Hughes in the Guardian:

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there probably isn’t an earthworm between John O’Groats and Land’s End that hasn’t heard about the auction of Damien Hirst’s work at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday – the special character of the event being that the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.

If there is anything special about this event, it lies in the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent. Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people, from museum personnel such as Tate’s Nicholas Serota to billionaires in the New York real-estate trade, into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his “ideas”. This skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist. He has manoeuvred himself into the sweet spot where wannabe collectors, no matter how dumb (indeed, the dumber the better), feel somehow ignorable without a Hirst or two.

Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free.

Alex Cooley in EurasiaNet:

At a recent special panel on the Georgian crisis convened at the Bled Strategic Forum, European foreign ministers and representatives of international organizations lamented that they had failed to adequately engage Georgia’s unresolved or “frozen conflicts.” Since the early 1990s, the international community effectively ignored the disputes between Tbilisi and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, allowing tensions to fester until in early August the disputes escalated into a six-day war between Georgia and Russia. Russia’s subsequent recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence has legally challenged Georgia’s very territorial integrity and sovereign boundaries.

While much of the West struggles to enforce a precarious ceasefire and formulate a common response to Russia’s actions, it is worth considering the exact sovereign forms that might govern Georgia in the near future. Three options – indefinite occupation, formal partition or international administration – are possible; though all three pose risks, the internationalization option, the least discussed thus far, may offer the best blueprint for stabilizing the region and eventually resolving status issues.

Under the first and most likely scenario, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will remain recognized by Russia and a handful of other countries, such as Nicaragua, that wish to curry favor with Moscow. We could refer to this as the “Cyprus model.” [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Under this arrangement, Russia ensures the dependency of the breakaway territories by stationing a permanent military contingent and keeping the de facto governments isolated from Georgia. In the case of Cyprus, the Turkish military intervention of 1974 was followed by a relatively stable three decades, during which a sizable contingent of Turkish troops was stationed in the self-proclaimed Turkish Northern Republic of Cyprus (TRNC). During this time the sequestered TRNC languished, while the Greek-Cypriot part of the island developed rapidly, culminating in its admission to the European Union 30 years later.

One entrance to the Other Museum stands behind the massive skeleton of the giant ground sloth. Another is opposite the crocodiles. For the building that houses the public galleries of London’s Natural History Museum also houses an entirely different museum — a working museum, where the aim isn’t public edification or entertainment but the care, cataloging and description of millions of different life-forms, both extinct and extant, as well as thousands of different minerals. An inventory of the planet.

The offices, laboratories, libraries and vast storerooms of the Other Museum are wrapped around the public galleries like ivy on a fence. The storerooms house about 80 million specimens, from whale skeletons and jars of mites to stacks of pressed flowers and meteorites. The offices house a collection of — judging by Richard Fortey’s entertaining memoir, “Dry Storeroom No. 1” — extremely eccentric scholars.

more from the NY Times here.

From The Telegraph:

“And the Taj Mahal. How was the Taj Mahal?” Amanda asks Elyot at a particularly sticky moment in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. “Unbelievable,” Elyot replies, “a sort of dream.” Ever since the Emperor Shah Jahan’s tomb for his favourite wife, Mumtaz, was completed in Agra around 1648, people have tried and failed to describe it without resorting to cliché. More often than not they have fallen back on poetic evocations, such as Tagore’s “teardrop on the cheek of time”, while Edward Lear gave up entirely, suggesting that “descriptions of this wonderfully lovely place are simply silly, as no words can describe it”.

The Taj Mahal is nevertheless one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in the world, endlessly painted and photographed, and currently welcoming an average of 8,000 visitors a day. Giles Tillotson’s sprightly account of its structure and history, the stories that have accumulated around it and the impression it has made on tourists down the centuries is a welcome addition to Profile’s “Wonders of the World” series. These books are not only architectural monographs; they are equally concerned with what buildings mean, and few structures have meant more different things to people than the Taj Mahal. It is traditionally seen as a symbol of love, built by a grieving emperor who spent the last eight years of his life gazing on his wife’s tomb from a balcony of the palace where he had been imprisoned by his usurping son.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Now, in the tradition of “Dispatches,” with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, “The Forever War,” it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.

It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration’s fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership’s method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war.

More here.

When I think of the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922–79), the word “canvas” comes to mind, for a couple of reasons. Non-visual artists who create works broad in scope are often said to work “on a large canvas,” a phrase that certainly applies to Mingus’s compositions. And his works bring to my mind’s eye—I have just realized this—an image that is very much like a painted canvas, a wide, Jackson Pollock–like work: abstract, full of energy and simultaneous happenings, dark here, humorous there, turbulent, explosive. The strapping Mingus was no stranger to fistfights, sometimes drawn in by racial slights, real or imagined, that no doubt recalled for him the abuse he suffered at the hands of benighted teachers in his youth. His humor is evident in his works as well as in many of their titles, notably “Bemoanable Lady,” “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers,” and the prize winner—a riff on the title of the jazz standard “All the Things You Are”—”All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” He dealt with his feelings about racism in intellectual/compositional as well as physical ways, titling one of his works “Fables of Faubus,” after the segregationist Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, and another “Meditations on Integration,” also known simply as “Meditations.” Recently, the bassist’s widow, Sue Mingus, discovered tapes containing performances of those two works—each a half-hour in length—along with other tunes recorded at a 1964 concert at Cornell University. In 2007 Blue Note released the recordings as a two-CD set, under the title Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy-Cornell 1964.

more from Threepenny Review here.

Robyn Creswell in The National:

One of the few passions shared by Adonis and his daughter, as it emerges over the course of these conversations, is a conviction that there is something deeply, even pathologically wrong, with Islam. (Adonis is, in general, ambiguous as to whether by “Islam” he means “Islam in itself” or “Islam as interpreted by its orthodoxy”: in fact, his writings tend to make a distinction between these two meanings impossible.) For Esber, who strikes one as a fiercely opinionated if not especially well-informed observer, Islam is first of all a culture of political and sexual repression: “Let’s say that religion exacerbates frustration,” she argues, in a typical exchange. “Men are sexually frustrated in the Arab world, you can see it by the way they look at you! So they get what they can, but sneakily, of course.”

For Adonis, the problems are somewhat more complicated, though only somewhat. The great flaw in Islamic culture, according to his account, is its lack of that hoary French principle, laïcité: “Here precisely lies the problem with Islam,” Adonis tells Esber. “The Muslims refuse to effect this separation [between Church and State]. Hence, the despotic character of their religion. Islam seeks to foist its laws on everyone.” A further problem is Islam’s lack of any concept of “the individual” – another fêted achievement of the Enlightenment – which Islam subsumes, to the point of disappearance, in the community of believers (umma).

More here.

Protestant Irish-born 99 years ago, Bacon grew to be the most famous British painter of the latter half of the 20th century. Myth, rumour and anecdote about his life have come to dominate discussion of his art, in the same way that his art fed on the litter of medical illustrations, books of nature photography, cricket annuals, newspaper clippings and gay body-building comics that he tramped underfoot in his midden of a studio, now rebuilt in Dublin. All those published conversations with David Sylvester, the hilarious drunken TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, John Maybury’s biopic with Derek Jacobi, and the appearance of Bacon paintings in the credits to Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris – all these things add to the intensity of Bacon’s painted scream. Aaaaarghhhh.

But it is a hollow cry. Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement – yours as well as his – setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was. Bacon died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Velázquez will kill him there again, when the show comes to town – but then Velázquez kills everyone.

more from The Guardian here.

The man whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees voted to hire yesterday as the museum’s next director is not an art world power broker. He is something infinitely more interesting. In selecting Thomas P. Campbell, the curator responsible for the titanic exhibitions of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry mounted at the Metropolitan in recent years, the Board of Trustees has rejected all the usual suspects. They have made a brave and brilliant choice. They have put their trust in a man who knows how to bring the most rarified artistic achievements before an avid, heterogeneous museum-going public. And that is what running a museum ought to be about. Of course, even people who remember standing awestruck before the gloriously woven narratives in the 2002 show, “Tapestry in the Renaissance,” will probably not know Campbell’s name. But that is going to change–and change very fast. There are many reasons to believe that this 46-year-old curator who has just been elevated to the most powerful museum job in the United States is destined to do great things.

more from TNR here.

Brian Greene in The New York Times:

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.

After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect? The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles. It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated. Here’s a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.

More here.

///
Elsewhere
Derek Walcott

(For Stephen Spender)

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea’s
weeping, for the fishermen’s dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they’re tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year’s massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.

From The Arkansas Testament
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

///

Kai Wright in The Root:

It’s difficult to remember just how ho-hum the political stakes felt in the 1990s, a time when our country’s prosperity and stability made leadership seem secondary to things like ideology, faith and personality. People who came of age in that era could still debate deep, academic questions like whether history is shaped by the person or the moment, whether great times or great leaders define us. Back then, there was nothing to force the scary question of what happens when leaders crumble amid great crises. On the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, we don’t have to speculate. The 9/11 anniversary will inevitably prompt many to take stock of George W. Bush’s soon-ending tenure. For many, his presidency will be cast in the moment those planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and by the high-stakes political battles that followed that frightening morning. But the most crucial lessons of both 9/11 and the Bush presidency lie in neither national security nor partisan politics.

The most urgent truth for us to understand is that the Bush era has been defined by our president’s steadfast refusal to be in command and by our nation’s collective unwillingness to value real leadership. As we finally end our white-knuckle ride with Bush, we must realize that our future turns on our ability to differentiate between someone seeking to take power and someone committed to lead.

More here.

From Scientific American:

An alcohol-busting enzyme may help prevent heart attack damage, according to a new study in Science. Researchers report that aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2), an enzyme important for processing alcohol in the human body, clears harmful toxins produced in cells when blood flow is blocked in the heart—and a new drug can switch it on.

Red wine has long been toted as a preventive measure against cardiac disease. In fact, heart cells exposed to ethanol in the laboratory actually recover better when researchers temporarily stop the flow of oxygenated blood to them. The study published today suggests that ALDH2 may contribute to wine’s beneficial effects. The enzyme, activated as cells work to clear alcohol, also eliminates toxic by-products from the breakdown of fats in cells during a heart attack—thereby reducing damage to this vital organ.

During a cardiac event, blood flow to the heart ceases. Free radicals (highly reactive molecules released during energy production) accumulate in cells struggling through oxygen deprivation, damaging critical fats and proteins and increasing the chance of premature cell death. ALDH2 may help heart cells survive this onslaught by repairing some of the damaged fats, according to the study. Although not all cardiac damage is avoided, “any time you can save cells, you have a better chance of recovery,” says study co-author Thomas Hurley, a biochemist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

More here.

From Nature:

Creative ideas are not always solo strokes of genius, argues Ed Catmull, the computer-scientist president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Frequently, he says, the best ideas emerge when talented people from different disciplines work together.

This week, Nature begins a series of six Essays that illustrate Catmull’s case. Each recalls a conference in which a creative outcome emerged from scientists pooling ideas, expertise and time with others — especially policy-makers, non-governmental organizations and the media. Each is written by someone who was there, usually an organizer or the meeting chair. Because the conferences were chosen for their societal consequences, we’ve called our series ‘Meetings that Changed the World’.

This week, François de Rose relives the drama of the December 1951 conference at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris that led to the creation of CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory based near Geneva.

More here.  And this is the first essay of the series:

As a young French diplomat taking my first steps in international affairs, I had the privilege of representing my country for several years at a United Nations commission in the late 1940s. The United States, under the leadership of the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, wanted the United Nations to be given oversight of all the world’s nuclear weapons and nuclear power — the so-called Baruch plan. The plan failed, but as France was a keen supporter, it gave me the opportunity to work with Oppenheimer. We met frequently to discuss tactics and strategy and soon became friends.

One day, Oppenheimer told me of a problem that was very much on his mind. Most of America’s best physicists, he said, had like him been trained, or had worked, in Europe’s pre-war laboratories. He believed that Europe’s shaken nations did not have the resources to rebuild their basic physics infrastructure. He felt they would no longer be able to remain scientific leaders unless they pooled their money and talent. Oppenheimer also believed that it would be “basically unhealthy” if Europe’s physicists had to go to the United States or the Soviet Union to conduct their research.

The solution, Oppenheimer felt, was to find a way to enable Europe’s physicists to collaborate.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge Oppenheimer.]

David Haglund in Slate:

Just released for a third time on DVD, The Big Lebowski has, in a decade, inspired a following to rival all cinematic cults, complete with annual festivals, monthly podcasts, and teachings to live by. At the heart of this denomination is the Dude, brilliantly incarnated by Jeff Bridges as a Zen slob whose three great loves are weed, white Russians, and bowling. And the Dude is indeed a fantastic character. Ten years on, though, the movie’s most striking role belongs to John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: a hawkish, slightly unhinged Vietnam vet and the Dude’s best friend and bowling partner. Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon.

More here.

Results from an experiment by the Center for Deliberative Democracy, for this election season:

A national experiment in public online deliberation, sponsored by By the People in partnership with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as part of the Dialogues in Democracy project, reveals what citizens would think about their role in a democracy-if only they became more informed about the issues and talked about them together. Over 1,300 citizens from around the country participated in this experiment over four weeks in fall 2007. A nationally representative sample was recruited and randomly assigned to deliberate about the issues (301 participants) or to simply answer survey questions before and after (1,000 person control group). The results show that once people talk about the issues and become more informed about them, they change their views in significant, and sometimes surprising, ways.

“We put all of America in a virtual room to consider the future of citizenship,” said James Fishkin, Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, which conducted the poll in conjunction with YouGov America. “The results are thoughtful and balanced and deserve to be considered by policymakers everywhere.” Sample results will be featured on the By the People national broadcast, airing in January on PBS.

The discussions focused on four aspects of the role of citizens in a democracy: political participation, exercising choice, becoming informed and public service. The discussions focused on four aspects of the role of citizens in a democracy: political participation, exercising choice, becoming informed and public service. In each case there were statistically significant changes of opinion and gains in information. The sample learned a lot and changed its views. In fact, 39 out of 56 policy questions (66%) changed significantly among the deliberators from the beginning to the end of the process.

William Dalrymple in the FT:

From a distance, Tarapith looked like just any other Bengali village, with its palm weave huts, and still, cool fishpond. But here one building dominated all the others: the great temple, which rose above the surrounding village like a cathedral in medieval Europe. Its base was a thick-walled red brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like the snow capping of a Himalayan peak.

Tarapith is regarded as one of the most powerful holy places in India, the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. Yet despite the reputed power of its presiding deity, compared with the other great pilgrimage sites of the region, Tarapith is little visited. A thin line of pilgrims were queuing to do darshan (pay homage) to the image of the goddess, but although it was approaching the time for the evening arti, the place was still surprisingly empty for such a famous shrine.

The reason for this, I had been told in Calcutta, was that Tarapith had a sinister reputation, notorious for the unsavoury “left-handed” Tantric rituals which are daily performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumoured to take place in the nearby cremation ground after sunset. Here the goddess was said to live, and at midnight – so Bengalis believe – Tara can be glimpsed in the shadows drinking the blood of the goats slaughtered day after day in an effort to propitiate her anger.

From The Washington Post:

Now in his mid-70s, Roman Polanski seems finally to have slowed down a bit. He lives in France with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, to whom he apparently is devoted. According to Christopher Sandford, who has also written several biographies of rock musicians, people who know him “insist that Polanski is ‘almost ludicrously mild-mannered,’ ‘nearly teetotal’ and even an ‘occasional churchgoer.’ ” The “top moment” of his day, he has said, comes when he drops his children off at school: “It’s the best. It’s great to see them walking away into this school. It’s a moving moment.”

As if to underscore his autumnal mood, three years ago Polanski released his 17th film, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” that is surprisingly mellow, even sentimental, perhaps because he is believed to have made it for his children. It was released only three years after “The Pianist,” one of the three films of his that rank among postwar classics — the others being “Knife in the Water” (1962) and “Chinatown” (1974) — and the one that brought him, at last, an Academy Award, and, with it, something approximating the acceptance and forgiveness of his peers.

Nobody who pays even the slightest attention to the headlines needs to be told that the past decade or so of Polanski’s life stands in stark, even startling, contrast to much of the rest of it.

More here.

Anthony Lewis in the New York Review of Books:

Since the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed, in April 2004, the Bush administration has maintained that any mistreatment was the work of a few “bad apples.” No action has been taken against any higher-up, military or civilian. But a steady accumulation of disclosures, capped in June by a Senate committee report and hearing, has made it clear that abusive treatment of prisoners was a deliberate policy that came from the top—the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House.

In July 2002 the office of the Pentagon’s general counsel made a survey of the techniques used in a Pentagon program designed to teach ways of resisting torture by enemy forces. (The program focused especially on techniques used by Chinese forces during the Korean War to induce American prisoners to confess falsely to such things as using germ warfare.) In August, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issued a secret fifty-page memorandum concluding that the president had plenary power to order the torture of prisoners in the war on terror. It built on an earlier memo by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, which had been approved by Alberto Gonzales, then President Bush’s White House counsel. Bybee’s legal conclusions were incorporated into a memorandum prepared for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

More here.

Amazon.com has an interesting map of which states buy more “red” or “blue” books:

Go here for much more information.