IN PAKISTAN, THE BIGGEST STAR IS IN DRAG

Hasan Zaidi at NBC News:

X_lon_pakistantalkshow_0701_standardLast year when a journalist from Indian-administered Kashmir asked me what the “story” was behind Begum Nawazish Ali, I was more than just surprised. The Begum (the term means “Lady” in Urdu) in question is the host of Pakistan’s most popular TV talk show – “Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali.”

I didn’t think Aaj, the fledgling television channel which broadcasts the show, was even seen outside the country. I asked him how he knew the name of Pakistan’s rising star and he said “Oh, we all watch her program off satellite!”

The talk show host making waves in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (and apparently Kashmir) is purportedly a stylish, middle-aged, socialite widow of an army colonel. Her monologues are often laced with sexual innuendo, she flirts openly with her guests, and sometimes embarrasses them with probing questions about their private lives. Her guests include some of Pakistan’s most well-known personalities: the urban elite, film and television stars and even some top politicians. Most are nevertheless thrilled to be invited to appear on a program millions are watching.

Viewers are obviously fascinated too. Dinner party conversations here in Karachi are often peppered with anecdotes about her risqué banter and sly digs at Pakistani politics. Women call the television station to inquire about the tailoring of her sequined blouses and where to buy her glamorous saris.

The thing is, Begum Nawazish Ali is actually a man. Ali Saleem, the 28-year-old man who dons lipstick, mascara and a wig to Begum Nawazish Ali, has managed to break many taboos in conservative Pakistan through the character.

More here.



Thursday, February 8, 2007

The Women of Pedro Almodóvar

Daniel Mendelsohn reviews the film Volver, directed by Almodovar, in the New York Review of Books:

20070301volverThe theme of returning to and suggestively recycling old material is at the very core of Almodóvar’s new film, the Academy Award–nominated Volver, as its title reminds us. The Spanish verb volver means not only “to turn” —there is, indeed, a recurrent visual motif here of windmills turning—but “to return” and, with a verbal object, “to do again.” Here, as in Talk to Her, two women are at the center of connected plots; here, as in All About My Mother, the emphasis is on motherhood. Most remarkably there is here a crucial allusion to the groundbreaking Flower of My Secret. For Volver takes as its donnée the plot of the very novel that Leo, in her quest for seriousness, had tried and failed to publish in the earlier film. Exactly like Leo’s novel, The Cold Storage Room, the new movie is about a mother (here called Raimunda), a lower-class cleaning woman, who learns that her deadbeat husband has tried to rape her daughter and, after the husband is murdered, disposes of the body in a freezer in a neighbor’s restaurant.

We eventually learn that these crimes —the incest, the murder, the mother’s willingness to do anything to protect the daughter—are echoes of, “returns” to, earlier crimes committed by Raimunda’s own mother; but this internal return is nowhere near as interesting as the larger one taking place here, which is that of Almodóvar himself once again returning, with delicious self-consciousness, to an old plot—one that sounded hopelessly excessive, too much like his own early work—and reconfiguring it, as he does here even more radically than in his other recent films, in the subtle but provocative manner of his mature style.

More here.  [Photo shows Almodovar and Penelope Cruz on the set of Volver.]

Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple

From the website of Cornell University:

Screenhunter_01_feb_08_1932Three Lectures by Hans Bethe

IN 1999, legendary theoretical physicist Hans Bethe delivered three lectures on quantum theory to his neighbors at the Kendal of Ithaca retirement community (near Cornell University). Given by Professor Bethe at age 93, the lectures are presented here as QuickTime videos synchronized with slides of his talking points and archival material.

Intended for an audience of Professor Bethe’s neighbors at Kendal, the lectures hold appeal for experts and non-experts alike. The presentation makes use of limited mathematics while focusing on the personal and historical perspectives of one of the principal architects of quantum theory whose career in physics spans 75 years.

A video introduction and appreciation are provided by Professor Silvan S. Schweber, the physicist and science historian who is Professor Bethe’s biographer, and Edwin E. Salpeter, the J. G. White Distinguished Professor of Physical Science Emeritus at Cornell, who was a post-doctoral student of Professor Bethe.

To see the videos, go here.

In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:

Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

More here.

The Truth About Beauty

Virginia Postrel in The Atlantic:

Cosmetics makers have always sold “hope in a jar”—creams and potions that promise youth, beauty, sex appeal, and even love for the women who use them. Over the last few years, the marketers at Dove have added some new-and-improved enticements. They’re now promising self-esteem and cultural transformation. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” declares a press release, is “a global effort that is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty.” Along with its thigh-firming creams, self-tanners, and hair conditioners, Dove is peddling the crowd-pleasing notions that beauty is a media creation, that recognizing plural forms of beauty is the same as declaring every woman beautiful, and that self-esteem means ignoring imperfections…

Last fall, Dove extended its image building with a successful bit of viral marketing: a seventy-five-second online video called Evolution. Created by Ogilvy & Mather, the video is a close-up of a seemingly ordinary woman, shot in harsh lighting that calls attention to her uneven skin tone, slightly lopsided eyes, and dull, flat hair. In twenty seconds of time-lapse video, makeup artists and hair stylists turn her into a wide-eyed, big-haired beauty with sculpted cheeks and perfect skin. It’s Extreme Makeover without the surgical gore:

But that’s only the beginning. Next comes the digital transformation, as a designer points-and-clicks on the model’s photo, giving her a longer, slimmer neck, a slightly narrower upper face, fuller lips, bigger eyes, and more space between her eyebrows and eyes.

More here.

Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions

John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, in TruthOut:

George_bush_uniform_smResentment naturally contaminated Bush’s efforts to prove himself to his father and receive his father’s approval. The contradictory mix showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father’s war against Iraq, but this time winning the duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam. He could at once emulate his father, show his contempt for him, and redeem him. But beneath this son-father struggle lies a far more significant issue for Bush – a question about his own competence, adequacy and autonomy as a human being.

We have seen this inner question surface repeatedly, and we have largely conspired with him to deny it.

  • On September 11, 2001, we saw (and suppressed) the image of him sitting stunned for seven minutes in a crowd of school children after learning that the second plane had hit the Twin Towers, and then the lack of image of him when he vanished from public view for the rest of the day. Instead, we bought the cover-up image, three days after the attack, of the strong leader, grabbing the bullhorn in New York City and issuing bellicose statements.
  • In 2004, we saw and denied the insecurity displayed when the president refused to face the 9/11 Commission alone and needed Vice President Cheney to go with him.
  • In 2003, we saw and suppressed the dark side of the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier landing, in which a man who had ducked out on his generation’s war and dribbled away his service in the Texas Air National Guard dressed up like Top Gun and pretended that he was a combat pilot like his father.

More here.  [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

Ian Buruma: the debate continues

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It is the fate of certain books, like certain phrases (“fascism”, “Orientalism”, “multiculturalism”, “racism”), to be used as bludgeons to beat up people whose views one dislikes. These verbal sticks often bear little or no relation to their original meanings, or, in the case of books, to what their authors actually wrote. I suppose I should feel flattered that “Murder in Amsterdam” is gradually turning into such a book.

Professor Cliteur wishes to beat up nihilists, postmodern cultural relativists, and multiculturalists, and uses my book as his bludgeon. I can only assume he has actually read it, but his version is certainly not mine. Nowhere did I suggest that the ideals of the Enlightenment are no better than radical Islamism. My descriptions of Theo van Gogh’s killer and his murderous ideology make it quite clear what I think of religious extremism. Either Professor Cliteur is incapable of grasping a complicated argument, or he wilfully misreads my book in order to classify me as a “post-modern relativist.”

more from Sign and Sight here.

All that is required is that we should let Europe live

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Europe has lost the plot. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the treaty of Rome on 25th March 2007—the 50th birthday of the European economic community that became the European Union—Europe no longer knows what story it wants to tell. A shared political narrative sustained the postwar project of (west) European integration for three generations, but it has fallen apart since the end of the cold war. Most Europeans now have little idea where we’re coming from; far less do we share a vision of where we want to go to. We don’t know why we have an EU or what it’s good for. So we urgently need a new narrative.

I propose that our new story should be woven from six strands, each of which represents a shared European goal. The strands are freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity. None of these goals is unique to Europe, but most Europeans would agree that it is characteristic of contemporary Europe to aspire to them. Our performance, however, often falls a long way short of the aspiration. That falling short is itself part of our new story and must be spelled out. For today’s Europe should also have a capacity for constant self-criticism.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

age of innocence

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It is a strange fate for a celebrated writer to be remembered as the friend of a still more famous one. Such, for a generation after her death in 1937, was Edith Wharton’s lot. Her novels were out of fashion, indeed had been consigned to that limbo of all things ‘Victorian’ – ‘prim’, ‘mannered’, ‘violets and old lace’, etc – by a consciously modern public who simply supposed her books to be like that, from their setting in old New York, without actually reading them. Her personal image was of a large, rich, imperious old lady who – ah, ha – had seized on poor Henry James who was too polite to resist her and bore him off on wild journeys across France by chauffeured car. Did not James himself write piteously to friends of her ‘unappeasable summons’, and refer to her as an ‘eagle’ swooping down on him and as ‘the Angel Devastation’? And had not others complained about her bossiness, her arbitrary changes of plan, her chilliness to people who did not measure up to her own high social or intellectual standards, and her nineteenth-century assumption (correct, as it turned out) that her life would always be well padded with servants and that this was her right?

more from Literary Review here.

Salad Days

From SaladThe Washington Post:

Tristram Stuart’s thought-provoking book is not a global history of this taboo. Instead, it revolves around the vegetarian movement that began in 17th-century England — the name first came into use in the 1840s — and that remains strong today. But there is nothing narrow about the author’s focus. Both scholarly and entertaining, The Bloodless Revolution is a huge feast of ideas — ideas from India and France and America, from ancient Greece and Thoreau and Emerson, from Rousseau, Hobbes, the Kabbalah, the Old Testament, Descartes and Darwin, to name just a few of the better-known sources that weigh in on the meatless diet.

Vegetarianism illustrates the tremendous impact that India had on British culture but also the impact of the British on India. Mahatma Gandhi, Stuart tells us, didn’t take up vegetarianism as a cause until he encountered the raw food movement, which dates back to the poet Shelley, while in London to study law. Gandhi embraced the diet — he had rejected vegetarianism in his youth — because he determined it was free of “himsa” or violence.

But the meatless diet couldn’t be completely violence-free, for it also appealed to Adolf Hitler.

More here.

Ingredient in Male Sweat Raises Women’s Hormone Levels

Male

From Scientific American:

Rats, moths and butterflies are all known to send chemosignals to secure mates. Similar phenomena have been suggested but not proved in humans: Studies such as Elizabeth McClintock’s work in the early 1970s—in which women living together in a dormitory were found to have synchronous menstrual cycles—indicate that a sort of sixth sense exists that allows people’s bodies to communicate with one another.

But no evidence was produced, says Claire Wyart, a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, “that a single component of a complex mixture like sweat could induce a change on a hormonal level” without direct contact. Now a new study led by Wyart, published in this week’s issue of The Journal of Neuroscience does just that.

The researchers exposed 21 subjects to 30 milligrams of androstadienone and to yeast, which is not in sweat but has a similar olfactory sensation. The results: smelling the androstadienone increased positive mood, total physiological arousal and sexual arousal, which grew with longer exposure.

More here.  (Thanks to Ga and Zehra).

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Ameliorate, Contain, Coerce, Destroy

Niall Ferguson reviews The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by Rupert Smith, in the New York Times Book Review:

Ferg450Karl von Clausewitz, the greatest of all military theorists, learned the art of war the hard way. As a senior Prussian officer, he was on the receiving end of the Napoleonic revolution in warfare at the Battle of Jena in 1806, ending up a prisoner. Watching how Bonaparte used the French army to redraw the map of Europe convinced Clausewitz that war was “not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means” (the most famous and most frequently misquoted sentence in “On War”).

Clausewitz had witnessed a revolution not of technology but of mobilization and motivation. Under Bonaparte, war had become “the business of the people.” Raising larger armies than ever before, inspiring them with nationalist fervor, concentrating their attack on the enemy’s weakest spot and then annihilating the enemy’s forces: these were the essential traits of what Clausewitz called “absolute war.” In his view, its advent made political control of the military more important than ever before.

Now comes Rupert Smith, whose “Utility of Force” seeks to update Clausewitz for our own times.

More here.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

One of many letters from the To Whom It May Concern blog:

January 15, 2007

Dear Alarmist Weathermen,

Everyone was saying that this storm system that’s moving through the Midwest was going to be big. Really big. Broadcast repeatedly were pictures from the Plains States of general carnage caused by the ice and snow that would surely be our doom. Desperate as I have been to spend time with friends this week, I decided not to call anyone or make plans for fear I would get stuck in the city during this impending blizzard that you had told me was going to land overnight Friday night. Friday night came and went and nothing happened. Oh, so now it was going to be overnight Saturday. Again, I thought, well, if I just go to Target, I won’t get caught in the Storm Of The Century.

What happened? Oh, nothing. It was raining. Raining. I was pissed. A friend texted me and asked what my plans were. By 7 pm I realized that the rain was certainly not snow and I should go out. The nagging suspicion that you had planted in my mind haunted me all night. On my way home the salt trucks were out and I thought – this is it. It is coming.

Sunday morning I woke up to some ice on my car, and again, I was pissed. On and off on Sunday I watched the news for the weather. Every single time, we got absolutely no information. None. Nothing of substance.

Here’s how every newscast happened:

Hairdo #1: Wow, the Bears won. Who knew? Roll that footage of drunk fans, just one more time!

[Fucking stupid tape of Bears fans celebrating in the parking lot of Solider Field]

Hairdo #2: Oh my, looks like fun!

Hairdo #1: Cold fun!

Hairdo #2: (dead serious) And how cold will it get? Weatherman McBlowme will tell us how terrible the commute will be tomorrow – because there’s a good chance your commute will mean death.

I began to get frustrated.  But then I thought, you know what? I would love to be you. I would love to have a job where I could basically make up whatever story I wanted and broadcast it across a major metropolitan area…

More here.

Language, truth … and wine

Colin Bower in New English Review:

An early reviewer of the writings of DH Lawrence remarked with some degree of accuracy and exasperation: “For Mr Lawrence, everything is always like something else”. In the belle epoque of Edwardian Britain, when a kind of debonair confidence made all knowledge unproblematic, it must have been puzzling for a stolid Times of London reviewer to have a chap come along insisting that things could only be understood by appreciating their likeness to other things.

WineThis probably explains why there was never much writing about wine in those days. Wine is always described as being like something else. This is appealingly post modern. If a chardonnay tastes a bit like a peach, what then does the peach taste like? A chardonnay? And if so, what does either taste like? If you must describe the Van Loveren 2001 limited edition Merlot as being “chocolately”, does it mean that chocolate tastes like the Van Loveren Merlot?  And if we like the Merlot on account if its tasting like chocolate, why don’t we eat chocolate instead of drinking wine?

More here.

the perfect narcissist

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Andy’s more alive than ever. The press loves him, young artists discuss him reverently, foreigners consider him essential. The filmmaker Ric Burns recently made a two-part documentary about him. A show of his late work was one of the most discussed exhibitions last year. Phaidon just published a giant book called Andy Warhol: “Giant” Size. A trendy downtown club on Chrystie Street is dolling itself up to look like the Factory, the name of Warhol’s tinfoil-wrapped studio. (Three weeks ago, this magazine ran the cover headline WARHOL’S CHILDREN on a story about three ultrahip downtown art stars.) And Factory Girl—a movie about Edie Sedgwick, the rich young thing who hung out at the Factory and OD’d at 28—opened last week.

There’s something strange about this.

more from New York Magazine here.

the war to end all wars

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In “The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It” (Houghton Mifflin; $27), David A. Bell, a professor at Johns Hopkins, tries to restore military history to the center of history. This ambition may come as a surprise to amateur readers, for whom military history is probably already at the center of history. But academics tend to regard it either as old-style history, where seven key battles change everything, or as hobbyist’s history, where Tom Clancy types look up from the pages to buy Blue and Gray fighting action figures. Real history is the slow-crawl study of small changes, from clan loyalties to price ratios—gradually shifting tectonic plates that suddenly erupt into visible mountains. We see the peaks, but the movement, not the mountain, is the story.

Against this notion, Bell believes that understanding warfare, its practice and its particulars, is necessary to understand modernity—those mountain peaks really are the places that give you the longest view. He wants to make military history respectable by enfolding it into intellectual and cultural history. His subject is Napoleon’s wars, and he goes into great and often riveting detail about the tangles of Marengo and Moscow, all offered with a gift for storytelling and a flair for the weird, unfamiliar fact. (The problem that the French Army had in Russia, he points out, was not just the cold but the heat, too. It was ninety-seven degrees when the French arrived in their heavy woollens.) The thesis, though, is what’s startling: that the practice of “total war” is a modern and ideological invention, born in the French Enlightenment, and first realized fully by Napoleon—a millennial idea before it was a murderous activity.

more from The New Yorker here.

Every day I try to be as generous as I can be

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Koons, meanwhile, has always seemed the sort of clever, wildly successful artist-cum-businessman one could afford to hate, or at least to distrust with bilious envy. But if the audience were expecting someone who wore his intellectual flair on his body, along with, say, funny hair and multicolored tennis shoes, they were disappointed. (There were some funny-haired people in the audience, and they were sitting together – does LACMA provide a special row?) Either he is a very good actor, or Koons is in reality a soft-spoken, thoughtful and articulate man who believes that the artist’s “journey” begins with the “acceptance of self.”

At one point a questioner in the audience addressed the result of Koons’ own self-acceptance, suggesting that his work is “cynical.” Koons seemed to take a slightly deeper breath; he’s heard this before. “I’m not cynical,” he said with deliberation. “My definition of cynicality is when you have more information than you reveal. I try to reveal everything I know. Every day I try to be as generous as I can be.”

more from the LA Weekly here.

Rubinstein on Levitt

The very talented economist and game theorist Ariel Rubinstein on Steven Levitt’s Freakanomics (via Tom Slee over at Whimsley):

Freakonomics lashes out at the entire world from the Olympus of economics. My response is an outline of “my new book”—Freak- Freakonomics. In my (“brilliant . . . ”) book, I will borrow from the structure and text of Freakonomics. I will show that if one also looks upon economists, including Levitt, as economic agents, one can use the insights of Freakonomics to lash out against . . . economics and economists.

Like Levitt, I have no central theme. My book will be a series of observations—some about economics, some about Freakonomics—that I hope the reader will find intriguing.

Chapter 1: is imperialism still alive?

Economists believe that they have a lot to contribute to any field—sociology, zoology or criminology. The academic imperialism of economics has something in common with political imperialism. Therefore, I will begin my chapter with a fascinating historical review where we will learn that imperialism stemmed from the perceived superiority of the conquering people over the conquered peoples, and that the role of the conqueror is to disseminate its lofty culture.

From here, I will move to describe Freakonomics as a typical work of academic imperialism. The complex interplay of feelings of superiority and deficiency has driven every empire, and economics is no different. Levitt: “Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers, but a serious shortage of interesting questions”(xi). Freakonomics makes statistical reasoning, which is used in all the sciences, look like a subdued colony of economics. Furthermore, Freakonomics expresses the aspiration to expand economics to encompass any question that requires the use of common sense.