The Dish

Olivia Rosane reviews the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a popular web series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice:

Watching a story that has survived two centuries play out over new media is an assurance that something of our humanity remains constant between the world of quills and parchment and the world of styluses and screens. We will still judge each other based on first impressions. We will still have embarrassing families. A combination of money and reserve will make you seem like a huge jerk to everyone who doesn’t know you well. But more than that, watching a serialized adaptation of a story we all know takes the edge off our suspense. No matter how disturbing some developments may be, (Spoiler alert: in this version, in stead of running off with Lydia under the false pretense of an elopement, Wickham plans to publish a sex tape of Lydia online without her consent) we know the end is happy. We keep watching not to know what will happen, but how it will.

She adds:

Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising. She is, after all, one of those few authors who live on as both a pop-cultural phenomenon and a dissertation topic. In fact, given her talent for snarky dialogue, Austen and the internet seem like a perfect match. For what do we use social media, after all, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

Previous Dish on Jane Austen here.

Great moments in Jumbotron history:

In 1985, the Public Library of Nijmegen, Netherlands pulled from its shelves Charles Bukowski’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, calling the book “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).” Bukowski reacted in a letter to journalist Hans van den Broek:

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists, I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

(Video: Tom Waits reads Bukowski)

The artists’ group onformative combines facial recognition software with satellite images from Google Maps to reveal the planet’s “GoogleFaces.”  Explain the artists:

Our Facetracker already circumnavigated the world a couple of times and astonished us with quite versatile results. As it continues to travel the world within the upcoming months, it continuously zooms into the earth. This process decreases the step-size for each iteration and therefore increases the amount of images and travel time exponentially. Some of the detected images aren’t usable at all, as we are not able to recognize any face-like patterns within the detected images. Other satellite images, on the other hand, inspired our imagination in a tremendous, yet funny way.

An interactive version of the project is here.

(Hat tip: ANIMAL)

The great German artist Albrecht Dürer inured himself to the melancholy of his time by embracing religion:

Like so many of his contemporaries, Dürer was haunted by death and guilt and the fear of damnation. He had good reason to be. Death was everywhere. Dürer had seventeen siblings, and only two made it to adulthood. Both his trips across the Alps to Italy—in 1494 and 1505–1507—were partly inspired by the desire to flee outbreaks of the plague in his home town, Nuremberg. “Anyone who is among us today,” Dürer wrote in one poem, “may be buried tomorrow.” This was not a poetic conceit. It was the brutal truth. …

To overcome the inborn tendency to evil, Dürer appears to have believed there were three things you could do, if you received the grace to do them. One was to mortify the flesh. It may sound morbid to us, but mortification was a common part of religious practice then. It is even recommended in the third of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses: “penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.”

We do not know for a fact that Dürer also practiced this discipline, but his sense of its attractions is evident in his art. … If the artist did not actually practice self-flagellation, he surely understood why someone would and sympathized with the impulse.

The second was to throw yourself onto the mercy of God. His writings are full of sayings such as “Always seek grace, as if you might die any moment” and “No help could have reached us save through the incarnation of the son of God.”

The third was to work without ceasing. Never stop. … Work was a form of prayer and art was a form of praise. Dürer wrote, “[Painting] is useful because God is thereby honored.” But if you ever stopped, you would lose your way and fall into error, like the idle genius in Melencolia I. To quote [Martin Luther's spiritual advisor Johann von] Staupitz once more, “The first sign of true faith is the battle against the demons.”

(Image: St. Jerome in His Study, Albrecht Dürer, 1514, via Wikimedia Commons)

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.

“The animated GIF, meanwhile—whose origins go back to the antediluvian age of dial-up modems and whose natural home is the resolutely non-artistic bottom-feed of Internet image production—rudely interrupts the unbroken sheen of all the slick shit, since to GIF an image is not only to create a loop, but—in very literal terms pertaining to the effects of LZW compression—to apply a verfremdungseffekt, or distancing effect. The shiny mirror finish of HD video is dithered to dust, dots and dashes, and all the smoothing of Photoshop reduced to a crude cartography of color. The v-effekt was one of political playwright Brecht’s theatrical techniques to ensure an audience never get too comfortable: a device to make the abstract immediate and the political relatable. Here, the distancing effect allows the moving image to circulate widely on low-bandwidth connections, bringing it closer to home. To GIF is to reduce a picture to the “poor image” defended by Hito Steyerl; the conditions of its own circulation made visible. ‘The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities… In short: it is about reality.’

The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium not only in the distancing effects of image compression, but also in that the repetition of a single gesture ad infinitum constitutes a sort of gestus—a symbolic moment that is amplified in context to represent a whole paradigm of existence,” – Jesse Darling.

(Hat tip: Cyborgology)

Dressing The Air digs up a short film by Alex Roman:

Entirely built and rendered on computer, this impossibly controlled journey around Louis Kahn’s Exeter Academy Library evokes the soul of the architecture with very particular attention to material and light. Roman is managing to distill more into these digital “fictions” than most photographer/filmmakers manage from encounters with actual built structures.

From an interview with Roman:

I find inspiration in the aesthetics of the fine arts; specifically painting, but even something as varied as architecture. For technical reference, I find inspiration in still image photography for static renderings, and TV and film for animation.

A shot from the making of the film here.

Jacksonville, Florida, 7.18 pm

Prospero pans the 2013 Met Ball, designed to celebrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture”:

It was a silly idea to begin with. Doing punk through the clothes is like trying to do hippiedom with peace symbols. Punk was never about the threads. The clothes, the hair, the makeup, the sewn-on patches and the badges conveyed a message about who you were and what you stood for. For those who were not interested in punk’s message, the clothes served as a warning. But punk was always more than a fashion statement. …

To look at punk viewed only through the attire, rather than the beliefs, is to make a cultural error. Punk wasn’t “chaotic”, as the title of the Met’s new fashion exhibit suggests. Some punks were anarchists, but anarchy and chaos are not synonyms. The anarcho-punks believed that an absence of government would produce harmony. They were libertarians who believed in personal freedom and individualism—a bit like Texans, but unwashed and smelling of petunia oil. An exhibition that juxtaposes the idea of chaos and punk makes it appear that punk was about nothing. The establishment often undermines youth movements this way. Dismissing them as incoherent is easier than answering angry questions.

Or maybe, as Morgan Meis argues, “Punk was about fashion from the beginning”:

The bored, blank stare of the punk rocker can be seen most clearly in one other place of popular culture: the catwalk. … Punk was important not because it was more than a fashidon, but because it was the soul of fashion. In exploring the dark side of fashion it explored the dark side of modern life … Usually we don’t have the strength to take a good look at our empty, death-driven culture. For a short time in the 1970s, punk rockers did just that. Then they died. Literally or figuratively.

(Photo: Paloma Faith attends the Costume Institute Gala for the ‘PUNK: Chaos to Couture’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 6, 2013 in New York City. By Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for People.com)

Ta-Nehisi reflects on his recent experience abroad as a novice French-language student in his mid-thirties:

I stayed with a host family and took my dinners with them. These were awesome affairs—wine, cheese, meat, chocolate. They took no pity on me. They bombarded me with French, and from snatches of body language, from a smile or a frown, I deduced what I could. I went through entire dinners—and even engaged in conversations—during which I understood only snatches. We spent those evenings talking, our gestures making up for a paucity of shared words. But I knew, in some unnameable way, that they were good people. And from that, I could tell how two people with no shared language could fall easily and deeply in love; how the way a man expresses longing, or a woman expresses possibility, could be like discovery; how an entire person could be, to another, a long, dark country.

The Internet is overrun with advertisements meant for those who feel the longing for another language, who hope to attain understanding without the fear, the pain of mocking or rejection. There is a symmetry in language ads that promise fluency in three weeks and weight-loss ads that promise a new body in roughly the same mere days. But the older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google, the places in which you must be immersed to comprehend.

Part of an excerpt from Temple Grandin’s new book:

If people can consciously recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their ways of thinking, they can then seek out the right kinds of minds for the right reasons. And if they do that, then they’re going to recognize that sometimes the right mind can belong only to an autistic brain.

Dreher shares his thoughts:

I remember a few years back, when our son Matthew was suffering a great deal from his Asperger’s and related conditions (sensory processing disorder) — which meant that his parents, especially his mother, struggling with him were suffering too — I thought that there was no amount of giftedness that was worth what that child was going through. He’s a really intelligent kid, but I would have traded that genius in a heartbeat for respite for him from what really was torment. He has grown out of most of the bad stuff, thank God, and I can see easily now how his mild autism can be a tremendous intellectual and vocational asset to him, depending on the field he goes into, even as it remains to some degree a social problem. Put simply, he sees things that most of us don’t, and he sees them as a result of the way his brain is wired.

This is a gift. It is at times a terrible gift, but it is a gift.

Alyssa heralds their rise. On the movie whose trailer is seen above:

The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do. … [W]hile most romantic comedies focus on the work that couples do in the relationship they’ll end up in, putting their bad dates, agonizing breakups, and most hurtful failures in the past, unromantic comedies take a step back in time to focus on the fallacies, self-delusions, and errors that precede successful, long-term relationships.

I’d say those errors do not end with a successful relationship. They just need to be managed and recognized. One thing I have learned from married life is a realism about who I am and the daily effort required to make that work with another person. I think of my marriage as born in romance of the most extreme kind but sustained by unromantic commitment and love that is sometimes effortless but also sometimes an act of will. I’m a better person for it, flawed though I remain.

Ned Resnikoff highlights the tense battle over public school closings in Chicago:

Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 reportedly “underutilized” schools—49 elementary schools and one public high school—in what was the largest round of school closures to ever occur in a single American city.

Diane Ravitch recognizes the significance:

The New York Times has written about this story and twice said that the school closings were the largest “in recent memory.” The Times wrote this despite my telling them–twice–that these were the largest mass closure ever. I wish the reporters would explain whose “memory” they were relying on. Just yesterday I explained in an email that no public school district had ever closed 49 schools at one time. On this issue, the “Times” is not the newspaper of record but the newspaper of “recent memory.”

Why does it matter?

Read On

Madrigal examines Microsoft’s claim that the servers for their recently announced Xbox One gaming system will exceed “the entire world’s computing power in 1999.” He gets Martin Hilbert, who co-authored a paper on world processing capacity over time, to weigh in:

“I think the reality is rather that the computing power of this cluster is equal to the world’s total computing power in 1994 or the world’s general-purpose computing power in 1996.” As he summed it up, “I’d say they are some 5 years off… but nevertheless very impressive!”

Amanda Marcotte reacts to the recent finding that “women are far more likely to lose interest in sex with their partners” than men:

What’s really fascinating is that with this shift in understanding comes a profound shift in how we as a society are deciding to respond. There will be no shrugging of the shoulders and tossing around the word “hard-wired” to rationalize women disappointing male expectations of passionate monogamous sex. Instead, as Bergner writes, a ton of money is being spent on developing a drug women can take to restore their desire for their husbands. The drug, called Lybrido, is in clinical trials now with the hope of writing an FDA application by the end of the year. …

When people believed that boredom with monogamy was a male trait for women to endure, interest in fixing it was pretty low. Now that we understand boredom with monogamy to be a female trait for men to endure, it’s suddenly a Problem—with possible solutions. Though frustrating, this is ultimately probably a good thing. Since most of us want to be monogamous, it’s about time we took seriously the need to keep it interesting.

The mother and stepfather of murdered soldier Lee Rigby, Lyn and Ian Rigby, and Lee’s wife Rebecca Rigby, grieve as Ian reads a family statement, at the Regimental HQ of his unit, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers on May 24, 2013 in Bury, Greater Manchester, England. Drummer Rigby was murdered by suspected Islamists near to his regiment’s Woolwich Army Barracks. The UK’s security services are facing a Commons inquiry after confirmation that the two men – who were shot and arrested at the scene and remain in police custody – were known to MI5. By Dave Thompson/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

Kyle Kondik observes that “rural/urban divide in American presidential politics is pronounced”

Generally speaking, Republicans win the districts that are geographically large, and Democrats win the districts that are geographically small. This squares with the national political scene — as we noted right after the election last year, Obama won more than 90% of the nation’s 50 most populous counties, while Romney won more than 90% of the counties in rural Appalachia.

Read On

Ryan McGee worries about Netflix releasing an entire season of Arrested Development on Sunday:

The intensity in and out of the industry means this show will essentially blind everything else around it for a few days. Of that, we can be certain. Everyone will be talking about it. But they may not necessarily be discussing it.

He zooms out:

If social media/social energy is a deciding factor in which shows live or die above and beyond the increasingly irrelevant Nielsen ratings, then harnessing that energy rather than dissipating it seems like a smart business move. Releasing everything all at once results in a very loud, very short burst of interest. But it also potentially scatters that interest the nanosecond after creating it. The week between episodes isn’t just a time for people to sit on their hands and passively wait for a new episode. It’s time to analyze, criticize, and proselytize. Telling everyone about a great show you just finished is fine. Telling everyone about a great show they could share with you in real time is even better. People love watching TV, but they love talking about it even more. The Netflix model cuts off that conversation, and thus cuts off a central part of what makes the medium so great. It’s not just about what’s onscreen. It’s about those on the other side of it.