More Than A Feeling

Claude S. Fischer points to the limits of empathy when it comes to helping others:

Relying on empathy to motivate charity means that it is not enough that the needy are humans, but they must also be lucky, like the children who happened to live near a Google mogul and got needed dental treatment as a Christmas present; children living further away did not. The needy must also not be repulsive, but preferably be adorable. That is why relief organizations try to show individual, attractive victims who are suffering but not suffering so much as to turn viewers away (see this earlier post on “ugly” laws to bar the poor from city streets). The latest development to mobilize empathy for altruism is “a crowdfunding website for homeless people, where the needy can post photos, videos, tell their story, and request donations for the things that might help them take the next step.” So, the homeless who can best display their empathy-worthiness get personal help from the homelessness-kickstarter audience.

The Abrahamic tradition has a different approach to altruism. The New and Old Testaments largely command people who are comfortable to give to people who aren’t—unconditionally (discussed here). Feeling empathetic has nothing to do with it. Nor does the recipients’ deservingness. (Even the president’s spokesman goofed in attributing the Greek saying about helping “those who help themselves” to the Bible.) In this tradition, God wills, commands that we help those who need help, with no qualification tests. On a comparable subject, rendering justice in disputes, the Bible enjoins that “You shall not favor the wretched and you shall not defer to the rich” (Lev. 19:15; Alter trans.)—that is, a judge should not let empathy guide justice in either direction.

A Short Film For Saturday

Greg Jardin’s short film Floating follows the urban adventures of a figure made entirely of balloons:

Floating once again proves our remarkable human ability to discover empathy for abstract non-humans. Known for his high-concept stop-motion music videos, Jardin, in a new passion project, displays remarkable adeptness at CG in crafting his remarkable protagonist. A bare-bones production, shot on public streets, Jardin puts in extra work in handling Edit/Sound Design and VFX in addition to writing/directing. The result is a film that looks much more lush and expensive than it probably was. … [T]he remarkable “performance” of his animated lead hits the right spots in enabling an audience to experience his crushing loneliness.

Jardin explained his inspiration in a recent interview:

I really liked the idea of crafting an emotional narrative around something that you would normally not have any real emotional connection to, in this case, balloons. When I started discussing the idea with my friend Matthew Beans, who ended up co-writing it with me, we started discussing the notion that giving the balloon person a kindred spirit and separating the two could give it more of an emotional impact that a balloon person alone for the duration of the film.

Just Browsing

Marisa Meltzer contemplates the “vicarious Tinder fantasies” of the settled-down:

“They want to save you, the married friends,” said Karen Luh, who is a lawyer in Los Angeles. She sighed audibly. “I was having dinner with a friend and talking about losers I was dating. She said, ‘You should use this thing Tinder.’ She had seen it at a baby shower. She presented it like she wished she could use it, too.” …

Perhaps, at least in part, the envy isn’t even about wishing they were single and seeing what’s on the menu out there, but about fear of being left out by new technology — or way of life. “It’s America, so people are always worried about getting old and out of touch and obsolete,” said Emily Witt, who profiled Tinder in GQ earlier this year and whose forthcoming book, Future Sex, is on women and sexuality. Married people feel like they’re “missing out on this new kind of socialization, which isn’t to say they should be jealous of us,” she said.

Or for some would-be Tinder voyeurs, maybe it’s simply a way to get their significant other a little bit jealous. One night last winter Gio Muniz and Ruth Reader were at a bar in Brooklyn, and the topic of Tinder came up. “We were talking to a friend who had just started messing around with it and telling us how someone finally figured out a hookup app for straight people,” she said. So they downloaded it on his phone and started browsing. “It lasted 22 minutes or so,” said Muniz. Then, “Ruth was like, ‘You’re gonna delete that, right?’”

Leonard Cohen On Love

Ezra Glinter looks at sex and intimacy in the work of Leonard Cohen:

Cohen’s rawness, and the honesty with which he displays his own vulnerabilities, sometimes leads him to extreme positions, granting sex a primacy that it doesn’t deserve. In his view “there is a war between the man and the woman” as well as “a war between those who say there is a war and those who say that there isn’t” (“There Is a War”). He has written, “a friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism.” And he has concluded, “when I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction.”

For me, that’s the voice of a less mature self, for whom deprivation is not just the mother of poetry but of exaggeration.

… Usually those emotions, even when we can admit them to ourselves or share them with our closest friends, have to be covered up in polite society. We can’t walk around constantly in the throes of our own private maelstroms. More important, maturity—and good sense—demands that we view each other as human beings who suffer from basically the same problems, not as enemies in a never-ending war of the sexes. We are the perpetrators of pain as well as its victims, we reject and are rejected, desire and are desired. But that knowledge doesn’t lessen the joy and suffering of our innermost selves. It doesn’t diminish the feelings of delight and anger that seem as though they had never been felt before. Only time diminishes them, along with experience, repetition and age.

Except, it seems, for Leonard Cohen. In his work, the bite of those feelings is still sharp. In his albums and novels, memories of love and heartbreak stay on the surface, bobbing up and down. In his poems and songs there is always, as Wordsworth put it, “The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Reading and listening to Leonard Cohen it is always, and forever, the first time.

A Story About Leaving The Dreamhouse Behind

Ophira Eisenberg survived a car accident when she was eight years old. Here she tells the poignant, bittersweet story of how her recovery gave her the perspective that comes with growing up:

Eisenberg is a comedian, writer, and a regular host of Moth storySLAMs, as well as of the NPR quiz show Ask Me Another. Previous storytelling on the Dish here.

Pop Questions

What makes a pop song a hit? David Samuels talked to music exec Mike Caren, who maintains there are nine rules:

“First, it starts with an expression of ‘Hey,’ ‘Oops,’ ‘Excuse me,’” he begins. “Second is a personal statement: ‘I’m a hustler, baby,’ ‘I wanna love you,’ ‘I need you tonight.’ Third is telling you what to do: ‘Put your hands up,’ ‘Give me all your love,’ ‘Jump.’ Fourth is asking a question: ‘Will you love me tomorrow,’ ‘Where have you been all my life,’ ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up.’” He takes a deep breath, and rattles off another four rules. “Five is logic,” he says, “which could be counting, or could be spelling or phonetics: ‘1-2-3-4, let the bodies hit the floor,’ or ‘Ca-li-fornia is comp-li-cated,’ those kind of things. Six would be catchphrases that roll off the tip of your tongue because you know them: ‘Never say never,’ ‘Rain on my parade.’ Seven would be what we call stutter, like, ‘D-d-don’t stop the beat,’ but it could also be repetition: ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.’ Eight is going back to logic again, like hot or cold, heaven or hell, head to toe, all those kind of things.”

The ninth rule of hit songwriting is silence. Why?

Because most people who are listening to music are actually doing something else, he explains. They are driving a car, or working out, or dancing, or flirting. Silence gives you time to catch up with the lyrics if you are drunk or stoned. If you are singing along, silence gives you time to breathe. “Michael Jackson, his quote was ‘Silence is the greatest thing an entertainer has,’” Caren continues. “‘I got a feeling,’ space-space-space, ‘Do you believe in life after love,’ space-space-space-space-space.”

Meanwhile, Gillian Turnbull, a music professor, worries that young music fans grow disenchanted when they can find any song they like on YouTube:

For older listeners, we reached a pinnacle in genre fragmentation in the form of satellite radio: if you like rock n’ roll—but not Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard—you can tune in to a station that only features Elvis. Perhaps you’re especially into 1970s proto-metal? There’s a station for that. In many ways, satellite radio is the ultimate expression of the increasingly narrow, and genre-defined, markets that new radio stations had to create through the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, younger listeners mostly go to YouTube, at least to test out any music they might actually buy. They can go on an unexpected journey through related acts and styles, opening their minds to genre diversity far more than any radio station would allow.

Still, while exploration can’t be a bad thing, I’d argue that being unable to zero in on one style of music and dig into it deeply means that music is being treated too superficially. Maybe we’re obsessed with categorization, but I think categorization matters. Genre exists for a reason: we privilege difference; it is the means for personal and collective expression. My students come to class with a catalogue of Bee Gees and The Police swirling in their brains. They have encyclopaedic knowledge of Grateful Dead bootlegs. I hope they start digging more, learning what made genres sound like they did and their practitioners and listeners act like they did. I hope these kids create new genres and music subcultures, encouraging their peers to not treat music like it’s a throwaway product waiting to be replaced, but that it tells us everything about who we are and what matters.

Chart Of The Day

drinking

Christopher Ingraham captions:

Do you drink a glass of wine with dinner every night? That puts you in the top 30 percent of American adults in terms of per-capita alcohol consumption. If you drink two glasses, that would put you in the top 20 percent. But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.

Fiction Of The Future

David Mitchell explains how he imagines worlds of what’s to come:

[W]hen you’re writing about the future, you simply try to work out what people in that future point will be taking for granted. In The Bone Clocks, there are two future sections. 2025 one is only about 11 years away—there’s just a few gizmos about the place and we’re basically there already. In the 2040s, however, more dramatic changes have taken place. There’s no more oil—or very little oil left. So you think about what people at that point will be taking for granted about travel, about the ability to hop on airplane and be hundreds of miles away in an hour or two. Or to have a conversation like this one, to speak across a continent—which, in the context of human history, is a profoundly bizarre thing to be doing. Animpossible thing to be doing, an unthinkable thing to be doing! We can take a device out of our pockets and speak to somebody in Auckland on it. And the miracle is that we don’t we see it as a miracle. We’ve only had this skill—to take out a smartphone out and call anywhere on earth—for 10 years, maybe 20. But, already, we take it for granted. It is part of what it means to live in our time.

When there is no more oil to power the system of power stations, which power the electric grid, which we power our devices on—we will no longer take it for granted that we can do it. It will be something that our grandchildren will marvel at—my grandfather lived in a world when you could phone someone in Auckland, my god! So that’s how you project yourself, narratively, into another time. You work out what people will be taking for granted, and what not.