Yippies met with Miami Beach’s glad-handing liberal police chief, who laid out the ground rules: “Fellas, I don’t believe in trying to enforce laws that can’t be enforced. If you guys smoke a little pot, I’m not going to send my men in after you.” They got the same welcome from Mayor Charles Hall. “Call me Chuck,” he said, before showing off his print of John and Yoko’s wedding day—“It’s the original, you know”—and offering them the city’s golf courses as campsites. When the Yippies staged their first march to the convention center, “Chuck” arrived to try to lead it. Abbie and Jerry were celebrities. Celebrity was power in 1972. Abbie and Jerry were all about the new youth vote. Youth was power, too.

At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival, “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?”

more from Bookforum here.

///
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time

///

From Nature:

If snakes strike terror in your toddler’s heart, he might still grow to be brave. A tendency toward fearfulness does have genetic underpinnings, but those shift several times as children become adults, a study has found. The worries of adolescents differ from those of young children — fear of the dark gives way to squeamishness about blood in a well-documented developmental progression. Now, psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond and his colleagues have found that the genetic factors that leave a person prone to fear also shift during development.

To tease apart the effect of genes and upbringing, the researchers tracked 2,490 Swedish twins as they aged from 8 to 20 years old, asking them to answer questions sent by mail. The twins were quizzed on whether they were afraid of 13 potentially terrifying phenomena, including lightning, dentists, spiders and heights. At every age a child was more likely to be fearful if their identical twin was too. Fraternal twins also shared a tendency towards fearfulness but the link was less strong, indicating a genetic component to fearfulness.

More here.

Over at his NYT blog (followed with some heated comments):

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act, a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this theory that I thought had run its course.

The worldwide religious revival may be a reaction to the disenchantment of the world. Sven-Eric Liedman looks at the possibility of an enchanted materialism, in Eurozine:

The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed, that all of life’s and society’s integral components be ingested into the same process. In effect, that construction proved early on to not hold water. Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union managed to combine stern dictatorship with economic, technological, and scientific progress. The People’s Republic of China embodies a ready example of the same thing today.

Thus, the great development project that the Enlightenment philosophers once launched does not appear to be cast in a single slab. One might say that contains a hard component – the hard enlightenment – consisting of science (at least the exact one), technology, the economy, and modern rational administration; these elements are indeed closely connected. In these fields, the development process has persisted. For us, it goes without saying that today’s computers are better than yesterday’s, but that they will be surpassed by tomorrow’s. Each research grant is more or less expected to render a significant scientific breakthrough. Economists take for granted that a country’s GNP will grow each year. If it does not, something must be wrong.

Within this hard enlightenment, when considered singularly, the enchantment of modernity remains; that which cannot be solved today can be solved tomorrow.

But there are also the soft parts to development, where no advances can be taken for granted or considered natural.

In The Believer:

WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling—the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara—The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling I’ve seen a feature, a narrative feature film with an inventive narrative structure and with a sort of ambience created that you only normally create in a feature film, in an inventive, fictionalized film.

The new film that I saw, Standard Operating Procedure, feels as if you had completely invented characters, and yet they are not. We know the photos, and we know the events and we know the dramas behind it. And yet I always walk out feeling that I have seen a feature film, a fiction film.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. [To moderator] Werner certainly shares this. It’s the perverse element in filmmaking. Werner in his “Minnesota Manifesto” starts talking about ecstatic truth. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

But what I do understand in his films is a kind of ecstatic absurdity, things that make you question the nature of reality, of the universe in which we live. We think we understand the world around us. We look at a Herzog film, and we think twice. And I always, always have revered that element. Ecstatic absurdity: it’s the confrontation with meaninglessness.

I was talking with Ron Rosenbaum, a friend of mine, who had just finished a book on Shakespeare. We were talking about the meaning of meaninglessness. Is there such a thing? And I would say: yes. Werner’s work could be considered an extended essay on the meaning of meaninglessness.

It’s time to rewrite the book on Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” This 1988 film has long been considered a footnote in Hollywood history, an extraordinary financial boondoggle that went millions over budget and was shut down by a bond company before landing with a resounding thud in the handful of theaters that showed it. If it’s remembered at all, it’s for Uma Thurman’s brief, nude appearance, rising from the sea as Venus on the half shell.

Now that it’s been released in a special 20th-anniversary DVD by Sony Pictures, it is clear that “Baron Munchausen” is one of the most visionary and accomplished movies of the 1980s. The third in Mr. Gilliam’s trilogy that covered childhood (“Time Bandits”), middle age (“Brazil”), and finally old age (“Munchausen”), it tells the story of a city under siege by invading Turks. In the midst of the bombardment, a troop of actors performs a stage version of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” which is interrupted by the real Baron Munchausen, who insists that only he can end the war since he started it when he stole the Sultan’s treasury during a wager.

more from the NY Sun here.

Baudelaire wrote in 1846: ““A portrait is a model complicated by an artist.” Many a poor painting and studio photo tried capturing our highly pictorial friend, Walt Whitman. It seems HE preempted all visual invention. That beard, the head massively seaworthy as Neptune’s, a tendency to have himself photographed about as often as most men get haircuts. Those self-consciously unstructured workmen’s clothes, chosen by a closet dandy. With characteristic grace, he usually found something to praise in each bad picture of him.

Today we speak of the poet’s only painted portrait that convinces us we’re really with him. It shoehorns us into conversation at the front-side of his wheelchair. He is sixty-nine, half paralyzed but this picture flatters us into thinking we’ve just somehow made him laugh. Fact is, the portrait most resembles the poet in its being so invitational. The picture becomes, in the end, Whitman’s collaboration. With us. And, of course, the painter.

Thomas Eakins started this work in November of 1886 and finished it only the following April. Had Whitman’s health permitted, there would surely be many other Eakins likenesses of Walt. The old man was dying. Soon he could not even ‘sit’, couldn’t remain propped upright up for the countless hours Eakins always required. So the young painter hurried home, bringing his camera. A good thing. Thomas Hardy proved as great a poet as novelist; and Eakins was our first brilliant American artist equally expressive with a camera and a brush.

more from The American Scholar here.

In Outlook India, Aamir Khan on why he is running with the Olympic torch in the wake of China’s recent crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjaing.

Over the last few days I have received several requests not to participate in the Olympic Torch Relay. Requests through members of my family, personal friends, people who are associated with the Tibetan struggle, and my blog. I have gone through and read each and every letter, message and post pertaining to this issue.

I would like to state that I have the highest regard and respect for the struggle that the people of Tibet are going through. I completely empathize with them. Similarly, I have the highest respect and regard for the struggle that the people of Iraq, Kashmiri Pundits who have been displaced, Kashmiris in general, and the people of Palestine, are going through. I have named above just a few instances of human rights violations. Across the world, and indeed within our own country too, there are several instances and examples of atrocities and human rights violation, which are still continuing. I categorically state that I am absolutely against any form of violence, and certainly I am deeply upset whenever the basic rights of human beings are violated anywhere in the world.

However, I feel that the Olympic Games do not belong to China.

It’s hard to imagine another member of the United Nations Security Council, for instance, feeling threatened by Bjork. But when the big-voiced Icelandic pixie shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” from the concert stage in Shanghai – nearly two weeks before any hint of the violence that would roil Lhasa – the official Xinhua news agency reported that the Ministry of Culture would “investigate” her performance, which had “not only broken Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feeling of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist.”

China is one of the very small number of places on the planet where the political impulses of rock musicians are taken seriously by politicians. Last year, when Sonic Youth played Beijing, the group’s handpicked opening act, the local Carsick Cars, mysteriously failed to appear. The best guess afterward was that the government had blocked the performance as an oblique act of retaliation against Sonic Youth for having appeared in a Free Tibet concert.

more from The Boston Globe here.

In the NYT, John Tierney looks at the issue:

For half a century, experimenters have been using what’s called the free-choice paradigm to test our tendency to rationalize decisions. This tendency has been reported hundreds of times and detected even in animals. Last year I wrote a column about an experiment at Yale involving monkeys and M&Ms.

The Yale psychologists first measured monkeys’ preferences by observing how quickly each monkey sought out different colors of M&Ms. After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey — say, red, blue and green — the researchers gave the monkey a choice between two of them.

If the monkey chose, say, red over blue, it was next given a choice between blue and green. Nearly two-thirds of the time it rejected blue in favor of green, which seemed to jibe with the theory of choice rationalization: Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice).

But Dr. Chen says that the monkey’s distaste for blue can be completely explained with statistics alone. He says the psychologists wrongly assumed that the monkey began by valuing all three colors equally.

…
Monet’s Waterlilies
Robert Hayden

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Thanks to Fred Lapides

…

From Nature:

They say that laughter is the best medicine, and now research is beginning to prove that this adage might be truer than we think. Laughter has long been known to make people happier, but a new study has shown that even anticipating a good laugh is good for your health. When stressed out, the body constricts blood vessels, elevates the production of potentially damaging stress hormones, and raises blood pressure. Short periods of stress are normal and not dangerous, but over long periods of time stress weakens the immune system and makes heart problems more likely.

In 2005 researchers found that laughing lowers blood pressure, but the biochemical mechanism within the body remained unclear. Now Lee Berk at Loma Linda University in California and his colleagues have revealed part of the answer. Back in 2006, Berk and his colleagues found that merely anticipating laughter boosted the production of mood-elevating hormones called β-endorphins and the immunity-enhancing human growth hormone by 27% and 87%, respectively. This led the team to wonder whether the link between lowered blood pressure and laughter could be the result of laughter somehow interfering with the production of stress hormones.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year. Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint. “Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived.

In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted “Unravelling Bolero” a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form. Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

More here.

Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.

When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

more from the NY Times here.

Damian Kulash, Jr. in the New York Times:

Recently, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust task force invited me to be the lead witness for its hearing on “net neutrality.” I’ve collaborated with the Future of Music Coalition, and my band, OK Go, has been among the first to find real success on the Internet — our songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times (orders of magnitude above our CD sales) — so the committee thought I’d make a decent spokesman for up-and-coming musicians in this new era of digital pandemonium.

I’m flattered, of course, but it makes you wonder if Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner sit around arguing who was listening to Vampire Weekend first.

If you haven’t been following the debate on net neutrality, you’re not alone. The details of the issue can lead into realms where only tech geeks and policy wonks dare to tread, but at root there’s a pretty simple question: How much control should network operators be allowed to have over the information on their lines?

Most people assume that the Internet is a democratic free-for-all by nature — that it could be no other way. But the openness of the Internet as we know it is a byproduct of the fact that the network was started on phone lines. The phone system is subject to “common carriage” laws, which require phone companies to treat all calls and customers equally. They can’t offer tiered service in which higher-paying customers get their calls through faster or clearer, or calls originating on a competitor’s network are blocked or slowed.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Charles Kupchan on what Obama may mean for the rest of the world, throw away threat to bomb Pakistan not withstanding, in Reset Dialogues on Civilization:

How do you explain the fact that Obama seems to be the favourite of the “rest of the world”?

Part of it is that he would represent a new vision of the United States, one which is very multicultural and multiethnic. At a time in global politics in which globalization and migration are raising concerns about multiethnicity and social cohesion people would see Obama’s election as a sign of progress on that front. And also there is a widespread discontent with President Bush and its two terms in the White House and there is a belief – whether justified or not – that Obama would constitute the most significant change from the Bush years.

Do you agree with this belief?

I do. I think that Obama’s background and Obama’s instincts are likely to result in a more distinct foreign policy and form of government than that which would be brought forward by Hillary Clinton. I also think that he would be more successful in trying to bring together what remains of a much divided country.

From Scientific American:

• An alarming number of sports—baseball, football, track and field, and especially cycling—have been shaken by doping scandals in recent years.
• Among the many banned drugs in the cycling pharmacopoeia, the most effective is recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), an artificial hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, thereby delivering more oxygen to the muscles.
• Game theory highlights why it is rational for professional cyclists to dope: the drugs are extremely effective as well as difficult or impossible to detect; the payoffs for success are high; and as more riders use them, a “clean” rider may become so noncompetitive that he or she risks being cut from the team.
• The game theory analysis of cycling can readily be extended to other sports. The results show quantitatively how governing bodies and antidoping agencies can most effectively target efforts to clean up their sports.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Among other things, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a hymn to the creative and destructive power of female beauty. The heroine is a young woman of such transporting physical allure that on seeing her men fall instantly and insanely in love, heedless to the ensuing dangers. Wherever could he have come by the idea? ‘Ridiculously beautiful, comically beautiful’ was how he once described Padma Lakshmi, the woman who became his fourth wife. But in fact, Rushdie insists, he had the concept of the novel before he met the Indian-American model, actress and cookbook author. Still, that piece of chronology won’t prevent many readers from glimpsing the shade of Lakshmi in the ‘slender’ and ravishing ‘banquet for the senses’ that is Qara Koz, a woman ‘meant for palaces, and kings’.

According to Rushdie, the irony is that not only did she not inspire the book, she was very nearly the cause of its demise. ‘To put it bluntly,’ he says, ‘I had to write it in spite of her. Because what happened to me last year when I was writing this book was a colossal calamity.’ By this he means the end of his marriage. In January of 2007, Lakshmi asked for a divorce. ‘It was like a nuclear bomb dropped in your living room when you’re trying to work,’ he says. ‘I really feared for a time at the beginning of last year that I’d lost the book. I was in such a state of turmoil that I couldn’t work. I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk. And I got scared because I thought, if I lose this, I’ve lost everything. Genuinely, I think it was the biggest act of will that I’ve ever been asked to make, including after the fatwa, just to pull my head back together.’

More here.