Category: The Dish

After the celebrity photo hackings earlier this year, Jenna Wortham decided to explore “the way that our phones … foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.” She elaborates on why she started her “Everybody Sexts” project, which pairs illustrations of NSFW selfies with short interviews:

I think that everybody sexts. Not everyone sends nude photos, of course, for a variety of reasons. But many people I’ve talked to define a sext as anything sent with sexual intent, be it a suggestive Gchat exchange, a racy photo, a suggestive Snapchat, or even those aqua-blue droplets of sweat emoji.

I asked people I knew — and many I didn’t — to talk to me about sexts and the stories behind them, the risks, perceived and real, and why they did it, knowing that they could be shared beyond their control. Lastly, I asked them to share a nude that they had sent to someone. And so many people did, without hesitation, or requiring anything in exchange. I was floored by their openness, and the expanse of human emotions and experiences on display. What I discovered, mainly, is that sexting — like anything else done on our phones — was mostly just meant to be fun, for fun, grown folks doing what grown folks do.

How “K,” a 30-year-old writer in Chicago, describes her sext life:

I sent my first sext the very first second cell phones with cameras were invented. It was very posed — white sheets semi-covering artfully displayed boobs. Now, I send them whenever the mood strikes, or I feel like I look especially great. It has to be someone I’ve been seriously dating for a long time and someone who will be properly in awe of my magnificent everything. I would not send a nude to someone I was not in a trusted relationship with, and anyone in a trusted relationship with me knows better than to trifle with that trust.

I sent this [image] to my girlfriend in July, when she was off on tour with her band. She was sharing rooms with her bandmates every night and had zero privacy, and I wanted to torture her. She really, really liked it and sent me several desperate texts an hour for the rest of the day. This is the exact effect I hoped for.

Another entry:

S, 25
Cultural worker, Brooklyn

Q. Tell me about this image [seen above].
A. I sent this photo to my boyfriend, from his bedroom. He leaves much earlier for work than I do. I wanted to show him what he was missing.

Q. What was his response?
A. “Oh my lord.”

Keep reading here for more.

(Illustration by Melody Newcomb)

Noting the release of a new Jacques Tati box set from Criterion, Michael Wood recalls a standout scene from Playtime:

Playtime settles down into the masterpiece it finally is at a very specific moment: the satire vanishes, and you realise the work is not about the folly of advertising and conformity but about the way we enthusiastically build worlds we can’t live in – and live in them.

Hulot meets an old army friend on the street. The friend invites him into his brand-new flat for a drink, and we witness the whole thing from outside. The flat is on the ground floor and the living room has a vast picture window, as if domestic life were a department store display. Hulot greets the man’s wife and daughter, and takes his leave when they are all set to show him a home movie. The film we are watching is a silent one at this point because of the glass, or silent as far as its action is concerned: we can hear the buses and cars on the street. Then the camera moves slightly to the right, showing the next picture-window flat, different people, similar scene. After a while the camera lifts to show the flats on the next floor, and we now see four pretty much identical apartments (and scenes) at once. The effect is of a split screen, four separate shots combined. But the screen isn’t split, this is rectangular, quadruplicated city life. Why are the people so happy here? Why aren’t they screaming, as Philip Larkin might say. For good measure … one of the inhabitants of one of the flats turns out to be the man Hulot has been trying all day to see in his glassy office. Now he meets him on the street when the man walks his dog, and they have the conversation they have been failing to have.

From Neal Pollack’s entertaining 1,700-word opus titled “I Shat Myself In A Lexus Press Car”:

My house was about 14 miles away, most of it on open highway. I turned on the seat heaters, along with Sirius XM Radio. The station, I believe, was “Willie’s Roadhouse.”

Something unpleasant hitched in my gut.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird.

Then it hitched again. There was a gurgle, and a churn. Suddenly, I felt a strong pressing on my abdomen. It was very strange. I had eaten a light dinner that night. At the movies, Ben and I had shared a bowl of popcorn, and I’d had a beer, but it had been a long movie, and I wasn’t full.

But there it was.

My stomach gave an audible groan. I felt a full-on descent in my colon.

Oh no.

I began to sweat. My exit wasn’t for several miles. The station began to play Your Cheatin’ Heart, by Hank Williams.

Your cheatin’ heart

Will make you weep

You’ll cry and cry

And try to sleep…

I tried to focus on the road, but it was hard. My forehead began to melt. My stomach churned like the fetid waters beneath an urban pier. Whatever had invaded my gut insistently pressed downward. It had to come out.

Please God, I thought. No.

You’ll never guess where this ends.

Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, is based on the memoir of Maziar Behari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested while covering the 2009 elections in Iran. Behari spent 118 days in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison. Michael O’Sullivan calls Stewart’s film “an impressive and important piece of storytelling,” and David Edelstein agrees:

In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless — something you’d watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror. The heart of the movie is the Kafkaesque relationship (if that’s the word) between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and the interrogator-torturer whom Bahari dubs “Rosewater” (Kim Bodnia) for his distinctive scent. What happens between them has a dramatic fullness that’s rare in political filmmaking.

Other reviews are more mixed. Esther Breger questions “whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker,” writing that the film is at its best when it employs humor:

The scenes between Behari and Rosewater also allow Stewart to do something he’s very good at—be funny. The interrogation process is both grueling and surreal, and Stewart has an eye for those absurdities. Behari’s “Sopranos” DVDs are treated as pornography when he’s taken into custody. Trips to New Jersey are automatically suspicious. And who is that Anton Chekhov mentioned on your Facebook profile? Midway through his confinement, Behari begins to distract Rosewater by appealing to the man’s prurient side, concocting deadpan tales of Western decadence and erotic massages. For his next film, Stewart should take things a little less seriously.

Thomas Hachard differs, suggesting Stewart “may have been too tasteful” in sticking to “predictable knocks against the kinds of insular interrogators and government officials that wouldn’t be able to recognize the Daily Show’s satire.” He criticizes the film’s disjointed narrative:

When Stewart features news footage of a debate between Ahmadinejad and one of his main challengers, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, or real video of the violence against those protesting the contested election results, the most serious concerns surrounding Bahari’s arrest come into view. But in other moments, Stewart takes a more dismissive approach, treating Bahari’s interrogator, for example, as an unappreciated buffoon looking for recognition from his superiors. In those moments, Stewart seems to want to turn these men into trifling figures, refusing to give them even the benefit of serious treatment. There are times, too, when the film takes a more broadly inspirational tone, addressing itself to Bahari’s resolute spirit — itself an allegory, it would seem, for Iran’s quelled opposition.

One can imagine a film that combined these various approaches into a cohesive story, but in Rosewater they’re blindly tossed together, and the result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari’s incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Brett McCracken agrees the movie fails to find a focus:

Stewart’s film champions the important role of journalists even as it laments the degradation of the profession. Are traditional journalists even necessary in a world of citizen reporting and organizing via cell phone and social media? Rosewater nods in this direction, but doesn’t take up the question thoroughly. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the film is that it doesn’t have clear focus or commitment to going deeper into one particular question. Is the film about Iran? Torture? Family? Journalism? The cyclical nature of war, terror and violence? Rosewater is about all of this, but it may have been stronger had it chosen just one or two of these areas to more profoundly ponder.

And Rob Hunter zooms out:

Stewart’s film is attractive, well-acted and “important,” and his stylistic touches of visible hashtags and other social media shorthand make it very much a film in the now. But is it a film that will be remembered in a year’s time? Bahari’s triumph is real, impressive and relevant. Rosewater is a pleasant feature debut.

For his new documentary Do I Sound Gay?, which opened the NYC DOC festival this week, director David Thorpe filmed his investigation of the “gay voice”:

The film starts on a clever and fun note, with Thorpe clearing his throat before reading the credits out loud and then staging, in very low-tech manner, the Friday-night train ride to Fire Island that made him realize he disliked people with gay voices — which includes not only practically all his fellow passengers but also himself. Over 40 and newly single, the insecure Thorpe wonders if there’s something that can be done about his voice, so he goes to see a speech therapist, who has him working on his nasality and long vowels.

In a review, Rich Juzwiak calls the movie a “bold documentary that derives its momentum from Thorpe’s seesawing between self-loathing and acceptance”:

I related to Thorpe’s hyper-consciousness over his voice and his attempt to alter it. … Past encounters may have taught us that if we sound gay, we won’t be taken seriously or that we’ll put ourselves in some kind of danger or that other guys who are similarly obsessed with the construct of masculinity won’t want to fuck us. In some instances, it’s impossible to refrain from internalizing this. Part of your responsibility as a considerate human interested in communicating is evolution.

At the same time, and where do we draw the line at improving ourselves, and who dictates what constitutes improvement? If we historically deferred to majority opinion, we’d be closeted and attempting to twist our soft dicks into a point to fuck our wives. Because sexuality involves not just the internal but also the external, there will always be people arguing that being gay is a choice. And it is, insofar as one chooses to live his or her life fully, pursuing happiness to the best of his or her ability. One chooses to reject traditional narratives and cultural expectations and whatever external shame lurks, for the sake of just being. Do I Sound Gay? explores the complications that arise once you’ve settled into a life of just being. For a lot of us, just being is an aspiration itself. Even as adults, even in 2014.

In an interview, Thorpe and Dan Savage (who is featured in the film) talk about why they think the topic provokes so much interest:

Thorpe: The gay voice is a symbol—of homosexuality, of femininity—and symbols are very powerful. So it was important for me to address the gay voice as something larger than the gay voice and something representative of gayness, of femininity, and how it can provoke homophobia and misogyny. It seems like a small thing, but the disruption it causes is enormous. I would liken it to holding hands with your lover or kissing in public: it’s a very small act but if you kiss someone of the same sex in a room like this [a public restaurant], you know people are watching you and the temperature of the room changes. So a small act like speaking has enormous consequences.

Dan Savage: It’s also homophobia. It’s the hatred of gay people by non-gay people, but also the self-hatred that so many people struggle with. Like, what’s wrong with sounding like who you are? Some people have a real issue with that. There are straight people that want to live in a world where they can pretend gay people don’t exist and then there are gay people who so struggle with self-hatred that’s been pounded into them so that they policing themselves for any traits that might give them away. If you’re the kind of gay person that has a very identifiable gay voice, a lot of gay people will say it’s like you’re coming out all the time.

Check out my thoughts on the subject here, and read the long-running Dish thread here.