Bizarro U.N.

Finally Israel is starting to speak up about the depraved U.N. — that favorite organization of people who congratulate themselves for their love of “peace”. The U.N. has found so many ways to destroy its credibility, to dishonor its mission, that it has become a sure sign of a zoned out ideologue when you hear the name of the United Nations reverentially intoned as an “answer” to some world problem.

Israel's ambassador, after the default tepid response of the U.N. to the slaughter of Jews:

“Vague references to 'those who resort to violence and terror that have claimed innocent lives in the region' are not sufficient,” the envoy, Dan Gillerman, said of Mr. Annan's comments, made Thursday in Brussels.

The bias of Kofi Annan is brought to the fore:

Mr. Gillerman said he had noted a troubling trend in Mr. Annan's office recently, claiming it had given scant support to efforts to obtain General Assembly condemnation of anti-Semitism last fall and had shown bias “that borders on the absurd” in papers filed Friday with the International Court of Justice in The Hague in connection with a General Assembly request for a legal ruling on the barrier being built by Israel.

Like many of the institutions of the modern world, the United Nations has become a travesty of itself — a self parody, receiving a respect it has not earned by the character of its actions:

Mr. Gillerman said that the secretary general's failure to make a specific reference to the bombing was “in distinct contrast to the tendency of the office of the secretary general to issue statements of reprimand, with clear and specific detail, when Israel engages in defensive measures against terrorist operatives.”

Just Be Happy

Advertising is conceptual art — ideas about products, planted seductively — using sex or status as the lure. Advertising does its best to make us feel inadequate in some way: too fat or thin or ugly or not enough of this or too much of that — then we buy the products and that drives the economy and everybody is happy — so why question it? Right?

Now it is Super Bowl time, a time for manly men and for women who like being women — as Garrison Keillor would say. After the Patriots win most of the discussion will be about the commercials.

The Super Bowl is the premier commercial venue. The popular culture is actually a commercial culture — co-opted by business to sell things, using our attention, captured with an exquisite guile, to suggest product preferences, without our full awareness of the idea pods that have been planted in our mental universe in the process. There is a dark genius in advertising and the cleverness of business culture.

For example, somehow they have figured out how to take a boxy, unattractive, dangerously large, unreasonably demanding on the environment, car — and the need to transport ourselves — into the current meme involving SUV'S — you just gotta have one.

You have to admit the toys we buy are fun even if we are not fully aware why we buy them, or more aptly, why we buy into it, when we know, on some level, what is really going on….

A Daisy For Buffy

Sometimes nature has a sense of humor. How about a flower that is a yard across, smells like a rotting buffalo carcass, no green tissue, no photosynthesis — a plant that lives parasitically off of other plants. The stink it produces attracts carrion flies, which then merrily propagate this boutonnière from hell.

What could be the evolutionary story of this strange botanical beast?

Dr. Barkman and colleagues persisted, however, and found a gene in the mitochondrial DNA of rafflesia that was still intact and in a state suitable for comparison with other species. So rafflesia was placed, along with violets, poinsettias, passionflowers and willows, in the group known as the Malpighiales.

Who would think — a plant that makes you laugh.

Grappling

Joe Rogan, host of one of those idiot demi-celebrity shows and stand-up comic, was talking to Howard Stern about a sideline of his: Rogan hosts the Extreme Fighting spectacles.

These events seemed to me to be a sure sign all was lost — civilization had gone bonkers, as Regis would say. Burrowing deep into the limbic system, they were originally, Rogan said, designed to determine which martial arts actually work the best.

As Rogan went on it became more interesting and my cynicism about the event moderated. It turns out Rogan is heavily into the martial arts — clearly he felt a part of that community in his frequent use of the term “we”. As in: “we have determined, absolutely for sure, which martial arts work, and which don't”.

Rogan seemed credible. He said that karate and more traditional martial forms are too bound by tradition and that an amalgam of forms works best. What most of the combatants utilize now is a mix of Thai kick boxing and Brazilian Ju-Jitsu.

Conclusions: for grappling, this Brazilian form of Ju-Jitsu seems to have worked best, while for striking, Thai kick boxing was most effective.

Gracie Ju-Jitsu

Cooperation and Self Interest

This article about the young and their quick take on coordination probably has greater significance than it first might seem.

What works in human families appears to work with gulls, too. Canadian and French researchers have found that adult black-headed gulls respond more often when two or more of their chicks beg for food together than when one chick goes it alone. This means less effort for each chick, and they wise up rather quickly: the more offspring there are, the researchers say, the more they coordinate their begging.

Without getting too sentimental or anthropomorphic — for all the conflict in behavior — survival would have been impossible for any species without at least some hardwired cooperative spirit.

(It often seems that studies seek to corroborate self-interest rather than cooperative behavior. Sociologists could study the questions scientists investigate to reveal the tenor of the times.)

Speaking of hardwired, but in another arena, it still surprises me that suicide-bombing has become such a worldwide phenomenon. You would think something as basic as a survival instinct would trump even the most intense indoctrination or manipulation by cynical ideologues. But in the case of this disturbing manifestation of modern life, it seems to me the operative power — what makes suicide bombing attractive to its perpetrators — is approval of the group, a social rather than strictly political function, far more powerful than one might first assume.

Ad Reinhardt

A NYT article revealed that the abstract expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt was also a cartoonist. (My early interest in art began with cartooning also — if you grow up in this country, the popular culture is often the entry point for the fine arts.)

He sounds like an interesting guy:

A wise-cracking contrarian whose penchant for dialectics would not allow him to hold any position he could not later undermine, he was a consummate art-world insider and a fierce defender of abstract painting. At the same time, his ingrained populism made him suspicious of the rhetoric and institutional power brokering that supports any art elite.

Reinhardt satirized the New York artworld circa 1946-1961:

By the 50's, Reinhardt's colleagues were better established, and so he trained his guns on outposts that supported them, including the Museum of Modern Art. In his “Museum Racing Form,” a 12-panel work that he did in 1951 for the short-lived magazine “Trans/formation,” he handicaps the artists for the coming season and pairs them with their advocates. Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred Barr pick Jackson Pollock, while Hess has his money on Willem de Kooning. He fills a final panel, “From the Horse's Mouth,” with a series of dialogue balloons.

“My painting paints me,” says one bubble. “I'm a primitive,” says another. “I don't know what I'm doing. Please buy my masterpieces anyway.”

As examples of the kind of blather that can still be overheard in cafes and galleries and art schools, Reinhardt's cartoons are still timely as satire. But they may be even more valuable for capturing the high spirits of a wily provocateur and his hot-house milieu. The Pop artists weren't the only ones who knew how to have fun.

Kerry and Brooks

More and more David Brooks' columns in the NYT express my own feelings. Although Brooks is a self-described conservative, he seems fair to me, as Tom Oliphant, who often appears on Lehrer, seems fair, from a more liberal perspective.

Brooks' Saturday op-ed piece presented Kerry as a man of good ideas who doesn't follow through — unlike McCain, whose convictions are deeply woven into his character.

Kerry, although buoyed by the recent upsurge in his electoral fortunes, still seems a man without the energy of his ideas. There is a lackadaisical quality — can this man really lead?

Edwards appears to be an American Tony Blair. Edwards is vibrant, his demeanor engaging — this does matter — he is going to have to convince not only the nation that his ideas are workable, but if elected, a Republican Congress.

Now if only, like Blair, Edwards could just get his head straight about the war and a needed emphasis on assertive defense…

Consciousness and Perception

Oliver Sacks considers the great mystery of consciousness as it relates to time:

“Time,” says Jorge Luis Borges, “is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river….” Our movements, our actions, are extended in time, as are our perceptions, our thoughts, the contents of consciousness. We live in time, we organize time, we are time creatures through and through. But is the time we live in, or live by, continuous — like Borges' river? Or is it more comparable to a chain or a train, a succession of discrete moments, like beads on a string?

Sacks' idea about visual perception:

… I could not help wondering then whether visual perception might in a very real way be analogous to cinematography, taking in the visual environment in brief, instantaneous, static frames, or “stills,” and then, under normal conditions, fusing these to give visual awareness its usual movement and continuity — a “fusion”…

Is consciousness a seamless, Einsteinian phenomena? Or is it more like the world described in quantum mechanics — individual perceptions accumulated by consciousness into the experience of a flowing whole?

But Is It Art?

This article relates the anger of the Israeli ambassador to Sweden at an art installation extolling suicide bombing.

The incident that sparked the brouhaha occurred last week at a genocide conference in Stockholm. The conference was supposed to be free of references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a tacit deal watched closely by Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel.

The artist's turgid reasoning:

Jaradet [the suicide bomber] is another example of how the inhumanity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict perpetuates itself, he said. The Snow White reference in the piece’s title, he said, was inspired by the terrorist’s pale makeup in her portrait photograph.

The artist doesn't understand the ideas presented in his own work. “Snow White” is a referent of innocence and beauty. The artist is offering an encomium for a murderer that masquerades as humanitarian statement.

For the artist, it turns out it is the Israelis' fault they are killed — and anyone who protests the idea doesn't support free speech:

“That’s what happens when you push someone into a corner. That person becomes a monster,” Feiler told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, alluding to Israel’s military actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He accused Mazel of trying to stymie free speech.

Seems to me that it is really Israel that has been pushed into a corner, but far from turning into the mass murderer this artist mythologizes, Israel has remained a deeply egalitarian democracy. It also seems to me that the ambassador might have been expressing his own free speech in disrupting the installation…

The “artist” is using the subject of a tragic massacre of innocents — 21 human beings slaughtered — as careerist opportunity.

Caucus City

Kerry's victory in the caucuses is a sign that the Democrats haven't succumbed to Dean's siren song of self-indulgent Bush hating rhetoric. The polls show that Democrats, more than anything else, want to win the presidential election — and the caucus results corroborate that desire.

Kerry has a far better chance than Dean of winning in a general election. From all reports, Edwards turns out to be the best of the campaigners — and to my mind, the best of the candidates to oppose Bush. Edwards, who voted for the war, and then voted against giving money in the aftermath, might have self destructed in that latter act.

Edwards has a shot at toppling Bush — but the Dems are stuck with the anti-war crowd who are conflating their hate of Bush and frustrations with the past presidential election with a distorted portrayal of the war. Edwards attempted to ingratiate himself with this marginal left and might have done himself irreparable harm in the process.

But the impossible situation the Democrats find themselves in — of having no candidate who can speak to consensus opinion in this country although they want so much to win — is of their own making. Being against the war runs through the Democratic field of candidates as a founding agenda.

The truth is, a majority of Americans feel that the action in Iraq was a good idea — that we should be proud as a country that we removed a dictator — no matter what the european's or the anti-American wing of progressive thinking says.

For myself, the weak tea of “internationalizing” — the world will help — is like believing in the Tooth Fairy. Eventually the world might see it in its own interest to help the people of Iraq form a democracy — it's just that the world can't be counted on — it isn't an answer, it is an evasion of the fundamental issue of the stance we will take towards the nuts in the world.

The Democrats want someone who is electable, and of the field, they chose two likely candidates. But those candidates are never going to get the support of a majority of people in this country who feel that security is a major issue — an issue that even trumps Bush's corporatized economy.

Changing Times

When the comedian Dennis Miller became a regular on Monday Night Football I had the same reaction as the audience in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein to Frankenstein's performance of Putting On The Ritz — my jaw dropped, agape. The MNF venue seemed so inappropriate for Miller, yet I wanted him to succeed.

I've had conflicting reactions to Miller over the years. I was glad that someone who made obscure cultural references was in a popular venue — it seemed gutty of him to trust the audience's tolerance of someone who might make them feel ignorant — the reaction to that feeling is usually defensive disparagement.

On the other hand, Miller was so in your face that it was hard to escape the feeling that there might be more than a little contempt for the audience expressed in a passive aggressive way; as if he were saying: I know this stuff and you don't — try and keep up, if you can, Jack. But finally, Miller is funny and smart, whatever his rhetorical devices.

Miller's recent turn to more conservative views mirrors my own in many ways, especially in this:

The Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Miller said, changed him. “Everybody should be in the protection business now,” he said. “I can't imagine anybody not saying that. Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, `That's our fault.' And on the middle end they'd say, `Well, there's another way to deal with it other than flat-out protecting ourselves.' I just don't believe that. People say we're the ones who make them hate us because of what we do. That's garbage to me. I think they're nuts. And you've got to protect yourself from nuts. ” [my emphasis]

Dean Memes

Howard Dean has become, as the police say, a person of interest.

Some thoughts on Dean and the Democratic primaries:

It seems obvious from the continual shifting in Dean's positions, that Dean's true attraction to his supporters is the strength of his opposition to Bush. The other candidates seem weak and recessive by comparison. Dean is combative and confrontational — attractive to a Democratic party that has felt jerked around since the presidential election. The Iraq war is the cipher for this anger.

The real issues the Democrats need to place front and center: corporate influence, the erosion of privacy rights, health care, social safety nets, a skewed tax system that enriches the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

Rather than the Iraq war, the Democrats should be talking about security — the paramount issue to most citizens. Dean is the “I Hate Bush” candidate — that may be tasty now, but won't fly in a presidential election.

Of course, centrally, if Dean can't explicitly reject the reflexive anti-Americanism of the marginal left, if Dean can't condemn the anti-Israel hatemongering which often percolates with anti-Semitism, no one will vote for Dean but Bush-hating fanatics and bigots.

The passionate support for someone who is just beginning to put together a coherent set of ideas relies on the unexamined enthusiasms of youth and the desire for change for its own sake. The excitement around Dean comes from the excitement around Dean — not his ideas, which aren't articulated. That is, oddly, in these dauntingly ideological times, Dean's personality is the true enticement. This is strangely reminiscent of the way the Nader campaign went — from admired but somewhat unknown public figure to shoot yourself in the foot personality-cult excess.

By nature Dean seems more an independent than a Dem. He is progressive in his anti pronouncements, but Perot-like in his dissing of both parties and their leadership; there is a further narcissistic arrogance in his assumption that the continual shifting in his message will be accommodated by his followers — although that assumption has held true thus far.

The message seems to be: “Hey, just come along for the ride, don't worry about it, I know what I'm doing, it's exciting — we need change, you know it and so do I, and when I get to be president I'll do the right thing, trust me — right now, let's run on adrenaline”.

Today in Literature

This site tells you about something that happened on this day in literature. The entry for Thursday, January 15, 2004:

On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin's Reign of Terror, Mandelstam became the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly because of his poetry — most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets — and partly because of his wife, who salvaged his work and told his story in her memoir…

For January 13th, this, about James Joyce:

On this day in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight, from peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties — the schizophrenia of his daughter, his son's floundering career and broken marriage, his own poor health, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. “Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante,” writes biographer Richard Ellmann, “he had reached his life's nadir.”

French Resistance to the Truth

Born in Toronto in 1926, the fine Canadian director Norman Jewison's new film about French complicity in abetting the Nazis — and the mythologized French Resistance — is examined in his new film The Statement.

Based on the real-life crimes of Paul Touvier, the film, which opens Friday, stars Michael Caine as a French Nazi sympathizer who executed seven Jewish neighbors during World War II and is finally on the run after being protected for 50 years by the Catholic Church and high-ranking officials in the French government.

Jewison saw it with his own eyes:

Fascinated by…a nation in perpetual denial, Jewison remembers being confounded by the issue of French-German collaboration when he was a soldier in the '40s.

“I was just a 17-year-old kid serving in the Navy during World War II when France fell and the Vichy government took over. Let's face it: They collaborated with the Germans, but nobody ever wants to talk about that. I looked at documentaries put out by the Vichy government that played in French cinemas in 1942, '43 — the most horrible, blatant, anti-Semitic stuff I've ever seen. And yet in France, everybody (supposedly) was a member of the Resistance. Well, if they were all in the Resistance, how the hell did 77,000 Jews get shipped out? The Germans did it by themselves? That's always been a big question mark in my mind.”

These are the same French who are now, with condescension, lecturing the United States about how it should behave, using international comity as a cover for their efforts to assert their hegemony in world affairs — astonishingly, the political marginalia of our own society have bought into this transparent ploy…

“In the final analysis, I think we have to be responsible for our actions,” Jewison says. “I'd like people to take away from 'The Statement' some sort of moral consciousness. When seven people are chosen to be killed without any reason other than their religion, I think people have to be responsible, and nobody wanted to be responsible for this crime, including the French prime minister, or the Paris chief of police, or Paul Touvier himself. So that's what the film is about — it's about taking responsibility for our actions.”

So, I guess we can say, fairly, that the United States can take responsibility for removing a dictator in Iraq, and the French can be responsible for their war crimes, and responsible for their obstructionist policies in implementing the removal of that self-same dictator. The French saw Hussein through their cynical self-interest — more as a business partner than as the Stalinist monster he was…

Survivors

Sometimes public life seems like a dispute in which the claim of victimization is the prize — the more victimized wins. But victimization appears as a poisonous weed through the landscape of human history — it is a human story.

This touching story of an old Jewish man and a young black woman says it all:

When he spoke [about his Holocaust experiences] at a high school in Queens two years ago, Ms. Murekatete, then a student, was in the audience. She said his story had made her burst into tears. She wrote him a note relating her own horrible story, which took place in Rwanda, in central Africa, in 1994. She narrowly escaped being hacked to death by a rival tribe. Her family - both parents and all six siblings - did not.

“I finally found someone who understood what I went through because he went through the same thing,” said Ms. Murekatete, now 19 and a freshman at the State University at Stony Brook.

Mr. Gewirtzman met the teenager, heard her story and suggested she begin speaking to groups with him.

…”She's black, I'm white; she's young, I'm old; she's African and Christian and I'm a Jew from Poland. Yet we're like brother and sister, because we're bound by the common trauma of our experience and a common history of pain and suffering and persecution.”

The torments of history can unite rather than divide:

The Gewirtzmans went to her high school graduation, and she had tears in her eyes.

“I didn't know what to do with my experience and he showed me,” she said when asked about that day.

Mr. Gewirtzman said, “In a way, we've become sort of parents to her.”

Scientific Imagery

Scientific imagery has influenced several series of paintings I have done over the years.

Here is a raw image (208 KB), recently sent, from Mars. The silvery sheen, unprocessed, has even more mystery than the colored images.

Here is an index of raw images from the Spirit rover.

Here are some photomicrographs of beer — all your favorite brands.

A primer on this type of photography.

Break

Blogging will be light for the next week…

Mysteries of the Unseen

You gotta admit it: muons have their charms. Subatomic particles, like large electrons, shot out into a 50 foot diameter track, flying around at nearly the speed of light, spinning like tops — polarized, so aligned — waiting for unseen pushes and pulls from the unseen world that would prove the theoretical to be true.

This recent experiment, which, ” if correct, [would] rank as one of the greatest discoveries in science”.

It is frustrating that there is some doubt about the outcome. The experiment, if confirmed, would prove an extension of the mental universe as well - an unknown realm.

The existence of the new matter is predicted by an unconfirmed theory called supersymmetry. According to the theory, every known particle in the universe from the electron to the neutrino has a counterpart that has eluded detection. Some versions of the theory suggest that “dark matter,” a substance that seems to outweigh ordinary matter in the cosmos, actually consists of tremendous swarms of supersymmetric particles that waft through space.

Zorro

Don Rafael Montero: Do you recognize him?

Elena: No, but he was young and vigorous. He was very vigorous, father.

The Mask of Zorro was on TV a few days ago. Antonio Banderas was the best thing in it. Banderas' zest for acting adds energy to this unsurprising but still entertaining fantasy. Anthony Hopkins phoned in his performance. More and more Hopkins seems an actor of reputation and received notion rather than one of great talent. Zeta-Jones is a physically active and beautiful Elena Montero/Elena Murrieta, but she has never had the radiance of great screen beauties. Her natural, quiet, approachable beauty, is a relief from the surgically enhanced fembots the pop culture currently hurls at us as desirable.

This is a remake of The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks. The moviemakers felt this time that the female lead couldn't just be a passive prize, so she fences. But Zeta-Jones' fencing was used as just a cheap gesture of political correctness when it could have served a plot purpose. They could have used her character to mirror the young Banderas' character saving Zorro — at least utilizing her fencing skills for some purpose. There is a joy and fun in her fencing that has more of a sexy pull than her scenes with Banderas, which don't have the chemistry they should.

They could have explored the story behind her fencing skills, as well — maybe as a young woman, insisting, despite her putative father's objections, to learn how to fence — a suppressed memory of her true heritage, as the daughter of Zorro.

The dance sequence could have been the crown jewel of the movie but it was poorly staged and not long enough. Banderas has a light quality unusual in a role like this — he isn't the knuckle dragger monotone action hero — and it matches well with Zeta-Jones. A trained dancer, she could have fully let out her inner drives — as was meant to be implied — if they had just done a better job filming the sequence.

The over-the-top action sequences had a wit the script lacked. There is one fight sequence where Banderas defeats all the extras the moviemakers' budget could afford. It ends in Tom and Jerry fashion, with a big smirk on Banderas' face, after he has lit a canon to finally emulsify his opponents. Banderas was hysterical — you laugh along with him in satisfaction.

A lot has been made of the fact that Banderas is the first Spanish Zorro. The film has a blessed lack of special effects — that deadening encrustation on modern movies that makes them cold and distant. The look of the film is luxorious, a kind of Las Vegas kitsch married to Hispanic themes. But there is also a lack of expansiveness — the outdoors doesn't seem to have a sufficient part in this movie, space for the mythology to fill out the story — it's all interiors — even the exteriors feel done on a movie lot. The mine scenes with child laborers reminds me of Spielberg's slave-urchins in Raider's…

Trivia:

Joaquin Murieta, Antonio Banderas's character's brother, and Three-fingered Jack were real life bandits in Northern California at the time of the 1849 Gold Rush. Joaquin Murieta was a Mexican born in Sonora who moved to California to find his fortune. But after being beaten and robbed by American gold miners, he swore that he would avenge his dishonor. He was the lead in a group of bandits in the California wilderness, killing anyone who stood in their way. His life was the stuff of legend, used by Mexicans as a source of patriotism and by Americans as reason enough to hang anyone who spoke Spanish. Three-fingered Jack was actually a Mexican by the name of Manuel Garcia, who was Murieta's side kick. Murieta was supposedly killed on July 18, 1853 by Captain Harry Love who preserved Murieta's head in a jar of alcohol, along with Three-fingered Jack's hand as proof that the bandit was dead.

Beginnings

Not that long ago a book was written by John Horgan, former editor of Scientific American, with the title The End of Science. The thesis was that the major discoveries have been made and now all that is left to science is to fill in the pieces — significant work, but the big time theories are in place.

Horgan characterizes String Theory as “scientism” — more a belief system than a scientific theory. He doesn't feel String Theory can be validated by traditional scientific standards.

Now, with physics seemingly turned upside down in trying to understand dark matter and dark energy, yet another discovery that makes you feel the supposed end may be barely the beginning:

“The universe is growing up a little faster than we had thought,” said Dr. Povilas Palunas of the University of Texas, one of the astronomers who found the string of galaxies. “We're seeing a much larger structure than any of the models predict. So that's surprising.”

In the prevailing understanding of the universe, astronomers believe that slight clumpiness in the distribution of dark matter, the 90 percent of matter that pervades the universe but still has not been identified, drew in clumps of hydrogen gas that then collapsed into stars and galaxies, the first stars forming about a half billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxies then gathered in clusters, and the clusters gathered in long strings with humongous, almost empty, voids in between. The first such string, named the Great Wall, was discovered in 1989 about 250 million light-years away.

The questions raised:

“We think it disagrees with the theoretical predictions in that we see filaments and voids larger than predicted,” Dr. Woodgate said.

Balanchine

This article discusses Balanchine and plans for a celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Balanchine insisted that dance was primary. Like an abstract painter concerned with paint, he created nonillusionist art. It was art focused on its own essence. In a typical Balanchine ballet, the material of dance is dance.

To anyone familiar with Balanchine, such concepts are basic truths. More than anyone, he raised choreography in ballet to an independent art. He introduced speed, energy, attack and startling compositional patterns that pushed dance into the space age.

When “Agon,” the milestone Balanchine-Stravinsky collaboration, had its premiere in 1957, the choreographer and Lincoln Kirstein, City Ballet's founders, compared the work in a program note to an I.B.M. computer.

I am very sympathetic with the following, which affirms the past achievements of culture as something to be built upon —

Tradition was the springboard for his innovation. That he used toe shoes and a centuries-old vocabulary did not make him old fashioned. Even today his focus on pure dance, steps and structure, is too rigorous for those who demand dance-drama or movement that expresses specific emotion….”Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal,” he told the British critic Arnold Haskell. The dance idiom he chose was classical (codified) and impersonal (unmannered).

I read that Balanchine would choreograph to the edges of his dancer's abilities. If in a sequence the dancer simply could not hold a position and would begin to fall or lean, he would incorporate that into the sequence, extending the reach of the dancer's expressiveness at the same time he played with conventional forms — true extension.

There is a life affirming, coiled energy in Balanchine's choreography — a controlled ecstasy, a precise explosiveness. He is the dance equivalent to Bach in the architectural power of his creations.

Terry and Hierarchies

Terry Teachout got angry with a blogger about an unfair representation of his views. Terry's views, in part:

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

As I read what Terry has been saying on his weblog — as he is saying again (with frustration) above — and as I feel myself — we don't have to go back to dissing the popular culture when we value the superiority of the classics.

My own take on the subject of the fine arts and the popular culture:

The popular culture was snobbishly dismissed for a long time — but the pendulum has swung way too far the other way — the popular culture has for some time now been ridiculously aggrandized. This has been done for commercial reasons, and because people want to feel that what they like is important, and for political reasons, because postmodernism was suspicious of high culture as being supportive of power hierarchies.

The truth is, the fine arts have always drawn energy and a down to earth subject-interest from popular and traditional cultures — that is, the fine arts have always valued popular culture — but it was understood by those in the fine arts that popular culture was not as nuanced as the fine arts, not as deeply informed, nor meant to be.

Cast Away

Cast Away, on TV last night, managed to avoid the claustrophobia of star-vehicle movies. Visually, it was spacious and rich, as was Hanks' performance. Hanks lived up to the praise he received for the role.

Hanks has a likable open face, which with aging, has allowed him a greater actor's range. When he is angry or depressed, it weighs on you — his baggy visage is affectingly open to experience. You allow him narrow or mean-spirited thoughts because you like him.

The movie was gripping in its ability to plug into our deep survival instincts. Zemeckis, the director ( Back to the Future ), was able to get a lot of out of a very simple and conventional plot. The ending was overlong — the last speech by Hanks a real dud — but the mechanics of the plot were well thought out. The humorous thread of FedEx packages running through the plot had you wondering if you should respond to the cynical product placements or the witty comment on our consumer society.

It was a downer that this guy, who had so struggled to live, had not been rewarded with a “Hollywood ending”. But as written, the story had a truthful feeling. The audience's acceptance of this unromantic outcome to the story was insured by making Hanks' character a time-obsessed competitive yuppie. The island transformed him because he needed transforming and therefore couldn't go back to his life as it was, because he wasn't the same anymore.

The ending of the movie, with the character at his literal crossroads, looking into the camera, as if to say “What now?”, was a reference to the freeze-frame ending of Truffaut's movie about his childhood, The 400 Blows:

He walks away from the waves, and toward the camera. He becomes larger in the frame. Suddenly the shot becomes a freeze frame of Antoine. Camera moves in slightly on the freeze frame. The word “Fin” flashes on the screen…

The Alphabet

Despite Arabic and Cyrillic variations, there is essentially only one alphabet in the world. The origins of the alphabet:

[ In ]…1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

Like the Arabic number system brought to europe from India to replace ungainly Roman Numerals and thereby expedite the growth of mathematics and science, replacing Egyptian hieroglyphics with a flexible alphabet helped spur the growth and expansion of culture.

New Year / Phone Bill / NFL

New Year's felt canned this year. As though people were celebrating because that is what you do. Maybe it is the pall of the times, or I'm just projecting. I never did understand why you would want to celebrate the passage of time.

We went for a run New Year's Day. It is usually quiet, with a few Resolution Runners and people walking their dogs. It was cold and rainy — just the way I like it. The rain turned to light hail which elevated the weather into more than background music — it became the experience. Weather makes things memorable.

I was just paying the SBC phone bill and noticed that they have two fees at the top of the coupon you return. The amount on the left, a few cents more, is what you pay if you send your payment in late. The amount on the right is the actual charge. SBC knows that many people, reading left to right, and only glancing at the return coupon, are going to pay the higher amount — even though their payment is arriving on time.

Nickel and diming customers to make a few extra cents each time — amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars no doubt — cynical and predatory. They know exactly what they are doing…

The intro videos to NFL games on ABC are getting really good. It may be they are employing MTV directors for these brief segments, because they are clever and well done.

It made me think that these breaks between shows could be used for elevating the medium — injecting some intelligence and taste into the brainless pour-it-in-the-audience's-brain landscape of commercial TV. How about a painting shown, full screen, for five seconds, on the breaks? That's gonna happen.

Post Postmodernism

This article about the cultural critic Terry Eagleton speaks to the ethos. A Marxist academic superstar literary theorist, Eagleton sees the beginning of the end of postmodernist theorizing:

But now the postmodernist giants — like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes — are over, he says.

“The golden age of cultural theory is long past” …[he says] cultural theory has become increasingly irrelevant, because theorists have failed to address the big questions of morality, metaphysics, love, religion, revolution, death and suffering.

“The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one,” … theorists can no longer “afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are.”

He feels that the relativist angle taken by postmodernism has left the big issues unexamined.

He still believes in socialism though:

… “in which each attains his or her freedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others.”

“Get out of NATO. Get rid of capitalism. Put the economy back into public ownership.”

Academic theorizing might have its place, but you need to have a solid center as well:

“You need the satirist and the debunker…But you need constructive politics, too.”

Snowflakes-R-Us (updated)

A great article today about the Snowflake Man inspired me to pull a post from 9/30/03 (below) and update it with this additional info —

About the Snowflake Man:

…Between 1885 and 1931, Bentley, a farmer who became known as the Snowflake Man, photographed 5,381 snow crystals, most of them caught on his family's farm in Jericho, Vt. Using a bellows camera rigged to a Bausch & Lomb microscope, he was the first to capture individual snowflakes on film.

About snowflakes:

A perfectly symmetrical flake is rare, “one in a million,” according to Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at Caltech, whose www.snowcrystals.com Web site reveals his own obsession with snow. When Bentley captured a perfect specimen, he lifted it with a broom splint, then flattened it with a wing feather. With no electricity at his farm, he illuminated the crystals with the cloud-muted sunlight that came through the barn window, giving the images a silvery, highly polished shine.

…Each crystal begins its journey as a microscopic speck of dust in the middle or upper atmosphere. Water vapor crystallizes around this nucleus, typically clay, and temperature and humidity determine growth. (On ski slopes, freeze-dried Pseudomonas syringae, a commercially produced bacterium isolated from corn, is used as the nucleating agent for artificial snow.)

The flake's journey is recorded in its arms. Stellar dendrites, the familiar snow crystals with six intricate branches like trees, are common in temperatures between 10 and 30 degrees. Below zero, hexagons are formed, and by minus 30, there's no innovation: the “little artists of the snow,” as Bentley called the forces in the clouds, restrict themselves to simple columns and pyramids.

Given that there have been millions of years of snow and millions of flakes in each storm, can each flake truly be unique, as Bentley proposed? Dr. Libbrecht insists that it is true, at least for the large crystals: “When you have a complex shape, it's like a fingerprint. The odds of all the features falling in the same place becomes astronomically small.” For smaller crystals, Bentley gets off on a technicality. Although the typical water molecule is composed of two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen, one out of every 5,000 water molecules has deuterium (a heavier, stable isotope of hydrogen) instead of ordinary hydrogen, and one of every 500 water molecules will have a rare isotope of oxygen. The difference is not visible to the naked eye — or even in Bentley's pictures — but, like human DNA, it helps determine the individuality of a flake.

Post from 9/30/03:

In 1925 Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley wrote:

Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

These natural growth forms, echoing plants and patterns that exist in every corner of nature, on every scale, micro to macro, suggest nature endlessly spinning variants; as though nature was doing a small turn: “look what I can do, with even the smallest and most evanescent of things of this world.” And that doesn't even speak of the dedication of this man who photographed them, a story in itself. Amazing.

Click the images below to see enlarged.

I've explored growth related forms in many images; the image below is one example - it was inspired in part by scanning electron micrographs of crystal formations and cell wall structures (click to see larger):

And in these images - growth is expressed in branching arabesques:

This image from the Amazon Series

Also this, from the Amazon series

If I Were A Rich Man

The hyperbolic squawking of Robin Leach, Mr. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, is a nerve jangling verbal signature familiar from years ago. Leach had a series by the same name that appeared to die a well deserved death, only to arise from the bowels of TV a few days ago.

Leach gives you some sense that he is in on the joke — that there is self-parody buried somewhere in there (at least you hope so). The joke is the drooling envy Leach tries to cultivate in his audience for the things his rich folk display. Unlike lust, greed can't be sated. Greed seeks envy as its rightful enabler. It's like an infomercial for capitalism.

The brief few minutes of Leach's show that I watched presented the wife of a music industry mogul showing off her cars and baubles, while her husband, shown in clips, looked a chronic depressive, in need of Zoloft.

Most of the house interiors that are shown here for high display seldom look intimate or interesting. Shiny seems to be big with the rich. The rooms contain agglomerations of things, often individually beautiful, and probably put together by others with putative taste — the interior decorators of the world servicing their masters. Just not very personal or lived-in, or looking as though much is going on in the minds or spirits of the people who own them; they then tastelessly present their objects like Price Is Right models.

Anyway, Leach has had the last laugh, of course — thanks to his shows, he is a very rich man himself. Enjoy your caviar Robin.