Month: October 2013

Bringing Outer Space Down To Earth

Megan Garber focuses on how the blockbuster thriller Gravity turned space from a mere setting into a true “environment”:

Gravity represents a reversal from most other entries in the “SpaceFlick” genre. Most of Hollywood’s iconic portrayals of the world beyond our own—epics, almost by default—tend to be macrocosmic, rather than micro-, in scope. They concern themselves, in pretty much every way, with wide angles rather than short. And those perspectives translate to the films’ characters, too: The main players tend to be communities and systems, collectives that wage a kind of Red Rover game against space and all its complexities. The Empire in Star Wars. The Starfleet in Star Trek. The Nostromo in Alien. The NASA of Apollo 13. The deep-core drillers of Armageddon.  The assorted nerds of Contact. Within the worlds of most traditional SpaceFlicks, there are certainly men who take steps; the films’ main concerns, however, are the great leaps taken on behalf of mankind.

J. Hoberman was also sold on the film’s depiction of space as an unpredictable, nail-biting environment:

With only two actors and a single situation, the movie is stripped down and elemental. It focuses on the minutiae of individual survival and—after a brief, wacky paean to the pleasures of swanning around in outer space—is suffused with metaphysical dread. …

The anxiety rarely abates even as the debris storms from broken-up satellites that plague the astronauts—whizzing shards of lethal confetti, explosions so violent the entire screen seems to disintegrate—provide the movie with its most visually enthralling moments. Maximum tension is derived from [Sandra] Bullock’s repeated attempts to find something, anything to hold on to. In 2001, space has a majestic indifference. In Gravity, space is an active threat. The precariousness of existence is a visual constant.

Contrasting the film with Kubrick’s 2001, Paul Wells contends that Gravity demonstrates America’s diminished interest in space exploration:

Pull back the cameras. Look at the assumptions about humanity’s place in space. Kubrick’s vision was grand. He depicted routine trips by tourists to orbit, colonies circling the earth and on the moon, astronauts on their way to Jupiter, and a humanity whose destiny is the stars. [Gravity director Alfonso] Cuarón shows technicians futzing around among three space stations, two of them decrepit, with no greater hope than to make it back down to Earth where they belong. It’s a fair measure of how far most people’s ambitions for space travel have collapsed in 45 years.

Cuarón’s done nothing wrong here. He’s operating within the assumptions of his time, as Kubrick was in his.

Recent Dish on Gravity here and here.

Isolation Incites Violence

Andrew Gumbel explains:

Prisoners going into solitary [confinement] sometimes imagine they can take advantage of their isolation to read, or study, or develop an interest in painting, but, invariably, they grow listless and unfocused within just a few days — unable to concentrate for even short periods of time. In a 2003 paper, Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “There is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days […] failed to result in negative psychological effects.”

The evidence of these studies clearly contradicts the official line that isolating prisoners is a necessary measure to reduce prison violence.

Violent incidents at California prisons have actually increased by almost 20 percent since Pelican Bay opened and long-term isolation became institutionalized statewide. When a national commission spearheaded by a retired federal appeals judge and a former US attorney general looked into the matter in 2006, they concluded that responsibility for prison violence lay primarily with the prison authorities, not the prisoners themselves. A system that either packs prisoners into overcrowded cells or isolates them, then fails to provide an adequate daily structure of work, exercise, reading and socializing, is a system ready to explode.

Previous Dish on solitary confinement here, here, and here.

Big Pharma’s Chokehold

Dr. Russell Sanders fumes after reading a NYT report on how drug companies price-gouge kids with asthma. One company, for example, charges Americans $250 for a nasal spray that retails for $7 in Europe:

I learned of this revolting turn of events a couple of years ago when a mother asked if there were an alternative I could prescribe for her child’s Flovent. Inhaled fluticasone is one of the most commonly used medications for patients with persistent asthma, a low-dose steroid that calms the chronic inflammation that predisposes these patients’ airways to spasm. Generic fluticasone was the medication I intended to prescribe (or, rather, renew) to keep this particular patient’s asthma in good control, thereby obviating the risk that she would have worsening of her illness and possibly end up hospitalized. She had no option to do without it.

“Why would she be getting Flovent?” I asked. “Fluticasone has been around for a million years.  I’m sure it’s available as a generic.” No.  Because of the requirement that CFCs no longer be used as propellants, all inhalers are shiny new hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) products.  Which meant new patents and much, much higher prices.  For the exact same medication. … [A]s the Times article makes very clear, the utter lack of cost control and patent regulation on these life-saving medications means pharmaceutical companies gouge my patients to their heart’s content.

Drum notes that Big Pharma invented this new stranglehold:

[T]he ozone layer was the initial cause of all this, so feel free to place some of the blame on environmentalists if you like. But as it turns out, scientists raised some early concerns about the inhaler ban because the replacement for CFCs was a powerful greenhouse gas. So they suggested that maybe it was better just to make an exception for asthma inhalers and let well enough alone. At that point, the pharmaceutical companies that had been eagerly waiting for the old inhalers to be banned went on the offensive. … [They] didn’t just take advantage of this situation, they actively worked to create this situation. Given the minuscule impact of CFC-based inhalers on the ozone layer, it’s likely that an exception could have been agreed to if pharmaceutical companies hadn’t lobbied so hard to get rid of them. The result is lower-quality inhalers and fantastically higher profits for Big Pharma.

History Of The Guitar Solo, Ctd

A reader responds to a recent post:

I loved watching that video you featured, but it leaves out THE father of the guitar solo, Django Reinhardt. Watch this unembeddable video from about 2:27 on. First a duet, then in a band setting, Django – a gypsy – was playing guitar solos long before Chuck Berry (let alone British rockers trying to copy him or B.B. King), most likely live in the 1920s, and certainly on record as a soloist by 1934. That video is the only known one of Django in which the sound syncs up to the visuals; watch his left hand, and you’ll see that he can play rhythm/chords with four fingers and his thumb, but he could only play melody with TWO fingers. A caravan fire had mutilated his hand, but just look at how he compensated!  [The video embedded above] is an even more awe-inspiring demonstration of his abilities.

American Charlie Christian was Django’s only real contemporary, but due to failing health, he was only active from 1939 to 1941. Django, on the other hand, played from the 1920s until his death in 1953, leaving a staggeringly large catalog of material.  He remains the most influential European jazz musician to this day.

As a guitar player, I had always wondered where guitar solos really came from. It didn’t make sense to me that one day we had delta bluesmen like Son House and Robert Johnson, and then it somehow morphed so quickly into Chess Records and rock ‘n roll.  Then I heard Django, and it all really fell into place.  He brought together the type of musical tradition only a gypsy could, combining the fiery playing of Spanish Flamencos to the popular music of his day (musette), and then adding in American jazz.  B.B. King counts him as an influence, which plants the seed of his soloing back into American hands, and lo and behold, there’s the answer. Most guitar players (let alone music lovers) don’t realize that the man most responsible for taking the guitar from an instrument purely used as part of the rhythm section into the limelight of soloing is a Belgian gypsy with a funny name (in Romany, Django means “I awake”).

One last piece of trivia: his most famous song, Nuages, was the anthem of occupied France during WWII.  It became his signature tune, one he carried with him in his switch over to the electric guitar (around 1946).  This version of it is from his electric guitar/bebop-era:

It’s drenched with pinch/artificial harmonics and rapid-fire playing, the type of work later “guitar heroes” are famous for.

Update from a reader:

Your correspondent has no idea what he’s talking about. Django was great, sure, but there were many who preceded him. The best of which, to my mind and ear, is Eddie Lang (Born Salvatore Massaro in Philly in 1902), who was also one of Reinhardt’s inspirations. He accompanied Bix Biederbecke and Frank Trumbauer on their landmark recordings, including “Singin’ the Blues,” made records with Lonnie Johnson (as Blind Willie Dunn … can’t have whites and blacks playing together), and became Bing Crosby’s accompanist before dying of a botched tonsillectomy in 1933 at the age of 30. His recordings with violinist Joe Venuti paved the way for Django’s partnership with Stephane Grappeli. Here he is with Bix and Tram on “For No Reason At All In C”:

To all your readers, you’re welcome.

When Pumpkins Weren’t Popular

The gourd’s omnipresence today is a far cry from centuries past:

[P]umpkins have been associated with stupidity since the Roman philosopher Seneca auspicated the tradition of “pumpkinheads” in his rebuke of Emperor Claudius. And Falstaff, dum-dum par excellence, is characterized by Shakespeare as a “gross watery pumpion [pumpkin]” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Like Claudius (and sort of Falstaff), the anthropomorphic pumpkin is always foolish yet aggressive: Before there were scarecrows and jack-o’-lanterns, Americans traded folk tales about animated vines and pumpkins so huge they had to be harvested by teams of axe-wielders, only to find their faith belied by a family of pigs trapped inside. …

[P]umpkin was decidedly low class. New Englanders were called “Brother Jonathan and pumpkin pie” to signify their bumpkinhood and Puritans demeaned the pumpkin as callow and ill-restrained when they chastised—yes, chastised—Thanksgiving feasts as “St. Pompion’s Day.” Up until the 19th century, pumpkin was eaten primarily as slave and hog feed or as a poor man’s alternative to sugar cane, molasses, or malt.

Updates from a few readers:

Your post about pumpkins is interesting, except that the first paragraph has its facts all wrong.

There were no pumpkins for the Roman philosopher Seneca to compare Claudius or anyone else to; and likely but less certainly, there were no pumpkins in England in Shakespeare’s time. Pumpkins are a member of the squash (and melon) family: purely a New World crop. No European saw a pumpkin until the so-called Columbian Exchange, in which squash, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, most beans, and peppers from the chili family came to the Old Word; and wheat, rice, citrus, apples, cabbage and much more came to the New World. (Thus Italy was without tomato sauce, Ireland and England without chips, Thailand without most hot peppers and peanuts.) Pumpkins in particular appear not to have been grown in England until after 1700. It is a matter for speculation what sort of gourd-like crop Seneca and Falstaff (via Shakespeare) actually had in mind.

Another:

The notion that Claudius was compared to a pumpkin is the result of overly imaginative translation. The Apocolocyntosis Claudii, an anonymous text attributed to Seneca the Younger, was given its title by Dio Cassius. Roman emperors, of course, claimed that they became gods upon their deaths; the name for the process was “apotheosis”, the process of deification. Apocolocyntosis is a satirical pun on apotheosis. Latin trots dating at least as far back as Robert Graves popularized the translation of “apocolocyntosis” as “pumpkinification”, but a less anachronistic translation might be “gourdification”.

But the title doesn’t really have much to do with the work proper, in which Claudius winds up spending eternity as a law clerk in the underworld rather than a vegetable of any kind. Chris Young suggested a superb title for the work, “The Ascension of the Living Gourd”, inasmuch as Claudius was being mocked for his fat head rather than for actually becoming a fleshy fruit.

The Glass Ceiling For Corporate Fraud

Dina ElBoghdady describes it:

Just nine percent of those who commit major corporate fraud are women, according to a recent study published in the American Sociological Review. … By major, [DoJ officials] mean cases involving fraud to cover up a corporation’s true financial health, Ponzi schemes and insider trading as opposed to low-profit schemes such as embezzlement, where some studies suggest that women are on near equal footing with men.

Reasons for the disparity:

[W]omen are less likely to occupy the top management positions that open up some opportunities for lucrative financial fraud, said Darrell Steffensmeier, lead author of the study and a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University. … But there’s also a more nuanced side to the gender gap. For starters, the old boys’ network thrives in corporate crime schemes, which tend to be group-centric, Steffensmeier said. Women are bypassed when opportunities arise. “Men lead these conspiracies, and men generally prefer to work with men,” Steffensmeier said. “If they do use women, they use them because they have a certain utility or they have a personal relationship with that woman and they trust her.” Gender expectations and risk preferences also play a role. Even if women had equal opportunities to commit a serious corporate crime, they are less likely to take risks for economic gain, according to the study.

Reconstructing Genocide

Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has devoted his career to documenting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. His newest documentary, The Missing Picture, takes an inspired approach to a dearth of visual evidence from that period (1975-79), when all existing photos and films were created by Pol Pot’s propaganda machine:

To make up for the pictures we don’t have, Panh uses small clay figurines, hundreds of them, painted, clothed, with individual expressions on their faces, and placed in meticulously detailed dioramas that he seems to have reconstructed from the memories of his youth.

Among the first of these is a figure of Panh’s father, an official in the Ministry of Education in a white suit and dark tie who, in what Panh eventually came to see as a heroic act of resistance, starved himself to death rather than allowing himself to be treated as a farm animal by Cambodia’s rulers. There are scenes of Khmer Rouge hospitals where patients lay on beds of wooden planks. And, then there’s the scene in a village, again recreated with clay figurines, in which a nine year-old child who denounces his mother for eating a mango, an act of selfish individualism. Afterwards she is led into the forest and never returns.

These clay statuettes, never before used by Panh in any of his earlier work, cannot, of course, fully depict the horror of the Khmer Rouge story. They are necessarily silent, immobile, and therefore devoid of the intensity of those moments in other Panh films where his camera bores in on the face of a witness and lingers there as he remembers what happened, or what he did. But as Panh’s narration in the new film proceeds, the statuettes take on a reality of their own, a voodoo-like power, their individual features an aid to avoiding what might otherwise be a kind of depersonalizing abstraction.

The Act of Killing is another critically acclaimed film this year to delve into the representations of genocide, in this case the Indonesian mass killings of the Suharto regime. The Dish covered that film here.

Why Don’t Americans Have Bike Barriers? Ctd

A reader writes:

There may be something to Fleming’s argument; I know of at least one cycling activist in Chapel Hill, NC who’s against bike lanes altogether on the ground that motorists need to accept that cyclists have an equal right to the road.  But there are other issues with bike barriers.  Here in Nashville, bike lanes have been slowly installed on existing streets, but they begin and end arbitrarily and are designed to accommodate both traffic and parking.  I have bike lanes on my home street, but three blocks down from me is a sizable university and restaurant district, where double-parking in the lanes (including by semis) is rife, and the university administration is more concerned with pressuring the city to provide on-street parking than it is with bike safety.   Politically, barriers are nonstarters here.

I’d also add that the bike lane failed to prevent me from nearly getting killed four years ago when a motorist made a left turn right into me.  As I understand it, most car-bike collisions result from cars turning across the lane at intersections or coming off a side street; barriers would do nothing to prevent those.

Read here for a good illustration of that point.  Another reader:

I’m an avid user of New York City’s new CitiBike bike-share program. For two decades, my perhaps wild-eyed theory about city cycling was that it’s considerably safer than cycling in the suburbs or in rural locations: despite the menace of getting doored, urban traffic tends to be slow and relatively predictable compared with cycling in settings where you literally never know what could come zooming around a bend.

But I must admit that a couple of months on CitiBikes has shaken my faith in my urban-cycling theory.

The problem isn’t taxis and trucks. It’s pedestrians and other cyclists. Pedestrians aren’t yet conditioned to look for thousands of additional bikes before stepping off the curb – I’ve had to scream at (and terrify) a few people to prevent either of us getting killed. Even worse are cyclists who “salmon” – riding the wrong way on one-way lanes. Store messengers are bad enough, but they ride very carefully. The real threat is other Citibikers, who I often see blithely riding in the wrong direction, without helmets, and with earbuds plugged in. They seem to believe they’re not riding actual bicycles in the middle of an actual city. They also happen to be breaking the law, and I really wish New York City’s police would ticket them. A week of tickets and the bike lanes would become a lot safer.