You want to argue about wine? Screw it. Let’s argue about wine

Ben Dreyfuss in Mother Jones:

ScreenHunter_1332 Aug. 25 16.31Wine is a joke. Whether it's in a bottle, a box, or a boot, it's a stupid drink. Since time immemorial people have consumed wine, but for most of that time people were backwards and lived in fields and didn't know anything. Now we live in the 21st century and drink wine? Lol.

It doesn't even taste good! It tastes ok sometimes, but it's really sugary! It gives you terrible hangovers! It doesn't get you drunk! It ruins your teeth! You know who drinks wine? Europeans.

Americans who drink wine do so because they think they are living in a BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. It feels rich and smart to have thoughts about wine and to order fancy, expensive bottles of wine. You are not smart. You are not fancy. You are not rich—or at least you won't be if you keep pissing your money away on wine.

You drink alcohol because your life is hard and you need a respite from the pain. You drink wine because you have been tricked by society into thinking it is a shibboleth of class and taste.

More here.

CIA Funded Literary Magazines, Ranked

PartisanreviewPatrick Iber at The Awl:

Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex legacy. During the Cold War, it was commonplace to draw the distinction between “totalitarian” and “free” societies by noting that only in the free ones could groups self-organize independently of the state. But many of the groups that made that argument—including the magazines on this left—were often covertly-sponsored instruments of state power, at least in part. Whether or not art and artists would have been more “revolutionary” in the absence of the CIA’s cultural work is a vexed question; what is clear is that that possibility was not a risk they were willing to run. And the magazines remain, giving off an occasional glitter amid the murk left behind by the intersection of power and self-interest. Here are seven of the best, ranked by an opaque and arbitrary combination of quality, impact, and level of CIA involvement.

more here.

The Pope and the Planet

Mckibben_1-081315_jpg_600x596_q85Bill McKibben at The New York Review of Books:

It is, therefore, remarkable to actually read the whole document and realize that it is far more important even than that. In fact, it is entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe. Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary. In scope and tone it reminded me instantly of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and of the essays of the great American writer Wendell Berry.1 As with those writers, it’s no use trying to categorize the text as liberal or conservative; there’s some of each, but it goes far deeper than our political labels allow. It’s both caustic and tender, and it should unsettle every nonpoor reader who opens its pages.

The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.”

more here.

The mysteries of “Whistler’s Mother.”

150831_r26901-320-240-19173714Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

The chromatic subtleties contribute to an unsettled feeling. A more substantial jolt occurs when you register an over-all spatial distortion: the forms stretch horizontally, so that the length of Anna’s concealed legs, angled and descending to an upholstered footstool, suggests the anatomy of an N.B.A. draft pick. The more you notice of the composition’s economies—such as the cavalier indication of the bentwood chair legs, at the lower right, and, at the lower left, three perfunctory diagonal strokes that do for establishing the plane of the floor—the more happily manipulated you may feel, in ways that, like the camera tricks of a great movie director, excite a sense of the scene as truer to life than truth itself. It took me an hour of inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the canvas. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It is the edge of a stage or a platform. Whistler is looking up at his mom.

“Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible,” Whistler allowed years later, answering friends who praised the speaking likeness of the portrayal. But he was exasperated by sentimental responses to the work. He regularly preached that subject matter should be regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. He said, “To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”

more here.

Business for the Other Billions: Addressing human needs at the base of the economic pyramid

John S. Rosenberg in Harvard Magazine:

BillionImagine a simple triangle diagram of the planet’s population. A fortunate couple of billion upper-income people—in the United States and Canada, much of Europe, Japan, Australia, and prospering urban centers in parts of Asia and Latin America—occupy the apex. The invisible hand of market capitalism supplies this prominent minority with bountiful goods and services. But that leaves a lot of people out. At the very bottom of the pyramid, a billion or more humans live in poverty (on less than $1.25 per person per day), often depending on government programs and charitable aid to subsist.

In between, pointed out V. Kasturi (universally, “Kash”) Rangan, live the low- and low-middle-income majority of mankind: perhaps four billion people who are entering or are already in the cash economy—but barely, with incomes of up to $15 per day. In a conversation, he compared the lives of these people, the base of the pyramid, with those at the top. Because they likely do not own property, and lack rent or tax receipts, they are not bankable, so they turn to exploitative money lenders for credit to stock a shop or start a small business. For medical care, they choose among local healers, vendors of patent nostrums, or queues at public clinics (where it may take a bribe to advance in line). Their labor, often interrupted by those queues or long bus trips to remit cash to a rural family, may be seasonal, itinerant, and legally unprotected. Functioning markets, he noted, imply a level playing field between consumers and producers, but most of these people aren’t getting a remotely fair deal. It is as if the broad base of the pyramid were an alternate universe where familiar rules don’t apply.

More here.

Square Root of Kids’ Math Anxiety: Their Parents’ Help

Jan Hoffman in The New York Times:

MATH-tmagArticleA common impairment with lifelong consequences turns out to be highly contagious between parent and child, a new study shows. The impairment? Math anxiety. Means of transmission? Homework help. Children of highly math-anxious parents learned less math and were more likely to develop math anxiety themselves, but only when their parents provided frequent help on math homework, according to a study of first- and second-graders, published in Psychological Science. Researchers tested 438 children from 29 public and private schools in three Midwestern states for math ability as well as math anxiety, at the beginning and end of the school year. Their parents completed questionnaires about math anxiety, and about how often they helped their children with homework.

So much for good intentions. The more the math-anxious parents tried to work with their children, the worse their children did in math, slipping more than a third of a grade level behind their peers. And the children’s weaker math achievements increased their nascent math anxiety. “The parents are not out to sabotage their kids,” said Sian L. Beilock, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Choke,” about anxiety and performance. “But we have to ensure their input is productive. They need to have an awareness of their own math anxiety and that what you say is important.” For example, she said, comforting a homework-distressed child, by saying, “ ‘I’m not a math person either, and that’s O.K.,’ is not a good message to convey.”

More here.

Tuesday Poem

From a Balcony

The sun is an orange from the Peloponnese
staining clouds and stuccoed walls,

sailboats tacking out to sea.
Damson shapes chase light from under vines;

shadows grope their way,
thick arabesques of lace furrowed at the frame.

Hills are a smoke-stained fresco flaking,
rooftops shrill as pomegranate seeds.

Poplars are the spears of long-dead warriors
sprouted from a rill of dragon’s teeth.

Rising from that faded terracotta dome
come the curling throaty notes

of evening mass below, swelling in
and out of polyphony like a weaver’s skilful woof

their path the disappearing smoke
dragged from a censer’s golden arc.

Far across this dim intaglio
a white cat pads along a cooling lintel stone.

Only the distant thrum of a scooter
navigating narrow roads.
.

by Sarah Howe
from A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia
Tall-lighthouse, Luton, 2009

Cabinets of Wonder: the Shroud of Turin & the Museum of Jurassic Technology

by Leanne Ogasawara

The-mona-lisa-experience-at-the-louvreFriends have been talking about Michael J. Lewis' recent article, How Art Became Irrelevant. An art historian at Williams College, Lewis is basically stating what we all have come to suspect: that museums have become the bread and circuses of our day.

Arguing that that there has been a collective disengagement with the fine arts in our society, he says that young people no longer care or have an emotional response to the art works themselves. And that is a worry.

Like many people, I have wondered about the pretty significant changes seen in art museums over the past twenty years. I'm pretty sure that no one passing the mob in the room where the Mona Lisa is hanging in the Louvre could fail to wonder if the picture itself is in any real way relevant to the experience of “seeing the Mona Lisa.” Especially fresh in my mind was something that recently happened to me at the Uffizi. Standing in front of Botticelli's Venus on a very crowded summer weekend, an American family of five stepped up right in front of the painting and posed while someone else took multiple versions of their picture. It was a rather long process involving corralling the kids and then the posed shots. It was bizarre.

In LA, it is said that people go to the Getty but they don't look at the art. The Getty is putting on more photography exhibitions and flashy blockbuster shows now, maybe to address the financial implications of this (though you would think of all museums the Getty with its massive budget could do its own thing as directed by its own particular history and the endowment).It's actually not at all clear whether it is the commodification and privatization of museums (museums' disturbing transformation) that has affected these changes in museum-goers that Lewis describes or whether their lack of care is what is driving the transformation of museums into entertainment hubs. I have no idea.

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Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: Rogue Nation and the Perpetual Intensity of Elections

by Matt McKenna

Tom-cruise-mission-impossible-5-rogue-nation-2015-bmw-s1000rr-motorbike-wallpaperThere’s a scene in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation in which CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) describes to a Senate oversight committee just how insane the IMF’s counter-terrorism practices are why the department should be shut down immediately. To provide context for readers unfamiliar with the Mission Impossible show or series, the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) is the franchise's super-secret government agency that tracks down bad guys–specifically those with violent, existential issues–and eradicates them. As you can imagine, over the course of each of their missions, the IMF explodes a goodly number of cars, helicopters, buildings, etc. Anyway, Hunley lands some great points about how the IMF is more of a liability than an asset because it has no accountability for the mayhem it causes. To drive home his claim about the recklessness of the IMF, Hunley shows footage from the previous Mission Impossible film in which, as a result of the IMF’s attempts to stop some such bad guy, a nuclear warhead grazes the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and falls into the Bay, narrowly avoiding detonation. If the best the IMF can do is just barely avoid world-ending calamities via last-second heroics that nonetheless cause millions/billions/trillions in damage, Hunley suggests, perhaps it’s time to put our faith in a different form of international relations.

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A White Blackman

by William L. Benzon

The first time I heard the phrase – “white black man” – Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a July 4th party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, three-quarters of a life ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit, the joy, the freedom and dignity, I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

[Portrait of Louis Armstrong, Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., ca. Apr. 1947] (LOC)

By William Gottlieb, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY, April 1947.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn't quite understand why this man was so important. For one thing, this was an old recording and the sound quality was thin. I had to hear through that. For another, I’d never heard anything quite like it.

But I listened and listened and, gradually, I learned to hear Armstong’s music. There was his tone – by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender – his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience, the latter mostly in middle school and high school marching and concert bands. It was exciting.

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The Donald Is Coming! The Donald Is Coming!

by Akim Reinhardt

Donald Trump, image from Salon dot comI've lost track already. During the past month, too many people to keep count of, each with a look of bemused panic in their eye, has asked me if I think Donald Trump has a chance. Knocked back on their heels by the frenzy surrounding Trump's recent surge, they implore me to tell them what I think.

Is it possible that this crude, bombastic display of runaway hair known as The Donald will actually succeed Barack Obama in the White House?

Alas, it's hard to blame these worry warts. Of late, the press marvels at Trump's soaring poll numbers, and ruminates endlessly on his success in spite of his obvious shortcomings and endless string of outrages, and what it says about American society and its broken political system.

From NPR to Ezra Klein, there's no shortage of media mavens trumpeting Trump and theorizing what his success means. Everyone seems to have an opinion. Or if they don't, they're desperate to find one. Confused by it all, The Atlantic went so far as to simply ask people why, oh why, do you support this man? Then, sans analysis, the magazine simply threw up its hands and published the responses.

Why, oh why indeed. Why is this barbarian at the gate? Why is this roaring, fatuous pig of a man on the verge of undressing our republic and claiming its highest office?

In looking for an answer, I believe we should not dig too deep. After all, Donald Trump doesn't seem to over think much, so we probably shouldn't over think him.

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Donald Trump Is The GOP After Five Drinks — And Proof That The Party Is Dying

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

TrumpWhen a political party can get hijacked by an outsider billionaire vulgarian like Donald Trump, it is palpable evidence that this party is on its last legs. Listen up, rich guys, you don't have to buy a politician to take over these days: why not skip all that and run for office yourself?

And the rudderless Republican Party is ripe for such predation. After all, now that the cultural wars have been won by the liberal left — witness gay marriage — what does the Republican Party have left to run on?

Cutting taxes? Look at the mess Kansas is in. Shrinking big government? That only happens under democratic presidents like Clinton and Obama anyway (and burgeons under the likes of Reagan and Bush). Less regulations? Deregulating the banks gave us the Great Recession.

The fact is that the Republican Party is down to its core racist agenda, which is nothing more than the following: lookie here, you Republicans — our enduring base of older white men — if you vote for us, you can be sure that we will NOT give your hard-earned taxes to the undeserving blacks and poors whom the Democrats expect you whities to carry on your backs.

Not a recipe for a lasting party (whose base of old white guys may be dead in another twenty years). Not a recipe for actual life if the racist, sexist GOP core keeps hating on women, blacks and Mexican immigrants, when young women, blacks and Latinos are where the votes of the future lie, as America becomes less white and more multicultural and gender-fluid.

And into this void that is the dying Republican Party, has stepped one Donald Trump.

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Ashley Madison hack reveals nothing surprising at all

by Sarah Firisen

AshleyBig news: millions of married people, mainly men, are using the Internet to try to cheat on their spouses. The Ashley Madison hack scandal, the data dump of records of 32 million would-be adulterers, is apparently a surprise to some people. Not to me. Ever since I started online dating after my divorce, I’ve been blown away by the realization of just how many people, not all men, but probably primarily men, are in some way or another looking to cheat on a spouse. Based on the interactions I had over a few years, I’d break down these men (and I was only interacting with men) into a few categories:

  1. Saying they’re in open marriages – maybe they are, maybe they’re not.
  2. Feeling out the waters, maybe indulging in some online flirtation for titillation but probably wouldn’t go through with anything in person – probably
  3. Making their status as married men looking for an affair very clear upfront – not many of these
  4. Pretending to be single and actively cheating on spouses

I was a big Googler of men I was considering dating. Call me paranoid, suspicious, closed minded, whatever you want. The fact is, what I used to find by pretty simple Google searches of these men was pretty horrifying. There was the guy whose Tinder profile photo turned out to be his wedding photo up on Facebook, except with his wife cropped out for his dating profile. When I called him on his marital status, he of course initially tried to pretend otherwise. When I told him his wife’s name and where she lived (people, secure your Facebook pages for heaven’s sake), he finally spiraled through a bunch of lies: they were separated – I pointed out that in a Facebook post the week before she called him the love of her life and said that these 3 months of marriage – yes, they were newlyweds – had been the happiest of her life. Then he told me that he was planning on leaving her, she just didn’t know yet. Then, he told me she was pregnant.

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TIIME and SPACE. Richard Long. Arnolfini, Bristol until 15th November 2015

by Sue Hubbard

It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.

— Nietzsche

Arnolfini_Long_003Since early Christianity pilgrimages have been made to the Holy Land, to Rome, to Lourdes and Canterbury, by walking on foot. Buddhists, understanding that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, walk in mindfulness. The writer, Bruce Chatwin, wrote in his celebrated book, The Songlines, that “… a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet”. According to Aboriginal legend, the totemic ancestors – among them the great kangaroo and dream-snake – were first sung into existence, as was every feature of the natural world, as ancient Bushmen walked across the Australian continent.

The British artist Richard Long also walks. Other artists paint, sculpt or make installations but Long walks and as he does so he notices and records the minutiae of the landscape. Sometimes he stops to create interventions using the raw materials – stones and driftwood – found along the way as a means of articulating ideas about time and space. Through the act of walking connections are made to rivers and mountains, deserts and clouds, sky and ground. He touches the earth lightly, rarely re-tracing his steps. His interventions are tactful: a realignment of stones, a path trodden across scree, a track left in grass or water poured slowly onto rock. He has been walking for more than 40 years. His process is simple. He takes time, pays attention and records what he notices and hears, sometimes as text, sometimes in photographs so we, too, can share something of the experience. And although we might all engage with the natural world this way, the point is, we don't. He makes looking and seeing into art.

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Magic Prague

by Eric Byrd

RIPELLINO-AM_praga1Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923 – 1978) was a poet, Slavicist, translator of the great Russian Symbolists and Silver Agers (Bely's Petersburg into Italian, a transmutation as arduous and heroic as any of Ulysses, from what I've heard Nabokov say), and, most memorably, a servant of Czech letters whose devotion extended, in one instance, to the patient chaperoning of Věra Linhartová in her cognac-confused dipsomaniacal descent on Rome. Shortly after the Second War, Ripellino went to study in Prague, married a Czech woman, and lived in Prague for some years. He became a student of the city's hauntings and urban demonology, its “lugubrious aura of decay” and “smirk of eternal disillusionment.” Denied visas after the Soviet invasion in 1968, he joined the émigrés in a sympathetic semi-exile. Shut out of Prague, “perhaps forever,” Ripellino caught himself “wondering whether Prague exists or if she is an imaginary land,” and under an exilic gloom compounded of ill-health and nostalgia, “despair and second thoughts,” he composed – gathered – dreamt – Magic Prague (1973). Mournful anatomy, elegiac bricolage, rarefied and classless as the best books are; a civic enchantment (as St. Petersburg and Dublin had been enchanted), an ark of motifs, an “itinerary of the wondrous”:

How then can I write an exhaustive, well-ordered treatise like a detached and haughty scholar, suppressing my uneasiness, my restlessness with a rigor mortis of methodology and the fruitless discussions of disheartened formalists? No, I will weave a capricious book, an agglomeration of wonders, anecdotes, eccentric acts, brief intermezzos and mad encores, and I will be gratified if, in contrast to so much of the printed flotsam and jetsam surrounding us, it is not dominated by boredom…I will fill these pages with scraps of pictures and daguerreotypes, old etchings, prints purloined from the bottoms of chests, réclames, illustrations out of old periodicals, horoscopes, passages from books on alchemy and travel books printed in Gothic script, undated ghost stories, album leaves and keys to dreams: curios of a vanished culture.

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REVIEW: Song of love and loss: Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker

Muneeza Shamsie in Dawn:

55d6e13e1eaebLast winter, the Lahore-born poet Imtiaz Dharker consolidated her reputation as a mainstream British poet with her powerful and moving sixth collection, Over The Moon, which won her the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The award, which was established in 1934 for Commonwealth writers, has been given to eminent poets ranging from Robert Graves and Derek Walcott to Ted Hughes and Fleur Adcock, but Dharker is the first recipient of South Asian origin.

Over the Moon is a spellbinding work, dedicated to Dharker’s late husband, Simon Powell, with the words “not because you died, but how you live”. Her collection is a poetic communication with him in which absence and memory are enriched and intertwined by an interplay of music, light and sound to convey both life and loss and worlds beyond the corporeal: Powell permeates the book as an ever-present, beloved, living spirit. Dharker grew up in Glasgow, with a strong awareness of Pakistan which she visited with her family and later spent several years in Bombay. Her book begins with a sequence rooted in Dharker’s subcontinental heritage and the cultural symbiosis so intrinsic to her poetry, and indeed her sense of self. ‘Taal’ captures the movements of time through the whirling imagery of music and dance.

More here.

In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

3000Back in the fat years – two or three decades ago, when the “mainstream” media were booming – I was able to earn a living as a freelance writer. My income was meager and I had to hustle to get it, turning out about four articles – essays, reported pieces, reviews – a month at $1 or $2 a word. What I wanted to write about, in part for obvious personal reasons, was poverty and inequality, but I’d do just about anything – like, I cringe to say, “The Heartbreak Diet” for a major fashion magazine – to pay the rent.

It wasn’t easy to interest glossy magazines in poverty in the 1980s and 90s. I once spent two hours over an expensive lunch – paid for, of course, by a major publication – trying to pitch to a clearly indifferent editor who finally conceded, over decaf espresso and crème brulee, “OK, do your thing on poverty. But can you make it upscale?” Then there was the editor of a nationwide, and quite liberal, magazine who responded to my pitch for a story involving blue-collar men by asking, “Hmm, but can they talk?”

I finally got lucky at Harper’s, where fabled editor Lewis Lapham gave me an assignment that turned into a book, which in turn became a bestseller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Thanks to the royalties and subsequent speaking fees, at last I could begin to undertake projects without concern for the pay, just because they seemed important or to me. This was the writing life I had always dreamed of – adventurous, obsessively fascinating and sufficiently remunerative that I could help support less affluent members of my family.

Meanwhile, though I didn’t see it at first, the world of journalism as I had known it was beginning to crumble around me.

More here.