Month: June 2014

Praise Be To Presbyterians

A reader points to some fantastic news (NYT):

Just wanted you to know that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church voted on Thursday to allow same sex marriages in states where they are already legal. My Dad, a Presbyterian minister, is thrilled to finally be able to marry same sex couples within his church. This is probably under the radar, but I think it is huge for common society to have a large national mainstream church recognize this right for all loving couples. Progress!

Another Presby writes:

I know we’re a bit late to the marriage equality game, but we’ve been at this conversation for a long time and this is a day to rejoice for so many of us in our little corner of the church. By a strong majority (61%-39%), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) at its biennial assembly in Detroit voted to allow ministers to officiate at weddings of same-sex couples in states where it is legal. (The technical language is that this is an “authoritative interpretation” of our constitution by our most inclusive governing body.) It takes effect immediately. Presbyterians who love their church may be married by their own pastors as early as this Sunday if they wish. As a young adult minister who serves this denomination, I could not be more grateful.

Later that afternoon we also voted to change our constitutional definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” This passed by an even wider margin (approximately 71%-29%). This change must be ratified by a majority of our presbyteries (regional governing bodies – we have 172 of them) in the next year, but the hope is that it will pass with flying colors.

We have so much to be grateful for. As you would say, “know hope.” As it turns out, our theme for this year’s general assembly is “Abound in Hope,” drawn from language from chapter 15 of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Behind The Screens

When the new Transformers movie, Age of Extinction, began filming in Chicago last year, Kevin B. Lee decided to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about how the filming affected the city. But he wasn’t the only one; he noticed “dozens of people standing across the street, most of them holding phones and cameras, doing the same thing I was doing.” So his project, Transformers: The Premake, took a twist:

The original idea for the Transformers documentary grew out of my dissatisfactions as a freelance film critic who spent most of his waking hours in front of screens. … Part of the reason I backed away from work as a critic and went to graduate school was so that I could spend more of my time interacting with people face to face. Similarly, I chose a film project that would allow me to connect with the physical realities behind the media that gets served up on our various screens.

But my encounters with so many other people filming their own videos made me rethink my whole approach. Frankly, it humbled me as a filmmaker, because it drove home the realization that everyone is a filmmaker now. I also realized that everyone in their own way was making their own version of Transformers, based on the small privileged glimpses they had of this massive production. I started to notice these videos popping up on YouTube, and not just from Chicago, but from Utah, Texas, Detroit, Hong Kong. After a weekend of keyword-spelunking through the caves of YouTube, I emerged with 355 videos that documented the production. In a sense, the documentary of the making of Transformers had already been made, in 355 pieces. Now it was a matter of figuring out how the pieces fit together.

Noel Murray appreciates the end result:

[W]hile Transformers: The Premake’s insights into modern life and modern moviemaking are depressing, the movie itself is anything but. Lee’s not really scolding the fans here; The Premake seems to acknowledge that big blockbuster explosions are fun to watch, and that it’s genuinely thrilling to catch a glimpse of Mark Wahlberg on the other side of a barricade. …

Transformers: The Premake is about the increasingly long cycle of build-up to the release of a major motion picture, and how studios defray the staggering costs by getting communities to provide tax breaks, and convincing local governments and businesses to work for them for nothing. Lee explores the myriad aspects of the complex ecosystem that’s developed, up to and including the way that studios allow some fans to hype their films for them, but shut others down. Lee puts it all together cleverly, contrasting the state censorship of China with the relatively benign (but still irritating) copyright claims of Paramount, and conveying the surreal experience of sitting inside of a Starbucks and watching a city pretend-crumble outside. In the end, Lee takes his cues from a piece of Age Of Extinction set dressing: a giant poster from the Chicago location that reads, “Report Alien Activity.” Transformers: The Premake does just that, thoroughly and entertainingly.

The full 25-minute documentary can be seen above. The Dish previously featured a browser-based short film here.

The Most Influential Rock Band Of All Time?

http://youtu.be/jtN8oBjMr_E

Jack Hamilton nominates Zeppelin:

Depending on your preference in white male hagiography, “modern” rock music is often said to have started with Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” or Sgt. Pepper, but these myths are wishful, and overly fanciful: Modern rock music started with Led Zeppelin. Their influence, for better and worse, over all that’s come since is singular. Punk in the 1970s was a rejection of their pompous pretentiousness, metal in the 1980s an affirmation of their excesses, grunge in the 1990s a reclamation of punk that often sounded a lot like Led Zeppelin. We have Led Zeppelin to blame for Creed; we have Led Zeppelin to thank for the White Stripes. They were a band loved by millions, but if you were smart, or just cool, you probably hated them. Led Zeppelin lifted popular music to new heights of opulence and ambition and in doing so made people fear for its future. … Forty-five years later, we live in their aftershocks.

The Picture Of Controversy

Early into his long profile of Terry Richardson, Benjamin Wallace sums up why the fashion photographer holds “a singular, controversial position” in his field:

He has cultivated a reputation of being a professional debauchee, a proud pervert dish_richardson who has, outside his commercial work, produced a series of extremely explicit images—often including himself naked and erect—that many find pornographic and misogynistic, and which can make viewers distinctly uncomfortable. In recent years, a number of the models in those images have indicated that they, too, weren’t altogether comfortable, filing lawsuits and, increasingly, speaking up in essays and interviews. Richardson has been called “the world’s most fucked up fashion photographer” by the website Jezebel, “fashion’s shameful secret” by the Guardian, and “America’s Next Top Scumbag” by Wonkette. Baron von Luxxury, a Los Angeles DJ, wrote a song called “Terry Richardson” with the lyrics “She’ll have a few more sedatives / I’ll have whatever comes next / And then I’ll burn the negatives.”

Callie Beusman rips Wallace to shreds for “consistently gloss[ing] over Richardson’s sketchy behavior.” Robyn Pennacchia shakes her head in disgust, and Mary Elizabeth Williams is also unsympathetic:

There are, to be fair, references to lawsuits “quietly settled” and some of the more vivid and troubling stories about the photographer, including Charlotte Waters’ account from earlier this year of a session in which “He also straddled me and started jerking off on my face. He told me to keep my eyes open super wide.” But the overwhelming image is of a man who grew up listening to his father banging Anjelica Huston in the next room and struggled with addiction, who now “meditates and attends AA meetings and exercises daily” but still “obviously misses the old Terry.” …

I find it more damning than anything else out there written about him, because it shows a man of deeply arrested maturity, a man who lives in “always the same clothing, always the same pose in front of the camera, always the same sandwich.” I don’t find understanding some of the reasons someone might be selfish and unfeeling toward vulnerable women any excuse at all; I just find it, if anything, more compelling evidence of the credibility of his accusers.

One of those accusers is Anna del Gaizo, who says she is bothered by “the fact that this man, who has announced with his actions that his desires, fantasies, and yes, his raging boner are more important than another human being’s state of mind or consequential distress, continues to be revered, hired, and supported by celebrities, professionals, and publications alike. And that’s really the problem here.” Tom Hawking, who finds Wallace’s profile “startlingly sympathetic,” doesn’t disagree:

The quality of Richardson’s art is beside the point. Throughout history, societies have been notably willing to indulge the whims of those it deems to be worthy artists, from the catankerous to the thoroughly unpleasant to the downright criminal. To an extent, this comes back to the good old question of art/artist separation. But … Richardson’s life and his art are so intertwined that it’s impossible to separate them. …

[W]e return [to] the fact that we’re talking about consent and exploitation, about a man coercing young women into situations they find threatening, and/or to do things they might be reluctant to do, or simply just don’t want to do. Richardson is a grown man in a position of power, and the accusation is that he has exploited this power to, in his own words, become “a powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls.” Sure, it’s perversely fascinating to know why this might be. But ultimately, the only really important question is how to stop it.

Related Dish on the conundrum of great art and its perverted purveyors here. Update from a reader:

Everybody acts like the Richardson situation is complicated, like it’s about whether or not its OK to explore sex in a passionate way, or if its OK to make art with strong sexual content. But I don’t think that’s what’s at issue here. It’s a pretty simple question of consent.

Richardson takes work situations and makes them sexual without explaining what’s going to happen upfront. He starts to shift things while the work is in progress, when the models are expected, by the conventions of their industry, to do what Richardson tells them to do. I assume it’s true that at least some women are glad to have an exciting experience, and to get really good photos from him. But it’s indisputably true that many, many other women feel pressured and uncomfortable, and in extreme cases, deeply violated by what he does.

If Richardson would fully disclose to the modeling agencies and models what he’s going to do, it would be ok. If Richardson said to a modeling agency, “Please send over an 18-year-old woman for a shoot, who is ok with my being naked during the shoot, and putting my penis in her mouth,” it would be better. If before the whole thing started, someone sat down with the young woman and said, “OK, this is what’s about to happen, we want to make sure you know about it ahead of time, and we want to be sure you’re ok with it,” then it would be a lot easier to defend.

But that’s not what he does. He takes young women who are desperate to break into the industry, starts doing a traditional shoot, and then transforms the whole thing into a porn shoot without any prior negotiation.

It’s not the sex that’s the problem. It’s ok to make porn movies, because the people who make porn movies all know what they’re doing, and go into the shoots. If someone goes to kink.com to shoot a movie, they know what they’re doing. But if, on the other hand, someone took a job as a lab technician at a pharma company, and found everything getting super freaky on their first day of work, with no prior warning or prior consent, that would be really wrong.

I’m uptight about sex, and I’m not exactly a sex positive person. But the sex life I have had has revolved mostly around BDSM, and consent is what makes BDSM possible. It’s not prudish to insist upon consent; it’s quite the opposite, because when you have clear communication and consent, the universe of what you can do expands enormously. Sexual freedom is predicated on the idea that adults can talk to one another about what they want, and ought to be free to participate or not, depending on how they feel about it. That’s what a sexually free world looks like.

Richardson acts like it’s his raw sensuality that causes all his problems. But there are lots of people making erotic images who manage to handle consent properly. It’s not like he wouldn’t be able to find collaborators in his projects who would be excited to work with him.

(Photo of Terry Richardson by Dave Tada)

A Flirty Fail

Your next attempt to flirt will most likely bomb, if a new study is any indication:

People – both men and women – are just not very good at recognizing flirty behavior, new research shows. The study paired up 52 college women and 52 college men, sat them in a room, and told them to talk for ten minutes. Afterward, the participants were each asked (separately) whether they’d flirted a little with their conversational partner, and whether they thought their partner had flirted. Both men and women were very good at judging when someone was not flirting; more than 80 percent of the pairs could correctly sense a just-friends situation, the researchers found. But they were less accurate at recognizing when someone was flirting; men only answered correctly 36 percent of the time, and women judged accurately 18 percent of the time.

Rachel Raczka adds:

At the end of the study, the researchers concluded that flirting is decoded and deciphered by humans in the similar way we detect lying. Hall said that humans tend to have difficulty spotting a liar because the common assumption is that people are telling the truth. Flirting — as well-intended as it can occasionally be – falls into a likewise category, and most people require third-party confirmation to recognize.

Or perhaps students at the University of Kansas just skew awkward?

The Trophy Wife Myth

A new study undercuts it:

To get to the bottom of the trophy wife myth, relationship inequality researcher Elizabeth McClintock analyzed attractiveness ratings, professions and socioeconomic backgrounds of couples from a nationally representative survey. McClintock combed the data for statistical correlations, looking for hints that successful men pair with attractive women.

She found, however, that attractive women weren’t necessarily pairing with rich guys – they were pairing with attractive guys. Like tends to attract like. The biggest statistical predictors of whether two people would get together were how similar they were in their educational background, race, attractiveness and religious views.

As Claire Hannum notes, a lot of previous research on the subject was flawed in a way that seems pretty obvious in retrospect:

In examining couples, [previous] researchers only looked at the women’s appearance and the men’s status and disregarded data on women’s status or men’s attractiveness. They were so certain they’d find a specific result (in this case, proof of exchange relationships) that the studies were skewed. More problematic to the skewed data is the fact that rich people are more likely to be good-looking, and vice-versa. …

Young women who marry these rich old dudes could easily have just as much status as their husbands, like the correlation between wealth and looks hints toward. By overlooking a full half of the equation and not even studying these ladies’ status level, researchers could have missed the fact that plenty of the supposed “trophy wife” marriages were actually matches rather than exchanges.

Jesse Singal observes, “McClintock’s study touches on some extremely important, fundamental questions about how we deal with gender in the social sciences”:

No one study can conclusively disprove the idea of beauty-status exchange, but this one certainly puts a sizable dent in it, and it offers a rather compelling-seeming reason as to how so many researchers could have come to believe this idea in the first place. …

Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern who studies relationships but who wasn’t involved in this study, expanded on this point in an email. “Scientists are humans, too, and we can be inadvertently blinded by their beliefs about how the world works,” he said. “The studies that only looked at men’s (but not women’s) income and only looked at women’s (but not men’s) attractiveness were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that allowed flawed papers like that to be published. Fortunately, cases like that are the exception rather than the rule, and science tends to do a good job of ferretting them out. That’s what McClintock has done here.”

Update from a reader:

Too bad the episode of Tales From The Crypt that you featured didn’t include Danny Elfman’s great funny/scary intro. (It’s no wonder Tim Burton tapped him to do the songs for The Nightmare Before Christmas.) At 40 seconds into it, we get to hear the greatest squeaking door sound effect ever. I always wondered who created it, when, and in what other movies it’s been used. It never fails to make me giggle.

Listen for yourself:

Growing Pains

dish_weedpic

Lee Ellis traverses California’s “Emerald Triangle” – the marijuana-growing counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity – and discovers the pressures facing growers like Ethan and Brianna:

Humboldt strictures cap the number of plants allowed per medical user at ninety-nine. “Ninety-nine, you’re fine,” goes the growers’ jingle. If you cultivate the maximum, though, the diameter of each plant’s canopy can’t exceed one foot. Seriously ill residents have their choice of growing a whole field of dainty plants or a handful of mammoths, but, either way, to stay legal they can’t have more than ninety-nine square feet of marijuana canopy. An average [cannabis strain] Longshot specimen has colas—the crowns of the marijuana plant—that, when combined, stretch four feet across, with torsos twice that size. In terms of yield, probably one of Ethan’s plants hit the ceiling on medical, Brianna told me; if this was true, the farm was over the limit by 749 plants.

And yet California, long the marijuana movement’s pacesetter, and a haven for high-capacity growers, finds itself in the perhaps-unwelcome position of losing outlaws like Ethan. Should the state follow Colorado’s and Washington’s leads in legalizing recreational use, as is expected, already-fragile economies in the north—specifically in the “Emerald Triangle” of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, home to some quarter of a million people—could be crippled. The “prohibition premium” that keeps marijuana prices, and those economies, aloft would fall, possibly so precipitously that many growers would lose their incentive and (perhaps ironically) leave for more-punitive regions. In recent years, many growers have reportedly left California for places like Wisconsin and North Carolina—markets where a pound of marijuana might fetch double what it does in the Golden State. Legalization helps keep growers out of jail, but regulation slashes their profit margins.

(Photo by Flickr user eggrole)

Prose For The Road

Reviewing Patrick Leigh Fermor’s posthumously published The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, Daniel Mendelsohn samples the charms of the man “considered by some to be the greatest travel writer of the twentieth century”:

The author’s chattiness, his inexhaustible willingness to be distracted, his susceptibility to detours geographical, intellectual, aesthetic, and occasionally amorous constitute, if anything, an essential and self-conscious component of the style that has won him such an avid following. It has more than a little in common with the “centrifugal lambency and recoil” he found in Central European design, the “swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous” aesthetic that he so extravagantly admired in a picture of Maximilian I’s knights, which he came across one night while leafing through a book on German history in the luxurious apartment of a charming girl he met and ended up staying with in Stuttgart. (The strange new city, the chance meeting, the aesthetic reverie, the hints of money and eros: this would prove to be the pattern of the young man’s progress across the continent.)

It is indeed odd that, among the many classical authors to whom Leigh Fermor refers in his writing—none more famously than Horace, verses of whose Soracte Ode the author found himself swapping, in Latin, with a German general he had kidnapped on Crete during World War II, a famous incident that was later turned into a film starring Dirk Bogarde—Herodotus does not figure more prominently. There is no writer whose technique Leigh Fermor’s more closely resembles. Expansive, meandering, circular, it allows him to weave what is, after all, a relatively straightforward tale of a youthful backpacking hike into a vast and highly colored tapestry, embroidered with observations, insights, and lessons about the whole panorama of European history, society, architecture, religion, and art.

When Leigh Fermor died in 2011, David Bentley Hart paid enthusiastic tribute to his writing:

He was…a man of boundless erudition: a classicist, a linguist, an historian, deeply and broadly read, widely and wisely traveled, with impeccable taste in literature and the arts. As it happens, his formal education was of the most irregular and intermittent kind. He was sent as a boy to a “progressive school” (which was something of a nudist colony), had a good private tutor for a while, got himself expelled from Canterbury’s King’s School, was drummed out of Sandhurst before beginning studies, and never attended university. And yet few men of his time could match him for breadth of learning.

Early on in life, he acquired a passion for Greece and all things Byzantine (in part, under the influence of Robert Byron). He even celebrated his twentieth birthday by staying at the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mt. Athos, and his book Roumeli includes some of the most illuminating writing on Orthodox monasticism in English. (Even Leigh Fermor’s close friends seem uncertain whether he had any particular religious convictions, but he definitely had a fascination with the monastic life.) And for a great deal of his life, he kept his home in southern Greece.

In the end, Leigh Fermor will chiefly be remembered for his prose , which has few credible rivals in modern English letters. He was an exacting and excruciatingly slow writer, by all accounts. He could polish a single sentence obsessively, draft upon draft, for months on end. Nothing went to print before it met his highest standards, which were already far higher than most of his contemporaries could hope to achieve. He also spent a great deal of his life living rather than writing. The result is that, when one adds up the sum of his published works, one sometimes cannot help but feel he was a little parsimonious towards his readers.

Dreher recently discovered Leigh Fermor as well, and offers similar praise, especially for his A Time of Gifts. Check out his excerpt-heavy posts on the man here, here, and here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening paragraphs of Leo Tolstoy’s 1885 story, “Where Love Is, God is“:

IN A CERTAIN TOWN there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdéiteh by name. He had a tiny room in a basement, the one window of which looked out on to the street. Through it one could only see the feet of those who passed by, but Martin recognized the people by their boots. He had lived long in the place and had many acquaintances. There was hardly a pair of boots in the neighbourhood that had not been once or twice through his hands, so he often saw his own handiwork through the window. Some he had re-soled, some patched, some stitched up, and to some he had even put fresh uppers. He had plenty to do, for he worked well, used good material, did not charge too much, and could be relied on. If he could do a job by the day required, he undertook it; if not, he told the truth and gave no false promises; so he was well known and never short of work.

Martin had always been a good man; but in his old age he began to think more about his soul and to draw nearer to God. While he still worked for a master, before he set up on his own account, his wife had died, leaving him with a three-year old son. None of his elder children had lived, they had all died in infancy. At first Martin thought of sending his little son to his sister’s in the country, but then he felt sorry to part with the boy, thinking: ‘It would be hard for my little Kapitón to have to grow up in a strange family; I will keep him with me.’

Read the rest here. For more check out Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy. Previous SSFSs here.