Author: Andrew Sullivan

The fact that I saw a commercial for a head shop since I'm in Colorado is awesome.

— David Holm (@dmholm) January 19, 2014

I want to move to Colorado and own a head shop

— Dan McGee (@Danmcgee_2) January 18, 2014

The legal pot business is already spurring the growth of supporting industries:

[I]n the world of legalized marijuana, pot shops and grow facilities aren’t the only business opportunities; there are also all the ancillary businesses that service those pot shops, grow facilities, and the pot-smokers themselves. “You can relate it back to the gold rush,” says Ean Seeb, co-founder of the Denver Relief marijuana consulting company. “For every chunk of gold, you needed picks and shovels, a pan and a sifter, and the same thing applies to cannabis. For every gram of marijuana, you need a bag, labels, receipts, exit packaging, point-of-sale, a way to pay for it, staff, uniforms, a payroll company, insurance, and so on.” …

Ancillary businesses are particularly attractive to out-of-state investors. That’s because to have an equity interest in a Colorado marijuana business, state law requires at least two years of Colorado residency. So if you’re an out-of-state entrepreneur who wants to bet on the new industry today, the only choice you have is to invest in the picks and shovels—buying interest in megasized garden product stores, consolidating real estate portfolios to lease to Colorado-based pot-store owners, funding research and development for thumbprint-based security systems for grow facilities. Plus, while buying recreational marijuana is starting to feel downright ho-hum here in Colorado, let’s not forget that selling, cultivating, and manufacturing marijuana remains prohibited by federal law. Thus, risk-averse businesspeople might prefer to invest in companies that are not directly involved in violating federal law.

A reader writes:

I need to challenge Joe Mathews’ assertion that the design of the average Council Chamber defeats the goal of public engagement in decision making. As a government employee, I have sat through many public hearings and forums specifically designed to solicit public comment on policy issues, and one of the observations I’ve made is that almost all speakers at these events aren’t bothering to speak to the council members or hearing officers – they’re speaking to the audience. Their attention is directed at the crowd, and their words are intended to enflame the crowd to support whatever their message is … which in turn is generally targeted towards the media covering the event rather than the government officials. Unless Mr. Mathews believes that we all live in a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America, we should be prepared to accept the reality that those who speak at government meetings are those with the courage and the drive to do so, regardless of how the deck chairs behind the dais are arranged.

Another quotes Mathews:

“To unleash the untapped power of council and school board meetings – to make them about creating conversations – we must flip our priorities and redesign the spaces, so that council chambers and boardrooms are foremost places for people to gather and talk.” And the rest of the quoted text is just about the stupidest idea for city council and school board meeting spaces I can imagine. Cross-talk? Coffee and snacks? Booze? Holy crap, nothing would ever get accomplished (as opposed to almost nothing, as it often seems now).

I agree that raising the seating of the board above the floor level of the public is a problem because it makes them look like priests or something, but it’s a fairly inexpensive way to keep them visible. Rather than turn the whole thing into some sort of third space (per Oldenberg or Putnam), why not raise the public seating into a more auditorium-like configuration? We already (metaphorically) look down on our politicians, so why not in reality?

Joe Mathews seems mainly to be concerned that public decision making is petty, boring, and legalistic. No kidding. We’re talking about local politics, and decisions about roads, bus routes, and zoning (and so on, and on, and on, and on) – the important, daily, mundane work of developing and maintaining the (ideally) invisible frameworks through which we live our real, exciting lives getting along with our friends, neighbors, and strangers.

We already have third places where community members can talk about the issues of the day, and the week or month between public meetings is when people can chat up their neighbors and express their opinions to their officials directly: face-to-face, or e-mails, letters, social media, or even the public comment periods of the meetings. Making the meeting space look like a coffee shop isn’t going to eliminate closed sessions, or make it possible for the school board to do anything different about the problem teacher just because some parents are talking about it during the public meeting.

In my job as a planner in a small Midwestern city, I’ve seen well-run meetings, where citizens get engaged when someone does something to make people mad, and I’ve seen them invited to comment during board discussion of the current agenda topic to air the matter. Indeed, in one board, it’s done for every single agenda item. So citizen engagement is possible and desirable in the current, ordinary configuration. However, it’s up to the community to find the way to get that engagement. The configuration of the meeting space can surely make a difference in the feeling of a meeting, but the legal requirements of public notice and equal treatment mean meetings of public officials will never be as chatty as Mathews seems to want.

Another reader:

Although I’ve found the Quakers can be as full of crap and deluded as anybody else, their meeting houses can be a democratic delight – see photos here and here. There is neither dais, nor (in theory) any authority figure.

Another:

If Joe Mathews thinks that American city councils are bad, he should try British ones! Most British councils have rows of chairs for the councillors, facing towards a central dais where the mayor or council chairman sits, with the public seating up in balconies, facing the backs of the councillors. Not only are we not looking at our fellow citizens – we’re not even looking at the politicians themselves, but at their backs.

One more:

I have to call BS on the comparison between City Council and Church, or that City Councils will be more appealing if they looked like Starbucks. City Council officials are facing the crowd because they’re “elected”; they’re not equal to Joe Citizen in the crowd. They hold the responsibility and authority to actually make a decision. That’s why you address them. After all, this is not just a democracy, it’s a representative democracy. Average people in City Council meetings don’t get to talk much, not because it’s laid out like a Church, but simply because there’s only so much time and too many people who all want to ramble on and on about their stupid idea of how to fix everything.

So, how do we let everyone talk without wasting time and still letting good idea rise to the top and reach the council?

We do it online. Set up a web site where good ideas can rise to the top and enforce strict rules to keep the discussion civil. Then bring in those with the best ideas and argument to have a live discussion in the City Council meeting. People don’t go to Starbucks (or other coffee shops) because it has a comfortable layout. They go because there they don’t have to discuss mind-numbing issues and eventually have their voice drowned by the loser who has nothing better to do than be there at 6am to stand at the start of the line and shout at the council for their totalitarian regime.

I’d like to thank the Council and I yield the rest of my time.

A reader writes:

I enjoyed your review of the new TV show “Looking”, and I’m right there with you on your criticism of Philadelphia and Jeffrey and your praise for Weekend.  I’m guessing we might agree on the bulk of gay films and TV shows out there.

Do yourself a favor and check out the new French film Stranger by the Lake [trailer here]. It’s a fantastic drama that just happens to take place within a specific sub-culture of the gay male population, but the story asks questions which can just as much be asked of anyone gay or straight: what are the risks of love and sex, and why do we take them?  It’s honest and intelligent, but the bottom line is that it’s just plain entertaining as hell. I promise I’m not a troll working for the film’s publicity department.  I’m just a film nerd always looking for good cinema that portray gay characters with honesty and respect and doesn’t treat us like fashion accessories.

Another sends the above trailer:

If you are looking for a more authentic account of gay life, try the film Keep the Lights On.

It’s about a relationship that finally goes south because of one partner’s meth addiction, but overall it’s totally free of all the things that make you cringe. Ira Sachs, the director, has another film at Sundance right now, Love is Strange, which in some respects eerily resembles the case recently covered on The Dish about the teacher in the Pacific Northwest who lost his job when he got married. Anyway, I think you’ll find that Keep the Lights On beautifully represents a couple plagued by many troubles, none of them necessarily related to being gay.

Another looks back a decade:

I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Six Feet Under in your discussion of gay men in the media. The character of David Fisher (played by Michael C. Hall) was portrayed in such a compassionate, human way – we see him break up with his long term boyfriend because of his inability to come out; engage in a period of self-destructive behaviour; and eventually grow up, become emotionally healthier, come out, and form a family. For me, following the life of this character, which is written and acted so naturally (indeed, all the relationships in this show are astonishing for how natural and right they feel, even when they’re dysfunctional or falling apart) that it really hammered home the idea that ALL people have the right to form a family with whomever they choose.

Another reader:

I hear ya. There’s a lot of bad gay-themed drama out there, stuff that thought it could pull in an audience just because it was “gay-themed”, in a world where there wasn’t much in the way of gay-themed art; stuff that tried so hard to be “representative” or “sensitive” that it forgot to have characters (“Take Me Out” and dozens of others too forgettable to name); stuff that relied on the titillation factor of getting its characters naked (“Party”, “Naked Boys Singing,” “Take Me Out”); stuff that thought being shocking was enough (“Taxi Zum Klo,” “F*cking Men”); stuff where the gay men acted more like suburban couples from the Mad Men era (“Love, Valour, Compassion” – ugh!).

And, yeah, as brilliant as the British “Queer as Folk” was, I couldn’t get past the first episode-and-a-half of the American series.

In fact, in all my years of seeing gay-themed theatre in Chicago, I can think of just two plays so good I could recommend them to anyone without reservation. In the 1990s, “The Expense of Spirit” by Michael Barto, and from this decade, “The Homosexuals” by Philip Dawkins (a terrific young playwright with a half-dozen plays of diverse styles and themes under his belt – three of which were being performed simultaneously by different theatre companies in Chicago a year ago).

I look forward to seeing “Looking” (but since I don’t have cable, that won’t happen until it’s available on DVD).

Stephen Walsh praises Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad, a book on how the siege of the city influenced the work of composer Dmitri Shostakovich:

Shostakovich, a native of Leningrad/St Petersburg, was in the city for the first few weeks of the siege, and by the time he was flown out in early October 1941 he had composed the bulk of three movements of his Seventh Symphony. He already saw it as a symbol of the city’s defiance, and in Moscow he told an interviewer: ‘In the finale, I want to describe a beautiful future time when the enemy will have been defeated.’

It had become a Leningrad Symphony in all but name. Its composer had been photographed on the roof of the Conservatoire in a fireman’s outfit hosing down a (non-existent) conflagration. Now, in his absence, Leningraders struggled to concerts played by emaciated, half-dead musicians in freezing halls. Music had become an emblem of that peculiar Russian ability, honed through centuries of repression and hardship and in the end disastrously underestimated by Hitler, to slow down their mental metabolism almost to a standstill and survive like aesthetically tuned cattle in conditions that would drive others to breakdown and insanity.

How else to explain the successful performance of the Seventh Symphony that following August? It was a full-blooded 70-minute work for an orchestra of more than 100, performed by a radio band reduced by death and infirmity to a mere handful of sickly regulars, augmented by military-band players from the battlefront and by whatever extra wind and string players could be drafted in from the city’s dilapidated musical substrata, and directed by a conductor — Karl Eliasberg — who could himself barely hold a baton or stand upright.

Gavin Plumley discusses the piece with Semyon Bychkov, a conductor born in Leningrad shortly after the siege who is now conducting the symphony:

The first image that comes to Bychkov’s mind while preparing is that of his mother, as a giddy school leaver on 22 June 1941, 11 years before he was born. “Throughout the country, graduation balls are taking place for those finishing high school. It’s a big celebration. In Leningrad, it’s the White Nights,” he says, referring to northern Russia’s famed twilit season, “so the city is bursting with young people, by the river, partying, celebrating. Some are dreaming of university or going to the conservatoire. The future is very beautiful and very mysterious.” It’s a scene described, in effect, in the lusty opening bars of the symphony. “That first stride has a real sense of energy and optimism,” Bychkov notes, “and when the second theme comes, it’s a dream put into sound.”

Update from a reader:

(Video: Shostakovich plays a fragment of his Seventh Symphony in 1941)

James Fallon, a neuroscientist diagnosed as a psychopath, discusses his idiosyncrasies:

I treat strangers pretty well—really well, and people tend to like me when they meet me—but I treat my family the same way, like they’re just somebody at a bar. I treat them well, but I don’t treat them in a special way. That’s the big problem.

I asked them this—it’s not something a person will tell you spontaneously—but they said, “I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back.” They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don’t believe it, but I’m going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that’s what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!” And they said, “No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try.” It blew me away then and still blows me away now.

Previous Dish on non-violent psychopathy here, here, here, and here.