Are Movie Theaters Fading? Ctd

Hollywood screenwriter and director Paul Schrader revives a Dish thread:

Films were never communal just because people wanted a communal experience‒it just happened to be the economic model that made the most sense. You could sell a lot of tickets and show the film at the same time to everyone. On a nickelodeon, of course, which predated movie theaters, only one person could watch the movie at a time. Nobody said, ‘We want to sit in a hot room together!’ That’s just how it was. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. You know, this myth that people will always want to go out to the movies, they’ll always want a communal experience‒I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. … I always prefer to go to an empty theater‒I’d rather go to an eleven o’clock matinee than an eight o’clock show, so I don’t have to be there with all those people. The seats are uncomfortable, when there’s lots of people there you can’t get up so easily, so I prefer to go with less people there.

Many readers know my thoughts on this:

I’ve effectively stopped “going to” the movies, because TVs are as good, if not as giant, and because I don’t like crowds, can stop the movie at home to take a pee or grab some munchies, and rewind parts I didn’t quite catch.

Tina And Sally vs Dicks, Ctd

Readers sound off on this post:

I hesitate to comment when you’re in such high dudgeon, but I’d like to point out that Tina cerneabbas.jpgBrown (who should be able to write more clearly) probably wasn’t referring to Weiner’s adulterywhen she called his behavior “dickmanship.” What she meant washis highly reckless behavior in continuing to send dick pix after his resignation and grand public mea culpa. And while it’s not equivalent by orders of magnitude, the recklessness of the banker, the ship captain and the train engineer was probably what led to those tragedies.

As for Brown tarring the entire gender, I don’t agree with that, either. I know many men who find Weiner’s behavior deeply dishonorable. But I am hard-pressed to come up with examples of “consequences be damned, the rules don’t apply to me” recklessness among women (except Sarah Palin, where it’s arguably part of her act). I guess what I’m saying is, not all men engage in “dickmanship,” but those who do are almost always men.  And when you’re a woman, it’s hard not to attribute it to the male sense of entitlement we deal with every day.

Another female reader differs:

The diatribes by these two (and I will admit that I enjoyed Tina’s) are a very stark example of why “feminism” is dying out. Young women see the entire picture, see the role of women in all these scandals (not as victims, but generally as willing partners) and don’t engage in general male-bashing. The old school paradigm of woman as victim and the man as complete dick just doesn’t work for most women under 45. And thank goodness for that.

I enjoyed Tina’s a lot too. I wish she’d write more. Another woman:

Waitwaitwait, just wait a minute. There’s a lot going on here, and you might be conflating some slightly related topics that might not all be totally related.

I’m with you on the whole “Clinton-people-throwing-stones-from-their-own-glass-houses” thing. It’s outrageous, and yes, another reason to pray that Hillary finds something else to do with her golden years, and take Bill with her. Yes, both Tina and Sally are overwrought and judgy and, maybe, shrill. Yes, really, it’s not our business.

But you, as a male (gay/straight, no matter), have stumbled upon a little truth nugget that gets laughs sometimes, but may be more true than you know: Women (even professional journalists) quite often think men are dumb – like, really stupid, led-around-by-their-peckers dumb. As in George Carlin’s “Women are crazy, men are stupid, and women are crazy because men are stupid.”

A while back there was some conversation about why much more Dish readers are male than female. This might be one of those times when having a better grasp of, not only the female psyche, but, maybe even female life experience could help you.

I saw it as soon as I started reading the piece – the underlying eye roll that ALL women have adopted after living life with fathers and husbands and pushy bosses and wolf-whistles on sidewalks. It’s not just powerful men seeking more power. Working in a blue-collar environment, I can tell you, there are eye rolls in abundance from the girls whenever certain men walk by (waaaay too much testosterone going on with that one). I remember seeing interviews of transsexuals who went from male to female, and didn’t realize how much more empowered they were as males, just by virtue of being male. There is a difference in how you experience the world, and how the world experiences you.

So when Anthony Weiner shows us who he is (again), all we girls can do is the eye roll and ask “Jesus, this shit, again?” So there is a backstory here that, you must remember, is most likely the backstory of a majority of women. Sorry, but the very fact that you have a dick can make you dumb. Sometimes your testosterone is charming. But not always. “Being guilty of being online while male.” Hello? Dumb.

A male reader:

I hope this post develops into a conversation. The demonization of heterosexual male sexuality is one of the larger taboos in our culture.

There is a great scene in Before Midnight where Ethan Hawke talks about hating a man for his sexual drive is like hating a frog for being green.  It is possible to say this while also saying that you value your own, and even other people’s, personal commitments. It is a matter of recognizing what is the case about common patterns of normal heterosexual male sexuality and simultaneously assessing one’s valuation of one’s own, and possibly other people’s, personal sexual commitments.  The degree to which you value those commitments seems to be better formed if it’s grounded in an honest  understanding of heterosexual male sexuality.   This doesn’t excuse anything; it places a proper degree of valuation on the matter.

(Photo: a view of a part of the chalk figure at Cerne Abbas in England.)

Weiner, Sharks, Balls, Jumping, Etc

At this point, I’m afraid, I am reduced to giggles. This is his campaign spokesperson’s idea of how to react to a former intern blowing smoke in a tabloid:

“And then like she had the fucking balls to like trash me in the paper. And be like, ‘His communications director was last the press secretary of the Department of Education in New Jersey. You know what? Fuck you, you little cunt. I’m not joking, I am going to sue her.”

I’m just trying to imagine TPM reporter Hunter Walker’s face as he heard this on the phone. Good times.

So, yes, regardless of any of the merits of the debate about sexting and adultery and double standards, we now have ourselves a fantastic shit-show on our media hands. Which requires that I note the top three comments from MrHippity on the Gawker page which features the unpixellated photos of the member from Brooklyn:

I didn’t look very hard at these pics. I just took a quick glans.

I thought these new dick pics would be like his earlier ones, but there’s a vas deferens.

I didn’t have to look at them, of course. Nobody was foreskin me to do it or anything.

Get your popcorn out front.

Reading Your Way Out Of The Closet

Gregory Wazowicz and Christopher Richards recently asked a number of gay writers “what books spoke to them when they were coming out, asserting their identities, or putting a name to their desires.” Jesse Bering’s choice:

George Santayana’s semi-autobiographical The Last Puritan played some role in my decision to kick the closet door off its hinges once and for all. I was about 21, and I’d already come out to my family and some close friends. But I was a sad case—I was living an ascetic scholarly lifestyle and throwing myself into my graduate studies to somehow cultivate the illusion that I was ‘above’ sex. I saw aspects of myself in the character of Oliver Alden (in fact, I even faintly resembled the black-and-white etching of him on the jacket cover). And it really wasn’t a flattering sight. I found it irritating how Oliver was sublimating his obvious homosexuality in lofty philosophical abstractions. Santayana would allude to Oliver’s same-sex desires repeatedly in the narrative, but he refused to come out and say it. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Oliver, just come out already and get some action!’ I found his sexual cowardice—which was in fact a reflection of Santayana’s own—so pathetic and disturbing that it made me reexamine my own erotic austerity.

Related Dish on Christopher Bram’s history of gay literature in America here.

The Self-Seeking Tourist

dish_touristselfie

Claire L. Evans, a musician frequently on the road, contemplates the meaning of travel:

Travel is inherently narcissistic. Even if we’re looking to be knocked off our axis, we’re still in the business of self-improvement. People want to go to faraway places and return changed. A lot rides on this expectation. We hunt for perspective, for miraculous connections, but when these moments happen, we don’t always recognise them — or we look in the wrong places.

There is a collection of jungle villages around Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali, which is as remote and humid and disorienting as any foreign place. The landscape is clogged with temples spewing incense, and yet long lines of Western tourists snake out the doorway of the single mountain temple that featured in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love (2006). I

t’s easy to laugh at these people. It’s easy to say that they are missing the point, but are they? Maybe they’re just mainlining into the essence of what travel is always already about: pat revelations about the self. When we were in Bali, we went to a different temple, and our dirty tennis shoes looked ridiculous beneath the stiff embroidered sarongs we were commanded to wear. I felt nothing, except for self-consciousness and the impulse to snap a dozen pictures I haven’t looked at since.

(Photo by Flickr user mollybob)

The Roots Of The DSM

Philosopher Ian Hacking assesses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the clinicians’ guidebook for psychiatric diagnoses. He finds a fundamental “fatal flaw”:

The first stab at a medical diagnostic manual was made by a friend and exact contemporary of Linnaeus, with the rather daunting name of François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix, a physician and botanist in Montpelier. In 1763 Sauvages published his Nosology Methodica, explicitly stating in its title that it was modelled on the classification of plants. He had ten classes of illness, of which the eighth was madness. Each class was divided first into genera and then into species, producing 2400 kinds of malady.

There have been many systems for classifying mental illness since then, but all seem to me to be on the botanical model, and that has been their fatal flaw. …

Sauvages’s dream of classifying mental illness on the model of botany was just as misguided as the plan to classify the chemical elements on the model of botany. There is an amazingly deep organisation of the elements – the periodic table – but it is quite unlike the organisation of plants, which arises ultimately from descent. Linnaean tables of elements (there were plenty) did not represent nature.

The DSM is not a representation of the nature or reality of the varieties of mental illness, and this is a far more radical criticism of it than [National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas] Insel’s claim that the book lacks ‘validity’. I am saying it is founded on a wrong appreciation of the nature of things. It remains a very useful book for other purposes. It is essential to have something like this for the bureaucratic needs of paying for treatment and assessing prevalence. But for those purposes the changes effected from DSM-IV to DSM-5 were not worth the prodigious labour, committee meetings, fierce and sometimes acrimonious debate involved. I have no idea how much the revision cost, but it is not that much help to clinicians, and the changes do not matter much to the bureaucracies. And trying to get it right, in revision after revision, perpetuates the long-standing idea that, in our present state of knowledge, the recognised varieties of mental illness should neatly sort themselves into tidy blocks, in the way that plants and animals do.

Previous Dish on the DSM here, here, and here.

The Deadliest Service Job In The World

This picture taken on May 23, 2010 shows

Grayson Schaffer finds that few Westerners appreciate just how dangerous it is to be a Sherpa:

According to the Himalayan Database, which keeps track of such things, 174 climbing Sherpas have died while working in the mountains in Nepal—15 in the past decade on Everest alone (see sidebar for a country-by-country comparison). During that time, at least as many Sherpas were disabled by rockfall, frostbite, and altitude-related illnesses like stroke and edema. A Sherpa working above Base Camp on Everest is nearly ten times more likely to die than a commercial fisherman—the profession the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rates as the most dangerous nonmilitary job in the U.S.—and more than three and a half times as likely to perish than an infantryman during the first four years of the Iraq war. As a dice roll for someone paying to reach the summit, the dangers of climbing can perhaps be rationalized. But as a workplace safety statistic, 1.2 percent mortality is outrageous. There’s no other service industry in the world that so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefit of paying clients.

(Photo: A Nepalese Sherpa collects garbage at an altitude of 26,200 feet during a May 2010 clean-up expedition at Mount Everest. A team of 20 Nepalese climbers collected 4,000 pounds of rubbish during the high-risk operation. By Namgyal Sherpa /AFP/Getty Images)