Category: The Dish

by Tracy R. Walsh

A plan to send a “library of cultural and biological records” to our lunar companion – where, as Paul Marks calmly explains, “they would be preserved in case Earth suffers a pandemic plague, nuclear holocaust, or lethal asteroid strike” – is apparently in the works. Sacred texts would be the first in line:

The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll, the Sefer Torah, to the lunar surface. If they succeed, later flights will carry Hindu scriptures called the Vedas and the ancient Chinese philosophical work, the I-Ching. Each document will be housed in a space-ready capsule designed to protect it from harsh radiation and temperature changes on the moon for at least 10,000 years. “This is an incredible, beautiful project,” says group founder Paul Aouizerate, an entrepreneur and inventor. “These three texts are among Earth’s most ancient documents, created over 3,000 years ago. They are significant to billions of people.”

But not everyone’s behind the idea:

“The Sefer Torah has unique symbolic value and is nowadays the most sacred object in Judaism,” says Nicholas de Lange, a researcher in Jewish and Hebrew studies at the University of Cambridge. “Such an object is supposed to be treated with extreme respect and care. I find it hard to believe that shooting it into space can fall under this heading.”

by Matthew Sitman

Many described in the New Testament as encountering Jesus didn’t know what to make of him, with his strange parables and convention-defying social habits. John Koessler reviews Derek Cooper and Ed Cyzewski’s new book, Unfollowers: Unlikely Lessons on Faith from Those Who Doubted Jesus, which explores what we can learn from them:

Unfollowers focuses on “the people who got it wrong” in the Gospels and invites us to see these familiar stories in a new light. When we see ourselves in their stories we are able to better understand their reaction to Jesus. We also begin to see ourselves more accurately. We would like to think that if we had been present when Jesus taught and performed miracles, we would have been among the few who believed. But this is probably not the case. The authors want us to consider the possibility that we might have responded to Jesus with skepticism, disappointment, and even outright rejection. In the process, they propose to deconstruct our view of Jesus. This is necessary because our tendency is to “imagine that Jesus looks just like and wants the same things as us.” But the book’s real objective is to deconstruct the view we have of ourselves. Or if not to completely deconstruct it, at least provide us with a needed reality check.

The book directs our attention to the unfollowers of the Gospels in the hope that it will close the distance between the lives we live and those we read about in Scripture. Cooper and Cyzewksi do not want us to view these biblical accounts as stories about religious or irreligious people who are now long dead. They want us to understand that they are stories about us. The specific events and people in the life of Christ are used to highlight our own spiritual problems. John the Baptist shows us the folly of projecting our own expectations into God’s plan for our lives. The townspeople of Nazareth cast a light on the shadows of our ambivalence toward Christ and reveal that we expect too little from God, despite all our affirmations of faith. The Pharisees expose our tendency to exclude others, along with our tendency to judge them based on the “external markers of religious devotion” that we have set.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader makes an excellent point:

This is one of the whitest threads ever. I’m a fat, white woman (though not in high school – then I was taught fat is perceived as bad, but now I know better). I am married to the hottest guy ever and never had a problem getting a date. Of course, most of the men interested in me AND who let me know it are not white. (Living in DC made it easier.)

When we talk about desire and dating and plus-sized women, we are almost always talking about perceptions of us from the privileged perspective of acculturated white American males. Not Black males. Not males from other cultures. White American Males, mostly. But they are just the tip of what is out there.

Yes, being fat as a woman is harder in general than it is for a man, but there are plenty of men that love us, admire us and really want to fuck us. Works for me.

by Jessie Roberts

Micah Hauser appreciates that the “sly, genre-busting” web series High Maintenance depicts potheads as regular people:

[T]he protagonist, an unnamed pot dealer known only as “The Guy,” cycles around New York City delivering his wares to the people. To call him a protagonist, though, is not really accurate — he’s more like a reference point. Each episode focuses on a particular customer, and by extension, their living space, which is where all of these deals go down. …

The show is funny, but not in the ways we’re conditioned to expect from stoner-leaning media. There are no 3-foot bongs, no cross-joints, no late-night expeditions to Shake Shack, no burnouts philosophizing about space and time, man. (Full disclosure: there is some giggling.) These are ordinary people who live ordinary lives and happen to smoke weed. Some of them should probably smoke less — the husband in the newest episode, “Rachel,” bums around all day getting high instead of working on his second book — and some use it to escape particular problems or moments of stress, but most are unremarkable, functional adults. Zero judgment is passed (on the weed smoking, anyway). It’s just part of people’s lives, and the act of smoking and purchasing weed is treated no differently than getting a drink at a bar — an activity portrayed without ceremony in basically every television program in history. Welcome to the 21st century.

Previous Dish on High Maintenance here.

by Jessie Roberts

PBS’s excellent Blank on Blank series animates a 1988 interview with David Bowie, who describes his alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, as “half out of sky-fi rock and half out of the Japanese theater”:

Meanwhile, Prospero’s C.G. reviews the Bowie exhibit at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin:

Fascinated by the early-20th-century German expressionists of the Brücke movement, whose works he frequently went to see, Mr Bowie began painting in Berlin and gained inspiration and motivation for his music. … The exhibition takes visitors through the career of an artist who was constantly reinventing himself. Flickering video screens, quirky costumes, handwritten documents, soundtracks and interviews provide a kaleidoscope of impressions. Thanks to Christine Heidemann, the curator of the show’s new Berlin section, 60 items have been added to the retrospective to give a broader idea of what went on during Mr Bowie’s stint in the German city between 1976 and 1978.

Many items refer to Iggy Pop, whom Mr Bowie lived with. At first the two shared a huge, slightly run-down flat in an old building in West Berlin’s bohemian borough of Schöneberg, then and now home to a large gay community. But Mr Bowie eventually threw his friend out—Mr Pop is said to have done a bit too much fridge-raiding—and found him a flat in the back of his building. Other highlights include letters from 1978 revealing a short correspondence between Mr Bowie and Marlene Dietrich about “Just a Gigolo”, an unsuccessful film in which Mr Bowie played a gigolo who works in a brothel run by Dietrich’s Baroness (her final appearance on screen). According to Mrs Heidemann, Mr Bowie and Dietrich never actually met in person, since his scenes were shot in Berlin (pictured) and hers in Paris.

by Matthew Sitman

Nina Caplan finds that, despite the all the pages written about the British Empire, “one great culprit in the colonisation project rarely receives its fair share of blame: gin.” How the gin and tonic helped shape history:

Without quinine, malaria would have felled the conquerors; without gin to alleviate the bitterness of this highly effective anti-malarial, the soldiers would have refused to down their medicine.

The Spanish went to the Andes and found the cinchona tree, the bark of which turned out to contain an acrid but exceptionally useful substance. The British planted the tree in their Indian colony and attempted to sweeten that bitter bark with sugar, water and lemon: the resulting “tonic” turned out to be much more palatable when dosed with gin. Halfway down my second Pahit, I still can’t work out which is more peculiar: that those long-ago soldiers needed booze to persuade them to protect themselves from an often fatal disease? Or that a spirit so lethally popular that a quarter of mid-18th-century Londoners averaged a pint of the stuff a day was enlisted to save the lives of those same poor people—the ones who became foot soldiers in the Imperial British Army? The ability to withstand malaria helped Britain to conquer half of Africa and keep India subjugated (more or less). So much misery, engendered by one of the world’s most inspired taste combinations.

(Photo by Armando Alves)

by Tracy R. Walsh

File lawsuits:

Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than 1,300 copyright-infringement lawsuits – more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all US copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer – against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.

Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about $2,000 and $30,000. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.