Jon Rafman‘s creepy short film “Still Life (Betamale)” is NSFW:
Ben Valentine details how Rafman’s film captures the dark art of the Internet:
“Still Life (Betamale)” confronts some of humanity’s newer and more obsessive activities, all things that may be unique to the web (though we’re never sure). The video sets the stage with shots of disgustingly lived-at computer desks covered in bits of food and cigarette ashes, surrounded by energy drinks and dirty dishes. The main character, the fat man with panties covering his face, pointing two guns at his own head, is leading us on a nearly psychosis-inducing stream of various types of fetish and subculture porn — some of the web’s darkest and strangest corners. This is not the safe and corporate internet of Facebook or Google; “Still Life (Betamale)” is drawn from the visually overloaded world of 4chan, as obsessively browsed by a man who lives in his mother’s basement.
The video paints a clear picture of the stereotype we associate with 4chan users:
smelly men who obsessively consume, produce, and share socially unaccepted media, never AFK. By splicing together footage and images from these online communities, Rafman places the viewer at the center of a mind-numbing search for meaning in some of the most socially questionable places. … Rafman shows how these creations were made in a sincere search for pleasure, meaning, community, and self-expression, as grotesque as they may look to some of us.
Brandon Soderberg reviewed the film back in October:
The 8-bit imagery (recalling the digital pixel art of Uno Moralez) brings with it an ambiguous menace. Moments of joy and humor creep in as well: Can you deny that a guy in a bunny suit bouncing up and down in his ground floor apartment isn’t having the time of his life?
The more you sit with this collection of clips and images, the harder it is to LULZ away. You gain empathy even as you grow more creeped out. The combined pile-up of seeing suicidal panties dude a few times, and the long-as-hell clip of someone in a fox costume, stuck in a mudpit in the middle of the woods, is mind-cracking. A sense of overabundance sits in your gut long after “Still Life (Betamale)” (which climaxes by finding infinity in piss-soaked panties) ends. You’re overwhelmed and engulfed by the unlimited. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a furry flailing about in quicksand—forever.
The Dish has featured Rafman’s work here and here.
Leah Reich considers how sex robots could alter human relationships – or keep them trapped in the strictures of the past:
Perhaps the best-known work on intimate relationships with robots is by the British author, chessmaster, and CEO of Intelligent Toys Ltd, David Levy. Most of the discussion regarding the ethics of robot sex centers on his article ‘The Ethics of Robot Prostitutes’ from Robot Ethics(2011), wherein he separates types of sexbots according to their sophistication. Levy argues that as long as sexbots are artifacts, without ‘artificial consciousness,’ there are no ethical implications in having sex with them or using them for prostitution. …
But even if sexbots are not currently conscious, they do have the external markings of personhood, and we are programming them to be person-like. Indeed, we are programming them to be like a specific type of person: the type of woman who can be owned by a heterosexual man. If women are the model on which most sexbots are based, we run the risk of recreating essentialized gender roles, especially around sex. And that would be too bad, because sex technology has the potential to alleviate longstanding human problems, for both men and women. Sex tech can help us take on sexual dysfunction and profound loneliness, but if we simply create a new variety of second-class citizen, a sexual creature to be owned, we risk alienating ourselves from each other all over again.
In other high-tech sex news, Victoria Turk investigates “the DIY side of the 3D-printed sex toy revolution”:
The descriptively named ‘Dildo Generator’ lets you tweak a phallic model until it fits your preferences just so, ready to be saved and exported so the 3D file of your fantasy can be forever solidified in silicone. I reached out to Ikaros Kappler, the Berlin-based programmer behind the project, to ask why. Fittingly, the idea came to him while he was hanging out with friends, drinking beer, and listening to techno at a maker space. “It was the aim to print something more useful instead of printing small figurines to put on your windowsill,” he told me over email. He also wanted to explore the new features of HTML5. “Oh, and I love Bézier curves!” he added. Those are the curves you can make by adjusting points at either end on a computer model, always resulting in a nice smooth finish. Pretty important to dildo design, I guess.
Allison P. Davis mulls over Wyldfire, a new app where female users double as gatekeepers:
[F]emale users can sign up freely, but any man on the app has to be invited, theoretically creating a network of only women-selected desirable, dateable, single men. “Everyone has that one friend who they think is a great-quality guy but they either don’t want to date themselves or want someone else they know to date,” says brand manager Jesse Shiffman. Founders Brian Freeman and Andrew White created the app, “designed specifically around the needs of women,” after hearing several of their female friends complain about “getting creeped on” whenever they used Tinder. … By using existing social networks to build an expanded dating pool, it simulates a more desirable, “organic” dating experience – like Hinge, but with more options. …
But here’s a problem:
How many men in your inner circle do you consider dateable that you don’t want to date yourself? I have maybe two. On a good day. Will “female-centric” dating networks turn into a smorgasboard for dudes? They might be “safer,” but they don’t necessarily increase chances of dating success for the female user.
As Davis notes, that type of eligible bachelor – the single, straight guy you don’t want to date, don’t want to set up with any of your friends, and yet are eager to recommend to all female strangers in your general area – may be even more elusive than the guy who actually sparks your interest.
But let’s say we all have these men in our lives: Identifying a guy as an obvious creep isn’t easy, either. The Wyldfire system operates on the assumption that men who text aggressively crude material to strangers on the internet have no female friends in real life. While it’s tempting to believe that men who type with their penises have simply never had any contact with female human beings, who really knows what lies in the dark recesses of your friend’s Tinder messages? Not you – you just hang out at parties.
Update from a reader:
I wonder how many men are going to want to participate in an app where merely being invited to it means you’ve been implicitly turned down by the person who invited you.
Can a museum dedicated to all things phallic serve as a center of learning? As Julie Beck finds, the answer is … sort of:
By the time Siggi’s private collection became a museum, in 1997, he had 62 specimens. The museum now boasts 283 biological specimens, including at least one from every species of mammal found in Iceland.
And I mean every mammal. The documentary The Final Member, which comes out on DVD June 17, profiles Siggi and his museum’s quest to complete his collection by acquiring—you guessed it—a human penis. The film portrays an apparent race against time between a 95-year-old Icelandic adventurer (and, seemingly, notorious womanizer) named Pall Arason, who has promised his organ to the collection when he dies, and an American named Tom Mitchell, who so desperately wants his penis, which he calls Elmo, to be famous, that he considers cutting it off while he’s still alive, so his can be the first on display. “I’ve always thought it’d be really cool for my penis to be the first true penis celebrity,” Mitchell says in the movie. …
[T]here is a strange tension [in the museum] between the spectacle and the scientific.
The spectacle gets people in the door, but the museum’s purpose seems to be more sincere. The “About” section of its website states: “Now, thanks to The Icelandic Phallological Museum, it is finally possible for individuals to undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion.” It’s certainly not pornographic. …
“It is very very important for me to inform people or educate people,” Hjartarson says in the film. “I think this serves and helps decrease taboos about the human body. Especially about this organ, I’m presenting here… I was a professional teacher for 37 years. I like telling people, I like informing people.”
“My father is a teacher, not only by learning, but by heart, in his soul,” Sigurdsson agrees. “There’s nothing lewd or pornographic about [what he’s doing]. It’s an educational and funny sort of way to display something that isn’t seen every day. If you take something like the penis and just treat it like any other thing, it becomes more ordinary.”
Two weeks ago, the English broadcaster Jeremy Paxman ignited a furor by arguing that contemporary verse “connives at its own irrelevance” and needs to “raise its game a little bit, raise its sights.” One word in particular rankled poets:
Paxman suggest[ed] (not, it would appear, entirely ironically) setting up “inquisition” panels before which poets would be forced to justify their decisions, including “why they chose to write about the particular subject they wrote about, and why they chose the particular form and language, idiom, the rest of it.” This, Paxman claims, would be “a really illuminating experience for everybody.”
On Twitter, Paxman’s comments were fodder for some choice responses from poets, including Canada’s own David McGimpsey, who wrote, “Asking poets to appeal more to the common person is like asking Colonel Sanders to appeal more to chickens.” And Q&Q’s April cover subject, Sina Queyras, responded, “Jeremy Paxman can kiss my obscurity.”
What really got some poets angry was when Paxman called for an “inquisition” in which poets would be “called to account for their poetry.” The language of “inquisitions” and being “called to account” has ugly resonances – that is why the provocative Paxman used it – and it has led some poets to denounce Paxman: George Szirtes saw it as an allusion to McCarthy and Stalinism. But if we take the element of compulsion out of it, there is nothing wrong with Paxman’s suggestion. Indeed, not only is there nothing wrong with it, it’s already, as Shakespeare once said in a different context, lawful as eating. Poetry magazine publishes issues in which poets are interviewed about their poems; anthologies feature poets explaining their work; poets clamor to get the chance to talk on panels, to read their work aloud and discuss it; and the whole creative-writing industry is premised on the idea that poets learn by explaining and defending what they’ve written. …
The real problem with Paxman’s comments lies in their incoherence: He is complaining about two different things as if they were the same thing. On the one hand, he urges poets to open up, to write for the general public, to be more accessible; on the other hand, he wants poetry to be better, to be more interesting and captivating. Both are understandable demands, but it’s important to recognize that they contradict one another. The best poetry is not always accessible, and the most accessible poetry is usually not good.
Maliki’s forces may have halted, or at least slowed, ISIS’s advance:
Security sources said Iraqi troops attacked an ISIL [ISIS] formation in the town of al-Mutasim, 22 km (14 miles) southeast of Samarra, driving militants out into the surrounding desert. They said army forces reasserted control over the small town of Ishaqi, also southeast of Samarra, to secure a road that links Baghdad to Samarra and the now ISIL-held cities of Tikrit and Mosul further north. Troops backed by the Shi’ite Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia also retook the town of Muqdadiya northeast of Baghdad, and ISIL was dislodged from Dhuluiya after three hours of fighting with tribesmen, local police and residents, a tribal leader said.
It was far from clear whether government forces could sustain their reported revival against ISIL, given serious weaknesses including poor morale and corruption, and the risk of Iraq sundering into hostile sectarian entities remains high. ISIL insurgents kept up their assaults on some fronts.
The biggest questions center on whether the United States will carry out air strikes, either with warplanes or unmanned drones, against militants of [ISIS], which moved swiftly to seize the northern cities of Mosul and Tikrit this week and now threaten Baghdad. Such attacks, an option the Pentagon described on Friday as “kinetic strikes”, could be launched from aircraft carriers or from the sprawling U.S. air base at Incirlik in Turkey. The carrier USS George H.W. Bush and its strike group are already “in the region,” the Pentagon said on Friday.
Last night, Clinton basically agreed with Obama’s reluctance to get re-involved with Iraq or to further support the Maliki government:
“You’d be fighting for a dysfunctional, unrepresentative, authoritarian government,” she said on Friday at George Washington University. Clinton talked at length about the unfolding crisis in Iraq, where the extremist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has moved from Syria, taking hold of cities north of Baghdad. “There’s no reason on earth that I know of that we would ever sacrifice a single American life for that,” Clinton added.
Amen. Meanwhile, Kilgore is not liking the deja vu:
Moqutada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, which may be reforming; Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has now called Iraqis to arms to resist the ISIS breakup of the country; the Kurdish Peshmerga militia, which just seized the oil city of Kirkuk that the semi-autonomous Kurdish regional government has long coveted; the “holy sites,” which Shi’a revere but that the ISIS would just as soon destroy as “idolotrous.” And yes, among the bad returning memories is the daily hectoring from John McCain about the need for U.S. troops in Iraq forever—this time, presumably, in a more explicit and highly ironic alliance with Tehran, which many of McCain’s neocon buddies would love to see reduced to radioactive ash.
The Obama administration seems to be treating the Iraq crisis as it would an adverse breakdown in the military balance in Syria, not as some sort of implicit repudiation of the U.S. decision to shut down its part of the Iraq War. That makes sense. But it will be interesting to see how U.S. public opinion reacts to any sort of return engagement with Iraq in all its complexity. The bad memories are just too recent to have faded entirely.
To wit, Aaron Blake notes that if Obama does attack, the US public will likely respond in kind:
[A] Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found his ratings in this area sinking to a new low. Just 41 percent approved of his job on international affairs, down six points in three months and currently five points below his overall approval rating. Layered on top of Obama’s weakness on foreign affairs is the long-standing unpopularity of the war in Iraq. As of March 2013, just 38 percent said the costs of the war were worth the effort and 58 percent said they were not.
Back in Iraq, the government has instituted a social media blackout in an effort to cut down ISIS’s communication network, though as Craig Timberg notes, it’s unclear how effective that will be:
Regions beyond government control often rely on alternative sources, such as satellite links and fiber-optic lines coming from telecommunications providers in Turkey, Iran and Jordan, analysts said. Service in semiautonomous Kurdish regions, for example, appeared to be flowing without a blip.
“It kind of echoes the larger themes in Iraq, of how little the Iraqi government controls in that country,” said Doug Madory, a senior analyst with Renesys, a New Hampshire-based company that tracks Internet performance worldwide.
Read all Dish coverage of ISIS here. Mackey is live-blogging the latest developments.
On Thursday, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, announced the appointment of Charles Wright as the new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry:
Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric. For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God.’ Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality.
Truly, is there anybody better? No — though some equals among his peers come to mind. His body of work takes in Dante, the Civil War, Eastern philosophy, manhood, poetry and poets, and the superaliveness of a certain American mind in the second half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first.
Wright was born in 1935 in Tennessee and served with the U.S. Army, first exploring poetry while stationed in Italy, and was later a professor at the University of Virginia. His influences range from the work of Ezra Pound to that of ancient Chinese poets. In 2011, he told PBS that the content of all of his poems, no matter their precise subject matter, is “language, landscape and the idea of God.” He also noted that his poems have gotten less “loquacious” as he’s gotten older. “I once said if a guy can’t say what he has to say in three lines, he better change his job,” he joked. “I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m down to six lines.”
His poetic bona fides are many: 24 poetry collections and two books of essays. A Pulitzer Prize. A National Book Critics Circle Award. A National Book Award. The International Griffin Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A term as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. The Library of Congress’ own award for lifetime achievement in the form. (And lots more.)
In an NPR interview about this appointment, Wright describes his sources of inspiration:
It’s always been the idea of landscape that’s around me, that I look at; the idea of the music of language; and then the idea of God, or of that spiritual mystery that we doggedly follow, some of us, all of our days, and which we won’t find the answer to until it’s too late — or maybe it’s not too late. Maybe it’s just the start, I don’t know.
In any case, that’s what I’ve always written about, and those three things are the meanings of my poems. The content changes — you know, what it’s about, this, that and the other — but the meaning has always been the same, the same thing I’ve been after. Ever since I was a tongue-tied altar boy in the Episcopal Church.
Wright hopes to bring a fresh perspective to the job:
As the new poet laureate, Wright will have few required duties. The library provides an office and allows each poet to define the job however he or she would like. (The salary is $35,000, plus $5,000 for travel — meager, even for a poet.) Some laureates stay in Washington and use the office, some don’t. “The most important thing that they do,” Billington says, “is to provide an inspirational example of how powerful poetry can be.”
Billy Collins (2001-2003) began a program to bring a poem a day into high school classrooms across the country. Ted Kooser (2004-2006) wrote a weekly newspaper column. And the most recent poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey (2012-2014), toured the country for a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour called “Where Poetry Lives.”
Wright has something quieter in mind. “I’m not going to be an activist laureate the way Natasha was,” he says. “She was great at it, but I’ve been around the block more than twice — I’m 79. I guess I’ll bring wisdom and good luck. It’s all a new experience for me. Basically, one has to pull up one’s socks and say, ‘I’ll do it.’ My wife wanted me to. She wouldn’t say so, but she wanted me to. I think she thought we’d be coming up to D.C. and going to museums.”
In his 1989 Paris Review interview, Wright had this to say about what he looks for in poetry:
Music and substance, I guess, as most anyone would. One man’s music, naturally, is another man’s Muzak. One’s ear is one’s Virgil, however, leading you on. … One looks for a reach, an ambition. One looks for language, an exuberance. Well, one looks for Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson, for Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman. There seem to me to be certain absolutes in whatever field of endeavor one is in. In business and banking they may be availability and convertibility, security and safekeeping, minimal loss and steady, incremental accession. I don’t think it’s that way in poetry, though such values will get you to temporary high places. Brilliance is what you reach for, language that has a life of its own, seriousness of subject matter beyond the momentary gasp and glitter, a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful, a willingness to be different and abstract, a willingness to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one … Is that asking too much? Probably. Is there going to be someone to come along who fits this description? Probably. Will we recognize him when he comes? Probably not.
You can read over fifty of Wright’s poems here. His most recent collection is Caribou: Poems.
Isaac Chotiner is willing to consider some sort of response:
[I]t’s not clear what America can or should do, which is why remarks like those from John McCain, who called this “an existential threat” and seems to want some sort of huge response, are alarming. But that doesn’t let the United States off the hook, and certainly not at the rhetorical level. Would Obama say that the Cambodian genocide was ultimately up to the Cambodians to solve, after America bombed and destabilized the country? Was the genocide in the former Yugoslavia a Bosnian problem, even though the West kept an arms embargo on the Bosnians, essentially preventing them from defending themselves?
Wieseltierism really has taken over that magazine, from top to bottom. I’d say eight years of blood and treasure and failure in Iraq is enough. Unless, like Wieseltier, you see the entire planet as a patient and America as the only nurse. Relatedly, Noah Millman declares that people “who think the world will swiftly get more peaceful if we mind our own business may well be just as wrong as the people who think that by sticking our nose into other people’s business we can force the world to be peaceful”:
[W]e are responsible for the situation in Iraq.
We are directly responsible in that we broke the existing arrangement of power and installed ourselves as the occupier. We are also indirectly responsible inasmuch as our overweening hegemonic influence in the region means that inaction is also a kind of action. So, because the Syrian civil war has not resolved, but expanded and become more violent and extreme, and because that civil war and Iraq’s are, with the rise of ISIS, effectively merging, to the extent that we may be “blamed” for not resolving that civil war, we may also be “blamed” indirectly for the deterioration in Iraq.
None of which means we should make feel obliged to do something stupid and counter-productive, but it provides and genuine moral explanation for why we might feel obliged to do something.
I love this formulation: hegemony means inaction is action, so there’s no difference between the two! So let me put this as kindly as I can. We lost 5,000 young Americans trying to keep this centrifugal country in one piece. After eight years, and huge expenses in training and equipping the Iraqi army, we bear no blame and never have for the pathological sectarianism of so many Arab countries, culturally or politically. And it’s time to have enough self-respect to say so. The sanest, wisest way to wriggle out of this trap is precisely to do nothing – again and again – until the pathology of dependence is finished.
If there is something we can do, it should be to ratchet up our ability to monitor these groups – sorry, NSA-haters, but spying is one of our strongest and least disruptive tools in preventing attacks on the homeland – and to provide as much diplomatic and political advice, if asked, as to how to render the situation less volatile. But even there, the limits of our behavior are so much more profound than the potential. If you think Maliki pursued text-book sectarianism out of a whim, or could have been effectively dissuaded by a few American military officials, you are only missing the entire modern history of Iraq. And in sectarian warfare, there is usually very little magnanimity. Just payback – again and again and again.
Leave it alone. And do what we can to protect ourselves. That doesn’t guarantee anything. But intervention guarantees far worse.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has just opened up his company’s patents, saying that the company will not “initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” In a conference call with reporters also on Thursday, Musk added that the company plans on aggressively filing electric car-related patents and opening them to the public as a pre-emptive measure to thwart other companies or potential patent trolls. This also applies retroactively to all currently held Tesla patents.
Musk isn’t naive, and Tesla isn’t a charity. Rather, he knows that Tesla’s real battle isn’t with other automakers for leadership of today’s niche market for electric cars. It’s the much greater struggle between electric cars and their gas-powered counterparts.
Viewed in that context, the obstacles to Tesla’s success aren’t the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3—they’re the constraints of technology, cost, infrastructure, and customer expectations. The more money is put into electric batteries, the cheaper and more powerful they’ll become. The more electric cars there are on the road, the greater will be the demand for regional and national networks of electric charging stations. And guess what company will stand to benefit the most.
Tesla needs widespread adoption of electric cars and the easiest way to do that is to get other automakers to sell them too. More electric cars in the world means Tesla’s cars aren’t so weird, and they become an easier sell to a skeptical public. … At the end of the day, the biggest risk for Musk isn’t that BMW or Toyota will steal his technology. It’s that the big automakers might not be interested in electric cars enough to bother building them at all.
Meanwhile, Timothy Lee suggests that electric cars aren’t such a unique case after all:
The standard economic argument for patents assumes that without them, new inventions will be quickly imitated by competitors, destroying the ability of the original inventor to turn a profit. But if you look at the history of actual inventions, this is often not how things work out.
In practice, the biggest challenge many inventors face isn’t fending off copycats, it’s developing a market for the product in the first place. For major inventions, the potential market is usually much larger than the first few firms can hope to serve. The challenge is converting all those potential customers into actual customers. In a new industry, competitors can actually help with this by helping spread news about the invention, pioneering better sales techniques, and developing improvements that make the product more attractive.
[I]t is revealing to see just how many of Wilde’s journalistic writings are for and about women. This activity peaks when Wilde takes over the editorship of the Lady’s World, an illustrated monthly that advertised itself as a “high-class magazine for ladies”. Famously, the first thing Wilde did when he took charge of the journal was to change its title: Lady’s World became Woman’s World – a shift that signals a different target audience and different political ambitions. The revamped journal was to provide high-quality journalism aimed at modern middle-class female readers who did not think of themselves as “ladies”. These women were keen to read about culture, education and employment, and Wilde catered for their advanced tastes. Wilde’s editorship of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889 was a crucial step not only in his career as a journalist but in his development as a writer in a broader sense. It was the only period in his life in which Wilde received a regular salary. More importantly, though, he was now in charge of commissioning essays and reviews, which he did by recruiting an impressive array of women contributors ranging from successful novelists to graduates of the new women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford.
In a review of the volumes of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that cover the writer’s journalism, Stefano Evangelista observes that the genre proved a good training grounds for Wilde’s later literary experiments:
It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”. The traffic between his journalism and criticism makes us realize that to draw a sharp divide between these two fields in the Victorian age is a rather arbitrary affair. It is also in the journalism that Wilde learns to play with the epigram – a literary device that he would perfect in his society comedies. He learns to cultivate an effortless style, which mixes critical acumen with silliness, balances learning with superficiality, and tempers natural donnishness by means of studied flippancy. He learns to master that characteristic blend of praise and ridicule. He learns, in other words, to establish that easy, direct contact with the audience that made him a successful dramatist in his own time and that still makes him, on the stage and in print, so appealing to many today.
The Dish 