Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 84

A Poem For Sunday

“Pain I Did Not” by Sharon Olds:

When my husband left, there was pain I did not

feel, which those who lose the one

who loves them feel. I was not driven

against the grate of a mortal life, but

just the slowly shut gate

of preference. At times I envied them—

what I saw as the honorable suffering

of one who is thrown against that iron

grille. I think he had come, in private, to

feel he was dying, with me, and if

he had what it took to rip his way out, with his

teeth, then he could be born. And so he went

into another world—this

world, where I do not see or hear him—

and my job is to eat the whole car

of my anger, part by part, some parts

ground down to steel-dust. I like best

the cloth seats, blue-grey, first

car we bought together, long since

marked with the scrubbed stains—drool,

tears, ice cream, no wounds, but only

the month’s blood of release, and the letting

go when the water broke.

(From Stag’s Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds © 2012 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Flickr user Thomas)

Quote For The Day II

“Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than ‘die,’ ‘pass away,’ the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday— …

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are,” – David Foster Wallace, The Pale King.

Face Of The Day

Adriane Ohanesian photographed the women of Burma’s Kachin Independence Army (KIA):

In Kachin State, in northern Myanmar, the anti-government sentiment runs particularly strong. In fact, rebels have a strong enough presence that control over Kachin is effectively split between the government and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). The KIA is the last remaining major rebel group in Myanmar that has not signed a ceasefire agreement with the government. While the country at large has begun opening its doors, the government has simultaneously banned UN agencies, international NGOs, and even foreigners from entering into KIA territory. Effectively, this leaves the people of Kachin with little access to the outside world.

The women of Kachin have few opportunities in this isolated region, outside of serving the KIA. From the age of 16 women are eligible to join the army, and often remain there until they are discharged for marriage. While some join out of dedication to their people, others are forcibly recruited. This is a look into the lives of the young women going through their first experiences of military training with the KIA.

In an interview, Ohanesian describes how she got access to her subjects:

Through the assistance of local NGOs, I was able to make contact with women who had been soldiers and from there I was able to get into contact directly with the leaders of the Kachin Independence Organization (the political branch of the Army). Once I made contact with the right people within the KIO/KIA the logistics and access were relatively straightforward. When I got on the ground, I explained to the women what I wanted to do, which was to follow their lives from morning to night. I also made sure that they knew that they could ask to me stop photographing at any time. I think that part of gaining the trust and respect from the women was the fact that I accompanied them at all times. I went on every patrol, to every boring military lecture, even if I wasn’t photographing. We were exhausted on patrols together, we were drawing together during boring lectures, and we were falling over slippery rocks in the river when it was time to wash.

In general, my most powerful organizational tool for this project was emailing—a painful amount of emailing. I emailed everyone, and I had meetings with everyone who would offer to see me, even if they seemed to have no relation to the project.

See more pictures from the series here.

(Image caption: After finishing morning training a young woman applies thanaka to her face inside the women’s room at the military base outside of Laiza, Kachin State, Myanmar, May 17, 2013. The 9 women shared an unlit room throughout the two-month training. © Adriane Ohanesian)

A Short Film For Saturday

A portrait of Richard Thompson, the “cartoonist’s cartoonist”:

In an interview with Michael Cavna, filmmaker Andy Hemmendinger explains what motivated his tribute:

MICHAEL CAVNA: Congratulations on the beautiful documentary, guys. When did you first discover Richard’s work, and what inspired you to make this film?

ANDY HEMMENDINGER: Richard has been a friend and neighbor of mine for the last 15-plus years. I enjoyed his sense of humor from the beginning, and while I knew he did illustrations and cartoons, I’d never seen any of his work. One day, a friend of mine called up and said that he’d made fun of my last name in a cartoon that he’d done. After that, I started paying attention to his work.

I loved his sense of humor and began to read him regularly, especially when “Cul De Sac” started. It did surprise me that not everyone knew who he was, though. This past spring, I was visiting Richard and saw a self-portrait he’d drawn in which he was a chick that had just hatched. That image really struck me. It made me think of the endless hours he’d spent staring at a blank piece of paper, waiting for ideas to strike. Like staring at the inside of the egg. And now it wasn’t the lack of ideas that constrained him, but the Parkinson’s. [Ed. note: Thompson retired "Cul de Sac" in 2012 to battle his Parkinson's disease.]

Between the combination of this mental image and wanting … other people to enjoy his work as much as we did, we decided to make a film.

Millennials Are Just Selfie-Centered

Autoscatto papale (col cellulare) #PapaFrancesco pic.twitter.com/nCvuxLdmwD

— Fabio M. Ragona (@FabioMRagona) August 29, 2013

Responding to a book by Jeffrey Kluger, Brooke Lea Foster defends today’s young adults from accusations of narcissism:

[A]re Millennials any more narcissistic than, say, the Baby Boomers, who were once considered the most self-obsessed cohort of their time? Consider the 1976 cover story of New York Magazine, in which Tom Wolfe declared the ‘70s “The Me Decade.” One could argue that every generation seems a little more narcissistic than the last, puffing out its chest and going out into the world with an overabundance of self-confidence, swagger, even a bit of arrogance. These traits are simply hallmarks of early adulthood—it’s often the first time people are putting themselves out there, applying for first jobs and meeting potential life partners. Overconfidence is how people muscle through the big changes. …

[S]tudies have directly contradicted the idea that Millennials are the most narcissistic of previous generations.

In a large survey of high-school seniors across several decades, psychologist M. Brent Donnellan (now at Texas A&M University) found little change when looking at the Millennial generation’s ideas about self-esteem, individualism, or life satisfaction compared to young people in the past. And when psychology researchers at the University of Illinois compared narcissism rates with age and life stages in another 2010 study, they found that narcissistic behavior was related not to generation, but to age-related developmental stages. “This leads to the conclusion that every generation is Generation Me, as every generation of younger people are more narcissistic than their elders,” the researchers wrote.

Perhaps today’s young people are products, rather than drivers, of the cultural saturation of narcissism that Kluger describes. They’re not leading the charge—they’re simply evolving with the times, just as their parents, siblings, and grandparents are. Maybe Kluger is right: Maybe we’re all just a little more into ourselves than we used to be.

Start-Up Of The Day

Smart Pipe, the latest in the Adult Swim Infomercial series of recent viral fame, gives a new meaning to disruptive innovation:

Recent Dish on technology and excrement here.

Fangs And Farsi On Film

Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night features a vampire heroine who claims her victims in a chador:

Performed entirely in Farsi, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in Bad City, a fictional Iranian ghost town (played by Taft, California, situated in the San Joaquin Valley) where oil rigs pump continuously and corpses are dumped in ditches. Plot is subordinate to mood and atmosphere … aspects enhanced by the film’s high-def black-and-white imagery. Yet punctuating the film’s pleasingly languid rhythm are jolts of fear and desire.

The girl of the title (Sheila Vand), never identified by name, slinks through Bad City long after sunset cloaked in a chador. She coolly observes the evil that men do before bearing her fangs and exsanguinating them, the fate that befalls her first victim, a heavily neck-tattooed pimp and drug lord (Dominic Rains). Those not guilty of any crime—besides possessing the XY chromosome—are still not above suspicion; in a demonic growl, our undead heroine warns a wide-eyed seven-year-old tyke wearing a tatty sport coat, “Till the end of your life, I’ll watch you.” This vigilante upholds a gender-inverted Sharia law.

Melissa Leon recommends that viewers reserve judgment about the movie’s gender politics:

The vampire of Amirpour’s film preys only on men, ostensibly to balance the abuse women suffer at their hands in the film … which has prompted many, perhaps prematurely, to label the film as “feminist.” (The Girl doesn’t necessarily always operate with gender equality in mind. She does kill one homeless man just because she’s hungry.) Amirpour herself calls just one character in the film a feminist: A TV infomercial host who reminds women of their precarious positions in society and implores them to join his network of prostitutes. That is, a TV infomercial pimp. … The infomercial, playing on a character’s TV, comes less than five minutes in, setting the tone for the world the film’s women live in. Amirpour sees the pimp as a liberator rather than a predator.

“If there’s one feminist thing in this movie that I would lay claim to, it’s that that pimp is a feminist,” Amirpour says. “He’s just giving these women a chance to still take control of their life by using something that, you know, could be useful. Become an entrepreneur, a small business owner.”

Meanwhile, Sheila O’Malley, in a review of the movie, suggests its rich visuals offer the strongest political statement: “The image of a female vampire skateboarding down a street, her voluminous veil flying out behind her, does the job with more poetic satisfaction and truth than any explicit monologue about the repression of women could ever do.” She finds that Amirpour prefers celebrating pulp cinema to fighting the patriarchy:

Along with [Jim] Jarmusch, “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave. There’s an early 1990s grunge-scene club kids feel to some of it, in stark contrast to the eerie isolation of the nighttime industrial wasteland in which the film takes place. The number of influences here could have made “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” yet another movie-mad parody or an arch exercise in style; instead, the film launches itself into a dreamspace of its own that has a unique power and pull.

The images are suggestive and symbolic, resonant with intersecting meanings and emotion, nothing too spelled out or underlined. Some of the images sit there unmoving for too long, but that very same stasis also helps create and enforce the underlying tension, the tormented space between people even when they are standing very close together. The film feels extremely personal. It is clear in every frame that Amirpour has put her own dream onscreen.

Andrew O’Hehir, who raves that the movie “moved me and thrilled me in ways I totally did not expect,” also applauds its range of influences:

This really is an American film and an Iranian film at the same time, and I think it relates as much to Abbas Kiarostami’s “Ten” and Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly” as it does to Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. It marks an entirely new way of assimilating the immigrant experience, in this case by exploring the connections between Iran and the enormous expat community in Southern California on a subterranean and psychological level. But you don’t need to know any of that to roll with the spectacular chiaroscuro wide-screen images of cinematographer Lyle Vincent, the awesome sound design or the wordless scenes of reverie set to Iranian and/or American indie rock. It’s a tale of past tragedy and future hope, a story about a beautiful girl, a handsome boy and the car that just might get them out of the bad dreams of Bad City. If you can’t relate to that, you simply aren’t alive. Or undead.

Face Of The Day

Scott Chasserot‘s portrait series Original Ideal explores how people envision their ideal selves:

The experiment is actually fairly straightforward and easy to understand. First, his subjects have their portrait taken in the most unadorned, simplest terms possible. Then, the photos are modified many times over into 50 different versions of the original that are all shown to the subject, one-by-one, while monitoring their brain activity using an Emotiv EEG brain scanner.

Based on the data from the brain scanner, Chasserot can pinpoint the photo that generated the strongest positive reaction. Finally, he posts the original image and the ‘ideal’ image side-by-side so you can see the differences.

See more of Chasserot’s work here, and check out a video about the project below the jump:

Hot Cookin’

Claire Lower mulls over the links between “food pornography” and the real thing:

Food porn, like pornography, is all about visual stimulation. Food is posed,painted, injected with fillers (chicken legs are made plumper with mashed potatoes), and masterfully lit for maximum appeal. Sometimes, the food you think you are seeing is something else entirely. For illustration, we need look only to the radical differences between promotional photos and the real thing when it comes to fast food. Like a 15-year-old boy whose only view of naked women has been online, we may be less aware of the artifice and may become distraught when real-life food doesn’t live up to the fantasy of food porn.

This was apparent when Martha Stewart – whose magazine is quite well known for its air of effortless perfection – shared some photos of some fancy food she was enjoying. The photos appeared to be taken on a camera phone in very poorly lit places and the results were – to put in mildly – not very attractive. The subsequent uproar was intense, and maybe a little undeserved. Though some of the photos were truly terrible, anyone who has ever Instagrammed a meal could see that this was a case of terrible restaurant lighting plus camera phone flash, two things which one is taught to avoid in Food Photography 101. Though no one should be surprised to find that Martha herself does not take the photos for her magazine and website, people were quite surprised to find that the reality of what Martha eats to be so far removed from the exaggerated representation of what Martha eats that we are so used to seeing in her cookbooks.

A Short Story For Saturday

We haven’t featured any of Raymond Carver’s short stories on the Dish yet – a major oversight, given the writer’s reputation and influence. “Cathedral” generally is considered one of his finer works, and here’s what Carver said about it in an interview:

The story “Cathedral” seemed to me completely different from everything I’d written before. I was in a period of generosity. The character there is full of prejudices against blind people. He changes; he grows. The sighted man changes. He puts himself in the blind man’s place. The story affirms something.

The story begins this way:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED – Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose – even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

Read the rest here. This story also appears in the collection that bears its name, Cathedral. Peruse previous SSFSs here.