In In these Times, Jessica Clark on the political impact of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

So, how do these Comedy Central send-ups impact politics? A study by two East Carolina University political scientists recently set off some alarm bells. They sat college students down in front of ‘04 campaign coverage from either CBS News or “The Daily Show,” and then asked the students to judge the candidates. After watching Stewart, students were harder on candidates and expressed less trust in the electoral system.

On June 23, Washington Post columnist Richard Morin fretted that the study was “particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don’t bother to cast ballots.” TNR television critic Lee Siegel piled on, “Constant ridicule seems to have the effect of turning the political system into one gigantic self-parodying freak show.”

A freak show? No kidding …

Print journalists’ doleful hand-wringing prompted flames of derision from progressive bloggers. “This is a woefully misleading representation of the study,” wrote Matt Stoller of MyDD.

In American Scientist, Terry Hunt offers another look at the collapse of the civilization on Easter Island.

The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

There is no reliable evidence that the island’s population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui’s shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island’s name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island’s inhabitants.

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile. It remains part of that country today.

In the LRB, Steven Shapin reviews Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford.

ristotle specifically looked down his nose at cooks. Knowing how to cook was the sort of instrumental knowledge suitable for a slave. If you were going to live the life of virtue, you needed the right number and sort of slaves, but the idea that you would learn to be a cook yourself was absurd. From the Middle Ages onwards, Continental – more rarely, English – noblemen might, and occasionally did, value their skilled household cooks very highly. They might even make a display of how much they themselves knew about the culinary arts, but the number of gentlemen who sought to acquire cooking skills was small. The Princess Palatine, married to the younger brother of Louis XIV, expressed a certain surprise about the exotic ways of her crapulous son, the regent: ‘My son knows how to cook; it is something he learned in Spain.’ However well regarded your cook was, he was still your servant: why on earth would you want to do that sort of thing yourself?

But a ‘kitchen slave’ is precisely what Buford wanted to be. He chucked his full-time job at the magazine, and for more than two years indentured himself to the celebrity chef Mario Batali at Babbo, then the flagship of Batali’s New York Italianate restaurant empire; for shorter periods, he studied how to make pasta fresca at a restaurant in Emilia-Romagna where Batali himself served an apprenticeship, and how to be a butcher and sausage-maker at the most traditional macelleria in Chianti. And it’s a sign of our times that the general reaction – certainly mine – to Buford’s adventure is more envy than wonderment. Buford paid a heavy price for the skills he acquired. At Babbo, he went through the degradation rituals of the prep and line-cook that have become familiar from the ‘kitchen nightmare’ literary and TV genre. Working for free, he was bumped, burned, bloodied and subjected to verbal abuse.

You don’t have to break it. Just give it a little
tap.

tap tap. See,

there’s the crack. And if you pry it a little
with the flat end of that spoon,

you’ll be able to slip yourself through.

—

To the woods where you’re walking. Crushed ice above you
like a layer of sky–

Some sun under it making it gleam.

Some snow under it bloodless and bright

in the fissured heart, the winter morgue of its imagined
land.

more of Dana Levin’s poem Bardo at Salmagundi here.

Mel Is Condemned by the Press. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. “Arrest me not,” he telleth the centurion, “for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.” Sayeth the centurion, “Tell it to the procurator.”

Mel Is Fingerprinted and Has His Mug Shot Taken. Mel calleth his lawyers, agents, and celebrity crisis managers and sayeth unto them, “I have opened my mouth and stirred up the Jews.” His lawyers, agents, and crisis managers sayeth, “Yet we are Jews.” Mel sayeth, “Thou didst not look Jewish when I was besotted with drink. Even so, gettest me out of this place of desolation.” . . .

Mel Rises from the Grave. Mel emergeth from Rehab and proclaimeth that his best friends are Jews, yet he addeth, “I met none in Rehab, for they hath not time to drink, being busy in the starting of wars.” His spokesperson proclaimeth, “Oy,” and fainteth.

more from The New Yorker here.

There is no question that Anne-Louis Girodet is one of the great figures in the history of modern art, indeed, as crucial to its early development as Goya and Gericault. Like them, Girodet is one of the founding fathers of modern romanticism, but he was much more influential than they were. He was influential into the 20th century, which is when his reputation revived: a literary painter of romantic fantasies, most notoriously The Sleep of Endymion (1791) (also called Endymion, Moonlight Effect), Girodet was a predecessor of Symbolism and Surrealism, as Sylvain Bellenger notes in his brilliant catalogue essay in Girodet, 1767-1824 (Musée du Louvre / Gallimard). Symbolist and Surrealist imagery also tended to the poetic and perverse (often confused with one another). The Symbolists and Surrealists were also sexually suggestive if not overtly sexual. They were certainly beyond the pale of the good sexual manners established by the classicism in which Girodet was trained. One was allowed to view but not touch the classical nude — but Endymion seems to invite one to touch his fleshy body. It is far from classically fit, and has been thought to be homosexually suggestive. (Is that so unclassical?)

more from Artnet Magazine here.

I’m not saying Eva Hesse wasn’t a great artist. Her unique mashup of Minimalism, Arte Povera, Surrealist Biomorphic Abstraction, Pop and Process Art brought humor and pathos to a field that was threatening to disappear up its own ass in a frenzy of high-serious math-geek reductivism, and has proved to be a powerful and positive influence on subsequent generations of object makers — if only for the adoption of the respirator as a standard art-making tool. Hesse died of brain cancer at 34 after half a decade of unmediated exploration in highly evaporative sculptural materials like fiberglass and resin. In the last five years of her brief life, almost clairvoyantly integrated into the burgeoning discourse-dominated mainstream art world, she produced more remarkable sculptural pieces than most sculptors manage in a lifetime — certainly enough to justify her position as a major contributor to the history of late-20th-century art.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From The Edge:

Discover Magazine had run a cover story proclaiming Smolin “The New Einstein”. It may have impressed the general reader, but not mainstream physicists. As cosmologist Alan Guth, father of the inflationary theory of the Universe, noted in The Third Culture:

“The relativity physicists belong to a small club. It’s a club that has yet to convince the majority of the community that the approach they’re pursuing is the right one. Certainly Smolin is welcome to come and give seminars, and at major conferences he and his colleagues are invited to speak. The physics community is interested in hearing what they have to say. But the majority looks to the superstring approach to answer essentially the same questions.”

Also weighing in was particle physicist and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann:

“Smolin? Oh, is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong!”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says lab rats and even goldfish can outwit them. Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins, whales and porpoises are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence. “We equate our big brain with intelligence.  Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said.

“The real flaw in this logic is that it suggests all brains are built the same … When you look at the structure of the dolphin brain you see it is not built for complex information processing,” he told Reuters in an interview. A neuroethologist who looks at brain evolution, Manger’s views are sure to cause a stir among a public which has long associated dolphins with intelligence, emotion and other humanlike qualities. They are widely regarded as one of the smartest mammals.  But Manger, whose peer-reviewed research on the subject has been published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, says the reality is different.

Brains, he says, are made of neurons and glia.  The latter create the environment for the neurons to work properly and producing heat is one of glia’s functions. “Dolphins have a super-abundance of glia and very few neurons … The dolphin’s brain is not made for information processing — it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water,” Manger said.

More here.

International festival for electronic music and political media art

“The c.sides Festival for Independent Electronic Music and New Media Arts is a three day independent and non-commercial international festival for artists, producers and musicians working in mediums of electronic and digital art and who are interested in creating a platform for exchange, networking and discussion concerning issues of art, social, political and cultural concern.

The festival which will take place in Jerusalem for three consecutive days and nights, August 29th – August 31st 2006 is a convergence between a media arts festival and a conference including various performing stages, exhibitions, workshops and theoretical discussions and panels.

About 100 international and local artists will participate in the festival as well as in a introductory program for participants that will address the social, political and cultural situation in Jerusalem, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and will include meetings with local artists, cultural institutions, human rights advocates and social justice organizations active in the city.”

More Here

Jude Stewart for MetropolisMag.com:

“Talking about the sustainability strategy behind Pearl River Tower “is like pulling on a thread-everything is connected in some way,” says Gordon Gill, the project’s lead architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Scheduled for completion in fall 2009, in Guangzhou, China, the project aims remarkably high: the first zero-energy supertall building in the world. “We definitely sought to utilize proven technologies; what’s unique is that we’re assembling them symbiotically and gaining from the interrelationships. That’s the beautiful thing about the project really.” Just as critical is the design’s relationship to the surrounding site landscape. As Roger Frechette, SOM’s director of MEP engineering, remarks, “We’ve knit these technologies together to take advantage of this specific location too. If the building was even across the street, it would look different.”

More Here

And more about other SOM’s projects in China Here

“The left’s embrace of an Islamist movement supported by Iranian mullahs would have appalled Karl Marx.”

Hazem Saghieh in Open Democracy:

Europe’s left-wingers are supporting us Lebanese against Israel and its war crimes. Thanks, that’s great: the Lebanese need all the backing they can get in facing the overwhelming technological savagery unleashed on their land and airspace, scorching the earth and not distinguishing civilians from soldiers, babies from adults.

Yet it would be better if the left, which is by definition progressive, grasped the specificity of the situation it is dealing with, rather than contenting itself with generalisations motivated only by hatred of American foreign policy and sometimes of America itself. American policy, especially in the middle east, is certainly despicable, but love for Lebanon and other countries and peoples should come before hating America and its policy, just as devotion to concrete peoples should always take precedence over allegiance to “causes”.

It is all very well for demonstrators to wave placards depicting George W Bush, Tony Blair and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, but it would be much better if the face of Hizbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah were up there with them, too.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

“Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them.” Gerald Brenan Thoughts in a Dry Season.

“A heretic is a person who offers too good a criticism of the authorities,” Brant Gartley, fictional documentary telejournalist.

Advances in rational understanding can be achieved in at least three ways:

1) Through novel ideas popping up, their rationale unentangled by old proofs;

2) Through the refinement of an existing set of ideas; or

3) Through heresy.

‘Heresy’ can be defined most simply as a challenge to orthodoxy. A set of beliefs is called an orthodoxy when it becomes the official line of those who have the power to plausibly say where the official line is to be drawn. Or for a more precise and more useful definition, an orthodoxy might be thought of as ‘a publicly-shared official belief system’. For a view to be heretical presupposes a canon of opinions held by those claiming, and sometimes having, authority about the subject in question. The basic recipe for creating heresy then, is at least two people who share a common opinion, and someone else who disagrees with them. (You’re free to be heretical against this wannabe orthodoxy about the word ‘heresy’, by the way.)

more from Philosophy Now here.

TJ Clark’s absorbing book takes the form of a diary and, like all published diaries, it frees the author to write in many genres at once. He began it as a way of simply recording his impressions of two paintings by Poussin, Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake and Landscape With a Calm, that were hanging facing each other at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles when he was there for what he calls ‘a six-month stint’ in January 2000. He had arrived at the Getty not quite knowing what to do with himself and, after settling in, went ‘in search of several paintings’ in the Getty collection, one of which was Poussin’s Landscape With a Calm – ‘Nothing special was in my mind. I was just looking.’ . . .

It is not incidental that at a time when there is more visual art than ever before, most writing about the visual arts is either mind-numbingly pretentious and cliquey or boringly descriptive and without vision. Clark’s book could not be more timely.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

What was her name, her home, her life, her past?” wonders Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau on seeing Mme Arnoux for the first time. “Even the desire for physical possession gave way to a deeper yearning, an aching curiosity which knew no bounds.” Much the same feeling is stirred in the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel Travesuras de la niña mala (“The Bad Girl’s Escapades”) by the woman to whom he consecrates his life. So indefatigably unreliable and elusive will she prove, so resourceful in her self-reinventions, that Ricardo Somocurcio’s curiosity, far from being satisfied, is endlessly renewed. He will meet her again and again, over forty years, in several different cities and under a variety of names, and fall in love with her anew each and every time. She really is a bad girl, and his will be a sentimental education one wouldn’t wish on anybody, yet we can hardly imagine that Ricardo would have had it any other way. And since, for narratives as for mistresses, there are clear advantages in unpredictability, the result is a wonderfully seductive and enthralling novel.

more from the TLS here.

From The London Times:

KATEY: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter by Lucinda Hawksley. To his public, Dickens was a sun, dispensing warmth, light and laughter. But to his family he was a black hole — a vast, irresistible attractor that sucked all the energy and willpower out of them, and left them limp. Of his 10 children, only two made anything of their lives — Katey, the subject of this biography, and Henry, who became a high-court judge and was Lucinda Hawksley’s great-great-grandfather.

Katey, born in 1839, was Dickens’s favourite. He nicknamed her Lucifer Box because of her fiery nature. Her talent for painting and drawing soon became apparent, and he arranged for her to have lessons at Bedford College. To outsiders, the Dickens children’s life seemed idyllic — the fun and frivolity, the hilarious parties and parlour games, with Dickens as indefatigable master of ceremonies, the famous Christmases at Gad’s Hill, the summers in France, Italy or Switzerland. Thackeray’s daughter Anny remembered how she envied the Dickens daughters’ white satin shoes and long flowing white sashes. Their father’s fame ensured a constant stream of fascinating visitors — writers, actors, artists. Katey got to know John Everett Millais, and in his 1860 Royal Academy painting The Black Brunswicker he used her as the model for the distraught girl clinging to her soldier lover, who is off to Waterloo.

But there was another side.

More here.

In the wake of the current Arab-Israeli, Fred Halliday offers and odd recollection of his first encounter with the issue and turns to Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt.

The Oxford debate of October 1964 [on the Arab-Israeli conflict] thus took place before the enormous shifts of sentiment and solidarity, evident today in relation to Lebanon and the Hizbollah movement, towards Arab causes and away from Israel…

The debate was conducted along already (and still) familiar lines: on one side, evocation of the genocide of Jews in Europe under Nazism (the term “holocaust” came into general use only later), the Arab refusal to accept the 1947 United Nations partition plan, the Arab responsibility for the flight of the Palestinian population in the war of 1947-1949; on the other, the violence of the Zionist acquisition and conquest of Arab land, the betrayal by Britain of its many promises to the Arabs up to its unilateral backdoor scuttle from Palestine in May 1948, the hypocrisy and passivity of the international community thereafter.

As it continued, however, the atmosphere became more disputatious. Edward Attiyah’s speech was interrupted by the shouts, way beyond normal heckling, of a group of young supporters of Israel who rose to their feet in unison, seeking to silence the speaker by accusing him of being a “Nazi” and raising their arms in mock-Hitler salute. This must have been hard to take for the author of the elegiac autobiography of a Lebanese upbringing, Having Been an Arab, who (in common with other modern Arab intellectuals such as George Antonius, Albert Hourani, Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said) was brought up as a Protestant, and in his case had identified England as his spiritual home.

I was never to find out. Attiyah battled on, his voice rising intermittently above the din, before a sudden pause. A throttled sound came from his throat, and he fell to the floor, victim of a heart attack. He was dead. I shall never forget the sound of his body hitting the union’s wooden floor.

From The National Geographic:

They can crush a stack of concrete slabs with a bare fist, walk with catlike balance on a bamboo pole, and generate deadly kicks and punches at lightning-fast speeds. Real-life martial artists have long defied what many people would think is humanly possible, and their seemingly superpowered abilities have inspired generations of movies and television shows.

But where do the true skills end and the special effects begin? Maybe Hollywood magic doesn’t enter the equation as soon as you think. For the upcoming television special, Fight Science, researchers used high-tech equipment to put real martial artists to the test. The feature will air on August 20 on the National Geographic Channel. The action took place inside a specially designed film studio that is part laboratory and part dojo, a school for training in the various arts of self-defense. Here world champion martial artists from diverse disciplines were pitted against a customized crash-test dummy outfitted with impact sensors. The sensors—along with infrared, high-speed, and high-definition motion-capture cameras—allowed scientists to measure and map the speed, force, range, and impact of the fighter’s techniques.

The result is an unprecedented look at how martial artists generate the power and speed behind each move.

More here.

Jonathan Curiel in Saudi Aramco World:

Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connec- tion between Muslim traditions and American blues music, she’ll play two recordings: The athaan, the Muslim call to prayer that’s heard from minarets around the world, and “Levee Camp Holler,” an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.

“Levee Camp Holler” is no ordinary song. It’s the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. But it’s the song’s melody and note changes that closely resemble oneof Islam’s best-known refrains. Like the call to prayer, “Levee Camp Holler” emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter’s vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both “Levee Camp Holler” and the adhan. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

More here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

When Clement Greenberg was five years old, he beat a goose to death with a shovel handle. Near the end of his life, Greenberg explained that he had killed the bird not out of cruelty but out of fear. This incident was a portent, quipped the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik: “The slow escalation in targets, the growing taste for blood, the rise to bigger and uglier assaults…The die is cast; the boy will become an art critic.”

The anecdote and Gopnik’s response are retold in Art Czar, Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ masterful biography of Greenberg (1909-1994). With a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and crisp, vivid prose, Marquis has astutely constructed a complex, highly nuanced portrait of America’s most controversial art critic.

more from Brooklyn Rail here.