A collective experiment in brand perception.

Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

The August 21 issue of the New Yorker profiles the posthumously influential Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin. The article, called ‘The Philosopher Stoned’ and written by Adam Kirsch, is ostensibly an essay on Benjamin’s attempt — an unsuccessful one by any measure — to gain inspiration and insight through the use of hashish. The discussion of the drug’s effect on Benjamin’s life and thinking aren’t particular valuable and merely form bookends for the more interesting central substance of the article, which describe Benjamin’s move away from academic philosophy towards popular criticism (a deflection which would have a positive effect on Benjamin’s thematic and stylistic accessibility), his shallow and facile flirtations with Marxism, and the state of his thinking towards the end of his life in the early 40s, as he struggled to finish his unwieldy Arcades Project with Nazism expanding rapidly across Europe.
 

 

Bully for MSNBC’s Ken Olbermann and his classy and eloquent primetime response to Rumsfeld’s recent speech, in which he compared critics of the botched Iraq war to Chamberlain-style appeasers of Hitler during World War II. Although the cynics out there might fault his speech as presumptuous for its evocation of Murrow, but I can more than dig the attempt for its ambition and earnestness in this otherwise craven day and age of lapdog journalism.

Crooks and Liars has the video posted here. Richard Greene offers strong praise for the piece in the Huffington Post. And the ever-on point Frank Rich calls Rumsfeld out by invoking this damning image of a smiling Rummy himself shaking hands with Saddam 20 years ago. Sets up an amusing parallelism to the image of Neville Chamberlain swapping skins with Adolph Hitler, no?

 

As depressingly doubtful as it often seems, however, Olbermann is not the only one working in television news who hasn’t completely lost their sense of up and down. Two others, while not journalists themselves, carry the burden of journalism’s supposed commitments to rigor and investigation (noble commitments that since Murrow’s day seem to have mutated into a kind of vampiric and solipsistic pursuit of ratings and ad revenue; news has turned into an empty, anodyne, complacent, PR- and quote-friendly form of mythmaking) by mercilessly satirizing TV news journalism itself. Of course, I am talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Here are some other seminal, declarative moments of television news which have cracked and rolled like heavy thunder in the fuzzy white noise of the contemporary mediasphere, seeming to stop, if only for a moment, everything in their tracks.

Jon Stewart’s brilliantly acerbic appearance (which struck a notable contrast with his warm and congenial host persona on The Daily Show) in 2004 on CNN’s erstwhile ‘debate’ show Crossfire resulted in CNN’s termination of the program shortly after this broadcast. Jon Stewart derides the left-vs-right debate format of the show as political theater, a spectacle of soundbites and crude witticisms more akin to verbal pro-wrestling than with real debate, with its hosts shilling and spouting rhetoric in their roles as partisan henchmen.

Then there is Stephen Colbert’s famous dinner roast of Bush — delivered to the president’s dazed and reddening face! — back in April.

Colbert, in a virtuoso and magnificently unfazed deadpan, delivers a ballsy calvacade of broadsides against the administration over the course of 20 earth-stopping minutes, including this one:

“I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, has he stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

This stuff that Bush, in his insulated bubble, never gets to hear, let alone hear live and in person and in front of a public. But moreover, just as he’s shielded from criticism, he is also consitutionally impervious to it; Bush, after all, believes in Divine insight, in his personal connection to jesus. Did Colbert’s lancing of his imcompetence and hipocrisy grant the Decider-in-Chief one iota wisdom, thoughtfulness, or humility? Seems unlikely (in fact, the fiercely supportive response among the blogging world was a world away from the MSM’s tepid coverage of the event). Did Stewart’s plea strip down the propagandistic facades of television news and inspire a revision in its intelligence-deadening practices? Not really (though, but Crossfire did get canceled and Fox’s ratings are declining). Will Rumsfeld watch Olbermann and take a minute to reflect, rethink his choice of words, let alone worldview? Again, doubtful. And even if our SoD suddenly ‘gets it,’ isn’t it too late for the broken Iraq and the thousands dead he’s helped create and the hubris, professional ineptitude and moral callousness he’s already displayed?

But of course to ask Olbermann, Stewart and Colbert those things is unfair. They are for their own part and in their own ways and by their own degrees rousing a sleeping country, slumbering in front of its televisions, into a state of reason and alertness. One only wishes that in 2006, as far as wider tv news culture is concerned, they were the rule rather than the exception.

An insightful and entertaining piece on the emergence of Wikipedia in this week’s New Yorker.

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.

Greenpeace UK released a brilliantly acidic ad (part of their What Does Your Car Say About You? campaign) that tucks anti-SUV sentiment neatly within the metaphor of all-too-familiar intra-office relations.

This video tells me two things about the British: that 1) they are (still) obsessed with The Office, and 2) they are much further along culturally in their rejection of the irresponsible fuel-hogging behemoths known as Sports Utility Vehicles. The message of this piece would simply not fly in the US. For Americans, the social pariah in the commercial is less likely to be the douche with the SUV than the sensible person with the gall to argue in favor of a gasoline tax or carbon trade caps on our vehicular and industrial emissions. Sigh …

But I do think things are changing. If the increase of ad hominem attacks on specific car-types and drivers indicates a larger and more ingrained shift in our attitudes, then sites such as FUH2 (a user-generated photo submission site with its guns trained unflinchingly on the H2 line of Hummers) are encouraging. Sometimes you must be hater to be a lover!

Check out our submission of June 14, 2004:

[via Treehugger]

We caught Exorcist randomly on the tele the other day and I’ve caught a horror movie bug because of it …

The still above is from the British film The Descent, which, in all honesty, scared the living shit out of me. While I can view most horror movies now critically and dispassionately, The Descent contains a premise which still exerts a visceral andrenal effect on me — the idea of being stuck in a dark, airless, cramped, potentially inescapable underground tunnel (of being buried alive, basically, which is probably my freakout button #1); and this is all before you realize that there are legions of feral, bloodthirsty mutant creatures down in the dark with you, picking your friends off one by one in horrifically brutal ways. Good times. The spelunking industry will probably be raging at this film’s release.

Appropriately timed enough, The Sunday Times Magazine published a highly enjoyable piece this weekend about the emerging international renaissance of horror moviemaking, written by John Hodgman (the mightily intelligent cultural correspondent for The Daily Show, and oh yes, he – in the role of the PC – of the recent obnoxious Apple ads).

Adbusters has an interesting piece about how Nike, once distrusted by skaters because of its enormous bulk, financial clout and marketing savvy, insinuated its way into the skateboarding subculture. Midway through is a pertinent passage about the sneakerhead’s — he or she of 14-35 years of age who appropriates kicks less out of an athletic or (sub-)cultural impulse but rather for the pure material/aesthetic pleasure of having the product itself — role in burnishing Nike’s street bonafides.

[Thanks JB!]

Two weeks ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett announced that he will give away 85% of his wealth to charity. That’s $37.4 billion in liquid stock, $31 billion of which will pass on to the hands of Bill Gates (the only person on the planet richer than he is), who along with his wife Melinda, as you know, runs the formidable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (as you might also know, Bill recently quit day-to-day operations at Microsoft in order to administrate his charitable organization full-time).

Bravo to both of these guys — fat cats with soul. Buffett, the folksy, gnomic financial figure who belongs to a previous, more upright era of money-making, has some choice quotables in this NYTimes article:

***

“I’m not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when 6 billion others have much poorer hands than we do in life.”

***

“I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society,” he said. “At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.”

***

Not that his children will be left empty-handed. Mr. Buffett said that the assets he is not giving to charity today will be divided up later between other philanthropic causes and his family. His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion’s share of his fortune.

“They’ve known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them,” he said in a news conference this afternoon. “They have money that most people would dream of. They’re lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents.”

 

I generally try to avoid reading movie reviews before I see the movie in question, but anticipation of the release of Block Party, a documentary involving two of my favorite artist/entertainers, comedian Dave Chappelle and director Michel Gondry, became overwhelming, and so I indulged in a little bit of pregnostication.

I first read Stephanie Zacharek’s piece in Salon, and it seemed to me a little overcooked. A sample quote:

While the rest of us are busy carving up the country — red state, blue state; urban, suburban; sophisticated, rustic; them, us — in ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,’ there’s room for only one America, but it’s one big enough to include everybody.

While I love Salon, and have nothing but disdain and contempt for the state of our politics in 2006, I have been somewhat saddened by the heavily politicized air the webzine has taken on since its more genteel, arts and literary editorial origins in the late 90s. Salon is fighting the good fight, but I miss the frivolous decadence of, say, its ’Masterpiece’ series, one of which elaborated on Seinfeld as ’one of the most complex and troubling art works of our time.’ Sigh …

The mention of the insidious and tired red state / blue state trope in Zacharek’s review seemed unwelcome, jarring, limp-wristed, a little too simplistically and cloyingly topical. But it’s a sign of how the malady of the times has infected and desensitized us all that I only became simpatico with Zacharek while watching the film, thinking: Jesus, what a lovely, beautiful, joyous, exuberant movie … With belated clarity came the realization that it wasn’t that Zacharek was placing the film within a ‘red/blue’ framework (the mention of which must have triggered some kind of involuntary gag response in me), but that she was arguing precisely the opposite; that historicized frames simply cannot contain the bursting spirit and abundant soulfulness of this film.

 

I came across a post to this London-based photographer’s flickr collection and his work is brilliant. His portfolio primarily consists of photographs taken in London’s streets and subways; no studio or posed shots here. They are rich with clever visual puns and they even achieve, at times, a kind of pathos.

I have always found a maddening tension at the point where the experience of city-living and the practice of photography meet. The city is such a profound spectacle, a ceaselessly unfolding performance written in razor-thin moments of time, but its tiny dramatic intervals are only seen and marveled by those who are really looking, and are more often than not missed entirely by a poorly-timed blink, by some distraction coming from another direction, or by the general dullness of spirit and sensation brought on, paradoxically, by excessive and overpowering urban stimuli (see Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life for more on this timelessly Modern idea). In Baudelaire’s era, the poet meandered through the city, gathered experiences and distilled them into essences post-facto, through a process of creative synthesis. What the advent of photography (and more specifically, the invention of the portable camera) introduced was a much more discursive approach to capturing the evanescent moments in the city. Memory and interpretation and ‘poetic fudging’ became extra-dimensional, error-prone, re-gurgitated facets of experience when squared against a mechanical shutter which was capable, within a 1/400th of second, of indelibly etching reality into photographic emulsion. Those charming, but fleeting moments which, except to the most vigilant or sensitive souls, were hidden beneath the rushing torrent of time, found a tool of authentic record that could freeze invisible moments, and open up their private experience into a shared one.

But the technological capability of capturing those moments didn’t mean that those moments, once captured, retained their ineffable qualities. The critical but slippery distinction between photography as a technique and photography as an artform would hinge on the image’s ability to transcend its documentary nature and embody, as Baudelaire would have seen fit, an aesthetic, a poetry, a story. On any specific basis of qualification those are really hard to pin down, and I won’t try to get at it here (Art History was my minor degree, after all, ha! For further reading though, Susan Sontag’s extraordinary book On Photography is worthy of a gander). Cop-out aside, that question seems more and more relevant (or irrelevant at the same time too, I suppose) given our hyper-prolific tendency towards, as well as our appetite for, the production, manipulation, storage, and exhibition of photographic images, in our age of the digital camera, Photoshop, and the internet (as evidenced by photo-archive websites such as flickr).

Poetics aside, there are also issues of praxis. Photographing someone, as a concrete set of actions, goes far beyond mere observation. For example, I know several photographers (my amateur self included) who have never felt comfortable whipping our cameras out and directly shooting a stranger on the bus or on the street. Is that reflexive sense of politeness or anxiety a hindrance to our ability to commit the images we see to film? If so, then doesn’t that represent a compromise, a triangulation between the artistic temperament and will of the photographer, and the not-necessarily-passive receptivity of the subject? Photography is not a purely aesthetic or technical artform, but it is also an act that is often a clandestine and intrusive, and my own hangups over its ‘operational necessities’ dictate the extents of what I can and/or am willing to do with a camera. In my own case, I can only stick to landscapes and still-lifes, while appreciating from afar what photojournalists (but not necessarily paparazzi, say) do everyday.

However nebulously great urban photography is made and defined, like they say about porn, you know it when you see it, and you see it in Henri Cartier-Bresson, you see it in Robert Frank, you see it in Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and you see it, I think, in Nils Jorgensen.

 

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a terrific — and thoroughly depressing — piece in last week’s New Yorker called ‘Watermark’ regarding the deterioration of the southern Gulf Coast. You need the dead-trees version of the magazine to read the article, but a Q&A with the author Elizabeth Kolbert can be found on-line (Kolbert’s upcoming book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, will no doubt contain a longer verion of the piece as well).

As with many of Kolbert’s articles on the environment, ‘Watermark’ begins with a scientific overview. In this case she describes the shifting, precarious geological characteristics of the Louisiana coast, which artificial interventions — such as the existence of New Orleans itself – throw out of balance. Combined with the trend of increasingly powerful hurricanes (which a positive feedback cycle of global warming reinforces and accelerates) gouging the coastline each season, the forecast for the Gulf Coast is grim. 

So do you continue to man the guns? And if so, for how long? The most heartbreaking passage in the article is the one in which the cold, scientific conclusion — that post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans and beyond will be an expensive exercise in futility – is pitted against the fierceness and passion of New Orleans residents, still fighting bureaucracy and political inertia to repair their lives and their beloved city.

From BoingBoing: 

Video explains the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop. This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

The historical exposition of the Amen Break’s evolution into the musical forms of hip hop, breaks, and drum ‘n’ bass is satisfying unto itself, but then Harrison brilliantly uses this to make a case against overzealous copyright laws which, he argues, ultimately stifle creative innovation. (the Steven Wright-style delivery is hypnotic, too)

 

There was an extraordinary feature in this past weekend’s Sunday Times Magazine on Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a young, former Taliban diplomat who went from civil war in Afghanistan and exile in rural Pakistan to the peaceable cloisters of Yale …

Read it here.

 

I became aware of George Packer’s writing during the run-up to the Iraq War. In and around 2002, the war-bent Bush Whitehouse and its cabinet/cabal of neoconservatives were pushing full throttle towards an invasion of Iraq. But behind them, mostly hidden in their wake, thousands of more reflective, liberal viewpoints were being quietly pulled along. Not all of them were, as you might expect, reflexively anti-war; they saw that there were indeed tangible and concrete benefits to ousting Saddam’s Baathist regime and opening up the possibility for a liberal democracy to take root in the center of the Middle East, without, at the same time, remaining undisturbed by and uncritical towards the potential costs and perils of an assault and occupation. Packer, a liberal reporter for The New Yorker, took the difficult, ambivalent position of being anti-war (he came of age after all in post-Vietnam America) but also too smart and sensitive (and for better or for worse, hopeful) to ignore the possibilities that a truly liberated Iraq could entail. Of all the ‘liberal hawks’ punditing around at the time (others that I remember reading included Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek. There was also Christopher Hitchens of Slate — prior to that, Vanity Fair and The Nation –, but I found his stridency and rhetorical smugness enormously off-putting), Packer stood out for me for what I can only say was his writings’ sense of nuance. That admiration only deepened once the war had actually gotten underway, when he began writing war dispatches for the New Yorker from within Iraq itself, reporting on the occupation with a deeply intelligent and humane eye.

His book, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, which I finished last month, is in many ways his coverage of the war expanded into book form. It contains two thematic sections; the first covers the ramp up to the war, the second, the aftermath. Packer discusses at length the philosophical origins of Paul Wolfowitz’s neoconservatism (extrapolated — or corrupted – from Leo Strauss’ teachings at the University of Chicago), as well as the political jockeying of Iraqi exiles (including the thinker Kanan Makiya, and the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi) in the U.S., who for opportunistic or utopian reasons, agitated and lobbied for a military confrontation with Saddam. He also discusses the ideological lines that 9/11 and Iraq broke apart, and their reconstitution in new and uneasy patterns:

Ideas as big as [establishing a liberal democracy in Iraq] attracted strange bedfellows. The pairings both for and against grew so weirdly promiscuous that it was less useful to think in terms of left and right than of interventionists and anti-interventionists, or revolutionaries and realists. Old-fashioned realists from the Republican establishment found themselves on the same side of the debate as anti-imperialist leftists and far-right isolationists, while liberal veterans of humanitarian war became uneasy allies of administration hawks. Brent Scowcroft was tangled up with Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan; Michael Ignatieff woke up next to Paul Wolfowitz. [The leftist intellectual Paul] Berman wondered whether he and the believers in the administration even wanted the same thing. “I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language because I don’t know how to judge the language of the neoconservatives,” he said one night in his apartment. “If the language is sincere, and there is an idealism among the neocons that echoes and reflects in some way the language of the liberal interventionalists of the nineties, well, that would be a good thing. It’s true that neoconservatism had a left-wing origin, and were it to turn out to the case — which I’m extremely skeptical about — that some of the neocons would return to their earliest intellectual roots, that would be excellent.” But if this warplane ever took off, “liberal interventionists of the nineties” would not be at the controls. So the administration’s intentions mattered greatly. “It’s extremely hard to judge what the people in the administration really do think,” Berman said. “On what points are they sincere? On what points are they hypocritical? They haven’t allowed us to be able to tell.

But after the war began, it wasn’t even anymore a question of the Bush administration’s original intentions, be they thoughtful, cynical, or insane. Moreover, Packer would argue, history’s judgment will fall on Bush’s arrogance, incuriosity, and incompetent handling of the occupation on Iraqi soil and in Iraqi hearts and minds, directly and unmediated. The second portion of the book, the remaining 350 pages, is comprised of Packer’s boots-on-the-ground reporting, the dirty, messy counterpart to the heady theorizations that conjured the war into actual being. He reports on the realities of the American boots on increasingly hostile ground, speaking to Americans and Iraqis alike (including a young State Dept administrator — a former scholar — named Drew Erdmann; a vibrant, secular young Iraqi woman named Aseel, who took to the new mandate of wearing veils unkindly; and a tough, sincere Captain named John Prior who seemed to be keeping street order through force of will along; many of these character had appeared in his New Yorker articles), and tracing many of the hardships and setbacks to policy decisions that were misinformed at best, and criminally negligent at worst. As Packer says in the book, and which he’s said since (in interviews on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, for instance); history will judge Bush and the neocons very harshly for their fatal blunderings in Iraq.

Packer, however, doesn’t give the other side a free pass, either. And that’s because to him there are still elements of good faith alive — but slipping away — in Iraq whose human dimensions get lost underneath the bigger stories of ideological clashes and policy breakdowns.

With their eyes turned to such lofty matters [i.e. 'the war against WMDs, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy], few prowar ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for themselves and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure: “This war is illegal, it’s immoral. Nothing good can come of a lie.” In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the elections as a “Kodak moment.” It was Bush’s war, and if it failed, it would be Bush’s failure.

He goes further to ask, however noble the abstract principles, if we were ever up for the work it would take to do it right — if we could walk the walk this time:

America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too partisan, divided, and small to manage something as vast and difficult as Iraq. Condoleeza Rice and other leading officials were fond of comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the peevish, self-serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Amery’s four-hundred-page manual on the occupation of Germany; the other produced talking points.

It’s a moving, thoughtful book, and I certainly would not be surprised if it wins the Pulitzer for non-fiction this year. It’s a terrible thought, ultimately, that the sort of insights contained in the book won’t be able to repair the extensive damage that has already been done. We will have to be satisfied with the hope that Iraq will reach some measure of political stability by the next generation (that is, if it hasn’t fallen into an intractable, decades-long sectarian civil war), and that in as yet unwritten histories that the Bush gang will take its deserving place amongst the worst administrations in American history.

Another favorite, Fareed Zakaria, wrote a review of the book for the Times.

More recently, the Sunday Times Magazine published a piece — ‘After Neoconservatism’ – by Francis Fukuyama (distilled from a larger forthcoming book called America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Newconservative Legacy).

 

I spent my Friday off roaming the streets of the city and the hallways of the Met and the Museum of Natural History.

The Met is currently showcasing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines,’ the name for his mixed media, half-painted, half-sculptural works. I was already enamored with Rauschenberg’s messy, layered, collage sensibility (I throw Tapies, DeKoonig, and Basquiat into this camp as well, but Rauschenberg was probably there first), but to see physical objects — furniture, window frames, clothing, ladders, electrical fixtures, and stuffed animals, including an alpaca goat with a tire hooped around it! — extend out of the picture frame into your physical viewing space was very satisfying in a real, visceral way.

There is also something satisfying by their utter lack of pretension, too. If Marcel Duchamp’s dull, ordinary, mass-produced ‘found objects’ were meant to puncture the sanctimony of High Art, they still did so by taking on themselves the articulation of that polemic — the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the wine rack, provide a semiotic purpose, and are therefore still slaves to a concept; they are still ideas. Rauschenberg’s found objects, on the other hand, are much humbler. They are comfortable amidst the paint smudges and their own ugly, scattered imperfections. They lack any sense of self-consciousness, they don’t raise their voices …

In a distant room in the museum, much smaller in size and more compact in presentation, was a small exhibit of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural and architectural projects, its emphasis on the relationship between the two.

Ok, I begrudge Calatrava (trained as both an architect and an engineer) the precision and elegance of his sculptures; every piece is a system of tension (wires) and mass / compression (solid material, usually ebony or bronze) held static in an equipoise of competing forces. His buildings and his bridges also share that kind of structural rigor, and they too are beautiful to behold. But when extrapolated to the scale of architectural, the beauty of Calatrava’s formalism turns tyrannical. We can all tiptoe around his sculptures and admire them at a distance in the controlled space of a museum (no cameras please!), but architecture is a larger, more complex, messier, interactive affair — it contains a vitality and dynamism that fights against Calatrava’s rigidity. This conflict is especially apparent given the fact that several of his recent commissions seem to be massive transportation hubs (including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub under construction in Lower Manhattan), whose urbanity and bustle seem completely at odds with their stately, quasi-religious designs. Now if he were designing cathedrals or libraries or something of the like, then perhaps I would be onboard …

I can no longer remember which professor/architect said this at one of our undergraduate studio reviews, but the critique, over a student’s spartan, hyper-symmetrical, super-minimalist, ultimately prison-like design, went something like, ‘Now tell me. What about the Coke machine? If you have to put one in here, and you will, where would you put it? Where can you put it?’

The final, and as it turned out, the longest, leg of my day was across the park at the Museum of Natural History, which was mounting an exhibit on Charles Darwin, founder of Evolution. I went primarily as a show of support and solidarity for fellow reason-based, humanist souls, in light of the shitstorm brewing these days over the teaching of Intelligent Design in American public schools. My $20 was meant mainly to say, ‘Thank you for putting on this show at this particular point in time, and fighting the good fight against the forces of ignorance,’ but it ended up paying for much more than mere lip-service.

The show is incredibly well-executed. The displays (which contain a lot of text — those who don’t like to stand and read be warned) are arranged chronologically, with a strong sense of pacing and narrative. The story begins with Darwin’s curious, insect-collecting boyhood, and progresses through his college days; his 5 years traveling the world and collecting exotic specimens (and eating them! ha!) aboard the HMS Beagle; his return to London and his subsequent entry into its scientific intelligentsia; his move, with his new family, to his manor in the English countryside, where the germination and methodical development of his Evolutionary theory began in earnest; and up through, finally, the publication of The Origin of Species, and the subsequent storm of controversy that it generated — and eventually triumped over. As any well told story does, it envelopes you so completely. And it is also successful because it not only presents the scientific history intelligently and rigorously, but situates the ideas in the rich, emotional life of Darwin the man.

The rebuke of Creationism (and its insidious proxy, Intelligent Design) comes at the very end, but the argument is made persuasively, not angrily. Which meant the show has a good political sense, too, by making politics invisible. This is was perhaps the only museum exhibition I’ve ever left with the urge to applaud outloud.

Now my question is: could anybody over at the Discovery Institute mount something as smart and coherent as this without some kind of divine intervention?

 

There was always something about the Winter Games that seemed cool and pristine … You think more of the slick, effortless gliding over of ice and snow (after all, which winter sport doesn’t involve this dynamic of slipperiness?) while the Summer Games evoke more grueling, sweltering, sweat-drenched associations. The Winter Games always seemed leisurely somehow, while the Summer Games always seemed like work. So what if you dug beneath this shallow, aesthetic comparison? Would you not find an ugly socioeconomic reality?

So argues Paul Farhi in the Washington Post:

‘Never mind the usual puffery about what this month’s Winter Olympics are all about. Sure, there’s the beauty of sports, the spirit of friendly competition, the dedication of great athletes and all that. But the Winter Games are about a few other things as well: elitism, exclusion and the triumph of the world’s sporting haves over its have nots.

What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations. In fact, I’d suggest that the name of the Winter Games, which start Friday, be changed. They could be more accurately branded “The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival.”‘

Farhi is still a little on the strident side for me, too much a killjoy; call me sentimental, but the Olympic Games, be they Winter or Summer (their ego-driven dramas, idiotic doping scandals, and commercial taints aside), still represent for me one of the few embodiments of Spirit left in our modern — and my grown-up – age, now that Santa Claus and World Peace appear to have been ruled out. Nevertheless, its an argument that holds heft and it’s one I tuck under my hat.

Against the drab backdrop of Farhi’s cynicism, though, it’s lovely to see gems like these shine.

• Shani Davis, who grew up poor in gangland South Chicago and became a speedskater, is the first black athlete to win gold in the Winter Olympics.
• Joey Cheek, another speedskater (he won the silver to Davis’ gold — they are both pictured above), gives his bonuses for both gold and silver medals (totaling $45K!) to Right To Play, a charity that gives disadvantaged kids across the world a chance to play sports they would otherwise not have access to — a direct intervention against the economic disadvantages Farhi points out.

[thanks Meredith, for the ALDaily link to the Post article]

 

The Guardian has a terrific, rather literary piece from 2002 about Mark Rothko’s presitigious late-career commission for murals in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. It was a commission he himself scotched, giving his paintings instead to the Tate in London.

There is much psychobabble here about Rothko’s vengeful artistic temperament, and the elite social and cultural scene of late 50s New York — centered in the Four Seasons, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building – on which he wanted to inflict it, as well as some discussion of Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence, whose spatial derangement served as Rothko’s muse.

[from BoingBoing via Things Magazine]

A profile of Bob Greenberg and R/GA (which happens to be my current bread and butter).

The article lives here.

 

I picked up The Book of Probes from the always excellent Reed Space while wandering the LES a couple of weekends ago. The book could easily be one of those vaguely pretentious, eyecandy / Big Idea books that stimulates your impulse-buy nerve, and then gets put on the shelf or on the coffee table once you get home, never to be opened again. Those art books that disappointingly turn out more farty than arty … 

It’s the sad fact that the über-hotshot designer David Carson, who put together the visuals for the book, for me represents the worst of that pretentious, pseudo-artistic/literary tendency due to his work for the erstwhile late ’90s magazine Raygun (a magazine whose graphic anarchy pushed itself to the very edge of legibility). Yes, Carson’s art direction was certainly eye-popping and unprecedented (upside-down, backwards copy, articles that begin on the cover, articles written in some kind of since-clichéd ’broken typewriter’ typeface, etc), but it was in service to writing that was utterly disposable, even shoddy. Nothing transcendent came out of the relationship. Raygun was in the end all skin and no brains …

But in support of the evocative, epigrammatic writing of late Canadian media mystic Marshall McLuhan (of ‘Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’ fame), Carson’s aggressive design sensibility is given a second life, and the two elements on the page (MM’s words and DC’s visuals) find a clear and powerful synthesis.

Another recent impulse purchase that escaped coffee table purgatory was the fabulous book Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places, a survey book of primarily graphic artists (such as Ryan McGuiness and Pleix’s Genevieve Gauckler) who are moving their flat media into the volumetric.

From the book description:

‘From surface and into space is the overlying design trend these days. Graphic designers and urban artists are creating objects and interiors, moving into art galleries and museums worldwide. Designs, artworks and illustrations are emerging into the third-dimension increasingly featuring ornamental and sculptural objects. Hidden Track documents this movement introducing protagonists and their spaces that are taking current visual culture out of the underground to the the level of high culture.’