Plasma Pool

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a set of sharp and cogent notes

Stuff We Like

  • F for Fake

    This is Orson Welles's masterpiece, a virtuoso performance of sound and video editing that co-opts the documentary but is not one. It is the rare postmodern text that's laugh out loud funny, steeped in the relativism of the post war period but not held hostage by it. He appears as himself, sheared of doubts and humanity, in full possession and knowledge of his genius, but he is not the subject (excuse my language) of the film. It's a "film about trickery, fraud and lies," and about two great exponents of those arts, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. The film is not much watched by people from any generation, met with cold critical reception on release, how can it be Welles's masterpiece? But it is, and is neglected due to its translation from the dross and palaver of our late capitalist society in which relativism extends mainly to the comparison of ledgers, a number of hard, unpleasant truths about meaning, about value, and about our modern oracles, the experts. Or as Welles says of art (or anything): "How is it valued? The value depends on opinion. Opinion depends on the expert. A faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who's the expert? Who's the faker?"

  • Ferret-Legging

    Ferret-Legging

    The ferret goes in your pants. Your pants are cinched to prevent its escape. Then you stand there while a scared rodent scratches, bites, and generally freaks the fuck out in the vicinity of your manly-bits. He who endures the longest wins. There you have the “sport” of ferret-legging, a Yorkshire coalminer practice now revived at the Richmond, VA Celtic Festival. While I cannot speak for the rest of the Plasma Pool team, I have not personally experienced the joy of ferret legging – nor do I have any desire to do so in the future. But what should be Liked about this particular Stuff is not corporeal, but rather its statement about the competitive nature of man such that he would trap a ferret in his pants for over five hours for no reward but the knowledge that he did what no other man could do. There exists in each of us a compulsion to strive for greatness, and in the course of this pursuit we are capable of unimaginable sacrifice in the name of achievement. Today humanity faces new and difficult challenges, but what drives these semi-sane “athletes” is the same that drives those in more noble fields to cure diseases, create art, and improve humanity in countless other ways. So, thank you ferret-leggers. Just keep that animal away from my junk.  -- Donny Bridges

  • Reactions to the OJ Simpson Verdict

    OJ Simpson Verdict

    Without getting into any kind of commentary about the trial itself or its place in pop culture memory, this video of the OJ Simpson verdict is stunning. Pay attention to 1:24, 2:10, 3:30, 3:59. The camera pans over a near-complete spectrum of emotions, almost oblivious to the murmur of the verdict while the faces hang on to every word. The calm voice at the end advises to "expect the worst." For me, the bizarre essence of the clip is that some idea of "justice" is located somewhere in the physical and conceptual space between the rows of silent faces and the implied source of the unseen voices. The mass of bodies tenses and contorts as an articulation of the disembodied speech of the justice system. I am reluctant to give a reading of all this beyond this cursory description, but one final thing to consider is that our detached gaze is nearly embedded in the perspective of the invisible jury, who sits at the center of the verdict.  -- Scott Coomes

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

drink deep

Aug 19, 2009 0

Information Gaps: Drug Labels and Medical Decisionmaking

Daniel Roth

Last week, a research team from Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that new drugs be labeled not only with what we know about them (which they now are), but also with an accounting of what we don’t know.

The Stanford researchers’ effort to clarify the ambiguity surrounding the comparative effectiveness of recently approved drugs is laudable. But their proposal that the FDA begin labeling drugs with measures of this comparative effectiveness both ignores the realities of how pharmaceutical innovation happens today and endorses a flawed decisionmaking model that could foster false security in patients and undermine their medical caregivers—the professionals who are trained to help each particular patient discriminate among drugs of the same class in a way a label cannot. Doctors can and do disagree about what constitutes a statistically significant difference between two drugs. Giving patients a nudge in the direction of involving themselves in that decision—and the confidence to do so—without properly equipping them to make informed decisions will diminish rather than improve the overall quality of patient care.

The Plasma Spring