Eric Liu in The Atlantic:
Is the culture war over?
More here.
Month: July 2015
Stravinsky’s Illegal “Star Spangled Banner” Arrangement
Timothy Judd over at his website (via Rick Perlstein):
Did the Boston Police really arrest Igor Stravinsky in 1943 for adding a dominant seventh chord to theStar Spangled Banner? The unlikely mug shot, above, seems to back up the story…until you look carefully at the date.
The tale is an enticing urban legend of twentieth century music history, rooted in a few grains of truth. The “mug shot” was actually taken for a 1940 visa application. Stravinsky emigrated to the United States in 1939 and became a citizen in 1945, eventually settling in sun-drenched West Hollywood, California. He did arrange the Star Spangled Banner for a series of Boston Symphony concerts, explaining his
desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.
After the first performance, the audience was apparently shocked by what they considered to be an unconventional harmonization. The Boston Police, misinterpreting a Federal law prohibiting “tampering” with the National Anthem, told Stravinsky that he had to remove his arrangement from the remaining programs. Reluctantly, he conceded.
More here.
confronting death
Someone must care for the dead, who, as the mortician Caitlin Doughty writes, “have become useless at caring for themselves”. In ancient Egypt, it was the job of the jackal-headed god Anubis, who would usher them to where their hearts would be weighed against the feather of justice. According to Greek legend, the task of ferrying the corpses went to Charon, “a shaggy-jowled, white-haired demon who piloted sinners by boat across the River Styx into hell”. But “at Westwind Cremation”, Doughty tells us, “that job belonged to Chris”.
Death is the point at which the profane and the sacred collide — an event completely natural and yet surrounded by mystery; steeped in the physical realities of bodily processes, yet enwreathed with existential hopes and fears. How therefore should we think about it? Many in the secular west and beyond, who have been unmoored from the spiritual certainties of the past, seem to have concluded that it is best not to think about it at all. For others, averting our gaze from death means stumbling through life half-blind.
more here.
The Grateful Dead and the old, weird America
For about 10 minutes on Sunday morning, I regretted not going to Santa Clara to hear the Grateful Dead. This was after I saw the set list from the first of the five “Fare Thee Well” shows scheduled to conclude July 3, 4 and 5 at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
“Alligator,” “Cream Puff War,” “What’s Become of the Baby?” — these were songs they hadn’t played live, if at all, in close to five decades. And yet, there was no Jerry Garcia. How could it be the Dead without Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995? This was a key reason I’d dismissed these goodbye shows; how could you say goodbye to something that was already gone?
My last Dead show was at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on April 6, 1982. Even then, my relationship with the band was ambivalent; I was an admirer of the intent if not always the execution of the music, the ideal of improvisation, making mistakes in public, but wary of nostalgia, then and now.
more here.
the new american discontent
In the absence of any perceptible contractions of revolt, two writers — Charles Murray on the libertarian right, Chris Hedges on the apocalyptic left — have given up waiting and decided to induce labor. Their methods are different: Murray’s “By the People” administers a strong but targeted dose of Pitocin, while Hedges’ “Wages of Rebellion” counsels lots of sex, which is called “sublime madness.” But the most interesting aspect of these two books is where their authors overlap. Both are appalled by the collusion between the federal government and corporations. Both describe the legal system as essentially lawless. Neither has any faith that electoral politics, the three branches of government or the Constitution itself can make a difference. Neither fits with any sizable faction of either of the two parties. Both despise elites. Both are willing, even eager, to see Americans break the law, in nonviolent ways, to force change.
At times Murray and Hedges sound exactly the same. “It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone. At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right,” says Murray, though it could be Hedges. “Appealing to the judicial, legislative or executive branches of government in the hope of reform is as realistic as accepting the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea-Party,” writes Hedges, pulling off a pretty good Murray.
more here.
How I Would Vote in the Greek Referendum
Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian (Photograph: Sotiris Barbarousis/Sotiris Barbarousis/epa/Corbis):
Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?
In January, Greece’s citizens voted for a government committed to ending austerity. If the government were simply fulfilling its campaign promises, it would already have rejected the proposal. But it wanted to give Greeks a chance to weigh in on this issue, so critical for their country’s future wellbeing.
That concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.
And, sure enough, what we are seeing now, 16 years after the eurozone institutionalised those relationships, is the antithesis of democracy: many European leaders want to see the end of prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate.
It is hard to advise Greeks how to vote on 5 July. Neither alternative – approval or rejection of the troika’s terms – will be easy, and both carry huge risks. A yes vote would mean depression almost without end. Perhaps a depleted country – one that has sold off all of its assets, and whose bright young people have emigrated – might finally get debt forgiveness; perhaps, having shrivelled into a middle-income economy, Greece might finally be able to get assistance from the World Bank. All of this might happen in the next decade, or perhaps in the decade after that.
By contrast, a no vote would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands.
More here.
Independently Drawn Districts Have Proved to Be More Competitive
Kim Soffen in the NYT:
Buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling, opponents of gerrymandering want to get more state legislatures out of the business of drawing congressional districts. So it’s worth examining the performance of the independent redistricting commissions validated by the court on Monday.
Arizona, via a ballot initiative in 2000, was one of the first states to entrust congressional boundaries to an independent commission, and California followed suit in 2010. Four other states have their congressional districts drawn by independent panels in an effort to make the process less partisan and yield more competitive districts. But those commissions were formed by their respective state legislatures and were not affected by Monday’s ruling.
Measuring the success of an independent commission is tricky, as it’s impossible to know how a legislature’s lines will have differed from a commission’s in the same year. And other factors like people’s relocations can alter a district’s ideological balance. But the evidence suggests that the commissions yielded more competitive races in Arizona and California.
The Arizona ballot initiative, Proposition 106, directed the commission to make the districts competitive “where to do so would create no significant detriment to the other goals.” Those goals included complying with theVoting Rights Act, equality of population, compactness, contiguity and respect for communities of interest and natural boundaries.
The “no significant detriment” clause, according to Willie Desmond, the lead map drawing consultant hired by the Arizona commission for the 2011 redistricting, “was kind of hard to interpret.” He said in an interview, “The commissioners all viewed that in slightly different ways depending on whether they wanted there to be more competitive districts.”
Even so, the maps resulting from both the 2001 and 2011 redistricting in Arizona were among the most competitive in the nation, as measured by election results. They had an average margin of victory more than 28 percent lower than that of the United States as a whole. Indeed, two of its nine districts were among the 29 in the nation that had margins of victory under 5 percent in 2014.
More here.
Dancing in Your Head
Adam Shatz remembers Ornette Coleman in the LRB:
‘One of the most baffling things about America,’ Amiri Baraka wrote in 1963, ‘is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’ Perhaps, he wondered, ‘it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.
I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman. No one mentioned the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama had drawn on the cadences of the Southern black church, in perhaps the most powerful speech of his presidency, and invited his audience to join him in singing ‘Amazing Grace’.
In speech after speech, Coleman, who died at 85, was remembered as a man who embodied a set of values – freedom, independence, improvisation, cultural survival – that transcend music, values shared by Coleman’s friend John Coltrane, who, just before he died in 1967, requested in his will that Coleman perform at his funeral. With Coleman’s death, an era closes. As the jazz DJ Phil Schaap said, ‘I have the feeling of the conclusion of the age of the prophets.’
More here.
The last Americans in Palmyra
Matthew Stevenson in The Critical Flame:
A classical oasis in the Syrian desert, Palmyra was recently captured by the Islamic State (sometimes called ISIS or ISIL) from a coalition army that included soldiers still loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
An outpost of the Roman Empire that remains vibrantly intact, the city is about a three-hour drive (134 miles on dodgy roads) east into the Syrian desert from either Homs or Damascus. Carry on another nine or ten hours, and you will arrive in Baghdad.
Dedicated to creating an Islamic state in western Iraq and eastern Syria, ISIS brutalizes the population in its conquered areas and has destroyed unnumbered artifacts from earlier civilizations. Although it has yet to take down the ruins at Palmyra, it has committed shocking atrocities in Iraq against such UNESCO sites such as Nimrud, Hatra, and Nineveh—beheading statues, much as it has the local opposition to its extreme Sunni rule. Erasing historical complexity is as important a weapon in its arsenal as an AK-47.
In recent days around Palmyra, ISIS blew up several Muslim tombs (located just outside the city) and, according to some reports, might have laced land mines in or around the ancient Roman city.
More here.
RAVI SHAVI PLAY “INDECISIONS” IN A BAR
From Noisey:
Rafay Rashid was born in Islambad, Pakistanin but it was in Providence, Rhode Island where he formed Ravi Shavi, a garage pop doo-wop/new wave/ quartet who recently released their debut album on Brooklyn based Almost Ready records.
In August, Rafay is heading back to Pakistan to play some shows. Here’s hoping that the audiences are a bit more enthusiastic than the one found in the video for “Indecisions”. Who the hell reads a book at a gig?
We spoke to Rafay to find out more.
More here.
Happiness is…. what?
Arifa Akbar in The Independent:
…The simplest definition of happiness is in the few images in the book: Jez Alborough’s illustrated rhyming poem, Nat the Cat, with a smiling cat as she comforts an unhappy rabbit, and Chris Riddell’s sketches of a mother holding a child, a couple holding hands; the image summarising the feeling in a way that words can’t. Which takes us back to the picture of the woman in the Rijksmuseum who might have been smiling or crying, happy or regretful or sad, or all of these things, at once.
More here.
Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:
Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was remarkable not only because the president sang the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace” on live television, and not only because of his eloquence in memorializing the pastor and eight other parishioners killed by a white gunman. It was also remarkable because the eulogy drew on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect — first glimpsed in “Dreams From My Father,” his deeply felt 1995 memoir about identity and family. And because it used those gifts to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself. Mr. Obama’s view of the nation’s history as a more than two-century journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence (“that all men are created equal”) real for everyone, his former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, suggested in an email, is “both an American and a religious sentiment” — predicated upon the belief that individual sinners and a country scarred by the original sin of slavery can overcome the past through “persistent, courageous, sometimes frustrating efforts.”
…At the same time, the eulogy he delivered that Friday afternoon in Charleston turned out to be the capstone to a dizzying and momentous week in which Southern politicians began calling for a renunciation of the Confederate battle flag, while the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and found that the Consitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. It was a week in which a lot of Americans felt they were actually watching the arc of history bend in front of their eyes, and it was a eulogy that both spoke to the moment and connected that moment to the past and the future of what Mr. Obama calls the great “American experiment.”
More here.
Gary Snyder, ‘Poet Laureate of Our Continent,’ Lives in the Present
Sean Elder in Newsweek:
Wouldn’t hurt. Snyder, who turned 85 the week before, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (for the 1975 collection Turtle Island), award-winning essayist, early conservationist, community activist, pioneering bio-regionalist, amateur geologist, avid mountaineer, conscientious omnivore (before the term existed), multi-linguist, Asian art and history expert, Native American story archivist and perhaps the person most responsible for awakening a generation of beatniks and hippies to Buddhism. (A former Zen monk, Snyder translated the ancient Chinese Buddhist poet Han Shan—Cold Mountain Poems—and was the unwitting model for the hero of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.) And he shows little sign of slowing. Though he’ll later tell the assembled that his new collection, This Present Moment, is “the last book of poems I’ll publish,” he has a new book with artist Tom Killion (California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry and History) and is gearing up to finish another based on the history of the environment in China—the kind of thing he makes sound like a little side project, the way you might talk about building a treehouse for the kids.
More here.
Revisiting the forgotten stories of childhood
Last Boxing Day, in my annual attempt to figure out what Boxing Day is, I embarked on an Internet expedition from the confines of my chilly bedroom in New York City. Before long, I came across this tidbit on Time magazine’s website: “The Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen’s Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town.”
Hunting the wren, I thought. I know what that is. I was sure I’d seen the ceremony before, watched a procession of boys in tunics march over a misty hillock on a cold day, one piping a melancholy tune while the others hoisted a platform woven of branches and reeds. The platform supported a delicate bird—until, quite abruptly, the bird turned into a woman…..
Once the Celtic haze had lifted, I recognized, with some disappointment, that I couldn’t possibly have witnessed this scene. I glanced across the room, toward the low bookshelf that houses my favorite childhood paperbacks. And suddenly I felt certain of the vision’s source. It was a series of fantasy books I’d read and reread between eight and eighteen—a series that transported me from New York City to the foggy shores of Wales, that ushered me into King Arthur’s tent on the eve of the Battle of Badon, that both encouraged and capitalized on my mania for British folklore.
more here.
the rise of normcore
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed forNew York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:
Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”
Brad, however eloquent and charming, did not coin the term himself. He got it from K-HOLE, a group of trend forecasters. To judge by K-HOLE’s name alone—a slang term for the woozy aftereffects of the animal tranquilizer and recreational drug ketamine—the group was more than happy to claim Normcore as its own licensed playground. As company principals patiently explained to the New York Times, their appropriation of the name of a toxic drug hangover was itself a sly commentary on the cultural logic of the corporate world’s frenetic cooptation of young people’s edgy habits.
more here.
Pieces of porcelain history
In 1938, Japanese forces advanced inland from China’s coastal regions. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army had no defence against the Japanese bombers. The Chinese soldiers who had taken possession of the large residence of Liu Feng Shu, Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather, were more concerned with chopping up the house’s heavy door for fuel than defending the area. As the soldiers retreated and the local residents prepared to flee, Liu made the decision to hide his treasures. Over the course of several nights, together with his trusted servant and his eldest granddaughter, he dug a hole as large as a bedroom. They filled the vault with the family’s heirlooms: jades, bronzes, paintings and calligraphy, as well as his beloved collection of fine porcelain. A few days later, they stuffed the remaining jewellery and silver coins in their pockets, barricaded the door and fled. This story would accompany the members of Liu Feng Shu’s extended family as they scattered across the globe, some remaining in mainland China, some moving to Taiwan, and others settling in the United States.
Liu’s great-great-grandson, Huan Hsu, grew up an all-American kid, with little interest in the language or culture his parents had left behind. An encounter in the Seattle Art Museum with a piece of eighteenth-century porcelain changed all that. Because this red dish with a scalloped rim and decorated with characters in gold “might have once passed through my great-great-grandfather’s hands”, Hsu decided he wanted to dig for the buried treasures of his family. In The Porcelain Thief, he embarks on a three-year journey to try to reunite the story of the family’s treasure with the pieces of porcelain themselves. Along the way, he learns Mandarin, meets relatives, and slowly gains an understanding of the way things work (and don’t work) in China.
more here.
Friday Poem
Bicycles in the Sixties
Early morning, free of clothes
I stay indoors, coolness like a fine silk covers my skin.
I light up a cigarette, and reopen the book
to where I left off yesterday, the small town
in Ireland where Beckett spent his childhood,
his father taking him to Dublin in 1916.
There, the burning fires of an uprising
troubled him all his life.
In my youth—the Cultural Revolution—
the buses roaring through the streets
with Red Guards brandishing guns, tearing down the replicated
Imperial Dam. It was time to “Break the Four Olds”.
I remember leaving home for middle school
two miles away, and saw a young guard in glasses
raised his gun and started shooting porcelain vases
off the power poles.
Shattered pieces flew like birds in all directions.
Armed conflict. The corpse wrapped in asphalt,
abandoned in a roadside truck, shone a blackened light
in the sun. And my mother, head of a small factory unit,
wanted by the opposing faction of the Red Guards,
fled to someplace remote, in fear.
I returned home and saw grandmother worried, a blackened light
in her eyes.
.
by Sun Wenbo
from Poetry International
translation Ming Di and Neil Aitken
Guns and Butter in Pakistan
Ahsan Butt in Foreign Policy:
There is precedent to Kidwai highlighting the potential welfare-increasing effects of nuclear weapons. When Western leaders first grappled with its political effects in the early 1950s, they believed that this new and dangerous technology could help them save money. The strategy of “massive retaliation” in the first decade of the Cold War prioritized nuclear over conventional deterrence against the Soviet Union, and was pursued partly in the hope of cutting long-term defense expenditures. Indeed, the intellectual case for massive retaliation was most persuasively made by Britain in its 1952 Global Strategy Paper, primarily due to its dire economic situation. Even France, pushed by former President Charles de Gaulle’s fiscal conservatism, emphasized nuclear weapons in its defense policy for budgetary reasons.
These states were acting on what, on the surface, appears to be sound reasoning. All countries operate in an environment of scarce resources. Those resources must be channeled to the population’s well being, through building schools and hospitals, as well as the state’s security, through buying tanks and missiles.
Nuclear weapons seemingly allow states to ameliorate the pressures of this guns-butter tradeoff; their awesome power means that states locked in arms races do not necessarily have to match their rivals’ conventional acquisitions.
More here.
Watch How This 1981 Film Accurately Predicted The Current State Of The World
Fear gets you nowhere, and other things I wish I’d known at 17
Tim Lott in The Telegraph:
In my own life, I would not pretend to know less than I did when I was 17 – that would be difficult indeed. And there are a number of things I would tell my 17-year-old self if I happened to bump into him – not that he would listen for a moment, since I am old, and therefore by definition, stupid. The first thing I would tell him is not to be afraid. Because although teenagers are meant to be fearless, I’m not sure that they are at all – in fact I suspect they are secretly terrified. Terrified of failing, terrified of being cast out of their homes and into an uncaring world, terrified of being unattractive, unlovable, unfashionable, unpopular. But fear, which is part of all our make-ups, is a fundamentally useless emotion most of the time, simply hampering effective action. I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about – I’m just saying that worrying doesn’t do any good.
My 17-year-old self was fundamentally confused, and I think I would tell him that this was not because there was anything wrong with him, but because the world really was confusing – incomprehensible in fact. So incomprehensible that one of the most fundamental truths about the world is that people spend their lives trying to deny uncertainty by clinging rigidly on to whatever their world beliefs/philosophies happen to be. This is why most people never change their minds, once their minds are made up, and why they do crazy things, like go to war, or become suicide bombers, in order to defend their sense of meaning. So I would say to 17-year-old Tim – it’s not you that’s crazy, it’s the world.
More here.