From Smithsonian:

Paul Gauguin did not lack for confidence. “I am a great artist, and I know it,” he boasted in a letter in 1892 to his wife. He said much the same thing to friends, his dealers and the public, often describing his work as even better than what had come before. In light of the history of modern art, his confidence was justified.

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and writer, Gauguin stands today as one of the giants of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernism. He was also a great storyteller, creating narratives in every medium he touched. Some of his tales were true, others near-fabrications. Even the lush Tahitian masterpieces for which he is best known reflect an exotic paradise more imaginary than real. The fables Gauguin spun were meant to promote himself and his art, an intention that was more successful with the man than his work; he was well known during his lifetime, but his paintings sold poorly. “Gauguin created his own persona and established his own myth as to what kind of a man he was,” says Nicholas Serota, the director of London’s Tate, whose exhibition, “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” traveled last month to Washington’s National Gallery of Art (until June 5). “Gauguin had the genuine sense that he had artistic greatness,” says Belinda Thomson, curator of the Tate Modern’s exhibition. “But he also plays games, so you are not sure whether you can take him literally.”

More here.

Uluru was built up during the creation period by two boys who played in the mud after rain. When they had finished their game they travelled south to Wiputa … Fighting together, the two boys made their way to the table topped Mount Conner, on top of which their bodies are preserved as boulders.
………………………………………………………………….. –Australian Aborginal Legend

Uluru/Ayers Rock

old Mr Uluru
a proud man
the day the Rock
was handed back
sits waiting

old Mr Walkabout
a proud man
at the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the
hand back
sits waiting

in the Red Rock tavern
the old men sit
waiting

yous wanna beer
the barman yells

he comes over
whatcha waiting for

the old men stare out
over their Country
waiting

waiting
for recognition
as Traditional Owners

more than just
a few days
in their life time.

by Ali Cobby Eckermann
publisher: PIW, 2011

From NPR:

In 1960, there were 400,000 lions living in the wild. Today, there are just 20,000.

“That represents a 90 to 95 percent decline,” says National Geographic explorer-in-residence Dereck Joubert. “Unless we start talking about this, these lions will be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years.”

Joubert and his wife, Beverly, have lived among populations of big wild cats for decades. Based in Botswana, the filmmakers and conservationists have spent much of their career documenting Africa's animal population for National Geographic. In their latest documentary project, The Last Lions, the Jouberts follow the dwindling lion population living in Botswana's Okavango Delta as they battle their prey — the buffalo — as well as rival prides.

“Marauding lions [come] in from the outside into their territory and fight with them,” says Dereck Joubert. “These territorial battles are dramatic and often end up in death one way or another.”

But obtaining dramatic footage of lions battling each other in the murky, swamplike Okavango Delta is not easy, even for seasoned documentarians like the Jouberts. They followed lions across river systems, pushing their car into chest-height water while driving — and they often had a front-row seat to heated attacks.

More here.

Veteran diplomat Ilan Baruch quits, says he can no longer represent government; Israel's foreign policy is 'wrong,' he says, adds that blaming global anti-occupation views on anti-Semitism is 'simplistic, artificial'.

From Ynet News:

A veteran diplomat says he has resigned from his post because he had a hard time defending the policies of Israel's current government, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.

Ilan Baruch says he quit because “Israel's foreign policy is wrong,” pointing to the Palestinian issue.

Should this trend continue, he warned, Israel will turn into a pariah state and face growing de-legitimization.

Baruch told Israel TV Wednesday that Israel's standing was in danger because of its policies, which he said were “difficult to explain.”

“I can no longer honestly represent this government,” he said earlier. “As (Foreign Minister) Lieberman was elected by a large public in a legitimate manner, I cannot question him – but I don't have to serve him, and therefore I'm quitting.”

More here.

Fasih Ahmed in Newsweek Pakistan:

“Shahbaz, from your blood revolution will come!” Thus the protesters outside the Lahore Press Club some four hours after the assassination on Wednesday of Shahbaz Bhatti, federal minister for minorities. If this scant, disorganized protest—some clutching umbrellas, others holding up blood red crucifixes as irate motorists splashed by—is any indication, this crowd is more likely to be at the wrong end of any revolution here in Pakistan.

Despite the widely known threats to his life, which started in 2009 after Pakistani Christians were massacred in the small Punjab town of Gojra, Bhatti was not traveling with his security detail when he was attacked. Like Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab who was assassinated barely two months earlier, also in Islamabad, Bhatti was slain in an audaciously public manner. Bhatti, 42, had just left his mother's house for a cabinet meeting when a white Suzuki Mehran stopped his black Corolla. Wajid Durrani, inspector-general of capital police, says three men stepped out and opened fire. Bhatti was shot 30 times, according to the autopsy, including in the head. His driver survived the attack.

“Bhatti's ruthless and cold-blooded murder is a grave setback for the struggle for tolerance, pluralism and respect for human rights in Pakistan,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, country representative for Human Rights Watch. “An urgent and meaningful policy shift on the appeasement of extremists that is supported by the military, the judiciary and the political class needs to replace the political cowardice and institutional myopia that encourages such continued appeasement despite its unrelenting bloody consequences.”

More here.

Shortly after midnight in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, after having delivered a victory speech celebrating the results of the Democratic primary in California in which he had defeated Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy was shot three times, once in the head, by Sirhan Sirhan in a service area of the Ambassador Hotel. He was rushed to a hospital, where he underwent surgery; all night and throughout the next day and much of the next night his life hung in the balance; my wife and I remember staring numbly and futilely at the small black-and-white TV in our student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the endless hours dragged by. Eventually a spokesman appeared and announced that Kennedy was dead. Barely two months earlier Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered in Memphis, and a short time after that Andy Warhol, of all people, had been shot and gravely wounded as well. And of course Robert Kennedy’s brother, JFK, had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963. In Vietnam the war showed not the least sign of abating. Anyone in my generation who wanted to believe that there was hope for an American future worth having would have a hard time finding the terms in which to express that hope after the events of 1968.

more from Michael Fried at nonsite.org here.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cézanne on twentieth-century art. He’s the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. Matisse called Cézanne “a sort of God”; Picasso said he was “the father of us all.” Max Beckmann called him “the last old master … the first new master.” He’s also an artist who can be hard to come to terms with: Great art often looks ugly when first seen, and Cézanne’s is an extreme case, so much so that his work can still vex. His optical disequilibrium made peers dubious, friends skeptical, and critics jeer. Twelve stunning Cézanne canvases are now up at the Metropolitan, in a teensy show centered on three of his five Card Players paintings. They’re fantastic, even if they’re not my favorite Cézannes—those would be the bathers, still lifes, and landscapes—and they precisely mark a turning point in the history of art. These quietly grand insurrectionary works were made around Aix-en-Provence in the 1890s, when Cézanne was in his fifties and growing sickly. He had, by then, been virtually abandoned by increasingly successful Impressionist colleagues, who felt that the public ridicule his work attracted reflected poorly on their group exhibition. (In his time, he was attacked far more than Van Gogh was.)

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Dump.fm (http://dump.fm) is a chatroom in which images, primarily in jpeg, png, bmp, and gif formats, text, and animated gifs are posted in real time by registered users. It was created by Ryder Ripps, Tim Baker and Scott Ostler and became available to the general public in 2010. Users range in age from their teens to their forties with a majority being in their twenties. They use pseudonyms like hypothete, noisia, timb, mirroring and frakbuddy. These and such dumpers as tommoody, frankhats, mrkor, ryder, jeanette, minty and zoesaldano, among many others, produce images and animated gifs that are worthy of the imprimatur of Art. The problem is that for all the radical, chic talk about it since the 1960s, the art establishment does not know how to deal with the actual dematerialization of the art object represented by this unfetishizable medium. Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun.

more from Eric Gelber at artcritical here.

From The Independent:

The back cover of the journalist Leo Benedictus's debut is emblazoned with details of a gimmicky publicity campaign. Or is it? That this is actually part of the novel is only one of the feats of trickery that Benedictus pulls off in this shockingly accomplished novel. Even the dedication turns out to be part of the same achingly smart metafictional joke. Novels within novels are often Pandora's boxes of complexity, and nowhere more than here. The story kicks off with an email to a literary agent, Val, from a writer, William, wanting to get his debut novel published. The first chapter of William's novel follows, plunging the reader into William's fearlessly funny prose. In it, a dweeby red-top sub editor, Michael, takes refuge in the loos at the exclusive party in London to celebrate the birthday of Hugo, a reclusive film star. Michael is a timid soul. He would rather have stayed in his taxi and be subjected to the cabbie's stories than brave the party, and within the social setting sees himself as “a sterile node. Humanity's appendix.” Having not been personally invited, he knows that he doesn't fit in with the glamorous throng, which includes Hugo's coke-snarfing model wife, Mellody, and the callow but puppyish X-Factor reject Calvin, whose beauty is buying him teeny adoration and commercial success. William emails Val with more chapters as he writes them. The novel's important events unfurl at the titular afterparty, where the unbridled entertainment of the earlier chapters darkens. But that tale, compellingly recounted as it is, isn't the only one. William's occasional tetchiness with Val hints that all is not well in his life, and, as with Andy Coulson or Alastair Campbell, the story manager becomes bigger than the story.

William's novel hums with astute comments on celebrity, and characters that pulse with life and depth, and are observed with delicious insight. Gormless Calvin wonders, for example, why Mellody's Pete Doherty-esque ex says, “Not tonight Josephine”, “in a voice like he was quoting someone”, and earnestly looks forward to releasing his own version of Chris de Burgh's “Lady in Red” – much to the jeering derision of the cool hipsters around him.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

British investigators, in a new study released on Wednesday, looked at the strange dynamics of choice in speed-dating, a fashionable way for singles to meet. Speed-daters race through a rota of one-on-one meetings, judging each person for suitability after a conversation of a few minutes that ends when a bell sounds. Assessing large numbers of candidates was not a problem in itself, the researchers found. In fact, many speed-daters found more potential partners when they were able to cast their net into a larger pool. But this advantage only worked when the available candidates were all broadly similar. When candidates were too dissimilar, speed-daters became confused by many conflicting factors — and often failed to choose anyone. “There are models of human 'rationality' which posit that variety is a good thing,” said researcher Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “What will be surprising to some people is that our results suggest that increasing option variety leads to chooser confusion. People are more likely to choose no-one at all when faced with greater variety.”

The study, published in the British journal Biology Letters, tracked 1,868 female and 1,870 male participants at 84 commercial speed-dating events. Hopeful singles gave details of their occupation, education level, age, height, weight and religious affiliation, allowing researchers to gauge differences. The women's mean age was 34.3 years and men were aged 35.6. Twenty percent of women and 27 percent of men were in professional or managerial positions, and the remainder classified themselves as “skilled non-manual” or other occupations. Speed-daters met in groups and engaged in three-minute encounters with between 15 and 31 singles of the opposite sex. After the event, the organiser matched up individuals who indicated a mutual interest in each other, thus opening the way to a possible date. Big speed-dating events typically generated 123 such “proposals,” or shows of interest, when candidates were similar, the researchers found. But the number dropped by more than a quarter, to 88, when candidates were varied. Small speed-dating events would lead to 85 proposals when candidates were similar. But this fell by nearly a third, to 57 proposals, when candidates were varied. Men were generally keener than women in formulating a proposal — but were also likelier to be stumped by choice.

In short, variety is fine… but in manageable doses.

More here.

Octavio Paz
from Octavio Paz – The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Press, 1987

Greg Waldmann in Open Letters Monthly:

“Let me propose,” writes the Palestinian academic and activist Sari Nusseibeh in What is a Palestinian State Worth?, “that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship.” It will seem startling that such an idea could come from the pen of an organizer of the first intifada, a former prisoner of the Israeli military, and a one-time representative of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But Nusseibeh isn’t exactly endorsing this, not as a permanent solution. It is a provocation, one he hopes is “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state.” The two-state solution has become stale in the imagination, and it is time, he says, to “think outside the box,” to find another way forward. He wants Israelis and Palestinians to prepare to live together because he believes the dream of two peaceful states living side by side is probably dead. Few people have more authority to issue that judgment.

More here.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Huffington Post:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades — against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News — fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that “a licenser may not broadcast….any false or misleading news.” The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio.

More here.

Mohannad Al-Haj Ali in Ya Libnan:

The creative mind of Steve Jobs is often chronicled, including his life story as the adopted child of a modest American family.

What most fail to realize is that his living biological father is of Syrian origin. Abdul Fattah “John” Jandali emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s to pursue his university studies. Most media outlets have published little about Jandali, other than to say he was an outstanding professor of political science, that he married his girlfriend (Steve’s mother) and by whom he also had a daughter, and that he slipped from view following his separation from his wife.

An American historian, his distance from the media.What is known about him lacks detail, and is both one-sided and a source of however, has now stirred controversy over the role of genes and their superiority over nurture in the case of Steve Jobs, by describing Jandali in a detailed critical article published briefly on the Internet before it was suddenly removed, as “the father of invention”, given that Jandali’s daughter Mona (Simpson) – Steve’s sister – is also one of the most famous contemporary American novelists and a professor at University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

The 79-year-old Jandali has deliberately kept curiosity at the same time. Here is his story as Jandali himself told it to Al-Hayat.

More here.

Evgeny Morozov in The Boston Review:

In 2003 Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published an article on the once-sleepy subject of telecommunications policy. In it, he coined the term “net neutrality” to capture the idea that network operators—the Comcasts and Verizons of the world—should not be in the business of regulating the information traffic that passes through their networks. The term took hold, and the article launched Wu to cyber-rock-star status.

Net neutrality is a simple idea with powerful implications. A neutral net would, for example, prevent cable providers from slowing down their customers’ connections or, worse, banning them from running certain services. That is good for customers, who get equal treatment whether they are streaming movies on Netflix, chatting on Skype, or shopping on Amazon. And it is also good for Netflix, Skype, and other companies that have grown using an Internet infrastructure they do not own and have been able to innovate without worrying about shifting rules of the road.

With those credentials, net neutrality seems like a winning policy. But what about the network operators? They are not so happy with net neutrality, and it is easy to see why. If they respect net neutrality, they cannot impose special burdens on consumers who occupy lots of bandwidth by running data-intensive applications during periods of peak use. Nor can they ban Internet services that compete with their own offerings of cable TV or telephony, thus denying them a lucrative source of revenue. The result may be an underinvestment in infrastructure improvement, which is not good for Netflix and Skype, which depend on fast and ever-improving networks. Predictably, then, network operators prefer that the government not tell them how to run their networks and embrace industry self-regulation instead.

Despite this potential conflict between service and network providers, things have worked out pretty well so far. So even as battles over net neutrality have heated up over the past year—with important rulings from the Washington, D.C. Federal Court of Appeals and the FCC, and Verizon’s appeal of new FCC regulations—opponents often ask: why pass laws or regulations ensuring neutrality if we are doing all right without them?

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

He can be very funny. Sometimes intentionally so, other times not. He once said, “I cannot recognize either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. The Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots.” His sense of fashion is completely his own. He'll wear a pure white suit one day and then robes and animal skins the next. His military outfits sometimes seem like an outright parody of the military, as if he may, even, be trying out for the Village People. But one can never be sure how to take Colonel Muammar Qaddafi when it comes to clothing, or anything else.

The laughter sticks in the throat though when one thinks of the suffering. Qaddafi has been a dictator for a long time — 42 years, ever since he led a coup against King Idris in 1969. During that time, he was never shy about cracking down on any possible opposition. He was directly responsible for some of the more senseless acts of international terrorism in recent history (see the Lockerbie bombing of 1988). He has lorded over the corrupt economy of a country that sits on massive oil reserves but has done little to raise the general standard of living in Libya. His crimes are extensive and well documented. At the time of this writing, Qaddafi still holds power in Libya and seems resolved to drag his country into civil war and the massive violence of a “last stand.” It looks as if Qaddafi's final end will be pathetic and tragic at once.

And yet, there is a way that he may get the last laugh. I say this because of a book Qaddafi published in 1975. It is called The Green Book. When we are all dead and gone, when the literary and political documents we find important have long since been forgotten, I suspect that The Green Book will still be around, still studied by the future historians of present times.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

The world has watched in horror as Libya’s Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi uses his military to attack protesters opposed to his rule, killing hundreds or possibly thousands of unarmed civilians. Many of his own men have refused to fire on their own people, instead defecting to the rebels or flying their planes to nearby Malta, so Qaddafi has called in mercenaries from neighboring countries who are more willing to obey his orders.

World leaders were quick to condemn Qaddafi’s actions. On February 26, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose an arms embargo on Libya, urge member nations to freeze assets owned by Qaddafi and his family, and refer the regime’s violence to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution of those responsible.

This is the first time that the Security Council has unanimously referred a situation involving human rights violations to the International Criminal Court, and it is remarkable that countries that are not members of the Court – including the United States, Russia, and China – nevertheless supported the referral. The resolution can thus be seen as another incremental step towards the establishment of a global system of justice able to punish those who commit gross violations of human rights, regardless of their political or legal status in their own country.

Yet, in another way, the Security Council resolution was a disappointment. The situation in Libya became a test of how seriously the international community takes the idea of a responsibility to protect people from their rulers. The idea is an old one, but its modern form is rooted in the tragic failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The author is the owner of a dilapidated summer cottage on a small island in the Adriatic. This inheritance from a distant relative included the accompanying goods and chattels – the collected clutter of several generations. We did not dispose of this junk immediately, but inspected and assessed it, with a loving eye for detail: a fatal mistake. Inspection and assessment turned the “junk” into traces of life, relics bearing witness to an eventful family history that could no longer be “disposed of”. The piece of land and the structure that occupied it became a place of remembrance that resists demolition and hampers renovation. In a sense we inherited the hoarding syndrome of aunt S. (1918-1996), the last inhabitant of the house, albeit not to the same pathological degree. For S., not a single woodworm-infested piece of furniture could be disposed of, not a kitchen utensil replaced, not a document in the art nouveau bureau touched. But it was these documents that finally revealed the reason for her hoarding. Expropriation Decree No. 3723/45, dated 8.1.1946, lists familiar objects: furniture (“cloth armchairs, 3 pieces at 150.-“), crockery (“bowl, porcelain, with lid, 1 piece, 90.-“), clothes, (“women’s hats, with boxes, 12 pieces at 20.-“, the toys (“Children’s iron, 1 piece, 10.-“), utensils (“bread basket, basketweave, 1 piece, 10.-“), books (“Skiing, with a postscript by the Ustasha Youth”). Of the 335 items listed, only six are included in the final Court Decree No. 3723/45-4 dated 26.1.1946: 1) three men’s nightshirts, 2) light summer coat, 3) short underpants, 4) razor strop, 5) walking stick, 6) old shoes (men’s).

more from Svjetlan Lacko Vidulic at Eurozine here.