Month: July 2013

Nick Coccoma reviews Sofia Coppola’s new film, The Bling Ring, which he describes as “perhaps [Coppola’s] most biting, damning portrait of society yet”:

The Bling Ring depicts Hollywood culture yet again … The kids in Coppola’s current picture don’t even possess the elemental soul powers to know they’re fucking nothing. They’re parodies of people, but they don’t seem to care. After all, that’s what celebrities are, isn’t it? And The Bling Ring is yet another hilariously terrifying reminder that a huge segment of America wants to be just like them.

What’s most disturbing is the utter simplicity of these kids’ motivation.

As Coppola presents them, they’re living proof of anthropologist René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. They want the Prada, Chanel and Gucci because it’s what other people want, famous people. (And this despite the fact that most of their families already have more money than God.) They seem to come prepackaged with these desires; we don’t see any process by which the kids become what they are. And with the slight exception of Marc, none of them displays even the faintest hint of hesitation—the exactitude with which Rebecca, Nicki, Chloe, Sam, and Emily case the joints and carjack Mercedes’ makes you simultaneously laugh and gasp. Coppola shows depth upon depth of material vacuity. …

Coppola shows you the insanity of a world in which people fall on their face so publicly and then turn even their bad girl/boy behavior into egomaniacal redemption stories for the press. Nicki is the apotheosis of this cult of the self, played to delicious perfection by Emma Watson. Her performance is at once tongue-in-cheek and shot straight from the hip; she’s so intelligent in her ditzy portrayal that you can almost hear her saying, “Can you believe this girl?” What you do hear from her mouth are lines that boggle the cerebral apparatus. “I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being,” she tells an E! News camera crew outside the courthouse. “God didn’t give me these talents and looks to just sit around being a model or being famous. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country, for all I know.” The only thing more stupefying than these words is the fact that it’s what Alexis Neiers, the flesh-and-blood basis of Nicki’s character, actually said.

The article on which The Bling Ring is based is here.  Previous Dish on Coppola here.

Sam Lipsyte lauds short stories:

Many of my greatest moments as a reader have come with short stories. Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, Chekhov, Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Roberto Bolano, Borges, Barry Hannah, Gordon Lish, Christine Schutt, Joy Williams, Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, Leonard Michaels, Donald Barthelme were all major revelations for me. I still recall reading many of their stories as distinct episodes of a nearly manic euphoria. I’ve had the same experiences with novels, of course, but perhaps fewer. Your heart breaks when even the best novel sags a tiny bit, as they all must, sort of like the give in bridge suspension. A great short story is more like a stiff plank across a narrow but bottomless crevasse. The plank will hold. But that doesn’t mean you are not in danger of freaking out and falling off.

I love writing novels and short stories, and though I started with short stories, I never thought of them as stepping stones to novels. I consider them a rich and vital artform. They are harder, really. They demand the rigor of poems. They are also a good way to start writing, because you can work on one and recognise its failure and throw it away, start another one. And years haven’t gone by. I teach writing and many students don’t even want to bother with stories. They are all at work on the novel that will deliver them riches and fame within a year or two of graduation. It will happen for one or two of them. But the rest will wish they’d played more, experimented more, hit a dozen different walls, found fresh ways to tell stories and learned about the beauty of language under pressure in the bargain.

(Hat tip: Tandeta)

A reader writes:

This is ridiculous. I am a mildly overweight person. I am 5’10 and about 190 lbs. My BMI is about 27. I could stand to lose about 15-20 pounds. I am the only person in my extended family who is not obese. I have obesity on both sides for generations. Morbid obesity.

Why am I the only member of my family who is not obese? Because I am the only member of my family who walks 15 miles a week. And runs 20 miles a week. And works out several times a week with weights. And eats carefully.

I do all that and I’m still about 20 pounds overweight. So I get that genetics has a lot to do with it. I would have to starve to be truly normal weight. But barring injuries that prevent people from being physically active, no one has to be morbidly obese. You just have to do what you have to do.

In my case, I have to run like hell to maintain my body weight at simply “overweight”. I have family history of hypertension, obesity, diabetes – you name it. But I don’t have any of those things. Because I work incredibly hard at not having them.

I don’t hate, or discriminate, against people for being overweight. I love my family and I know how hard it is to stay even reasonably trim, because I have to do it. But the fact is, if you don’t want to be fat, and your legs work, you don’t have to be.

Another is even more blunt:

I am fat.

I have lost 25 pounds since April 1 and I still, according to all the charts, have about 50 to lose before my BMI becomes the high end of normal. I have lost this weight by working out six days a week, watching every calorie and all but eliminating soda and alcohol. The next 25 pounds will be harder and the final 25 pounds will be the hardest yet.

This is genetics. My mother was 5 feet tall and 215 pounds and died two years ago of heart and diabetes issues. My maternal grandmother died at 55 of diabetes. Two maternal uncles, massively obese men, died before their 50th birthdays of heart attacks. I will turn 42 later this month.

This is difficult. I’ve yo-yoed in the past. I could yo-yo again. But here’s the difference: It is physically possible for me to make a massive lifestyle change and lose weight. Unless you are willing to argue that a gay person, through Herculean effort and willpower, can NOT be gay.

I am working too hard to be put into a group where someone else – my ancestors – takes the blame. Fuck you. I am fat and I’m going to not be fat.

To all the fat people out there: Work harder. There are too many people out there who are like what I used to do – donuts for breakfast; pizza buffet for lunch and McDonald’s for dinner. Figure it out. And stop expecting Fat Acceptance. Support? Yes. Encouragement? Yes. Education? Yes.

But never acceptance.

Update from a reader:

I don’t think “FA” is an ideal fit with LGBT, but geez … I’m rolling my eyes pretty hard at the “suck it up, fat people” direction this thread has gone. Yeah, I’m fat too. About 40 lbs more than I should but 60 lbs less than I weighed two years ago. An uncomfortable balancing point between being pretty proud of myself for the work I’ve done but also beating myself up every day that I don’t have the time or will to push for that last 40 yet. And you know what? I don’t need other people, fat or thin, thinking it’s OK to excoriate me for my failure to achieve this!

The poor: suck it up and get a better job!

Addicts: suck it up and kick the habit!

Blacks: suck it up, the Civil War was 150 years ago!

Gays: suck it up – my fancy book says you are an abomination!

So fucking lazy, this argument. Even lazier than my 40 lb overweight fat ass.

Life is a struggle for everyone. We are all in a mind-numbingly difficult spiral of self-improvement and defeat. It’s about treating people with dignity. Is having formal recognition of this a step too far? I don’t know. Have I felt harassed and lessened my entire life for being “fat” even when I was in no danger of poor health but was merely “fat” by beauty standard norms? A bit.

Deep breaths.

I wonder if people offended by the concept of a formalized “fat acceptance” movement would otherwise agree with the assertion that all people should be treated with dignity across race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, AND appearance. I certainly don’t want people’s tastes to be policed. I may be less than perfect for my inability to fully “suck it up” but I’m certainly not less a person.

Jay Pinho – who tracked the Dish’s use of read-ons following independence – turns his analytical eye to the VFYW feature:

The Dish’s View From Your Window posts have been going on for years (since May 22, 2006, in fact), long before the start of the weekly contest. (As of April this year, The Dish had published over 2,700 VFYW photos.) But quite frankly, I had neither the time nor the stamina to log every single View From Your Window throughout The Dish‘s history. (I’m certain there’s some non-manual way to do this via page-scraping or something, but I haven’t figured that out yet.) And anyway, the 1,228 posts I recorded between June 9, 2010 [when the VFYW contest launched] and May 25, 2013 — a period during which The Dish itself was hosted on three separate sites: The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and now independently via WordPress – seemed like a large enough sample size to provide a solid idea of VFYW trends.

As far as I know, this is the first-ever long-term study of the View From Your Window feature. The closest (and much cooler) cousin to this concept that I’ve seen is Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones’ View From Your Window game, in which — with a limited number of guesses available — the contestant must click on the correct sector of a map, as the view zooms in ever closer before finally zeroing in on the location of the photo. But as far as I know, no statistical study of VFYW has ever been conducted. (Cue the drum roll…”until now.”)

Going back through the archives was more fun than it sounds.

(That said, the old military axiom — “It’s 99% boredom punctuated by 1% of sheer terror” — roughly applies here too, although terror should be replaced by something more pedestrian. “Pleasant surprise,” maybe?) Although most daily posts simply contained a photo and a caption listing the city and country, occasionally I’d run across some tearjerking post about a reader’s brother succumbing to his injuries in a hospital from which a VFYW photo was taken, or an admonition from another watchful reader not to include photo EXIF data in the weekly contest. (My personal favorite? My girlfriend’s submission from Alaska while clerking there last year, of course.)

The coincidences, too, were startling — none more so than the case of the reader who responded to the weekly contest by noting that he was sitting, by happenstance, in the very same room where the contest photo had been taken by someone else. And I couldn’t help but laugh at the August 3, 2010 post in which one reader marveled at his fellow contestants: “Gosh, you would think Dish readers could find Bin Laden if you made it into a contest!” Turns out, one did.

Jay goes on to break down a variety of statistics, including the most overrepresented and underrepresented states in the VFYW feature.

(Image: “a map of all View From Your Window locations in the “modern era” — from June 9, 2010, when the VFYW contest was launched, through May 25, 2013.)