Year: 2013

J. Bryan Lowder likes spoilers. He calls them “a prophylactic against mediocrity in shows of middling appeal”:

In truth, if the spoiler does her job well, you will leave with an appreciation of the episode at least equal to, if not better than, those poor souls who gambled their lives watching the whole thing. Memory is organized in flashes, moments, and a few pithy, secondhand ones recounted on a newsfeed are, considering cost-benefit, preferable to recording some myself over a long hour. (And honestly, I find the practice so seamless that I often can’t remember whether I actually watched something or spoil-watched it.)

You could say that, in my support of spoil-watching, I’m arguing for a CliffsNotes approach to television—and why not? Every good student knows there are texts worth reading in full and texts for which it is perfectly appropriate, even necessary, to skim. As students of pop culture, we should jealously guard our time with the former and, each according to his taste and ability, help each other get on with the latter as quickly and efficiently as possible. Such a utopian arrangement won’t spoil anything, I promise.

Ex-architect Christine Outram assails her former peers, arguing that those in the field simply “don’t listen to people”:

Let’s face it, most commercial buildings, hospitals, and police stations are underwhelming. And even when they are pleasing to the eye, it doesn’t mean they are built to address human needs: If you don’t believe me, read this New York Times review of Santiago Calatrava’s buildings. No wonder architecture has become a niche vocation. You don’t connect with people any more.

The problem is that architects seem to pray at the feet of the latest hyped-up formal language. I dare you. Flip through an architectural magazine today. Find any people in the photographs? I didn’t think so. Find plenty of pictures that worship obscure angles and the place where two materials meet? You betcha.

Kaid Benfield concedes some points but says “the issues involved with today’s architecture are a lot more nuanced than Outram acknowledges”:

First, I know lots of architects who are doing good, humanist, contextually sensitive design. Outram gives a passing nod to Jan Gehl in this regard, but only minimally. He’s hardly the only one (here are some great examples). Second, highly original, “statement” buildings and places are not inherently anti-human. One of my favorites is the modernist high-speed rail station just outside Avignon in France. It’s as much sculpture as rail depot, but it also is an utter delight to visit or pass through.  …

Third, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare retail to other kinds of architecture. Most of the cold, lifeless architecture I see is corporate or institutional. Retail establishments such as Starbucks are in the business of attracting customers and, if they have adequate resources and the location is right for business, I’d say they succeed at that more often than not. It may not be Great Architecture, but it works for people. Consider the amazing success of the enclosed suburban regional shopping mall, for example. The exterior architecture is generally hideous, as are the parking lots; but, on the inside, designers figured out exactly what people wanted.

Update from a reader:

Could not agree more with Outram. But it gets worse. These days I’m exposed regularly to grad students at one of the top architecture schools in the world, and the dehumanized understanding of architecture’s concerns is matched by what amounts to a fuzzier, more patron-pleasing version of the awful Le Corbusier school of architecture as a means of social engineering. Both the profs and, as a result, their students seem to believe that their primary job is to build “meaning” into their work in order to inspire a desirable response in its users (e.g. open-floorplan offices and glass-walled courthouses, to inspire dialogue, communication, equality before authority). There often seems to be no concern for the fact that to most people, the primary question asked of a building is not “what does it mean?” but “where’s the fucking bathroom?”

This said, I’ve visited that Calatrava train station in Lisbon, and it functions as beautifully as it looks.

(Photo: Santago Calatrava’s Estação do Oriente in Lisbon)

Piercarlo Valdesolo reviews research into the psychological and behavioral consequences of a belief in “pure evil” (BPE):

According to this research, one of the central features of BPE is evil’s perceived immutability. Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people. Following this logic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that there would be a relationship between BPE and the desire to aggress towards and punish wrong-doers.

Researchers have found support for this hypothesis across several papers containing multiple studies, and employing diverse methodologies. BPE predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

Meanwhile, Father C. John McCloskey reviews an updated version of True or False Possession: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the Demented, a 1960s guide by French neurologist Jean Lhermitte:

Written primarily for health professionals, True or False Possession is nonetheless of interest to any educated Catholic, in that it recounts from a Catholic viewpoint genuine suspected demonic possession and helps the layman, priest, psychiatrist and even family members to distinguish the real thing from mental illness and fakery.

However, when and if it is necessary to bring the victim to an exorcist for treatment, [editor] Dr. [Aaron] Kheriaty points out, “This author knows the permanent limitations of his science: This book does not attempt to detail cases of what may be considered true possession, for these by their nature would be outside the scope of the author’s clinical expertise. In such cases, the physician and priest need to collaborate responsibly and with respect for the insights of both science and theology.”

Not surprisingly, given the profession, the medical emphasis of the book is paramount, yet the author writes as a convinced Catholic and, as such, gives what is almost a short history of diabolical possession from the time of Christ’s exorcisms, as recorded in the Gospels, up to his own time. The author recounts examples of saints to whom the devil appeared, such as doctor of the Church St. Teresa of Avila: “She depicts the evil one as possessing hideous form, with a terrifying mouth and a regular proteus, able to transform and to multiply himself.” …

Many seeming cases of diabolical possession were in fact cases of simple insanity or mental illness, as Lhermitte explains. And many more were simply frauds that, in turn, caused mass hysteria in others who simply suffered from neurological illnesses that produce symptoms having nothing to do with the devil or hidden demons.

(Hat tip: Books, Inq)

A reader reminisces:

I read with interest your post on Evangelicals and the morphing of Halloween into an adult celebration. I’m 65 and enjoyed Halloween in the post-WWII days that were unencumbered by the shibboleth of razor blades in apples.  It was a heady time of kids roaming the streets after dark unsupervised in mashed together costumes from parents’ closets and corked faces.  It was giddy and wonderful and the “evil” abroad was pretty much limited to the naughtiness of smashed pumpkins, trees festooned with toilet paper and car windows spattered with shaving cream.  My sister and I never engaged in the tricks but we, sheltered Catholic school girls that we were, never went home until people stopped opening their doors to us sometime after 9pm.

My generation got to fully indulge in the permission to be libertine for one night of the year.  We grew up to put on a costume as adults and use the excuse for a party, but for us it was never the event on steroids that it became for the generation that followed.

Parents became paranoid that their own neighbors were trying to poison their kids.  They raised their kids with the conscious message that anyone they didn’t know was a stranger who needed to be distrusted. Their Halloweens were anemic chaperoned affairs conducted in commercial costumes heavily influenced by TV characters or the witch/ghost/clown standards in acetate and screen printed masks.  At home, before they got to tuck into their loot, parents had to go through it to make sure there was nothing so onerous as a homemade cookie or popcorn ball and that each item was commercially prepared and individually wrapped.

No wonder their kids grew up to embrace the goth well beyond Halloween and usher in the slutty adult costume.  They didn’t have any idea how to “do” Halloween for their kids, so they huddled them together into suburban parties and marauded shopping malls. Eventually they hurled them into the sad church-sponsored Trunk or Treat things that are only marginally better than the gratuitous Halloween Horrors things they first used to hammer home their point and now do as annual fund raisers.  If they give out candy, they do it resentfully grousing that someone may have come into their neighborhood for a rotten 5¢ candy bar or that they’re “too old” and not entitled to have some fun.

Each year I still remember the fun I had.  Unfortunately, it’s also tinged now with sadness for what Halloween has been turned into.

Speaking of parents’ paranoia about poisoned candy, Dan Lewis dutifully debunks that enduring myth by detailing the “only known example of a person intentionally poisoning Halloween candy and providing it to neighborhood trick-or-treaters”:

On Halloween, 1974, an 8-year-old boy named Timothy O’Bryan died. His candy had, indeed, been poisoned. A few days prior, his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, took out a $40,000 life insurance policy on Timothy and Timothy’s sister, Elizabeth (then age 5), as an unimaginable way to get out of debt. The only way to collect required that at least one of his children die, so the elder O’Bryan laced some Pixy Stix with cyanide and cajoled his son into eating one before bed.

As murder would negate the insurance policy, the father had to cover his tracks. Already showing a wanton disregard for the lives of others—children, at that—he decided to potentially kill a few. He distributed some of the tainted candy to at least four other children (including his daughter), according to the Houston Chronicle, setting up the story that a neighborhood madman or demented factory worker had caused the tragic death of his son. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful. None of the other children ended up eating the poison, in part due to a quick reaction from authorities and in part due to dumb luck—an 11-year-old tried to eat the sugar in the Pixy Stix he received, but could not undo the staples that O’Bryan had used to reseal the package.

Like our reader, but from a very different perspective. Liz Galvao issues a cri de coeur to “rise up and take back our holiday” – for goths:

These days, a plague of indifference has consumed the goth community when it comes to Halloween. Even when I was a wee kindergoth, we had respect for the true meaning of All Hallow’s Eve. It wasn’t all Nightmare Before Christmas screenings and weirding people out at the mall. Sure, it had pagan origins or something, but at least we knew it didn’t belong to the posers in the store­-bought witch costumes. Goths these days couldn’t care less about the holiday. They’re more concerned with their Tumblr reblogs and sideways cross jewelry than with protecting the history of their people. …

I write to you now a reluctant but natural leader, like Robin Tunney’s character in The Craft. We must fight to end the commercialization of Halloween, because it is the only way we can survive. If we do not seize Halloween from those that would sell it to us, what is to become of our rich gothic subculture? Why avoid the sun and dye our hair black (red, green, purple)? Why pretend to understand Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari? Why read Poppy Z. Brite over Charlaine Harris? We might as well give up and name our dogs Bella. I stand here today, a proud gothic American, and I pledge to stand with you and fight. For if we do not reclaim Halloween for goths, then like Bela Lugosi, we are dead.

Previous Dish on goths here, here and here.

The creators of the possessed board had to scare their way to a patent:

[T]he chief patent officer demanded a demonstration—if the board could accurately spell out his name, which was supposed to be unknown to [investor Elijah] Bond and [his sister-in-law Helen] Peters, he’d allow the patent application to proceed. They all sat down, communed with the spirits, and the planchette faithfully spelled out the patent officer’s name. Whether or not it was mystical spirits or the fact that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have just known the man’s name, well, that’s unclear, Murch says. But on February 10, 1891, a white-faced and visibly shaken patent officer awarded Bond a patent for his new “toy or game.”

How it works:

Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than 160 years: the ideometer effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, examining these automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example). Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideometer effect in the popular spiritualist pastimes. In 1853, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.