SACHA BARON COHEN

Two Escalades stop in the middle of Sixty-Fifth Street on the West Side of Manhattan. Out of the front SUV, a tall, awkward mustachioed man in an ill-fitting blue-gray suit emerges. In the past month, through a series of press stunts, interviews, news events and blanket advertising, this man has turned himself into a household name in America: Borat.

It is Halloween, the night of a thousand living Borats roaming our city streets in costumed adulation of the spurious Kazakh journalist, but this Borat is the real thing. A throng of movie publicists, photographers, collaborators and assistants close in around him as he heads toward the escalators that lead up to the Walter Reade Theater, where an advance screening of his American cinematic debut is about to start. He pauses at the foot of the escalator, turns to me and extends a hand. "Hi," he says, in a deep, genteel British accent that I've never heard emerge from this mustachioed visage, despite having watched every minute of available footage he has recorded. "I'm Sacha."

And with this one word -- "Sacha" -- he informs me that I am being let behind the Kazakh curtain, into the mind of the man behind the buffoon, into the very private world of England's most popular enigma, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Since reaching star status in Britain in 1998 with his other alter ego, the wangsta jester Ali G, Baron Cohen has never done an interview in his home country as himself and has never done an interview this extensive anywhere. Even when promoting his supporting role in the Will Ferrell Nascar parody, Talladega Nights, the Sacha Baron Cohen he presented to the press was still a character: typical of either a pretentious British thespian or a really stupid bystander who didn't understand any of their questions. A shorter, shaven-headed man chases after Borat. "Your hair," he mouths, as he reaches him and adjusts the tangle of black curls on his head. This man is Jason Alper, who has designed all of Baron Cohen's costumes and will later tonight accidentally steal his shoes.

After pausing for paparazzi in his usual pose -- shit-eating grin, elbows pressed against his sides and two thumbs up -- Borat heads into the theater and introduces Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

"At first, Kazakh censors wouldn't let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism," he tells the assemblage. "But then they decided that there was just enough."

What follows is one of the greatest comedies of the last decade and perhaps even a whole new genre of film. It features just four actual actors (and a male porn star found to portray Borat's teenage son, Huey Lewis); the rest of the cast consists of real people Borat encounters while traveling across the country in pursuit of Pamela Anderson -- each one an unwitting actor propelling forward his Don Quixote-like quest (Anderson was in on the joke). If you've been anywhere near a television or newspaper in the last month, you know the story. Chances are you've already seen it. Maybe even twice.

After the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiance of actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. I'd met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. ("Let's talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?") At the time, our interview resulted in answers like this one: "When me came out me mum's poom poom bush, me immediately started crying in a junglistic riddim. Me first word was 'ho.' "

This interview promises to be different....

Today, without the funny mustache, Baron Cohen responds to the statements from the Kazakh government seriously for the first time.
"I've been in a bizarre situation, where a country has declared me as it's number-one enemy," he says, forcing a wry grin. "It's inherently a comic situation." He stops, then backpedals a little. "I mean, it's always risky when you don't go down the normal route." Pause. Maybe he's taking himself too seriously now. "I wish I would have been there at the briefing that Bush got about who I am, who Borat is. It would have had to be great."

When Baron Cohen first heard that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him and placing a full-page ad promoting the country in The New York Times, he was editing his movie in Los Angeles. His reaction: "I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realize that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist -- who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."

In actuality, it turns out that Borat is a far more damning critique of America than it is of Kazakhstan. The jokes that Baron Cohen mentions above -- and all the rest about beating gypsies, throwing Jews down wells, exporting pubic hair and making monkey porn -- are clearly parody. But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here -- rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism -- is all too real.

"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.

A waiter places a complimentary appetizer in front of Baron Cohen.

"What is this?" he asks.

"Ceviche," the waiter answers.

"No, what's in it?"

"Coconut, fish, yuzu, pomegranate."

Baron Cohen continues to grill the waiter: "What kind of fish?"

It soon becomes clear that he is not merely curious or vegetarian or allergic to peanuts. He keeps kosher and is making sure that there is no shellfish, pork or other forbidden food or food combination in the dish. A devout Jew, Baron Cohen also keeps the Sabbath when he can, which means that he doesn't work from Friday evening to Saturday evening.

Unsure of the waiter's trustworthiness, Baron Cohen pokes at the appetizer as he points out that his parents "love" the Jewish humor. And his maternal grandmother, who's ninety-one and lives in Haifa, Israel, went to a midnight screening, then called her grandson at 4 a.m. to compliment him and dissect the scenes in detail.

"Borat essentially works as a tool," Baron Cohen says. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.
"I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."

Baron Cohen doesn't make this grand statement with confidence. He makes it shyly, as if he's speaking out of turn. It's interesting to watch Baron Cohen get bashful, because it is the exact opposite of the characters he portrays. These sincere boors aren't afraid to bring a bag of their own excrement to the table at an antebellum dinner party or ask David Beckham if he can feed on his wife Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham's breasts.

There is a certain sadism to Baron Cohen, who seems most comfortable when making others uncomfortable. To some degree, Borat and Ali G are safe refuges for him, masks he can hide behind. If everything that comes out of your mouth is parody, then you never have to be accountable for what you say -- because you didn't really mean it anyway. You only said it to lead your interview subjects to the thin line between patience and intolerance in order for their true personality to reveal itself.

In contrast, Baron Cohen himself has no defenses or alibis. One wonders if he could withstand the awkward situations to which he constantly exposes his alter egos.

"I think I'd find it hard to," he admits. "I think you can hide behind the characters and do things that you yourself find difficult."

There are two things Baron Cohen doesn't like talking about: his background and his creative process -- how he creates his characters, how he procures interviews with highly inaccessible figures like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, and how he gets them to take seriously his preposterous questions. ...

>> This is an excerpt from the new issue of "Rolling Stone," on newsstands until November 30th.

Blizzardman
Uploaded by frischtom

MUSIC

When Tom Waits claims he doesn't know why he called this three-CD set Orphans, he's being cagey. Orphans obviously began as an outtakes collection -- unreleased work tapes plus old soundtrack, tribute and benefit tracks. Only then, Waits, painfully aware that odds-and-sods projects were lame, decided to fill in some blanks with new songs, couldn't resist rerecording others and ended up with a definitive album. Each disc has its own subtitle: Brawlers for rock, Bawlers for ballads and Bastards for weirdness. Although the promo advertises "56 Songs. 30 New Recordings," only fourteen can be readily found on other albums.
Brawlers is Waits blues a la Mule Variations, only broader. His drummer son Casey's basic thump on "Low Down" reminds the ear that Waits generally bellows over pretty intricate beats. He was on the dreamy New Orleans lilt of "Sea of Love" back in 1988, and though Tito Puente might not think so, "Fish in the Jailhouse" is indeed a mambo. Of course, there's also the first of two Ramones covers, and, fitting nowhere but so good they'd fit anywhere, the mandolin-tinged "Bottom of the World" and the unrhymed, seven-minute "Road to Peace," a portrayal of a Palestinian terrorist that blinks even less than Springsteen's.

Bawlers is Waits' bread and butter -- professional sentimentalists love the way he mauls slow ones, and six of the soundtrack tunes are here, from Big Bad Love, Pollock and Shrek 2. Waits can get grotesquely goopy when he makes nice, but the new "Tell It to Me" and the recycled "The Fall of Troy" are genre classics right up there with Waits' bumptious claims on "Young at Heart" and "Goodnight Irene." Bastards is messier musically, but its six spoken-word pieces are long overdue for anyone who's guffawed at the shaggy-dog monologues Waits rolls out at shows. In "The Pontiac," a dad reminisces about his cars, the mad entomology lecture "Army Ants" isn't far behind, and "First Kiss" explains something we've always wondered. Waits reached that romantic milestone with a trailer crone who made up her own language, wore rubber boots and could fix anything with string. Just like our Tom.

$

The Real Marriage Penalty
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
“Some of usare becoming the men we wanted to marry,” Gloria Steinem proclaimed 25 years ago. She meant, of course, that women in large numbers were seizing the places in higher education and the professions that had formerly been closed to them, becoming the doctors, lawyers and executives that they once hoped only to wed. Over the past generation, the liberal notion of egalitarian marriage — in which wives are in every sense their husbands’ peers — has gone from pie-in-the-sky ideal to unremarkable reality. But this apparently progressive shift has been shadowed by another development: America’s growing gap between rich and poor. Even as husbands and wives have moved closer together on measures of education and income, the divide between well-educated, well-paid couples and their less-privileged counterparts has widened, raising an awkward possibility: are we achieving more egalitarian marriages at the cost of a more egalitarian society?

Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater. People, like other members of the animal kingdom, have always been prone to “assortative mating,” or choosing to have babies with a reassuringly similar partner. But observers like Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and author of “The Mating Mind,” suggest that the innovations of modern society — from greater geographic mobility to specialized work environments to Internet dating — have made this matching process much more efficient. “Assortative mating is driven by our personal preferences, but also by whom we meet, and these days we have many more opportunities to meet others like ourselves,” he says. (As with most contemporary sociological phenomena, “Seinfeld” was there first: a 1996 episode featured the comedian finding “the female Jerry.”)

In particular, Americans are increasingly pairing off by education level, according to the sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare. In an article published last year in the journal Demography, they reported that the odds of a high-school graduate marrying someone with a college degree declined by 43 percent between 1940 and the late 1970s. In our current decade, the researchers wrote, the percentage of couples who are “educationally homogamous” — that is, share the same level of schooling — reached its highest point in 40 years. Assortative mating by income also seems to be on the rise. In a 2004 study of couples wed in the 1970s through the early 1990s, the researchers Megan Sweeney and Maria Cancian found an increasingly strong association between women’s wages before marriage and the occupational status and future earnings prospects of the men they married.

Why is this happening? For one thing, more couples are meeting in college and other educational settings, where prospective mates come prescreened by admissions committees as discerning as any yenta. Husbands and wives who begin their relationships during their school years are more likely to have comparable education (and, presumably, income) levels. Secondly, men and women have become more alike in what they want from a marriage partner. This convergence is both cultural — co-ed gyms and bars have replaced single-sex sewing circles and Elks clubs — and economic. Just as women have long sought to marry a good breadwinner, men, too, now find earning potential sexy. “There are fewer Cinderella marriages these days,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.” “Men are less interested in rescuing a woman from poverty. They want to find someone who will pull her weight.” For this reason, the “marriage penalty” once paid by highly educated women has all but disappeared: among women born after 1960, a college graduate is more likely to marry than her less-educated counterpart. And finally, there’s what Schwartz calls the growing “social and economic distance” between the well educated and the less so, a gulf even ardent romantics may find difficult to bridge.

This last theory holds that disparities in wealth influence whom we marry, but there’s reason to think that our mating patterns could be producing economic inequality as well as reflecting it. A model constructed by the economists Raquel Fernández and Richard Rogerson, published in 2001 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, led them to conclude that “increased marital sorting” — high earners marrying high earners and low earners marrying low earners — “will significantly increase income inequality.” A 2003 analysis by Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, found that a rising correlation of husband-and-wife earnings accounted for 13 percent of the considerable growth in economic inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Burtless himself does not think that assortative mating is necessarily becoming more prevalent. In fact, he says he believes that “the tendency of like to marry like has remained roughly unchanged over time. What have changed are the labor-market opportunities and behavior of women.” In this conception, men have always married women of their own social class, but such stratification was obscured by the fact that the female halves of these couples often did not work or pursue advanced degrees. Now that women who are in a position to do so are attending college and graduate school and joining the professions, the economic consequences of Americans’ assortative mating habits are becoming clearer.

If assortative mating does contribute to our growing gap between rich and poor, does that matter? Few people would question any individual’s romantic preferences. And yet as the current clash over gay marriage demonstrates, private choices about whom we marry — or don’t marry, or can’t marry — can have loud public reverberations. Not long ago, the marriages of whites and blacks, and the lifting of laws that once prohibited such unions, revealed a nation beginning to open its mind on matters of race; likewise, rates of marriage across lines of education and income provide an index of social mobility. If there are fewer such marriages, then there are “fewer sources of intimate ties” between groups, Schwartz says, making marriage one more brick in the wall that separates America’s haves and have-nots.

Of course, men and women don’t choose each other on the basis of education and income alone. Putting love aside, as men’s and women’s roles continue to shift, other standards for selecting a partner may come to the fore. Indeed, the sociologist Julie Press recently offered what she called “a gynocentric theory of assortative mating,” moving the focus from what men now desire in a marriage partner to the evolving preferences of women. What would-be wives may be seeking now, she proposed in The Journal of Marriage and Family, is “cute butts and housework” — that is, a man with an appealing physique and a willingness to wash dishes. Could this be a feminist slogan for our time?

Buyer Be Aware
By ROB WALKER
Obsessive Consumption

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.”

Since then the project — or brand — has taken two forms. She exhibits her work in shows with titles like “Love Your Money” and “Available Credit,” and she also sells things in an online shop: drawings; stuffed dollar signs sewn from “vintage and recycled materials”; and pillows with sewn-on designs inspired by credit-card logos. For $4, you can buy a zine of her pen-and-ink-drawings of purchases she made in May 2006: “Exciting stuff here kids. . . . Kate buys a lime on May 5, her second pair of sunglasses for the summer on May 1 and falls victim to purchasing trendy skinny jeans that do nothing for her figure on May 20.”

Although she no longer documents every product she buys, her own purchase patterns still occupy a prominent place in her work, through (for instance) an ongoing series of hand-drawn recreations of her credit-card bills — which are for sale through her Web site. Her first credit-card-statement drawing, as she recalls, was purchased by Jim Coudal, the founder of Coudal Partners, a design and advertising agency in Chicago. Coudal remembers seeing the drawings online and contacting Bingaman-Burt about acquiring the portrait (as it were) of her October 2004 Chase statement. At the time, she hadn’t figured out how to price them, and ended up charging him the minimum balance due, which happened to be $140.

“The credit-card statement is this thing that everyone in America understands, and it’s completely produced by machine,” Coudal observes. “No human touches it, except for the human at the other end, who has the card — and who affects the content of that statement by the purchases they make.” Coudal appreciated the idea of animating this soulless document through hand drawing (the Chase logo suddenly looked so attractive), but what he really liked was that it connected with the artist’s actual purchases. “It brought an anonymous part of everyone’s life and made you look at it in a completely different way,” he says.

Bingaman-Burt, who also teaches graphic design at Mississippi State University, does not see her work so much as a negative reaction to consumer culture as an attempt to cope with it on its own terms.

“Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture,” her site explains. “It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels an hour later. It doesn’t want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant.” Indeed, the June statements of her various cards showed a cumulative total balance of more than $23,000. She says that it has been reduced to something like $15,000, as she has recovered from grad-school-era debts — but she also acknowledges that there’s “a lot of guilt and emotion” involved in recreating evidence of money spent and interest racked up.

But of course that’s part of the point. And Bingaman-Burt knows perfectly well that nobody needs any of the Obsessive Consumption objects any more than the gifts and cards she designed and helped market in the early 2000s. Her hope, she says, is to engage an audience on a more conceptual level, inviting them to think about consumption and obsession and their after-effects (and to think of them more frequently than during the holiday retail frenzy that begins this coming “black Friday”). The objects she creates and sells are, in a way, simply “souvenirs” of that thought process. As a brand, Obsessive Consumption is about facing the stark realities of obsessive consumption. As Bingaman-Burt puts it: “The products are aware of their lack of necessity.”