The General Election Begins

Well, the general election is off and running. It is Obama vs McCain with some assists from Clinton and Bush.

Bush gives a speech in Israel stating that unconditional negotiations with terrorist nations meaning Iran is appeasement. Obama responds, well, he doesn't really respond. He is offended. How dare the president say such a thing. Obama never explains why the charge doesn't adhere. Why isn't it appeasement? In marches Pelosi, who also disapproves, most morosely. Such a statement by Bush on foreign soil is indecorous. She never explains why Bush's statement is incorrect. And the Hillary, desperate for any primary chance, throws away her tough girls get the job done affectations, and agrees with Obama.

Didn't Obama say in his book that he joined pastor Wright's congregation — mingling his life, his marriage and the christening of his children with this toxic Pastor — to gain street cred? Didn't Obama make this calculation based on his understanding of street cred? Why doesn't Obama understand that meeting unconditionally with international criminals issues to the brown shirts street cred at no cost?

The paradigm has been established: Obama, like Carter, will respond to any and all ideas which truly challenge his generalities with condescension and preaching. Obama responds by telling us if he approves or disapproves — we don't need to know why, just trust Barack. David Brooks said Obama was using outrage to show that he is tough — a perceived weakness of Obama's candidacy. But Obama didn't show toughness in his response — he was angry, or acted angry. Obama revealed he had no response — Obama thinks unconditional negotiations with terrorist states is a good idea.

Rodrigo and Gabriela

We stumbled on a late night video of Rodrigo and Gabriela and watched the whole thing. Usually the special effects and abrupt editing wear off in music videos, but the two had a charismatic presence. Not to mention that the music is just great.

Rodrigo and Gabriela describe their style as 'Fusion music': “It's mainly got Latin harmonies and rhythms but the structure is rock. It's not jazz because it's structured, and we don't improvise; our solos are exactly what's on the record…”

This isn't the video I saw, but it gives you an idea of their expressive, trance ecstatic presence onstage — united in the driving energy, but contained, alone, surfing the flow of the music:

Unlike many paired musicians, they seem perfectly balanced, unique but equal contributors, in what they bring to the dramatic sound.

Here's another performance, of Diablo Rojo, in Europe, with an appreciative audience.

Rauschenberg's Death

Rauschenberg's death is a great loss to the art world. His combination of energy, play, and enormous graphic talent, pushed art in a benevolent direction. He allowed in the ambiguity of experience, the popular culture was used to his own purposes, as were the materials that surrounded him. His aesthetic was a sunny and welcoming jazz like improvisation. Enemy of purity, he instead opted to create art.

Rauschenberg took the painterly default — where the paint ebbs and flows, forming the image from a sorting out, losing drawing and finding it in a chancy exchange, the sea erasing the shore only for it to re-emerge, and integrated that purely aesthetic dialectic with familiar images. He enlarged the conceptual basis of the visual arts, but it wasn't an intellectual widening or emotional extension — he didn't care about the pop images themselves, except as useful placeholders; much as the pop culture uses images itself. Material, and the morphology of the image's presentation, would often trump an expression of the interior life — the soul of art — in Rauschenberg's work.

I sometimes felt Rauschenberg didn't rise above his materials and concepts. Using pop culture images, which by their nature are shallow, can yield shallow results. “Contextualizing” these images, within works of art, doesn't necessarily give them expressive power or personal meaning. He involved others in his creative process, in the privacy that is so valuable in the creation of images. There is a convivial spirit expressed in this, but art isn't by its nature a shared expression. Rauschenberg made contemporary art, which was ponderous at the time, so desiccated you could hardly care, interesting to look at. Rauschenberg appreciated the wonder of a fully integrated image — a world presented; an image that works.

Smackdown: Shakespeare vs Philosophy

In this article you have a great combination: philosophy, clarity, and Shakespeare. Martha Nussbaum reviews three books by philosophers about Shakespeare. She likes Cavell (not reviewed but discussed) and most especially Zamir, a young Israeli philosopher.

Shakespeare sometimes appears as deep as experience itself, unanswerable to equation or formulation. But we keep trying, and the philosophers which Nussbaum touts are often very insightful. It is just fascinating reading the speculations — Shakespeare chides us to a higher level of discourse.

Nussbaum considers one of the mysteries of Othello's character — the ease with which he can be manipulated. Not that Iago isn't one devilishly clever fellow, but Othello almost seems enabling a lie about Desdemona's fealty — everyone knows she is faithful. Why does Othello seem so complicit in the slander? Cavell feels that it is the view Othello has of himself, as being pure, that does Desdemona in — because conceptions of purity have trouble with physicality; Desdemona knows Othello's physical self and thus seeing him more fully, threatens his narrow self-conception.

In other words, we are all to some degree ashamed and horrified at our own sexuality, of which another person's sexual response to us is the proof. We are horrified because we wish not to accept our finitude. We wish to be pure souls without limit or imperfection.

What makes Nussbaum such a gem is not only her clarity, but her balance, which you might think goes along with being a philosopher herself, but in fact, current philosphy is so congealed by arcane language that it has become a monster, gobbling up understanding.

There is a wonderful section in the article about Antony and Cleopatra, representing a mature love, of play and understanding, contrasted with the young love of Romeo and Juliet, which swims in the dreamy abstractions of physical love.

Nussbaum's sense of context — her appreciation of the limits of academic understanding:

To write philosophically about Shakespeare, or any other great author or artist, one needs not so much philosophical learning, or even philosophical argument, but a genuinely philosophical temperament, puzzled and even humble before life's complexities, and willing to put one's sense of life on the line in the process of reading a text. As Plato rightly said, it is no chance matter that we are discussing, but how one should live. The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.

Gadget Funnies

One of the funniest blog entries we've read in a long time. It is a comment on an aggregated 15 monitor setup.

Oh, look at you with your three monitors. I bet you think you're king nerd of computer mountain, don't you? Well you know what? You suck. That's right. That's because I have fifteen monitors strung together making my screen bigger than all of yours. Did you hear me?! I HAVE THE BIGGEST SCREEN! Finally, I win at something!

…Sure, it's likely to topple over and pin me down, leaving me to slowly starve to death in my own home, my cellphone just out of reach up on my desk and no one coming to visit me or check on me because I've alienated all of my friends and family with my constant bragging and boasting about my gigantic monitor setup…

Pogue Goes Bonkers Over Pangea Day

David Pogue was emoting today about an upcoming global movie marathon spectacle called Pangea Day.

Pogue's hypervigilant wit and upbeat game-show-contestant enthusiasm is very winning and informative when he writes about gear — he is down-to-earth reliable about gadgets and their real world value. He's value-added Dave, putting more fun in fun stuff. Six Flags!

In addition, Pogue's manuals, which seem to reproduce in the dark, there are so many of them, reveal he is a wonderful, gifted teacher. His manuals are models of clarity and in-depth knowledge. When he wanders off that reservation he tends to devolve solely into his game-show-contestant persona, sans usefulness — not much context or depth there.

I think the quality of Pogue's enthusiasm for this event makes me sour on it proactively; in description Pangea Day reeks of the photographic Festivus, with names like “A Day in the Life of Wisconsin”. In the latter, you have people with high-priced photo gear and bucks to travel running off to arbitrary places to take pics, hoping it will be meaningful and aesthetic. It's great, for the participants, and the expectation is that the audience will react appreciatively. (It is actually predatory in its shallow use of place and people.) In events such as Pangea Day — yikes, the dumbo name: one continent, pre-human — the participants think they are protected by a bonus — an umbrella of social value. The howler is that the creator of this event thinks she will be “fostering tolerance and understanding”. The subtext here is that the public needs to be taught, in a condescending Obama sense, by the…filmmakers.

Perhaps this upcoming marathon of here-I-am-with-gear, all-over-the-place, will be a unifying force, bringing us all together, a group expression bringing us into remarkable harmony, all of us breaking into that dreadful We Are the World. I suppose, like the Super Bowl, or international soccer, there is a pleasant sensation in thinking we are, many of us, sharing the same experience.

Although there is an implication that Pangea Day has something to do with art, this is far from likely. Art at its best is interior, meditative, complex, layered, ambiguous, suggestive, individual, even uncomfortably eccentric — averse to groups and din and ideological agenda, even a do-gooder agenda. Art can be an entry way into our inner lives, our true, common humanity. Then again Pangea Day might be game show exciting.