Month: September 2010

Hippos inexplicably like to lick crocodiles.

In a wonderful profile of an improv comedy performer in New York City, this excerpt struck me:

When I ask him what he’s doing for money, he starts telling me about his new job as a driver for Van Leeuwen’s Artisanal Ice Cream trucks, which doesn’t start till the weather warms up, but which he’s already excited about because it meant he got to spend yesterday at the Department of Consumer Affairs learning about all the forms one has to fill out to get certified to handle food in New York. “I like the bureaucracy of it because I don’t have that in my life at all,” he says, sounding like an excited child. “You have to do this up here and then you have to wait six days and then you have to go downtown and check with somebody at an office and then you have to wait for something in the mail and then bring that and do other things that other people have sent you and then you have to get them in triplicate and make sure you have a proper proof of ID, and proof of address, which can be a number of different things …”

All that to sell ice cream.

A breakthrough:

The Obama administration has cited the state-secrets argument in at least three cases since taking office – in defense of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping, surveillance of an Islamic charity, and the torture and rendition of CIA prisoners. It prevailed in the last case last week, on a 6 to 5 vote by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

My italics. So the news side of the Washington Post logically now regards one its columnists, Marc Thiessen, as a war criminal.

Stefany Anne Golberg mourns the death of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas:

Liberace was the highest-paid performer of his day. This made him, in one sense, bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles (and ergo bigger than Jesus). For every person who was ashamed of him, thousands more fell to his charms. Liberace’s art was the show, and he gave us everything he had.

The costumes, the glitz, the fancy cars, the rhinestone-encrusted pianos — they were instruments in Liberace’s orchestra. “I’m a one-man Disneyland,” Liberace once said proudly. Liberace didn’t just put on a concert; he was ringmaster in a theater of fairytales. And with each show, he captured why it is we like fairytales so much: At the center of the stories are ordinary people, trying to believe in something a little extraordinary, a little bigger than themselves.

And everyone who loved him and worshiped him at the time were absolutely sure he was straight.

Good news, everyone! We have finally initiated a "Read On" feature for longer posts that doesn't require you to click onto a totally new page and then click back again to the Dish. Instead, when you click "Read On", the whole post will unfold on the same page and then collapse again when you click on "Collapse Post."

This turned out to be more complicated technically than we thought (don't ask me why, I have no expertise) but Patrick, Chris, Zoe and Conor are thrilled with it, and hope you are too. Immense thanks to Betsy Ebersole, Bob Cohn, Scott Havens, James Bennet, Patrick Appel, and all those who helped make this happen.

Of course, if you notice any problems with anything, especially any slowness in loading, please let us know.

This week Rachel Sklar ripped apart Newsweek's cover story (itself a less-satisfying echo of Hanna R0sin's Atlantic cover-story here) on how the traditional male species is endangered:

[N]owhere in the article does the term “gay” or “homosexual” appear. This article conceives of men, maleness, and “the New Macho” as an entirely heterosexual thing. That, too, is wildly irresponsible.

Tracy Clark-Flory lobbed a different criticism:

Their argument is essentially that we need to encourage men to take active caretaking roles at home and at work. This means putting more emphasis on the importance of fatherhood and recasting so-called nurturing professions so that they no longer seem the sole domain of women. Another way of saying all that? Men need feminism.

Jezebel's Anna North weighed in:

And while Romano and Dokoupil do seem to care about such important issues as child care and the division of household labor, in some ways their piece echoes more softly what backlash pieces shout: that men need to find a way to get back on top. 

Today, my old boss and friend has just been honored at Harvard and $650,000 fellowship fund endorsed by supporters in his honor. Fallows concludes his coverage:

I was among those on Peretz's back for the bigotry of his comments, so let me explain why I think this outcome is OK.

Donovan Hohn interviews Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, which views games through an intellectual screen:

This is the great bugaboo of people opposed to video games as a workable art form: that interactivity sabotages narrative meaning. I can see how that argument works, and I agree with it insofar as an interactive Macbeth would not be Macbeth. The counterargument is that video game storytelling doesn’t really mean a Macbeth in which you can do whatever you feel like; the video game author has to give the player a limited number of choices and make it seem as though anything is possible. A video game Macbeth means a slightly more variable Macbeth, not an anything-goes Macbeth.

I think that a sensitive, thoughtful game designer could design any number of affecting scenarios to play out within a Macbeth-like plot structure. But this is all citrus and cider, obviously, since, as Clint Hocking says in the book, the nature of drama as it is currently understood is that it is authored. Period. No one designing a game, I think, would have any aspirations toward something like Macbeth, which is a work of art designed to plunge inward. Games don’t do that very well. And maybe they don’t have to, any more than novels need to have great action sequences.