To most westerners, Arabic script is familiar only from media images: as a threatening, cryptic tangle on the bandannas of suicide bombers, on banners carried through the streets of Gaza or Basra, or in the rolling captions on al-Jazeera news clips. Yet the history of the written Arabic word is, in reality, a volatile 1,500-year-old blend of religion, magic, politics and art. Today, artists working with Arabic are just as likely to use InDesign or a spray can as the calligrapher’s pen of 24 neatly cut donkey hairs, but they draw on the same complex tradition. “Word Into Art”, based on the British Museum’s rarely seen contemporary Middle Eastern collection, traces the way in which artists interact with this legacy.

“It’s an immense story to tell,” says Venetia Porter, curator of the exhibition, as she leads me into a gallery half-hung with calligraphy. “But we’ve tried to begin at the beginning.” As “Word Into Art” emphasises, written Arabic originated as a sacred vehicle for religion. According to the Koran, the Archangel Jibreel delivered the first revelation to Muhammad with the command to recite: “In the name of thy Lord . . . who by the pen taught man what he did not know.” When the reluctant (and illiterate) Prophet eventually complied, generations of scribes and calligraphers devised increasingly elaborate scripts in which to copy his words. Constrained by the Islamic taboo on representation, they created a sophisticated art of the word governed by precise rules.

more from The New Statesman here.

The world of Lowbrow Art was shocked and saddened on April 22, when 59-year-old Juxtapoz publisher Fausto Vitello died suddenly of a heart attack while riding his bike in Woodside, California. Vitello was, of course, best known for his High Speed Productions flagship skateboard publication Thrasher (which disseminated its own unique punk aesthetic vision — call it Gnarlism), but when he decided in 1994 to band together with Robert Williams, Craig Stecyk, Greg Escalante and a handful of other Lowbrow luminaries to launch a magazine to chronicle the amorphous post-punk stew of hot rods, tattoos, comics, commercial illustration and other unacceptable fringe elements of visual culture, he tapped into a global vein of art-world frustration and catapulted Lowbrow from a local subculture into an international phenomenon.

more from the LA Weekly here.

In the Guardian:

A Somali-born Dutch MP who came to symbolise the Netherlands’ troubled relations with Islam is planning to leave her adopted country and settle in the United States.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is expected to announce today that she will resign as an MP, days after a television programme accused her of lying in 1992 in order to secure Dutch nationality.

Ms Hirsi Ali, a fierce critic of radical Islam who lives under armed guard, wants to pre-empt any move by the Netherlands’ tough immigration minister to strip her of Dutch citizenship.

She will be going to the American Enterprise Institute. More reactions here.

Lee Siegel in The New Republic:

Enough already. I mean, enough. Is there anything this guy writes about that doesn’t shill for business values? Is there any aspect of existence he hasn’t transformed into a strategy for coming out on top in a meeting? Is there any business strategy that he hasn’t converted into a universal way of living?

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell turned a banal business-concept–that moment when an idea, trend or style of conduct “tips” into a craze–virtually into an explanation of how history unfolds and society works. In Blink, he argued that the artist’s creative intuition is something everybody possesses, something that can be used for practical purposes in any situation. (The Power of Positive Blinking.) One of the book’s central dramas is the role intuition played, according to Gladwell, in the battle between (successful) Pepsi and (failed) New Coke. Businessmen, Gladwell wants to tell us, have the instinct of poets. That was a thrill.

More here.

Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

The past dozen years have been the most convulsive in television history. The four major networks’ share of the viewing audience has fallen from seventy-two per cent to forty-six. As the HBO hits “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” made even the best network shows look strangely antique, basic-cable offerings like “South Park” (on Comedy Central) and “The Shield” (on FX) fattened their channels’ purses through subscription fees as well as through ads. Even Univision’s telenovela “Alborada” began to outdraw some network shows. Scrambling to keep up, the networks began premièring shows throughout the year, rather than just in the fall; running them for “short arcs” of only ten or twelve episodes; and putting on serial dramas and reality shows, which can’t profitably be aired in repeats. These changes meant that the networks were often abandoning their expectation of vast profits from the “back end”—the sale of a hit show into syndication—although they began to recoup by selling DVDs of shows like “24” and “The Office.”

The biggest development was that the “linear” viewing model—in which people watched “Lost” when it aired, Wednesdays at 9 P.M. on ABC—started to give way to the “on-demand” model, in which people watched “Lost” whenever and wherever they wanted to: on TiVo systems, iPods, or P.C.s, which swiftly routed them to an illegal P2P download, or to abc.com (which began streaming episodes a few weeks ago), or to a montage of the show’s best scenes on YouTube, a video bazaar where viewers were likely to forget about “Lost” altogether as they watched grassroots “content”—skateboard wipeouts, say, created by “sk8hed,” from Bakersfield.

More here.

Claudia Parsons at Reuters:

Pulitzer Prize-winner Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate remembered as a mentor to young writers and a devoted gardener, has died at the age of 100 in New York, his publisher said on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for W.W. Norton, which published his last book “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden” last year, said Kunitz had died on Sunday of pneumonia.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said Kunitz would be remembered as both an extraordinary poet of great compassion, and as a mentor who encouraged countless younger poets in their writing.

More here.  [Thanks to Chris Harris.]

From The Guardian:

In an unprecedented politicisation of the most prestigious prize for popular science books, the winning author pledged to donate his £10,000 prize to the family of the late government scientist David Kelly. David Bodanis, who was awarded the Aventis science book prize last night, said he hoped his gesture would, “tell some people in England something about the importance of truth.”

“Science is all about truth. There’s one realm where a lot of people feel that truth hasn’t come out and truth is known but it hasn’t been acknowledged,” he told the Guardian. Alluding to Dr Kelly’s death following comments he made to a journalist about Iraq war intelligence Dr Bodanis said, “[Dr Kelly] was aware of what was really going on and the government lied and tried to feel they could suppress the truth. Events have clearly shown that they were wrong and he was right.”

More here.

From Nature:

A study of the effects of low oxygen levels on ‘economy class syndrome’ has re-opened the debate over how long-haul flights increase passengers’ risks of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the formation of potentially fatal blood clots.

Although it is well known that restricting blood flow by sitting immobile for long periods can increase the risk of such clots, some researchers have proposed that there may be other factors on flights that contribute to the risk. Studies comparing people on long-haul flights to those sitting still on the ground have indicated that there is a difference between the two groups, although it isn’t clear exactly why. Researchers have suggested that the explanation could lie with passenger stress, poor air quality, low humidity, low air pressure, or exposure to cosmic radiation.

More here.

Wilfrid M. McClay in the Weekly Standard:

It’s a safe bet that W. H. Auden would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the “prudery” of “cultured people” who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms “far more shocking than any of the four-letter words.” Furthermore, there can be no doubt that Auden was, and deserves to be known as, a Christian writer, rather than a writer who merely happened to be Christian. Many of his most distinguished works of poetry and criticism, especially in his American years, are not only indebted to, but positively enveloped in, the riches of Christian narrative, language, imagery, allusion, and moral insight.

The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a “religious” man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.

More here.

Robin Lloyd in LiveScience.com:

We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least. So why do we do it?

It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.

“It’s tied in with self-esteem,” says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. “We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels.”

Not all lies are harmful. In fact, sometimes lying is the best approach for protecting privacy and ourselves and others from malice, some researchers say.  Some deception, such as boasting and lies in the name of tact and politeness, can be classified as less than serious. But bald-faced lies (whether they involve leaving out the truth or putting in something false), are harmful, as they corrode trust and intimacy—the glue of society.

Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others, researchers say.  People are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds, Feldman’s research shows.

More here.

The NYU grad student strike is over for the semester. Meanwhile, GSOC continues to make its case for unionization and also takes a closer look at NYU’s activities. For example:

At his inauguration as NYU’s President in 2002, John Sexton articulated a vision of what he calls, “the Common Enterprise University.” He refined that vision in an essay entitled, “The Common Enterprise University and the Teaching Mission,” in which he wrote:

Taken together, these factors-the reality of decreasing government support, the need for increasing investments in both traditional areas and new knowledge and teaching, and the limits on tuition-manifest the depth of the dilemma faced by universities committed to high standards and even higher aspirations. We will generate the resources to fulfill our mission only if we move to common enterprise, with its emphasis on faculty engagement in the setting of priorities as well as faculty ownership of the decisions made and in all parts of the university, led by the faculty, a willingness occasionally to sacrifice for the collective good.

The analysis offered here begs the question “who is being asked to sacrifice for NYU’s future?”… NYU data shows a marked increase in the number of full time, non-tenure track faculty along with an increase in the salary gap between men and women among tenured and tenure track faculty.

Also in the New York Review of Books, there is a transcript of the inaugural PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture given by Orhan Pamuk. I found this passage lovely.

I always have difficulty expressing my political judgments in a clear, emphatic, and strong way—I feel pretentious, as if I’m saying things that are not quite true. This is because I know I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view—I am, after all, a novelist, the kind of novelist who makes it his business to identify with all of his characters, especially the bad ones. Living as I do in a world where, in a very short time, someone who has been a victim of tyranny and oppression can suddenly become one of the oppressors, I know also that holding strong beliefs about the nature of things and people is itself a difficult enterprise. I do also believe that most of us entertain these contradictory thoughts simultaneously, in a spirit of good will and with the best of intentions. The pleasure of writing novels comes from exploring this peculiarly modern condition whereby people are forever contradicting their own minds. It is because our modern minds are so slippery that freedom of expression becomes so important: we need it to understand ourselves, our shady, contradictory, inner thoughts, and the pride and shame that I mentioned earlier.

In the New York Review of Books, a recap of the end of the clown show that was the reign of Silvio Berlusconi (or at least this episode of it).

Traditionally on losing an election, a politician calls to congratulate the winner and urges voters to put their differences aside and come together for the good of the country. But Silvio Berlusconi is anything but a traditional politician. Instead, after his narrow defeat by the center-left candidate, Romano Prodi, Berlusconi made charges of fraud (even though his own government had overseen the voting), demanded a recount (which quickly confirmed the original result), and demanded that he be included in any new government in order to avoid “civil war.”

Prodi will probably have enough seats to put together a parliamentary majority. But a weak government, presiding over a sharply divided country, will likely make it possible for Berlusconi to block legislation. Or Prodi’s government could be short-lived, and there could be new elections in the not-too-distant future.

A close outcome was not only predictable but actually planned by Berlusconi during his government’s twilight as a way of lessening the impact of possible defeat. A few months before the election, Berlusconi studied polls that showed the center-left winning a substantial majority in parliament with the country’s winner-take-all electoral system. He decided to change the election system and return to the proportional representation that the Italian electorate had strongly rejected in a popular referendum in 1993. The old proportional system was thought to have encouraged a plethora of small parties, unstable government majorities, short-lived revolving-door governments, and ceaseless horse-trading among coalition partners, all of which fostered corruption and lack of clear policies in the post– World War II period.

Brita Sydhoff in Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition):

If the entertainment industry, not least Hollywood, reflects a prevailing state of mind in the United States and the West in general, torture may be steadily gaining acceptance as a means of extracting information from suspects.

Or is it just a coincidence that the entertainment industry increasingly appeals to its audience through scenes of torture and violence at just this time when politicians and intellectuals are arguing in favour of interrogation methods that amount to torture, as a countermeasure in the so-called war on terror? In an earlier season of the popular Fox television series 24, Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) agent Jack Bauer fought a radical Islamist plot to cause meltdown at US nuclear power plants.

The series is highly entertaining, but it is also a test of its audience’s views on the ticking-bomb scenario: are they prepared to condone torture if thousands of innocent lives are at stake? Is it acceptable, for example, when a CTU agent tortures his colleague’s husband with electric cables in an attempt to extract the information that could possibly prevent the meltdown?

In openDemocracy, Francis Fukuyama has a new afterword for his 1992 book The End of History. A number of thinkers respond: David Scott, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Anthony Pagden, Talal Asad and Saskia Sassen. Fukuyama:

I have been contrasted by many observers to my former teacher Samuel Huntington, who put forward a very different vision of world development in his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. In certain respects I think it is possible to overestimate the degree to which we differ in our interpretation of the world. For example, I agree with him in his view that culture remains an irreducible component of human societies, and that you cannot understand development and politics without a reference to cultural values.

But there is a fundamental issue that separates us. It is the question of whether the values and institutions developed during the western Enlightenment are potentially universal (as Hegel and Marx thought), or bounded within a cultural horizon (consistent with the views of later philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger). Huntington clearly believes that they are not universal. He argues that the kind of political institutions with which we in the west are familiar are the by-product of a certain kind of western European Christian culture, and will never take root beyond the boundaries of that culture.

So the central question to answer is whether western values and institutions have a universal significance, or whether they represent the temporary success of a presently hegemonic culture.

From The New York Times:

Zero gravity can really mess up your look. Blood rushes to the head and puffs up the face. Hair floats like seaweed in a current. Luckily for those of us with normal bodies, Star Trek tights never did take off as spacewear. But while the shorts and T-shirts favored by modern shuttle astronauts might be comfortable, they are hardly inspired, and unlikely to appeal to those who will be able to afford space tourism.

Help is on the way.

On the grounds that you have the right to look as stylish in heaven as on earth, the Japanese space agency, JAXA, and Rocketplane Ltd., a space tourism company in Oklahoma, are sponsoring a space fashion contest for clothes that look good in zero gravity. The best designs will appear in a fashion show in Tokyo this fall. “I hope ‘fashion in space’ makes everybody happy,” said Eri Matsui, a Tokyo fashion designer who presides over the Hyper Space Couture Design Contest. The deadline for submissions in the form of sketches is Aug. 15.

More here.

From Science:

Those smelly mothballs grandma has in her closet do more than just keep her sweaters free of holes. They cause cancer in mice and possibly humans, and now researchers may have figured out why. A study of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans suggests that chemicals in mothballs shut down the natural process by which cells commit suicide, allowing cancer cells to divide and conquer.

The finding is serendipitous. When a neighboring lab became infested by mites, biochemist Ding Xue of the University of Colorado in Boulder tried to protect his C. elegans by putting mothballs in their containers. But the balls may have done more harm than good. Some of the worms’ cells that were programmed to apoptose–or kill themselves–kept living indefinitely, a problem that has been linked to cancer in humans.

More here.

A poem by Jim Culleny:

Slovak women in black; black babushkas; Slovak men in black; black fedoras –and black beads flowing through fingers like prayers past fluttering lips:

Svätá Mária, Matka Božia, pros za nás hriešnych teraz i v hodinu smrti našej,.Amen

The Byzantine proscenium lit white and gold in it’s bounding box of incense and incantations,
priests and altar boys shift here and there; they bend and turn making signs with graceful hands.

Dancing like candle wicks,
but precise and cool,
they scratch an itch,
the blessed sacrament.

And grandpa in his stone cathedral, granite-hard and hoary;
and big-bosomed grandma, her eternal rosary;
and Sunday is very far away.

In the last fifteen years, a certain era in New York has ended.  From roughly 1970 to 1993 (from the late-sixties flight of whites to the onset of Giuliani time), a strange state of affairs obtained in the city: most central districts between Midtown and Wall Street were also fairly undesirable by bourgeois standards.  The Upper East Side and the Upper West Side were known as the East and West Sides, as though there was nothing beneath them, and with the exception of Greenwich Village, the area between 34th Street and Canal Street was filled with zones of freedom from many forms of compulsion: economic, regulatory, etc.  These autonomous zones were able to shelter many populations from the need to have regular work and income: artists and street people, partygoers and throwers, various and sundry types who disidentified with the mainline of U.S. culture.  Indeed, one of the cultural meanings of New York in recent decades has been as the city that represents the escape from U.S. culture, from cars, commuting, cultural homogeneity, national chains, social segregation, order.  That meaning is not necessarily permanent.

Many cities, of course, perform this function in their nation’s social imaginary.  Many metropolises are seen as, paradoxically, shelters from the capitalist economy of which they are also the beating heart.  The difference is that the shelter is usually on the periphery, not smack in the middle.  Whereas Houston Street and Broadway, which in 1993 was a sort of crossroads of a uniquely New York art-music-film-performance culture, is also structurally central to the city, both geographically and in terms of the other relevant urban topology, the subway map.  Back then there were pieces of street art on three corners.  Today the intersection features a Pottery Barn, a Crate and Barrel, an Adidas flagship store, and a branch of HSBC.  Down the street, on Bowery and Houston, a giant condominium building awaits the opening of its major commercial tenant, Whole Foods (which I, unlike Steven Shapin, find a soul-destroying place to shop).  These nationwide brand names, along with others such as Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc, were never to be seen here until recently.

Much hand-wringing occurs about this state of affairs – Whole Foods within sight of CBGB’s?  Oh, my.  Yet I think from a longer perspective it is the period in which the Lower East Side and Soho represented zones of autonomy that is the anomalous one, not the present re-corporatization of New York.  Would I prefer that Bowery was still a bustling restaurant supply district by day, a urine-soaked sleeping gallery by night?  Would I prefer that the East Village not become the home of another twenty-dollar entree yuppie joint and retain the Ukrainian bars with pool tables of yore?  The Soho of After Hours, in which Fanelli’s was the only place to go, instead of an upscale outdoor mall?  Sure, I would.  But I also think that artificially preserving the short-lived bohemian character of these neighborhoods is equally unreal: should NYC pay people to squat in LES buildings and drink in the Mars Bar, a la nineteenth-century gentry who employed hermits to live in the artfully ruined hermitages on their Capability Brown-designed grounds?  Clearly making the city into a museum of itself, as with large stretches of Paris, is not the answer to anything. 

The freedom from hugely expensive rent is no longer something that now exists in many places in the city, center or periphery.  But with real estate developers and lawyers and rezoning permits comes in addition a much more invasive state presence.  Neighborhoods that were once nearly outside the boundaries of the law are now routine and orderly places where people wearing jogging clothes walk their dogs.  East River Park, which was roamed by bands of freaky ruffians, is now the site of friendly barbecues and safely ironic activities like the hipster street hockey league.  This elevated policing has had a terrible side-effect: it has almost killed dancing.  Not only are large spaces downtown nearly impossible to come across, but cabaret licenses (the city’s license to dance) must have the signatures of six or seven different city agencies before approval.  The only sites that can be found nowadays for large, vaguely eclectic nightlife are in peripheral places like Greenpoint and Bushwick, instead of on East 14th Street or Gansevoort Street.  Nightlife in the center has fallen victim to the need for (quiet) order brought along by bourgeois residents of neighborhoods that until recently were the domain of the disenfranchised: West Chelsea, the Meatpacking District (is there a more off-putting transformation in the city?), Alphabet City.

So has the city lost a facet of its identity, the one that holds up Downtown as the site of a unique creativity and roughness?  To some extent, it never was so free as they say.  A paradise lost is much easier to maintain than to regain.  On the other hand, I think it’s objectively different from the days when squeegee guys reigned and the city’s image as ungovernable was confirmed by the, well, lack of governance.  Strangely, though, the social identity of the neighborhoods seems not to have caught up with the new reality.  The Lower East Side, despite the fact that an apartment on Orchard Street costs as much as one on the Upper East Side, retains some patina of countercultural transgression.  A recent ‘happening’ in the disused half of the Essex market was a perfect example of this incoherence.  It was a kind of avuncular imitation of an underground event: noise bands, artists talking to each other, a cavernous and dilapidated space.  But on the other hand, the event was sponsored by Hermes, and some trendy new vodka sprung for an open bar, hoping to convince the connected to drink their brand.  There were porta-potties with Musak playing in them outside, trucked in from some Westchester wedding.  The City had approved the use of the Market.  You had to sign a release to get in, saying you wouldn’t sue if you got lead posioning.  Corporate-art dinosaur Jeff Koons spoke.  Hardly a subterranean upswell of pure creativity. 

That is the kind of event that gets put on here these days.  It has become much more important, downtown, to ape the signifiers of the chaotic eighties scene, than to recreate it (see Strokes, The).  The scenesters of the moment like to think of themselves as bohemians because of their stylistic choices, but they are players in a world of intense competition for status and yes, money.  A successful gallery or a major label record release are also paths to embourgeoisment, and they require constant networking, and regular working, just as much lawyering does.  Finally, the money to be made by the real estate boom has conferred a strange kind of status on people who bought a building on Greene Street for twenty thousand dollars in ’75, which is now worth five million.  They are hardy bravers of the frontier beyond gentrification, but also economically rewarded for their defiance of purely economic motives.  It’s a self-knowing take on the concept of aesthetics as the reverse of economics, in which the eschewing of monetary advancement is the secret to eventually having both virtue and money.  If anything, this is the permanent dialectic in which New York is ensnared: make art or make money, but keep hustling.

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