A commentary on civil-liberties issues and surveillance in modern society? No, says one of the filmmakers, the agenda of Drone Boning (poetry) was simpler: “The plan was to take beautiful landscapes and just put people fucking in them.”
Mission accomplished, sir. The groundbreaking video features straight, gay, and lesbian couples having sex alfresco on the beach, in the mountains, nestled in the mossy bed of a regal forest, amid the blossoming crops of an apple farm, and on the side of a highway against a vintage-looking royal-blue car. It’s like if a Google Maps camera caught you humping unawares amidst a Kinfolk photo shoot. Or perhaps the uncensored, unrated cut of Planet Earth. Simply stunning.
Jason Koebler agrees that the film “skews way more artsy and thought provoking than your average entrant into the genre”:
“We wanted to see the artistic value of this perspective,” John Carlucci, [filmmaker Brandon]LaGanke’s partner, said. “It’s an omniscient point of view, really. We did these shots in places where you couldn’t see much from the ground, but then you put a drone in the air and you can see what’s happening.”
So, even though the two used hired actors in mostly isolated places outside of San Francisco, there’s a certain amount of voyeurism that goes into actually watching the video. Carlucci calls it a “Where’s Waldo” sort of thing: You see these amazing, beautiful landscapes, and you quickly want to see where, exactly, people are getting it on.
While a precise number is open to scientific debate, it’s commonly accepted that the average size of an adult male penis is five and a quarter inches, erect. Generally speaking, measure in under about three inches erect, and you have what’s called a micropenis — the least common of the conditions falling under the banner of an “inconspicuous penis,” which includes a webbed penis, where it is difficult to decipher exactly where the scrotum ends and the penis begins; or a buried penis, where the shaft of the penis is hidden by skin and fat.
One man she interviewed, “a 51-year-old English teacher from the U.K., gave an in-depth account of his life with a micropenis”:
[Q.] Do you think about your penis size every day?
[A.] I can tell just by the way people walk and the way they look and the way they relate to other people that they have a big penis. You go into a meeting and the guys are swaggering around with their legs akimbo as if they’ve been riding a horse because they’ve got such an enormous package they can’t really walk straight and it’s just crazy. I have got to a point where I am quite amused by it and I’m fascinated by all this sex stereotyping and gender stereotyping. I’ve got strong heterosexual instincts and if I see a woman I feel strongly towards, even if I just glimpse somebody, the next thing I think is, No, don’t! You know what will happen … Well, nothing will happen, but if something did happen, you know how it will end up. It will be that terrible scene again; it will be that thing with the regrets and the apologies. And there’s nothing worse than that.
After a while, you just accept that you can’t ever do it properly. You can try all the textbook stuff and advice column stuff about positions, but thinking about that kills things. You want it to be more natural and you just start thrusting away and it’s popping out all the time. It just doesn’t stay in because it’s just too small. That’s what it comes down to, I’m afraid.
I’m laughing, not crying, by the way. But I might cry as well.
This week saw the release of a 6-CD set from Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes Complete, which features 138 songs that he recorded with members of The Band in the late 1960s, some which have been circulating in bootlegged form for decades, and Dylanologists are rejoicing. Sasha Frere-Jones provides the context for these remarkable, freewheeling sessions – Dylan’s famous 1966 motorcycle accident, which spurred a relatively reclusive period of his career:
There is no official documentation of the accident, and it’s not clear what injuries Dylan incurred, though he said that he suffered a concussion and “busted” some “neck vertebrae.” It is also unclear how many people witnessed the accident—Dylan said that his wife, Sara Lowndes, was behind him, in a car. “It happened one morning, after I’d been up for three days,” he said. He told one interviewer, “I probably would have died, if I had kept on going the way I had been.”
After a short convalescence, Dylan tinkered with a tour documentary he was making, called “Eat the Document.” (It has never been commercially released, but bootleg copies have circulated for years.) In the spring of 1967, he began making music again. He worked in his house and in the basement of a house outside Saugerties, near Woodstock, with his touring band, a mostly Canadian group originally called the Hawks and later renamed The Band. He performed no live dates in 1967, made a single appearance in 1968, and played only three shows in 1969. He removed himself from public view for all of 1970, and then, in 1971, he appeared at the Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit in New York organized by George Harrison. That year, he told Shelton, “Until the accident, I was living music twenty-four hours a day.” In the summer of 1967, he was recording music without living it, or living it differently from before. The recordings he made in Woodstock are a document of Dylan determining where he and his songs and his audience and his country and his past overlapped, or didn’t.
Tom Moon offers advice on how to approach these recordings:
It’s best appreciated not as a collection of songs, but as a kind of audio documentary, a painstaking account of the daily song-chasing that went on for nearly seven months at Dylan’s house and then Big Pink.
It catches Dylan in a fertile writing period, and offers telling glimpses into his process — his use of absurd placeholder words (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”) and nonsense syllables that would eventually become lyrics in subsequent versions. At the same time, it shows how resourceful his collaborators were as they cobbled together, often on the fly, a rustic and rarified textural landscape that could complement and enhance his images.
By all accounts, very little premeditation was involved: Hudson once noted that they were doing anywhere from seven to 15 songs in a day. Dylan worked constantly on lyrics, banging them out on an Olivetti typewriter sometimes right before tape rolled. He’d bring a page downstairs, and in a matter of minutes, a song would take shape. Not just any song, either: These sessions yielded “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears Of Rage (co-written with Richard Manuel), “Quinn The Eskimo,” “Northern Claim,” “This Wheel’s On Fire” (co-written with Rick Danko) and others.
[T]his banquet really needs to be savoured entire. After all, seeing the stack of reels that sat in a Toronto studio awaiting transfer to digital, one can’t help but be reminded the boys at Big Pink took their time. The Basement Tapes, which for years were seen as the work of a few summer days, turn out to be nine months in the life of a former boy wonder and a family man, at a time when he could still make music in the most idyllic of settings and count his blessings.
Even Dylan allowed himself to wax lyrical about those times when prompted to remember them by a young Wenner: “You know, that’s really the way to do a recording – in a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with the windows open and a dog lying on the floor.” No expectations, no commitments. Just for the love of it. Expect to spend a lifetime unravelling the mystery that is Big Pink. Dylan has.
A Dish reader flags the above video, in which Boris Johnson nominates Kingsley Amis’ famous account from Lucky Jim. Here’s the passage in question:
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.
Do readers have a better suggestion? For those unfamiliar with Amis’s novel, there might be no better introduction than this essay from Hitch, which particularly emphasizes what makes the book so funny:
I happened to be in Sarajevo when Kingsley Amis died, in 1995. I was to have lunch the following day with a very clever but rather solemn Slovenian dissident. She knew that I had known Amis a little, and she expressed the proper condolences as soon as we met. Feeling this to be not quite sufficient, however, she added that the genre of “academic comedy” had enjoyed quite a vogue among Balkan writers. “In our region zere are many such satires. But none I sink so amusing as ze Lucky Jim.”
This, delivered with perfect gravity in the lugubrious context of the Milosevic war, made me grin with inappropriate delight. How the old buzzard would have gagged, with mingled pride and disdain, at the thought of being so appreciated by a load of Continentals—nay, foreigners. And what the hell can his masterpiece be like when rendered into the Serbo-Croat tongue?
Just try to suggest a more hilarious novel from the past half century. Something by Joseph Heller? Terry Southern? David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury? Yes, the Americans can be grotesque and noir; and the Englishmen have their mite of irony. (In fact, the academic comedy is now a sub-genre of Anglo-Americanism.) But even so. The late Peter de Vries—much admired by Amis for his Mackerel Plaza—depended too much on the farcical. No, the plain fact is that Amis managed in Lucky Jim (1954) to synthesize the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse. Just as a joke is not really a joke if it has to be clarified, I risk immersion in a bog of embarrassment if I overdo this; but if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.
With the age of technology advancing faster than we can possibly keep up with, we are left with obsolete media. Film cameras have been replaced with digital capture and USB drives render floppy disks useless. As an artist, Gentry finds beauty in these forgotten remnants, like the rolls of exposed 35 mm film he finds in abundance in thrift stores and secondhand sales, or receives from donors.
His effort to give new life to the media that are now obsolete has created inspiration for a beautiful body of work, which is given greater depth than if simply painted on canvas. Gentry paints many of his portraits with a direct gaze, which almost summons to viewer to look deeper into the work.
Explore more of Gentry’s work here, here, and here.
That’s the refreshingly straightforward title of a recent study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Andy Cush sums up its findings this way: “The bad news: you’re probably a freak. The good news: everyone else is, too”:
Researchers from University of Montreal presented 799 men and 718 women—85.1 percent of whom identified as heterosexual, 3.6 percent homosexual, and 11.3 percent somewhere in between—with a long list of statements regarding fantasy scenarios, asking them to rate their agreement with each on a scale of one to seven. Anything rated over three was counted as a fantasy.
Some notable trends: women were far more likely to fantasize about sex with strangers or in particular locations, while men were more interested in oral and anal, as well as sex with acquaintances. Men also tended to describe fantasies that weren’t on the list more vividly and expressed more interest in actualizing their fantasies than women.
Interestingly, both sexes were about equal when it came to participating in group sex, although more men reported wanting to have an active versus passive role during group sex. When it came to whom the subjects thought about, men reported fantasizing more about people they were not currently involved with. Of particular interest to the researchers was the high number of fantasies that were mostly unique to men, for example, fantasizing about anal sex and watching their partner have sex with another man. “Evolutionary biological theories cannot explain these fantasies,” researcher [Christian] Joyal said.
Check out the researchers’ full chart of common and rare fantasies here.
In a wide-ranging essay about food culture, Jeff Sparrow makes the case that takeout meals have an ideological bent:
“The abolition of the private kitchen will come as a liberation to countless women,” proclaimed August Bebel in his extraordinarily influential 1879 Woman and Socialism (a book that went through 53 German editions in his lifetime). “The private kitchen is as antiquated an institution as the workshop of the small mechanic. Both represent a useless and needless waste of time labor and material.”
Collective cooking as liberation to the tyranny of the private oven remained a progressive orthodoxy into the first half of the 20th century. The Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai explained: “Instead of the working woman having to struggle with the cooking and spend her last free hours in the kitchen preparing dinner and supper, communist society will organize public restaurants and communal kitchens.” …
The rhetoric might sound antiquated but, in a sense, we now take for granted Bebel’s communal kitchens, albeit in private form. The ubiquity of cheap, almost instant takeaway meals represent a transformation almost unimaginable to the 19-century women whose daily routine still involved plucking fowls and skinning rabbits and other tasks now only performed in factories.
F. Scott Fitzgerald almost went with Trimalchio in West Egg; Edward Albee got Who’sAfraid of Virginia Woolf? from bathroom graffiti in a Greenwich village bar. In a piece for The Millions, Chloe Benjamin talks to five authors about how they came to name their novels. Among them is Matthew Thomas, who found the title for his book We Are Not Ourselves in the pages of King Lear:
While re-reading Lear in preparation to teach it, I came to the line in Act 4, Scene 2, where Lear is wondering why Cornwall won’t appear, even though he’s been ordered to. To explain away the offense to his ego, Lear says, “Infirmity doth still neglect all office/Whereto our health is bound”—i.e., sickness prevents us from doing the duties we’re required to do when healthy. The next line elaborates on this theme: “We are not ourselves/when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind/to suffer with the body.” Lear justifies Cornwall’s flouting of his authority by appealing to the universal experience of being beholden to our bodies: when the body isn’t working, the mind doesn’t work perfectly either. I found rich resonance in the idea of locating both the mind and the body in Lear’s formulation in the brain, so that the body that isn’t working is the mind, in fact — and then positing the mind in Lear’s formulation as what we think of as the spirit, the soul, the personality. When the brain isn’t working at its optimal best — when there’s an obstruction of function through illness, or a fixation or obsession that springs from traumatic early childhood experiences — the animating spirit of the person, what we think of as personality, is impaired as well.
The phrase struck me immediately as being at the heart of my concerns in the book.
We Are Not Ourselves suggests characters who are not at their best, who by dint of circumstances are not allowed to be themselves. It also suggests that we’re always learning and evolving, that we’re works-in-progress. We are not ourselves yet, in a sense; there’s hope in that. In a different vein, we are not reducible to whom we appear to be in our biographies. We contain multitudes in our rich internal lives that our lived lives don’t reveal. Another resonance for me is that we need each other to experience the full flowering of our humanity and our greatest happiness. We are not only ourselves; we are not islands unto ourselves. I liked that the phrase opened up fields of interpretation that would extend beyond the more circumscribed concerns of my original title, so I grabbed it and didn’t look back. As soon as I knew it was the title, it was as if it had been the title all along.
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