Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times:

There’s a Starbucks near where the orgies used to be, and although the aura of Bohemia is distinct, things aren’t as unhinged as they were 17 years ago when punkers, pornographers, anarchists, squatters and artists of all persuasions landed amid the rust and drizzle of this liberated city.

It seems an era from a scrapbook, a time of cheap rents when everyone with a brush and a bit of brio claimed a garret. Some were talented; many were not. But they roamed the east side of a fallen wall, scavenging ideas and materials to make art and revive a naughty, creative spirit that resided here before decades of fascism and the Cold War.

The zeitgeist these days is more commercial. Galleries serve sushi amid prattle about hedge funds and economic indexes. Berlin has become a production center for works sold from Portugal to Dubai. Rents are going up. The dilettantes have departed. The foreign purveyors have nestled in. What remains is less the innocent verve of the past than an atmosphere that — although aesthetically adventurous and more open to experimentation than in most cities — has matured with a shrewd eye toward marketing.

More here.

In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that’s preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush’s “history,” like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.

David Halberstam in Vanity Fair:

We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Federico da Montefeltro has one of the most memorable noses in Western art. Thanks to the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, whose portrait of Federico is a prize of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the abrupt crook of the duke’s profile is a staple of art-history texts the world over. Only the disfigured nose of the grandfather in Ghirlandaio’s Old Man with a Young Boy (ca. 1490) and, perhaps, Rembrandt’s tuberous proboscis can vie with that of Federico.

A different side view of the duke can be seen in Federico da Montefeltro and His Library, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum. Double Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Son Guidobaldo (ca. 1475) is the show’s centerpiece. There’s still no definitive attribution for the painting, but whoever created the picture did justice to the nobleman’s nose, making it part and parcel of Federico’s regal bearing. Sitting upright in his armor, he reads a tome by Pope Gregory and wears an expression that is equal parts erudition, refinement and arrogant power. The painting may be adulatory, but it does expose the conscious contrivance behind Federico’s image.

more from the NY Observer here.

Whether they realize it or not, Jolie and Pitt have wandered into the fraught zone of black hair care, particularly as it concerns black women. For centuries, the identities of African-American women have been bound up in what they’ve chosen to do with their hair: straighten it, get extensions, get a press ‘n’ curl, get a Jheri curl (yes, it’s still an option), get cornrows, grow dreadlocks, twist it, wear a weave, wear a wig, or just leave it natural. It’s a prideful question asked in the poorest homes and the toniest houses — a question from which no black female living in America is immune. Oprah Winfrey might be able to do anything she wants with her hair today, but when she first started out, she had to face the same dilemma as a lot of black women breaking into TV: whether or not to get rid of the kinks.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In the 1989 poem “Golden Wasp,” Tomas Tranströmer provides a telling remark about his project: “We’re in the church of keeping-silence, of piety according to no letter.” Tranströmer’s particular piety requires only receptivity as an active principle of personal engagement with the world. It places images together in unexpected and beautiful ways and holds them steady enough to create unmistakable tension, even if it doesn’t always tell the reader what that tension is for.

Tranströmer, a psychotherapist as well as a poet, remains one of Sweden’s most widely translated and discussed living poets. His shortest poems are his most characteristic, and they may be his best. He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object. Off-kilter and mystical, many of these poems approach the surreal and have an American parallel with Emily Dickinson’s slant of light: “There’s a tree walking around in the rain, / it rushes past us in the pouring grey. / It has an errand. It gathers life / out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard” (from “The Tree and the Sky”).

more from Boston Review here.

From Psychology Today:

Excerpted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, to be published by Perigree in September 2007.

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex. What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all. So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates.

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media. Women’s desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

While familiar images of King are commonplace in 1960s montage sequences, Hollywood has yet to make the definitive King biopic. Indeed, of all the social, cultural and political touchstones of the baby boom generation — World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War, Watergate, feminism, gay rights, AIDS and all manner of political coverups — the civil rights movement has yet to be the subject of a pivotal, defining feature film.

That the story of the most important social and political moment in this country’s history has gone untold in its dominant narrative art form is shocking on any number of levels (one being that among the movement’s most effective tactics was creating media images). Here is a chapter of American life whose legacy and ramifications — from Don Imus’s idea of humor to the decisions of the current Supreme Court — are still deeply, if painfully, felt. It’s a chapter filled with charismatic characters and compelling stories. It’s a chapter that — considering the ever-increasing number of bankable African American stars — seems not just worthy of Hollywood’s attention but positively ideal for a major movie event.

Ask studio executives why this is, and this is what you’ll hear: Black-themed films don’t play overseas. African American actors can’t open movies. American filmgoers don’t like dramas. Multi-character historical dramas are just too expensive.

More here.

Andras Kallai. Fat Barbie. 2006.

Terracotta, plastic.

More on the current Venice Biennale here, here, and here.

Max McGuinness at The Dubliner:

There was a young man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
“Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.”

So goes the one lasting Irish contribution to the history of philosophy. This ditty by Ronald Knox is a paraphrase of the bizarre thoughts of Bishop Berkeley, who held court in Trinity during the early 18th Century. Berkeley was an idealist, more specifically an immaterialist, who denied the existence of the material world. All that truly existed for the Bishop were the contents of our own tiny minds – our perceptions. This view is summarised in the maxim esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived. Thence the bewilderment of the young man in Knox’s doggerel, anxious no doubt that were he to take his eye off his wallet, it would indeed disappear. Fear not. As long as God is around to keep an eye on things, they’ll stay right where they are. So you’d better believe in God, right? Or else He might just stop watching over that pad of yours in Ranelagh…and puff! It vanishes when you trot out to buy a pint of milk.

So next time some moon-faced spelt-chewer murmurs, “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one’s around, does it make a sound?” (‘Deepshit’ Chopra pseudo-spirituality), you can retort, “‘Twas a Mick who thought o’ that one, so ‘twas.” And there, alas, is the end; no Irishman has been so clever since. Idealism may be crackers but it is still frightfully hard to refute.

More here.

Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer:

Did Shakespeare work as a Catholic spy during his ‘missing years’, between 1586 and 1592? Or did he simply lie low and teach in a Welsh school for a little extra money? Perhaps, as one school of thought has it, he joined a troupe of travelling players, or even enjoyed a prolonged holiday in Italy.

Each of these rival theories has been proposed by historians and academics over the last decade alongside another serious proposition: that Shakespeare spent this time working for the English embassy in Spain.

A new Spanish film has developed this solution to the biographical mystery and come up with a plotline that the producers argue is entirely feasible and will also shed fresh light on the playwright’s creative process. William and Miguel, to be released in Britain later this year, stars Will Kemp, the British actor and former classical ballet talent, in the role of Shakespeare.

More here.

Go here.

Amitava Kumar in his eponymous blog:

This is a stunning film. A visually rich report on the costs of development that is effective because Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, which serve as the focus of this documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, reveal that industry can be as monumental and awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon. In fact, the point of the movie is to show that there is no Grand Canyon left any more, and, what you have instead, when you go to a place like China, are giant mountains of discarded computer terminals sent back as waste from the rest of the world. It is not an unending herd of running antelope that stretches to the horizon–it is workers in bright uniforms leaving the endless rows of worktables. (And, in minutes, all are gone except for one who has fallen asleep out of exhaustion.)

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

The large number of candidates running for president in both parties splinters voter support. Two unfortunate consequences of this are that good second-tier candidates often quickly fall by the wayside and that not so impressive first-tier candidates are anointed early by the prevailing poobahs and pundits.

A partial solution to the first problem of losing good second-tier candidates prematurely is to use a method different than the standard plurality way of determining winners in the various primaries and caucuses. There are many.

Voters might, for example, rank their favorite candidates, giving, say, three points to their first choice, two to their second, and one to their third, and the one with the highest point total would be the winner. In this way voters could give support to both Obama and Clinton, say, or indulge their secret liking for Ron Paul.

Alternatively, voters might vote for as many of the candidates as they wish and the one with the highest approval percentage would be the winner. The principle of “one person, one vote” might be replaced with “one candidate, one vote.” Scenarios in which, for example, two liberal candidates split the liberal vote, say 32 percent to 28 percent, and allow a conservative candidate to win with 40 percent of the vote would not develop. This method might favor consensus candidates and work against polarizing ones.

More here.

The thing about your new MX-207 Digital Video Disc Player is, it doesn’t like you. Your two-tone Frigidaire FC-109 refrigerator with built-in icemaker? Your GE Ultraquiet dishwasher with four separate wash settings? They’re pretty OK with you. But the sleek matte-black progressive-scan work of art still sitting in the styrofoam packaging at your feet, it’s not so forgiving. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that nobody likes to be told what to do, and this guy’s on the receiving end of a 2.1-gigahertz, variable-channel wireless remote control 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365.25 days a year.

Point. Click. Watch.

Point. Click. Watch.

more from McSweeney’s here.

For a book that consists so largely of summary accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its almost equally surprising organisation. Two or three very large and very general claims frame the book: that politics is a form of religion, that apocalyptic fantasies have been the stuff of Western politics since the Middle Ages and continue to be so now, that the restoration of peace requires a combination of political realism on the one hand, and on the other an acceptance of the need to accommodate in public life the non-rational needs that religion satisfies.

Within that framework, Gray takes aim at a wide range of targets. By no means everything he says is plausible, but even at his most unpersuasive, he is invigorating. Readers of a certain age will be reminded of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, but where Cohn wrote in detail about the Anabaptist revolt led by Thomas Müntzer to draw parallels with Communist totalitarianism, Gray skates lightly over not only medieval millenarianism but also twentieth-century Communism and Nazism in order to concentrate on our present discontents. Not the madness of George III, but the utopian follies of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld provide the main focus of the book.

more from Literary Review here.

An absurdist of outrage, Moore has attacked corporations that destroy cities by closing down local plants (“Roger & Me”); a gun-happy culture that makes arms easily available (“Bowling for Columbine”); an Administration that begins a war without sufficient cause (“Fahrenheit 9/11”). He has stalked corporate officials and congressmen, planted his bulk before them and asked mock-naïve questions, and his provocations, at their best, have smoked out hypocrites and liars. But this confrontation is different. Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank. And the insensitivity isn’t much relieved by the piece of whimsy that comes next: Moore and the rescue workers (the other sick voyagers having mysteriously disappeared) wander onto the streets of Havana and ask some guys playing dominoes if there’s a doctor nearby. They go to a pharmacy and then to a hospital, where the Americans are admitted and treated. Few people in Moore’s audience are likely to be displeased that they receive help from a Communist system. But what is the point of Moore’s fiction of a desperate, wandering quest for medicine on the streets, as if he hadn’t known in advance that Cuba has free health care? Why not tell us what really happened on the trip—for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?

more from The New Yorker (for the sake of debate, PS I haven’t seen the film) here.

From The Boston Globe:

Man of the people or America ‘s very own Great Satan? Wherever you stand, you have to admit Michael Moore has a gift for making a point. Perhaps that’s understating the matter. When the celebrated (and reviled) filmmaker pulls up in a fishing boat outside the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and announces via bullhorn, “I have three 9/11 rescue workers! They just want medical attention! The same you’re giving Al-Qaeda !,” we are witnessing a master gadfly at the top of his game. Whether we can’t breathe because we’re laughing too hard or because we feel like we’ve been punched in the gut is moot.

“Sicko” is Moore’s best, most focused movie to date — much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous “Fahrenheit 9/11 ” — and not just because the director turns the dial down on his own faux-folksy persona. Moore has a thesis he can get his arms around this time. Resolved: The US health-care system is a disaster, built to punish the sick and enrich corporations. Other countries do it better — a lot better. Why is that, and how do we change? It’s only on the last point that Moore falters.

More here. (I saw the movie yesterday and my conclusion: it is every American’s civic duty to rush to the nearest theater and see it.)

From The National Geographic:

Instead of thriving on water, extraterrestrial organisms might live in a sea of liquid methane. Or instead of getting energy from the sun, they might thrive on hydrochloric acid. These possibilities could revolutionize future space missions in search of life elsewhere in the solar system, says the report, issued today by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report concludes that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called “weird” life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn’t.

Instead of dispatching spacecraft to dig into the subsurface of Mars, considered a prime candidate for primitive life because of its watery past, the report says the probes may have better luck on Saturn’s moon Titan, which has seas of liquid methane and ethane. In fact, the report concluded that Titan is the most likely candidate in the solar system for weird life. “It’s a carbon world, so there’s plenty of different kinds of carbon compounds there, and the possibility is that there may be the carbon compounds that make up life,” said John Baross, an oceanographer at Seattle’s University of Washington, who lead the report team.

More here.

Bertolt Brecht has a famous poem from 1933, “Germany, pale mother” (Fassbinder later used the words as the title for a film). The poem has an epigraph: “Let others talk about their shame, I will talk about mine.” Grass has done the opposite: he has carefully incubated his particular shame for 60 years, all the while encouraging others to talk about theirs. Now, possibly threatened by its imminent disclosure – the relevant documents have surfaced lately in Grass’s Stasi file – or in an attempt to keep some sort of “authorial” control over it, he has published it, and impertinently required readers to pay for it, the only significant revelation in a long and miserably bad book. This lifelong silence, and the manner of his breaking it, have hurt Grass’s reputation in ways from which it will never recover, and which, depressingly, he seems not even to have understood.

more from The Guardian here.

IF there’s such a thing as an “old soul,” then W.S. Merwin surely is one. This has been evident over a long career, in his questioning, vatic voice and dreamy, meticulously crafted poetry. It’s clear in his poems’ commitment to the big mysteries and their explorations of archetypal disquiet, infinite bereftness and protective tenderness toward Mother Earth. You can even discern glimmers of Merwin’s abiding identity as post-Presbyterian Zen poet and channeler of ancient paradoxes by comparing two iconic jacket photographs of this lionized writer, now nearing 80.

The early one shows a tousle-haired, vigorous dude in work shirt and jeans. Unapologetic Vietnam War protester, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award conferred by W.H. Auden (another poet apparently not fond of his Christian names), translator from a handful of romance languages, Merwin gazes straight into the camera’s lens. Clear-eyed and calm, he’s not exactly smiling. His mouth sits a bit crooked, which makes him appear quizzical. His expression suggests that while observing the current moment, he is also navigating strange interior lands.

more from the LA Times here.