Have you heard of the filmmaker, Henry Jaglom? He’s not well known because he wouldn’t appeal to that large demographic, the teenage boy, for whom most movies are made nowadays. I myself am conflicted about Jaglom. Is he a genius or a jerk? And are these categories mutually exclusive? A thought to be pondered.

Henry Jaglom is one of those quirky filmmakers who seems to have forged a career without ever developing a profile. He began, as far as I can see, by knowing some of the right people. The Internet Movie Database states that “he was a frequent escort of Natalie Wood.” He befriended Orson Welles toward the end of his life and snagged that legendary figure for a movie (Someone to Love, 1987). This must have gone some way to establishing his artistic credentials.

Jaglom’s distinctive style was forged in three `80s films: Always (1985), Someone to Love (1987), and New Year’s Day (1989), which chronicle the break-up of his first marriage and subsequent search for love and companionship.

more from The Smart Set here.

For Bhaisaheb:

From lensculture.com:

Photographs and text by Nathalie Mohadjer

The combination of the literal words Blood+Honey in Turkish means Balkans. The Balkans have always been a region of borders and wars, the “Backyard” and the “Problem Child” of Europe. The war in BiH (Bosnia – Herzegovina) from 1992 until 1995 took a great toll on human life and infrastructure. In 1998, the administration of the BiH Federation counted 242,330 deaths, 36,470 missing and 175,286 wounded. More than 12,000 corpses have been exhumed from around 250 mass-graves in BiH after the end of the war. The total number of refugees is 2,200,000. The financial damages have been estimated by the World Bank to lie between 15 to 20 billion dollars.

Countless cultural artifacts, such as the old bridge of Mostar, the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the National Library in Sarajevo were either completely destroyed or badly damaged.
The consequences of the war are, however, much more extensive than the damage that can be observed. In the long term, the ideology of war from ethnic and spatial perspectives is the costliest mortgage that future generations will have to bear. Near the city of Tuzla, in the heart of Bosnia, around 100 refugee camps can be found today. One of these camps is Grab Potok. It was possible to visit Grab Potog for four weeks in November 2004 via the support of the Non-Governmental Organization Snaga Zéne.

More here.

From Slate:

Everyone knows that classic cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking and How To Cook Everything make great gifts for aspiring chefs. But what if you want to give a cookbook to an adventurous baker with a passion for popovers? Or to your cookbook-fanatic cousin who already seems to own every title known to man? Slate asked notable food writers, chefs, cookbook bookstore owners, and food editors to share their current favorites—offbeat cookbooks they’ve loved for ages, or gems they’ve discovered among the hundreds published more recently. Dan Barber, Barbara Fairchild, Ming Tsai, Mimi Sheraton, Ethan Becker, and many more offer their thoughts on inspiring cookbooks and reference books that can be relied upon for great recipes and clearly explained techniques. Their responses are printed below.

More here.

From Nature:

A component found in semen can enhance HIV transmission by as much as 100,000-fold, researchers have found. The results, if verified in a clinical setting, could identify a new way to help prevent the spread of the disease. “I think this is tremendous,” says Christopher Pilcher, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not affiliated with the study. “It raises a lot of really fundamental questions about how HIV is transmitted.”

Over 80% of HIV infections are acquired through sexual intercourse, primarily via semen from HIV-positive men. Pilcher says that researchers have been studying the role of semen in HIV transmission, but have focused primarily on the quantity and type of virus contained in semen. “We’ve looked at everything except the semen itself,” he says.

More here.

Nassir Ghaemi reviews Peter D. Kramer’s Sigmund Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind in Metapsychology Online Reviews (via Sci Tech Daily):

Freud’s main vice was his dogmatism.  The man would not brook disagreement, at least about his main ideas.  In fact, letters exist between Freud and Stanley Hall (president of Clark University who had invited Freud to the US in 1909) in which Hall takes Freud to task about this habit (the letters were exchanged in the 1920s after the excommunication of Jung) and Freud defends his strict attitude.  Indeed, the virtuous flipside here is that Freud knew how to take a stand; he was courageous and clear about his ideas, a wonderful quality when one is right, a massive weakness when one is wrong.  The level of dogmatism that Freud bequeathed to psychoanalysis as a tradition was deadly from the start: So certain that their truth was the only one, or at least better than all the rest, psychoanalysts took over psychiatry (in the US at least) as if they were enlightened colonizers sent to the bush to save the natives.  As later psychiatric critics put it, case conferences became intolerably boring in the hands of psychoanalysts:  the end could always be predicted at the beginning, and all cases ended up in the same place – repressed unconscious sexual instincts, the Oedipus Complex or some variation thereof, and infantile wishes.  (Kramer cites a parody in a play by Moliere:  “If the patient loved his mother, it is the reason for this neurosis of his; and if he hated her, it is the same reason for the same neurosis.  Whatever the disease, the cause is always the same.  And whatever the cause, the disease is always the same.  And so is the cure: twenty one-hour sessions at 50 Kronen each.” p. 110))

Vice number two (Kramer brings this out clearly): he was extraordinarily ambitious.  Kramer describes how Freud seemed to go from idea to idea in his early medical career, seeking to hit a lottery ticket for fame; it did not seem to matter if the magic numbers alighted on the id or on cocaine: whatever made for fame was what Freud wanted. Now there is nothing wrong with wanting fame; we all dream of such acclaim (at least in adolescence).  But there are some risks, too, in sacrificing to what William James called “the bitch-goddess, Success.” 

In the LRB:

In American Gangster the plot doesn’t stagnate but it does go soft, and this is where Scott loses control of his balancing act, where the fantasy of self forgets about the social reality, and Denzel Washington escapes into pure charm. He grins like his old screen image, and the hard fierce face he has been displaying disappears completely. Crowe, similarly, whose character has now, through diligent hours at night school, become a lawyer, abandons all his anger about the drug trade and smiles in sheer admiration of Lucas’s resilience and ingenuity. We are told that Roberts, as a lawyer, became a defence attorney and represented . . . Frank Lucas. It was a buddy movie all along.

Part of what is happening here has to do with race and class politics. The stern black Lucas and the driven working-class Roberts are different from everyone else: the corrupt cops, the time-serving government officials, the doped-up soldiers, the Italian gangsters. They are different not because they are honest (in their way) but because they are scorned and they are rocking the boat.

Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater’s role in the 2008 campaign, in The Nation:

Blackwater is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Cofer Black is Romney’s senior adviser on counterterrorism. At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call waterboarding torture, he said, “I’m not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we’re able to do and what things we’re not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some thirty-five years.” That was an exaggeration of Black’s career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency could make Blackwater’s business under Bush look like a church bake sale.

In short, Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren’t enough to slow it down. The company’s critics in the Democratic-controlled Congress must confront the root of the problem: the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world’s the limit for Blackwater Worldwide–and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.

Sarah Kofman had something to say, about philosophy, about psychoanalysis, about art, about women. She found her voice in the 1960s, and the language she came to speak was deferred and delivered—articulated—through the lexicon of her generation. It was a time that prized radicalism of thought and often of deed. Impetuousness was rewarded; extravagance in interpretation became an odd norm. Some of the writing from this period, and some of its dramatic political gestures, now look like mere antics; the invitation to easy irony was a slippery slope and could easily be co-opted by commercial culture. And it was.

But Kofman had something to say, and her writings still command attention for their insight, their adventurousness, and their attentiveness to the philosophical traditions with which she so productively wrestled. She was one of the great readers of Freud in the twentieth century, and she brought the same caring intelligence to her interpretations of Nietzsche. In his memorial address for Kofman (reproduced as the introduction to this volume), Jacques Derrida called her love for these thinkers “pitiless,” by which I think he meant that she gave herself to them, and tried to find what they had to offer, without restraint.

more from Bookforum here.

Is it just me, or have the Old Masters got younger lately? If so, it may be because present anxieties about the state and the fate of Western civilization echo past ones, when artists were energized around big issues, such as clashes of modernizing and medievalist mind-sets, which may never have been completely settled. Consider a rousing retrospective of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), which has opened at the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt, and will travel in the spring to the Royal Academy, in London. There are contemporary tangs to this most bewildering paragon of a cohort which included the Leonardoesque Albrecht Dürer and the dazzling Hans Holbein the Younger. Cranach was a sometime religious revolutionary and a full-time entrepreneur. In his work, early strains of late-Gothic blood and guts give way first to courtly high styles, then to pictorial propagandizing for the new theology of his friend Martin Luther—even as, strangely, Cranach continued to oblige Roman Catholic clients. (Those were intricate times.) He rivalled Dürer and Holbein in portraiture, and he developed product lines of delirious erotica and hilarious genre scenes. Buyers seemingly couldn’t get enough of his “ill-matched couples”: fatuous geezers or crones acuddle with gold-digging babes or young bucks. With a prolific workshop, so well coached that its authorship can be hard to distinguish from his own, and with businesses in real estate, publishing, and a liquor-licensed pharmacy, Cranach became one of the richest men in the Lutheran stronghold of Saxony. He was three times the mayor of Wittenberg. As an artist, he siphoned his era’s chaotic energies into wonderments of style. His re-visionings of humanity are philosophically resonant and lots of fun.

more from The New Yorker here.

Christmas is coming in Alsace, and the in-flight magazine promises wonderful markets in quaint half-timbered towns. It’s that time of year when masterpieces of western art twinkle alongside the tinsel. The stable, the star, the wise men bearing gifts, painted by Botticelli, Veronese, Jacopo Bassano – they all did a nativity or 10. Great art gives Christmas cards a touch of class – and who’s complaining?

But there is a niggle, of course. Like playing Bach cantatas as background music to Christmas drinks, snipping out details of Christian paintings to illuminate our seasonal greetings is a debasement of their true meaning. Religion is a serious business, a fact of 21st-century life that should make us look twice at those cute angels, that dumbly innocent donkey. The most “Christmassy” paintings are often deeply disturbing when you look a bit harder: the lovely, intensely hued visionary scene on the previous page of the Madonna and Child serenaded by a choir of angels is no exception. But this cheery scene actually comes from one of the most terrifying and visceral works of art ever painted – a religious masterpiece that is harrowing to the core.

more from The Guardian here.

For 44 days in the fall of 1977, West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF) held captive Hanns Martín Schleyer, a leading German industrialist. In exchange for letting Schleyer go, the RAF—a left-wing urban guerrilla organization—demanded the release of ten imprisoned members, including their leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

From its founding in 1970 to its dissolution in the 1990s, the RAF robbed banks, assassinated prominent politicians, and bombed U.S. military bases, under-construction prisons, and the offices of the tabloid press. Its stated goal was to bring revolution from the third world to the first and overthrow the “fascist” Federal Republic in favor of an undefined socialist state. After the first wave of terror in the early 1970s, most of the RAF’s founding generation— including Baader, Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof—were behind bars, their successors acting on orders smuggled out through lawyers and paroled comrades.

more from Boston Review here.

Beena Sarwar in Himal Southasian:

…political darkness is nothing new for Pakistan and Pakistanis. For most of the country’s 60-year history, it is the men in uniform and jackboots who have governed. For most of the country’s history, the executive and judiciary have been ranged against the ordinary people. Pakistanis won independence from the British colonists in 1947, but the rulers never stopped colonising their own people. Pakistan’s ‘smaller’ nationalities, bitter at the promise of a federation, are alienated from the Centre. Ordinary Pakistanis had to continuously resist the tyranny and attempted hegemony of religion and nationalism that the state, and the rightwing non-state actors, have sought to impose. Crucially, amidst the sea of disenchantment, over the last three decades a small but vocal civil-rights community has developed.

Pakistanis have long seen the promise of democracy being dangled before them, though usually far out of reach, precluded by the military’s stranglehold. (As someone once famously said, “Most countries have an army, but in Pakistan the army has a country.) But over the last year, this promise finally seemed to be coming within grasp, particularly with the country’s judiciary finally standing with the people rather than with the establishment. But now the dream of democracy seems set to remain just out of reach. The caretaker government installed to oversee the upcoming elections is comprised of Musharraf loyalists, and has no credibility. The general has manoeuvred in such a way that he is back firmly in the saddle: mandated not by the people of Pakistan but by hand-picked judges.

Nevertheless, the struggle will continue. Lawyers are refusing to accept the ‘PCO judges’. Ordinary citizens are honouring the ‘real’ judges, visiting their homes and presenting them with flowers and notes of appreciation. Journalists have vowed to continue their struggle for media freedom. The political parties, some discredited less than others, are getting back into the fray. One way or another, Gen Musharraf is certainly going to have a tough time stuffing the democratic genie back into the bottle.

More here.

From Science:

Gravity is not kind to the pregnant woman. With 7-plus kilograms added to her tummy, a soon-to-be mother must stretch her lower back to balance the bulge. Now, a study suggests that women’s spines evolved to help them carry the extra weight. The findings show how the need to reproduce can drive evolution, say the authors, but some scientists argue that the changes in the spine stem from an already well-explained phenomenon.

Anatomists have long known that, because of the demands of childbirth, women’s bodies differ from men’s. Most notably, the female pelvis is more open, an adaptation that makes way for our big-brained species to emerge from the birth canal. Biological anthropologist Katherine Whitcome of Harvard University wondered whether women’s spines also had to adapt. When primates began to walk on two legs, they freed up their hands for other activities. But this new upright posture posed a problem for pregnant women. With a baby on board, a woman’s center of mass, the point on which gravity acts, shifts forward, away from the spine. This shift threatens to topple pregnant bipeds. (Expectant quadrupeds can resort to their hands for balance.) To realign this shifting mass, women arch their backs.

More here.

Via Sepia Mutiny:

Chris Blattman looks at the issue:

The pundits say yes, but what do the data say?

According to a Democracy Now interview with Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, climate change is a main driver of the conflict:

From the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and you’ve been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where people’s simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been one of the elements, because it has driven the nomadic population in the north down into the south.

Jeff Sachs agrees in this 2005 book interview:

Two things have happened. First, the population has doubled in the last generation, and second, the rainfall has gone down sharply. These are very hungry, crowded people, and now they are killing each other.

Darfur’s climate crisis even finds its way into Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth:

Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. One of the factors that has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought.

But if a thousand pundits say it’s so, does that make it true?

Over at Duck of Minerva, Charli Carpenter notes:

It’s easy to make light of the glitterati for this self-serving humanitarianism. (For another example, click here.) Celebrities use causes to brand themselves.

But so what?

Governments do the same thing when they tie foreign aid to official recognition of their beneficence. And whether it is Bono peddling poverty reduction, George Clooney advocating for Darfur, or Leonardo diCaprio condemning conflict diamonds, celebrity sponsorship seems to go hand in hand with public awareness of global issues.

But scholars of humanitarian affairs should be asking: under what conditions are these humanitarian players effective in practical terms, and at what? Is theirs an agenda-setting effect: can the rise of new issues in the transnational primordial soup be traced to celebrity influence? Or do they essentially bandwagon on issues that have already gained prominence? If so does this at least have a catalyzing effect on transforming campaigns into mass movements? Do they exercise power, as Dan Drezner’s recent National Interest piece argues, through social networks of access to policymakers and donors – civic activism plus? Or, is the power of celebrities not their personal crusades but the stories they tell on screen?

I personally suspect that given that (i) each of these mechanisms and processes are regularly witnessed, (ii) the mechanisms well-specified, but (iii) also an absence of any law-like rule on motivations and psychology, any clustering in a specific direction will be largely an accident. But I was interested another issue raised by the post. Personally, I imagine that many of our desires, noble and base, reinforce each other. Caring about Darfur and building brand can coexist, be mutually buttressing, and be sincere. Yet, we take the selfish or self-interested desire to be authentic and the other-regarding desire to be an instrumental one for the ends of the former. I have a hard time imagining an other-regarding desire that is purely isolated from all self-interested ones, but it seems to be a common standard for judging the involvment of prominent individuals in any social and political cause.

At TED talks:

Wielding laypeople’s terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called “theory of everything,” really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.

In NY Magazine, Sam Anderson reviews the Kindle:

In the current ecosystem of American gadgetry—in which predatory herds of omnivorous iBeasts devour ever greater zones of our attention—the Kindle’s devotion to text feels practically medieval. It’s not clear yet whether this musty innovation is naïve or brilliant. It’s the spiritual antithesis of the iPhone, and the rare piece of technology that seems to encourage, rather than sabotage, the contemplative life. It’s like an iPod for Victorians. They should make it out of wood paneling instead of white plastic.

In fact, I’m already nostalgic for the Kindle. This kind of pure textual devotion can’t possibly survive: Future versions, if they exist (Web rumors suggest that it might soon be swallowed whole by a mythical iTablet) will inevitably make concessions to our appetite for distraction—we’ll be able to check our e-mail, watch YouTube, and track scores on ESPN. It will probably evolve, like Amazon itself, from a book-delivery system to a multimedia emporium.

The beauty of a book, however, is that it’s marvelously nonintegrated—the great ones stand outside of busy consumer cycles of tweaking and upgrading. (If only Crime and Punishment had more features!) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called books “the last bastion of analog.” It’d be miraculous if they could stay that way, even in digital form.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Alan Gilbert reviews Tino Sehgal’s New York solo debut, in The Village Voice:

Like many Sehgal titles,This situation both identifies the piece and literally describes its enactment. At random moments, the players flatly state in round- robin fashion: “Tino Sehgal.” “This situation.” “2007.” Previously “shown” in Berlin (where Sehgal lives), it’s the first New York City solo exhibition by the young global-art-world star. Much of Sehgal’s work combines his earlier studies in dance and political economy. The results are pieces such as This is good (2001), which required gallery staff to repeat the title while waving their arms and hopping on one leg; This success, also titled This failure (2007), in which children played games in a bare gallery, stopping to declare whether or not they thought the work was a success or failure; This objective of that object (2004), which featured five people chanting: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion”; and This is right (2003), in which two kids describe Sehgal pieces available for purchase.

With its refusal to produce a material object or employ self-documentation (no photographs, no videos; the gallery won’t even distribute a printed press release!), Sehgal’s work might seem to function as an obvious critique of a market-driven art world gone gaga over commodities. Yet Sehgal’s work is for sale—though only through an oral transaction made in the presence of a notary. As Sehgal declares in interviews, he’s not interested in starving to prove a point. Besides, his interest seems less in overthrowing a system, whether aesthetic or economic, than in undermining it from within—however slowly, i.e., one word, one conversation, one social interaction at a time. But perhaps this form of institutional tectonic-plate-shifting is what’s required for fundamental change to take place. Or maybe it’s a subtly subversive talking cure for whole ecologies—artistic, human, and natural—damaged by overproduction and material consumption.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]