauchery than two cigarettes. But Adams, a 32-year-old jewelry designer, and her business partner, 29-year-old stylist Micole Taggart, are purveyors of what Taggart calls "porn lite." You might say that the Brooklyn residents take dirty pictures for girls who may be nicer than they are naughty. Imagine a less cantankerous Bust with, as Adams puts it, "lots of dick." If you are a liberated feminist type who is turned off by what the classifieds like to call "hot sexxx," and would feel ridiculous baring your breasts at a Cake striptease-a-thon or strapping on a Louise Brooks wig and a dog collar for the alt-Hefners over at SuicideGirls, Sweet Action might be just the smut you've been looking for.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/02/19/sweet_action/feed/ 0 This is your brain in love http://www.salon.com/2004/01/27/fisher_6/ http://www.salon.com/2004/01/27/fisher_6/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2004 22:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/01/27/fisher Claude Lévi-Strauss and Charles Darwin probably never received letters containing such desperate pleas as "Do you think it's possible for someone to fall in love with you after a year of being together ... I would love to hear from you because my heart is just breaking and I don't know what to do." But for evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has spent her career writing on the biology behind human intimacy, handling such correspondence is all in a day's work. In her latest book, "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," Fisher, the author of "The Anatomy of Love" and "The First Sex," examines the brain chemistry responsible for the swooning, stalking and general irrationality associated with romance. She argues that romantic love is a basic human drive like hunger, orchestrated by neurotransmitters and hormones, that evolved to ensure we would find mates suitable enough to raise families with, thereby propagating the species.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/01/27/fisher_6/feed/ 0 Jesus is my crush http://www.salon.com/2003/10/09/revolve/ http://www.salon.com/2003/10/09/revolve/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:36:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2003/10/09/revolve What would Jesus do about clogged pores? It's a topic on which the Bible is mute. Unless the Bible being consulted is Revolve, which dresses up the New Testament to look and read exactly like a teen magazine -- complete with cover lines that promise much more than the Good News inside. "Guys Speak Out on Tons of Important Issues," declares one, hinting that the guys holding forth aren't Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Others offer "100+ Ways to Apply Your Faith" and "Beauty Secrets You've Never Heard Before!"

That's for sure. "As you apply your sunscreen," one reads, "use that time to talk to God. Tell him how grateful you are for how he made you. Soon, you'll be so used to talking to him, it might become as regular and intimate as shrinking your pores." And what exactly are those aforementioned guys speaking out on? Comportment. They like girls who dress conservatively, wear as little makeup as possible, and don't overreact if they don't notice a new haircut. Thinking of asking a guy out? Revolve girls don't. "Sorry," they're told. "God made guys to be the leaders. That means that they lead in relationships. They tell you they like you." If you need distraction from that total bummer, there are charts ranking the "top ten random things" you can do to make a difference in your community or bond with your dad. Or calendar pages that designate celebrity birthdays as occasions to Pray for a Person of Influence. (Kelly Osbourne and Anna Nicole Smith, junior varsity prayer warriors have got your back.) As well as quizzes that pose such questions as "Are You Crushing Too Hard?" and "Are You a Good Daughter?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/10/09/revolve/feed/ 0 Joan of Arc goes Manic Panic http://www.salon.com/2000/10/24/lynne_ramsay/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/24/lynne_ramsay/#comments Tue, 24 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/int/2000/10/24/lynne_ramsay Lynne Ramsay has a thing for Joan of Arc. "She's a good person to be into if you have to be obsessed with someone," says the 30-year-old Scottish director, who looks like Joan gone Manic Panic -- tiny, slender, with a girlish haircut dyed red and black. And she has a bit of the unexpected visionary about her. Ramsay grew up thinking she'd be a photographer, but on a whim, after seeing Maya Deren's film "Meshes of the Afternoon," she applied to Britain's National Film and Television School. Even though she'd never made a film she was accepted.

After a few years of confidence shaking she came out the other end with a graduation short film that won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, with one more Prix du Jury and an acclaimed feature, "Ratcatcher," to her name, Ramsay has been dubbed one of Britain's finest young filmmakers by the U.K. press.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/10/24/lynne_ramsay/feed/ 0 Sharps & Flats http://www.salon.com/2000/06/27/belle_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/27/belle_2/#comments Tue, 27 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/2000/06/27/belle "Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be me," sang Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch on the band's first proper record, "If You're Feeling Sinister" (1997). He delivered the line with a modest shrug, but for some listeners -- mainly grown-up boys and girls who still took solace in Smiths records -- it sounded like a manifesto.

Murdoch himself could have been the subject of a song off the Smiths' "The Queen Is Dead" -- a church janitor who likes to wear silver trousers. And his seven other bandmates from Glasgow, Scotland, also seemed to know what Morrissey and Marr knew back in the 1980s: that even if your pimples clear up and your braces come off, the world can still pinch like the wrong shoes. With such lilting anatomies of melancholy as "Lazy Line Painter Jane" and "Stars of Track and Field," Belle & Sebastian made a virtue of that sort of wallflower wit.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/27/belle_2/feed/ 0 Sharps & Flats http://www.salon.com/2000/05/08/broadcast_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/08/broadcast_2/#comments Mon, 08 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/2000/05/08/broadcast "You won't find it by yourself," sings Broadcast's Trish Keenan, over an electronically generated whirl of Bacharachian psychedelia. "You're going to need some help/And you won't fail with me around/Come on let's go."

The song -- "Come On Let's Go," from the English quintet's first proper LP, "The Noise Made By People" -- never reveals where exactly they're headed. Yet the album hints in the direction of the fabled lost city that was the '60s, where British birds on Vespa scooters buzzed past Italian cowboys lounging at sidewalk cafes. Broadcast are on a mission to loot that landscape of its sounds -- spaghetti Western guitars, Phil Spector physics, sci-fi dread -- and scramble them into an almost oracular transmission for the future.

At first listen, Broadcast may not seem much different from Portishead, Plone, St. Etienne or Stereolab -- any band that writes traditional songs with electronic instruments. Or they may also bring to mind groups that raid the musical thrift store for inspiration. But Broadcast don't look back to escape invention. Somewhere between Keenan's incantations and the group's deft meshing of synthesized sounds and live instrumentation the comparisons become irrelevant.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/08/broadcast_2/feed/ 0 Welcome to the Machine http://www.salon.com/2000/02/15/machine/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/15/machine/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/feature/2000/02/15/machine In 1993, before Starbucks colonized the East Coast and alternative rock became a box to check off on the Columbia House order form, songwriter Lois Maffeo released a tune called "Indie" on Simple Machines, an independent record label in Arlington, Va. The song was a cheer for the do-it-yourself movement, the premise of which was that if you wanted to make a movie or put out a zine or record some music you should do it. "Do it on your own," she sings. "Be just who you want to be/Get it on in the land of the free."

The song could be the Simple Machines theme. Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson, the two women who founded the label in 1990, ran it with a freewheeling determination to put out records by bands they liked. Toomey and Thomson wanted to spread the good news: Anyone could do it, if they worked hard enough. Simple Machines released singles by underground bands like Superchunk, Bratmobile, Unrest and the Coctails in packaging that was often as complex and lovely as origami. They also managed to donate proceeds of some records to charities benefiting troubled kids, maintain a small media empire through mail order and nab a spot on Lollapalooza for their own band, Tsunami.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/15/machine/feed/ 0 Sharps & Flats http://www.salon.com/1999/12/15/mogwai/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/15/mogwai/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/1999/12/15/mogwai Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus once told Melody Maker that he thought Mogwai was the best band of the 21st century. It's possible that the Scottish quintet has already played out that endorsement. The band makes music that is elementary and epic at once, usually erected with nothing more than twinkling riffs, a lugubrious two-step on drums and a sometimes migrainous, sometimes serene guitar undercurrent. It's a neat trick -- once. Performed over and over, on three albums, a remix record and two EPs, it's a rock 'n' roll swindle, one that Mogwai has pulled off with the help of an adoring indie rock cognoscenti.

Mogwai won the hearts of this mostly male cabal because the band's boring, grandiose non-rock has no potential for popular appeal. If members of the boys' club can take the repetitive, glacial-paced attack like a man they'll end up with a musical favorite safe from co-opting sorority girls.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/15/mogwai/feed/ 0 Sharps & Flats http://www.salon.com/1999/11/11/tigre/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/11/tigre/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/1999/11/11/tigre What do you do for an encore after you've co-written the soundtrack for revolution grrrl-style now? If you're ex-Bikini Kill front woman Kathleen Hanna, you give up the growl and seek liberation through the groove. Hanna and Bikini Kill, her four-piece punk band, led the confrontational, early-'90s female-powered charge against sexism and other societal ills with verbally viscous three-chord rants. The band quietly broke up in '98, just before Hanna released her solo debut, a low-tech, digitally enhanced affair that she recorded as her alter-ego, Julie Ruin. Hanna's latest project, Le Tigre, is a similar affair, a collaboration with video artist Sadie Benning and zine author Johanna Fateman.

But this switch, from the screech of Bikini Kill to the rudimentary bump and grind of Le Tigre, doesn't mean Hanna's finished being a pain in the patriarchy's ass. On Le Tigre's self-titled album, she's still a creative force, even when she's not screaming, "Suck my left one." The new record's thesis: Never underestimate the power of feminism, especially when it's articulated by a girl group with punked-out, primitive electronica.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/11/tigre/feed/ 0 Sharps & flats http://www.salon.com/1999/10/14/archer/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/14/archer/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/1999/10/14/archer Archer Prewitt spent his formative years in indie rock suited up in a coat and tie, playing avant-lounge with the young Chicagoans known as the Coctails. Since that band's 1995 demise, Prewitt has shed the monkey suit several times over. As a member of the Sea and Cake, he recorded four albums of mellow minimalist pop. Then, in 1997, Prewitt released his first solo album, the understated, orchestrated "In the Sun."

"White Sky," his second solo effort, isn't a radical departure from its predecessor, but it proves that Prewitt is a singular talent, an assured songwriter whose work borrows from pop's past and sparkles with contemporary charms. The nine songs -- based on folk-rock, funk, bachelor pad ballads and soul -- linger even without lyrical hooks or verse-chorus-verse obviousness. They feel like something Prewitt dreamed up while lying on a shag carpet in a slice of mid-afternoon sun. What makes them special is that Prewitt infuses the laid-back aura with an overt but never alienating intelligence. He makes the music tell the story: His arrangements create images through subtle shifts in instrumentation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/14/archer/feed/ 0 Mightier than the sword http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/bronte/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/bronte/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/09/08/bronte When she wasn't writing novels, Charlotte Brontk busied herself stirring up some bosom-heaving drama of her own. Possessed by jealousy and love, the eminent Victorian kept quiet when her curate husband,
Arthur Bell Nicholls, poisoned her siblings Branwell and Emily. Charlotte herself also
managed to poison her youngest sister, Anne, and eventually died at the
hands of her husband, who wanted to silence one last possible snitch.
If that doesn't sound like anything you ever read in your "Norton
Anthology of British Literature," there's a
reason: This is the Brontk legend according to British true-crime writer James
Tully, whose mystery novel "The Crimes of Charlotte Brontk" owes more to
the Fleet Street school of journalism than the Penguin Classics.

Tully, whose previous book was the nonfiction "Prisoner 1167: The Madman Who
Was Jack the Ripper," originally submitted his tale to his British publishers as true
crime; Robinson Publishing suggested that his somewhat suspect theories might go over better in novel form. So his conjecture
appears in the form of a deposition given by Martha Brown, a housemaid who did in fact serve the Brontks. (Her protracted dalliance
with Nicholls, however, is invented.) Martha's story is framed by that of
Charles Coutts, a lawyer who discovered the document and frequently
interrupts Brown to corroborate her testimony.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/bronte/feed/ 0 Bearly reading http://www.salon.com/1999/06/23/pooh/ http://www.salon.com/1999/06/23/pooh/#comments Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/06/23/pooh A Bear of Pleasing Manner and a Positively Startling Lack of Brain has caused a Small Ruckus Over Nothing at the University of California at Berkeley. All because integrative biology professor Marian Diamond made A.A. Milne's "The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh" her pick for the college's unofficial summer reading list -- which also includes Genesis and Exodus.

The San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press took notice; Jay Leno and Craig Kilborn lobbed potshots. A Reuters item in the New York Times reported
that the list was "recommended reading for all freshman" and put "Milne on a par with" two-fifths of the Pentateuch. It's the
sort of academic news blurb that sends conservative pundits reaching for their guns, blasting the book's inclusion as typical of the leftist sophistry that would have the best minds of a generation doing sex work for credit.

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