Roberta Smith’s recent article on the Chelsea gallery scene in the Sunday New York Times was informative Arts & Leisure fare, defending the neighborhood’s exponential expansion in recent years as a boon–not something to bemoan–while also offering useful guidelines for the casual Chelsea visitor.

She suggests that despite it’s megamall development, the neighborhood stretching from roughly w 13th St. to 29th St. along Tenth Avenue is in fact quite complex:

“The Chelsea gallery scene is exactly the opposite of monolithic or homogeneous: astoundingly diverse, a series of parallel worlds catering to different audiences and markets, from avant-garde to academic, blue-chip to underground. With art fresh from places as far apart as China and Williamsburg, Chelsea is messily democratic, the most real, unbiased reflection of contemporary art’s global character.”

But she also raises a provocative incidental point that would be interesting to pursue further. In the section titled ‘Big Dogs Acting Like Bigger Dogs,’ Smith asserts that, “The galleries that make up Chelsea’s elite often present shows that, in their ambition, expense and importance, are tantamount to museum exhibitions…When [they] serendipitously stage related exhibitions, the effect can be overwhelming, an unplanned mega-exhibition more exciting and convincing than many museum efforts.”

Given that admission to almost all Chelsea galleries is free to the public, this strikes a chord in the wake of MoMA’s new twenty-dollar admission. How might we further concieve the counterpart relationships between private (and commercial) and public institutions in the cultural sphere? As galleries continue to produce more elaborate, historically contextualized programs, how might this change an understanding of their essential market-oriented position? In the age of advanced corporate cultural sponsorship, is there potential for more open coordination between private, for-profit capital and institutional, not-for-profit funding (as well as intellectual resources) in the production of culturally significant exhibitions?

As we are all too depressingly aware, there are scores of armed conflicts raging in the world today. These often result in displaced populations, which leaves the UN and other relief agencies scrambling to provide temporary shelter, water, medical care, etc., mostly in the form of what end up as tent-cities. In addition, populations all over the world are regularly subject to famine, storms, earthquakes, and other disasters which also result in large numbers of displaced people.

Shabbir Kazmi is an upcoming New York architect who has thought up an elegant and brilliant solution of the why-hasn’t-anyone-else-done-this? variety, for the provision of medical care, shelter, drinking water, and energy for these situations: he has designed medical mobile-units which can pump and purify ground-water and also collected rain water, which deploy solar-panels and wind-turbines for electricity, and which fit right into standard shipping containers. The beauty of this scheme is that these containers are cheaply available, and most important of all, they are designed to be shipped, so, can be gotten anywhere in the world in large numbers very quickly, by ship and/or train, and then by truck. There are several types of container-based units that can be deployed to an afflicted region, such as mobile medical-units, mobile dwelling-units (which may contain other emergency supplies, such as food aid, blankets, etc.), and school and dormitory units.

Architecture is a field which usually brings to mind the glamorous housing of the rich, the glitzy office towers of commerce, or the fancy designs of the buildings which in our secular society function as shrines to high art: museums. It is a testament to Shabbir’s inventiveness, as well as to his acutely developed moral sense, that he has chosen to apply his ample architectural talents in a socially conscious way. As he said to me, “Architecture is not just a luxury profession, we can actually save lives.”

Shabbir has started a non-profit organization called Project Life-Line which will build the first prototypes for these container-based systems in the next few months. They are raising funds and are having a benefit concert on December 6, 2004, this coming Monday, in Manhattan. Please check out details of the project at http://www.project-lifeline.org and do come to the concert if you can. (Click on “Who We Are” and on “Project” at the site.) This is surely a very worthwhile project, please support it as best you can. Thank you

Douglas RushKoff, of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, reports on a talk that our own 3 Quarks editor Marko Ahtisaari gave at NYU:

The mobile industry is stuck. But don’t start printing out those resumes quite yet. A new romance may give the industry just the kick it needs, if we are to put faith in the words of the intriguing director and head of user experience at Nokia’s Insight and Foresight unit, Marko Ahtisaari.

In a talk he provocatively called “Phones as a Hackable Platform,” the Helsinki-born technologist shared a dark and rarely uttered truth: “If we look at this industry and the speed of innovation, innovation has largely stopped.” Speaking before a packed house of open minds at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (where I run The Narrative Lab), he did not equivocate: “What have we had? We’ve had mobile voice, which was the lead application and still is the lead application. Texting, person-to-person, one-to-one messaging. And, recently, the only dominant functionality that we’ve added is the camera. We need new innovation on this platform for it to grow.”

Ahtisaari understands that the most promising and compelling software innovations have always been born in the hands of playful users. Now more than ever, the mobile industry needs to put some faith in a history borne out during the Internet era. Just as the most successful companies in the software and networking markets have already learned, often the best way to develop a product is to let the users do it. In other words, follow the lead of the alpha-geeks, or those Japanese schoolgirls that Wired and other industry magazines have begun to champion so enthusiastically.

Defining hacking loosely as the “ability to manipulate a product either through hardware or software to one’s own ends and apparently in a way that no one has guessed before,” Ahtisaari offered appropriately diverse illustrations of this kind of creativity.

Read more here at TheFeature.

Nancy Ramsey in the New York Times:

“Write what you know.” That literary dictum has sent first-time novelists down some dark paths, and on some days and nights, the one chosen by Shannon Burke, the author of “Safelight,” was as harrowing as they come.

Mr. Burke is a former night-shift paramedic whose experiences with life and death on the streets of Upper Manhattan inspired “Safelight” (Random House), the gritty, moving story of Frank Verbeckas, a paramedic and photographer in his 20’s who, while struggling to recover from his father’s suicide, falls in love with a young woman who has AIDS. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Julia Livshin called it an “accomplished and haunting debut” and “a minimalist tour de force.”

More here.

“Automated method seems to spot forgeries as well as a connoisseur does… The technique, devised by computer scientist Hany Farid and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, identifies the artist by analysing an individual’s characteristic brush or pen strokes. It is able to distinguish eight drawings by Bruegel, deemed authentic by art experts, from five acknowledged imitations.

Farid’s program suggests that a painting attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Pietro Perugino was in fact produced by at least four different artists (presumably Perugino’s apprentices in his workshop). This analysis is also supported by the judgement of art historians.”

More here from Nature.

Javed Mostafa, the Victor Yngve Associate Professor of information science and director of the Laboratory of Applied Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, explains in Scientific American:

There is a multitude of information providers on the web. These include the commonly known and publicly available sources such as Google, InfoSeek, NorthernLight and AltaVista, to name a few. A second group of sources–sometimes referred to as the “hidden web”–is much larger than the public web in terms of the amount of information they provide. This latter group includes sources such as Lexis-Nexis, Dialog, Ingenta and LoC. They remain hidden for various reasons: they may not allow other information providers access to their content; they may require subscription; or they may demand payment for access. This article is concerned with the former group, the publicly available web search services, collectively referred to here as search engines.

Search engines employ various techniques to speed up searches. Some of the common techniques are briefly described below.

More here.

Abdul Sattar Edhi is nothing short of a phenomenon, a miracle even, and a ubiquitous one no matter where you are in Pakistan. His ambulances are everywhere, his clinics and homes for the destitute help millions. His story is truly inspiring. The following is from an article by Richard Covington in Saudi Aramco World: (Thanks to my friend Nazo Kureshy for bringing this to my attention.)

For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.

Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.

Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.

Read the rest here and take a look at the Photo Essay as well. The Edhi Foundation’s website is here.

“In the popular histories of political ideas, there’s no more omnipresent figure than the godfather–as in, Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism, or William F. Buckley Jr., godfather of modern conservatism. But intellectual historians tend to unjustly neglect a very important influence when they trace their genealogical lines: the weird uncle. For American conservatives that figure is Albert Jay Nock–a man who died a decade before the first issue of National Review but who shaped its spirit nonetheless.

Nock didn’t try hard to obscure his strangeness. In fact, he carefully tended his eccentric image on nearly every page of his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, published in 1943. During his long career as a writer for New York’s little magazines like The American Magazine and Harper‘s, these foibles became enshrined in myth. A misanthropic character, who considered Western civilization to be on a road to perdition, he viewed himself an atavistic figure from premodern times and occasionally wore a cape to symbolize his preference for the past. This sartorial detail also had the intended effect of enshrouding him in mysteriousness. During a stint as editor of the Freeman, he declined to give his colleagues his home address or to reveal more substantive details about himself. Van Wyck Brooks recounted a rumor that contacting Nock required leaving a note under a rock in Central Park. None of his New York friends or colleagues knew that Nock had spent decades as an Episcopal priest or that he had abandoned his wife and children. Had they read his Memoirs they would not have come to know these facts either.”

More here by Franklin Foer in The New Republic.

There is a Manny Farber exhibit at PS.1 in Long Island City, New York right now and through January 16th.

The exhibit has the interesting distinction of showing some of his earlier abstract work alongside his more recent representational paintings. The latter consist largely of from-above views of big cluttered tables. But they are flat and lacking perspective in a way that suggests someone who has come back to the world from having been outside, way outside, in pure space for awhile.

Of course, it is difficult to imagine Farber in pure space for too long because he is so exhuberant. He simply loves the surfaces of things, the colors and textures of it all. And that is also the way that he watched and wrote about movies. Indeed, you can’t really start to love Manny Farber until you read his criticism and look at his paintings as a whole.

When you do, you will surely start to love him, because his generosity as an artist is so expansive. Perhaps I can reference my own further thoughts on the matter here.

“The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery.

It isn’t a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I’ve belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I’ve worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I’m terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they’d find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side. These institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple.”

More here from “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews” by William J. Stuntz in Tech Central Station (via Arts and Letters Daily). Stuntz is a professor at the Harvard Law School.

“Chronic pain may permanently shrink the brain, US researchers believe. The Northwestern University team had previously shown patients with back pain had decreased activity in the same brain region called the thalamus. This area is known to be important in decision-making and social behaviour. The team’s current study in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests some of the changes may be irreversible and render pain treatment ineffective.”

More here from BBC News about the work of Dr. Vania Apkarian and his team. For more information, take a look at the website of the Pain and Qualia Laboratory that Dr. Apkarian heads.

The Verve never made much sense in the context of Britpop. From 1993-97 British music was dominated by the Gallagher brother’s laddish buffoonery, Damon Albarn’s pretty mug and wit, Jarvis Cocker’s working class escapist anthems, and Thom Yorke’s barbed melancholy. During this period The Verve were creating moody rock’n’roll full of soul, darkness and light. Their final and seminal album, Urban Hymns, was released just a few months after OK Computer and on the same day (August 26, 1997, the day Britpop died) as Oasis’ third record. The Verve lasted long enough to tour in support of Urban Hymns, but would officially break up soon after.

This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 is their first official release in five years and features two new tracks. The compilation culls together songs from their three full-lengths, as well as their first single, “All In The Mind”. The songs are as good today as they were years ago, although this album only tells half the story. The Verve made complete records, they weren’t a “singles” band. For a full appreciation start with Urban Hymns and work backwards through A Northern Soul and A Storm In Heaven. If only to gain a cursory understanding of one of the great and too-often-overlooked bands of the ’90’s, this will do.

Click here to view a full review of the album at Pitchforkmedia.com

MoMA’s back in Manhattan at its refurbished and redesigned and much-expanded home, after 3 years of exile in Queens. I haven’t had a chance to go look for myself yet (and at $20 a pop, I may have to save up for it!), but the press has been quite uniform in its encomia. Fairly representative of the laudatory responses is this essay by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker:

Reopened now in a lustrous building by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA is an effect: historical, conservative, magisterial. It works. The devout, incredibly expensive perfectionism of the building’s lapidary joinery and excruciating lighting may cloy—the God in these details is a neat-freak—but it optimizes looking. That’s all that really matters for the expanded display of a collection whose quantity magnifies its quality.

For a more critical appraisal, you might want to look at this piece entitled “Modern Immaturity” by Jed Perl in The New Republic:

The good news at MoMA–the building and the relatively straightforward installations of selections from the museum’s collections–is so encouraging that when the bad news hits you may find yourself reeling. Far from accepting the hard fact that the time has come to embrace a solid maturity, a maturity grounded in an assessment of its glorious past that is at once forthright and modest, the Modern has insisted on remaining the aging hipster who long ago had one too many of those martinis and fled midtown Manhattan in search of the next snort of art-world cocaine.

Probably the battle in Falluja is a harbinger of things to come and not the end of anything at all. If the whole episode about the shooting of the injured fighter passed you by there is an interesting discussion of it here, as well as an open letter by Kevin Sites, the journalist who took the footage here.

On the same note, a new generation of reporters are making names for themselves covering this increasingly intense war. Dexter Filkins will be a name that people remember along the lines of Kerr, Halberstam, Sheehan, et alia from that other quagmire.

James Atlas in the New York Times Book Review:

Approaching the half-century mark of a distinguished literary career, V. S. Naipaul has entered his ”late phase” — as scholars and biographers euphemistically refer to the productions of old age. Now 72, he has written (or published; who knows what went into the circular file?) 14 works of fiction and 14 works of nonfiction: a tidy congruence. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he is, after a lifetime of heroic labor, home free. What more can we ask of him? T. S. Eliot, after he won the Nobel, glumly described it as ”a ticket to one’s own funeral.”

Naipaul would seem to concur. Last month he made the public announcement at a speech in New Delhi that his new novel, ”Magic Seeds,” may be his last. ”I am really quite old now,” he said, turning his biblical span into premature senescence. ”Books require an immense amount of energy. It is not just pages. It is ideas, observations, many narrative lines.” And because V. S. Naipaul will no longer write novels, the genre must die. ”I have no faith in the survival of the novel. It is almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires.” It is almost over for him.

More here.

“For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel’s control. Just as important, Gaza is to be turned into a living example of why Palestinians are undeserving of an independent state. Under the conditions attached by Sharon to the disengagement, Gaza will exist essentially as a large prison isolated from the world, including its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. Its population will be denied the freedom of movement essential to any possibility of economic recovery and outside investment. Sharon’s insistence that withdrawal from Gaza will be entirely an Israeli initiative and will not be negotiated with any Palestinian leaders seems designed to produce a state of anarchy in Gaza, one that will enable him to say, ‘Look at the violent, corrupt, and primitive people we must contend with; they can’t run anything on their own.'”

More here by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books.

“The genetic code was cracked 40 years ago, and yet we still don’t fully understand it. We know enough to read individual messages, translating from the language of nucleotide bases in DNA or RNA into the language of amino acids in a protein molecule. The RNA language is written in an alphabet of four letters (A, C, G, U), grouped into words three letters long, called triplets or codons. Each of the 64 codons specifies one of 20 amino acids or else serves as a punctuation mark signaling the end of a message. That’s all there is to the code. But a nagging question has never been put to rest: Why this particular code, rather than some other? Given 64 codons and 20 amino ­acids plus a punctuation mark, there are 10⁸³ possible genetic codes. What’s so special about the one code that—with a few minor variations—rules all life on Planet Earth?

The canonical nonanswer to this question came from Francis Crick, who argued that the code need not be special at all; it could be nothing more than a ‘frozen accident.’ The assignment of codons to amino acids might have been subject to reshuffling and refinement in the earliest era of evolution, but further change became impossible because the code was embedded so deeply in the core machinery of life. A mutation that altered the codon table would also alter the structure of every protein molecule, and thus would almost surely be lethal. In other words, the genetic code is the qwerty keyboard of biology—not necessarily the best solution, but too deeply ingrained to be replaced or improved.

There has always been resistance to the frozen-accident theory.”

More here by Brian Hayes in American Scientist Online.

“…the bigger issue involves the so-called ‘secondary market’ for these pieces, i.e., everything after the original sale from the gallery. As Napster and KaZaA have taught us, once creative works have been digitized, controlling their distribution becomes problematic. In video art, for instance, there is a trading site with everything from Matthew Barney to Nam June Paik available for bartering. Once files start floating around in cyberspace, the certificate of authenticity becomes paramount. And what if that certificate gets lost? That’s precisely what happened with a Dan Flavin neon-light piece recently offered at Christie’s London. Estimated at roughly $83,000 to $117,000, it had to be withdrawn from the sale because the owner mislaid the certificate and Flavin’s estate would not issue another.

Worse yet, after a few decades of electronic-edition works shuttling through the art market’s notoriously opaque channels, faked certificates of authenticity will surely start circulate (just as they do today for Modiglianis and Maleviches). At which point, no expert will be able to distinguish market-legal pieces from their digital doppelgängers. Electronic editions have an allure, removing production hassles for artists, allowing collectors to customize works for their environment, and offering dealers a chance to reap massive financial rewards for simply uploading data files. But perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of the model’s architects, Javier Peres, was a lawyer before becoming an art dealer. Anyone who switches too glibly into this new art-market mode will discover a hornet’s nest of potential litigation and provenance battles.”

More here by Marc Speigler in Slate.

From an essay by Adam Shatz in The Nation:

When Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,” he was not only taking a swipe at philosophers. He was slighting interpretation itself, as if thinking were an idle affair compared to action, where real men make their mark on the world. In fact, the act of interpretation is always an act, sometimes a veritable event, and, in rare instances, a harbinger of far-reaching changes. Maxime Rodinson, the distinguished scholar of the Arab and Muslim world who died at age 89 in Marseille on May 23, and Jacques Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction who died at age 74 in Paris on October 8, were two of the most inspired interpreters of our time.

More here.

Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers:

I’m very pleased to hear that Edge is having an event highlighting the work of Robert Trivers on deceit and self-deception. I consider Trivers one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.

In an astonishing burst of creative brilliance, Trivers wrote a series of papers in the early 1970s that explained each of the five major kinds of human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, acquaintance with acquaintance, and a person with himself or herself. In the first three cases Trivers pointed out that the partial overlap of genetic interests between individuals should, according to evolutionary biology, put them in a conflict of psychological interest as well. The love of parents, siblings, and spouses should be deep and powerful but not unmeasured, and there should be circumstances in which their interests diverge and the result is psychological conflict. In the fourth case Trivers pointed out that cooperation between nonrelatives can arise only if they are outfitted with certain cognitive abilities (an ability to recognize individuals and remember what they have done) and certain emotions (guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, trust)—the core of the moral sense. In the fifth case Trivers pointed out that all of us have a motive to portray ourselves as more honorable than we really are, and that since the best liar is the one who believes his own lies, the mind should be “designed” by natural selection to deceive itself.

More here by Pinker, and Trivers’s talk “A Full-force Storm With Gale Winds Blowing”.