Category Archives: Hedonism

EU heads of stategathered in Rome on March 24 to celebrate the Rome Treatys anniversary and be received by Pope Francis. But what arethey celebrating?

Today Judeo-Christianity, on which the European leaders founded their civilizationwith Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman Law, has been banished from public life. In 2003, European constituents were even unable to insert the word Christianity in the preamble of the constitution.

The Church of St. James in Stockholm, built to host 900 worshipers, today on Sunday houses not more than 30.

In France, the most important daughter of the Church, less than 5% of the population regularly attends Mass.

The English national Church is an object of fun and ridicule. In Wales, most of chapels have been turned into private homes.

In the Netherlands, only the faith based TV channels remind the people of the existence of a religion.

A weak will, a spiritual inertia, a religious fatigue and a lack of self-confidence are leading Europe to a psychological diagnosis of a defeated ego. Culturally, todays Europe sees the triumph of nihilism in a hedonistic uncultured form, spiritually miserable, but full of rights and social acquisitions. No matter how often European values are invoked and praised. Because a weak will, a spiritual inertia, a religious fatigue and a lack of self-confidence are leading Europe to a psychological diagnosis of a defeated ego.

Material prosperity in Europe has created a "shy" society, avoiding allconflicts and trying to ignore all the warning signs that it perceives as harmful to its own hedonism.

The example of Eastern Christians in Iraq and Syria is there to remind us that if we do not want to replace the cross with the crescent over Saint Peters dome, it is important to put an end to this voluntary suicide which, for almost half a century, led Europe to sacrifice everything important and rid itself ofevery form of authority, including that of Catholicism, to replace it with the dictatorship of the cool, the permanent injunction for pleasure closely watched by psychologists, hygienists and pornographers.

We rejoice unhindered, the heirs of the European hedonists of the 60s repeat for us.

But that is an expression of an infinite sadness, maybe a work of death: Europe is dying in celebrations and parties. But as the barbarians in Rome, Muslims are not the ones whoconvinced the Europeans that their own happiness hadpriority over everything else, or convinced them to have fewer children.

Radical Islam dreams of reaping the consequences of Europes fatal choices, but it is not their conquest, but the conquest of Europeans over themselves.

Europe is a civilization destroyed for a few seconds of pleasure, under the eye of barbarians who do not really from their non-Muslim fellow citizens. But, on their side, they have unlimited numbers.

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Europe conquers itself - Arutz Sheva

"If we were to use traditionalmeasures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.

"On the world stage, who could vie with him?"

So asks Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard in a remarkable essay in Hillsdale College's March issue of its magazine, Imprimis.

What elevates Putin above all other 21st-century leaders?

"When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that.

"In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he resurrected a national-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country's plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country."

Putin's approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin's appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump's?

Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind's future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.

The U.S. establishment loathes Putin because, they say, he is an aggressor, a tyrant, a "killer." He invaded and occupies Ukraine. His old KGB comrades assassinate journalists, defectors and dissidents.

Yet while politics under both czars and commissars has often been a blood sport in Russia, what has Putin done to his domestic enemies to rival what our Arab ally Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has done to the Muslim Brotherhood he overthrew in a military coup in Egypt?

What has Putin done to rival what our NATO ally President Erdogan has done in Turkey, jailing 40,000 people since last July's coup or our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte, who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers?

Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West, when standing up for Russia's interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.

There is another reason Putin is viewed favorably. Millions of ethnonationalists who wish to see their nations secede from the EU see him as an ally. While Putin has openly welcomed many of these movements, America's elite do not take even a neutral stance.

Putin has read the new century better than his rivals. While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.

The new dividing lines are between social conservatism and self-indulgent secularism, between tribalism and transnationalism, between the nation-state and the New World Order.

On the new dividing lines, Putin is on the side of the insurgents. Those who envision de Gaulle's Europe of Nations replacing the vision of One Europe, toward which the EU is heading, see Putin as an ally.

So the old question arises: Who owns the future?

In the new struggles of the new century, it is not impossible that Russia as was America in the Cold War may be on the winning side. Secessionist parties across Europe already look to Moscow rather than across the Atlantic.

"Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism," writes Caldwell. "That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that's true even here."

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Is Putin the 'preeminent statesman' of our times? - Coos Bay World

Charles Finch , Special for USA TODAY 12:22 p.m. EDT April 3, 2017

by Peter Gethers

(Henry Holt and Co.)

in Memoir

Food is the art within reach, the art that all of us live with day after day. Everyone wears clothes and lives in rooms, but its nevertheless easy enough to be indifferent to fashion or architecture whereas its almost impossible to imagine a person without feelings about their childhood dinners.

Maybe thats why the food memoir is such a blighted genre, trading year after year in the same slender profundities about youth, comfort, warmth. Food is yes tied intricately to memory, linking us to previous versions of ourselves, to people weve loved. That single insight isnt enough of an excuse to write a book about it.

Luckily Peter Gethers has a better one: his mother. At the age of 53, Judy Getherstook a low-level job at a Los Angeles restaurant called Ma Maison,whose chef was a young whiz named Wolfgang Puck. What followed was an almost impossibly gratifying and successful second act to her life a savant in the kitchen, Judy quickly became Pucks close associate, a friend of Julia Child,and a presiding spirit at Ma Maison, where, just for instance, she taught Sammy Davis Jr. how to roll pastry dough.

My mother forgets nothing when it comes to food: not taste, not texture, not appearance,her son writes. Even into her 90s, after four different cancers and two strokes,she retained that gift, and after her second stroke, her son, an editor, television producerand author, sensing that their remaining time together was probably short, decided to recreate the dishes that mattered most to his mother.

They provide the structure of his book, My Mothers Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life (Henry Holt, 320pp., *** out of four stars).The recipes are all over the map, the family maids chocolate pudding side by side in the lunch menu with Joel Robuchons mashed potatoes.

Author Peter Gethers.(Photo: Tsuji/ Getty Images)

Each is an avenue into Gethersown personal memories of his family, which he tells in a funny, practiced, exuberant voice, a raconteurs voice. This is a happy book, which is less mundane than it sounds writers, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, are a disproportionately depressive lot, which means books in general may be less representative of the human experience than their authors think.

There are moments when that happiness blurs into hedonism. Gethers (The Cat Who Went to Paris) buys houses at random, drops names, eats truffles and steaks smothered in cheese, gulps priceless wine. He belongs to a traveling private club dedicated to the martini. This should have been a shorter book; the best food writers, like M.F.K Fisher and Laurie Colwin,knowing their subject to be inherently indulgent, understand how crucially a little acid can cut richness.

So no doubt did Judy Gethers, however, and her sons depiction of her merciless palate, quiet feminismand courageously resilient spirit give My Mothers Kitchena reliable homing signal when it verges on the frivolous. Its recipes may not change your life, but some dish has, somewhere along the line; if youre fortunate you remember who made it for you as clearly and lovingly as this book does.

Charles Finch is the author of The Inheritance.

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'My Mother's Kitchen' is real comfort food - USA TODAY

This was officially named as being a type of heart disease, but most people who spoke about George in the month after his death portrayed a man who had been struggling. In the long wait for the autopsy results, a steady trickle of stories about the wildest excesses of his drugs use, blackouts and the public sex, flowed from the British tabloids. The novelist Tony Parsons, a sometime-friend of George's, wrote this week that it was a warped kind of hedonism which marred the pop star's life. This, Parsons felt, was down to a failure on George's part to recognise which act of the play he was going into. "There is a time and place for party drugs and sex in public places. It is not a man's middle years. After the booze-soaked, chemically crazed tumult of youth and young manhood, your 30s, 40s and beyond are a time for yoga, fruit smoothies and stretching exercises - not rehab and bad drugs and increasingly desperate attempts to stay clean."

What stopped George from ever moving into that squeaky-clean middle age that Parsons wished for him? Probably in common with a lot of gay men, it was a combination of a few factors. He was likely combating the legacy of a damaged childhood by numbing himself with drugs. His lack of children would allow for vast expanses of unstructured free time in which addiction flourishes. And perhaps most invidiously of all he saw a kind of timidity about calling out his destructive behaviour for what it was. George was one of the first gay pop stars. Criticism, or even concern about the way he was living, was conflated with homophobia. And his inner-addict was canny enough to understand how all this worked. Remember when he was caught having public sex in that toilet in Los Angeles? That sad, lonely and drug-fuelled incident was ingeniously repacked for the subsequent music video as an hilarious and sexy adventure. In interviews to promote it, George spoke about the court case he endured as though he had been Oscar Wilde, on trial for loving too much.

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Hedonism alone didn't kill George - Irish Independent

George Michael was too young to die and too old to be caning it.

Fifty-three is not old for a self-made millionaire looking forward to enjoying the final third of his life. But it is positively ancient when you have spent the last few years in and out of expensive clinics and getting busted. There is a time and place for party drugs and sex in public places. It is not a man's middle years.

After the booze-soaked, chemically crazed tumult of youth and young manhood, your thirties, forties and beyond are a time for yoga and fruit smoothies and stretching exercises - not rehab and bad drugs and increasingly desperate attempts to stay clean.

When he did four weeks' jail time for driving under the influence of drugs, George Michael was already 47 years old. I have known a few wild men in my time. But I never knew anyone who caned it all the way to the male menopause.

Oh, George! When I first met him, he was 21 years old and Wham! were in their pomp - stuffing shuttlecocks down their tennis shorts, mobs of teenage girls chasing George and Andrew Ridgeley down every street and a chauffeured limo waiting until the night's fun was over. But the fun was, like the 21-year-old George himself, as clean cut as could be.

Young George was shrewd, mature and totally unlike the debauched degenerates that I had been knocking around with for the previous ten years. The night we met, George and I went to Rudland & Stubbs in Smithfield and drank our bodyweight in sauvignon blanc. And I thought that was about as wild as it would ever get with this likeable young man. I was dead wrong.

Even nine years after that first meeting, at his 30th birthday party on his father's stud farm - the horses running free in the rolling fields, torch lights lining the long sweeping driveway - there was no indication that George Michael was going to go down in flames as the last of the great hedonists. Even on the night he turned 30, all that was still ahead of him. He looked too much the master of his destiny to ever veer wildly off the rails. He surely managed his career far too well to destroy it with gluttony for good times. But five years later we were sitting by the fire in his big open-plan house in Oak Hill Park, Hampstead - Hippy the Labrador chewing the white pile carpet between us - when George casually slipped into the conversation that he was smoking around 25 spliffs a day.

In those years he was still reeling from a double bereavement. Anselmo Feleppa, the Brazilian lover who finally convinced George that he was gay and not hovering somewhere on the bisexual spectrum, had died of an Aids-related brain haemorrhage in 1993. His mother Lesley, the only member of his family I ever met in the many hours I spent in his Oak Hill Park home, had died in 1997 at the age of 60. But life is full of loss. It doesn't make most of us want to ruin ourselves.

And suddenly, it seemed like the drugs were not for recreation but relief, respite and oblivion. And he was already far too old to be living that way.

This is not to suggest that fleeting fun is for the young. There will always be a time and place for transient bliss in a man's life, whatever his age. Witness Sir Rod Stewart, 72, flamboyantly making the draw for the fifth round of the Scottish Cup after possibly imbibing a drink or two. And consider the late Leonard Cohen, who always said that if he lived to be 80, he was going to start smoking again.

"It is the right age to recommence," Cohen solemnly told the New York Times. And that's exactly what Cohen did - it is no coincidence that on the cover of Cohen's last album, You Want It Darker, released just before his death at the age of 82, he has ostentatiously got a fag on the go. Leonard Cohen, the smoker, and Rod Stewart, the drinker, glow with joy. But then they obey the first rule of hedonism - enjoy it.

How much true undiluted pleasure, I wonder, did George Michael feel from his wild years? Rumours abound about what chemicals he was on. What is irrefutable is that they ruined him. I spent a lot of time around George in his twenties and thirties. We met each other's families. When I went out with my girlfriend Yuriko on the night before we got married, the only person who came with us to the little Japanese restaurant in Islington was George Michael. In the end I was really just the favourite journalist of a big star. But I considered him my friend. But by the time he was in his forties and fifties, we had stopped talking to each other. And I had stopped recognising him. It wasn't just the weight he piled on. He looked miserable.

Why do most of us bail out of hedonism? Because we worry about the consequences. You have to be either 18 or 80 to smoke cigarettes and not worry about lung cancer. Anywhere in between and you know it is a real possibility. After youth's first flush, other things take priority over having a good time. A serious job, a permanent woman and fatherhood. You don't stay up all night when you have to play with your child at dawn.

For most of us, life imposes its own restrictions. The hard-core hedonists are often the ones who take most readily to the Perrier and pilates of later life. Because they have watched their friends die. Because they have done unknown damage to themselves. And they know it. So they move from the dark to the light, from the madness to something approaching peace. George Michael, almost uniquely, travelled in exactly the opposite direction. Whatever George was on, he did too much of, much too late. Whatever your poison, you should start young and - when the hangovers take days to shake off, rather than hours - learn to pace yourself. You don't do what George did. Because that will give you a morning after that lasts for eternity.

On the wall of the Snappy Snaps on Hampstead's high street, five minutes' walk from George's old home in Oak Hill Park, there was some graffiti next to the dent where he crashed his car at 3.30 on a Sunday morning. "Wham" the graffiti quipped, and everyone enjoyed the joke. But it was probably a lot less fun to be the drug-addled middle-aged man who had passed out behind the wheel of his car when he was trying to find his way home.

I never saw anyone get hedonism so badly wrong as George. All the drugs, all the sex in public places, all the reckless driving - and he was not having fun. He was dying.

It is different for the authentically young, for the generation born in the 21st century. A major NHS survey of 6,500 schoolchildren reveals that the number of young people smoking, drinking and taking drugs has dramatically fallen over the last ten years.

The authentically young have watched their grandparents die of lung cancer because they smoked cigarettes. They can see that a drink or two is fun but that drunks are unequivocally pathetic. They know their parents took drugs - mum starting everything with an E in Ibiza, dad chopping out the white lines during the Britpop wars - so drugs seem old hat. They have watched their elders take hedonism to the end of the line. And they want very little to do with it.

For the second half of the last century, young folk drank up, lit up and cranked up the volume. But the clean teens of the 21st century make that old-school hedonism look out of time, as redundant as record stores. And nothing ever seems quite so old fashioned as the formerly fashionable.

Drugs are still out there. But even the use of cannabis, the most commonly used drug, is way down these days. And we are talking about the very young - which means we are talking about the shape of the future. The young of today have learned from the mistakes of all those arthritic old groovers who cavorted in The Roxy and The Haienda. And as the father of one of them, it seems to me that there has been a real cultural shift. It was once the cool kids who got off their faces. Now it is the uneducated idiots who get routinely rat faced. Unfettered hedonism is a dial-up pastime in a digital world.

The experts say the nature of childhood has changed. This coming generation set the pace for all of us, with our personal trainers and obsession with appearance. These clean teens are more vain than all those generations who passed the bong in leaky bedsit rooms. In those heady days of 20th-century hedonism, nobody fretted about how they looked in a photograph. Nobody joyously rutting in the mud of Woodstock worried about something so superficial as their appearance. Now it often feels as if nothing matters more.

Funny enough, George Michael was fanatically self-conscious about the way he looked. When we met in that house at the end of a private road in Hampstead, he would always put the kettle on and get out the biscuits. The only exception would be if he had a photo shoot coming up. Then he would not even touch a chocolate digestive. George was in control. He was disciplined. And in those years of early solo success, when he was up there commercially with even Michael Jackson, he was happy. Somewhere along the line, he lost his way. He lost the ability to know when it was time to say yes to a chocolate digestive - or your drug of choice - and when it was time to say no. Although we drifted apart, I remember him as a beautiful man with a huge heart and a generous spirit who could handle success but could not handle hedonism.

You can't make the pleasure of the moment last a lifetime. How will you celebrate your 80th birthday? Chop out a couple of lines? A threesome with friends? A fireside spliff? Or light up a cigarette knowing that life has waited too long to kill you with lung cancer? Leonard Cohen's cigarette at 80 was only fun because he had stopped smoking decades earlier.

We give up on the unapologetic hedonism of our extreme youth - the meaningless sex with a succession of strangers, the nicotine habit, the booze and powders - when we learn that life cannot be lived as if tomorrow never comes.

Because unless you fall off your perch, it always does.

George Michael was a legend

George Michael on beating drugs, depression and his outing in LA

George Michael's songs were powered by love

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Why George Michael's battle with drugs won't be repeated - GQ.com

I'm always wildly envious of younger people, but there's one thing I have over them: I went to Studio 54. The legendary 1970s disco arose like a mirage in an old theater on 54th Street. The country was in shambles due to the mass disillusionment over Vietnam and Watergate, and New York's "Fun City" tag had become ironic, because the city was dangerous and decrepit, but here came 54, where you could check your mind at the door and indulge in three floors of fabulous denial.

Getting in was a nightmare, of course. Frisky co-owner Steve Rubell wanted a mixed salad of a crowd, consisting of famous people, media, and everyday Joes who happened to look good or know someone. He once told a couple attempting entry that the man could come in, but the lady didn't quite look good enough. The guy pondered this Sophie's Choice quandary for a second, then shockingly said "Later" to wifey and went right in, choosing a night of frolicsome fun alone.

Fortunately, Rubell knew I was press, so if he was outside, he'd pull me in from the crowd, which resembled something out of the French Revolution. But if Rubell was busy in the club, snooty doorman Marc Benecke was solely in charge. Marc would eye me as if I were a decaying rodent and haughtily refuse to even acknowledge me. I'd stand there in a quilted kimono, being publicly humiliated for hours, and then I'd have to crawl over to the second best disco, Xenon, which was a fate worse than death. It was filled with rejects!

But let's stick to the times I got into 54. The main floor was the dazzling dance floor, where lit-up columns descended and rose up again, and as everyone line-danced to "Lady Bump," a quarter moon with a gigantic spoon attached came down to cheers. This place openly celebrated cocaine use! In their less agoraphobic days, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Cher, Dolly Parton, and Andy Warhol all mixed in with the crowd. They were right up in your grill! Purely by chance, I found myself dancing with Margaux Hemingway and talking to Liza Minnelli's best friendChita Rivera's daughter--who almost introduced me to Liza.

If you REALLY wanted to meet Liza, downstairs was the unofficial VIP room where the coke spoons weren't fake and attached to any cardboard moon. And the third floorthe balcony---was where you sat and got a blow job from a complete stranger. For all you knew, it might be Cher or Andy Warhol!

Three floors of sheer hedonism, all carried out before anyone knewor caredabout rehab, AIDS, or financial problems.

On the New Year's Eve that brought in 1979, Grace Jones was the featured performer and the invite promised a continental breakfast after the show. Grace shimmered and delivered, backed by an assortment of writhing male dancers. It's amusing that she feels Lady Gaga has ripped her off, since Grace was "liberally borrowing" from Dietrich, Piaf, and Bowie, but her lack of logic has always been incredibly glamorous, so who cares? The continental breakfast turned out to be a solitary cart, where they tried to create one crepe at a time for a starving crowd of over a thousand. Again, wildly illogical, but kind of desperately chic.

The IRS ultimately busted the club when they found shitloads of cash hidden in the walls. The owners went to jail and the new ones tried to recreate the magic, but by that point, disco was becoming deader than The Brady Bunch Hour. Today, the space is a theater again, and I always go there with a razor blade, hoping there'll still be some money in the walls.

Splash image via screenshot

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I Went to Studio 54, and You Didn't - Papermag

Folksy and charming, Carl Hardee Sr. is a no-nonsense kind of guy who doesnt care much for provocative ads featuring bikini-clad women. He aims to put the focus on food, not boobs, with a new marketing strategy.

Thats quite a departure for the Carls Jr and Hardees burger chains, where millennial playboy Carl Hardee Jr. has been running the place like a baller, using exposed skin and double entendres to grab consumers attention. Looks like the partysover, dude.

This is the fictional scenario, with a cheeky nod to real life, for a new campaign launching todayand kicking off a major brand overhaul for the fast-food restaurants. It also introduces the first-ever spokesman for the CKE-owned Carls Jr and Hardees sister chainsthe logically named Carl Hardee Sr. (an amalgam of actual founders Carl Karcher and Wilbur Hardee).

Played by actor-musician Charles Esten from the soapy series Nashville, the weathered and bearded character takes control of the company from his wayward son in the opening moments of the new spot. Flanked by movers who quickly get to work tearing down the displays of branded hedonism, Senior quickly gets the attention of his out-of-control progeny and his long-suffering employees.

Its unclear where Papa Hardee has been all this timethose risqu commercials go back at least 15 yearsbut its obvious that stuff just got real. (The mechanical bull in the corner office can stay, though).

Ad agency 72andSunny has created the Hardee character with the goal of changing the conversation around the burger chains (known as Hardees in the South and Carls Jr. in most other markets), which broke ground with industry firsts like made-from-scratch biscuits and grass-fed beef. (There is a meta element, of course, in seeing72andSunny tear down its old advertising with the new.)

Theyre also rolling out a new tagline: Pioneers of the great American burger.

Theyve never really gotten credit for their quality, and we want that message to land with consumers, said Jason Norcross, executive creative director and partner at 72andSunny. We want to reclaim their bona fides.

It was time to evolve. Some of the product attributes got lost because people were too busy ogling girls.

-Jason Norcross, 72andSunny

But theres no point in denying the controversial and much-maligned approach of the past, he said. Instead, the new campaign embraces previous ad stars like Charlotte McKinney, Genevieve Morton, Emily Sears and Elena Belle in a winking way (theyll appear only ascardboard cutouts and artwork).

It was time to evolve, Norcross said of the previous made-you-look tactics. Some of the product attributes got lost because people were too busy ogling girls.

The target audience is the sameyoung, hungry guysbut Norcross said the brand wants to be considered as a lower-priced alternative to competitors like Shake Shack, The Habit and others in the currently hot better-burger category. The campaigns ongoing emphasis will be on ingredients and sourcing, two hot topics in the broader food world.

Carl Hardee Sr. will show up in TV spots, on digital and social media and in GIFs from emerging artists. Theres a planned YouTube takeover where he physically pushes aside the former ads, which some critics have likened to soft-core porn, and replaces them with straight-up food porn.

The character will likely be integrated into programming or branded bits on networks like Comedy Central via media partnerships. (His girl-crazy son, played by comedian Drew Tarver, may have a recurring role as well).

The chain has new packaging, too.

72andSunny execs also revamped the chains logo, uniforms, menus and packaging streamlining the look and stripping out the bright red cartoonish touchesfor what Norcross called a big brand reboot that we hope becomes a brand transformation.

On the get-it-done scale, Carl Hardee Sr. is obviously an overachiever. As seen in the new 3-minute mini-movie, it doesnt take him long to effect some radical change at his old stomping ground, lining the walls with hero shots of burgers instead of eye candyand revoking his sons parking privileges.

He also gives viewers a history lesson about the brand, founded in 1956, showing in flashback how the chain popularized charbroiled meat and the drive-thru window. (Carl Jr. shows up in the time-shifted snippets when hes cute and young, pre-obnoxious bro phase).

Esten, who also has a comedy and improv background, plays Hardee Sr. with a mix of disciplinarian dad and straight-shooting Southern gentleman. (And he drives a vintage Corvette, so hes old-school badass).

Hardee Sr. will be the face of the brand for the rest of the year (at least), touting, among other things, new burgers with unique flavor combinations. 72andSunny execs also pulled in trap-music artist Oiki to reveal the brands new tagline in short films and announce all-natural chicken and other product launches. Watch the first, called Pioneer, below.

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Burgers, Not Boobs: Carl's Jr. Brilliantly Flips the Script by Tearing Down Its Own Smutty Ads - Adweek

It is clear that hedonism is a potent ingredient of grassroots activism. Women wearing pink hats against Donald Trump in Washington DC. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Heard about blackout culture ? Its sweeping across Americas universities and its lethal. Students down cocktails of alcohol with the singular aim of passing out. Nearly 2,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related injuries each year, and there are increasing calls for college authorities to stamp out binge drinking.

No wonder hedonism has a bad name. For many people, its nothing more than a byword for immoral and irresponsible self-indulgence, evoking the heroin overdoses and drunken rampages made infamous by films such as Trainspotting.

This disdain for hedonistic pleasures is reflected in a growing puritanical streak in the modern happiness industry, which would have us all staying calm doing mindfulness courses and sticking strictly to clean-eating wholemeal diets. You wont find sex, drugs and rocknroll in the index of many self-help books: western culture is becoming addicted to moderation and self-control.

I am not, of course, suggesting we embrace blackout culture. Rather, we need to recognise that we are neurologically wired to seek pleasure and that it is central to most peoples sense of wellbeing. The desire for pleasure is part of human nature, points out the neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach adding that perhaps we have to accept that the human brain makes us disproportionately interested in pleasure.

We should welcome hedonistic pleasure-seeking into our lives because of our brain chemistry and because, for centuries, it has been an incredibly enriching ingredient of human culture.

When Franciscan missionaries first arrived in Mexico, they witnessed Aztec rituals that began with the eating of a black mushroom, probably Psilocybe cubensis, a hallucinogen. Hedonism has also fuelled some of literatures greatest works, from Samuel Taylor Coleridges opium-dream poem Kubla Khan to Robert Louis Stevensons 60,000-word novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which he allegedly wrote during a six-day cocaine binge in 1885.

But perhaps the greatest hidden virtue of hedonism has been its role in catalysing social change. The roaring 20s saw an explosion of carpe diem pleasure-seeking in response to the horrors of the first world war. Here was a new generation, wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken. The result was an outbreak of vitality and experimentation that challenged social conventions, from open lesbian relationships to the spread of jazz that helped to bridge black-white divides.

Then came the drug-fuelled counter-culture of the 1960s, where any hippy worth their salt was turning on, tuning in and dropping out on a psychedelic bus tour, and spending the summers living it up in a free-love commune. Yet personal and social liberation went hand in hand: it was these same tie-dyed hedonistic explorers who turned their backs on Vietnam and joined anti-war sit-ins at Berkeley where they lit up joints instead.

Half a century on, I believe we are in danger of losing touch with our hedonistic selves. The time has come to rediscover this vital part of who we are, for both personal and political reasons.

On the personal level, a healthy dose of hedonistic experience is an antidote to our age of mediated proxy living, where we are caught in a state of continuous partial attention checking our phones, on average, 80times a day and spending more than nine hours each day staring at screens. We are becoming more interested in being spectators of life on our iGadgets than actually living it for ourselves, increasingly trapped in a matrix of vicarious experience. Hedonism is a route to reconnecting with direct experience, returning us to touching, tasting and feeling the world.

At the same time, hedonism has barely tapped potential to revitalise politics. Think back to the carnival tradition of the Middle Ages, which was about raucous boozing and dancing in wooden clogs, but also an expression of anti-authoritarian defiance: peasants would dress as priests and lords in mockery of their masters while, from the 16th century, slave revolts were common during carnival time in the Americas.

Such defiance is urgently needed today. Representative democracy is crumbling before our eyes, with a wave of far-right anti-system politicians stepping in where traditional parties have been failing to deal with issues such as widening inequality, migration and terrorism. The consequences have ranged from the authoritarian xenophobia of Donald Trump to a blinkered charge for hardline Brexit.

We need to reignite that carnival spirit with a new wave of collective hedonism. It is our greatest hope for creating a seize-the-day mass politics for the 21st century that can deliver progressive democratic renewal.

Todays grassroots movements can look for inspiration in medieval festivities and in more recent instances of political hedonism, such as the carnivalesque protests in eastern and central Europe in 1989, when the Orange Alternative movement in Poland held anti-government demonstrations led by people wearing fancy dress, while in Prague the Society for a Merrier Present held a silent march called A Fruitless Action wearing helmets made from watermelons and holding up blank banners. Such protests grew into the mass movements that brought down whole regimes. As the historian Padraic Kenney writes, what started as just a carnival became a revolution.

From the pink bloc protesters in fairy costumes who taunted police with feather dusters in the global justice movements Carnivals Against Capital in the noughties, to the pink hats of the anti-Trump Womens March this year, it is clear that hedonism is a potent ingredient of grassroots activism. Too many marches today end up deadening passion with strings of well-meaning but tedious speeches from inaudible speakers. We need to revitalise protest movements with a hedonistic carnival spirit that keeps us engaged and hopeful by making us feel fully alive.

Its time to forge a new political hedonism and dance to the tune not only of carpe diem but its plural, carpamus diem. Lets seize the day together.

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Put on your party shoes it's time for political hedonism - The Guardian

Pastor Joey Durham, Sturgis Baptist Church 12:02 a.m. CT March 29, 2017

Todays devotion is Perilous Times? Lovers of Pleasures MORE Than Lovers of God! My text is 2 Timothy 3:1-4, where we see, This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebeakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; (KJV) In our text, the first things said about people in general in the last days is that they would be lovers of their own selves. When a people have an inordinate love for self, it is manifested in a lack of love for God, which is perilous. In these last days, people are giving themselves more and more to loving pleasures which is hedonism. Rather than putting the Lord Jesus first, they are devoted primarily to pleasures that gratify their selfish desires.

Please notice with me the context of this scripture. People are loving pleasures MORE than they love God. In the context, people have not totally kicked God out of their lives, but they have relegated God to the back-seat in their life. This is a peril causing action of immense proportions! In other words, they love the lake and fishing more than God. They love ball games more than God. They love working their job more than God. They love catching up with family or friends more than God. Yet, when trouble and tragedy strikes their life, they want to run to God and act like Hes the most important thing in their life, depending upon Him like Hes their closest, most relied upon companion. In Matthew 15:8, the Lord declares the true condition regarding this perilous characteristic. This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. (KJV) The Lord knows what you love most. He knows if you love HIM most, or if youre just using Him only when you need Him. Such a relationship will certainly lead to perilous situations in your life!

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Steppingstones - The Gleaner

Tuesday, March 28, 2017 at 3 p.m.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos Suntan begins in such grim, static, deadpan fashion that you might be forgiven for assuming youve traveled back in time to an international film festival circa 2002. All sharp angles and stony faces and oblique interactions, the movie opens with glum, portly middle-aged doctor Kostis (Makis Papadimitriou) arriving to the tiny island of Antiparos to be the local physician. Its a desolate place: empty streets, dim buildings, sour people. Watching these early scenes, I found myself settling in for a wry, dry wallow in minimalist miserabilism.

And then summer starts. Its first announced with the arrival of Anna (Elli Tringou), a beautiful young woman who has suffered a nasty leg wound from a moped accident. As Kostis tries to treat it, her chums long-haired, scantily clad and quite possibly high wreak havoc in his clinic. Shy but also eager to act cool, the doctor tolerates them, even playing along a bit. He should be annoyed, but that grin suggests something else.

Before we know it, the gray, strained milieu has transformed into one of heaving bodies and hedonism. The camera loosens up, moving more and pressing closer to faces and limbs. A hat over his balding head and sunscreen smothered over his pale face, dumpy Kostis hesitates as he walks onto the islands crowded nude beach, with its half-thongs and waving dongs. But Anna welcomes him and even seems to like him though we cant tell at first if she sees him as a friend or a pet. He reminds her to cover up the wound on her leg; thats about the only thing she bothers to.

Structurally, theres little thats new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures. Anna and her friends are whirligigs of abandon and pleasure, jumping and dancing and somersaulting their way through seas and beaches and clubs. Kostis, tight and tense, struggles to keep up he cant seem to do anything right, try as he might. But he persists, because theres something magical about these kids and their otherworldly freedom. When Kostis hangs out with fellow townspeople his age, the partying is more depressing, more transactional they prowl bars and dance floors in search of one-night stands, dreaming of the loads of pussy that summer drops on their otherwise sad little shore.

This cant end well, and the movie traverses some truly scary places. Your heart may go out to Kostis initially, but thats part of Papadimitropoulos long game. Its reminiscent, oddly enough, of how Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader set up the viewer to identify with Travis Bickles alienation early on in Taxi Driver before revealing the full extent of his madness. In similar fashion, Suntan pulls you into this strange mans world before slyly and slowly turning the tables. You wont like the darkness you find there.

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From Greece, Suntan Takes on the Madness of Old Schlubs Pursuing Young Beauties - Houston Press