Charles Rosen reviews The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin, in the New York Review of Books:

A history of Western music is, more or less, a history of all the music that has a history—that is, a large body of musical works that stretch from a distant past to the present through a series of stylistic revolutions. Other civilizations, India in particular, have magnificent musical traditions, but few authentic, documented musical works survive from their past. Only in the West was there an elaborate system of notation that delivered the musical artifacts of more than a millennium to the future, and, as a consequence, only in the West has there been an extravagant historical development from the Gregorian chant of the tenth century to the symphonic complexities of Wagner and Stravinsky, and the contested triumphs of modernism. Western music, in short, has a history that can be placed in richness and complexity by the side of a history of literature and a history of the visual arts.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Idlers, loafers and layabouts, listen up. A new study suggests that the times when we sit around twiddling our thumbs could in fact be vital for learning.

The idea stems from experiments in which neuroscientists eavesdropped on the brains of rats as they explored their environments. They found that the rats’ brains ‘replay’ their experiences in reverse when the animals pause briefly to rest.

The scientists, David Foster and Matthew Wilson working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, inserted a pincushion of fine wires into the animals’ skulls. These allowed the team to simultaneously monitor the electrical activity of around 100 individual brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory.

The researchers placed each wired-up rat in a straight 1.5-metre run. They recorded brain-cell activity as the rats scurried up and down, pausing at each end to eat, groom and scratch their whiskers.

As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space.

But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting. Then, the same brain cells replayed the sequence of electrical firing over and over, but in reverse and speeded up.

More here.

Terry Teachout in Commentary:

The Beatles released Let It Be, the last of their thirteen albums, 36 years ago. Today there is no one musical group or soloist capable of commanding the attention paid to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr between 1964, when they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and 1970, when McCartney announced that the group was disbanding. Just as there is no longer a common culture, so there is no longer a common style of music to which most English-speaking people listen. Yet the Beatles and their music continue to fascinate successive generations of music lovers, so much so that more than two dozen books have been published about them, the latest of which is a thousand-page biography by the journalist Bob Spitz.

Written in a straightforwardly journalistic style, The Beatles: The Biography provides an exhaustive and generally reliable account of the bandmembers’ lives and careers up to 1970, and is of no small value as a study in what might be called the sociology of celebrity. But like most pop-music biographies, it has little of interest to say about the Beatles’ work; anyone in search of a thoughtful critical appraisal will find it unhelpful.

Such an appraisal must begin by taking into account the fact that the Beatles were the first rock-and-roll musicians to be written about as musicians.

More here.

Paul Richard in the Washington Post:

All depictions of Muhammad — or so we hear daily — are now and have always been forbidden in Islam. Art’s history disputes this. True, that strict taboo today is honored now by almost all Muslims, but old paintings of the prophet — finely brushed expensive ones, made carefully and piously by Muslims and for them — are well known to most curators of Islamic art.

There are numerous examples in public institutions in Istanbul, Vienna, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Los Angeles and New York…

These portrayals of Muhammad are not big or new or common. Most were made for the elite. And most were bound in books. These were lavish volumes that were political in purpose, and were designed to celebrate and dignify self-promoting rulers. What their paintings show is this: Once upon a time — in the era of the caliphs and the sultans and the shahs, when the faithful felt triumphant, and courtly learning blossomed — the prophet did appear in great Islamic art.

Old portrayals of Muhammad come from Sunni lands and Shia ones, from the Turkey of the Ottomans, the India of the Mughals, from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. The oldest that survive were painted circa 1300.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

With the aid of a tiny device that works like the needle on the arm of a record player, a scientist has pumped up the sounds made by tiny proteins zipping around inside a yeast cell. The discovery is driving the development of a new tool that may allow doctors to detect diseases like cancer by listening to the sounds of their patients’ bodies, said James Gimzewski, a biochemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gimzewski discovered cell sounds using a device called an atomic force microscope. But he says the name is a misnomer. “It’s not a microscope that you look through a lens to see something … [I]t’s kind of a paradigm shift in a way, from looking at things to a form of feeling them,” he said. The device has a very sharp tip that is attached to a spring, like the needle on a record player.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The report, from a huge federal study called the Women’s Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health. The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of two cancers or heart disease. Still the study’s results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts.

More here.

Terry Eagleton reviews For Lust of Knowing: the orientalists and their enemies by Robert Irwin, in the New Statesman:

Irwin is not the kind of commentator to dismiss Said as “a dandy and a Manhattan bon viveur“, as the pompously self-opinionated Ernest Gellner once did. On the contrary, he praises him with an agreeable old-school courtesy wherever praise seems due. He shares Said’s belief, for example, that US media coverage of Palestinian affairs has been “biased, ignorant and abusive”, and acknowledges his unswerving rejection of terrorist violence. Incredulous though he is at the idea that orientalism is in cahoots with western imperialism, he is quick to register the odd spot of anti-Islamic prejudice in Middle Eastern scholarship. He also jovially admits that the 16th-century Frenchman Guillaume Postel was not only the first true orientalist but a complete lunatic.

It would be hard to imagine any such generosity of spirit from the smug US Middle Eastern observer Thomas Friedman, who, despite writing a column for the New York Times, has about as much a sense of literary style as a rhino. Or, indeed, from a right-wing orientalist scholar such as Bernard Lewis, who has written that the destruction of the World Trade Center was one of the most wicked acts in human history. Why such coy understatement? Why not just confess straight out that the joint crimes of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, not to speak of Hiroshima and Attila the Hun, are utterly eclipsed by it?

More here.  [Photo shows Edward Said.]

From Slate:

Edward. O. Wilson long ago abandoned the fundamentalist Christianity of his upbringing, but you wouldn’t know it to observe his lifestyle. He assiduously avoids vice, stays faithful to his wife, and pursues his calling as if John Calvin were supervising. Here the world-famous biologist explains how to live right without the carrot-and-stick of heaven-and-hell. And it isn’t just that he doesn’t need the prospect of a blessed afterlife–he doesn’t want it. After all, he asks, do you have any idea how monotous eternal bliss would be? Still, he’s grateful for what his southern Baptist heritage gave him, notably including zeal.

More here.

Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker:

Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs. In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers, who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects so magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either, a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of a distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.

More here.

‘Like it or not, the “circus act” has always occupied a place, albeit a dubious one, in the boxing world.’

Charles Jay in Fox Sports:

For every Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard or Roy Jones Jr., moving about the ring with style, grace and fluidity, there’s a Mark Gastineau or Ed “Too Tall” Jones, clinging onto the fringes while offering little to the sport, save for the prospect of exploiting themselves, and the public, in the cheap pursuit of a buck or two.

But the proverbial boxing sideshow has, almost without exception, been just that — relegated to the side, safely distanced from that which would be looked upon as substantive, important, or mainstream within the industry.

Is that in the process of changing? Has one of the circus acts emerged to the point where it is positioned front and center in the landscape of what is traditionally boxing’s glamour division? And is it just a pathetic sign of the times in the depressed heavyweight picture?

These are the questions being asked in some corners of the fight game these days, inspired by the rise of a figure who may just be on the verge of boxing’s Holy Grail.

Nikolay Valuev is a giant of a man, standing at 7-foot (by most accounts anyway) and regularly weighing in at over 320 pounds. Though many people may not be aware of it, he is currently the heavyweight champion of the world, at least as far as the World Boxing Association is concerned.

More here.

In The Nation, Bernard-Henri Levy lists the ways in which the American Left is comatose (via locussolus):

I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic “left” in the United States, in the European sense.

But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.

And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side–to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American “left” lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old “young” Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the “enemy,” staring in disbelief when I say I’ve spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: “If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know”; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: “to raise more money”; and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals–I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called “American Empire” (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).

“GUY DEBORD MADE VERY LITTLE ART, but he made it extreme,” says Debord of himself in his final work, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (Guy Debord: His Art and His Time, 1995), an “anti-televisual” testament authored by Debord and realized by Brigitte Cornand. And there is no reason to doubt either aspect of this judgment. While Debord has been known in the English-speaking world since the 1970s as a key figure in the Situationist International and as a revolutionary theorist, it is only in the past decade that his work as a filmmaker has surfaced outside France. One reason is that, in 1984, following the assassination of Debord’s friend and patron Gérard Lebovici and the libelous treatment of both men in the French press, Debord withdrew his films from circulation. Though the films were not widely seen even in France, four of them—by the time they were withdrawn—had been playing continually and exclusively for the previous six months at the Studio Cujas in Paris, a theater financed for this purpose by Lebovici.

more from Artforum here.

You have never heard of Marvin Gates. But then, few people have. He is that art world myth: a painter who develops in hiding and emerges late, fully formed. I first met him in my studio in Boston, where he told me, after observing that I was the kind of person he would enjoy talking to at a cocktail party, that when it came to painting I should just “tack my balls to the wall and face ridicule.” His shirt was buttoned to the top button. . . . All of this puts time in a strange position. Allegory and hard-edge are revived, but they are put to work telling a personal story, something they wouldn’t have done in their heyday. An obvious nostalgia is coupled with a rare devotion to presenting the City as it lives now. One may admire Leger, but those sneakers aren’t retro. The story occurs in a flash which has taken forever to construct.

The picture might best be described as a pattern – it shows us an order but doesn’t reveal more than it has to. It is fixed, but it has implications. Much of the world’s identity has been stripped, and we have a hard time accounting for what remains. The magazine at the bottom left might be one of the art mags the young Gates read and abandoned, but we are not invited to know. And although we are invited to fix our stare on Death’s sky blue bag, we will never know what’s in there.

more from n+1 here.

Hamza and Umar exchange insults with Ghazanfar, and challenge him to battle outside the fortress of Armanus.

From The Hamzanama. Volume 11, painting number 19, text number 20. India, Mughal dynasty, circa 1570. Attributed to Mukhlis and Madhava Khurd.

More on “The Adventures of Hamza” here.

From NPR:

The Missa Solemnis may be the greatest piece never heard. Nearly 90 minutes long, it requires a large chorus, an orchestra and four soloists. It’s impractical for the concert hall and fits far less comfortably into a Catholic church service. It concludes with a fraught, fragile and unanswered plea for peace amid the drumbeats of war. But the answer comes in the Ninth Symphony, with its chorale finale based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” written in a time of revolution.

Those words and Beethoven’s music call for humankind to kneel before the creator, but for answers to turn to one another. The path to peace, he suggests, is bestowed not from above, but from within us and among us, in universal brotherhood.

(Note: I recently had the fortune of hearing a memorable rendition of the Missa Solemnis at the Boston Symphony Hall and feel that its message of universal brotherhood is particularly poignant on a day when Abbas posted his essay on Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding. If you do not own a copy of this CD, go get one today.)

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein in her excellent blog Majikthise:

The Danish cartoon scandal is a shameful manufactured controversy. A petty racist publicity stunt was hijacked by successively larger and more influential opportunists until it because an international incident.

It all started on September 30, 2005 when Denmark’s second-largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The paper didn’t just happen to publish some cartoons of Mohammed because they were good or topical. The cartoons were a self-conscious attempt to provoke controversy.

“[W]e wanted to show how deeply entrenched self-censorship has already become,” a J-P spokesman told Der Spigel.

In other words, The J-P decided to conduct a little experiment. Can we get a rise out of the Islamic fundamentalists? A drastically disproportionate reaction? Suppose we tip the scales towards by adding racism and inflammatory politics to the blasphemy? If when excruciatingly predictable happens, we’ll have “Proof Islam Hates Our Freedom.” If the cartoons go unnoticed, the experiment will be dropped–headline won’t be “Islam is Cool After All.”

More here.

Deborah Solomon interviews David Frost in the New York Times Magazine:

Q: As one of the most respected television journalists in Great Britain, why have you decided to take a job as an interviewer for an enterprise as freighted with controversy as Al Jazeera International, the new 24-hour English-language, Arab-owned news station that is scheduled to begin broadcasting in May?

Al Jazeera International is completely separate from Al Jazeera Arabic.

Aren’t they both owned by the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani?

The ownership is the same. Absolutely. He’s very liberal. He has friends in the American administration who no doubt try to persuade him to tone down Al Jazeera Arabic. But I think when viewers watch Al Jazeera International, they will be closer to watching CNN.

Not really. Its founder has specifically stated that it will differ from CNN or the BBC by offering an Arab perspective on world events. Which may explain why when Ted Koppel was recently offered a job in the Washington bureau of Al Jazeera International, he said he thought about it for about 38 seconds before turning the offer down.

We in the West have been broadcasting our views to the non-Western parts of the world for many years. It is only fair that these non-Western areas should have the chance to return the compliment.

More here.

Hamish Hamilton in The Guardian on Still Looking by John Updike.

I’ve always liked John Updike’s description, from an essay written 40 years ago, of what he most enjoyed reading. ‘I find my greatest luxury is a small book,’ he suggested, ‘between one and two hundred pages, which treats, in moderately technical language, a subject of which I was previously ignorant. I remember with great pleasure the Penguin books by Sir Leonard Woolley on his Sumerian excavations, and a treatise, in the same series, on the English badger. Lately, I read a fine study of suicide in Scandinavia.’

Updike has always been a painterly writer, or at least seeing things clearly and rendering them with precision is the beginning and the end of his formidable ambition as a novelist. No one looks quite as keenly as he has done at the surfaces of Waspish America or has as much skill in reproducing them. He brings this habit of mind to the art gallery, too, displaying a craftsman’s sense of work well done and an infectious desire to discriminate. He is, in other words, the most helpful kind of critic: he lets you know exactly what he thinks is good and bad about a painting and why.

More here.

As we near the one year anniversary of assasination of Rafiq Hariri (February 14th), Oussama Safa discusses the history of Lebanese consociationalism and Lebanon’s chances for democracy, in The Journal of Democracy.

As of this writing, moreover, the opposition’s most important demand is still waiting to be met: The world must know the truth about who murdered Rafiq Hariri. The final report of the international investigation into his killing is anxiously awaited in Beirut, for on this document hinges the future of stability in Lebanon. All indicators suggest that the UN investigative commission will produce evidence to corroborate the involvement in the crime of senior Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers. Syria will have to deliver the officers named in the report first for investigation and then to an international tribunal that will most likely be set up for that purpose on neutral territory.

In sum, the Cedar Revolution remains half-finished. Revealing the truth about the Hariri assassination and then prosecuting those responsible for it will go a long way toward providing a sense of national satisfaction and security. Then there must follow a serious and comprehensive dialogue on the country’s future. This discussion must include all the various factions, plus civil society. Without this, the gains of March 14 and after may dissipate. Friends of democracy should hope to see civil society become a growing force. It is already one to be reckoned with, as can be seen in the way that politicians frequently refer to “the spirit of March 14” when discussing the need for political change.

A slight young woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of Guatemala City, carrying a white basin filled with human blood. She sets the basin down, steps into it and then out, leaving a trail of bloody footprints from the Constitutional Court building to the old National Palace. The corrupt Constitutional Court had recently allowed the former military dictator, General Ríos Montt, to run for president despite the Constitution’s barring of past presidents who gained power by military coup. A Guatemalan who didn’t know that it was a performance titled Who can erase the traces?–or even who had never heard of performance art–would have had no trouble understanding the symbolism: the ghostly footprints representing the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered, overwhelmingly by the Army, during the long years of war and after; the persistence of memory in the face of official policies of enforced forgetting and impunity. I’ve read (and have contributed) plenty of words, a surfeit of words, about violence and injustice in Guatemala. That trail of bloody footprints was the most powerful statement I’d encountered in ages.

more from BOMB here.