Lee Child, Jack Reacher

Charles McGrath did a piece for the NYT Book Review about Lee Child of the Jack Reacher mysteries. It led to my taking out some of Child's work from the library. I've been immersed the last few days. Years ago I went through a streak, reading mysteries. I still am not sure what got me going, but it was addictive. Chewing gum for the mind — although to be fair, there are a few practitioners that do honor to the form. Like Fyodor Dostoevsky. John D. MacDonald (Travis McGee) seems to have been inspirational, a strong influence on many who practice the craft.

The Jack Reacher mysteries speak satisfyingly to the lizard brain. They are well-crafted, if by nature depressive, but do give a generous allowance for brutal revenge fantasies and provide yet another variant of the mythic hardboiled detective, able to do what no man could do. The Jack Reacher character is the new macho — he is certified pc approved. Reacher may be better than any man but not better than any woman. His women colleagues run faster, have washboard abs, kill as good as him; they are smarter and better drivers. Child flatters 'em and Reacher leaves 'em. Lee Child is plugging for a female readership and his calculations have been fulfilled.

A funny aspect of McGrath's piece was the testosterone in the air:

…[Lee Child] doesn’t appear to be the sort of person who would be much use in a bar fight. You can’t picture him head-butting, or breaking someone’s nose with his elbow.

He's not so tough.

Lin Arison, Arts Patron

This story of a young arts patron has a mention of her epiphany. She had thought artists were slackers but visiting Van Gogh's small workspace:

…she wept after visiting the closet-size room where van Gogh spent his final 70 days…“I realized that for [Van Gogh] being an artist wasn’t a choice…And just as much as I would have been unhappy being an artist, he would have been unhappy not being one…”

Okay, she should have, if properly schooled and more thoughtful, have wept at the intensity of the living spirit in Van Gogh's work; she could better and more honorably have derived the realization of Vincent's expansive spirit without the necessity of a visit to his cramped worldly quarters.

At least she realized. It is true about creating art — art chooses you.

Lovecraft

If you don't like contemporary Gothic you must not be 15 but then again I like Gothic images and I'm not 15.

These Lovecraft related images are mostly pretty good. Obsessive detail replaces heart in the Gothic image — grotesquerie satisfies our cynical, adolescent side.

E. Coli Rules

This article by NYT science writer Carl Zimmer discusses the subject of his new book on E. coli, the well-known rock group. Er, no, I mean the bacterial group. Zimmer makes it a fascinating subject, describing the incredible flexibility of a seemingly simple organism.

Looking in from the outside, without a specialist's knowledge, it appears that science is able to describe the biological universe in scalable terms, but not the physical world. Science can build from this relatively simple organism a credible journey to the most complex biological outcroppings, like us. But physicists are stuck in two worlds, with Quantum physics beautifully describing the micro, and Relativity the macro, but no connective tissue — no Theory of Everything, no algorithm to scale up and down.

Matt's Dancing Again

Well, Matt Harding is out dancing again. We linked to his first go round at dancing everywhere.

This new version is better produced and shot but the music — which I used for one of my youtube videos, from Deep Forest — somehow didn't sound as good and the cuts were too fast and…I don't know we like the guy even though we don't know him so we are linking to him. Sequel's never work. Except The Godfather. But Matt's got the right idea. Go Matt.

[Note that I picked the larger Quicktime video — it is 48Mb — but thought it looked best. Best to have a faster connection here.]

The Inner Life of the Cell

The Inner Life of the Cell shown in this online multimedia presentation is just fantastic.

The section where Motor Proteins walk Cargo Vesicles along Microtubules can give you chills, so miraculous is the machinery of life; so well presented I was able to name a few of the players using the arcane lingo of the universe biological. It is astounding how much science has learned about this complex and beautiful realm that throbs with our existence.

Jed Perl

[via Denis Dutton]

Jed Perl, speaking of the contemporary art world, its sell-out to pop cultural buzz and desire for shock/schlock-attention over value said it well at TNR,

All this sensational commerce is fueled by the anti-aesthetics that were born nearly a century ago among the Dadaists, and have by now morphed into the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koons's stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse. (A critic in The New York Times described one of these glistening metal doggies, currently on display on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a “masterpiece.”)

Perl's piece is unusually heartfelt for a work of criticism. He makes it clear he cares about art and the society that produces it,

A work of art—any work of art—is a particularity. The trouble with so much of the work at BCAM and the other contemporary art extravaganzas is that it trades in generalities that are passed off as universalities. I do not really believe that the educated audience that surveys the work of Koons at BCAM and the Metropolitan, or the work of Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, sees some deep meaning in these overblown comic-book heroes and factory-produced baubles. A lot of the visitors to these shows have a knowing, ironic look fixed on their faces. They can see that what is presented as art with a universalist message is really just global marketing swill…

A recent study indicated that the expected journey of reputation in the arts leading to elevated prices was actually reversed in the art world.

Seinfeld on Carlin

Jerry Seinfeld's tribute to George Carlin says as much about Seinfeld as Carlin. Both generous-spirited observational comics; both modest and down to earth. They aren't just funny, but convivial as well.

You could certainly say that George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways. Every comedian does a little George… [Carlin] was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met … reading you a bedtime story.

New Catalog of Paintings

Just posted a new pub link — a catalog of 15 paintings of my recent work, The Fables.

Here is the link.

In addition, there will be a permalink to the book in the left nav column. You can check out a preview of the book at the above link.

I worked on this series over a period of about two years. They are layered works — a lot going on, both on the surface itself, and in the complex associations suggested by these images — but I feel the reproductions do a pretty good job of reflecting that complexity. The series, as mentioned a few posts earlier, relates to my interest in art as an affirmation of the inner life, the imagination. Paintings present another world.

Here is a link to an off-site shop with all the books from PaintedMatter Studio Press.

George Carlin

I was sorry to hear of George Carlin's death. George Carlin was able to navigate irreverence without becoming obnoxious himself. In fact, he was likable — a hat trick many contemporary comedians can't seem to pull off. His humor combined observational and charming Cosby-like stories — he was a great storyteller — with the social criticism that can be a stand-ups most valuable contribution; that is, beyond the blessing of being able to laugh out loud at something cleverly said. Nothing like feeling there is a simpatico companion onstage sharing the exasperation of living. You never felt he had an axe to grind — although he clearly had his own value based judgments; a man whose personal battles reflected on his sympathetic face.

Steve Jobs and Pixar

This tale of Pixar and Steve Jobs confirms the self-evident. Steve Jobs is some kind of business genius. This is evident in a book that was not even trying to emphasize that point.

Without Jobs’s relentless drive, Pixar would have been an inferior and probably bankrupt competitor to Sun Microsystems, not the most important movie studio of our era (and certainly the only one interesting enough to write a book about).

Jobs not only conceives great products, beautifully produced (if not always as reliable as they once were), he creates entirely new categories that impact the general culture, from iPhones to iPods to the Apple stores. Jobs is one of the few business leaders who can really lay claim to oft-heard corporate-talk: Jobs really does have “the vision thing”.

But, as with all things human, there are ambiguities…

…Jobs appears socially awkward and unsentimental to a fault…The longtime Pixar romantics are heartbroken to realize they’re actually working at a business. “What am I doing?” one employee asks in a moment of clarity. “I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate.”

Business leadership seems to require a simple, optimistic, aggressive nature. Such a personality matrix is often also accompanied by a lack of emotional depth.

Campaign Finance Reform, Bye-Bye

Santayana noted that we are in a race between education and catastrophe. In the current election we are in a race between the fever-dream called Obama and the reality of this man. David Brooks seems to finally get it in his recent op-ed.

…Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations… Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

It wouldn't be a disaster if Obama were elected, but the A Face in the Crowd let down in his supporters, of seeing the real man Obama, once the race based sunglasses are removed, is going to be substantial.

…Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style…with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood…The media and the activists won’t care…

Obama is no different from any politician, taking advantage where he can. Obama is the product of blinded liberal guilt seeking an expiation freely conferred by Obama — and of course, frustration with Bush's incompetence. Neither of those reactions speaks to who Obama really is: a cynical careerist Yuppie with a narcissist's oratorical gift. “Content of his character” is the operative phrase.

GB Shaw said we learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Entitled Mediocrity

The PBS show last night surveying some young Chinese to give an idea about Chinese society is related to this article by a Yale English professor, which grapples with the same material, but with reference to elite schools in America: the conflict between social ambition, status seeking (via money), and the question of value, of social good, of the interior life.

The first disadvantage of an elite education… is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.

In terms of the value systems expressed in elite schools,

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.

It is not normalcy, but conformity that he is describing. He goes on,

The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”

Those who are seekers…

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

The Chinese youth who are trying to make it in their own society, a crude variant of Western capitalism, where value is money, are now facing the same quandary. In the interstices in Chinese society, as in American society, you see hope. One of the young Chinese, a doctor, seemed to have societal good as at least part of his calculation. The close bonds and deep respect for tradition and parents, the sense of societal context, is something I fear will be lost in China as it dances forward, unexamined, to the familiar tune of wealth as status.

Carnival Amour

[via Matt Campagna]

Matt feels that this album harks back to Beatles / psychedelic rock, and although I know what he means — and it might be more obvious in the whole album — this piece, “Carnival Amour”, if representative, makes me feel my wife Phyllis is more on target when she says it reminds her of Yiddish theater; even if unlikely as a direct influence on this Korean alternative rock group, a true companion in its nutbrain fun, inhabiting the same space.

The video holds its own as well…

The endless permutations of pop culture, as it migrates from country to country, each locale giving it a new flavor and energy, is one of the joys of our time.

School for Victims

This article tells you something about the academic environment these days. A teacher at Dartmouth College, self-righteous in her ideological delusions (something of a redundancy), apparently resents free speech, independent thinking and critical intelligence.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren't thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

This self-pitying, self-described victim, teaching at a major university no less, is preparing lawsuits.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

A paradigmatic case of pure projection. The term “liberal fascist” comes to mind — a designation which at one time seemed polemical excess but is manifest in this story.

Universities have as their major task instilling critical intelligence. The students should sue their teacher and the university that hired her for false advertising.

It happens the journalist went to this very school. He recounts,

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity … Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.

As the writer notes — credit to the students for standing up and speaking out.

Whence Come We?

Recent discoveries might indicate that life originated elsewhere.

The team found amino acids in two ancient meteorites called CR chondrites, which were found in Antarctica in the 1990s. By analysing the carbon content of these meteoritic amino acids the scientists were able to determine that, unlike Earth based amino acids which prefer a lighter variety of carbon, their samples where made from a heavier carbon which could only have been formed in space.

All that agonizing by already stressed-out humans to put together a plausible explanation for the complexity of DNA and RNA and its ineluctable path to the joys of human life and it might turn out we will never know how life first appeared. There is something of a joke in this, a cosmic joke.

Gauguin gave his last painting the title, “Whence Come We? What Are We? Whither Go We?”, before attempting suicide. He took arsenic, but he survived.

Lost in Faux

One of the interesting aspects of technology is that it pushes forward technically but looks back decoratively. As digital cameras have become more robust, with some photographers using the detail now possible to produce high def images by aggregating bracketed exposures for super duper high def, others have tried to aestheticize with faux painterliness. The grunge photos often seen, the old cameras used with bad lenses to imitate atmospheric effects from 19th century paintings, the effort to imitate degraded emulsions for texture, and the tricks a machine can play with light — time lapse.

This photographer takes time-lapse photos into that “painterly” realm — an interesting gimmick — one-eyed liars was a name given to photography in art school years ago. Photography gives the facts but not the truth.

The photo linked to looks like the dark fume that inhabits that sad little island inhabited by confused bipeds in Lost.

Get Enough Sleep?

In Annie Hall Annie complains to Alvy that he is always worried whether he got enough sleep. Doesn't everybody? This article says 6.5 to 7.5 hours is ideal, more than 8 or less than 5 not so good.

…we can prevent a lot of insomnia and distress just by telling people that short sleep is O.K. We've all been told you ought to sleep 8 hr., but there was never any evidence. A very common problem we see at sleep clinics is people who spend too long in bed. They think they should sleep 8 or 9 hr., so they spend [that amount of time] in bed, with the result that they have trouble falling asleep and wake up a lot during the night. Oddly enough, a lot of the problem [of insomnia] is lying in bed awake, worrying about it.

I had a friend who went to Europe and her traveling companion kept complaining that they weren't getting enough sleep. She said, “We'll sleep when we get home.” And so too, our lives are rounded with a sleep.

Selected Works Update and Prints

In a frenzy of updates, sort of, we have updated the Selected Work gallery.

These images, from different series, were literally selected, as the name would suggest. I would have preferred a random selection but could not find a javascript that would pull the images randomly from various galleries.

In addition, prints are available for three of the paintings in the new series shown here @ PaintedMatter.

Prints at these links:

Offsite link to the image titled Fairy Tale

Offsite link to the image titled Horned Creature

And, the image titled Blue Flower

The whole gallery of individual prints, including many photos that appeared in San Francisco Garden book.

The Big Bang Redux

Speculating about the origin of the universe beats parsing the state of the economy. This article posits possible “proof” of a bubble universe theory, one universe exfoliating from the other. This seems as likely as the angels dancing on the head of the pin stuff. Which unfortunately, and ironically, seems to be the direction science is drifting, as it simultaneously decries the irrationality of religion — it devolves to “scientism”.

Admittedly, much of 20th and 21st century science is counter-intuitive, on the macro and micro scales anyway, but some of the mathematical modeling in theoretical physics seems exponential self-indulgence. I have to admit that the author rubs the wrong way; Sean Carroll, in a bloggingheads.tv discussion, when asked why physics departments don't hire people who are skeptical of string theory and its variants — theoretical models without any possibility of proof, although they claim the new CERN collider will provide some proof — Carroll said, “Why should we hire them when we think we are right?” Does that sound like science, or guild speak?

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular.

Speaking of science, here is an article explaining how you can spot a doctored digital photo.

New Series: Fables

Just posted a new series of paintings on PaintedMatter titled Fables.

The images circle the realm of mythology and fairy tales — of the ambiguous story, the narrative soul-center of things.

Paul's Great Art Site

I've been a fan of this site for some time. The self-described Aussie curator desires anonymity, wanting the work he presents to be the focus, so he only identifies himself as pk or peacay (Paul). This admirable — really exceptional — modesty, along with his appreciative and scholarly approach to illustrative art, makes his site, BibliOdyssey, a fascinating oasis. Most conceptual art is by definition illustrative art, with the difference that Paul displays work that requires talent and often refers to the deep well of literature, rather than contemporary conceptual art which focuses on aesthetic theory. Paul likes what many people would call eccentric work. I just like much of what he shows and don't try to define it.

If there were more curators like Paul the art world would be a better place.

An article about Paul.

IQ Forever

Science is currently of an ascendant status because people fear the irrationality of religion and/or ideology. With the internet as catalyst irrationality can grow by an order of magnitude. (Unfortunately, the spiritual nature of human consciousness is thrown out along with the excesses of what the critics define as religion — the baby tossed with the bathwater; a confusion of the spiritual center of human existence with the irrational.)

Science however enjoys unquestioned “truth affirmation” status. One such arena is IQ — people ascribe intelligence to doing well on tests, manipulating certain complex tasks or algorithms, all sorts of things. There are many things to quibble with in those formulations. But is general intelligence a static feature of character? Many people feel smarter at various junctures in their lives — significantly brighter. It seems to me it often has to do with getting enough rest, having supportive people around, having some time and a general sense of calm and can be related to societal approval of the individual. That feeling is hard to quantify, but it seems real to me — even if not scientific.

This study suggests that general intelligence can indeed be enhanced in an area known as fluid memory.

“Our findings clearly show that training on certain memory tasks transfer to fluid intelligence…We also find that individuals with lower fluid intelligence scores at pre-test could profit from the training.”… The results are significant because improved fluid intelligence scores could translate into improved general intelligence as measured by IQ tests.

Big Brown Should Lose

After watching parts of a Charlie Rose show devoted to Big Brown and the potential for a Triple Crown winner I came across this article, turning things most sour. The writer, a fan of horse racing, felt Big Brown's winning would send the wrong message.

The op-ed piece says Big Brown's

… main owner is International Equine Acquisitions Holdings, whose stated purpose is to be an equine hedge fund that delivers profits to its investors by consistently racing winners. When you run your stable like a hedge fund, the horse becomes just another commodity to be bought and sold like a share of stock, with little concern for its fate…Rooting for the firm and its co-president and public face, Michael Iavarone (who was fined and suspended in 1999 by the National Association of Securities Dealers for unauthorized trades and who was ordered to pay a judgment in 2003 for not paying for horses he bought at auction), would be validating a “win at any price” mentality.

The op-ed columnist goes on about the former trainer whom he feels to be dubious, and the use of drugs(!) in horse racing,

And that’s to say nothing about the overuse of corticosteroids and painkillers that have ruined the lives of thousands of race horses by enabling them to run when they shouldn’t, causing irreparable injuries. Forget the illegal drugs; the legal ones are pretty awful, too.

It turns out the Charlie Rose piece, focusing on the sentimental connection which the team of trainers had to the beautiful animal, had a dark underlayer which Charlie, for whatever reason, of ignorance or of volition, didn't examine.

Obama and McCain: the Vice Prez

Lordee, the primaries are over in a riveting anti-climax. Obama was his stentorian self, tearing up as he spoke of it being “our time” which in his world means Barack's time. I wonder if Rev. Pfleger will mock Obama's mistiness? Hillary gave the better speech and was wise to wait a bit before letting her supporters down. The Identity Politics Bowl is over and now the media has decided that the next Big Deal is a choice of a Vice Prez. Of course, the really significant choices will be whom the two candidates choose as advisors — members of their prospective administrations who will actually do the work and shape the policies. But the media likes simple formulations.

However, since the media posits, we suggest. A modest proposal: McCain could choose Hillary as his running mate which would force Barack to choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate; that would be…confusing. Confusing is better than boring.

Now on to the general election where Obama's sole refrain will be to make McCain and Bush one word and McCain will point out the complete and total lack of experience of Barack. That will be a really engrossing debate.The Democrats are due if they don't blow it. It wouldn't hurt to get some left of center Justices on the Supreme Court and delimit the power of corporations and the banana republic wealthy. Off we go — don't expect too many subtle discussions of the issues — health care, security, the economy. That is not how you get elected in this country.