Alan Gilbert reviews Tino Sehgal’s New York solo debut, in The Village Voice:

Like many Sehgal titles,This situation both identifies the piece and literally describes its enactment. At random moments, the players flatly state in round- robin fashion: “Tino Sehgal.” “This situation.” “2007.” Previously “shown” in Berlin (where Sehgal lives), it’s the first New York City solo exhibition by the young global-art-world star. Much of Sehgal’s work combines his earlier studies in dance and political economy. The results are pieces such as This is good (2001), which required gallery staff to repeat the title while waving their arms and hopping on one leg; This success, also titled This failure (2007), in which children played games in a bare gallery, stopping to declare whether or not they thought the work was a success or failure; This objective of that object (2004), which featured five people chanting: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion”; and This is right (2003), in which two kids describe Sehgal pieces available for purchase.

With its refusal to produce a material object or employ self-documentation (no photographs, no videos; the gallery won’t even distribute a printed press release!), Sehgal’s work might seem to function as an obvious critique of a market-driven art world gone gaga over commodities. Yet Sehgal’s work is for sale—though only through an oral transaction made in the presence of a notary. As Sehgal declares in interviews, he’s not interested in starving to prove a point. Besides, his interest seems less in overthrowing a system, whether aesthetic or economic, than in undermining it from within—however slowly, i.e., one word, one conversation, one social interaction at a time. But perhaps this form of institutional tectonic-plate-shifting is what’s required for fundamental change to take place. Or maybe it’s a subtly subversive talking cure for whole ecologies—artistic, human, and natural—damaged by overproduction and material consumption.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

From The New York Times:

James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel Prize, raised a storm recently when a British newspaper quoted him saying that black Africans are not as intelligent as whites. But his own brilliant DNA seems to blur the lines. A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis. “This came up as a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Stefansson said in an interview, “especially as a sequel to his utterly inappropriate comments about Africans.”

After the news of Dr. Watson’s genetic ancestry was published in The Times of London on Sunday, much of the British media played the news for a lark, with headlines like “Revealed: Scientist Who Sparked Racism Row Has Black Genes” and “DNA Pioneer James Watson Is Blacker Than He Thought.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Thierry Heidmann’s office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of genetic catastrophe. Files devoted to the world’s most horrifying infectious diseases fill the cabinets and line the shelves. There are thick folders for smallpox, Ebola virus, and various forms of influenza. SARS is accounted for, as are more obscure pathogens, such as feline leukemia virus, Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, and simian foamy virus, which is endemic in African apes. H.I.V., the best-known and most insidious of the viruses at work today, has its own shelf of files. The lab’s beakers, vials, and refrigerators, secured behind locked doors with double-paned windows, all teem with viruses. Heidmann, a meaty, middle-aged man with wild eyebrows and a beard heavily flecked with gray, has devoted his career to learning what viruses might tell us about AIDS and various forms of cancer. “This knowledge will help us treat terrible diseases,” he told me, nodding briefly toward his lab. “Viruses can provide answers to questions we have never even asked.”

More here. (Thanks to Simrit and Matt)

Heather McHugh in Poetry:

Some etymologists give the Greek “to see for oneself” as the source for the English word “autopsy.” An alternative, “seeing into oneself,” is hard to overlook when one studies the work of the sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist Vesalius. I gaze on these écorché figures with an exquisitely doubled (or divided) sense of looking.

Take the suffering skeleton (1), for instance. Very detailed, down to the tailbone, an excruciated figure: wailing away under the auspices of the clinician. But the artist has been at work in this presentation too. For the facts are mysteriously informed by feeling, and as the brain can make us feel, so too the heart can make us think.

Vesalius had his drawings done by Titian and his studio. (Some scholars attribute the work to only one artist, Calcar. For economy I’ll refer to Titian himself, since I hold him responsible for his atelier.) There is some graphic footage here. The images rivet and reveal us as no list of facts could do. And the shocks are carnally compounded when (in the muscleman series) flesh adds its suggestiveness to gesture, yet overall, thanks to the depth of Titian’s gifts, the images cannot remain merely voyeuristic.

More here.  [Thanks to Thomas Zipp.]

From Christine Klocek-Lim’s brilliant site November Sky (which has recently undergone a redesign, so do go and check it out):

How to perceive red
Christine Klocek-Lim

Consider the persistence of memory,
how once seen, a red moon lingers
with a cinnamon tingle.
Remember the black widow’s
crimson hourglass in the garage
behind your cherry-bright bicycle.
Conjure the blood-lost wrench
of miscarriage: how the rose-
leather sofa, too soft for sorrow,
held the cast of a ruddy sunset.

Then there’s the leaden weight of rust,
how the muffler lost its battle with snow
and salt and dropped unexpectedly
because the pipes were rotten.
Your scarlet gloves sponged
the road’s grime and never washed clean.
Bleach was not a good idea. Fuschia
is not your favorite color.

Recollect the paint of death
on the ocher mummy, her curled
fingers stopped over the heart
with tragic calm. You could
not bear the quiet and fled
to the paintings, found Rubens’
Samson and Delilah.
There is no forgetting
the abandon of reason for passion.

Witness the autumn leaves dropped
like garnets on the front step,
how Mars rose in the east at dusk.
See the cardinal poised on the sill,
vermilion plumage puffed as thick
as your son’s maroon scarf
against your arm.
Consider the persistence of love,
how, once felt, it’s coral glow lingers
in memory’s quiet room, how red
is the color of the heart.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I have a particularly vivid memory of a childhood Christmas during which my sister would stalk the Christmas tree day after day counting presents. On the final day she made a stack in the middle of the room. On one side were the presents with her name on them and on the other, those with mine. She tallied them up. The number was not to her liking. I can still picture the stunned calm as she counted and counted again. But there was nothing to be done. It was clear that my pile was two presents larger than hers. I think it was the “two” that really bothered her. A difference of one is one thing, a difference of two is quite another. When there was nothing more to be done she gathered herself up, collected her faculties, as it were, and then proceeded to throw an epic and violent fit. Right there. She screamed and raged, she tore paper and hurled objects. Her little face took on the specific pallor and twist of mythical figures, semi-human things on frescoes buried in ruins—the shards of lost time. She dashed her head, as only she could, on the kitchen floor, her beautiful blond curls bouncing up and down against the tile and mixing with the tears and saliva. She grunted things that couldn’t be understood. I say again that this is one of the clearest memories of my childhood. She was magnificent, glorious, as she took up arms against a sea of troubles. She was having no bullshit whatsoever. She wanted the presents that were due her.

More here.

“The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world,” Tony Blair, then prime minister of England, famously said in 2001. “But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, that scar will become deeper and angrier still.” Today, the world is as focused on Africa as it has been in a long time, with heads of state, rock stars, movie stars, and philanthropic billionaires all publicly pledging themselves to the cause. And yet the scar appears deeper and angrier than ever.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy. The rebellion in Sudan’s Darfur region keeps threatening to flare back up and inflame neighboring Chad. Somalia’s government is barely holding on against Islamic rebels. Zimbabwe collapses further and further into economic ruin and political thuggery. According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS.

It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Lawrence Krauss in the WSJ on science and the candidates and calls for a debate on science (click here to call on the candidates to debate science):

Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.

Apparently many Americans agreed with him, according to polls taken shortly after the debate. But lack of interest in the scientific literacy of our next president does not mean that the issue is irrelevant. Popular ambivalence may rather reflect the fact that most Americans are scientifically illiterate. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that 25% of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun.

Our president will thus have to act in part as an “educator in chief” as well as commander in chief. Someone who is not scientifically literate will find it difficult to fill this role.

This summer in Aspen, Colo., a group of scientists, journalists and business people convened at a “science summit” to discuss ways to build a growing awareness of the importance of scientific issues in government. A working group was convened to explore ways that the scientific and business communities might work together to ensure that science becomes an issue in the 2008 campaign.

Jessie  Emkic in Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition):

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in Dylan’s life and work. Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (2005) chronicles Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966. And Todd Haynes’ new movie I’m Not There (2007) shows Dylan from various perspectives; it is a construction and deconstruction of Dylan’s life and character that uses a multiple storyline structure to express his complexity. Haynes started research for the movie when he left New York to live in Portland, Oregon, and bought an anthology of American folk music in Kansas on his drive across the country. Dylan’s early Columbia recordings had touched a nerve: by night Haynes wrote his earlier movie Far From Heaven (2002) and by day he listened to Dylan’s music, reading interviews and books about him. Haynes called it a “fresh flood of change”.

Haynes uses several parallel stories to describe Dylan’s life in I’m Not There. The inspiration to use a different actor for the part in each story came from Allen Ginsberg, who once described Dylan as a “collection of American archetypes”. Ginsberg, dissident poet, passionate Vietnam war opponent and Dylan’s friend, was one of the few openly homosexual celebrities of the time. Haynes claims that Dylan “loved Ginsberg, was completely unthreatened by Ginsberg’s homosexuality and probably had a huge crush on him.” But Dylan was also known to have made very homophobic remarks when he became a born-again Christian in 1980. “Dylan fully occupied each of these mentalities,” said Haynes, “and was committed to them totally at the time, but he would also discard them.”

In The Guardian:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

by Gunnar Ekelof (trans. by Robert Bly)

I do my best alone at night
alone with the secrets my lamp has
set free from the day that asks too much
bent over a labor never finished
the combinations of solitaire. What then
if the solitaire always defeats me
I have the whole night. Somewhere
chance is sleeping in the cards. Somewhere
a truth has been said once already
then why worry? Can it ever
be said again? In my absentmindedness
I will listen to the wind at night
to the flutes of the Corybants
and to the speech of the men who wander forever

From Scientific American:

Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.”

“We believe that this can be explained by an increase in the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size,” he adds.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Sven Steinmo.]

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Every year, the average American adult drinks the equivalent of 38 six-packs of beer, a dozen bottles of wine and two quarts of distilled spirits like gin, rum, single malt Scotch, or vodka that aspires to single malt status through the addition of flavors normally associated with yogurt or bubble bath.

Humans may have an added reason to be drawn to alcohol. Throughout antiquity, available water was likely to be polluted with cholera and other dangerous microbes, and the tavern may well have been the safest watering hole in town. Not only is alcohol a mild antiseptic, but the process of brewing alcoholic beverages often requires that the liquid be boiled or subjected to similarly sterilizing treatments. “It’s possible that people who drank fermented beverages tended to live longer and reproduce more” than did their teetotaling peers, Dr. McGovern said, “which may partly explain why people have a proclivity to drink alcohol.”

More here.

Jessica Hupp in Travel Hacker:

1. Anchor Brewing Company: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company offers a beer experience that you just don’t see often these days. It’s made in a gorgeous brewery modeled after traditional, historic brewhouses. Because of this, each brew is “virtually handmade,” a quality that beer lovers are sure to appreciate. Their most famous beer is Anchor Steam, which has a uniquely rich flavor. Make a reservation to tour their brewery and see how beer is made in this brewery that embraces the brewhouses of old.
2. Full Sail Brewing Company: The “specialists in the liquid refreshment arts” at Full Sail are “stoked to brew,” and it shows through their beers. This employee owned brewery in Oregon is home to award-winning beers like the Full Sail Amber, IPA, LTD and Wassail, which all picked up a gold medal at this year’s World Beer Championships. Even better, the brewery is located (and open for tours) in Hood River Oregon, a gorgeous little surf town that’s a favorite of windsurfers and skiiers alike.

More here.  [Thanks to Amy Quinn.]

Asif Farrukhi in Dawn:

Whether you think of Lyari as Karachi’s Harlem or Harlem as a Lyari in New York, for Noon Meem Danish places provide a context but not a definition. ‘I am what I am’; he explains his signature with a characteristic mixture of pride and humility. Off-beat and defiant, he was a familiar figure in the literary landscape of the ’70s and ’80s. His poems expressing solidarity with the Negritude and the plight of blacks all over the world were referred to in Dr Firoze Ahmed’s social topography of the African-descent inhabitants of Pakistan. Karachi’s poet Noon Meem Danish now makes his home in the New York state of mind, and feels that he is very much in his element there. It is where I met him again after a gap of many years, as he came to the Columbia University to attend a talk I was giving. We made our way afterwards to the student centre, talking freely in the relaxed and informal atmosphere.

Noor Mohammed was born in Lyari in 1958. He received his early education in Okhai Memon School in Kharadar and soon metamorphosed into Noon Meem Danish, the poet.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Yuri Kageyama in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic. But Toyota’s new robot plays a pretty solid “Pomp and Circumstance” on the violin.

The five-foot-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.

Toyota Motor Corp. has already shown robots that roll around to work as guides and have fingers dexterous enough to play the trumpet.

Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe said robotics will be a core business for the company in coming years. Toyota will test out its robots at hospitals, Toyota-related facilities and other places starting next year, he said. And the company hopes to put what it calls “partner robots” to real use by 2010, he said.

“We want to create robots that are useful for people in everyday life,” he told reporters at a Toyota showroom in Tokyo.

Watanabe and other company officials said robotics was a natural extension of the automaker’s use of robots in manufacturing, as well the development of technology for autos related to artificial intelligence, such as sensors and pre-crash safety systems.

More here.

Paul Chan. 1st Light. 2005.

Digital animated projection onto gallery floor, 14 minutes.

The still image of course cannot do justice to the power of the video, which is visually beautiful even if the political message is dark. Do try to see it if possible. Permanent collection, ICA, Boston.

More here and here.

Over at bloggingheads.tv, Joshua Cohen and Glenn Loury discuss religion.