Archive for ‘Art’

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May 24, 2011

English Majors and Their Incomes

This article in the Washington Post interprets new census data about the average income of various college majors as a huge blow to the humanities. But it’s not news to anybody that liberal arts majors make significantly less money than engineering or computer science majors. The article completely fails to take into account that people often pursue certain lines of work for reasons other than maximizing their income. People don’t go into nonprofit work, social work, education, journalism or the arts in order to make bank. Their priorities and goals are different than what this article assumes.

Also, why does everyone talk about “English” majors as if  majoring in English were some specific, carefully considered, career-motivated choice? There are so many English majors because English is the default major – if you get to senior year and still don’t know what you want to do with your life, you already probably have all the credits to graduate in English. It’s like majoring in “College.” It’s a Bachelor of Arts in Bachelor of Arts. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was an English major (not that I’m somehow proof of there being nothing wrong with it). But it’s weird to keep reading things about English majors working “outside their field.” What is their field? Reading?

(Image via)

Posted in Art, Economics | 11 Comments »

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May 20, 2011

Does Your Reading List Ever Make You Mad? (and Other First-World Problems)

I have some sympathy for Carmen Callil. Her actions are counterproductive, though, because now everyone’s going to be passionately defending Philip Roth’s literary reputation for weeks (well, days) and complaining about sour feminists, when if they’d just given him the prize without any controversy, everyone would have been like, “Roth again? Yawn! Why didn’t they give this one to Marilynne Robinson?”

But I think she just snapped, and we’ve all been there – as a reader, how many times are you told, “Okay. This guy was really messed up about women, but you just have to ignore all the blatant horrifying misogyny, and then, you have to admit, he’s a genius!” It’s constant. And most of the time, because women are great about doing this, because we – and it can’t be said often enough – do it all the time in every form of culture ever, we concede the point. We forgive the constant brutal, graphic rapes and the ‘mothers are manipulative, evil hags’ stuff and ‘I just want to kill my castrating wife’ stuff and the constant reducing of all women to two-dimensional jizz receptacles, and we overlook all that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. If you overlook the 90% of it that’s repeatedly telling us that we better never for a second think we have any power or status in our society whatsoever, it really is an amazing work of art.” (Meanwhile, ask some guys to come with you to see a movie with women in it, or pink somewhere on the poster, and it’s like you’re asking them to lick a public toilet.)

Anyway, eventually every single reading woman (and sometimes, a reading man) reaches that point where she just goes, “That’s it! That is it! I’m done! I do not have to overlook it and admit the genius! I do not have to admit any fucking knob’s genius anymore! I’m done! I am only ever reading stuff by women from now on forever and that’s it! YOU can overlook the dress descriptions and the stupid wedding at the end, and admit that this woman is a genius! YOU OVERLOOK SOMETHING FOR ONCE, DAMN IT!”

And then you have to go off by yourself for awhile and take some deep breaths, especially since you weren’t even talking to anyone specific, but just yelling at the air in front of your face, and you weren’t even reading anything at the moment, but just sitting there, thinking about stuff and seething. Plus, some of your favorite writers are men.

Ideally, you do not throw this tantrum publicly, while you are serving as one of the judges for a major literary prize.

Anyway, we’ve all been there. I can understand how Callil feels, although I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not Roth should have won – I’ve only read American Pastoral (I read it in Vietnam, which I think informed and added to my reading experience1), and I haven’t read everyone on the shortlist, but most current readers are not all that sad that the days of RothMailerUpdike dominance are ending (although I still plan to get around to reading those dudes some day).

If you ever have a moment of literary despair, it pays to remember that contemporary fiction is absolutely exploding with awesome writers, many of them women. Look at Jennifer Egan! I mean, I didn’t like her book that much, but everybody else loved it, and she won both the NBCC Award and the Pulitzer. Additionally, up-and-coming male writers have finally realized that being entirely dismissive of and confused about half the world’s population rather limits your ability to be a great recorder of the human condition, and literary misogyny is (I really think, though some people will argue with me) on the wane.

Here are some fantastic books I would recommend for anyone who needs a little break from being reasonable and open-minded about offensive content. Not only are these great books about women (I think? Maybe a couple are about men2), but they are not about “women’s issues”. They are not specifically about feminism or stifling marriages or dealing with abuse or anything like that (well, maybe some of them are a little bit, but those are not the elements I primarily remember about them)(and not that there’s anything wrong with books on those topics, but that’s not what we’re after here):

  • The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Everyone should read this! Why has everyone not read this?)
  • Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
  • Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
  • Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
  • Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
  • Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
  • Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (warning: look into this before you read it; it is not for everyone)
  • Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Hilarious! Read it!)
  • The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
  • Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
  • Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
  • Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
  • anything by Marilynne Robinson
  • Any others? What can you recommend in this category?

And I don’t even know, so many more! Those are just the ones I happened to think of, that I’ve read recently. So never feel like you have to read Philip Roth, and never feel like you have to not read Philip Roth, either. Read everything! There’s enough great stuff out there for anybody in any kind of mood, is all I’m saying.

(Image via)
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1I know, aren’t I tiresome?! If we were at a party, you would have just spotted someone you had to go talk to over there.
2Actually, two of these books (Atmospheric Disturbances and Novel About My Wife) are about men searching for their mysteriously missing (and not actually missing) wives. Weird!

Posted in Art, Books, Feminism, Rants | Leave a Comment »

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January 12, 2011

Two Views On Life Modelling

I have two friends who both posed for figure drawing classes in college, and this is what they said of the experience:

Friend 1: “It’s very humbling, because you drop your robe and nobody comes in their pants, or proposes to you.”

Friend 2: “It’s very self-confidence building, because you drop your robe and nobody vomits, or runs out of the room screaming.”

These are two very different people.

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Image via.

Posted in Art | 3 Comments »

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November 10, 2010

Aimee Mann

 

I don’t think I fully appreciated Aimee Mann before, but I sure do now.  @#%&*! Smilers might as well be called “Songs For a Plateau.”  I’ve been listening to it all week. 

Semi-related, if there’s one thing my generation seems to have proven, it’s that the best possible way to ensure a person will be totally worthless is to give them limitless options.

Posted in Art, People | 1 Comment »

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December 1, 2009

I’ve Been Watching: Once

Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) meets Czech immigrant (Marketa Irglova), and together, they record an album. Hansard’s character is broke, heartbroken and living with his dad, and Irglova’s character is broke, estranged from her husband, and raising a young daughter. Initially, one might expect the arc of this movie to follow the typical growth of a romance between two people, but instead, the arc is a love story about the artistic process. From initial uncertainty, through growing excitement, to total immersion, to the resulting opened possibilities and new, refreshed outlook on life: the story will be familiar to anyone who has been carried away by an idea and created something, however inconsequential. The film illustrates how the creative process can rejuvinate and rebuild a life, but this is not an idealistic or larger-than-life movie. Rather, Once feels real and honest, as do the original songs, written and performed by Hansard and Irglova.

Posted in Art, Movies | 3 Comments »

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December 10, 2008

On Style and Substance

In matters of grooming and dress, I am sometimes stylish, but rarely fashionable. I hope the same holds true for my creative output, but unfortunately, I fear the opposite is frequently the case for my ideas.

As this article points out:

There is a vast gap between fashion and style. Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself.

And

Style is also one part personality: spirit, verve, attitude, wit, inventiveness. It demands the desire and confidence to express whatever mood one wishes. Such variability is not only necessary but a reflection of a person’s unique complexity as a human being. People want to be themselves and to be seen as themselves. In order to work, style must reflect the real self, the character and personality of the individual; anything less appears to be a costume.

As anyone who’s ever tried to wear something too advanced for them knows, you can’t fake style that doesn’t belong to you. Nothing looks sillier than a person dressed in a way that makes them self-conscious and uncomfortable. I knew early on that I would not do well in outfits that needed to be managed, and in shoes that required an adjustment in pace. I might look silly wearing flip-flops with a cocktail dress, but believe me, I look far stupider trying to mince around in heels like I mean it.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I’ve been setting up my room, and it occurred to me that, with each move over the years, the way I design my living and working space has more and more conformed to a certain, specific style, regardless of the differences in the actual rooms themselves (which differences have been vast). I like clean surfaces, a good deal of floor space, blues and greens, and stacks of things. I do not like anything small, decorative or incidental. I don’t have knick-knacks, or pictures on the walls.  There is almost nothing in my room that doesn’t have a daily, utilitarian purpose. It’s fascist-chic.  But at the same time, I do choose my useful objects with aesthetic qualities in mind.

Here’s designer Nikolay Saveliev (via Kottke):

 I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read. Even my cat has to figure in there somehow. It’s a meticulous thing to maintain, but probably comes from the fact that I’ve discovered mostly everything through music, whether it’s ideologies, writers, artists, designers, cultures, subcultures, or other music. So it’s easy to tie things back into your work, as long as you keep your eyes and ears open, and maintain a healthy dose of critical thought.

Um, okay.  But actually, I think that many of us structure our lives this way to some extent, without being fully conscious of it. You design a personality in the same way you design your look. You pick and choose your political and religious philosophies. Choosing not to decorate a room can be as much a nod to one’s style as decorating it. I design my eating habits to match whatever goals I’m working on at any given time. I live in Williamsburg, land of dressing the part: you can’t be a starving artist if you look flush and fed, so everyone wears rags that accentuate their willful anorexia. Their slight waistlines reflect their genius (possibly in a more literal way than they’d prefer).

One big benefit to creating and adhering to a fully defined personal style is that it helps us easily weed through the massive amount of options that are available to us in every respect. Walking into a department store can be a dizzying horror of over-stimulation . . . unless you know you only wear black shift dresses, or only wear certain labels, or have a system whereby you purchase one kicky garment per month for the precise amount left over after you’ve met your expenses. Picking a book can be overwhelming, unless you narrow your interests to World War II and Catherine the Great, or vow never to read literature by contemporary authors, or only read comedies or mysteries. Style works as a sorting mechanism. If someone refuses to read Harry Potter no matter how much you assure them they’ll love it if they just give it a chance, it’s because it’s not a part of their self-defined style. It doesn’t fit.  Maybe they’ve decided they don’t do children’s literature, or fantasies, or anything that everybody’s currently into, and if they admit the possibility of liking this one exception, they have to alter their entire criteria, and that’s a whole big thing. 

We all enjoy constant and easy access to such an abundance of information and culture now. The challenge today is choosing what to consume and what to skip. All Them often say that the population is getting stupider, but I think the opposite is true, and, as this (cheering, if long) article proposes, the level of the dialogue has really gone up:

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. . . . Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

I read an article (somewhere, some time ago..in The New Yorker, maybe?) that discussed how much more sophisticated television shows have gotten. Sure, there are a number of dumb ones, and quite a lot of formulaic ones, as well, but shows such as The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, etc. are unprecedented in their complexity, requiring viewers to retain and recall a great number of fully-developed characters enacting multiple storylines, which proceed at differing paces and occasionally overlap and inform each other in complicated ways.

I don’t know why it’s so often said that the web is making people stupider. I can hardly see how people in general can help but grow more and more sophisticated as we all have greater and greater exposure to…well, everything.

Sort of.

But then again, perhaps we’re all generalists, dabblers and fakes. Whereas there used to (by which I mean, you know, back then) be fewer intellectuals (by which I mean people who spent a good deal of their time reading, thinking and writing), those intellectuals really dug in. They were all equally familiar with an agreed-upon canon, they had classical educations. Maybe now there are more people who are somewhat interested and a little bit knowledgeable about a great many things, but the standards of deep and specific scholarship have declined, along with the number of serious scholars. Or not – I’m not basing any of this on actual data.

Here’s one challenge to the above article:

Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we’ve learned-that we’re cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.

Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you’ve got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.

(via Readerville)

I’m not one of those cheerleaders that believe reading in itself is somehow a wonderful intellectual activity, regardless of the literary content of the material. Is reading the back of a Cheerios box a more intellectual task than watching Citizen Kane? Likewise, I wouldn’t say that reading (or watching or listening to) something you’re completely unable to truly comprehend is a worthwhile way to spend your time. I remember reading Animal Farm in ninth grade, before I had any knowledge whatsoever of political theory or Stalinist Russia (although not all of my classmates were so woefully ignorant), and I got nothing out of it at the time, even though I was able to successfully fake comprehension.

But at the same time, intellectual curiosity is desirable in and of itself, and if that intellectual curiosity is only born of social trends, well, so much the better. If society is making it trendy to be smart, well-read and verbose, isn’t that preferable to honoring thinness, stupidity and purchasing power? And if most people don’t possess a great amount of in-depth knowledge about very many things, isn’t it better to know something about some things than nothing about anything?

I hope so.  If not, I should really stop writing this blog.

Posted in Art, Books, People, Technology, Television | 1 Comment »

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September 14, 2008

DFW

David Foster Wallace took his own life on Friday. As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, he was one of my top favorite authors.

“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”

Here’s a link to Wallace’s great Atlantic article about talk radio hosts.

And here’s a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon college.

The 1000+ page Infinite Jest is infinitely worth it, but I understand most people don’t have as much free time as I do.

Wallace left a wonderful body of work behind for us.  His death is terribly upsetting.

UPDATE:  McSweeney’s has a lovely thread of remembrances of Wallace.

My personal discovery of Wallace’s writing is kind of funny, so I’ll tell it here.  My first year in Chicago, I was in a bar with two friends, and we met these two guys from Alaska.  One of the guys really hit it off with one of my friends, and they ended up dating for a couple months.  The other one began casually dating my other friend.  One night a few weeks later, these boys invited us all down to their house, which was at the very bottom tip of the South Side of Chicago.  Somebody’s parents owned the house and were letting them live in it free of charge, but it was weird that they lived there, and anyone who’s spent much time in Chicago will know immediately why.  At any rate, it was far, far, far away from our stomping grounds, and the night of the dinner, we all drove down there in my friend’s car.

When we got down there, the guy dating my friend (in the more casual of the two relationships) greeted me with a giant hug and launched into an excited recap of various authors and films we’d discussed at the bar when we first met.  I had barely gotten through the door before he’d foisted two books and a DVD on me that he just knew I’d love, and I just had to read and watch them and let him know what I thought, and he was so glad I’d come, and did I like pasta, because he had cooked.

Needless to say, my friend who was dating him was less than pleased.  It was a terribly awkward, uncomfortable evening, and I couldn’t escape, because they lived South of where all public transportation stopped.  I finally caught a ride back with another guy who’d been there (who then insisted I stop off at a bar for a drink with him, realized he had no cash, and rushed me out of the bar because he was running out on the check…which I did not find out about until several weeks later).  Meanwhile, back on the South Side, my friend ended things with the book-lending guy that night.  My other friend (the one in the more serious relationship) had a messy breakup months later, and so we all fell out of contact with both those guys.  I kept running into the non-book-lending one, and he would tell me that I really had to return his roommates’ property, but then he wouldn’t call me or have his roommate call me…anyway, I still have all that stuff today.

What does all this have to do with David Foster Wallace?  Well, one of the books was Infinite Jest, and it sat, huge and mostly ignored, like the Bible or the OED, on a dusty shelf in my apartment…until one long, bleak, lonely, sad winter, when I finally cracked it open, crawled into it, and fell in love.

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July 25, 2008

I’ve Been Reading: The Accidental and The Double

Ali Smith’s The Accidental has a freaking form poem flight thing in the middle of it. No book ever has the right to priss about being cute with the layout of text on page – I hate that. If there were a gimmicky little concrete poem in the middle of the greatest book ever written, I’d detest it. Short sentences, run-ons, overlapping dialogue – fine. I love me some DFW footnotes. But any actual text effects belong on motivational posters or in powerpoint presentations, not in the middle of a novel I am trying to read. I can’t stand gimmicks.

I took a poetry class in college wherein the professor went on and on about the way poems looked on the page, the shape of the thing. What were we, calligraphers? If you have something to say and you’re a painter, show it to me visually. But if you’re a writer, freaking write it! Don’t put a precious little fucking flipbook in the middle of your novel, don’t put one word on each page for a time, don’t make the paragraph look like a cat when you turn the book to the side. How trite and cute can you be? I can’t believe real critics have any patience for this kind of nonsense, but sickeningly, it seems to be increasing every year. What’s next? Music boxes that play when you flip the pages? A small hologram? A scavenger hunt? A free toy in a hollowed-out space in the middle? A plush bunny on the cover with a squeak in its tail? Come the fuck on! If you can’t blow my mind with your prose, you won’t make up for it in doodles. And the hell with you for wasting my time.

And yes, I liked House of Leaves (although I don’t consider it revelatory or anything), but it is the exception that proves the rule. And I realize graphic novels are growing in importance and popularity, and eventually there might be bleedover and to enforce a stern boundary between novel-novels and graphic-novels will be pointlessly rigid and fusty. But I’ll adjust my ideas about that when I see it. Meanwhile, I don’t want to read the free verse horridness painters from a decade back were fond of scrawling across their canvasses in metallic gold paint pens, and likewise, I don’t want a toy or a bauble in text form from a writer.

And lest I be misunderstood, my issue with all this is not its novelty, but its meaninglessness.

Ahem. Even beyond the alienating concrete poem bit of stuff in the middle of The Accidental, I didn’t particularly care for the book. I just felt it tread over a lot of really familiar territory without adding anything much. I didn’t take away any truth or insight into the human condition. But apparently, people loved this book. It was short-listed for the Booker and had mostly good reviews.

I did really enjoy the passages in Astrid’s point of view, the family’s 12-year-old girl. The family is staying in a rental house, and at the beginning of the novel, Astrid spends a lot of time trying not to touch any of the surfaces of the house, or anything in it, because she’s disgusted by the idea of all the people who have used the house before them. She arranges a sheet over the bed before lounging on it, she tears bread from the middle of a loaf rather than use a knife and so forth. I can attest to the accuracy of this portrayal; I spent a ton of time in childhood trying not to touch anything. And actually, I never really grew out of it. Even as I backpacked across Asia, I had my rituals.

I was talking to a friend about this the other day. My friend was saying something about hygienic restaurant conditions, or something to do with food. And I said that I have no squeamishness about food and don’t really stress about the conditions in which it was prepared, because, even though I know that people not washing their hands and then handling food transfers diarrhea around (hence traveler’s tummy), and even though that’s disgusting if you actually think about it…well, really, all that happens is you maybe get a little sick for a day.

I said that I really have more worries in the tactile realm – that I don’t like to touch surfaces.

And then I suddenly realized how freaking crazy that is. I mean, I always knew that my obsession over not touching anything wasn’t rooted in any actual germaphobia, and had no real base at all – that it was rather just a general feeling of squirmy discomfort. It’s just that some things you have to touch are gross, the way you find some foods gross – it’s not that you think they’re dangerous; it’s just that you don’t like them. But I never thought about how nuts it is to put any old thing inside my body, but obsess about things touching the outside of my skin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but apparently, I would rather eat feces than sit in them.

Not that the realization did away with my baseless phobia, but I thought it was worth remarking on.

Jose Saramago’s The Double did not annoy me with any gimmicks, and I did walk away from it with, I felt, greater insight into the human condition. It’s commonly advised that, if you’re not “into” a novel by 100 pages in, you should put it down and start another. I have read quite a few books, however, where I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not until I finished the very last page. Perhaps these are books that don’t so much reflect how I see the world, as explain in a complete and compelling way how the world appears to someone else (the author). So, while I don’t hook into them immediately, by the time I come to the end, I feel satisfied. The Double is one of those books for me. And the same books that I can’t figure out if I like them or not until I finish the last words are generally those about which I cannot articulate what I liked, so I have nothing else to say about this.

Posted in Art, Books, Food, Health, Rants, Travel | 3 Comments »

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July 16, 2008

Truth, Art, and the Changing Times

While America has become more and more casually potty-mouthed, newspapers and other publications continue to enforce fairly old-fashioned (if arbitrary) decency standards (not to mention television programs – RIP, George Carlin). Here’s a Times column on this matter, spurred by the inability of the major newspapers to quote Jesse Jackson when he said he wanted to cut Obama’s nuts off:

The Times on Thursday devoted a column of type to the ensuing controversy and Jackson’s apology for what the newspaper called his “critical and crude” remarks, which included the bitter charge that Obama was “talking down to black people.” But it left readers completely in the dark about the crude part. The Washington Post was slightly less squeamish. It said Jackson suggested “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

(via LL)

The column also summarizes the Times’ various decisions about such matters in the recent past. It’s surprising to me that a newspaper would be squeamish about direct-quoting expletives. Regular readers of this blog (and those who know me) will not be surprised to hear that I don’t put a great deal of effort into avoiding the swears. I feel like focus on nice language is a cosmetic fix to problematic thought. Words don’t offend people. People offend people.

For example:

At the 1988 Republican National Convention, when George H.W. Bush was running for president of the United States, future president George W. Bush was asked by a Hartford Courant reporter what he and his father talked about when they weren’t talking about politics.

Bush’s answer: “Pussy.”

And on the other hand, here are some entertaining examples of how you can make something totally innocuous seem nasty by censoring it.

The ability to be explicit is essential to getting at the real, objective truth:

. . . truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.

(via 3QD)

Language evolves along with what it’s describing – the world is continually changing, albeit gradually:

Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different.

(via 3QD)

But really, when is everything not different? I don’t know where people come by their fixed standards for how life is supposed to be. I suppose most people think the way things were in their particular childhoods is some eternal truth for how the whole world ought to function throughout all time. And of course, what they’re remembering is not the world at all, but the peace of being a child.

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More things I don’t understand: on Jean-Luc Godard:

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers – the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” – became an intolerable gasbag.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been watching a lot of French films without comprehending anything about them, and I’ve heard film buffs scoff at the type of person who says they love Godard, but it turns out all they like is Breathless. So, um, well…the only Godard film I like is Breathless.

Apparently, the Brits are worried that they prefer dumb books:

At a Royal Society of Literature debate in March, Clare Alexander, president of the Association of Authors’ Agents, criticised a literary culture in which ghostwritten celebrity books, misery memoirs and Richard & Judy endorsements have “tainted publishers’ minds”. Contrasting the current British non-fiction bestseller charts with the more high-minded titles on the New York Times list, she said, “We have the stupidest bestseller list in the world at the moment.”

Wow. I can’t believe the U.S. actually made the U.K. feel insecure about its reading habits.

And to round out updates on the arts:

Canadian copyfighter Howard Knopf has suggested (presumably with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that recording artists whose music is played by torturers in Gitmo are owed performance royalties.

(via Majikthise)

Hang in there, Guns N Roses.

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July 8, 2008

Time Enough At Last

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow:

We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom.

(via 3QD)

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Better, a roundup of art reflecting desolation, worlds without people and post-apocalyptic cityscapes:

This new ruin romanticism is especially evident in the Flooded London imagery, rendered up by Squint/Opera (the firm behind the visualisations for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, via Archinect – what could be the emotional motivation behind their fascination with rendered ruins?). The imagined ruin has always existed – they have been a staple artistic subject for centuries. Only the focus used to be on abandoned civilizations, the perceived hubris of the ancients. In contrast, the virtual ruination of the modern era is self-imposed schadenfreude, with all the damage and joy turned inwards. It is a feeling made universal by the internet, where planning catastrophes and architectural missteps are all lovingly chronicled and catalogued.

When I Am Legend came out, New York was briefly plastered with posters of Will Smith and his dog, walking briskly down a completely empty city street.  Commuters gazed upon the posters with wistful sighs.

Last night, the boy next door who’s been learning guitar, held a little concert just outside my window.  He went through the entire White Album, and his group of friends was very encouraging of his efforts.  If I woke up tomorrow and found myself the last human on Earth, I think I’d be alright with it.  (And I wear contact lenses, so.)

Posted in Art, Brooklyn, Misanthropy, New York City, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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July 1, 2008

More People I Don’t Like

Tibetans are getting stale on the Dalai Lama’s insistence on nonviolence.  This article says that nonviolence worked for Gandhi and others, and ends with this uplifting quote:

This week’s talks are unlikely to yield much, if any, progress, and could push more Tibetans to the boiling point. But listen to Gandhi again: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.”

Hmmm.  Do you agree with Gandhi’s assertion?  Discuss.

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You don’t see many critics around these days.  Is it because there are no longer non-participatory enthusiasts of the arts?  Or is that a good thing?

Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn’t about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness. I’ll tell you what makes sense about closeness right away. In today’s cultural world, a bird’s eye view of the situation doesn’t get you very much. There is nothing to sort out from up there because there is simply too much culture in too much variety. The distance, the desire to categorize and judge, is overwhelmed by the very pluralism it seeks to understand. The only solution is to get down into the mix and participate. You need to grab works of art and hold onto them tightly. Stepping away from them even a little bit is to risk losing touch altogether.

Well, I don’t know.  I can say that the New York theater scene, at any rate, is in desperate need of more objective gatekeepers, and I think a large part of the problem is that anybody who goes to theater here is trying to do theatre here.  I would say more, but I don’t want to burn any bridges.

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Now, here is some criticism I can get behind:

Gladwell dresses up all of his “realizations” in fancy clothes and too much make-up. He gives himself powers that he doesn’t have. He pretends to have sorted things out that he hasn’t sorted out. He imagines a possible control, and pretends that he has achieved that control. All the while telling people, whispering into their ears, precisely the kinds of things they would like to believe. And then (it must, I’m sorry, be said) he goes on wildly lucrative corporate speaking engagements spinning out the same titillating stories combined with his shoddy conclusions. I even kind of hate, I must confess, the way he looks. His hair all scruffed up just so. His cute little suits. It makes the skin crawl.

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Also in popular things that I have an irrational hatred of, Facebook has done away with the singular “they”:

Confronting complaints of ungrammaticality from speakers of English and untranslatability from speakers of other languages, Facebook will now be more in-your-face about choosing a gender identity. If you haven’t filled the information out on your Facebook profile, you’ll now get a prompt asking if you want to be referred to as him or her. But they’re not getting too insistent on sexual dimorphism, since users can still opt out of the gender choice, in response to what Gleit calls “pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”

Folks, I’ve finally joined Facebook.  After adamantly refusing to join, and telling everybody who brought it up to me (repeatedly) that I would never, ever join, and that was final, I’ve gone back on my resolution and set up a profile.  I resent the hell out of it, but I got sick of inviting people to things (my party, an upcoming show), and them being like, ‘Oh, well, I’d love to come – are the details on your Facebook page?’

Fuck all of you, and your stupid social networks.  There damn well better not be yet another must-join new one a month from now, or I’ll…resentfully set up a profile on that one, too.

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The perils of replace-all:

Apparently, if you are bothered by gay people, you like calling them homosexuals, which is clinical and gross sounding, as opposed to “gay” which sounds happy and fun-loving. An impressionable child would surely have much less interest in becoming a “homosexual” (snooze) than a “gay” (woohoo!). So, right-wing news site OneNewsNow.com does a quick replace all on stories from the AP. Guess what, though, sometimes the word “gay” appears in a non-sexual context. Like, say, Tyson Homosexual (née Gay), who just qualified for the Olympics in the 100 meters, or Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Rudy Homosexual (née Gay), who often gets great penetration in the paint.

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The rise of the nerds:

From the late 19th century onward, it was more or less accepted that the ideal purpose of American education and parenting was to produce athletic, popular young men and women, the sort who end up in business, law, or politics. But sometime during the 1980s it began to be a lot harder to dismiss the awkward kids with thick glasses, obsessive interests, and no social skills.  . . . As computers began to play a larger role in business, education, and life in general, the former class presidents were learning that the former class geeks held everyone’s future in their hands. Soon one nerd (Alan Greenspan) was running the economy, another nerd (Al Gore) was running for president, and two unbelievably rich nerds (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) were changing the ways a lot of us lived and worked.

(via 3QD)

The article focuses heavily on male nerds.  I don’t always get on well with male nerds, as I often find them to be immediately dismissive and condescending toward attractive women.  We were all unpopular in high school, but there are more constructive ways of dealing with it than being a triumphant asshole to anyone who reminds you of those who once rejected you.

Speaking of, when scientists attempt to study humor:

Blindfolded subjects are tickled by experimenters who they are told are machines. The sexual banter in an all-night diner in upstate New York is surreptitiously observed. People study cartoons with pens stuck in their mouths (to contract the facial muscles associated with smiling). An experimenter “accidentally” spills hot tea on herself when a jack-in-the-box erupts nearby. One Boston psychologist, the co-author of a paper entitled “A Threshold Theory of the Humor Response”, published in The Behavior Analyst last spring, understandably felt obliged to state in a footnote that her surname really is “Joker”.

(via A&LD)

Posted in Art, Humor, Misanthropy, People, Science, Technology, Theatre | 2 Comments »

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June 27, 2008

Because I Wish To Go…

…here are a bunch of cool photo galleries from around the world!

Iceland, Hotel Everland in Paris, surfing in the Amazon, Artists’ Playground at Sudeley Castle.

(all via Coudal Partners)

And, about Beijing’s Olympic Park:

For a nation that deeply values formal architectural symbolism, creating an iconic shape that simultaneously evokes Heaven (a circle) and the auspicious bird’s nest was genius on the part of the architects. But so mesmerising has it become that nobody mentions the small matter of the 2,800-acre Olympic park and 31 other venues surrounding it. This is probably a good thing. Because the “bird’s nest” might be the ultimate in architectural eye candy, but its neighbours are not. Architecturally at least, the Beijing Olympics are a flop.

(via things magazine)

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It’s not just that Cindy McCain was a drug addict; it’s that she was a real jerk about it:

Cindy McCain stole drugs from a medical charity. It doesn’t get much lower than that. Worse still, she used her employees’ names to obtain drugs, and even enlisted some her her staff to pick up those prescriptions on her behalf. . . . One of the doctors who worked with McCain at AVMT lost his license to practice medicine over the diversion scandal. . . .Ironically, part of her diversion from criminal prosecution involved joining Narcotics Anonymous–which stipulates that an addict must make amends to those she has harmed. That’s not a step Cindy appears to have taken to heart in her dealings with her former emplyee, Tom Gosinski, the main whistleblower in this case.  Gosinski alleges that Cindy fired him from AVMT for knowing too much about her drug habit.  Gosinski also tipped off the DEA to McCain after he left the charity. He came forward in part because he was afraid that Cindy had filed prescriptions in his name, a suspicion that turned out to be justified.  When he sued Cindy for wrongful dismissal, she levied spurious accusations of blackmail against him.

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This is interesting:  a blue/red map of the blogosphere.   (via Crooked Timber)

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On the theme of escapism, 101 Movies to Avoid Watching Before You Die:

But my nomination is more serious: The House of Sand and Fog. I rarely dislike a movie enough to warn people against it, but this is one of the worst, and most unpleasant, movies I’ve watched.

See, now, I thought The House of Sand and Fog was terrific – characters with strong, high-stakes wants in direct opposition to each other, and all that.  But then, I’ve said it before:  I know jack about films.

Posted in Art, Movies, People, Politics, Travel | Leave a Comment »

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June 24, 2008

Influencing Public Opinion Is Really Haaaard

Obama: still Muslim after all these smears:

“The rule that I was sort of raised on was … you never respond at greater volume and in a bigger medium,” said Mark Blumenthal, editor of Pollster.com and a longtime Democratic pollster. “The problem with that is that no one ever held a press conference [to say Obama is a Muslim], there were no ads, no campaigns embraced the notion of Obama as Muslim, yet it’s everywhere.” . . . “If the information can be disseminated that easily, the old rule can’t apply,” Blumenthal said. “You cannot be passive and be reluctant to engage.”

In addition to being Muslim, according to Karl Rove, Obama is also a judgmental tool:

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

. . . Interesting that Mr. Rove would use a country club metaphor to describe the first major party African-American presidential candidate . . . .

(via TPM)

Meanwhile, the main trouble with Michelle Obama is that she’s just so…black:

She grew up on Chicago’s ethnically isolated South Side — wasn’t poor but was hardly rich, was raised with a keen awareness of racial barriers but was also raised to achieve. She went to Princeton, excelled, retained her racial conscience but also eventually commanded a six-figure salary. All of this confuses white people mightily, far more than Barack’s biracial status. In their frame of reference, Michelle has no reason to be angry and every reason to be content. Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know. This is wonderful news for us — we finally see an accurate reflection of ourselves in someone who may one day occupy the most exclusive address in the country. But for a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem.

Meanwhile, McCain enjoys the benefits of being of little interest to anyone:

I just saw John McCain very gravely lamenting Barack Obama’s decision not to accept public financing for the general election campaign and opining about what it says about Obama’s ethics and trustworthiness. And I must confess that I’m a little confused why more Democrats are not hitting this preening peacock with the fact that he is as we speak breaking the campaign finance laws and specifically breaking the law on accepting public financing. Having opted into the system and gotten the advantage of it he’s now spending freely in defiance of the caps he agreed not to spend over. . . .It’s almost surreal that McCain is being allowed to get on his high horse on anything remotely connected to the public financing system.

Well, the Democratic Party typically steers clear of conflict:

Practically the entire record of the Democratic Party as a group over the past seven years is one misguided instance after another of “keeping their powder dry” in anticipation of a time when they held a stronger strategic position. . . . The GOP understands and is willing to demonstrate that “powder” is not a finite commodity that must be conserved and that, in fact, using your powder magically generates more powder.

Now, here’s how you influence public opinion:

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has spent nearly $500 million on an Arabic language television and radio station.  Now an investigation finds that the project has not only been poorly run and hemorrhaged taxpayer money but is also airing bizarrely anti-American and anti-semitic coverage despite repeated complaints from the State Department and Congress.

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Secret organizations, on the other hand, don’t wield as much influence as some people think (this article provides a guide to six):

I am a Freemason. . . . A meeting of Masons is as benign as a meeting of good friends around the fireplace. And yes, I know, that’s exactly what a Mason would say, which is why conspiracy theories are so hard to kill off. It is impossible to disprove the notion that somewhere out there is a roomful of people, bound by an oath of secrecy, pulling the invisible strings that make the world dance. The only way to know for sure is to become one.

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On an entirely different topic, here’s yet another article about the nothingness of contemporary art:

It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money.

(via A&LD)

Well, really, you can substitute any number of other things for “artists” and “art” in the above sentence, and it still holds true.

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June 6, 2008

I’m A Sucker For Arts

Oh, don’t give me those big eyes. I know, I know, you’re just as original and innovative as you can be, aren’t you? Yes, you are! Yes, you are!

I just love art, but I sponsor too much as it is. Harold has forbidden me from going to theatres and gallery openings and benefits, because he says I’m just too big a softy. But I can’t help it – I wish that I could take all the art in the world home with me. I wish I had a big farm in the country, and I could collect all the art in the world and let them all live there – I’d have a big stable full of theatrical productions, and a huge barn full of musicians, and I’d just let the painters and the writers run free. I’d love nothing better.

Oooh, don’t give me that look. Don’t you move me. You stop that being groundbreaking right now – you’re just too, too relevant. I could fund your little face off, yes I could! Oh, yes I could!

Look, I just don’t have the money or the time. We have one family art, and frankly, that’s all we can manage. The kids begged me and Harold for it: “please, please, Mama, can’t we have an art? We’ll watch it all the time!” But of course, after they’d had it a month, they got sick of it. Back to the television. I’m the only one that ever watches that art now.

Are you trying to involve me? Are you? You’re a precocious little art, aren’t you? Yes, you are.

Now, my sister – she has a whole house full of art. She spends all her time caring for art, watching art, loving art. No such thing for her as too much. But, you know, she never married and she has no kids, and I think art for her is a replacement for other things. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: somebody has to love all the art in the world, and I think that art and the more solitary among us really have something to offer each other. She has the energy for it, you know, and the time.

Aw, no, now stop being so outstanding. You stop that. You know I want to fund you, and you’re taking advantage. No, no, don’t touch me. No. NO. I don’t want to be touched right now – I’m on my way to meet with clients.

Alright, I have to run along. Thank you for showing the art to me; it really is darling, and I’m just a sucker for good art. I really am sorry I couldn’t take it all home.

Posted in Art, Humor, Theatre | 5 Comments »

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June 4, 2008

We Have a Nominee!!!

Great article about Jackson Katz, who educates men about “gender issues” that, he argues, should not be considered as such:

“As a culture, Americans first must take the step in acknowledging that violence against women is not a women’s issue, but a men’s issue,” Katz said.

. . . Katz points out a pattern that has evolved regarding how the media uses passive voice and sentences when reporting gender violence. Using a board in the front of the room, Katz helped make his point by providing the audience with a concrete exercise to illustrate the power of passive voice (see below).

John beat Mary. (active)

Mary was beaten by John. (passive)

Mary was beaten. (passive)

Mary was battered. (passive)

Mary is a battered woman. (active)

“John has left the conversation long ago, while Mary evolves into the active victim,” Katz said. “This evolution of victim-blaming is very pervasive in our society, because this is how our whole power structure is set up. We start asking why Mary put herself into a position to be beaten by John.” “If we really want to work on prevention, we need to start asking questions about John, not Mary,” Katz said. “We won’t get anything done until we start treating these issues as men’s issues and shift the paradigm at the cultural level.”

(via Feministing)

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On the other hand, sometimes blaming the victim is hilarious and satisfying (a NYC man was acquitted for physically confronting a grunter in his Equinox spinning class):

“I don’t know if there’s going to be an uprising, but the short-term message is sometimes you can get away with assaulting somebody who’s annoying,” he said.

Indeed, some of the annoyed sat on the jury.

(via tmn)

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How to win the New Yorker’s caption contest:

You are not trying to submit the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker’s caption contest.

Funny side note – not long ago, I actually met a New Yorker cartoonist (friend of a friend, who came to one of our improv shows), and what were the first words out of my mouth upon discovering his occupation?

“No kidding! I enter that caption contest every week!”

As soon as I said it, I realized: boy howdy, I bet actual cartoonists freaking hate that contest. And sure enough: “Well, that’s great,” he said. “I mean, I freaking hate that contest, but good luck to you.” (He didn’t say it in a jerky way.)

I really should have known better, because one of my pet peeves is that, when what you primarily do in life (or what you aspire to do) is creative, people who find it out will rush to explain to you how they actually do that thing, too. If you’re an actor, everybody who ever asks you what you do will be anxious to explain to you how they’re really an actor, too. If you’re a writer, you’ll be forever hearing about how your partner in conversation is really a writer, too. And I imagine that interior designers and chefs are constantly hearing about how everybody they meet is just brilliant at rearranging the furniture and cooking.

Now granted, most CPAs who declare, upon meeting an aspiring actor, that they used to act themselves in college are really every bit as much actors as whatever perpetually-not-cast “actor” they’re talking to, but my fascination with this conversational faux pas has more to do with why the CPA thinks the “actor” they’re talking to will somehow be gratified to hear that the CPA can do everything the “actor” they’ve just met can do and more, but has moved beyond it now and makes money instead. THIS IS NOT POLITE, PEOPLE!

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Also, everyone’s fat and stupid.

Posted in Art, Feminism, Health, Humor, New York City, People, Theatre | 2 Comments »

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June 3, 2008

The End of People, Movements, the World

Viennese artist Oscar Kokoschka had a doll made to resemble Alma Mahler (this is a letter to the doll’s maker):

“I was honestly shocked by your doll which, although I was long prepared for a certain distance from reality, contradicts what I demanded of it and hoped of you in too many ways! The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt, suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug rather than the soft and pliable skin of a woman. The result is that I cannot even dress the doll, which you knew was my intention, let alone array her in delicate and precious robes. Even attempting to pull on one stocking would be like asking a French dancing-master to waltz with a polar bear!”

(via Kottke)

Also, Jeremy Bentham’s corpse is an auto-icon:

As requested in his will, his body was preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his “Auto-icon”. . . . For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-icon was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where he was listed as “present but not voting”.[12] Tradition holds that if the council’s vote on any motion is tied, the auto-icon always breaks the tie by voting in favour of the motion.

Also, the creator of Pringles was just buried in a Pringles can.

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George Packer on why it’s impossible for us to discuss Iraq intelligently:

Throughout the opinion classes, the impulse to keep a little part of the brain open to inconvenient facts seemed to have been extinguished. In magazine offices, bloggers’ bedrooms, Hollywood studios, and the White House, a fantasy war was underway, a demonstration of American virtue or a series of crimes against humanity-both of them self-serving fictions.

(via 3QD)

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On those humorless Commies:

Humour offered the early communists the same philosophical conundrums that every other area of culture offered: what belonged to yesterday and what to tomorrow? Many argued that humour could be used to ridicule the old bourgeois habits that persisted … But, said others, given that the Soviets were creating a perfect world, there would soon be nothing left to laugh at in Russian politics or society …

(via 3QD)

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Ian McEwan on why it’s probably not a good idea to romanticize the end of the world:

The apocalyptic mind can be demonising – that is to say, there are other groups, other faiths, that it despises for worshipping false gods, and these believers of course will not be saved from the fires of hell. And the apocalyptic mind tends to be totalitarian – which is to say that these are intact, all-encompassing ideas founded in longing and supernatural belief, immune to evidence or its lack, and well-protected against the implications of fresh data. Consequently, moments of unintentional pathos, even comedy, arise – and perhaps something in our nature is revealed – as the future is constantly having to be rewritten, new anti-Christs, new Beasts, new Babylons, new Whores located, and the old appointments with doom and redemption quickly replaced by the next.

(via A&LD)

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Haruki Murakami likes to run:

Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn’t go running, I wouldn’t go the next day either. It’s not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one’s body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn’t do that. It’s the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn’t become disaccustomed. So that I can gradually set the literary yardstick higher and higher, just as running regularly makes your muscles stronger and stronger.

. . . Working artistically is unhealthy; an artist should lead a healthy life to make up for it.

(via The Book Bench)

Posted in Art, Books, Health, Humor, People, Politics, Writing | 1 Comment »

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May 19, 2008

Morning, Monday!

The Gap is offering a line of T-shirts designed by past Whitney Bienniel artists:

It’s rare that The Gap does anything I’d consider interesting or cool–they are the only store I can think of that would sell Relaxed Fit Skinny Jeans–but I was genuinely impressed with this particular partnership.

Of course, they misidentify the paintings they’re featuring, but you know, they gave it a shot.

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Libertarians might be moving into the ocean soon:

True to his libertarian leanings, Friedman looks at the situation in market terms: the institute’s modular spar platforms, he argues, would allow for the creation of far cheaper new countries out on the high-seas, driving innovation. “Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry,” he said. “You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That’s a ridiculous barrier to entry….”

Much simpler is to move into the ocean. But come on, it won’t be long before the hipsters start wading out, and then the whole cycle begins anew.

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Texas’s AT needed two years and $1.4 million in federal money to discover 8 cases of legitimate voter fraud, in addition to this:

The remaining 18 cases all involved eligible voters casting legitimate mail-in ballots. The ‘fraud’ was that others collected the ballots and deposited them in mailboxes without putting their own name and address on the envelope in which the mail-in ballot was sent. These latter instances were almost all cases involving elderly or disabled voters who could not easily mail their own mail-in ballots. In other words, the great majority of the cases in his meager haul were technical violations that non-politicized prosecutor’s offices most likely never would have pursued.

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Jessa Crispin reviews Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice, in which Brottman blames too much reading for contributing to antisocial behavior:

You start to appreciate the value of reflection and privacy, choosing isolation and solitude over social situations, which become increasingly awkward and difficult to endure. You start to anticipate and avoid occasions that make you bored or frustrated, those in which you’re forced to get involved, where you can’t retreat to the corner with a book. You get used to uncertainty, detachment, and silence, and turn to reading all the more, to make yourself feel less lonely. (Brottman)

Well, this certainly describes my adolescence (substitute blogging for reading, and it also describes my morning), but I wasn’t socially awkward because I read too much. I read too much because I was socially awkward. If books hadn’t existed, I would have taken solace in TV or a mud-puddle, or bouncing a rubber ball off the wall of my bedroom. But I still wouldn’t have shown up at school dances.

I agree that reading too much is a vice, however, and it’s quite handy that people who don’t read much think reading can’t possibly be anything but admirable. Compulsive readers like myself can completely indulge in something that’s basically laziness for us, and reap nothing but praise for it, because for differently wired people, it looks like work.

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Monks are sick and tired of the Dalai Lama’s crap:

Another monk. . . put it this way: “For 50 years, the Dalai Lama said to use peaceful means to solve the problems, and that achieved nothing. China just criticizes him.”

“After he’s gone,” the monk added, “there definitely will be violent resistance.”

This has not been a red-letter year for China. In celebration of China, here are some photos from my trip there in September of 2006:





















Posted in Art, Books, People, Photos, Politics, Travel | Leave a Comment »

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May 11, 2008

Interesting Things This Weekend

What the hell is steampunk? Yet another catch-all style term soon to be beaten into the ground:

“Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is,” Mr. von Slatt added. “That’s a marketer’s dream.”

(via The Morning News)

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Verbatim versus gist memories, or, why we sometimes remember sniper fire:

When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce a phenomenon . . . in which gist memory – designed to look for patterns and fill in perceived gaps -creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind.

(via The Morning News)

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A list of the many, many reasons to despise Phyllis Schlafly eventually makes its way around to this:

There are conservative scholars who do work that is respected within academia-many economists, for example-and they would not be inappropriate candidates for such an honor. Nor would I have a problem with conservative pundits, so long as they’re sane and genuinely distinguished . . . such as the late William F. Buckley. . . . [However,] it’s a distressing fact that many liberals, anxious not to be seen as “biased” or as condescending to conservatives, in fact bend over backwards to be “fair and balanced” towards them. Such behavior then allows them to congratulate themselves on their “tolerance” and “open-mindedness.” . . .

But this way madness lies. Because, as much as conservatives may whine and scream to the contrary, liberalism and conservatism are not moral equivalents. Because, on the one side you have the thinkers and activists who have advanced freedom, social justice, and human rights, and on the other, you have those who have attempted to thwart all those things. King George III is not the moral equivalent of George Washington. Jefferson Davis is not the moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Joe McCarthy is not the moral equivalent of Walter Reuther. George Wallace is not the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King. And Phyllis Schlafly is not the moral equivalent of Betty Friedan.

So if you’re going to be handing out honorary degrees to political activists, conservatives are always going to come up short. And that is how it should be.

There’s a hole in this somewhere, though, and I think it’s that the author is assuming “liberal” and “conservative” are immutable brackets under which an individual or movement can be fixedly pinned. While it’s true that conservative philosophy by definition is devoted to pulling at the reins, there’ve obviously been situations in which human rights were severely curtailed in the name of social progress, in which instances those holding the reins were praiseworthy. In other words, all champions of human rights are liberal (adj.), but not all liberals (n.) are champions of human rights.

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Jason Kottke’s blogging the New Yorker conference: get the choice bits without having to sit through long talks (or pay for a ticket)!

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What do pacifists have to say about WWII? Nicholson Baker’s controversial novel tackles the question:

This is to be agnostic about the ultimate good or evil in the human soul. It is to be prepared for either. Gandhi, and by extension Baker, strip everything down to that individual human soul and its capacity to suffer and resist and to find its goodness. The only way to enforce the law, from that perspective, is to undergo suffering at the hands of those who would break it.

I’m not convinced, but then, who am I to take issue with Gandhi?

If, like me, you’re not naturally pacific, meditation might help:

Now, a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed that meditation can dramatically change brain regions, which in turn can make a person more kind and compassionate. So-called compassion meditation includes concentrating on wishing loved ones and others well-being and freedom from suffering.

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America continues to welcome the huddled masses:

Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here. The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But they are not terrorists.

Meanwhile, recruitment agencies make big bucks funneling wealthy foreigners (who pay them for the service) to crappy colleges (that pay them for the students):

“The market range is anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of tuition,” said Visakan Ganeson, director of international programs at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Wash., which gets about half of its 200 international students through commissioned agents. “How much you pay depends on your position in the market.”

(both via Slate)

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Also, here are sculptures made of chewing gum.

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And finally, everybody’s linking to this, and I am not immune.

Posted in Art, Books, Feminism, People, Politics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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April 22, 2008

Pro-League Networking

Hi, oh, thank you! Thank you! I really enjoyed playing for everyone, I was so glad to be asked. You’re…Gisele? Nice to meet, you, I’m Joni. Yeah. That’s sweet of you to say – a little while, actually. I’ve been playing for like…I don’t want to age myself! Well, I enjoy it. Yeah, it’s great, it’s great, I’ve had a lot of success with it, been really lucky, but it’s tough, you know. And sometimes, I need to step away- I recently, this is exciting – I’ve been doing some modeling for, um, Gap? Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve seen – yeah, that’s me, that’s me! Thanks! Well, I’m not like a real model, I would never…I think they just think I’m interesting-looking, you know. Oh, are you really? Are you really – isn’t that a coincidence! Well, I have to tell you, I have been surprised at…I mean, it is hard work, isn’t it? People think it’s just, right, standing around-but it is work! And it takes a lot of…I really don’t know how to express this, but it takes a lot of courage, doesn’t it? Like emotional courage? Somehow it, it takes a lot out of you. Oh, totally. So, I really respect what you do – I mean, you would know better than I, it’s not like, I mean, I really don’t even. Wow. It’s creative, too, modeling, and I think that’s why I so — I really like to mix it up. I find it so refreshing to switch mediums, every so often, you know? Like, you just have to, or you start to just, blah. Exactly, why limit what you– like okay, I’m a musician, but you know, I also write, I design, uh, I’m also a painter. Yeah, I’ve exhibited…I paint kind of like, I don’t know, Van Gogh-ish sort of self-portrait thingys, and I really feel like it all relates, you know? My mind is in the music, the music’s in the paintings, they all inform each other, and then all of it…braugh, right out there for the camera! I don’t hide it away, you know, Gisele – it’s there on a bus, for all the world to see, so. That’s just me.

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Sheesh. How about this party, huh? I’m Joan. Nice to meet you, Bernadette. So, what do you do? Oh, really – that’s interesting, I’m also in the theatre. Well, just recently making my foray, really. I mean, I’m a writer, but I’ve just recently dramatized one of my memoirs. Yes, it’s running on Broadway now. And I was just so stoked, because I said to the producer – he was begging me for like a year, he was a huge fan of the memoir, he was like, you have to put this up as a show, and I’m like, I don’t know, I don’t know – because it was about some very personal events in my life, you know? Like, I’ve just had a lot of shit go down recently, it’s just been…anyway. So, it’s so hard, isn’t it? We have to be so revealing and sometimes you just think, enough! There’s only so much I can give. But then, you think, I’m a writer, I’m an artist, I can’t just, you know, squinch all up in my boudoir and hide from the world, right? We have to create, we must create, that’s what we do. So, anyway, I said I’ll do it, if…and this is a big if…Vanessa Redgrave has to do the part. Because I just…she is me, you know? I have always thought that she really just, we have this connection. So, he was like, Joan, I’ll get her. I will get her. And he did, I’m happy to say. Soooo…anywhooo…the whole process has just been so therapeutic and wonderful for me. It’s like, I have this whole new appreciation for you actors and you theatre people and what you do and who you are – it’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s just this huge, brilliant, courageous, sparkling service you do for us all, really, isn’t it, Bernadette? I mean, you sacrifice yourselves, you really do! Because the world is so- and pain- and we’re all- and the human cost- and suffering and joy— and whoosh- and laliday, too-too, I mean, really, bravo! Can I just applaud you right here?

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Hello, I’m Barack. Barack. Baa like a sheep says, rock as in stone. Oh, no, don’t worry about it. No problem, I’m like totally Kenyan, everybody’s like…who? And you are… Iranka? Like Sri Lank– Oh, Ivanka! Great to meet you. I’ve met such great people tonight. And you’re an… Oh, so many fascinating people here tonight. No, I’m not an actor. I’ve thought about it, but… I mean, I used to act in college. I’m a Senator now, though. Yeah, it’s great, really satisfying. I mean, I really feel like it’s such a rewarding…thing. And it’s really super exciting right now, because I’m running for President. Yeah. I mean, it’s just in the primaries right now, so I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ll see. I really think…I shouldn’t say this, but I really have a good feeling about it, you know? Which is just so amazing, I’m so lucky, I mean, this is my first time out of the chute, and it’s just been, whoa. I never expected to get this far my first time out, but I’ve got great people. It’s all about the people, I can’t even tell you. And I’ve learned so much, really. Just so much. It’s been such a rewarding experience, I really, no matter what happens, I feel that. I’m so blessed to have had this opportunity. Have you ever thought about running? Oh, you should do it! You totally should do it! No, I can’t even tell you – you would be so happy you did. Do you – I’ll put you in touch with my guy. Seriously, are you – I don’t mean to get all schmoozy on you – but are you registered? Yeah, awesome! Yeah, I’d totally appreciate your vote. I mean, yeah, I’m really trying to get people to- oh, I hear you, it’s obnoxious, but you have to do it. I know, I know. I mean, we’re all trying to – here, take this postcard: it’s got all the info on it, my website’s on there, everything. Wait, are you on MySpace?

Posted in Art, Humor, New York City, People, Politics, Theatre | Leave a Comment »

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April 18, 2008

How To Thrive In Artistic Circles

If you would be successful in any area of the arts, here are some concepts that you would do well to keep in mind:

  • Any dislike is really baseless prejudice. Discerning patrons of the arts approve of everything and everybody.
  • If it sounds like common sense, it’s probably offensive.
  • To fail to stand and cheer is as rude as is to boo.
  • Everyone is frighteningly talented, and all people are effortless geniuses.
  • In praising an artist or work, make up with emphasis and repetition what you lack in sincerity or actual interest.
  • Don’t piss on others’ parades with your quiet disapproval.
  • Every given thing is exactly equivalent to every other given thing, and all things are utterly divorced from context.
  • If being photographed, appear alongside the fat. If being produced, appear alongside the dull and inarticulate.
  • Be controversial in acceptable ways.
  • Any successful venture is 1% product and 99% promotion. Don’t waste too much time on content.
  • If something seems half-assed, that’s exactly the point it’s trying to make. If something seems pointless, it’s because the audience isn’t working hard enough at interpreting it.
  • Life is art. We’re all making it all the time. And we all deserve attention for it.

Posted in Art, New York City, Theatre, Writing | Leave a Comment »

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