Year: 2013

A reader writes:

I would like to encourage the Dish to make mention of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide this week at the age of 26. Swartz was a well-known writer, programmer and activist in the areas of copyright law and free speech in the digital age. Here are a few relevant links you can use: A eulogy by Cory Doctorow, a remembrance by Quinn Norton, a close friend and companion of Swartz's, and a piece by Lawrence Lessig. I would also really appreciate it if you would take the opportunity to promote some mental health services available to people who are suffering from suicidal depression: National Alliance on Mental Illness, The Trevor Project, and the Nat'l Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255. The Dish has such a large and powerful platform, and this is a moment when you might be able to save lives by bringing some attention to this young man and his story.

Some context for those not familiar with Swartz:

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library. Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

Remembrances of Swartz are being compiled here.

(Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski)

Devendra Banhart narrates the story of "the greatest (and craziest) soul singer you never heard of":

Infamous in Brazil, Tim [Maia] was a soul grenade that exploded in the 70s. He single handedly revolutionized Brazilian popular music and had the best time ever doing it. His story is one of humourous excess in every way imaginable and there’s something for all the family: drugs, women, money, guns and even a UFO cult thrown in. He REALLY lived the dream, always with a smile.

In a profile last October, the NYT discussed Maia's impact at his peak:

Maia’s enormous popularity in the ’70s triggered a shift in Brazilian pop culture that extended far beyond music, notably the emergence of a movement that came to be called Black Rio, with the English word "black" used instead of its Portuguese equivalent. The most obvious manifestation was that record companies signed acts that drew on Maia’s style… 

But fans of those bands also adopted Afro-American fashions and attitudes, which alarmed the all-white military dictatorship then in power, fearful of the importation of notions of black power into a country that had the largest black population outside Africa. In the working-class suburbs of Rio and São Paulo, fans would gather on weekends for exuberant all-night dance parties that featured Maia’s or other bands. 

(Video by Superheroes Amsterdam)

Derek Workman finds a measure of comfort in that fact that "even in a globalized world of evermore uniformity, table football, foosball, csosco, lagirt or whatever you want to call it still has no absolutely fixed idea of what really does constitute the core of the game":

The American/Texas Style is called "Hard Court" and is known for its speed and power style of play. It combines a hard man with a hard rolling ball and a hard, flat surface. The European/French Style, "Clay Court" is exactly opposite of the American style. It features heavy (non-balanced) men, and a very light and soft cork ball. Add to that a soft linoleum surface and you have a feel best described as sticky. In the middle is European/German Style,  "Grass Court," characterized by its "enhanced ball control achieved by softening of components that make up the important man/ball/surface interaction." And even the World Championships use five different styles of table, with another 11 distinct styles being used in various other international competitions.

(Photo by Gordon Anthony McGowan)

Daven Hiskey doesn't recommend it:

When you have a drink, the volume of blood brought to the skin’s surface increases, making you feel warm. (That dilation is why slightly or exceedingly intoxicated people look flushed.) This overrides one of your body’s defenses against cold temperatures: Constricting your blood vessels, thereby minimizing blood flow to your skin in order to keep your core body temperature up. … According to a study done by the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, drinking alcohol in chilly weather also reduces the body’s ability and tendency to shiver, taking away yet another method your body uses to help keep warm when it is cold. 

Bottom line? The age-old practice of drinking alcoholic beverages to keep the body warm in cold weather is the exact opposite of what you should do.

Shakespeare often employed alcohol for his plays:

If drinking kills characters in Hamlet, even the most comic scenes of Macbeth and The Tempest mingle drunken characters with treason and death: the Porter pitches the joys of inebriation as the Macbeths clean their hands of the king’s blood; Stefano and Trinculo guzzle a keg and plot to kill Prospero. The love potion in Romeo and Juliet kills rather than cures. Cleopatra hides away her own special draught to facilitate suicide; Antony gets drunk on a barge. Draughts and potions—these substances produce scenes of intoxication tainted by dark desires and threats of death. Even as Shakespeare created uplifting portraits of the "merry" drunkard, he equally illuminated what was clear to the Puritan: addiction was a growing problem in early modern England.

The theater was also a place to drink during performances:

All playhouses have liquor onsite, and [the London playhouse] The Curtain is no exception. As Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London, noted in his diary in 1599, "During the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment." The distractions were many, not only from drunk patrons themselves: ale produced a hissing noise when tapped, and those opening it were shouted down by audience members annoyed by the sound.

After the performance, fresh from hearing Falstaff’s advice to "addict themselves to sack," the audience members, as well as the actors and playwrights, head to one of the taverns or inns scattered throughout Shoreditch or lining London’s Bankside. Even if in 1598 the actors could boast an engagement at a permanent theater such as The Curtain, they still remember inn yards, the sites of their first performances—ale and theater have always been yoked together in the history of English playing.

Can drug writing really capture the psychedelic experience? The essay collection Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness attempts an answer. Michael Thomsen is disappointed:

Many of the essays in Edge Realms try to explain the paradoxes of scientific modeling with the transcendence of getting really fucked up. It is not enough to have done a drug and had a fine experience, one must recast the nature of reality in its afterglow, to find in the sober world inadequacies revealed through the shamanistic updraft of a trip.

Aldous Huxley remains the patron saint of this yearning conviction. The one-time satirist of using drugs to pacify the vigor and anger of a ruled class, Huxley became a bourgeoise guru when he discovered LSD. Catalyzing his years-long wonderment about human perception, LSD and mescaline prompted Huxley to spend the latter parts of his life praising drugs as a human utility for consciousness raising. And with the shift the bright cuts of language and thought in his early novels become overburdened with dim metaphors of acid highs being like a trip to the "antipodes" of one’s mind, in which one must catalog the wild fauna of giraffes, kangaroos, and duck-billed platypuses.

The unaddressed problem with drugs as co-pilots for metaphysical inquiry is that the high always ends, and after a certain point straining to pull meaning from a state that isn’t actually meant to be sustained becomes obsessive and distracting.