Year: 2013

Which Jesus Do You Believe In?

In an interview with Mockingbird marking the American release of his latest book, Unapologetic, Francis Spufford remarks on the different ways Jesus is portrayed:

M: So not the meek, not the cool, not the Ché, not the ironic, so then, what are we missing? Who is Jesus?

FS: We’re missing the open door to a generosity which thinks that law is the very beginning of what human beings need, where calling it radical is too small. You could call it conservative and it would make just as much sense, and you would still slough it off like a skin and leave it way behind. He is somebody. He is love without cost controls engaged. He is what it looks like to love deliberately without self-protection.

Reviewing the book, Wesley Hill appreciates that Spufford doesn’t offer “another defense of Christian ideas” but instead tries “to paint a picture of what it’s like to be a believer”:

Religious sensibilities, as Spufford writes in the preface, “are not made of glass, [and] do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience.” When we talk about sin and grace and faith, we’re not entering some rarefied realm of discourse removed from everyday life. We are, Spufford contends, trying to describe the sense of guilt that keeps us up at night worrying that our mean-spirited comment at a fancy dinner party puts us in the same predicament as the guy who tears into his former drinking buddy in a bar fight. We’re trying to describe the sense of mystery and elusive presence that frightens and comforts us—or comforts by frightening us—when we listen to the lilting melodies of Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto.”

At the heart of Spufford’s book is a long retelling of the story of Jesus, or Yeshua, that is as evocative as any I’ve read. When I sent a copy of the book to a skeptical friend, I told him, “Finishing the Yeshua chapter made me want to become a Christian all over again.”

Previous Dish on Spufford here, here, and here.

Where Is God In After Tiller?

Casey N. Cep ponders religion’s complex role in the documentary:

“The debate is always framed in such stark, absolute terms, but when you hear from these women and what their lives are like, it’s harder to apply blanket, abstract rules,” [filmmaker Lana] Wilson said. The same is true for the four physicians, who themselves articulate doubts and uncertainties over the procedures they perform. When Dr. Sella reflects on her work, she confesses, “The reason that I’ve struggled is I think of them as babies. I don’t think of it as a fetus.” Later, Dr. Robinson decides to deny an abortion to a woman who is thirty-five weeks pregnant because she lacks a compelling reason, and then disagrees with her staff by approving an abortion for a Catholic teen-ager who considers herself pro-life.

That teen-ager is one of many patients who prays and worries over her relationship with God. Listening to her testimony, I thought back to my second year of seminary, when I lived down the street from a Planned Parenthood health center. Some mornings, on my way to lectures on the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, I would stop to talk with the protestors who occupied the street corner. I remembered some of those conversations while watching “After Tiller.” When I asked Shane and Wilson why they did not interview those opposed to late-term abortions, they pointed to the presence of those views in the film. “Many of the patients, usually the ones struggling most with the decision, are wrestling with their religion,” Shane said. “Some of the patients are even anti-abortion,” Wilson explained. “These women struggle with these issues more than anyone.”

Check out the Dish’s “Ask Anything” series with the After Tiller filmmakers here.

Finding Sustenance For The Soul

In a wide-ranging interview, Ted Gioia, a Catholic writer perhaps best known for his books about jazz music, reflects on art and faith in an age of consumerism:

Those committed to a spiritual life understand what popular culture hasn’t yet learned (or is afraid to admit)—namely that the hunger of the soul cannot be satiated with sugary sweets and shallow entertainments.  Somewhere along the way, many people got the idea that the religious sphere and artistic sphere are at odds with each other.  I believe the opposite is true.  Both the arts and spiritual discernment broaden our perspectives and enrich our lives, and in very similar ways.

This was the single greatest lesson I learned from my years studying philosophy at Oxford—namely that the pervasive empiricism of modern life, which only accepts what it sees and quantifies, is ultimately a brutish philosophy.  The most important things in life cannot be seen with the eyes or measured with charts and numbers.  They are love, trust, faith, friendship, forgiveness, charity, hope, the soul, and the creative impulse.  You cannot live as a human without these, although you can’t even prove scientifically that any one of them actually exists.  They are metaphysical (a word used as an insult by my philosophy teachers, but their scorn was mistaken, in my opinion). To embrace these crucial aspects of our life, we must turn to art and religion. This hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years.  Nor will it change in the next two thousand years.

This Is Your Portrait On Drugs

In the 1950s, a researcher supplied an artist with two 50-microgram doses of LSD and asked him to sketch a series of portraits as the drug took effect:

Dan Colman provides more background:

We still don’t know the identity of the artist. But it’s surmised that the researcher was Oscar Janiger, a University of California-Irvine psychiatrist known for his work on LSD. The web site Live Science has Andrew Sewell, a Yale Psychiatry professor (until his recent death), on record saying: “I believe the pictures are from an experiment conducted by the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger starting in 1954 and continuing for seven years, during which time he gave LSD to over 100 professional artists and measured its effects on their artistic output and creative ability. Over 250 drawings and paintings were produced.” The goal, of course, was to investigate what happens to subjects under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

The mystery artist gave updates as the acid ran its course:

2 hours 45 minutes: Agitated patient says “I am… everything is… changed… they’re calling… your face… interwoven… who is…” He changes medium to Tempera. …

5 hours 45 minutes: “I think it’s starting to wear off. This pencil is mighty hard to hold.” (He is holding a crayon).

A few years ago we posted a similar series of self-portraits from Bryan Lewis Saunders, who experimented with dozens of different drugs, with fascinating results. Here is “1 ‘Bump’ of Crystalmeth”:

crystalmeth

Many more here.

Hathos Alert

Amber Frost explains the horror:

Incredible Instant Adoring Boyfriend is a DVD intended to provide a sort of simulated “boyfriend” experience, but only if your idea of a boyfriend is an obsessive simpering weirdo. The half hour performance feels like it was created by aliens who based their idea of heterosexual romance on an amalgam of sexist sitcoms. The “boyfriend” (shudder), compliments you on your thinness on one hand, while telling you how unattractive thin models are on the other. He buys you flowers, and does an extensive amount of chores, including your “hand-washing” (I’ve never trusted, let alone asked, a boyfriend to wash a bra in my life, but to each her own.) The entire thing is just watching a dude fawn and coo; it’s legitimately unnerving.

From a seemingly earnest Amazon review:

I got this out of curiousity and because it looked fun. People might think it’s lame, but it’s not. Just fun for the single girl. With all the good vibes and compliments he had, my “boyfriend” actually put me in a good mood! Sure, he’s just on a dvd and there isn’t anything interactive about him, but that’s sort of the point. You just sit back, relax and enjoy him complimenting you. … All in all, it’s a fun dvd if you want to waste time or feel like being praised and doted on after a hard day’s work, but really is no substitute for a real boyfriend.

Canned Laughter Has Passed Its Expiration Date, Ctd

A reader provides some great professional insight to the thread:

After reading the Dish for a couple of years and subscribing this year, I was pretty excited to see a thread that I had some knowledge of. One of the reasons that I read the blog is the seemingly endless reader expertise on almost any subject.  Even though expertise is not something that I would claim, I have worked in this field my entire adult life.

The clip of “The Big Bang Theory” that you embedded to is not a clip with no laugh track added; it is a clip with laughs removed.  You can hear the laughter briefly when it overlaps a line of dialogue. The clip is a great example of an actor’s technique of “waiting on the laughs”. They briefly delay their next line so that the audience laughter doesn’t make the next line difficult to hear. Done with skill and expertise, a cast can create a rhythm that enhances the comedic timing of a show. In this clip when they removed the laughs the pauses between the line deliveries destroys the timing and causes the actors and the scene to appear awkward and unfunny.

I have been involved in sit-coms for over 30 years and currently have several friends and a nephew who work on “Big Bang”. This is a funny show that has a live audience which genuinely laughs at the jokes. Even if it is edited to be a bit louder or quieter, or even if the laughs from the first take of a scene are applied to a different take, the laughter is real and drives the actor’s performances.

In the ’90s I worked on the HBO series “Dream On”.

At the time there were no single-camera sit-coms being made other than ours.  There were no sit-coms without laugh tracks other than ours. Despite the lack of laughs, we were a critical and audience hit. At some point FOX bought the rights to the network airing of “Dream On” but they were uncomfortable with a sit-com with no laugh track. They added one and it was a total debacle. The actors were not waiting for laughs, the timing was destroyed the jokes made un-funny and the show was quickly cancelled.

In the last few months I have worked a few days on “Anger Management,” which is shot with multiple cameras and made to look like a show before a live audience. There is no audience other than a couple dozen writers and producers who watch the filming and laugh at their own jokes. This option for filming a “live audience” sit-com is problematic because there are no independent judges as to whether or not a joke will make a non-involved audience laugh. The writers have a vested interest in their jokes inciting laughter and even if their laughter is actually recorded it tends to sound forced and fake. Most of the laughs are applied by an editor.

Bolonik reviews two new sit-coms; she doesn’t like one and likes the other. She notices less the laugh track in the one she likes and suggests that all laugh tracks be done away with because she notices more the laugh track in the un-funny show. It seems that she is objecting to the quality of the show not if it has a laugh track added. The actual problem with sit-coms is that comedy is very hard to write. Every week Hollywood employs somewhere around two thousand writers and on any day there aren’t more than maybe a hundred good writers in the entire country. Trying to pin her dislike for a show on the laugh track misses the point. It is just a bad show.

Customized E-Cigs

Meghan Neal records their rise:

Any self-respecting vaper has a PV (personal vaporizer), or Mod (personalized, or “modified” piece.) From there, you can customize basically every aspect of your vaping experience—the refillable cartridge or “tank,” atomizer or wick, nicotine level (samples at the Vaporium range from zero to 24 mg—the equivalent of a heavy smoker), mAhs (Milliamp per hour, an indicator of battery life), and the intensity of the TH (throat hit) when inhaling.

Then there’s the plethora of flavors of liquid, variously known as e-liquid, juice, e-juice, nic-juice, or ass juice if it tastes real nasty. You can vape a straight tobacco flavor, cotton candy, chocolate, or more stonerific varieties like “Hoops” and “The Dude.” Or DIY vapers will mix their own liquid recipes.

This is where vape shops come in. At first, these were places to sample flavors and try out equipment, then they brought couches and foosball tables and flatscreen TVs into the shops so you could vape in the comfort while perusing their products. Next came vape lounges with bars, cafe-style tables, juices, and snacks. And now, retail boutiques.

Economists are taking notice:

Goldman Sachs earlier this year pegged e-cigarettes as one of eight industry disruptions to watch in the coming years (others included 3-D printing and cancer immunotherapy). Goldman estimates that e-cigarette retail sales already totaled $1 billion last year and could reach $10 billion by 2020; by then it estimates e-cigarettes could account for 16 percent of the US tobacco industry’s profits. …

If e-cigs continue to grow in popularity, it could hasten the demise of traditional cigarettes. But e-cigs also promise fatter profit margins, because they are not taxed as aggressively as traditional cigarettes, nor do they have to fund legal settlements, Goldman says. Moreover, because e-cigarette devices are rechargeable, they can be sold in much the way that companies such as Gillette sell razor blades – subsidize the cost of the basic device but make a healthy profit on the cartridges. As a result, Goldman estimates that e-cig businesses could eventually achieve profit margins in excess of 50 percent, compared to 30 percent for traditional cigarette businesses currently.

“A Philosophy Of Tickling”

Aaron Schuster fleshes out the phrase:

While scientific research has refuted Aristotle’s claim that tickling is a uniquely human privilege—not only has tickling been observed in our primate cousins, but scientists have recorded laughter-like ultrasonic chirping in tickled rats [see above]—it has confirmed his intuition regarding the importance of this seemingly marginal and unserious phenomenon. (An additional note on animal tickling: the most famously ticklish beast is no doubt the trout, which falls into a trance-like state when its underbelly is lightly rubbed. This has been known for ages; in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Maria says, while planning to trick Malvolio, “Lie thou there; for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.”)

Far from being a meaningless spasm, tickling is intimately bound up with human development and the sense of self. Such is the argument expounded by neuroscientist Robert Provine, who sees in tickling an important form of pre-verbal communication and an element in the creation of the distinction between self and other. A primal, neurologically programmed mode of interaction, tickling creates intimacy through a benign and playful aggression. And the well-known inability to tickle oneself serves an important role in educating the infant about the limits of its own bodily experience, poignantly signaling the difference between self-affection and being affected by the other.

Previous Dish on tickling here.

The Premium On Legal Weed

Sullum fears that high taxes in Washington state will limit the market for legal marijuana and keep the state’s illicit market in business:

According to calculations by BOTEC, [Mark] Kleiman’s consulting firm, these taxes will make the retail cost of cannabis 58 percent higher than it would otherwise be, accounting for 37 percent of the price paid by consumers. One BOTEC projection, based on a production cost of $2 per gram, indicates the after-tax retail price will be $17 per gram, or $482 per ounce. Another projection, based on a production cost of $3 per gram, puts the retail price at $25.50 per gram, or $723 per ounce.

That’s a lot more than pot smokers in Washington currently pay. According to the website Price of Weed, which collects reports from marijuana consumers across the country, the average price for high-quality cannabis in Washington is $239 per ounce.

In another post, Sullum considers the fate of Washington’s medical marijuana dispensaries, which are untaxed:

The state-licensed outlets will face competition not only from ordinary pot dealers but from medical marijuana dispensaries, which are not explicitly authorized by state law but are run as cooperatives by patients and their designated providers. There are something like 200 dispensaries in Seattle, where the liquor control board plans to allow just 21 state-licensed pot shops. A.P. notes that “the City Council has passed zoning regulations for pot businesses that would require medical marijuana dispensaries to obtain a state license [which is not currently available for dispensaries] or stop doing business by 2015.” Despite assurances by supporters of I-502, Washington’s legalization initiative, that it would not affect dispensaries, it looks like the writing is on the wall. How long will state and local governments eager for marijuana tax revenue allow these untaxed, unregulated outlets to compete with government-licensed stores selling cannabis of similar quality at higher prices?