2013 – Page 94 – The Dish

Sci-Fi Impressionism

Swedish artist Anders Ramsell has produced a 35-minute version of Blade Runner made up of watercolor drawings, frame by frame:

It took him a year and a half to create the film:

Ramsell expressed his reimagining of the film through the medium of Aquarelle, a type of drawing done with transparent watercolors. He created 12,597 tiny paintings by hand and strung them together into a dreamy 35-minute video that manages to capture both the despair and beauty of the subject matter. The washed-out setting the process creates is mesmerizing to watch as the scenes flow together. The characters are impressionistic hints of themselves, but still completely recognizable. Because Ramsell edited the film down to 35 minutes, he calls it a “paraphrase” rather than a remake. “It was never my intent to make an exact version of the movie; that would fill no purpose,” he wrote. “Instead I wanted to create something different and never before seen.”

Amanda Kooser is astounded:

The original dialogue from the film plays over the scenes like a ghost. It builds up to the haunting final scene and leaves you with the feeling you just dreamed your way through the movie. It may be one of the most spectacular works of fan art ever created.

How Voyeurism Has Evolved

An excerpt from Julie Peakman’s The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex:

During the twentieth century, voyeurs were sent to psychiatrists for assessment and treatment, but most doctors seemed to consider them harmless (if excessive masturbators). As with exhibitionism, women were even blamed for men’s problems. One contemporary commentator of the 1960s exclaimed: ‘Some men provoke complaints from women; but some women invite such attentions by dressing and undressing with needless publicity.’ During the 1950s and ’60s, voyeurs were thought of as people who hung about parks, beaches and swimming pools hoping to catch a couple having sex or obtain a glimpse of genitalia. Others, known as Peeping Toms, peered through windows under cover of night, lurking in gardens. …

In the twenty-first century, voyeurism is no longer necessarily conducted outside the home but can be quietly indulged in while sitting at a computer.

In the comfort of an easy chair, it is possible to watch adults copulating, overhear schoolgirls chatting with each other about sex, watch women undress, see men urinate or all manner of acts which involve a state of undress – none of it illegal. Housewives have set up webcams to expose themselves and get paid for their services by the minute. Home videos now compete with the higher end of the porn market: teenage girls masturbating, single women having sex with their boyfriends, suburban married couples sharing partners with their neighbours – all are easily accessible to view online.

The concept of voyeurism has therefore been eroded to a large extent, although there are still those who seek their pleasures in a more 3d form. Striptease acts, pole dancing and naked bars all offer full frontal viewing for the price of a couple of pints. The acceptability of voyeurism now comes down to a matter of consent.

Fred Minnick surveys the controversy over labeling spirits “gluten-free,” a trend that “contradicts long-standing advisories from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that all distilled spirits are gluten-free unless it is added after distillation”:

Blue Ice vodka’s American Potato Vodka became the first spirit to receive gluten-free labeling in May 2013. Company officials said CD [celiac disease] sufferers frequently requested gluten content information. “With the celiac and gluten-free products becoming more accessible, why not go through the process of proving we were gluten-free to [the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)]? We could use it as one aspect of our marketing program,” says Thomas Gibson, the chief operating officer for 21st Century Spirits, Blue Ice’s parent company. With this labeling, Gibson says American Potato Vodka consumers can be 100-percent certain it’s gluten free.

But that guarantee is not necessary, says [food allergy researcher Steve] Taylor, one of the country’s leading gluten testers. Taylor calls gluten-free vodka a “silly thing. … All vodka is gluten-free unless there is some flavored vodka out there where someone adds a gluten-containing ingredient. I know that many celiac sufferers are extra-cautious. That is their privilege. But their [vodka] concerns are usually not science-based.”

“Gluten-free” products are becoming big business:

The new labeling has created a marketing frenzy that may become a $6.2-billion gluten-free product industry by 2018, according to a 2013 report from research firm MarketsandMarkets. Some say the risk of cross-contamination warrants such broad labeling; others claim the FDA just made gluten-free living much more complicated.

Previous Dish on gluten and wheat allergies here, here, and here.

Fake And Painful

Jonathan Mahler notes that pro wrestling has had its problems with brain injuries:

Wrestling may be staged, but that doesn’t mean it’s an optical illusion. When a wrestler gets hit in the head with a chair — which became routine during the extreme era — he really is getting hit in the head with a chair. This is not exactly salutary for the brain. At the time, there may have been little scientific evidence that seemingly minor head trauma could lead to progressive brain degeneration, but was it really so difficult to surmise that all these body blows might end badly? …

For years, pro wrestling denied any connection between violence inside the ring and medical trauma outside it. Like NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, McMahon focused on protecting his product. He not only downplayed the role of CTE in Benoit’s death, he erased Benoit from wrestling’s history, editing his matches out of DVDs and redacting his name and numerous “championships” from the record books. (You can do this when your sport isn’t actually a sport.)

But even a fantasy world can deny reality for only so long. In recent years, pro wrestling has taken steps to protect its employees. When one of the WWE’s emerging talents, Dolph Ziggler, suffered a concussion earlier this year, he was prevented from wrestling, or even traveling, for six weeks. Chair shots to the head have been banned. Wrestlers themselves are now much more willing to tell opponents before a match what moves are off-limits.

The long-running Dish thread on brain injuries in pro football is here.

The Drug Double-Standard, Ctd

Several readers join the conversation:

As a recovered alcoholic with almost four years of sobriety (I’m 31 and luckily caught my disease early), this post truly hit home with me. When I initially sought treatment for my drinking at the behest of my then fiancee (now wife – thankfully!), I was one of those individuals who had never done anything other than drink a lot and occasionally smoke pot. I knew I had an addictive personality and wouldn’t be able to just dabble in cocaine, as some of my friends did in college. When I received details of the Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) that I would be going through for three months for my drinking, I learned that I would be in the program with people suffering from all substance based addictions, including heroin, cocaine, meth, alcohol, etc. and in many cases a combination of two or more.

I was initially very distraught about this, as I did not put alcoholism on the same level as cocaine addiction and definitely nowhere close to heroin. It was unthinkable to me that I’d have anything in common with individuals who suffered from those maladies. Admittedly, I was passing judgement on them when I myself had absolutely no foundation to do so. But society as a whole conditions us that way and the war on drugs only reinforces this stigma. Upon entering the program and successfully graduating, I found out just how wrong I was. Addiction is addiction – period.

Regardless of what substance my peers were addicted to, we could all speak candidly about our experiences, struggles, mistakes and breakthroughs, and we all completely understood each other. I grew closer to many cocaine and meth addicts in that program than I did to even many of the other alcoholics. Even in recovery circles such as Alcoholics Anonymous, there exist “closed” meetings where only those suffering from alcoholism are welcome. I’ve heard men boast of kicking out cocaine addicts who mistakenly came to a closed AA meeting. I never understood that.

I am hopeful that as society begins to normalize around the recreational use of marijuana, and as more and more stories pour into the public domain about otherwise respectable people (Rob Ford may be excluded from this group) struggling with all types of addiction, we can start realizing that there is absolutely no difference between these substances, just the degree to which each individual become enmeshed by them and how deep or shallow their respective “bottom” is. I genuinely wish Congressman Radel the best in his recovery … regardless which substance he is in the process of recovering from.

Another responds to a related post:

I have to weigh in on “Worrying Over a Wonder Drug.” Alec MacGillis writes, “The fact is, there is no silver bullet for the country’s growing opiate addiction problem.” But there is. You’ve posted about it before – it’s called ibogaine. It’s an instant cure for a variety of addictions, including opiate addiction. Obviously it doesn’t guarantee that users won’t return to addiction afterward, but it does remove the need for constant doses of opiates and opiate substitutes to be administered.

Another reader on that post:

I have two people very close to me who were addicted to opiates, and Suboxone (buprenorphine) worked very, very well in helping them get off the stuff. Financially it just about killed us, because the drug is expensive, and you have to take it for 3-6 months, although they do taper the doses as time goes on. My insurance didn’t cover it.

Watching addicted people using Suboxone get through the terrible opiate withdrawal symptoms made me a true believer. The benefits vastly outweigh the risks. I think the Times is looking for a big problem where only a small one exists. It would help if Suboxone was cheaper and more widely available. It truly is a wonder drug for many.

Update from another:

I’d just like to push back against the claim that ibogaine is an instant cure for addiction. From my experience, it is not. My heroin addiction muscled past its ibogaine encounter. I wanted it to work and payed more than my daily fix, which at the time was a several hundred dollar a day, to take the drug. In all honestly, ibogaine just made me feel really really sick to my stomach. After a long and mildly hallucinogenic trip I found myself perhaps more in thrall to opioids than before. I can guarantee you that was not the expected outcome.

I’m certain it works for some -I have friends who had other more positive experiences with ibogaine – but for me it didn’t do a thing. And of those friends who had better outcomes, I don’t think any of them would claim ibogaine was a wonder drug. Not that it matters, but I quit getting high when it became like a full time job working for a super shitty boss. In the end, it was just easier to quit than to keep showing up. I can say that in my case being a lazy man probably saved my life. I quit cold turkey, which felt like getting beat up while you had the flu, and it sucked.

I tried bupe later, after a narcotic relapse, and realized that for me the only way to quit getting high was to just quit getting high. That’s just me though, and I’m not gonna judge anyone who manages to stay sober regardless of the means.

Mental Health Break

The Onion reviews Hunger Games:

Uncovering The Book Business

In an excerpt from his new memoir My Mistake, Daniel Menaker reflects on the publishing industry:

Publishing is an often incredibly frustrating culture. If you want to buy a project—let’s say a nonfiction proposal for a book about the history of Sicily—some of your colleagues will say, “The proposal is too dry” or “Cletis Trebuchet did a book for Grendel Books five years ago about Sardinia and it sold, like, eight copies,” or, airily, “I don’t think many people want to read about little islands.” When Seabiscuit first came up for discussion at an editorial meeting at Random House, some skeptic muttered, “Talk about beating a dead horse!”

To make matters worse, financial success in frontlist publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not. Yes, you may be able to count on a new novel by Surething Jones becoming a big best seller. But the best-seller lists paint nothing remotely like the full financial picture of any publication, because that picture’s most important color is the size of the advance. But let’s say you publish a fluky blockbuster one year, the corporation will see a spike in your profits and sort of autistically, or at least automatically, raise the profit goal for your division by some corporately predetermined amount for the following year. This is close to clinically insane institutional behavior.

A Poem For Saturday

In recent weeks, we’ve posted poems by all the nominees for this year’s National Book Award in Poetry. This past Wednesday, Mary Szybist was announced the winner for her book, Incarnadine. The judges’ citation read, in part:

In her gorgeous second collection Mary Szybist blends traditional and experimental aesthetics to recast the myth of the Biblical Mary for this era…. Szybist probes the nuances of love, loss, and the struggle for religious faith in a world that seems to argue against it. This is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful.

This weekend, we’ll post two poems from the book. In an interview on the National Book Foundation, Szybist said that the scene to which Incarnadine continually returns “portrays a human encountering something not human; it suggests that it is possible for us to perceive and communicate with something or someone not like us. That is part of what I find most moving about the scene: how it plays out the faith, the belief that that can happen—and can change us.”

We open with one of her most compelling poems evoking this encounter in a contemporary setting, “Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen”:

I could hear them from the kitchen, speaking as if
something important had happened.

I was washing the pears in cool water, cutting
the bruises from them.
From my place at the sink, I could hear

a jet buzz hazily overhead, a vacuum
start up next door, the click,
click between shots.

“Mary, step back from the camera.”

There was a softness to his voice
but no fondness, no hurry in it.

There were faint sounds
like walnuts being dropped by crows onto the street,
almost a brush
of windchime from the porch—

Windows around me everywhere half-open—

My skin alive with the pitch.

Face Of The Day

A reader writes:

This photo is a family heirloom. Our family friend Ruth is the woman right of center with the glasses and hat, and the arm in the tan sweater behind the woman in the bikini is our recently lamented Aunt Dorothy. The picture was taken in Santa Monica after the 1960 election, before JFK’s term began. He’s just out for a swim at the beach. In the context of modern security, this scene is astounding.

Update from a reader:

I instantly recognized that JFK photo from the beach in Santa Monica. It’s an L.A. Times photograph from 1962. The photog, Bill Beebe, talks here about how he got the shot. The woman JFK is smiling at spoke to the paper in 1962. So I guess the term “heirloom” just struck me as odd – considering the picture’s history – and I felt I needed to share.

Thanks for doing so. And major props to Bill Beebe.

A Short Story For Saturday

This week’s selection is the late Breece D’J Pancake’s “Trilobites,” published in The Atlantic in 1977, when he was just 25 years old. It begins:

I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy, and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop’s dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.

I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: “We will live on mangoes and love.” And she up and left without me—two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.

Continue reading here. For an overview of Pancake’s brief, troubled life and writing career, go here. Peruse his only collection of stories, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, here. The Dish recently featured other short stories here and here.

Year: 2013