In Pop Matters, L. B. Jeffries wonders:

Greg Costikyan, who co-founded Manifesto Games and writes for the indie games blog Play This Thing! wrote an impassioned piece in February of 2008 calling for real criticism in video games. He argues that video games, caught up in consumer culture, only produce buyer’s guides. Proper criticism, he argues, does not depend upon whether or not you should buy something, but rather answers the “why, and how, and to what end.” One of the people he distinguishes from consumer guide writing is Pauline Kael. She was a critic who would better inform the audience, hold filmmakers to task, and explain the cultural impact of films to a broader audience. How would a person go about doing that in video games?

Kael is an interesting person to hope video game criticics will aspire to given the intense relationship she had with her artistic medium. Being mostly unfamiliar with her work, I was told I Lost It at the Movies was her best book and picked up a copy. I’ve seen about a third of the movies she references, but many of her larger observations about some films are outside my personal experience. As with the Lester Bangs piece, the goal here is to study her methods and see what someone dealing with a superficially unrelated medium could borrow.

Kael, much like video game critics today, was faced with a massive philosophical shift in her chosen artistic medium that large quantities of critics were against. This occurred during the ‘60s and ‘70s when sex, anti-heroes, and films that didn’t mindlessly make everyone happy were being released. David Cook, in A History of Narrative Film, marks this era of film with the release of Bonnie and Clyde. Its advertising slogan sums the film up decently: “They’re young! They’re in love! And they kill people!” Many critics panned the film, but it went on to become a box office smash. The problem with the movie is that if you walk in expecting a traditional gangster film, it’s not very good. If you walk in expecting a sharp political satire that blends comedy, violence, and sex, then it’s brilliant. Kael, at the time of Bonnie and Clyde’s release, was one of the few who stood up for it.

Via bookforum, Alison Lee in This Magazine:

After moving to Toronto in 2005 I'd been out of work for almost five months when I found an intriguing help-wanted ad on Craigslist. The company was looking for writers to review adult websites. With a deep breath and undying love of ridiculous situations, I sent my resumŽ. The company owner explained the site's concept to me a few days later. My job was to give positive reviews of websites to direct online traffic to such enticing sites as “Black Dicks, White Chicks” and “Big Tits, Round Asses.”

As someone who strongly identified as a feminist, I knew taking this job did not reflect my politics. I still felt the sharp division between “good” porn and “bad” porn, and this was definitely bad porn. I had no idea what to expect. The offices were nice, and the project was backed by a semi-retired millionaire who fed his love of toned Latino men by starting several small-time softcore gay websites. I expected that the job would be strange, and an experience unlike anything I'd ever done before, and it was. But I wasn't prepared for the overwhelming boredom that awaited me.

A year and a half into the gig, I was closing in on my 1000th review; it was becoming difficult to differentiate between websites. The names were nearly indistinguishable, the performers generally looked the same, and the content was often not just similar, but exactly the same, just sold under a different title in order to grab customers with an appetite for whatever niche the sites were selling. The work at this point was automatic. I could do it in my sleep: count the videos and photo sets, document the frequency of updates, and offer some kind of snappy line that made yet another mundane site sound sexily appealing.

Generally I didn't feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn't really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together. But then I came across photos of a woman I knew. Her face and naked body brought me back to reality: We'd had drinks together, talked feminist politics. I was shocked by the reminder that these were all real people with jobs that put them in the strangely public/private realm of porn. Viewing this content day in and day out, my desire to learn about porn as a cultural force and to think about it critically had been overrun by my blasŽ attitude.

A Color of the Sky

Tony Hoagland

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,

driving over the hills from work.

There are the dark parts on the road

when you pass through clumps of wood

and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,

but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.
…

I should call Marie and apologize

for being so boring at dinner last night,

but can I really promise not to be that way again?

And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing

in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
…

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;

the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves

are full of infant chlorophyll,

the very tint of inexperience.
…

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,

and on the highway overpass,

the only metaphysical vandal in America has written

MEMORY LOVES TIME

in big black spraypaint letters,
…

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
…

Last night I dreamed of X again.

She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.

Years ago she penetrated me

but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,

I never got her out,

but now I’m glad.
…

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.

What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.

What I thought was an injustice

turned out to be a color of the sky.
…

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
…

overflowing with blossomfoam,

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,
…

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
…

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.

It’s been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.

From Harper's Magazine:

The Aeneid is a different sort of holy book. It has found its English voice countless times. The most recently heralded version was done by Robert Fagles, and written about approvingly in these pages by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi. I like the Fagles too, but first liked the Fitzgerald. He hooked me early in that unfinished epic’s first book with a series of lines I love. The moment comes as Aeneas, who had fled Troy during its destruction by the Greeks, is later marooned by a storm on an unknown shore. Through wilderness and woods, he comes upon a glorious city. Beautiful though it is, he worries that he and his hidden ship will be taken for infidels and destroyed like so much else they’ve already lost. Still brave, Aeneas enters the temple at the city center in the hope that he might make himself known to its elders. While he waits uneasily, he notices that upon the walls of the temple are many murals. The scenes that they depict seem familiar to Aeneas, and so he examines them. He does not believe his eyes: they are panoramas of Troy. Of the great war, the battles with the Greeks, the terrible invasion, the torching of the city—images of Trojan bravery even in defeat, everywhere visible within this foreign shrine:

Here Aeneas

Halted, and tears came.

“What spot on earth…

Is not full of the story of our sorrow?

Look, here is Priam. Even so far away

Great valor has due honor; they weep here

For how the world goes,and our life that passes

Touches their hearts. Throw off your fear. This fame

Insures some kind of refuge.”

He broke off

To feast his eyes and mind on a mere image,

Sighing often, cheeks grown wet with tears…

He stood enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze.

Here, Aeneas finds solace in the ordered universe of art in the wake of life’s disorder. Sarah Ruden, who has also done versions of Lysistrata and The Satyricon, now has done an Aeneid (Yale) that gives readers another chance to find solace in Virgil.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Howard Gardner is a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He’s also the author of over 20 books and several hundred scholarly articles. Gardner is probably best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, which is a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. His most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, offers some advice for policy-makers on how to do a better job of preparing students for the 21st century. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gardner about his new book, the possibility of teaching ethics and how his concept of multiple intelligences has changed over time.

LEHRER: Your most recent book argues that we need to dramatically re-think the way we think, especially when it comes to learning. What's the problem with our current models?

GARDNER: As many people have pointed out, our educational system basically prepared individuals for the 19th and 20th century. In Five Minds for the Future, I describe the kinds of minds that will be at the highest premium going forward. Although our existing models of learning are reasonably good for developing a disciplined mind, they have almost nothing to say about the synthesizing mind, though it is arguably the most important mind for the 21st century. I don’t think that any of us knows how best to cultivate the creative mind; but our current ways of thinking and teaching are excellent at quashing the creative mind.

As for the last two kinds of mind I identify in the book—respectful and ethical—these are generally considered beyond the purview of theories of learning. Respect should be inculcated from birth, and is best learned by example. As for the ethical mind, that has been my chief research concern for the past 15 years. Our current thinking about this vexing topic is best accessed via a visit to goodworkproject.org

LEHRER: Why are these five types of mind so important right now?

GARDNER: In writing this book, I was taking on the mantle of “czar.” If I were the czar of education and of the work place, these are the five minds that, I believe, would most be at a premium, the ones that I would train, if possible, or select for, if necessary. To summarize, they push the mind in three ways: disciplined (depth), synthesizing (breadth) and creative (stretch). There may be some division of labor across individuals, but everyone should have at least some experience with each kind of mind, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to work productively with others.

Despite the financial meltdown, the world is getting smaller every day. Unless we are able to respect those who appear to be different from ourselves, we are not going to be able to work with them. And unless we behave ethically and responsibly, we will not be able to enter into trusting relationships with others and it will become a dog-eat-dog world. Although the current financial meltdown is due to many factors, the lack of an ethical compass in major corporations and financial institutions is a major cause. I make no claim that these are the only five minds, nor that they were unimportant in the past. What I do claim is that these are the five minds that we need to keep front and center going forward, and I suggest how they work and how they cultivate them—but those details are in the book!

More here.

John Freedman in Moscow Times:

There is something about the Russian arts of the first three decades of the 20th century that will not let us go. It doesn’t matter what the field is. You can start picking names of writers, directors, painters, composers and photographers almost at random and it will make the beginnings of an encyclopedia: Igor Stravinsky; Vsevolod Meyerhold; Dmitry Shostakovich; Kazimir Malevich; Alexander Blok; Sergei Eisenstein; Alexander Rodchenko; and list could go on. It was a time when artists really were out ahead, forging an avant-garde. In fact, in my view, to this day few have caught up with the art of that time. The work those people created is still experimental, still breaking down barriers, still challenging us to see beyond our blinders.

It was a time when the notion of discrete genres began crumbling like a house of cards, and one of the great crossroads where artists met was the theatrical stage. The composer Shostakovich wrote music for the director Meyerhold. The painters Natalya Goncharova, Lyubov Popova and Alexandra Ekster created sets and costumes for various directors, including Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov. The poets Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky began writing plays. A man named Eisenstein, who was educated to make theater productions, began working with film.

Since I am always fascinated by the inter-pollination of various art forms, I recently was compelled to take in a small exhibit called “Theater in Works by Russian Artists” at the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. It is scheduled to be up until March 10, so you have plenty of time to do the same.

Ismene Brown in The Telegraph:

Fat, middle-aged, highly sexed women aren't supposed to dance. Or bare their breasts, or take lovers half their age. Nor were they when Isadora Duncan was leading her free-range, tragic, melodramatic life 90 years ago.

Could this woman really have been a dance genius? In 1921, when Duncan was 44, fat and notorious, a 17-year-old English boy bought a ticket for her performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. “I didn't think I'd like it but I was absolutely captivated,” he later recalled. “I suppose she was rather blowsy, and the first impact of her gave me a shock, but that soon passed. I find that people now stress this appalling life that she led, and the sexual side, but I didn't get that impression at all.

“She had the most extraordinary quality of repose. She would stand for what seemed quite a long time doing nothing, and then make a very small gesture that seemed full of meaning.”

That boy, Frederick Ashton, would grow up to become Britain's foremost ballet choreographer, and he was not the only creative figure to be enchanted by the alternative dancing Duncan proposed. Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, said she was his greatest inspiration; Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow's radical theatre director, was fascinated; George Bernard Shaw was impressed, despite himself; and the pivotal figures of 20th-century Russian ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova and Michel Fokine unreservedly admired her.

But while half the world marvelled at Duncan's magical ability to pluck dance from the air without apparent preparation or technique, the other half was dismissing her as a sensationalist.

Benoit d’Aboville in Project Syndicate:

What will be the consequences of France’s return to NATO’s integrated military structure?

The Allies are quietly satisfied, but nobody expects major changes in France military contribution: in the last ten years, it has been on par with the other major European allies. The reason is simple: since France’s return to the Military Committee in 1994, its position within NATO has allowed for full participation in the Alliance’s military and political activities. 

In Paris, the move has not in itself raised major political opposition for two main reasons.
First, nobody disputes the obvious: since Charles de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw from the military organization, more than 40 years ago, the Alliance and the world have changed profoundly. Today’s global threats demand greater European as well as NATO solidarity, and the Alliance’s successive enlargements mean that most EU members are now NATO members as well.

Second, the whole notion of “integration” is completely different since de Gaulle’s day.
When the Warsaw Pact existed, NATO troops were positioned in such a way that any attack would collectively involve most of the allies. The whole Central Front was tightly coordinated, and even France was involved in NATO planning through a set of special agreements. The Cold War’s end, and the subsequent transformation of NATO into an “expeditionary alliance,” has made “integration” largely irrelevant: each member’s contribution to NATO operations is decided by individual NATO members ad hoc and on the basis of consensus.

“Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me,
in the jingle jangle mornin’ I’ll come following you.”
-Bob Dylan

American Myth
Jim Bell

i flew out of bradley snow
sick & so tired of lawyers rocked

back over erie’s shivering green
gunk saw the fat fingered river that cuts

down american belly coasts of nebraska
chalk dust plains & jagged white slung

rocky & sierra nevada mountains
this land that rolls
west in one giant gulp that slides

into frisco at the end of a thumb I pissed
in kerouac alley opened my door

painted nothing black my limits were
new to me I watched the dead drug

eyes on telegraph & let berkeley become
my jingle jangle morning dropping

back in the musty church basement in dolores
barrio where a skinny girl with green hair &

pierced eyebrows named dragon asked
me to read the promises

From Science:

Feeling a little blue? Why not kick back and put Bobby McFerrin's “Don't Worry, Be Happy” or Queen's “We Are the Champions” on the stereo? Chances are you'll feel more cheerful in no time. But what about people who have never been exposed to Western music? A new study concludes that even they can tell the difference between a happy and a sad tune. Researchers have proposed numerous hypotheses about why humans make music, ranging from emotional communication to group solidarity. Other scientists, such as Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker, have countered that music is just “auditory cheesecake” with no real evolutionary significance.

If music is the result of Darwinian selection, it's likely that all members of the human species, regardless of their culture, will respond to it in similar ways. Yet investigating such cross-cultural musical universals has been very difficult. With increasing globalization, it is nearly impossible to find a Westerner who has not heard Eastern music or an African who hasn't heard the Beatles. “Someone may say that they have never heard Hindustani music or Japanese Shinto music,” says Laura-Lee Balkwill, a music cognition researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, “but chances are that they have been exposed to it, on the radio, as background music in a movie or on a Web site, even as someone else's ringtone.” And that makes it difficult for researchers to distinguish between musical sensibilities that might be hard-wired and those that are culturally determined.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The crime writer Laura Lippman was a reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at the Baltimore Sun. Since 2001, she has been a full-time novelist. Her novels have won almost every prize given for crime fiction in the United States, including the Edgar, Anthony, Nero Wolfe and Agatha awards. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, the writer David Simon, who created the hit TV series The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Her most recent novel, Life Sentences, is published by Avon.

I love memoirs, although I have promised my family members that I will never try my hand at one. (“Can I get that in writing?” my sister asked.) However, I'm generally not drawn to the addiction/dysfunction stories that have been popular of late; I wanted no part of A Million Little Pieces even when it was masquerading as nonfiction. As a former reporter, I have a pesky allegiance to fact, although I recognize that the fragile nature of memory makes it difficult for most writers to produce uncontestable versions of their lives. I am drawn to stories about the quotidian – marriage, friendship, childhood, work, life, death.

More here.

more from Big Think here.

Since becoming the successor to Jörg Haider after the governor’s fatal accident in October, Dörfler has won attention beyond Carinthia’s borders for one thing, above all. In the presence of his friend, Afro-Cuban schmalz-pop singer Roberto Blanco, he told a joke about two breast-feeding mothers, one black, one white. The white baby lets go of its mother’s breast and says, “Mummy, I want cocoa, too.” Of course this ruffled feathers, especially in distant Vienna; Roberto Blanco affirmed that he didn’t feel insulted, and Dörfler said he wouldn’t ban humor. With his carnival appearance in a garbage man costume, whose orange is also the colour of his party – the right-wing splinter group BZÖ (Alliance for the Future of Austria) – he once again confirmed who’s setting the standards for taste in Austria’s southernmost state. Last Sunday, this Dörfler, who has neither the looks nor the brains of his charismatic predecessor Haider, was elected to office with an overwhelming 45 percent.

more from Sign and Sight here.

The words Franklin in France are pretty much guaranteed to elicit a smile, a raised eyebrow, a mischievous wink, and at least one of the following words: frisky, randy, lecherous, dissolute. In great part this is the legacy of the portraitists: the French Franklin has made his way into our imagination courtesy of the artists who have relied on him as an excuse to paint a crop of European beauties, and a lot of European cleavage. It helps to remember that those are 19th- and 20th-century portraits, and that Franklin went to France in the l8th century. It also helps to remember that he has never been played on the screen by Nick Nolte; that was Jefferson in Paris. It helps as well to remember that Franklin’s most difficult colleague in France was John Adams, who contributed more to making Franklin a ladies’ man than did Franklin himself. Franklin went to Paris in l776 not on a lark, or to cement his reputation as a rake, but on a crucial mission. When he crossed the ocean that November he did so for the seventh time in his life—and for the first time as a traitor.

more from American Scholar here.

We’re on a historical cusp. No one knows what will come next. But in the art world, an aesthetic sorting out is already beginning. I’m not talking about the purging or comeuppance some critics have gleefully cackled about or howled for. I love art galleries, and worry that a wave of them will close this June when, looking ahead to the traditionally dead months of summer, dealers will be forced to throw in the towel. As for art, I admire much of the work that came to prominence in the last fifteen years. Recently, though, much of this art has been looking either dated or not so relevant. At this year’s Armory Show it was stunning to see almost no work by stars of last season like Murakami, Hirst, Koons, Prince, Reyle, Struth, and Gursky. Partly this is a natural process and doesn’t necessarily mean these artists are bad or not passionate. But the hypermarket that justly extended the careers of many artists also delayed the winnowing process of many others. Now all this winnowing is occurring at once. Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don’t seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist’s work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there’s something wrong with the art. One sign that this is happening is when the same things that were said about an artist a decade ago are still being said today.

more from NY Magazine here.

‘Why write on vampires at this stage in history?’ Toufic asked. ‘Were humanity to conquer death . . . it will suddenly dawn on it that the attributes of death, or pastiches or parodies of them, have become salient facts of life.’ Toufic is captivated by thresholds, misunderstood warnings, lapses in consciousness, ‘quantum effects, such as tunnelling’, ‘unreflective glass’: tropes traditional to the vampire movie, but versions of which structure all films, all narrative. How can a story ever be told without jumps through wormholes, dissolving doors and windows, dream-states and drowsiness and forgetfulness and the vagueness that comes with sitting in the darkness in front of an enormous screen of light? In the old days, the Gothic was said to focus readers’ deepest fears about their future: blood-sucking aristos; mills, engines, new technology, with its way of shifting boundaries between the human and the not-human; infant mortality, post-mortem flatus, doubts about the afterlife and, of course and always and mainly, the problem of death. In our day we don’t have to visit a cinema to hallucinate life into images of immortal perfection; they flicker everywhere around us, emptied of the animal and plumped up instead with plastics. And so, the question is not so much about entering the ‘labyrinthine realm of undeath’ as whether anyone can ever really be said to leave it.

more from the LRB here.

To see it all – the world of Palladio – you have to imagine it all. But there are aids to the imagination both in the vivid documents quoted by scholars, and in the photographs that survive from the nineteenth century, from the days just before the agricultural revolution destroyed the old order. Not that the old photographs are themselves without their anachronisms: wisteria or Virginia creeper growing up a Renaissance villa is a botanical anachronism, and a foolish piece of planting (the rats climb up the creepers to get at the corn in the attic). The arum lilies (Zantedeschia) you see everywhere clogging the ditches of the Veneto come from Southern Africa, and are named after the North Italian botanist Giovanni Zantedeschi (1773–1846). The nineteenth century also saw the planting of exotic trees in English-style parks, replacing the strictly economic fruit trees the sixteenth century would have known. But still, what grips us about the old photographs when we can see them (there are none at Burlington House) is the glimpse we have of the functioning rural economy in which these crucial structures played their part, caught in the years when it was coming to an end, when the threshing machines were making their first appearance.

more from the TLS here.

Ditty of First Desire
Frederico Garcia Lorca

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.

(Soul
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening’s end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.

From NewsDaily:

Canadian researchers said on Monday they have discovered North America's smallest known dinosaur, a pint-sized predator half the size of a house cat and cousin to the ferocious Velociraptor, which roamed in what is now Alberta 75 million years ago.

Hesperonychus, whose name means “western claw”, prowled southeastern Alberta in Western Canada during the late cretaceous period, running on two legs, eating insects, small mammals, or whatever else it could find. Researchers said the dinosaur resembled its cousin Velociraptor, a hunter with a fierce reputation and a killer claw similar to that of Hesperonychus. “It was only about half the size of a Velociraptor,” said Nick Longrich, a researcher at the University of Calgary, and co-author of a paper on Hesperonychus with University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie. “Presumably Velociraptors could take down large animals but in this one the blade-like claw on the foot is not that big. My guess is that it was a small-game hunter, taking down mammals and birds and baby dinosaurs.”

Hesperonychus fossils have been collected since 1982 but paleontologists had assumed that because of their small size, they must have come from juvenile animals.

More here.

Sukumar Muralidharan in Himal Southasian:

If any lesson is to come out of the current financial crisis, it is that the pipedream of corporate social responsibility needs to be shelved.

By all accounts, the mood at the customary annual gathering of corporate movers and shakers at the Swiss ski resort of Davos in late January and early February was sombre, even funereal. Public sentiment outside was turning restive, as tough questions were being posed about the turmoil in the world economy. And the conclave, which has had little difficulty all these years recycling the same nostrums as the solution to all problems, for once had no answers. It could warn against the dangers inherent in abandoning the free-enterprise model and pour subtle disdain at the undeniable drift towards economic nationalism. But it could not quite come up with a credible antidote for the economic woes that were an obvious outcome of the hard-edged pursuit of the free-enterprise model.

India had the stellar representation at Davos 2009 that it has in recent years become used to, consistent with its status as a country with a fast-growing tribe of billionaires. India also had the confidence that the shockwaves emanating from the US – which has rapidly transformed itself from global economic leader to the capital of chaos – had not yet dealt their full impact on its shores. But it just narrowly managed to avert a major public-relations disaster. B Ramalinga Raju, the former chairman of the once globally toasted enterprise, Satyam Computer Services – now the first in India to be caught using the creative accounting that was once thought to be the exclusive province of US corporations – had been scheduled to address a Davos session on the education of new entrepreneurs. What he might have taught them must, unfortunately, remain in the realm of speculation, since Raju had to make a detour into one of Hyderabad’s most prominent jails, where he has since been detained to answer the charges of fraud to which he has already admitted.

More here.