Bluebird

Gothic 2011: The trajectory of the modern tabloid star

Riff

How Tabloid Trainwrecks Are Reinventing Gothic Literature

 

Tom Gauld

By CARINA CHOCANO

Published: September 2, 2011

In the blustery wilds of Suffolk County on Long Island, in a seaside hamlet that was once a thriving whaling village, a young girl is raised by a prominent family. Her father — an impulsive and reckless figure given to fits of sudden rage — had been beset by legal troubles and was sent to prison for three years. During this time, the girl is pressed into service, perhaps to help with the cost of rearing her younger siblings, and soon she is projecting her phantasmagoric doppelgänger out into the cinemas of the world.

 

Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Lindsay Lohan arrives to begin her 90 day jail sentence for parole violations in her 2007 drunk driving conviction at the Beverly Hills Courthouse on July 20, 2010.

When the patriarch emerges from prison, he is enraged to find that the girl’s affairs are being controlled by what he considers to be his wife’s parasitic family. The girl, meanwhile, has taken up residence in a gloomy and most certainly haunted chateau perched atop a hill overlooking a somewhat frenetic village. There, she experiences a series of mysterious afflictions and is repeatedly institutionalized by patriarchal figures amid struggles to gain control over her estate and mental health. The excesses of her ancestors (cocaine abuse, alcoholism and D.U.I.’s) come back to haunt her. After a valuable necklace mysteriously appears in her possession, the girl, now escaped from the haunted castle, finds herself imprisoned once again, this time in her home. Her mother, meanwhile, is declared mad in a Mother’s Day poll of “10 Craziest Hollywood Moms” on Hollyscoop.com. That pretty much seals it. And thus we recount the tragic tale of Lindsay Lohan, modern gothic heroine.

Lindsay, Britney, Paris and all the lesser lights (if such dimness can be conceived of) who reside in the world of tabloids, both paper and online, may seem like a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon. And it’s tempting to see our obsession with their stories as yet further proof of our (at best) inability or (at worst) unwillingness to confront the true horrors of our modern age: war, recession, mass layoffs and endless financial panic. But as frightening as the actual news has been, these tabloid tales aren’t mere escapism. In fact, there’s something about these familiar narratives that exquisitely embodies the hysterical excess, madness and sheer existential nihilism of the moment.

Gothic is the genre of fear, and our fascination with it is reliably revived during times of anxiety and upheaval. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the resurgence of the genre as “the inevitable product of the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded.” As Fred Botting writes in “Gothic,” the genre reflects our unresolved feelings about “the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality,” along with issues of social disintegration and collapse. A rebellion against rationality and the ego, gothic represents both the irrational id and all our fears about that id.

When people talk about a contemporary gothic revival, they’re usually talking about Romantic fictions like “Twilight” and “True Blood.” But it’s in the so-called real world of the tabloids, Internet gossip sites and reality TV that the genre is truly thriving. With their troubled heroines, haunted castles (or bad-vibe hotels), fakes and counterfeits, long-buried secrets, madwomen, controlling patriarchs, damsels in distress, reckless cads, depravity and the looming threat of financial ruin, these stories are striking for their endlessly recurring themes of excess, addiction, decadence and madness. And like the pursued heroines of 18th-century novels, the waifs of the tabloid stories seem at once abject — doomed to wander the wilderness while being poked at by the villagers wielding sticks and telephoto lenses — and trapped: sealed off in the glass dungeons of their fame.

This kind of neo-gothic tabloidism seemed to spike right after the death of Anna Nicole Smith in early 2007 — a starlet who, up until the moment of her demise, was a more traditional kind of horror show. In the same month, Britney had checked herself out of rehab, walked into a hair salon in Tarzana, Calif., and shaved off all her hair. By then it was clear that we were all participating in some kind of weird gothic metanarrative in which the celebrities were cast as monsters and the rest of us were standing around holding pitchforks or, at least, rolled-up copies of Us Weekly.

One reason for the enduring appeal of the gothic genre is that while it tends to trot out the same old images and literary devices, it takes care to cloak these devices in a contemporary guise. Victorian gothic, for instance, was haunted by the theories of evolution and the unconscious; the changing roles of women in society; and rapid advances in science and technology. The crumbling castles of yore gave way to crime-infested urban centers, while fear of villains and ghosts were supplanted by anxiety about primitive impulses, incipient madness and barely repressed moral depravity. (See, for example, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”)

If all this felt scarily inescapable back then, what came next was more pervasive. In the 20th century, Botting writes, “gothic is everywhere and nowhere,” as its “narrative forms and devices spill over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.”

If 2007 seemed like the year in which real-life celebrity gossip turned gothic, it’s probably because new-media outlets that stormed the industry — outlets like TMZ and PerezHilton.com — had by then ditched the business of worshiping celebrities for the more lucrative business of persecuting them. Suddenly, we found ourselves transfixed by tales of young women moving unprotected (or legally emancipated) from the relatively sheltered condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world where they exist in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. And they were often placed in this peril by the very outlets that then shaped their resultant antics into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

So the trajectory of the modern tabloid starlet does not recall the 18th-century, Brontëan model, in which the heroine emerges from her ordeal stronger and happier, thanks to her intelligence, independence and strength of character. (Lohan is nobody’s idea of a contemporary Jane Eyre.) Rather, the modern starlet harks back to the 1790s, when Ann Radcliffe was writing “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” which is considered the archetypal conservative female gothic. As Maggie Kilgour notes in “The Rise of the Gothic Novel,” the literary critic David Durant has called Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” a novel of anti-education, or unbildung, because its heroine suffers enormous losses and endures terrible ordeals before reclaiming her inheritance and reuniting with her true love — and yet she remains essentially unchanged by her experiences. (What could sound more like modern tabloid exploits?) This also recalls the much darker vision of Radcliffe’s contemporary, Matthew Lewis, whose novel “The Monk” was a kind of reaction to her conservatism: it reimagined the plot of her book as one in which every foreshadowed horror is eventually, inevitably, gruesomely played out. Lewis’s characters live in a world in which innocence can never be restored, but can only be destroyed.

This same tension — between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle — is still at play in tabloid stories about wayward starlets. The way their stories are framed depends to a large extent on whether they “sort themselves out,” in the manner of the erstwhile cautionary tale Nicole Richie, or they don’t. What matters, ultimately, is the appearance of a specific kind of normality. As Kilgour writes, it was in “The Monk” — the story of a depraved monk falsely believed to be virtuous — that we first saw a division between “an appearance of innocence and integrity, and a reality of evil and doubleness,” opposites that “hypocrisy superficially reconciles” in the story “by confusing the natural and the artificial.”

Of course, confusing the natural and the artificial is now the defining tactic of the world of tabloid gossip and reality TV. As recounted in a recent article in The New York Times, sites like TMZ and Radar Online set out to create “addicts online” by inventing a business model that passes off celebrity gossip as breaking news and then provides a continuous flow of such gossip, sometimes more than 30 exclusive items a day. In describing the predatory practices of contemporary tabloids, the article made reference to the scandal sheets of the 1950s, which not only paid for dirt on stars, but also demanded celebrity “sacrifices” in exchange for protecting the reputations of bigger stars. A different Times article, this one on tabloid practices and the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, pointed out that TMZ is owned by Time Warner, the same conglomerate that owns Warner Brothers and People magazine. Back in the 1950s, tabloid magazines’ practices cost the studios money. In these days of vertical integration, it’s hard to say which is more profitable for the parent company — a hot young actress making a movie or the same hot young actress making a scene at a nightclub. That’s Franken-synergy at work.

Maybe Paris and Lindsay intuitively understand something about the business of being a celebrity in the 21st century that wasn’t true back when the studios were outing actors like Rory Calhoun to protect more bankable stars like Rock Hudson, as Henry E. Scott describes in his book, “Shocking True Story.” Maybe they understand that being famous in the 21st century has almost nothing to do with a part in a movie or a TV show, and that the business of being famous has not only transgressed its original parameters but quite possibly vacated them.

Fame is now just a crumbling, haunted castle where the counterfeits (e.g., tabloid and reality stars) await the inevitable return of the repressed (e.g., a hidden criminal record, a stripper past, bankruptcies, secret children or a history of spousal abuse). In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, formerly of MTV’s “The Hills,” talked about how they labored for years under the illusion that they were in control of their own narrative — even going so far as to fake every breakup and reunion — only to find that the story they invented will, in reality, never cease to haunt them. The recent suicide of the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” husband Russell Armstrong underscores this point. Celebrities in the new gossip economy are simply the ghostly, gothic embodiments of our shared anxieties: about privacy, identity, social decay and the increasingly blurred line between reality and fantasy. They’ve willingly become the tragic heroes and doomed heroines in our collective tales of terror, abjection and ridicule. And in the eternal return of the Internet, they come back to haunt us as they themselves are haunted, sometimes more than 30 times a day.

La dentist

Drill, Bébé, Drill

Women's Fashion

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By JOAN JULIET BUCK

| August 10, 2011, 5:00 pm

Nadav KanderBernard Touati’s dental practice may be the Avenue Montaigne’s most exclusive salon.

Sometimes dentists are lion tamers. Kings and presidents open wide for Bernard Touati, but he is careful, he says, to keep his own mouth shut.

His cabinet is in Paris’s Golden Triangle, where Chanel, Dior and Prada are perfectly aligned with the perfumer Caron and the impeccable chocolatier Fouquet. There is no plaque on the wall announcing his presence; he’ll see Diane Von Furstenberg on Yom Kippur if the film director Danièle Thompson asks him to, and Madonna can come in in a pinch, but this isn’t a walk-in clinic. He wouldn’t accept payment from Von Furstenberg; she gave him an I.O.U. for two dresses at her boutique instead. “He’d be worth moving to Paris for three months to see,” the designer says.

Nadav Kander “I can look in someone’s mouth and know their life,” says Touati, 63.

He grew up with Sidney Toledano, the C.E.O. of Christian Dior, who can watch what’s going on in the Dior showroom through the window when he’s being treated in Touati’s office. “My father wanted me to become a doctor, like Bernard,” says Toledano, a touch wistful. “It would have been simpler.”

Touati, born 63 years ago in Casablanca, Morocco, is fit, athletic, good-looking; also, low profile, a family man and famous. Married to Lily Buda for 41 years — they met in high school — he has three daughters. When the middle one, an actress and singer named Élisa, found that the producers of a Spanish film she was in had changed her name from Touati to Tovati, she kept the new name, so people wouldn’t keep asking if he was her father. Her duet with Tom Dice, “Il Nous Faut,” was a big hit this summer.

Touati knows a lot about a few world leaders, and, because he is diplomatic, as much about their mortal enemies. Surrounded by security, he started treating Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin hospital in 1996 and treated Vladimir Putin in the same hospital, surrounded by even more security. “The only words I can say in Russian are ‘open your mouth, close your mouth, don’t move,’ ” Touati says.

He looked after the teeth of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in prison in Russia for financial crimes, and still treats the regime’s archenemy Boris Berezovsky, who has political asylum in Britain. Mrs. Yelstin gives him homemade walnut cakes and jars of malossol pickles every time she sees him. He also treats the wife of Mikhail Fridman and other oligarchs like Alisher Usmanov, who owns a major share in England’s Arsenal football team.

But he’s a Chelsea man: for well over a decade, until last year, Touati flew regularly to Moscow for Roman Abramovich, who had equipped a full dental clinic in his office just for him. Abramovich had found it a waste of time for him and his friends to keep taking the plane to Paris. “I thought he was crazy,” Touati says, “but it was very useful.” Russian dentistry has caught up with Touati’s standards, and Abramovich now owns the Chelsea soccer team.

Touati likes to quote the author of “The Little Prince,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” “That,” he says, “applies to root canal — not visible, but essential, determining. It’s like politics — you can’t see the essential.” His art is in the concealed and the miniature: early on, while he was still an assistant university professor at Paris V, he created tiny dental burs that are now high-end standard issue. He founded the Société Française de Dentisterie Esthétique in 1983, is the head and chair and president of numerous associations and regularly writes aesthetic surgery textbooks full of truly terrifying close-ups of teeth and gums. Touati was one of the first proponents of composite inlays and ceramics for veneers and crowns — the worryingly named zirconium oxide and aluminum oxide. Traditionalists in the 1980s sneered at what they called “the white stuff,” but today no one in the public eye wants a glint of metal inside their mouth.

“I can look in someone’s mouth and know their life,” he says, sitting behind his desk, wearing a short-sleeved surgeon’s coat, in his immaculate and extensive suite of offices. “Levels of stress, hygiene, education, socioeconomic background. Are they nervous? The teeth are worn down. If the care is of a high quality, that means a sophisticated background; missing teeth, tartar, bad maintenance — not the same. You can see signs of smoking, or the erosion of bulimia — I can see the personality and the life habits of a patient by looking in their mouth.”

The blunt health care of the Soviet era meant that when the good times came around in the 1990s, Russian teeth were in pretty bad shape: multiple extractions, simple fillings, metal bridges, dentures, badly done root canals.

“They’d only had cheap materials,” Touati says.

“Our big advantage over the United States is the quality of the technicians, the ceramicists. In America, it’s more industrial than artisanal. There can be good work, but it’s not the high artistic level that we have in Europe. We have people with real talent — it’s like haute couture. Our prosthetics are known for that. As Chanel said: ‘Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.’ ”

From left: Miguel A. Lopes/Getty Images; BeImages; Marc Piasecki/WireImage; Sergei Zhukov/Getty Images; Markus Schreiber/AP Photo.Above, from left: Vladimir Putin; Valentino; Dr. Touati’s daughter, Élisa Tovati; Roman Abramovich; and Boris Yeltsin all know the drill.

Framed photos of the king of Morocco and the Russian nomenklatura are in his bookcase, along with pictures of some entertainers — Patrick Bruel, Jean Reno, Mélanie Thierry, Danièle Thompson and her companion, Albert Koski. In the past, he’s tended to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s teeth as well.

“Some actors won’t give you their picture because they don’t want people to know you redid their teeth,” Touati says. One actress has herself dropped off blocks away from his office, so that her driver can’t say she went to the dentist. “In America, people say they have caps; in France they say they’ve had a bleaching. Some women have had so much done to their lips that they ask to have their teeth lengthened, to compensate. When they smile or laugh, the teeth look like horse teeth. But women have been doing it forever — in antiquity, they used to prick their lips with needles to make them plump.”

Over a light lunch at a Japanese restaurant where he goes every day, he says: “I’m an artisan, at your disposal — I have no ego, but I like reciprocity.” The waitress, a pretty young Japanese woman, has incisors he finds charming. “Aesthetic concepts are entirely cultural,” he says. “In Japan, a big mouth is considered unattractive. Geishas made their teeth black to make their mouths look small. They would use lemon juice to strip the enamel and then lacquer their teeth with India ink.”

Before coffee, I learn that Northern people — Swedes, Danes, Norwegians — have bigger teeth than Spaniards and Italians. “It’s because in the south, puberty comes earlier,” Touati explains. The worst thing for teeth, he says, is grinding; he advises against bulimia, caramels, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, crunching ice, or using one’s teeth to open bottles and crack crab claws.

Late in the afternoon, Dr. Touati fixes one of my teeth. The treatment room is huge, with a Barcelona chair and its ottoman in one corner and his own paintings on the wall. He is a very good dentist; the most noticeable difference between his approach and that of others, however, is in the injection. He pulls the skin of the cheek away before he applies the hypodermic, and slaps it back against the gum just as the needle goes in. You’re so startled by the slap that you forget about the needle.

Afterward, he shows me his paintings. The canvases seem cheerful and bright. Looked at closely, some turn out to be collages that incorporate Band-Aids, surgical tape, medical gauze. “Life isn’t always nice,” he says.

He’s done a series based on photographs; one of them is of the young Marilyn Monroe. “She was only 19 in this picture,” he says, “married to the policeman, and was still Norma Jeane Baker, but look — she had two little teeth that had been redone.”

Playing God in Kansas

New Law in Kansas Seen as a Threat to Abortions

Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — One in a series of abortion limits approved in Kansas since Republicans took full control of the state government this year — a new license law — is raising uncertainty about the future of all abortion providers in the state.

Opponents of abortion say that the licenses — which newly dictate requirements for the size of rooms at abortion clinics, the stocking of emergency equipment, medications and blood supplies, and ties to nearby hospitals — will ensure at least a modicum of safety standards in a state that Troy Newman, the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, said “had been the Wild West for abortionists for as long as anyone can remember.”

But abortion rights supporters, here and nationally, say the rules, which take effect next week, are onerous, have been rushed into place too rapidly and are actually aimed at ending abortion services at the only three places in the state now providing them, perhaps as early as Friday.

“These requirements range from the impossible to the absurd,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “They’re not designed to protect patient safety; they’re designed to shut down abortion providers.”

For decades, Kansas has been a focal point for the national debate over abortion. Opponents saw openings for new restrictions this year, after eight years under Democrats who had vetoed such measures, when Sam Brownback, a Republican who has long opposed abortion rights, became governor.

This year, lawmakers here have limited abortion coverage in health care plans, required young people to get consent from both parents for abortions and banned providers from offering medical abortions to people in other locations, communicating instructions via computer.

“What this shows is there’s been incredible pent-up demand in Kansas to pass really thoroughgoing pro-life legislation,” said Lance Kinzer, a Republican state representative who helped spearhead the legislation.

Julie Burkhart, who leads Trust Women, an abortion rights group, said she believed that by the end of the year Kansas could be one of a handful of states with no abortion clinics. “The anti-choicers have figured out that we don’t need to overturn Roe v. Wade,” she said. “We can legislate abortion clinics to death so that women don’t have access.”

Three abortion facilities — all in the Kansas City area — remain open in Kansas since the killing in 2009 of Dr. George R. Tiller, the state’s best-known abortion provider, whose clinic had operated out of Wichita. Under the new licensing rules, officials from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said they were inspecting the remaining operations, including a Planned Parenthood clinic, this week and next week, and would then determine which ones receive licenses.

“These are common-sense regulations,” said Mr. Newman, who said that unsanitary conditions and a lack of preparation for complications had been a serious problem at some clinics nationally. “Do I want all abortion clinics to close? Absolutely. But if they can’t even comply with the basic minimum-safety standards, they certainly don’t deserve to be in business.”

Operators of the Kansas clinics were not optimistic about the licensing procedure.

M. Jeffrey Pederson, of Aid for Women in Kansas City, said there was no way he could meet the new standards. He said that his building was too small to meet the space standards and that he did not have visiting privileges with a nearby hospital — requirements he deemed unnecessary to run a safe clinic.

Peter B. Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, said he believed the group’s clinic in Overland Park would be able to meet the new requirements but expected it to be denied a license anyway. “We believe without question that the intent is to shut down abortion clinics in Kansas, so we are preparing to be in court,” Mr. Brownlie said.

And Dr. Herbert Hodes, who has operated a practice in Overland Park for 34 years with a wide array of obstetric and gynecological services, called the new regulations — the latest versions of which were issued only a week ago — bizarre and “out of date with modern medicine.” Among the provisions for which he said he might be deemed out of compliance: a rule that procedure rooms be at least 150 square feet in size and that storage areas for “janitorial supplies and equipment” be at least 50 square feet per procedure room.

Galliano on trial

Ex-Dior designer Galliano goes on trial

Galliano is charged with "public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity" and could face up to six months in prison and $32,175 in fines.

John Galliano is charged with "public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity" and could face up to six months in prison. (Jacques Brinon / Associated Press)

 

From the Associated Press

June 22, 2011, 6:47 a.m.

PARIS—

Former Dior designer John Galliano goes on trial Wednesday, charged with hurling anti-Semitic slurs in a Paris cafe — allegations that shocked the fashion world and cost him his job at the renowned French high-fashion house.

Galliano is charged with "public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity" and could face up to six months in prison and $32,175 in fines. The verdict is expected at a later date.

The outspoken British designer will be present at the one-day trial, his lawyer Aurelien Hamelle said.

A couple contended that Galliano made anti-Semitic comments to them in the cafe in February. Galliano was taken in by police for questioning, and an alcohol test showed he was drunk at the time.

Another woman then came forward with similar claims about an incident in the same cafe last October. Both accusations are being addressed at Wednesday's trial.

Days after the February bar incident, a video was broadcast on the website of the British tabloid The Sun showing an inebriated Galliano insulting a fellow cafe client, slurring "I love Hitler."

Hamelle told The Associated Press this week that the designer's comments were "misplaced and hurtful," but attributed them to Galliano's addition to alcohol and prescription drugs.

Galliano issued a statement at the time saying: "Anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society. I unreservedly apologize for my behavior in causing any offense." He also said he was "seeking help" for personal failures, spending two months in rehab in the United States, Hamelle said.

The lawyer said he will call witnesses who were in the cafe for both incidents, but did not hear any insults by Galliano.

An eventual conviction could depend on whether the court determines that the insults were made publicly or not.

The February cafe incident and the video reverberated throughout the fashion world, and came down on the eve of Paris Fashion Week.

Dior fired Galliano after 14 years with the company and denounced his comments. After joining the company in 1996, Galliano made an indelible mark on the storied house, with theatrical, often outrageous, runway shows that were among the most-anticipated displays on the Paris fashion calendar.

The trial, too, comes on the opening day of another round of Paris fashion shows, the menswear spring-summer 2012 collection.

 

Have Botox, lack emotion

Studied

With Botox, Looking Good and Feeling Less

 

Corbis

SMILE A study has found those with Botox injections cannot mimic the emotions of others.

By PAMELA PAUL

Published: June 17, 2011

THE GIST Using Botox decreases a person’s ability to empathize with others.

THE SOURCE “Embodied Emotion Perception: Amplifying and Dampening Facial Feedback Modulates Emotional Perception Accuracy” by David T. Neal and Tanya L. Chartrand, published in “Social Psychological and Personality Science.”

It’s no shock that we can’t tell what the Botoxed are feeling. But it turns out that people with frozen faces have little idea what we’re feeling, either.

No, Botox injections don’t zap brain cells. (At least not so far as we know.) According to a new study by David T. Neal, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, and Tanya L. Chartrand, a professor of marketing and psychology at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, people who have had Botox injections are physically unable to mimic emotions of others. This failure to mirror the faces of those they are watching or talking to robs them of the ability to understand what people are feeling, the study says.

The idea for the paper stemmed from a study conducted in the 1980s, which found that long-married men and women began to resemble each other over time, especially if they were happily wed. “So we thought, what’s going to happen now that there’s Botox?” Dr. Neal said.

The toxin might interfere with “embodied cognition,” the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. According to the theory in the study, a listener unconsciously imitates another person’s expression. This mimicry then generates a signal from the person’s face to his or her brain. Finally, the signal enables the listener to understand the other person’s meaning or intention.

While the first two steps of this process had been established by research, it was unclear whether facial feedback helped people make better judgments about other peoples’ emotions.

Enter the Botoxed person, a useful new laboratory specimen. And, as a control, the user of Restylane, a skin filler that does not alter muscle function.

In one experiment, women who had been injected with Botox within the last two weeks were offered $200 to look at a set of photographs of human eyes and match them with human emotions. Restylane users performed the same tasks, which were in both cases conducted via computer.

Women with Botox were significantly less accurate at decoding both positive and negative facial expressions than those who had used Restylane, whose abilities closely approximated those of plain old wrinkled adults. On average, the Botox group guessed 2 more out of 36 facial expressions wrong.

A second experiment found that people with amplified expressions do a better job deciphering emotions. Participants who had a gel on their faces that effectively made their muscles work harder to convey emotions could more accurately identify emotions in others. The gel was similar to an over-the-counter facial mask. Ah, the trials of beauty!

While Botox doesn’t go to the brain (the poison doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier), it does seem to affect its users ability to think. Such findings might perturb those who have dipped into the Clostridium botulinum. Not that we can tell.

Men and muscles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Muscle summer — the men of ‘Captain America,’ ‘Thor’ and ‘Conan’

May 28, 2011 | 10:08 a.m.

Jason Momoa, who stars in "Conan the Barbarian," ate a lot of chicken breasts to add 30 pounds of muscle. (Brian Andrew Mendoza/Lionsgate)

A barbarian has needs — a sword, a shield and roughly 56 chicken breasts a week. That’s what Jason Momoa ate while filming “Conan the Barbarian,” this summer’s big-screen reboot of the series that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action movie career in 1982.

Over a few months in 2010, Momoa, a 6-foot-4-inch Hawaiian actor and model, added about 30 pounds of muscle to his 205-pound frame to play two high-profile, bare-chested plunderers — Conan and Khal Drogo, the 7-foot-tall warrior-king marauding on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

Super-strength secrets of the Hollywood hulks

Momoa isn’t the only actor whose T-shirts have gotten a lot tighter recently: Dwayne Johnson packed 30 pounds onto his already brawny 6-foot-4-inch frame to grapple as a lawman opposite meaty Vin Diesel in “Fast Five.” Chris Hemsworth gained so much bulk to wield “Thor’s” giant, magic hammer convincingly that his costume didn’t fit. And Chris Evans added plenty of patriotic sinew for “Captain America: The First Avenger.”

These massive men of summer are a shift from seasons past, when slight actors such as Tobey Maguire and Orlando Bloom populated the franchise movies and walking mountains like Johnson were encouraged to winnow their physiques to get parts. Some of this muscling up of summer’s heroes is driven by comic-book aesthetics and some, academics say, by cyclical notions of masculinity: In times when men are losing financial or societal power, biceps the circumference of tree trunks are proof of virility.

In addition to grueling workouts and meticulous nutrition, a number of celluloid hunks benefit from digital embellishments that make them appear even larger in marketing materials like posters and billboards. Many moviegoers may also wonder whether actors use steroids to build their bodies.

To wield Mjolnir, as he does above, in the Marvel film about the Norse thunder god, Chris Hemsworth added so much muscle that his costume didn't fit. (Marvel Entertainment)

The actors interviewed for this story said they did not use illegal substances to pump themselves up. Yet some experts say the extreme images on screen, however achieved, may tempt men both in and outside of show business to consider using illicit products to keep up.

Steroid use “still occurs in Hollywood,” said Logan Hood, a former Navy SEAL who whipped the Spartan army into shape for “300” and recently helped Zac Efron add 18 pounds to play a Marine in this fall’s “The Lucky One.” “I hear about that. That is insanity to consider that sort of option.”

Pumping up

In the 1970s and ’80s, Schwarzenegger developed his Conan form through a championship bodybuilding career that he has admitted included the use of then-legal anabolic steroids. His bulging arms and massive chest replicated the look of heroic characters popularized by illustrator Frank Frazetta’s 1960s pulp paperback covers, which established a dramatic new standard in fantasy art.

“In a perfect world, I’d like to look like a Frank Frazetta painting, without doing steroids,” Momoa said of the artistic inspiration for his pumped physique in “Conan.”

Jason Momoa and Emilia Clarke in "Game of Thrones." (Helen Sloan/HBO)

Momoa said he followed a workout routine that included push-ups, pull-ups, squats and burpees (a torturous squat-jump-push-up hybrid) as well as a diet heavy in lean protein, broccoli, yams and peanut butter.

Johnson — a pro wrestler and former major college football player whose size helped him land his first Hollywood roles in movies such as 2002’s “The Scorpion King” — pared a few years ago and dropped his ring name, The Rock, to take on softer films such as “The Tooth Fairy.”

For “Fast Five,” Johnson packed back on the muscle. To reach a filming weight of 280 pounds — or, in action hero math, 1.5 Clint Eastwoods — the actor said he ate 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day and followed his regular iron-pumping regimen of “sweat, spit and sometimes training so hard I throw up a little bit in my mouth.” Johnson said he also took a daily multivitamin and glutamine, a supplement that aids in muscle recovery after workouts.

Dwayne Johnson bulked up for "Fast Five." (Jaimie Trueblood/Universal Pictures)

“I wanted to create a character that audiences immediately identified as a physically dominant, intense beast of a man who at any time could remove his badge and gun and rip Vin’s face off with his bare hands,” Johnson said of building his chest to 54 inches and his biceps to 23 inches. “No visual effects or green screen manufactured physicality — a real man.”

Just what it means to be a real man in the world today is changing — and that’s part of what’s making muscles a growth industry in Hollywood, according to Emily Fox-Kales, author of “Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders” and clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard University.

“As men have lost more economic power, more social power, they’ve wanted to look more pumped up,” Fox-Kales said, pointing to the recent recession that disproportionately hit male-dominated jobs like construction and manufacturing. “Muscles have become an accessory, like pickup trucks.”

This isn’t the first time social forces have coincided with changing movie star aesthetics — the preponderance of bodybuilder action heroes such as Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s, for instance, came just as a generation of American women were marching off to work in record numbers.

Desired transformation

In the World War II-era comic book Captain America, a weak and sickly young man named Steve Rogers is injected with an experimental serum designed to build a super-soldier. In the movie “Captain America: The First Avenger,” directed by Joe Johnston and due in theaters July 22, dozens of tiny needles inject the serum into Rogers’ major muscle groups, and then he enters a pod where “vita rays” stimulate his growth. On paper and on screen, the result is the same: Rogers emerges as a picture of physical perfection, a gleaming, rippling, flag-wearing, Nazi-killing machine.

“The transformation is absolutely key to understanding Steve Rogers as a character,” said Johnston. “He is essentially Everyman, a 98-pound weakling who is chosen for the rebirth program not for his physical attributes but because of who he is as a human being, with his sense of justice and compassion. It’s crucial that we know and love Steve as the kid who’s been bullied and rejected all his life so we’ll appreciate and relate to who he is as Captain America.”

Evans, the actor playing Captain America, has the kind of square-jawed good looks that lend themselves to roles as prom kings and superheroes — he’s best known for playing the football star in the spoof “Not Another Teen Movie” and the Human Torch in the “Fantastic Four” films.

To achieve the dramatic transformation “Captain America” required, Johnston relied on a combination of techniques, including shrinking Evans’ body with CGI and using a smaller actor as a body double for the “weakling” stage. For the “after” scenes, Evans did push-ups in between takes to pump up the broad new chest he’d built for the role.

Chris Evans did pushups between takes on the set of "Captain America: The First Avenger." (Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios)

For any real-life 98-pound weaklings — or even for the average 5-foot-9, 194.7-pound American male — all this physical perfection can potentially create the kind of body insecurity that was once considered the exclusive province of women.

“Men are increasingly getting the message that their muscles are important, that appearance matters too,” said Katharine Phillips, co-author of “The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession” and professor of psychiatry and human behavior of the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. “Men want to be bigger and want on average 15 more pounds of muscle than they have.”

Size matters in other pop-culture realms — the thick-necked protagonists of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” appear not to own shirts with sleeves, hip-hop stars like LL Cool J and 50 Cent flash shimmering abdominals on their album covers, and even the action figures boys play with have gotten burlier over the years. But the move toward muscularity is most dramatic in the comic-book and fantasy-soaked world of the cinema.

Most American men would do well to exercise more and improve their diets, but a small number —possibly as few as 100,000, according to Phillips’ book — suffer from a condition psychiatrists call bigorexia, or muscle dysmorphia, in which they feel crippling shame and embarrassment about their perceived smallness.

Exaggerated images

Links between steroids and images flowing out of Hollywood are easy to find.

A user going by the handle “Ironside” at the website forums.steroid.com posted a picture of the comic-book version of Captain America and inquired, “What would you say the best combination would be to create a realistic ‘Super Soldier Serum?’” Another user replied with a suggested regimen including the steroids Anavar and Tren.

In a recent segment on his Comedy Central show, satirist Stephen Colbert took note of the injections in “Captain America.”

“That is an all-American message,” Colbert joked. “If you’re a skinny kid who wants to serve his country, get jacked up on steroids…. Imagine the merchandising possibilities. Who wouldn’t want to open their kids meal to find a Captain America brand hypodermic needle? Collect all 8 violent mood swings!”

quack quack quack

Noticed

Duck Hunting on the Internet

By SARAH MILLER

Published: May 25, 2011

REGULAR Facebook perusers are no doubt familiar with a certain photographic expression: a pout-producing, cheekbone-enhancing pose featuring pooched out lips and sucked in cheeks.

 

Samir Hussein/Getty Images

 

The intended effect is a certain sultry allure. The actual result, many agree, is a duckface.

The duckface has become so prevalent in this age of perpetual smartphone snapshots that the look is now the target of a growing and vehement backlash.

“Stop doing it. It isn’t sexy,” proclaims the mission statement of the Web site antiduckface.com, whose content consists of photos of people making a duckface, and thousands of disparaging comments. There’s also an anti-duckface Facebook page, with over 16,000 likes, and a Twitter feed, with over 1,500 followers.

“Take your lips and put them back to normal,” croons John Gamble, 28, of Easthampton, Mass., in a song he wrote after his fiancée complained she was “sick of girls making duckface.” A video of him performing the tune has been viewed by an estimated three million people.

Anti-duckfacers debate how this phenomenon came about. Some blame Miley Cyrus. Others blame Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute friend Ashley. Some blame Donald Trump.  (Seem ridiculous? Google “trump duckface.”) Megan Fox duckfaced for a Motorola Super Bowl ad and is widely acknowledged among anti-duckfacers as the only person alive who looks good making a duckface.

The 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral” has one of the first known mentions of the term. Duckface is the nickname bestowed by Hugh Grant’s Sloane Ranger posse upon his pouting girlfriend.

But duckfacing itself is probably far older.  

 The self-conscious sexiness of an exaggerated pout is a fashion standby. Simon Doonan of Barneys cited the infantile moue of the ’60s and Blue Steel glint of the ’90s and added, “Models have always made exaggerated facial grimaces of one sort or another.”

But there is little evidence that it is attractive on civilians. Christian Rudder, 35, a founder of the dating site OkCupid, was so appalled by the amount of duckface on the site that he conducted a study to see which expressions best attracted prospective dates. He found that smiling drew more responses than duckfacing. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s just the pose people strike when they take their own picture because they think it makes them look hot.”

There are signs that the anti-duckface movement is having some effect. Zoe Slavonic, 16, from Nevada City, Calif., whose Facebook page was to duckface what the Frick Collection is to Whistler, saw Mr. Gamble’s video and erased all her duckface pictures. D’Arcy Drollinger, 42, who recently played Lindsay Lohan at La Mama, received an e-mail with a link to antiduckface.com. Soon after he posted on Facebook: “I’m horrified, no more duckface.”

Daring to bare it

Skin Deep

The Bikini Becomes a Fitness Badge

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

Published: May 25, 2011

EVERY spring, as sure as cherry blossoms bloom, so does the notion that women should diet, exercise and even liposuction their way to bikini-ready bodies. Magazines like Shape and Self reinforce the idea that preparation is essential, with months-long bikini body countdowns (100-calorie snack tips included) and workout DVDs like “Bikini Ready Fast!” as if the beach reveal were a test on par with the MCAT and only a slacker would settle for a one-piece.

Constance Bannister/Jupiter Images, via Getty Images

A retro woman posed on the beach in a bikini.

“It really sends the message that you’re not worthy right now to put on a suit,” said Malia Mills, a swimsuit designer whose brand’s motto is “Love Thy Differences.” Ms. Mills, 44, said shoppers often declare in one of her 10 stores: “I just wanted to see what you had. I’m coming back when I lose five pounds.”

As our culture increasingly enshrines physical perfection, the bikini has come to inspire dread and awe. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s, when belly-button-baring suits first became popular in America, “it was a youthful phenomenon definitely,” said Sarah Kennedy, the author of “The Swimsuit: A History of Twentieth-Century Fashions.” Then the high-fashion set and movie stars began to put on bikinis, and by the ’70s, she said, the bikini was “worn by all ages.”

And a few extra pounds didn’t disqualify anyone, considering the fitness revolution was still roughly a decade away. (In the book there’s a 1940s photograph of a fresh-faced still-brunette Marilyn Monroe looking smashing in a blue-and-white stripedtwo-piece, a roll of pale flesh at her midsection.)

Back then, bikini preparation was starkly laissez-faire by today’s grooming standards. In her recently published literary memoir, “Art and Madness,” Anne Roiphe wrote that in 1965, she suspected that a suitor was into her because of, not in spite of, the “tufts of dark hair that stuck out of the top of my bikini.”

But today it’s assumed that only the lean, muscular, hairless and ab-defined will feel comfortable in a bikini. “It’s become difficult to feel natural with a normal body,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Fatism has taken over. It’s O.K. to be mean to lumpy, lardy people. It’s a sort of subtle intolerance towards people that’s very bad.”

Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras, wearing a bikini is now scary even for gorgeous celebrities. Remember how Jennifer Love Hewitt was pilloried in 2007 for the crime of wearing a bandeau without being a size 0? Helen Mirren was accused of having had surgery when she dared to flaunt her (taut, toned) 62-year-old stomach in a tomato-red bikini a year later.

“It’s about everyone everywhere having a comment, and they are anonymous,” said Gabrielle Reece, the former volleyball star and now a fitness guru, who has also been captured bare-stomached by the paparazzi. “The bathing suit is really a metaphor for all the ways we can approach a lot of things,” she said. “Why would we punish ourselves when we don’t have to? Why dread that?”

But the bikini has become the star of several fear-inspiring marketing campaigns. A recent advertisement for Yoplait Light features an itsy-bitsy yellow-and-red polka dotted bikini hanging on a wall as a future award for the diligent yogurt eater.

Nivea has a Goodbye Cellulite, Hello Bikini! Challenge, which prods women to slim down and buy its products. Nivea also sponsors the Cosmopolitan Magazine Bikini Bash, which last year involved 100 lithe dancers in blue-and-white ruffled bikinis tossing their hair violently to the Midi Mafia’s song “Two-Piece” in front of 1,000 attendees at the Planet Hollywood resort in Las Vegas. The two male singers of “Two-Piece,” fully clothed, belted, “You all look like models off the cover of Cosmo.”

Amansala, a “bikini boot camp,” in Ibiza, Spain, and Tulum, Mexico, sells six-night stays starting at $1,875. “Our society definitely has a stigma of bikini readiness — my business thrives on that,” said Melissa Perlman, an owner of the resort, which she said mostly attracts women in their 30s and 40s. “But at the same time, we send a different message that you don’t have to be perfect. Feel good, take care of yourself, and looking good in a bikini will follow.”

Would-be attendees often call ahead asking, “Do all the women look like those on your Web site?” (That is, easy on the eyes and the jiggle.) Ms. Perlman said she’s considering starting “a program for larger women who don’t want to be around women who look hot in their bikini, but say, ‘I want to do this.’ ”

On April 12, Dr. Elie Levine, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Dr. Jody Levine, a dermatologist, hosted a bikini season prep event at their Manhattan practice to cater to the worried (19 women and one man showed up). The doctors’ press release warned, “Summer is about revealing yourself and can be dreaded if your body is not ready,” then went on to list tips such as “zap away embarrassing veins” or “boost bikini confidence with lipo for stubborn areas.”

This month, when I visited the doctors, at the end of the interview, I hoisted my shirt, pointed to the crepey skin under my belly button, and grabbed a pinch of fat that wasn’t there before childbirth, back in my triathlete days. The Levines’ prescription: liposuction, a skin-tightening procedure, or a tummy tuck, which costs $10,000, with a painful recovery.

It might just be cheaper to gain a fresh perspective. “If you feel your body is strong, and you’re in good shape, you’re halfway there,” said Norma Kamali, 65, the designer of (among other things) modestly retro bathing suits, who now also has a wellness cafe in Manhattan. “You’re not going to go out looking for surgery to fill up your breasts, you’ll be satisfied and comfortable.”

Not all women let the camera-phone-wielding bikini police (or their own self-criticism) stop them from enjoying a two-piece. Ms. Mills calls this type a “good-attitude girl.”

“She is a phenomenon and totally inspiring,” she said. “She is of any age, any body, she has a totally great attitude, because she has had a come-to-Jesus moment with her body.”

What, you were expecting substance?

Beyond reason, or when the celebrity mistakes himself with any semblance of intelligence/attraction:

Critic’s Notebook

Belligerent and Boozy, and That’s Just the Audience

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: April 3, 2011

DETROIT — Charlie Sheen chose Detroit as the starting point for his “My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” live performance tour. Before his show at the Fox Theater here on Saturday night you could speculate on a metaphorical link between the city and the star: phoenix rising from the ashes or shattered wreck of former glory. Either one might have seemed appropriate.

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Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

Charlie Sheen began his tour at the Fox Theater in Detroit on Saturday.

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Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

After the Detroit show, audience members showed their displeasure with Mr. Sheen, and the feeling appeared mutual.

Enlarge This Image

Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

Charlie Sheen's show included a ragged mix of video clips, loud music and profane monologues.

As it happened, Mr. Sheen and Detroit proved to be a disastrous match. The Fox, a lavishly ornamented, carefully restored 5,000-seat show palace evoking a lost golden age of spectacle, is beautiful, but the scene there was ugly, as a boisterous, liquored-up capacity crowd greeted Mr. Sheen with cheers that quickly turned to boos. The show — a ragged mix of video clips, ear-splitting music, profanity-laced monologues and clumsy attempts to encourage audience participation — did not so much end as collapse. After a little more than an hour Mr. Sheen turned the stage over to a rapper he said would “wake up” the increasingly belligerent spectators, or maybe calm them down. After a Snoop Dogg video, the house lights went up, and though the headliner briefly returned to trade insults with a mostly empty house, the evening clearly had not gone according to plan. If there ever was a plan.

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What did Mr. Sheen think he was doing? What did the people who snapped up all those tickets expect? What they got, much to their displeasure, was a warm-up set from Kirk Fox, a tall, skinny stand-up comedian who never really had a chance. The booing started early, and as Mr. Fox struggled through his act he tried, masochistically, to embrace the hostility, trashing his own jokes and praising the crowd for being “unified” in its hatred of him. The people wanted Charlie Sheen.

And then they didn’t. Mr. Sheen, taking the stage after a chaotic rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by two spangly blond women, brought two other blond women (excuse me, “goddesses”), who helped him choose a shirt to wear. (They also set fire to a shirt that appeared to have been taken from the wardrobe closet at “Two and a Half Men.”)

He settled on a white, button-front Detroit Tigers jersey with the name Warlock on the back, which inspired some cheers. Other attempts to rally hometown favor were not as well received. “How many people here are holding crack?” he asked. “I’m not smoking crack,” said Mr. Sheen, who has notoriously bragged about “banging seven-gram rocks” of the stuff in the past. “But if I were smoking crack, what better place than Detroit?” Oddly, the wave of applause he seemed to expect did not materialize.

The problem was not that Mr. Sheen’s material was offensive. You are likely to encounter much more obscenity, crude sexual humor and aggression at any comedy club in America, at least on a good night, and the patrons will be in no mood to complain. The problem was that Mr. Sheen did not really have any material, and certainly nothing new. After a loud montage of movie clips — mostly violent snippets from films starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and other actors whose ranks Mr. Sheen might at one time have aspired to join — he delivered a kind of mock State of the Union address that sent the evening tumbling irretrievably toward disaster.

With a gonzo grandiloquence that suggested some acquaintance with the early work of Allen Ginsberg — or at least the possession of a thesaurus, the collected rants of Dennis Miller and a pile of Rolling Stone back issues — Mr. Sheen reeled off what he called a “Manny-fest-oh.” “Tonight we trade our vanity for insanity,” he bellowed. “Our stupidity for smart-idity.” Declaring himself the “battle-tested leader” of a vaguely defined movement for freedom, he invited Detroit to bask in “a night of absolute redemption, a night of winning.”

Then — not to bore you with too many details — Mr. Sheen, star of the beloved “Major League” movies, played a little catch, showed part of a short film he wrote and directed long ago, sampled some fan videos and presented some of his own, including a remix of the interview that appeared on “20/20” last month. In short, the best parts of the show were either already available on, or best suited to, YouTube. And Mr. Sheen, whose skill and professionalism as an actor have remained steady through much of the tabloid mayhem of his personal life, proved not to be sufficiently nimble or inventive as a live performer to hold the attention of a large and restless mob.

That is the technical interpretation of what happened Saturday. The show was no good, and the public protested. But then there is the cultural analysis, which in the end is only slightly more interesting. Mr. Sheen is hardly the first celebrity to mistake morbid, hysterical curiosity for adoration, or to think that he could extend his fame by finding the right alloy of self-mockery, bravado and false populism. His act, such as it was, vacillated between sentimental declarations of solidarity with the audience and reminders of his own superiority. “I have two goddesses,” he said to one heckler. “How many do you have?”

Of course the people in the seats — fans, rubberneckers, critics — were guilty of a complementary hypocrisy. We profess dismay at Mr. Sheen’s long history of drug abuse and violence against women, but we have also enabled and indulged this behavior, and lately encouraged his delusional belief that he could beat the toxic fame machine at its own game. The price of a ticket to one of his shows represents a wager that it is impossible to lose. The audience that walked out of the Fox could feel righteously ripped off and thus morally superior to the man they had paid to see, who seemed to feel the same about them. Win-win!

So now the question is: Will the shows go on? Will career suicide become Mr. Sheen’s new career? Or is he finished? I know I am.

Charlie Sheen’s tour stops at Radio City Music Hall on Friday and Sunday. Details are at charliesheen.com/tour.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/arts/charlie-sheens-violent-torpedo-tour-flops-in-detroit.html

Stupid smart women

 

Vital Signs

Risks: Wealthier Women Get More Melanoma, Study Finds

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Published: March 24, 2011

Rates of melanoma among young white women have more than doubled in the past three decades, and wealthier, more educated women appear to be at greatest risk. Experts aren’t sure why, but a new study suggests that these women may be at increased risk because they are spending more leisure time outdoors.

Researchers at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California studied 3,842 cases of melanoma in 3,800 white women younger than 40 who received the diagnosis between 1988 and 1992 and between 1998 and 2002. The cases were compared with census data and ultraviolet radiation exposure measures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The analysis, published last week in Archives of Dermatology, was limited to invasive cancers to diminish the possibility that more cancers were found in high-income women simply because they have better access to care and find cancer earlier.

Melanoma rates increased significantly during the study periods only among higher-income women, the researchers found. Women from the highest-income areas were nearly six times as likely to be given a diagnosis of malignant melanoma than those in the poorest areas.

Living in an area with high ambient ultraviolet radiation also was associated with an increased risk of melanoma, the researchers found. This factor did not affect melanoma rates among low-income women.

“We think this has to do with cultural preferences in higher-income groups for tanning, having the time to tan and the means to pay for tanning beds, and sun exposure on vacations in the middle of winter,” said Christina A. Clarke, senior author of the paper

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/health/research/29risks.html