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.

Having chanced upon Warren Isensee’s tidy brand of abstract painting seven years ago—one of his canvases, glimpsed in the window of a Soho gallery, made a happy impression from across a traffic-congested street—I’ve followed the development of this promising young artist with some interest. Mr. Isensee’s latest paintings, on display at the Danese Gallery’s new space in Chelsea, continue to build upon that promise. His recent work buzzes with momentum, as if Mr. Isensee had only just begun to realize its expressive possibilities.

more from The NY Observer here.

The riots currently engulfing the Islamic world, prompted by a Danish newspaper’s decision to caricature the Prophet Mohammed, require two responses. The first is easy: horror. In the physical assault on Denmark’s embassies and citizens, and in the diplomatic assault on Denmark’s government–all because a free government won’t muzzle a free press–multiculturalism has become totalitarianism. Religious sensitivity, say the zealots marching from Beirut to Jakarta, matters more than liberty. Indeed, it matters more than life itself. To which the only answer, from democrats of all religions and of none, must be: In this matter, we are all Danes.

So responding to the thuggishness is easy. Responding to the cartoons themselves is harder. It is hard to condemn them when the barbaric response in parts of the Islamic world so vastly dwarfs the initial offense. And yet, the cartoons should be condemned nonetheless. Of course, the Danish newspaper had the right to publish them. But, in doing so, it revealed a particularly European prejudice, one that the United States must take care not to repeat.

The prejudice is not simply against Islam. Rather, it stems from Europe’s–or at least Western Europe’s–inability to take religion seriously at all. As my colleague Spencer Ackerman has written (“Religious Protection,” December 12, 2005), one reason Muslims find it harder to integrate in Western Europe than in the United States is that, in Western Europe, integration is often presumed to mean secularization. In defending his decision to print the cartoons, the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten declared, “This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society.” In defending its decision to reprint them, the French paper France Soir wrote, “No religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society.”

But most Americans–like most Muslims–do not think “modern” and “democratic” equal secular.

more from TNR here.

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.

Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film’s official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal‘s critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.”

More here.

Carolyn Fry in New Scientist:

Shock waves from ancient lunar impacts may be responsible for creating the Earth’s single most famous face – the “Man in the Moon”.

People have long interpreted a series of dark patches on the Moon’s surface as a human face but no one knew how they formed. Now, scientists at Ohio State University, US, appear to have solved the mystery by creating a topographical model of the Moon and mapping gravity signatures of rocks all the way to the core.

Their findings suggest that the impacts of ancient collisions on the far side of the Moon were so great they caused a corresponding bulge on the near side, and the Earth’s gravitational pull further tugged at this bulge.

Those colossal movements opened cracks in the crust and let magma from the lunar mantle flood onto the surface, at a time when the Moon was still geologically active. This solidified to form what we now see from Earth as the eyes, nose and mouth of the Man in the Moon.

More here.

Doug Stewart in Smithsonian Magazine:

Daybreak, August 25, A.D. 79. Under a lurid and sulfurous sky, a family of four struggles down an alley filled with pumice stones, desperately trying to escape the beleaguered city of Pompeii. Leading the way is a middle-aged man carrying gold jewelry, a sack of coins and the keys to his house. Racing to keep up are his two small daughters, the younger one with her hair in a braid. Close behind is their mother, scrambling frantically through the rubble with her skirts hiked up. She clutches an amber statuette of a curly-haired boy, perhaps Cupid, and the family silver, including a medallion of Fortune, goddess of luck.

But neither amulets nor deities can protect them. Like thousands of others this morning, the four are overtaken and killed by an incandescent cloud of scorching gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius. In the instant before he dies, the man strains to lift himself from the ground with one elbow. With his free hand, he pulls a corner of his cloak over his face, as though the thin cloth will save him.

The hellish demise of this vibrant Roman city is detailed in a new exhibition, “Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption,” at Chicago’s Field Museum through March 26.

More here.

“Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself off as Native American?”

Matthew Fleischer in LA Weekly:

Indeed, getting to the bottom of Nasdijj’s story is no easy task. He alleges a nomadic existence that is virtually free of specific names or places, rendering it difficult to substantiate his claims. A Google search brings up first and foremost his blog — www.nasdijj.typepad.com. (Shortly after Nasdijj was contacted for this story, his blog was taken offline.) A sampling of his almost daily blogs over several months suggests that one (and perhaps only one) thing is clear: Nasdijj is a very angry man. If in the books his passion and fierceness are modulated and concentrated, his blog posts are full of rants and denunciations. Targets include the American health care system, government treatment of Indians, middle-class values and, especially, the publishing industry.

More here.

Bjorn Carey in LiveScience.com:

A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.

Researchers created an artificial “music market” of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study’s Internet market, the participants were randomly, and unknowingly, assigned to either an “independent” group or a “social influence” group.

Participants could then browse through a collection of unknown songs by unknown bands.

In the independent condition, participants chose which songs to listen to based solely on the names of the bands and their songs. While listening to the song, they were asked to rate it from one star (“I hate it”) to five stars (“I love it”). They were also given the option of downloading the song for keeps.

“This condition measured the quality of the songs and allowed us to see what outcome would result in the absence of social influence,” said study co-author Matthew Salganik, a sociologist at Columbia University.

In the social influence group, participants were provided with the same song list, but could also see how many times each song had been downloaded.

Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group.

More here.

Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]