The D.J. Deadmau5, a leader in electronic dance music, performing at the Roseland Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan.

 

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

The Electric Zoo Festival last September on Randall’s Island in New York. Such events have drawn investors’ attention.

 

Electronic Dance Concerts Turn Up Volume, Tempting Investors

By BEN SISARIO

One Friday afternoon last month, 60,000 tickets at $100 and up went on sale for a major music festival at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., before the headliners had even been announced.

It sold out in three hours.

The festival with the fervent following was the Electric Daisy Carnival, a two-day event next month dedicated to the concert industry’s new favorite genre: electronic dance music. Long considered a marginal part of the music business that subsisted in clubs and semi-legal warehouse raves, dance has now moved squarely into the mainstream, with a growing circuit of festivals and profit margins that are attracting Wall Street.

For an industry increasingly reliant on aging headliners — like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and the Rolling Stones — the appeal of a genre with fresh stars and a huge young audience is undeniable.

“If you’re 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock ‘n’ roll,” said Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest concert promoter.

Two weeks ago, 165,000 fans went to the Ultra Music Festival in Miami to revel in the pulsating bass and wave glow sticks in the dark. Similar numbers have turned out for events in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas. With the boom, artist fees have exploded. Top D.J.’s like Deadmau5, Tiësto and Afrojack can earn well over $1 million for a festival appearance and $10 million for a Las Vegas nightclub residency, talent agents say.

Having developed on the margins, electronic dance music — high-energy waves of mechanized sound that, at its best, creates a communal experience for a sea of strangers — is dominated by a network of independent promoters.

They include Insomniac, which presents Electric Daisy Carnival; Hard Events, another nationwide promoter; Ultra, whose namesake festival in Miami has expanded to Brazil, Argentina and Poland; and Made Event, behind the Electric Zoo festival in New York.

Their success has attracted a clutch of potential investors from inside and outside the music world. The insiders include Live Nation and A.E.G. Live, the two biggest corporate promoters.

The outsiders include Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate who made an unsuccessful bid last year for the Warner Music Group, and the media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, according to people involved in investment talks who declined to be identified discussing private agreements.

Mr. Sillerman — who transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating regional rock promoters into what is now Live Nation — declined to comment for this article, as did a representative of Mr. Burkle.

For new investors, getting into the dance business may not all be a party. Determining the value of the promoting companies is difficult, and there are particular risks whenever putting on a musical bacchanal for tens of thousands.

At the Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles two years ago, a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose; at the same event in Dallas the next year, a 19-year-old man died and more than two dozen were hospitalized for drugs, alcohol and heat-related illnesses.

Pasquale Rotella, the chief executive of Insomniac, the company behind those raves, has also been implicated in a corruption scandal in Los Angeles. Last month, he and five others were indicted on charges related to the embezzlement of $2.5 million from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In a statement, his company maintained that the charges against him were “completely baseless and flat-out wrong, both on the law and on the facts.”

The investment talks may be only in the exploratory phase. But for a musical genre that not long ago was mostly associated with secret locations and drugs, it is a startling development, as are the amounts of money involved. According to the people involved in the talks, offers to buy the biggest promoters have ranged from about $20 million to $60 million.

“It feels like the dot-com era,” said Joel Zimmerman, an agent at William Morris Endeavor who books many of the top dance acts. “There’s a little bit of a gold rush going on, with outsiders looking in.”

Electronic dance music, or E.D.M. for short, has been common in one form or other for decades, but only in recent years has its audience become big enough to sustain large-scale touring. Last December, Swedish House Mafia became the first D.J. act to headline Madison Square Garden. (D.J.’s do not spin records so much as command computerized sound systems, playing snippets of songs and using them to create their own protracted rhythms.)

This summer acts like Avicii and Kaskade are touring in some of the same arenas and theaters where fans can see Coldplay and James Taylor.

While record sales for dance music are relatively low — even the biggest recent albums, like David Guetta’s “Nothing But the Beat,” rarely sell more than 300,000 copies — the sound has infiltrated pop radio through acts like Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry. At the Grammy Awards in February, Skrillex won three prizes and Mr. Guetta and Deadmau5 (pronounced like “deadmouse”) jammed with the Foo Fighters, L’il Wayne and Chris Brown.

The big dance festivals have built themselves into valuable brands, able to sell tickets on their name alone and the immersive audio-visual spectacle they present. One big company could bring together a handful of promoters and find economies of scale.

“I have been approached by all the big boys you can imagine,” said Gary Richards, the founder of Hard Events. “I’ve been working in this for 20 years and nobody cared. Now it’s so massive that everybody wants a piece of it.”

Yet a marriage between D.J.’s and billionaire investors may be difficult. Live music is a risky and low-margin business for promoters. Pricing tickets too high or too low, for example, can sink an otherwise successful venture. Dance music also faces the perennial fad question: will its popularity stick this time or blow over as it did in the 1990s, when it was called electronica?

How much the promoters need, or even want, outside money is also unclear. Some say outside capital is necessary to expand to new markets, but others have built powerful organizations on their own. Adam Russakoff, Ultra’s director of business affairs, said his company was profitable, debt-free and has no outside investment. The company handles its own ticketing and makes licensing deals for its events overseas.

And then there is simple culture clash. Many dance music promoters and managers are suspicious of big money and the corporate ways of the mainstream concert business. In an interview, Mr. Rotella said he has been approached by many potential investors but was worried of what might become of immersive, multifaceted events like Electric Daisy.

“You don’t want this to turn into what the concert business is today,” he said, “where you just sell people tickets and they come to the show and sit in their seat. There’s not a lot of soul behind that. What we do is more of an experience.”

Mr. Richards agreed, saying that the big investors he spoke with did not understand the market.

“You can’t just franchise this like McDonald’s,” he said.

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

 

 

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Tiger Woods dropped his putter in frustration after missing a birdie putt on the 15th green. He fell 12 strokes behind the leader.

 

 

Flustered Woods Loses Temper and More Ground

By SAM BORDEN

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods has heard crowds roar on the back nine at Augusta National for his entire professional life. Birdies at the 11th hole. Eagles on 13 or 15. Glorious championship walks up No. 18, the whistles from the fans cutting through the Sunday evening gloaming.

This week, though, Woods has walked in nothing but quiet. On Thursday, he shot a par 72. On Friday, he finished with a 75. And on Saturday, in the third round of the Masters, Woods stalled as the leaders zoomed even further away from him, another 72 leaving him tied for 38th at three over par, 12 shots behind.

So much more was expected, both by Woods and the fans who watched him win his first full-field PGA Tour event in 30 months at the Arnold Palmer Invitational two weeks ago. He has finished in the top 10 here in each of the last seven years, and with his game seemingly in form, it was hard not to imagine the most dramatic sort of Woods revival.

Instead, there has been nothing. The most noise around Woods has come from Woods himself, his on-course tantrums drawing more attention than anything else he has done. On Friday, he shouted angrily after several poor shots and, after recoiling from a shoddy 9-iron shot at No. 16, dropped the club and kicked it toward the back of the tee box.

That display of petulance could be costly. The PGA Tour has the right to discipline players for unprofessional conduct, even in events like the Masters that it does not run but co-sponsors or approves.

Asked on Saturday if he had heard from anyone regarding his behavior, Woods said, “Well, I certainly heard that people didn’t like me kicking the club, but I didn’t like it either.”

Woods’s histrionics have been an issue before, and on the 13th hole Saturday, he boiled over again. This time, he hurled his club to the ground after hooking his drive into the trees on the left side of the fairway, taking a sizable divot from the turf. During a brief interview with reporters after his round, he smiled as he offered an apology.

“Certainly I’m frustrated at times and I apologize if I offended anybody by that,” he said. “But I’ve hit some bad shots and it’s certainly frustrating at times not hitting the ball where you need to hit it.”

Woods began Saturday tied for 40th, eight shots (and about four hours) behind the leaders. When he birdied the third and fourth holes, however, there were at least a few murmurs around the grounds about a potential surge. But Woods bogeyed Nos. 6 and 9, then made nine straight pars to finish a round that was, in many ways, emblematic of his week.

His driver betrayed him. His putter never fired. And, for the second consecutive day, he did not make a birdie on any of the four par 5s — something that happened only two other times in his previous 17 years here.

“It’s so frustrating because I’m so close to doing it,” Woods said. “I’m so close to turning it around.”

Most alarming for Woods, there was no obvious explanation for his struggles on the holes that he typically dominates. Woods needed to do what Phil Mickelson did Saturday, eagling No. 13 and birdieing No. 15 to catapult up the leader board.

Instead, he did not reach either green in two shots and is just one under on the par-5 holes this week — stunning when you consider he was 10 under on those holes in 2011 and 15 under in 2010.

“I would like to say it was poor driving, but then I drive in the fairways and then miss into a bad spot or I would miss the drive, then compound the problem,” Woods said. “It was just one thing after another.”

Even with all of Woods’s inconsistencies in recent years, there remains the long-embedded feeling — however unrealistic — that he can do anything, come from anywhere on Sunday and win. The course record at Augusta National is 63, however, and Woods’s low round here is a seven-under 65 — a number he almost surely would have to better by more than a couple of shots to come anywhere near the leader.

If this week has been any indication, it seems nearly impossible. After another frustrating par at the 15th hole on Saturday, Woods and his playing partner, the defending champion, Charl Schwartzel, moved to the par-3 16th tee, which is tucked back behind some bleachers, where many of the fans on the opposite side of the green could not see them.

Moments later, a tee shot was struck and the ball carried high in the air, sticking sharply just a few feet away from the pin. A roar went up and the blocked-out fans craned their heads to see the tee, hoping that maybe, just maybe, it was Woods.

It was not. Schwartzel was the one admiring his shot, not Woods, and suddenly it was quiet again. It was fitting; on moving day at the Masters, Woods could do little more than stand still.

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

 

 

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She’s Fit to Be Tied

By MAUREEN DOWD

WHEN I was 14, I sneaked into the empty bedroom of my scholarly older brother to poke around in his bookcase. Tucked behind his law school tomes and Winston Churchill memoirs, I found the “Story of O.”

I was quickly submerged in the submissive: masks, chains, brands, whips, blindfolds, piercings.

In the classic bondage novel written in 1954 by the French author Anne Desclos under the name Pauline Réage, a beautiful, young fashion photographer agrees to be the slave of a powerful master who turns her into “a mannequin of perversion,” as The Times’s 1966 review said.

Even skimming, the book was too scary for me, so I stuck it back in its hidden spot and scampered away.

Now comes the story of E, a London writer named Erika whose pseudonym is E L James. The plump, happily married 40-something mother and former television producer seems like “a normal lady,” as one shocked Hollywood agent put it.

Yet she has written the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy, bondage-themed romanticas that have evoked hysteria, whipping up a frenzy with the housewives of Long Island and rippling out from there.

James started writing the series as “Twilight” fan fiction under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon, spinning another strange, obsessive love story in misty Washington State with a pale, virginal 21-year-old brunet student named Anastasia Steele and a breathtakingly handsome, 27-year-old telecommunications mogul named Christian Grey.

There is, naturally, a barrier, but this time it’s not supernatural; it’s that Grey wants Ana to be his “sub.” (Not the sandwich, though she does fix him subs with the French bread he favors.)

“I type ‘Submissive’ into Wikipedia,” Ana says. “Half an hour later, I feel slight queasy and frankly shocked to my core.” But soon she decides “some of this stuff is HOT.” Especially because he gives her looks so steamy that they “could be solely responsible for global warming.”

Even though James writes like a Brontë devoid of talent, her saga is the first smash hit in the era of “Mommy’s naughty reader,” as a 10-year-old dubbed it in The Wall Street Journal. Women can now download electronic erotica on their Kindles, Nooks and iPads anywhere they want, with no bodice-ripping Fabio cover to give them away.

“I told my mah-jongg group, ‘Oh my God, you have to read it,’ ” Janice Abarbanel, a 57-year-old jewelry maker and mother of two, told The Boston Globe. “It makes you think you could add more spice to your life.”

Even though bondage movies have had a troubled history — the embarrassing “9 ½ Weeks” and “Exit to Eden” — Hollywood had a bidding war over the movie rights, which were sold to Universal and Focus Features for $5 million.

In a season when Rick Santorum and other conservatives are on a tear trying to debase women, it’s natural to wonder why women are thronging to the story of an innocent who jumps into the arms of a Seattle sadist with a “Red Room of Pain” full of chains, clamps, whips, canes, flogs and cuffs, falling in love to the soundtrack of the Police’s “King of Pain.”

Admittedly, Grey, the libertine with the gray eyes and copper curls, uses winking smiley emoticons, believes in monogamy and likes to dance to Frank Sinatra. So he’s not as ominous as the orgy-loving sadists in the “Story of O.”

But he does want Anastasia to sign a contract to be a weekend Submissive, to always keep her eyes cast down, call him “Sir,” stay “shaved and/or waxed” and not snack between meals (except fruit). The contract stipulates that “the Dominant may flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason, which he is not obliged to provide.”

He shows he’s not a total ogre in the appendix, when he stipulates there will be “no acts involving fire play,” children, animals or “gynecological medical instruments.” He gives her safe words: “yellow” means caution and “red” means stop. And he buys her a platinum and diamond bracelet to cover the bruises on her wrist.

Anastasia’s typical response to sex or anything else is “Holy cow!” In fact, she utters that phrase 84 irritating times in the trilogy.

“ ‘Venus in Fur’ it ain’t,” Erica Jong told me. “It’s dull and poorly written. A girl falling in love with a rich guy is very 80s.”

Although the book is being snapped up because it seems daring, a woman I know who works as a phone dominatrix under the nom de dom Jennifer Hunter dismisses it as “just another conventional depiction of female submission. And more off-putting than most. Same old same old.”

James cleaves to hoary conventions out of Harlequin: powerful and wealthy heroes with a sense of entitlement who need to be rescued; smart and strong-willed heroines who tame their men.

“Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” a novel written in two volumes by Samuel Richardson and published in 1740, tells the story of a 15-year-old maidservant whose noble master becomes infatuated with her. He kidnaps her, locks her up in one of his estates and tries to seduce and rape her, but eventually her innocence, intelligence, resistance and love persuade him to straighten up, ignore class differences and marry her.

Just so, Anne Rice, the godmother of vampire and S&M fantasies, told me, “ ‘Twilight’ is like ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” Or Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” As is “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

A mousy, virginal girl who is spirited beneath her shy demeanor falls in love with a rich, arrogant man. She learns that he’s damaged, but decides to persevere and heal him through her transforming love. H.E.A., as they say in romantica: Happily Ever After.

The Harvard-educated Hunter asserts that most women are sexually submissive — “the sexually dominant woman is that rara avis” — and scoffs at the idea that anything in the book is offensive except its overwrought prose.

“Every good dominant knows that the submissive is really the partner in control,” she says. “All a submissive woman has to do is relax and enjoy the ride while delicious sexual acts are visited upon her. She’s the star of the proceedings. Someone is ministering to her needs for a change. Master is choreographing all the action. The book seems to have resonated with so many women because, after a long day of managing employees, making all the decisions and looking after children, a woman might be exhausted about being in charge and long to surrender control.”

Helen Fisher, the anthropologist and Rutgers professor, warns keening feminists: “Let’s not confuse the bedroom and the boardroom. This is the world of fantasy and play.” In the animal kingdom, she says, females surrender and males dominate, with female robins looking for the male robin with the reddest breast and best leafy real estate.

Rice agrees that submission fantasies are no big deal: “A woman has the right to pretend she’s being raped by a pirate if that’s what she wants to pretend. Very few people act out their fantasies, except in Northern California.”

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bleaker Sex

 

By FRANK BRUNI

 

THE first time you see Lena Dunham’s character having sex in the new HBO series “Girls,” her back is to her boyfriend, who seems to regard her as an inconveniently loquacious halfway point between partner and prop, and her concern is whether she’s correctly following instructions.

 

“So I can just stay like this for a little while?” she asks. “Do you need me to move more?”

 

He needs her to intrude less. “Let’s play the quiet game,” he answers.

 

The second time, she’s an 11-year-old junkie with a Cabbage Patch lunchbox, or so he tells her, commencing a role play in which he alone assigns the roles. He has highly specific fantasies, and she’s largely a fleshy canvas for them.

 

You watch these scenes and other examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of “Girls” engaging in, recoiling from, mulling and mourning sex, and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this? Salaries may be better than in decades past and the cabinet and Congress less choked with testosterone. But in the bedroom? What’s happening there remains something of a muddle, if not something of a mess.

 

“Girls” makes its debut in two weeks. Dunham, just 25, is not only its star but also its principal writer and director, and she has already been accorded a voice-of-her-generation status. She even lampoons this in “Girls” by having her character, an aspiring writer, claim such a mantle for herself.

 

The show is drawing inevitable — and apt — comparisons to “Sex and the City,” in whose long shadow it blooms. “Girls,” too, is a half-hour comedy (of sorts) about four women finding themselves and fortifying one another in the daunting, libidinous wilds of New York City.

 

But it’s a recession-era adjustment. The gloss of Manhattan is traded for the mild grit of Brooklyn’s more affordable neighborhoods. The anxieties are as much economic as erotic. The colors are duller, the mood is dourer and the clothes aren’t much. It’s “Sex and the City” in a charcoal gray Salvation Army overcoat.

 

It comes along at a moment of fresh examination of women’s progress. A just-published book, “The Richer Sex,” by Liza Mundy, asserts that women are well on their way to becoming the primary breadwinners in a majority of American families; it rated the cover of Time magazine two weeks ago. It will be joined later this year by “The End of Men,” by Hanna Rosin, which answers the question posed by the title of Maureen Dowd’s prescient 2005 best seller, “Are Men Necessary?” As Rosin sees it, not so much, because women have achieved unprecedented autonomy.

 

But “Girls” also amplifies a growing chorus of laments over what’s happening on the sexual frontier, a state of befuddlement reflective in part of post-feminist power dynamics and in part of our digital culture and virtual fixations.

 

Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex that’s an awkward emotional fit? Two movies released last year, “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits,” held that position, and Dunham subscribes to it as well.

 

In a recent interview, presented in more detail on my Times blog, she told me that various cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way that she couldn’t quite manage. “I heard so many of my friends saying, ‘Why can’t I have sex and feel nothing?’ It was amazing: that this was the new goal.”

 

She added: “There’s a biological reason why women feel about sex the way they do and men feel about sex the way they do. It’s not as simple as divesting yourself of your gender roles.”

 

THE Web confuses things further, unfurling a seemingly infinite cosmos of ready possibility and abetting lightning-fast connections. Several popular cellphone apps give someone with a sudden whim for a date the pictures and physical proximities of similarly inclined prospects. An assignation may be no more than 10 minutes and 20 blocks away.

 

Dunham noted that the Web also fosters a misleading sense of familiarity between people who have shared nothing more than keystrokes. “All sorts of promiscuity don’t feel like promiscuity,” she said. “But a month of text messages does not a personal connection make. I’ve fallen victim to the sensation that I understand some guy’s essence when I’ve really just read 15 of his tweets.”

 

And there’s an emerging literature of complaint from young men and women alike about the impact of free or cheap online pornography. Early last year, New York magazine ran an article by Davy Rothbart, 36, who admitted faking an orgasm with a real live woman, learned that other men had done so as well and wondered if a “tsunami of porn” was to blame. It was titled“He’s Just Not That Into Anyone.”

 

Last February GQ pondered the problem from a feminine perspective. A young woman writing under a pseudonym cited her and her friends’ experiences to assert that for more and more men, “the buffet of fetishistic porn available 24/7” had created very particular and sometimes very peculiar, ratcheted-up desires.

 

“To compare it to another genre of online video,” she wrote, “why watch a clip of one puppy frolicking in a field when you can watch eight different puppies cuddling with a sweet-faced baby armadillo tickling a panda bear? And after seeing that, why ever settle for a boring ol’ puppy frolicking in a field again?”

 

“Guys my age watch so much pornography,” Dunham told me, adding that she has been subjected to aggressive positioning and “a lot of errant hair pulling” and has thought: “There’s no way that you, young Jewish man from Chappaqua, taught this to yourself.”

 

These experiences inform her “Girls” sex scenes, which have a depersonalized aspect. So does the sadomasochistic relationship in the best-selling erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a publishing-industry phenomenon about a virginal college student presented with a contract to become the “Submissive” to a dashing older man’s “Dominant.” The contract covers waxing, hygiene and the frequency with which she must work out. She haggles him down from four times a week to three.

 

Credibly or not, the college student seems exhilarated at the start. Dunham’s more convincingly rendered characters seem perplexed, and their frustration with men raises questions about whether less privacy means more intimacy and whether sexual candor is any guarantor of sexual satisfaction.

 

People can be so available in a superficial sense that they’re inaccessible in a deeper one. Or, as Dunham put it, “People underestimate the importance of making solid connections.”

 

 

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved