Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 310

Turning The Camera On A Hidden Shutterbug

A new documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, investigates the life and art of the professional nanny whose stunning photography was discovered only after her death in 2007. (The film’s co-director, John Maloof, stumbled upon Maier’s work when he purchased a box of negatives at a Chicago auction for $380.) In a review of the film, Erin Fuchs focuses on revelations of Maier’s dark side:

She was an odd woman. Maier always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck and dragged her charges around Chicago’s seedy areas to take pictures. Those pictures often captured the weakest moments of their subjects, who included children weeping and a young boy who had just been hit by a car. Maier took one of her charges, Inger Raymond, to a stockyard, where she exposed the young child to the slaughter of livestock. …

Despite Maier’s odd and mean behavior, at least two of her former charges had some affection for her, as they put her up in an apartment near the end of her life. In her final years, Maier often sat in the park, mumbling in French, eating food directly from a can, and accepting old clothes from strangers.

Jillian Steinhauer considers the movie “standard artist-as-subject fare” but still appreciates the tribute:

Finding Vivian Maier isn’t particularly experimental or innovative in form, and suffers from a bit of structural scrambling when the narrative veers abruptly at one point. But it does a good and moving job of telling the story of Maier, which is the most important and interesting thing under discussion. Maier’s life was — if not tragic, then certainly sad. … She became — and the film emphasizes this to great effect — one of those characters her younger self would have photographed: a crazy old poor lady. “There’s a lot of eccentric people around here, and I just thought she was one of them,” says a former neighbor.

Haley Mlotek calls the film a “necessary documentary, and a necessary story”:

As a photographer, Vivian captured scenes, places, people — the elements of life that cannot be fixed, things that are either converted into memories that dim over time or discarded as unimportant and not worth preserving. As I watched image after image of Vivian’s work, I wondered if Vivian would have even called herself a photographer. Some interviewees in the documentary talk about her peculiar habit of calling herself a spy, giving fake names and false histories to the people she interacted with — a woman at a pawn shop, a man at the library — instructing them to call her V. Smith, Vivian Mayer, and other such versions of her real name.

Mlotek goes on to consider what Maier might have made of the attention her work now receives:

Vivian liked too-good-to-be-true headlines, the kinds of stories you can only see in newspapers and never in fiction: “Man Bites Dog,” that sort of thing. [Co-director Charlie] Siskel told me, when I asked about whether Vivian would have enjoyed being the subject of so much attention, that Vivian “knew a great story when she heard one. We would like to think this is exactly the kind of story Vivian would have appreciated. ‘Nanny takes 100,000 photos and hides them in storage lockers, but they’re discovered years later and she becomes a famous artist.’ That’s the kind of story Vivian would have liked.” I agree. But it’s not clear if that’s the kind of story Vivian wanted to tell.

Explore her work here. Previous Dish on Maier here.

A Poem For Sunday

“Conversation” by Elizabeth Bishop:

The tumult in the heart

keeps asking questions.

And then it stops and undertakes to answer

in the same tone of voice.

No one could tell the difference.

Uninnocent, these conversations start,

and then engage the senses,

only half-meaning to.

And then there is no choice,

and then there is no sense;

until a name

and all its connotations are the same.

(From Poems by Elizabeth Bishop © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Video is the trailer for Reaching for the Moon, the recent film about Bishop)

“Dreaming In League With God”

The philosopher Howard Wettstein argues (NYT) against the usefulness of debating whether or not God “exists.” How he – a self-proclaimed naturalist – approaches religion:

Religious life, at least as it is for me, does not involve anything like a well-defined, or even something on the way to becoming a well-defined, concept of God, a concept of the kind that a philosopher could live with. What is fundamental is no such thing, but rather the experience of God, for example in prayer or in life’s stunning moments. Prayer, when it works, yields an awe-infused sense of having made contact, or almost having done so. Having made contact, that is, concerning the things that matter most, whether the health and well-being of others, or of the community, or even my own; concerning justice and its frequent absence in our world; concerning my gratefulness to, or praise of, God. The experience of sharing commitments with a cosmic senior partner, sharing in the sense both of communicating and literally sharing, “dreaming in league with God,” as A.J. Heschel puts it, is both heady and heartening. Even when that partner remains undefined and untheorized.

He goes on to explain why he believes we’ll never have a “complete explanation” of religious experience:

Say we had a really satisfying psychological account of, for example, what we experience in a moment of intense love. Say further that this was somehow perfectly correlated with a neurophysiological account. Would this be a complete explanation? Would there be no more questions — “why” questions — to ask about the experience? Couldn’t we still be puzzled about the role that love plays in the human emotional economy? Wouldn’t we want to know what it says about these creatures, their needs, their frustrations, the things that make life worthwhile for them? I’m not sure that we can ever close the book on our multiple explanatory projects.

Faces Of The Day

Photographer Gonzalo Orquin captures same-sex couples in ornate church settings:

For the series “Trialogo,” the Catholic photographer Gonzalo Orquin captured images of homosexual couples kissing in centuries-old Italian churches; beneath the ornate ceilings, the lovers’ embrace harmonizes with the architecture, elevating gay love to the religious beauty and devotion normally associated only with heterosexual marriages. By locating each shot within a religious and cultural context that has opposed marriage equality, Orquin courageously asserts the sacred validity of same-sex love.

The Vatican blocked one of Orquin’s exhibitions last year:

Despite Pope Francis’ earlier remarks about opening up the Church, the Vatican has firmly shut the door on artist Gonzalo Orquin’s latest exhibit, “Trialogo,”scheduled to open at the Galleria L’Opera on Wednesday evening. The exhibit consists of photographs of same-sex couples kissing in churches mainly located in Rome, but the pictures have been covered up after the Vatican sent the gallery a notice threatening legal action and saying that “the church is against the exhibition.”

See more of Orquin’s work here.

In The Wake Of Mainline Protestantism

For an overview of Jody Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age, check out Bottum’s lecture at AEI. In it, he argues that “our purely political concerns have been reduced to nothing more than footballs with which we happen to play that public game of spiritual redemption”:

The major event that allowed this spiritualizing of our politics is the utter collapse of the Protestant mainline churches, those once central and stabilizing institutions in the American experiment. With their collapse, since the 1970s, strange entities have broken loose to find a new home in politics. There’s a reason far too many Americans think their opponents are evil. Politics has become a supernatural battleground, where we want to work out not our political problems, but our spiritual anxieties.

The disappearance of the Protestant ascendancy that defined the American new world for 300 years is a cause of enormous amounts of our current political situation, of our incivility toward one another, and of our politics of salvation.

Last weekend we featured laudatory reviews of Buttum’s book. Greg Forster wasn’t as impressed, describing it as “a bad book with a good book trapped inside it, struggling to get out.” He particularly laments its “cartoon caricature” of Protestantism:

Bottum’s sneers at evangelicalism arise from a deeper contempt for Protestant religion as such.

Having uncritically assimilated Max Weber’s long-discredited account of Protestant theology and sociology, Bottum sees the religious anxiety of the social gospel movement as a natural product of Protestant religion. Thus, the current downfall of American culture is merely the necessary historical consequence of Protestantism.

As Bottum’s own evidence shows, the social gospel did not develop religious anxiety and hand it down to today’s secularism because it was following the natural direction of Protestant religion. Bottum describes, complete with damning original source quotations, how social gospel theology denied the power of the cross to save anyone. Yet he never explains why he doesn’t accept what would seem to be the theory best supported by these facts—namely, that the social gospel created religious anxiety precisely because it abandoned Protestant religion.

If Bottum made a serious case against Protestantism, providing argument and evidence, his book would be worth taking seriously. But Bottum is no Brad Gregory. He is simply tossing around unexamined prejudices.

Geoffrey Kabaservice picks up on the pessimism of Bottum’s book:

The American experiment, in Bottum’s telling, has always rested on the three-legged stool of democracy, capitalism, and religion. Throughout most of the country’s history, these three legs both “accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.” At times, the force of democracy pushed back against overweening religion, as with the immigrant-led populism that halted anti-Catholic oppression in the nineteenth century. At other times, religion used its prophetic force to call democracy to account, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Bottum worries that with the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, much of what we value about America may not survive in the future, leaving us with either a rapacious consumer society or a nanny state. He also warns that liberalism itself may be undermined by the disappearance of religion from the public square; liberalism is based on religiously derived ideas of human dignity, and “every attempt to anchor human dignity in something other than biblical religion has failed.” …

Time will tell if Bottum’s more pessimistic conclusions will bear out. In the meantime, this book drives home what we have lost, as a culture, with the death of Mainline Protestantism, and the ways in which religion continues, in one form or another, to shape our American present.

 

 

Commemorating Cobain

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Tom Slater insists that “try as we might, it’s impossible to separate the man from his music”:

Cobain was widely hailed as the last great rock icon – someone whose life, work and time coalesced to form one totemic legend. Any claim that pop music, in and of itself, can attain some level of immortality, as if, like the great works of antiquity, we can easily separate the work from the man and the myth, is ludicrous. Popular culture is always intertwined with the conditions, and often the person, that helped create it and make it cool. The question, two decades on, is what do we make of it all; of Nirvana, Generation X and Cobain himself.

In an angst-ridden satirical essay, Zachary Lipez offers advice to writers looking to mark the occasion as “an excellent opportunity to write about what Kurt Cobain meant to you.” Josh Jones criticizes some recent commemorations of Cobain, particularly grimacing at the media’s “cultish fascination with newly-released police photos of [his] death scene”:

Atrocious though such coverage may be, there’s good reason beyond nostalgia, hero-worship, or sick fascination to revisit Cobain’s legacy. On April 10, Michael Stipe will induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, formally enshrining the once scruffy outsiders in the hallowed company of ultimate rock insider-dom. This gesture might make some people (maybe it’s just me) feel a little conflicted. After all, wasn’t it precisely the grandiose, popular-kid culture of halls of fame that drove Cobain to the margins, where he did his best work, and ultimately drove him to hate what he’d become—a star? In his strange suicide note, we see Cobain beating himself up for being unable to live up to the hype—unable, as he put it, to be a “Freddy Mercury” and “relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.” There’s something, perhaps, almost tragically insensitive, however well-intentioned, in posthumously turning Kurt Cobain into Elvis.

Two days after his body was found, thousands of fans met to mourn at a candlelight vigil in Seattle, where they heard a recording of Courtney Love reading her husband’s suicide note (a note that sparked the Dish’s long-running thread on suicide):

Anyone can now read Cobain’s suicide note. Google showcases a series of image files, JPEGs tinted in different shades of scanner. Some have been rendered artistically with superimposed images of Cobain’s face, or the less tactful splattering of digitally generated blood. If you prefer, you can read the note in print in several Cobain biographies or his published journals. You can study the directions his handwriting slants and the cross-outs and the font size. You can read it over and over, thinking that you are in that moment and might be able to stop what’s coming before you finish.

But in 1994, two days after his body was found, there was no search engine waiting to share the most private moment of his life. There was only his wife, who–like him–understood that generation and foresaw the sea change his death would cause. By reading the note, she offered them access to all of the incomplete answers–that he was overwhelmed by a lack of passion for writing and playing music, that he felt guilty about that emptiness, that he believed himself to be infantile, narcissistic, too sensitive, unappreciative, erratic, hateful. The note was not vengeful; it was hopeless and apologetic. She delivered it with periodically dispersed commentary, as though reading aloud a harsh break-up note she’d found shoved into the slats of her locker. But she also cried, and her sobs were genuine and resonant. Her uninhibited grief transformed his death into something messy and visceral and selfish and ultimately public, offering the several thousand impressionable young adults in Seattle Center the opportunity to identify with her pain, not his.

She highlights David Fricke’s January 1994 Rolling Stone cover story on Cobain, in which he spoke candidly about pain and suicide:

Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?

For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.

This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

Even as satire, though, a song like that ["I Hate Myself And I Want To Die"] can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.

That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.

Jillian Mapes pays tribute to Cobain with a thoughtful round-up of articles, interviews, and photographs. Alan Light contemplates how Nirvana affected the music industry:

In the wake of Nirvana’s success, the low-wattage radio stations and Xeroxed fanzines of the “college rock” scene were transformed into a marketing monolith known as “alternative culture”. Seattle’s thrift-store anti-fashion took over couture runways and mall stores. Nirvana, like Woodstock, marked both the pinnacle and the end of an underground movement – the moment that Madison Avenue witnessed the scale of a new audience and pounced. This commodification was a big part of what tormented Cobain in his final years, but ultimately it’s neither good nor bad – it’s just what happens when culture meets capitalism…. So, yes, Nirvana changed the world, at least for a moment.

(Video: Cobain performs “Come As You Are” in a rehearsal for MTV Unplugged, November 1993)

Pops The Pot Pirate

Laura Miller reviews Tony Dokoupil’s memoir about his father, who smuggled marijuana into the US during the ’70s and ’80s:

The pot Americans smoke today is almost entirely homegrown, sleekly and cleanly bred and raised. By contrast, “my father’s pot was dirty: doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders.” But for decades, the heyday of Dokoupil’s father and his cronies, smuggled dope was the only — or at least the best — game in town. Dokoupil offers a history of the American marijuana trade during those years, when smugglers were celebrated as daring counterculture heroes by magazines like High Times, men and women who put their freedom and occasionally their lives at risk to help their fellow freaks get high. Well, and also to make a buck — lots and lots of bucks. For a while, during the Carter administration, decriminalization advanced and legalization seemed imminent, but then Ronald Reagan and his gaunt, piously anti-drug wife took the White House and turned up the heat again with their war on drugs.

In a recent interview, Dokoupil elaborated on what motivated his father to move illegal drugs:

In the late 1970s, 90 percent of the marijuana was coming into Florida. It was primarily Colombian; some of it was Jamaican. My father’s weed would be delivered to an old fishing shack in the [Florida] Keys. … It’s only one road that connects that necklace of islands and everyone knew that that was the road on which marijuana was smuggled into the country. So to smuggle on that road took an incredible amount of tolerance for risk.

So my father, despite being a partner in the operation, volunteered, for $25,000 a shot, to drive Winnebagos of weed out of the Keys and into America, just for the sheer thrill of it. He had no financial reason to do it. He had no operational reason to do it. … But by then he was addicted to the sensation of it, to the risk.

“Hippie In The Front, Porn Star In The Back”

Maureen O’Connor scouts out a new trend:

My bikini-waxer, Jola, recently told me about a pubic-grooming configuration I had not heard of, which patrons of her Williamsburg salon have lately been requesting. The “full-bush Brazilian,” as we agreed to call it, involves removing the hair from the labia and butt crack (in accordance with Brazilian-waxing tradition) while leaving everything on top fully grown. It’s the exact opposite of non-Brazilian bikini waxes, which shape the hair on the pubic mound but leave the undercarriage untouched.

Who gets the full-bush Brazilian? I asked this of Jola Borzdynski as I lay without pants atop a sheet of paper on a tiny bed at her salon, Audrey. “Girls with hippie boyfriends,” she said. “Hippies with porny sex lives, who need to be hairless for licking,” I concluded. As Jola proceeded to tear 90 percent of my pubic hair out by the roots, I winced and contemplated the wisdom of being a hippie in the front of your crotch and a porn star in the back.

(The above self-portrait from Petra Collins was censored by Instagram – but not the Dish on NSFW Saturday night!)

Are 12 Steps Necessary? Ctd

A reader slams the claim that AA’s benefits remain unproven:

[Dr. Lance] Dodes’ assertions are false. Keith Humphreys has previously addressed this claim here. I also address it in this post. While the Cochrane study has flaws that are addressed in my post, it’s worth noting that the study compared AA and twelve-step facilitation (TSF) to other treatments. They found that AA and TSF were no more effective than other treatments. Cochrane’s abstract was poorly worded, but it only takes a few minutes to discern this.

Another writes that Dodes “depicts a superstitious, vindictive, and ominous version of 12-step recovery completely unlike the one I’ve experienced”:

Dr. Dodes claims, “The notion that people with addictions suffer from a failure of morality to be indexed and removed is fundamental to Alcoholics Anonymous.” In my own experience, AA literature and members are clear in their belief that alcoholism is not a moral failing, but better understood as a disease. On page 18 of Alcoholics Anonymous, the authors clearly state their view of alcoholism: “We have come to believe it is an illness.” The disease model of addiction is so widely accepted by members of 12-step programs that even South Park saw it as a ripe target for satire.

Later, Dodes refers to “AA’s emphasis on proselytizing,” which he rather snidely defines as “a basic tool through which recognized religions and certain fringe religious groups spread their message.” Whatever AA activities he regards as proselytizing are more casual than any I have ever seen used by any religious group in the world (whether “recognized” or “fringe”). AA does not place advertisements, solicit donations, preach on street corners or go door-to-door.

AA is composed entirely of volunteers and has no top-down leadership hierarchy. What organization there is comes from the “12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous,” first published in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Tradition Nine states, “AA, as such, ought never be organized,” and Tradition Ten is clear that “our public-relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion.” If Dr. Dode does not believe that AA groups live up to these professed commitments, he should say as much and provide evidence. If he is unaware of them, then he is embarrassingly uninformed.

I’m confused by one claim of Dr. Dode’s in particular: “For now, I will simply say that there are indeed better treatments for addiction.” Besides the anecdote he provides about his work with Dominic, I found no further mention of such treatments. Presumably, I’ll have to buy one of his books or schedule an appointment to learn more. In the meantime, millions of recovering addicts worldwide will be sharing their experience, strength and time – for free – to anyone with a desire to stop drinking or using.

Another pleads for the Dish to wise up on AA:

You link over and over and over again to these critiques of AA that are so wrongheaded as to be laughable – if they weren’t so full of pernicious disinformation. By conflating AA and rehab, the authors have a whole article that elides the massive difference between the two. Rehabs have taken the 12 steps from AA – which are not copyrighted, because, you know, as above, the sixth tradition avoids problems of money, property, and prestige – and the failings of the system are those of rehabs. There’s almost nothing accurate about AA in that Salon article. A few points:

AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

AA never costs money. Ever. The sixth tradition of AA is that “an AA group ought never endorse, finance or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.” And the court-mandated system is actually at odds with that same tradition. I have worked with many men trying to get sober in rehab and they have all relapsed because they were being forced to get sober. That doesn’t work and never will, because true alcoholics will look for any reason to keep drinking.

Another lie in the article:

AA has managed to survive, in part, because members who become and remain sober speak and write about it regularly. This is no accident: AA’s twelfth step expressly tells members to proselytize for the organization: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

This misinterpretation is completely counter to the eleventh tradition of AA, which expressly tells members not to proselytize: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”

And even writing you about this is not in the spirit of the tenth tradition: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” And yet people seem to be completely set on running it down, even though I’ve seen it work miraculously in my life and again and again in others. To educate yourself, you might want to check out the traditions of AA here.

A Titan Of A Trailer

Jonathan Crow spotlights Orson Welles’ trailer for Citizen Kane, calling it “as innovative as the film itself”:

The trailer for Citizen Kane, which you can see above, has no actual footage from the movie – something of a rarity. Instead, the trailer serves as a curious four-minute long documentary featuring behind-the-scenes footage and short vignettes of characters reacting to the movie’s mysterious central character. … Compare Kane’s trailer with one that was more typical of its time like Casablanca. Amid the overwrought copy and some comically flashy transitions, that trailer all but tells you what is going to happen in the film. There’s violence! Danger! Romance! Kane’s trailer, on the other hand, is less a sales pitch than a mystery. It shows plenty about the people behind the making of the movie but it shows nothing from the actual film. Based solely on the trailer, you don’t know what Kane is about, short of being about a shadowy, complicated character called Kane.

Welles wasn’t just being cagey for the sake of building audience interest. He was trying to head off a fight. Though Welles publicly claimed that Kane was not about media barron William Randolph Hearst, you can hardly blame the tycoon for feeling otherwise. Hearst was a newspaper magnet with a showgirl mistress who built himself a preposterously opulent castle. Citizen Kane is about a newspaper magnet with a showgirl wife who built himself a preposterously opulent castle.

For a broader look at the development of the movie trailer, check out the short documentary below:

Joe Berkowitz captions:

“The History of the Movie Trailer” is a 15-minute video that traces the evolution of its subject matter from the silent film era through to the blockbusters of today. In doing so, the video positions movie trailers as a unique medium that is halfway between advertisement and cinematic artform that is occasionally as impressive as the film it’s promoting. Created by FilmmakerIQ.com with help from BlackMagicDesign.com, “The History” highlights some interesting trivia that even the most hardcore movie junkies among us might not have realized we wanted to know. For instance, it’s strange to think that trailers were initially produced by theaters themselves until the 1960s, when studios took over.

More here.