F.W. Murnau (1888-1931), the German Expressionist filmmaker perhaps best known for his films “The Last Laugh” (1924), “Sunrise” (1927), and the beautifully shot “Nosferatu” (1922), is enjoying a retrospective at Film Forum from September 10th through the 20th. David Denby’s short review of Murnau can be found here.

“A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.” More here from CNN.

I have been saying to anyone who will listen for years that the most arresting visual images are often to be found on billboards and on the advertising pages of glossy magazines, not in art galleries. Andrew Otwell has now pointed out this article in The Guardian: “From record covers to road signs, posters to packaging, graphics and typography touch every area of our lives. Forget fine art, Rick Poynor argues: it’s design that is at the core of 21st-century visual culture .” I told you so.

Coincidental to Abbas’s post a couple of days ago titled “Men are from Earth, and so are Women”, I was reading a fascinating and very moving book called “She’s Not There – a life in two genders”, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, co-chair of the Dept of English at Colby College in Maine.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

“I was looking forward to introducing Russo that evening. It would be my first official re-introduction to the college community since I’d switched from Regular to Diet Coke. I knew the reading would be packed, too, the room likely to be filled with a couple hundred people. It would definitely be an occasion. To make it stranger, everyone knew that Rick had been my best friend back when I was a man. As a writer–and as a man–Russo was something of a tough guy. Having his best friend turn into a woman hadn’t struck him as a great idea at the time.”

From the book jacket (other reviews can be found here):
“By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. She’s Not There is a portrait of a loving marriage—the love of James for his wife, Grace, and, against all odds, the enduring love of Grace for the woman who becomes her “sister,” Jenny.

To this extraordinary true story, Boylan brings the humorous, fresh voice that won her accolades as one of the best comic novelists of her generation. With her distinctive and winning perspective, She’s Not There explores the dramatic outward changes and unexpected results of life as a woman: Jenny fights the urge to eat salad, while James consumed plates of ribs; gone is the stability of “one damn mood, all the damn time.”

In the New York Times – Janet Maslin wrote:
Although this story is by no means pain-free (one friend commits suicide), Ms. Boylan places her emphasis elsewhere. What she accomplishes, most entertainingly, is to draw the reader into extremely strange circumstances as if they were utterly normal. It’s easy to feel, as Mr. Russo apparently did, when being told by his friend’s doctor that sexual reassignment surgery and novel writing require similar precision.

More at Professor Boylan’s website.

Daniel Gross has an article in Slate which suggests that the Bush tax cuts worsened unemployment. There are two elements to his argument. Taxs cuts designed to boost capital spending “leaked”, that is, the moneywas spent on capital good purchased abroad. Gross’s second reason for stangant unemployment (and declining labor force participation) is that the tax cuts accelerated the substitution of capital for labor.

The Jobs and Growth Act of 2003 aimed to give corporations an extra incentive to rush out and buy more capital goods by allowing them to write off larger chunks of the purchase price more quickly. . .

If more companies moved up orders and purchase decisions for trucks, machinery, and computers, that would create jobs for manufacturers and subcontractors and for the people who build, deliver, and install the goods. What’s more, companies would then have to hire people to run and maintain all those new machines.

Jobs and Growth made simple, right? Yes, if this were still the 1950s, when capital purchases were largely labor-intensive goods made entirely in the United States. Today, an order for a capital good doesn’t necessarily translate automatically into U.S. jobs. Instead of buying a Gulfstream G-450, a company could buy a jet from Brazil’s Embraer. . .

Many companies have taken advantage of the temporary rule to increase their purchases of so-called enterprisewide applications. These are big, expensive software packages, made by companies like Cognos and Business Objects, that are designed to make operations more efficient. Buying a new copy of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 might not be a capital purchase, but when a large company like Home Interiors & Gifts Inc. installs BusinessObjects Data Integrator across the corporation, it can be. The rub is that such products, production and installation of which isn’t particularly labor-intensive, are expressly designed to allow companies to operate with fewer—rather than more—employees.

Now the question is that why hasn’t the savings been translated into more investment and thereby more employment. One possible conclusion is that productivity is growing faster than demand (or effective demand), and therein lies the puzzle.

“The skyline is back.”

“For the last three years, our collective focus has been on ground zero. Meanwhile, some of the world’s most prominent architects have been quietly pressing ahead with plans that will remake the city’s skyline on a level not seen since the World Trade Center was built in the 1970’s. The most remarkable expression of that shift is a growing list of stunning residential towers designed by celebrated talents like Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, Christian Portzamparc and Enrique Norten. But it also includes visions of corporate gluttony: colossal mega-structures that are essentially hybrids of residential skyscrapers and suburban office parks. And it coincides with the slow but inevitable erosion of the boundaries that have defined the edges of the Manhattan skyline for a century.”

This exciting article (at least for us New Yorkers) is from the New York Times. Thanks to my architect friend Shabbir Kazmi for bringing it to my attention. Shabbir’s own very beautiful entry in the competition to design a memorial at the WTC site can be found here. (Over 5,000 teams and individuals submitted designs.) Be sure to look at the slide show in the NYT article.

I read of a thousand killed.
And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw
Was there so bitten:
As a man at elections is thrilled
When the results pour in, and the North goes with him
And the West breaks in the thaw.

(That fighting was a long way off.)

Forgetting therefore an election
Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries
And orator’s frowns and flowers and posters’ noise
Is paid for with cheques and toys:
Wars the most glorious
Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious
… With the lives, burned-off,
Of young men and boys.

As the number of US troops killed in Iraq exceeded one thousand, Chritopher Hitchens has dredged up this poem, “A Thousand Killed,” by little known British poet Bernard Spencer here in Slate.

Paul Samuelson, perhaps the greatest economist of the post-war era, has weighed in on the debate on outsourcing, on the side of its critics, or rather against the enthusiasts.

“His dissent from the mainstream economic consensus about outsourcing and globalization will appear later this month in a distinguished journal, cloaked in clever phrases and theoretical equations, but clearly aimed at the orthodoxy within his profession: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve; N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading international economist and professor at Columbia University.

These heavyweights, among others, are perpetrators of what Mr. Samuelson terms ‘the popular polemical untruth.’

Popular among economists, that is. That untruth, Mr. Samuelson asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.

Sure, Mr. Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that ‘the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers.’

That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is ‘only an innuendo,’ Mr. Samuelson writes. ‘For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.’

Trade, in other words, may not always work to the advantage of the American economy, according to Mr. Samuelson.

Although, “Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs.” That fits with my social democratic sensibilities.

The article and the response by Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T. N. Srinivasan are forthcoming in the American Economic Association’s The Journal of Economic Perspectives.

“Pedro Almodóvar has sanctified society’s transgressors, rescued Spanish surrealism and liberated international cinema,” says Linn Hirschberg here in the New York Times Magazine.

“Walking through the retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, on view at MoMA-Queens, is uncannily like visiting an out-of-the-way museum of natural history, as if her entire work to date had been dedicated to the creation of a single work of installation art: a musée imaginaire. It begins with some animal sculptures and continues through what look like scientific instruments–cameras and other devices for the observation and recording of nature. These evolve into larger and larger structures, made of wire armatures covered with scraps of used fabric, each with one or two dark holes; like tribal masks, they convey an air of menace and mystery. One could construct a speculative anthropology for these extraordinary structures–what they mean, and how they function.”

Arthur Danto, still one of the sharpest art critics around, reviews the Lee Bontecou exhibit at MOMA here in The Nation. See also my earlier post on Bontecou here.

The fourth and last bad writing contest was won by Judith Butler in 1999 for this sentence in an article in Diacritics.

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Many of those accused of bad writing respond in Just Being Difficult? (Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb eds.). Here’s a review of that book from Philosophy and Literature (subscription required).

“In 1999, Philosophy and Literature gave the top prize in its annual Bad Writing Contest to Judith Butler, and the national press echoed the journal in denouncing critical theory as overblown, jargon-ridden, and ungrammatical. Academic theorists reacted with pique, but not a soul in the public sphere came to their defense. Now, the professors have issued an anthology justifying their prose and denouncing Denis Dutton and other critics of bad writing. They claim that bad, or rather ‘difficult’ writing has a critical thrust: to break down common sense and dismantle unjust social notions.They fail to make their case. Much of the writing is, alas, bad. Entries offer tendentious, petulant reactions to the hubbub. Rarely do they address the basic point of the contest: that humanities professors no longer respect ideals of wit, eloquence, and learning. Instead, we have another parade of academic parochialism and radical chic passing itself off as adversarial culture and social justice.”

Colin Powell has annouced to the Senate Foreign Relations committee that genocide has been comitted in Sudan, according to an investigation by U.S. officials. “However, he said the finding would have no immediate effect on the Bush administration, which he said is already doing everything it can to try to curb the Darfur violence.”

“Are American college professors unwittingly misleading their students by teaching widely accepted ideas about men and women that are scientifically unsubstantiated?

Why is the dominant narrative about the sexes one of difference, even though it receives little support from carefully designed peer-reviewed studies?

One reason is that findings from a handful of small studies with nonrepresentative samples have often reported wildly overgeneralized but headline-grabbing findings about gender differences. Those findings have then been picked up by the news media — and found their way back into the academy, where they are taught as fact. At the same time, research that tends to debunk popular ideas is often ignored by the news media.

Even worse, many researchers have taken untested hypotheses at face value and used them to plan their studies. Many have also relied exclusively on statistical tests that are designed to find difference, without using tests that would show the degree of overlap between men and women. As a result, findings often suggest — erroneously — that the sexes are categorically different with respect to some specific variable or other.”

More here from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“During the past 150 years, artists have regularly challenged power: Modern art emerged, after all, from revolutionary traditions. Artists made posters to rally rebels, lampoon officialdom, and propose new and better worlds. Last week, George Bush and the Republican National Convention staked out New York City—the capital of the American art world—and presented to the eye a large, inviting, and even outlandish target. More than 200,000 protesters, by some accounts, marched up Seventh Avenue. And yet apart from a few pro forma group shows, surprisingly little of note emerged from the traditional art world. What doesn’t happen is sometimes significant. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: ‘Why didn’t the art world bark?'”

Short article here from New York Magazine.

“In the annals of consumer electronics, certain devices have proven so compelling, they’ve created consumer cults. You know, Mac heads. Palm freaks. TiVoholics. Among the white-collar crowd, though, one particular gizmo has earned a street nickname all its own: CrackBerry. That’s a reference to the RIM BlackBerry, an addictive wireless palmtop that displays your e-mail in real time, as it arrives. The airports and commuter trains on both coasts are filled with BlackBerry fanatics, hunched over, eyes glazed, flailing at its microscopic alphabet keyboard with their thumbs callused in funny places. But for all its popularity among executives and financial-industry types, the BlackBerry is practically unknown to everyone else. RIM hopes to change all that with the BlackBerry 7100t, which it unveiled yesterday. (The device, with phone service from T-Mobile, will go on sale next month.)”

Review of the new Blackberry 7100t here from the New York Times.

“In the sex trade, sellers work hard to make buyers believe they will get their money’s worth. That’s sure true of Jenna Jameson’s extra-large memoir and improbable self-help book, ‘How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.’ Jameson, who is today’s top name in what is known as adult entertainment, takes readers on a round-the-world bender that begins in a tattoo parlor in Las Vegas, where as a 17-year-old biker chick she decides to become a stripper, and culminates at the pinnacle of dirty-movie success, the Hot D’Or awards in Cannes, where at 21 she is anointed Best New American Starlet.” Jane and Michael Stern review How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson with Neil Strauss, here in the New York Times.

“Can we rely on forensics as the arbiter of truth in the courtroom? In his latest investigation, Simon Cooper exposes a case of corrupted science at the heart of our justice system.” More here from Seed Magazine.

“What is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.” More here from The Economist.

Those who fantasize about history’s great athletes facing the best of the present should watch the U.S. Open quarterfinals (USA network, right now). Top-ranked Roger Federer, tennis’s virtuoso emergent, meets perpetually resurgent Andre Agassi, playing his nineteenth straight year in Flushing Meadows. The Nosferatu-like Agassi, after all, is the sport’s past living in its present, having started during the days of McEnroe and Connors, and played through the eras of Lendl, Becker, Edberg, and Sampras. The dude abides. If, however, you think ponytailed youth will inevitably defeat bald wisdom, don’t be so sure. Two years ago, a thirty-two year-old Agassi faced the dominant number one and defending U.S. Open champion, twenty-one year-old Lleyton Hewitt, in the semifinals here. Agassi swept Hewitt off the court in an exhilarating display of precise hitting. Tonight, Roger may be rusty, having had four days off due to an opponent’s default. Agassi, famously a fast starter, might well hammer his way to an early lead. Whether he can weather the ensuing barrage Federer is likely to rain upon him should produce some captivating drama.

The events in Breslan again raise a familiar, difficult, and depressing issue. I’ve followed the problem of Chechnya for a while. I remember the leveling of Grozny. Here’s a brief primer by Masha Gessen of Bolshoi Gorod.

“The war, which began on Dec. 11, 1994, lasted nearly two years, cost at least 80,000 Chechens and about 4,000 Russian soldiers their lives, and ended in military defeat for Russia. In 1996, Russia pulled its troops out of a virtually demolished Chechnya, leaving it to fester—again. For the next three years, Chechnya, whose infrastructure had been bombed out of existence, turned into a state run by and for criminals. . . . The second war in Chechnya began in September 1999, following a bizarre and brutal series of terrorist acts. Two apartment buildings in Moscow and one in the south of Russia exploded, killing more than 300 people.” (read on)

Gessen side steps a very large issue: a host of movements and peoples who’ve been the victims of horrid atrocities have not chosen to kill children en masse. And we may be left to only judge them to be evil or psychotic or both.