From Ego:

Preet Srivastava was born in India, lives and works in New York. She grew up on the West Coast, in a family of artists, at a time when India seemed very far way. Time has changed that and her connection with India is evident. She has a “relationship with bindis” and you see at least one dot in each of her canvases, sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden. After an undergraduate degree in Biology, Preet went to Johns Hopkins to study Medical Illustration but soon realized that she wanted to do something “less confining”. She subsequently joined the ART Academy in San Diego. Though grateful to Art School for teaching her the fundamentals she recognized that she was being forced to throw away her heritage and become a “European Painter”. “As long as we don’t lose something that is inherently our own, it’s okay.”

She loves Bollywood movies and finds them romantic but adds that they “could take a stronger turn towards different looking actors”. In that light she read an essay about art and Bollywood by Indian cultural theorist, Ranjit Hoskote, that “hit her in the stomach”. It talks in essence about how artists works “should not be about negation but negotiation”.

More here.

From lensculture.com:

The seeds of Observance began then, with a suspicion that a powerful image is capable of connecting people across time and space in a way that is visceral and real. Religions have tapped into this possibility. Throughout history imagery has played an important role in many faiths. Often, followers of a faith possess an image of their leader, their guru, or their teacher. They have them in their homes, on their altars, or tattered in a wallet. In countries where certain forms of religion are not tolerated, such as Tibet, to possess such an image can put one’s life at risk.

Why do people put such faith in the power of a photograph? What does this kind of image hold that is so precious? Observance raises these questions, and explores how a sense of connection is created through the directness of contact that an image can provide, particularly with the sitter gazing out of the image.

More here.

Let us visit the realm of a specialised art form that some might refer to as “naive art”. It is certainly not the kind of artistic production that attracts much criticism, deriving from the stress and strain of proletarian existence. It is an art that is familiar to the African continent, west, east, or central, and a genre that I have always considered more profoundly political than much of the art that is born of western middle-class radicalism. While post-colonial ideologues argue over what is committed or uncommitted in art, these artists appear never to have been in any doubt.

I often describe this genre as “mobile murals”, or travelling illuminated manuscripts – to borrow from the work of those medieval monks of Europe who spent their lives decorating divine manuscripts for the edification of the faithful and seduction of unbelievers or sceptics.

more from the New Statesman here.

The Painting of Modern Life, the first show at the Hayward Gallery curated by its American director, Ralph Rugoff, is an ambitious attempt to see how this artistic project stands nearly 150 years after Charles Baudelaire proposed it in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863). There the poet called for a shift in subject matter – already begun in the practice of Manet and others – away from the grand themes of myth and history, and towards the everyday activities of urban life, especially of middle-class leisure. Such a shift in content implied a shift in form, even in medium; for example, to capture the mobility of bourgeois types on the town, the sketch might be more useful than other means (the exemplar in the essay is not the great Manet but Constantin Guys, who was then known for his quick studies). What better vehicle to convey ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ – key qualities of the metropolitan kaleidoscope, according to Baudelaire – than the photograph? Yet the poet remained suspicious of the new medium, in part because he did not see its potential for imaginative invention, in part because he did not deem it suited to the ‘other half’ of his mandate for art, which was to extract ‘the eternal and the immutable’ from this protean modernity. The other half was still the province of painting, and so painting – perhaps pressured by photographic attributes – remained the essential medium.

more from the LRB here.

This year in France, the “rentrée littéraire” – the publishing equivalent of going back to school – is bigger than ever; some 727 literary novels have been published since August. The rentrée is a peculiarly French phenomenon which turns on the fact that the big literary prizes (Goncourt, Renaudot, Interallié, Femina, Académie Française, Médicis) are awarded between October and November. Of this year’s novels, 234 are translations from another language, mostly English or, to be precise, American. This is an astonishing figure, especially when compared with the small number of translated works published in Britain, but it still leaves nearly 500 French novels to choose from.

The problem with this tidal wave of new novels has been that only the most powerful publishing houses and the biggest names are heard; the few French writers who are known in the United States or the United Kingdom – Michel Houellebecq, Amélie Nothomb, Marie Darrieussecq – are the stars of the French scene as well. And yet the rentrée does ensure that literature remains at the heart of French cultural life; it is discussed and dissected at length in the press and on radio and television. It may take only two hours by train from London, but Paris is still a world away.

more from the TLS here.

“I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line,” Raymond Chandler wrote, in the voice of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in 1949. “Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”

Chandler first came to Los Angeles in 1912, a time so distant in the city’s history as to seem almost unreal. The population had only just climbed above 300,000. L.A. was still shaking from the dynamiting of The Times by the McNamara brothers, and Clarence Darrow was on trial for alleged bribery. William Mulholland’s titanic aqueduct was incomplete and no water had as yet come from the Owens River Valley. Speedy, efficient streetcars connected downtown with the recently incorporated city of Hollywood and the distant beach towns.

more from LA Times Books here.

The last time I saw Bette Davis, she was in her dotage, the painful ravages of cancer and a paralyzing stroke cruelly evident. We had tea in a Manhattan hotel room, and she admitted her two favorite words were “What’s next?” Her days in front of a camera were mortgaged beyond revival, but with her flaring nostrils and incendiary nicotine butts, and still walking like an anchovy, she slashed the air with one parting shot: “You have not seen the end of Bette Davis!”

Apparently she was right. Eighteen years after her death, they are still writing books about her. This is as it should be. She created a template for movie acting that generations of starlets have tried but failed to follow. So the obsession with Bette Davis continues to resonate, redefining Hollywood “longevity.” Few of yesterday’s divinities affect audiences with the same force. But after so many friends, enemies, colleagues and poseurs — even her daughter B. D., who logged in with her own controversial “Mommie Dearest”-type broadside — have written everything they know, the question is “What else is there to say?” With Ed Sikov’s “Dark Victory” as evidence, I submit that the answer is a reluctant “Nothing much.”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

“What can I say to make you understand?”

This is the calm reply of one of the murderers (génocidaires) while being interviewed about his actions, motives and emotions, leading to his sudden participation in the killings in Rwanda in 1994.

Indeed, the “idea” of the spontaneous hundred-day mass genocide is impossible to envision with any sense of clarity. But this unforgettable and important book puts us face to face with many of the killers, the collaborators, and victims who survived. Each is photographed alone, with complete cooperation, and presented in a series of powerful portraits with no captions at all. Are we looking at a killer or a survivor, a leader or a follower? Surely this young child would not have been caught up in the madness and started to kill, would he?

In a series of transcribed interviews, in another part of the book, each unnamed person tells his personal story, in his own words, as directly as possible, in response to a series of questions asked by a probing journalist.

More here.

Matha Nussbaum in The Times Literary Supplement:

In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his team of investigators selected twenty-four young men to participate in their study of the psychology of imprisonment. The men, only a few of whom were students, had answered an ad placed in both the student newspaper and the local town daily that offered subjects fifteen dollars per day for two weeks to participate in a study of “prison life”. The successful applicants were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner and guard, fifty-fifty. Prisoners were to stay in the prison for the entire two weeks; guards served in eight-hour shifts, three groups per day. Thus began the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

In Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect, the shocking events of the SPE (later documented in the film Quiet Rage) provide the lead-in to a detailed examination of psychological research showing the power of situations to overcome people’s better judgement. Zimbardo usefully describes a large body of research: Solomon Asch’s research on perceptual judgement, which documents the power of peer pressure to lead people to make statements about lines and shapes that they can easily see are untrue; Stanley Milgram’s experiments on authority, often replicated in many countries, which showed that about three-quarters of subjects would administer a shock labelled as seriously harmful to a person who was supposed to be a subject in an experiment on learning, if ordered to do so by the researcher; and a host of less famous but equally convincing experiments, all showing disturbing and even cruel behaviour by ordinary people. One particularly chilling example involves schoolchildren whose teacher informs them that children with blue eyes are superior to children with dark eyes. Hierarchical and vindictive behaviour ensues. The teacher then informs the children that a mistake has been made: it is actually the brown-eyed children who are superior, the blue-eyed inferior. The behaviour simply reverses itself: the brown-eyed children seem to have learned nothing from the pain of discrimination.

Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others. He then connects these insights to a detailed account of the abuses by United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, where, he argues, the humiliations and torments suffered by the prisoners were produced not by evil character traits but by an evil system that, like the prison system established in the SPE, virtually ensures that people will behave badly. Situations are held in place by systems, he argues, and it is ultimately the system that we must challenge, not the frequently average actors. He then sets himself to analyse the features that make systems and situations bad, and to suggest ways in which they might be remedied.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The moral of the story, as Graham Robb’s “Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War” makes clear, is that France is not a unified cultural monolith, but rather “a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations,” each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs. Yet according to Robb, who has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Arthur Rimbaud, these microcivilizations “were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state,” and their inhabitants didn’t constitute “a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as ‘the French.’” With exhaustive research and a witty, engaging narrative style, Robb corrects this misconception by showing how, even as modern developments like democracy and the steam engine transformed France from “a land of ancient tribal divisions” into a centralized nation-state, a wealth of regional particularities persisted in “disparate, concurrent spheres.” In its pivotal years between the revolution and World War I, France emerges in Robb’s telling as a land where the past did not morph seamlessly into the future; a land where diversity existed in a permanent tug of war with uniformity; “a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris.”

More here.

The dissonance and abstraction of 20th-century composers influenced a generation of visual artists.

Sholto Byrnes in The New Statesman:

It is tempting to see a connection between the breakdown of old styles in music and the visual arts from the mid-to-late 19th century onwards. Were the impressionistic works of Monet and Debussy both expressions of the same spirit? Were Matisse’s “jazz” cut-out pictures of the mid-20th century linked to the postwar bebop revolution? The answer is: only sometimes. However much Debussy may have disliked the term “impressionist”, the parallels between his compositional palette and the one used by the artistic school of the same name are obvious. In the case of Matisse, however, it would be quite wrong to suppose that his “jazz” series had anything to do with the explorations of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

More here.

Responses to Sasha Frere-Jones’s New Yorker piece about how indie-rock has largely evacuated all African-American influences in the Village Voice:

Breihan: OK, so what are your big problems with the article? And, I mean, can you really deny that indie-rock is farting off into rhythm-free tedium and that that’s a bad thing?

Harvilla: My first big problem here is LCD Soundsystem, rightly praised not too long ago by both Tom Breihan and Sasha Frere-Jones. Folks have already pointed out how Sasha’s complimentary LCD piece started: “About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm.” Two weeks after LCD plays to 350,000 people at Randalls Island, that dream is dead?

As for the co-headliner, Arcade Fire: Sasha praised them too, back in February. Now they’re taken to task for unbearable whiteness? Is he actually holding them up as emblematic of indie rock’s dearth of “ecstatic singing” and “elaborate showmanship”? They’re a football field’s worth of Canadians in military garb screaming into bullhorns, for crying out loud. They’re far closer to James Brown than James Taylor.

Darcy Argue also has some thought on the matter:

[W]hat I don’t get — and I am certain I am not alone here — is how, exactly, you write a 3,500-word New Yorker piece, plus a follow-up blog post and podcast interview, on the general topic of “Why does indie rock sound so goddamned white?” without once mentioning, even in passing, TV on the Radio.

Are they, like Eminem, an anomalous outlier — the exception that proves the rule? Well okay, but… isn’t it worth at least tangentially addressing the fact that the most critically acclaimed band in indie rock is 4/5ths black? I’m not trying to claim that this one group undermines SF-J’s entire argument or anything lame like that, but… well, don’t you think people might think this was kind of a curious omission?

Dylan van Rijsbergen in signandsight.com, originally in Trouw (Netherlands):

A few weeks ago it was all over town. A billboard with a picture of a beautiful near-naked female body, wearing nothing but a bra. Eyes invisible. In front of her vagina a small designer bag. The poster bore the words: “lesson 84: lead him into temptation.”

It was not so much the Photoshopped perfection of the female body that triggered me. Nor the absence of the woman’s eyes, which made the body into an anonymous signifier of pure sexuality. I was not irritated because the picture forced on me the voyeuristic gaze of the heterosexual, macho-male observer, turning women into sex-objects. Most shocking for me was the fact that the little bag and the vagina were totally interchangeable. The billboard suggested that sexual temptation and the temptation to buy commodities were one and the same. The picture was not only about turning women into sexual objects. It was about transforming human sexual desire into a commodity. Interchangeable, standardized and ready to be sold to the highest bidder.

The debate about the pornofication of society was started by feminists and conservatives alike. Feminists like the American writer Ariel Levy and Dutch publicist Stine Jensen criticize the way women are portrayed in an inferior and humiliating fashion as no more than compliant slaves of male desire. Conservatives of either Islamic or Christian origin are also unhappy with this sexualization of the public space. In their view sexuality should not be displayed in the open. It should be restricted to the privacy of marriage. All these naked bodies on billboards, on television and on the Internet are only leading men and women into temptation. In their opinion, it is likely that these images will stimulate sinful behaviour.Conservatives usually blame the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies for sexual morals disappearing down the drain.

In a sense they are right.

Alex Gourevitch in n+1:

[E]ven if the declining fortunes of the war on terror give the appearance that the politics of fear itself is on the wane, another campaign may be reviving it. While Democrats have become increasingly uncomfortable with the anti-democratic consequences of the hard power of the war on terror, they seem more comfortable with a “soft power” politics of fear: environmentalism.

Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right, and its influence only seems to grow as the war on terror’s influence declines. The New York Times’ bellwether of elite opinion, Thomas Friedman, recently swung around to the new framework. His solution for overcoming the “trauma and divisiveness of the Bush years” is “a new green ideology, [which] properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals, and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward.”

The congenitally unoriginal Friedman channels the hopes of others. Most prominently, it has been Al Gore who has championed the idea that environmentalism should replace the war on terror. He has long reminded us “global warming is a threat greater than terrorism.” This could have been simply a pragmatic judgment, but Gore is interested in more than technical risk-analysis.

Ezra Klein in The American Prospect:

The Commonwealth Fund just released a broad survey collecting health care attitudes and experiences from patients in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Here are summaries of some of the findings:

1. We spend the most. We spend more than any other country in the world. In 2005, our per capita — so, per person — spending was $6,697. The next highest in the study was Canada, at $3,326. And remember — that’s “mean” spending, so it’s the amount we spend divided by our population. But unlike in Canada, about 16 percent of our population doesn’t have insurance, and so often can’t use the system. These facts should set the stage for all numbers that come after: Every time you see a data point in which were dead last, or not leading the pack, remember that we spend twice as much as any of our competitors.

2. We don’t pay doctors according to the quality of their care. One of the first questions is “percent of primary care practices with financial incentives for quality” — in other words, how many doctors are paid, in part, according to the quality of the care they deliver. In the United Kingdom, the number is 95 percent. In Australia, it’s 72 percent. The U.S. scores lower than anyone else, at 30 percent.

Lakshmi Chaudhry in The Nation:

Most fish-out-of-water stories are told at the expense of the poor fish. But not so with Aliens in America, which may well be the best television show you’re not watching. Well, you’d first have to find that misbegotten offspring of the WB/UPN marriage, the CW channel.

Your efforts will be well rewarded with a very funny comedy that takes on racism, the war on terror, Islam, and that most hallowed of American institutions: high school. How can you resist a show that throws together a devout Pakistani teenager and small-town America?

Hollywood is usually at its excruciatingly racist worst when it comes to any plot that involves foreign exchange students of the non-white variety — think Long Duk Dong slobbering over Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. The joke is always at the expense of the “fish.”

But not so in Aliens in America.

David Harsanyi, in Reason:

[T]he decline in alcohol-related deaths persisted only until 1997. Since then the vehicular death toll attributed to alcohol has remained stable at around 40 percent. This stagnation in drunk driving deaths has caused considerable consternation among activists and law enforcement officials. Lately, the fight against drunk driving has shifted from serious alcohol abusers with no regard for the law toward responsible drinkers.

Neoprohibitionists aim to muddle the distinction between drunk diving and driving after drinking any amount of alcohol. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea at a Senate Environment and Public Committee hearing way back in 1997, contending that we “may wind up in this country going to zero tolerance, period.” Former MADD President Katherine Prescott concurred, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, where she stated “there is no safe blood alcohol, and for that reason responsible drinking means no drinking and driving.”

Technically she’s correct. Driving is never completely safe, and many things drivers commonly do-including speaking on a cell phone, talking to passengers, applying lipstick, eating a sandwich, drinking coffee, adjusting the radio, reprimanding the kids in the back seat, and daydreaming about weekend plans-can make it riskier. As states and cities have begun focusing on zero tolerance (or “driving while distracted” laws, which target the diversions laid out above) they are losing focus on the real threat, namely habitually drunk drivers.

The Economist has a number of artilces (nine or so articles at least) about religion and the “the new wars of religion” in an 18-page special report of the magazine. Here is an interview with John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, on the issue.

[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]

Father Michael Holleran over at Discover Magazine’s Science and Religion blog:

I would like to suggest, however, is that mature theology is also very far from intelligent design, which I consider to be a particularly unfortunate, maladroit, and problematic notion, at least as it is commonly presented and understood. It is true that the fifth argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is based on the design and governance of the universe. Yet theologians themselves noted, long before Richard Dawkins, that the argument is hardly cogent, and probably better serves as a reflection (in a double sense) of faith by believers than as an effort to persuade unbelievers. In addition, according with Stephen Jay Gould’s insistence on the paramount role of chance in evolution, a priest friend of mine often takes the case a seemingly irreverent step further: with all the chance, chaos, entropy, violence, waste, injustice, and randomness in the universe, the project hardly seems very intelligent! Do we imagine that God is intelligent in basically the same way that we are, just a very BIG intelligence and “super-smart”? And “design,” once again, evokes the watchmaker who somehow stands outside the universe, tinkering with his schemes at some cosmic drawing board. How could God be outside of anything or stand anywhere, or take time to design anything?

All of this is mind-numbingly anthropomorphic, and what seems to be irreverent and blasphemous is actually the only way to avoid being so. As I already suggested in my blog, we are perhaps not aware of the radical purgation of our concept of God that is incumbent upon us, whether necessitated by the challenges of science, or by those of our own theology and spiritual growth. Unfortunately, the most fervent people are often the most naive: the monks of the desert in the fourth century got violently upset when traveling theologians suggested that God did not have a body.