A Bahraini boy flashes the v-sign during the funeral of 10-year-old Ali Jaffer Habib, in the village of Malikiya, on August 10, 2013. Habib, according to his family, died after developing cancer due to the inhalation of tear gas fired by security forces earlier in the year. By Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty.
Phil Broughton explains what it takes to be a bartender in Antarctica:
I learned to spot the signs that someone was likely to wander drunkenly into the Antarctic night, and had heard too many stories of people returning to base with hypothermia and frostbite. My theory was that it’s easier to recover from too much drinking than to grow back a missing limb; I was happy only when everyone was safely tucked up and accounted for, even if it meant leaving them passed out on the bar’s couch.
I wasn’t just a detached observer, though; I was as enthusiastic a drinker as most of the patrons. One drawback was the hangovers: after a particularly heavy session, I would have to nip outside to be sick. Any liquid that came into contact with the ice froze immediately and, if left alone, it would remain so for ever. It was a point of honor to clear up after yourself, which meant chipping away with a pickaxe.
Olga Khazan spoke with Broughton last month:
Eventually, workers who were predisposed to seasonal affective disorder were hit hard. The darkness and cold caused sleepiness and memory problems, and over time some of the winter-overs became disoriented and lethargic.
“You were supposed to write copious notes to yourself in a notebook,” Broughton said. “Life gets rough when you can’t remember things. My strangest thing was that I lost complete command of written grammar. And I pretty much don’t remember the month of October.”
There were occasional tee-totalers and plenty of moderate drinkers, but for some, alcohol became a refuge.
“You see things that leave you uncomfortable. There were a good dozen people who were drinking to kill the days — that was hard to watch, and it was hard to serve. Though at some level, I’d rather have you drinking in front of me than drinking on your own.”
Sukhdev Sandhu comments on the rise of the “roaming essay film”:
Essay films, unlike conventional documentaries, are only partly defined by their subject matter. They tend not to follow linear structures, far less to buttonhole viewers in the style of a PowerPoint presentation or a bullet-pointed memo; rather, in the spirit of Montaigne or even Hazlitt, they are often digressive, associative, self-reflexive. Just as the word essay has its etymological roots in the French “essai” – to try – essay film-makers commonly foreground the process of thought and the labour of constructing a narrative rather than aiming for seamless artefacts that conceal the conceptual questions that went into their making. Incompletion, loose ends, directorial inadequacy: these are acknowledged rather than brushed over. …
Some of these films started life on television, but these days it is the gallery sector that is more likely to commission or screen essay films, which are attracting ever more sizable audiences, especially younger people who have been weaned on cheap editing software, platforms such as Tumblr and the archival riches at YouTube and UbuWeb. Visually literate and semiotically savvy, they have tools – conceptual as well as technological – not only to critique and curate (moving) images, but to capture and assemble them. Having grown up in the era of LiveJournal and Facebook, they are also used to experimenting with personal identity in public; RSS feeds and news filters have brought them to a point where the essay film’s fascination with investigating social mediation and the construction of reality is second nature. It could well be that the essay film – for so long a bastard form, an unclassifiable and barely studied hybrid, opaque even to cinephiles – is ready to come into its own.
(Video: A clip from Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003))
And, of course, it’s very close to being true. The decision to release prisoners jailed for barbaric acts of terrorist violence rather than freeze or stop a single West Bank settlement is a revealing one, don’t you think? Netanyahu would rather rub salt in the wounds of still-grieving relatives of terror victims than mess with a single hair on a settler’s head. The settlements are the hill this country now seems prepared to die on.
I have stopped believing that a majority in Israel wants a two-state solution. Because the wealth of evidence belies it. Yes, of course I want the talks to proceed. But whereas I once thought they’d almost certainly founder because of Palestinian intransigence, I now think Israel’s fundamentalist right is the real problem. And they have absolutely no intention of conceding an inch of what they believe God gave them.
Reviewing Caleb Crain’s new novel, Necessary Errors, Zeke Turner plumbs its central theme – “Can a change of scenery solve problems we have with ourselves? Has an existential crisis ever had a geographical solution?”:
As Jacob grows into his new universe, Crain neatly develops the paradoxes at the heart of life abroad, chief among them the reality that beginning to feel comfortable in a strange place can mean losing a sense of home. The more homes you make, in other words, the more lost you feel. “I don’t know what I am in America,” Jacob says to a group of chemists who want to know about his life in the US, which he must inevitably return to. Just as Jacob feels like a phony when he talks about himself as a writer, he feels equally unsure about himself in relationships with men. Jacob doesn’t see himself in the behaviors and values ascribed to gay men, and he has to reconcile his own values and ambitions with his expectations. Luckily, being abroad gives him space to do this work.
In an interview, Caleb (an old friend whose novel refers to an abstract version of me) discusses his book and the limits of nonfiction:
[W]hen I was a reporter, I remember thinking that there are times when you find out in the process of reporting certain things. And you realize, I just can never print this. The social reality is so complicated and so delicate that the whole process of fact-checking would destroy it. I feel like there are certain kinds of social reality that can only be portrayed on the understanding that it’s fiction.
In honor of last night’s kickass season premiere:
Noah Berlatsky, an introvert married to another introvert whose son turned out to be an extroverted aspiring actor, muses on what he’s learned from having such a different child:
Part of what’s great about it is, of course, just that it’s fun to see your kid do something well, and to see him love doing something well. Part of why he’s good at drama is because you can just feel the joy coming off him when he’s performing. Everybody likes to see their child happy.
But another part of what’s fun about watching him be a thespian is the fact that being a thespian is so thoroughly not something I did, or am. Obviously, it’s great too when your child loves something you love — teaching him to swim was one of the high points of my life. But there’s also something special about realizing that he’s going to be able to do all these things you couldn’t do, or didn’t even try. Or, even more than that, just realizing that he’s not you, or even a combination of you and your spouse, but is instead this whole different person, center stage in his own life, who you get to love.
“I think [Edward] Snowden might end up being the John Brown of the 21st Century—reviled and unpopular but unleashing a debate that led to the rebirth of freedom. Republicans like John Boehner and John McCain are with Barack Obama against Snowden. But let’s face it, [Snowden’s] perspective is more consistent with rugged individualism and privacy and everything that comes along with traditional conservatism. Isn’t it interesting that the more invectives are hurled at Snowden (by the establishment), the more the numbers rise in his favor?” – Craig Shirley, GOP consultant and Reagan biographer.
Daniel McCarthy compiles an impressive roster of right-wing support for Snowden.
Isaac Chotiner notes the dismal performance of this summer’s blockbuster season and wonders what studios will learn from it:
The most sanguine possibility is that you look over this roster of dreck and decide to make fewer derivative and dumb movies. (Oblivion, After Earth, and Elysium all have a similar plot; White House Down was nearly identical to this spring’s hit Olympus Has Fallen).
Still, it’s easy to imagine Hollywood studios learning precisely the opposite lesson. The problem isn’t derivative movies, the thinking might go; in fact, the most derivative movies sell. Superheroes sell. Enough of these new and risky products like R.I.P.D. and Lone Ranger: just look at where quirkiness gets you. Instead of taking a bet on an original (albeit not very good) movie like Elysium, why not make Grown-Ups 3, even if no one is exactly begging for it? Instead of White House Down, how about paying Robert Downey Jr. an extra $15 million above-and-beyond his already otherwordly salary for another Iron Man? It’s true that every studio needs to keep creating franchises as well as nurturing its existing ones. But who is to say that an extra sequel can’t be made, and that the new projects cannot just be reboots. No, the real lesson of the summer might very well be that audiences want what they already know. Don’t expect much to change.
Alex Mayyasi suggests Hollywood take a page from Silicon Valley’s book:
Despite their similarities … Silicon Valley and Hollywood have similar failure rates for opposite reasons. Silicon Valley doesn’t know what a future success looks like – every investor has a story about passing on a company like Facebook, Google, or Pinterest because it seemed unlikely to succeed or even stupid – so it accepts risk and celebrates it.
Hollywood knows what success usually looks like (it’s a sequel and tends to wear a cape). But pure repetition is not a sure thing (see the recent flop The Lone Ranger – a reboot of a classic story that was also Pirates of the Caribbean retreated as a Western) and it will miss out on surprise hits like Forest Gump.
Catherine Rampell investigates which movies pull in the most money, under the assumption that the answer would be low-budget horror films:
The genre with the biggest box office R.O.I. was actually documentary, with domestic box office
returns averaging 12 times the original production budget, and global returns at nearly 27 times the original budget. Of course, documentaries are generally much cheaper to make than other genres, averaging about $2.6 million in production budget versus $95 million for action films (unadjusted for inflation). So it makes sense that for the small subset of documentaries that do well (remember, these averages include only those films with domestic grosses above $2 million), the R.O.I. can be enormous.
What would the summer be without the occasional diverting obituary from the Daily Telegraph? This one has obscure royal lineage rules, mafia bosses and an avalanche in the Alps that killed the prince at the age of 44.
The Dish 