It was the “o” what did it, three swirling red crests with the vertiginous rabbit-hole center fading into white that hypnotized my attention and coaxed my bike tire left so that I nearly grazed the back wheel of a BMW. It was an encounter I would have lost, surely, and it surely would have been my fault, though I’m confident the owner was selfish and had no interest in looking out for my interests.

The bumper sticker was affixed with tape or static cling to the back windshield, hovering just below eye level. “Socialism Didn’t Work Last Time Either,” only instead of the “o” in “Socialism,” some wag had substituted the Obama “o”. One immutable law of rhetoric is that digs don’t need to be accurate to make their point. But as the BMW shifted gears and drag-raced past me, a second bumper sticker appeared, balancing the first like a convex diptych, secured in the other far corner of the back windshield, written in a cleaner sparer font than the fat white letters of “Socialism.”

“Who is John Galt?” Who, indeed.

The allusion, of course, was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a manifesto (or apologia) for capitalism unbound. Galt is the Prometheus of productivity, a dynamo whose fiery ideas would ignite the economy if not for the vulture bureaucrats. When Galt (among others) withdraws from society in the book and refuses to offer his liver to the body politic, the vultures panic, and society teeters on collapse. The lesson—practically spelled out in italics—is that a few brilliants like Galt drive mankind forward, and any constraints on their activities impoverishes all. Sporting a Galt bumper sticker ensures that you can take a moralistic stand without having to actually do anything.

I’m going to leave aside here the dubious taste of anyone who’d admit they read and liked Rand. If you plotted Literary Merit on the x-axis versus Book Sales on the y-axis, the slope of the line for Rand’s oeuvre would be undefined, a perfect vertical up and down. She’s atrocious with dialogue, unconvincing with sex, clumsy with pacing, heavy-handed with foreshadowing, lousy with clichés. (I’d add character development if she included any human beings in her stories.) I’m embarrassed for her, and she died in 1982.

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…in a curved space, a body can seemingly defy basic physics
and “swim” through a vacuum without needing to push on anything
or be pushed by anything.
………………….–Eduardo Guéron; Scientific American, August 2009

Swimming in Space Time

A short walk from our house
2 minutes tops
the river came through
in a bend at the end of
a short street where
on a small beach
built of slow sand
the river had sloughed
in the shelter of a prominence
upon which a monarch of a
tree stood its four foot trunk
under a green crown
cumulous as the cloud of
dark hair I’d one day wear
I dove down and came up
swimming in space time
in a vacuum when
a bird turned
above my head
and dove too
intent upon a dragonfly
which buzzed through
like the humming bird
with crimson neck
and impossible wings
(as invisible as she
was divine)
swimming in
space time

by Jim Culleny; 7/29/09

A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v. Sc. 2.

At the end, the readiness to face whatever providence had in store was there, both in the case of Omar as well as his mother Naheed. I only saw him two or three times without Naheed in the roughly 16 months of our acquaintance in New York, therefore it is hard for me to think of them separately. She brought her two sons to meet me in September of 2007 shortly after I had moved to New York. Omar, the 38 year old elder son, a graduate of Oxford and Columbia, had been diagnosed with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder. He had received a round of aggressive chemotherapy a few days before and his mouth was a battlefield of raw ulcers, abraded mucosa, bleeding gums. As we sat down to an elaborate meal with family and a few close friends, Omar calmly produced a bottle containing some sort of a bland, soothing drink and sipped away as if it were an equally exclusively prepared gourmet meal, all the while entertaining us with his signature brilliant quips and observations. Such was his class, such his chic. My childhood friend and the current Consul General of Pakistan, Mohsin Razi and his lovely wife Sarwat were present at dinner that evening. Earlier this year, when Mohsin and Sarwat heard about Omar’s death, they rushed to offer their condolences to Kamal and Naheed, both tearing up in the car at the memory of this dinner when Omar had shown such an astonishing and calm acceptance of his condition.

Starting with the first note I received from Omar via cyberspace in the summer of 2007 which was copied to Ama, and ending with my last glimpse of him as he lay dying with his mother curled up next to him in bed, straightening his blanket, holding his hand, I was exquisitely aware of what a unique privilege it was to be witnessing this sublime relationship. Of course love is never quantifiable. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1, Cleopatra demands to know how much Anthony loves her.

Cleo.If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

Ant.There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

Cleo.I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

Ant.Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

The friendship alone that existed between Omar and Naheed would require new heavens and new earths to accommodate it.

Arz o samaan kahaan teri wusatt ko paa sakay

Mera hee dil hai wu kay jahan tu samaan sakay

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By Diondra Marchus

“This great evil – where's it come from?
How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us,
robbing us of life and light,
mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known?
Does our ruin benefit the Earth,
aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?”

—Have You Passed Through This Night?, By Explosions in the Sky

There comes a point in every life when one makes the crushing and perplexing realization that the world is fundamentally flawed, that all of humanity recognizes the problem and agrees that it must be fixed, and that in spite of our agreement it continues to plague the Earth. The problem is violence, and though we feel victimized by it, and though we feel it is out of our control, we have no one to blame for it but ourselves.

In fact, ironically, it is our very desire for self-preservation which causes violence. The preservation of the self is dictated by human nature and society as the primary goal of every individual, and as long as this is so, we will continue to terrorize each other in defense of ourselves. Conversely, if world peace is ever to be achieved, it will require of all parties concerned a complete paradigm shift, contrary to our human nature, which decentralizes the pursuit of self-preservation.

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It's grown tiresome, but it still needs to be said.

The Story So Far: Very Famous Black Harvard Professor is arrested for breaking into his own Cambridge, MA house. Obama outraged. Media mayhem ensues. Cops pissed off. Tempest enters teapot. Obama invites VFBHP and cop to White House for a beer.

In other words, chillax, mofos!

Look, man, here's how it went down. Here's what Obama & Co. were thinking. What we have here, Obama thought, is the classic Town-Gown Conflict suddenly made tasty to the press corps – in part, but only in part – because this one event highlights the Great American Conflicts of rank, class and race in a single handcuff. Obama's seen this shit before, remember, both at Harvard and at the University of Chicago (the latter, a phenomenally white enclave surrounded by black Chicago slums which are currently among the most murderous of neighborhoods). This was a textbook example of how to turn a challenge into an opportunity, and – it must be said – without the cynicism that corporate or political interests tend to place upon that phrase.

But I'm not interested in the event.

I'm interested in the press's reaction. Moreover, I'm interested in, shall we say, “the press/political interface” – at this particular moment in time. Frank Rich is absolutely correct in his interpretation of Big Media's construction of this story:

[Obama] answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs.

What's hilarious is that even after Obama's remarkable speech at the Press Correspondents' Dinner (yes, I keep coming back to that), the media establishment, fighting for survival, continues to undermine itself. Even as veteran journalists like Mort Rosenblum write impassioned pleas for serious reportage, the monologuists in our national conversation chase headlines – rather than stories – like 3rd-graders chasing a soccer ball.

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My fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle:

Ever since my election, I’ve been watching you implode, my eyes dilated in horrified fascination (like they were glued in that Indiana Jones movie to the Nazi’s face melting into molasses).

Now I know I’m the last man on earth you want any advice from, but maybe you should consider absorbing a few choice pearls from my bipartisan heart, especially now that the only Republican leader who is still boning her own spouse, Sarah Palin, is fast losing ground among independents.

I want to speak to you honestly, clearly and candidly, with a generous measure of tolerance, totally on your own level, complete with punchy four-letter words I picked up from the Chicago streets and from Professor Rahm, so you know I’m absolutely sincere in my advice, and not towering over you from the commanding heights of my intellect or voiding over your pea-brained noggins with beefy Chicago-sized turds.

No. Not at all. You know me as a man who always gives the other fellow a fair hearing. When others engage in bickering, I advocate peace. When it comes time to protect our national interest, I’d shake a hand drenched in blood.

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by Colin Marshall

Because thousands of a certain generation's cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s had Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

The impact of Wes Anderson's second film didn't propel me immediately from the screening room to a new, theretofore unseen world illuminated by pure light cast forth by the angels of cinema. Its effects were those of a gradually-dissolving ingested substance, working only in the fullness of time. I knew I'd seen something epiphanic, but damned if I could put my finger on what or why. While it has sparked and continues to spark in young viewers as much of a fanatic enthusiasm for film, both its appreciation and its craft, as the most radical, stylistically transgressive piece of deliberate provocation, it does so within a shell of relative normality. But though translucently thin, this shell appears to have confused almost as many filmgoers as it's blindsided with slow-acting inspiration.

“You can't tell if it's a comedy, or if it's a drama, or what it is!” complained some with whom I excitedly sought to discuss the movie. While my adolescent mind couldn't counter this grievance, I now realize that coming up with a genre to fit Rushmore into is an exercise not only doomed to futility but ignorant of the very seat of the film's strength: you can't tell if it's a comedy or a drama or what because it isn't. It is, strictly speaking, a film without genre, which is to say, a film without any of the bundles of clichés that constitute the genres' membership qualifications. This must have rendered marketing a futile ordeal, which would account for the movie's unimpressive domestic box office performance. (But since genre is a labor-saving marketer's device in the first place, perhaps this is a simple case of reaping what's been sown.)

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When it comes to “memetics,” which some say is the new science of studying “memes,” consider me a skeptic. Doesn't a science need to have a clearly defined subject and verifiable findings? At this point the “meme” concept seems more or less to be where the “artificial intelligence” idea was twenty years ago: That is, it's not so much a hypothesis as it is an analogy – a somewhat vague and fluid analogy – one that lets people think in some new and smart ways but leaves them subject to flights of excessive rhetoric.

Which means it's useful … but not exactly real.

The uninitiated among you may be wondering what, exactly, is meant by the word “meme.” You're not alone. Meme advocates are still arguing about that. The word was first used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, as a contract of “mimeme” (meaning imitated behavior.) Dawkins was suggesting that cultural behaviors, reproduced as one person mimics the actions of another, could be considered analogous to genes.

What are some examples of memes? Opinions vary. But the word has caught on in the blogging and Internet world, where its definition seems to be indistinguishable from “fads” or “catchphrases.” Lolcats is described as a “meme” on the Web, for example, and so is “rickrolling.” Expressions like “Jump the shark” and “FAIL” are memes in the online universe, too. A more rigorous and universally agreed-upon definition appears to be lacking.

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by Steve Tignor

If you live in New York, there are, theoretically, an infinite number of reasons to vary your route home from work. Dozens of neighborhoods, hundreds of shops, thousands of bars can be explored with only the slightest detour from your particular beaten path. So why do I rarely, if ever, take the opportunity? Call it inertia, or lack of imagination, or, more realistically, the result of nine hours of staring at a computer and circling a mouse around. After that, whatever path gets me to my apartment and into a drink the fastest is the one I’m going to follow. More than once I’ve convinced myself to make a post-work side trip to, say, a book store in Union Square, only to emerge from a daydream and find myself walking up the steps at my normal stop in Brooklyn anyway. The best-laid plans are powerless in the face of the daily habits of the 9-to-5er. The upshot, sadly, is that the city where I work is seldom the city where I explore—it’s not the city where I see.

My office is in Murray Hill and I live in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, which makes my best commuting option the 6 train to 14^th St., and then the 4 to Borough Hall, a wobblingly reliable 20-minute express shot down the east side. Late in the evening, though, the 4 can be exasperatingly slow, so slow that on some nights I’m compelled to throw routine to the wind and take the 6 two more stops, to the Bleecker St. station, where I can catch the F to Brooklyn.

Bleecker is less a proper station than a decaying, half-finished interstice that serves as a connector between the subway’s formerly competing systems, the IRT (i.e., the numbered trains) and the BMT (the lettered trains). It’s the only stop in the city where you can transfer between lines on one side—downtown—and not the other, a flaw that’s currently costing the MTA $134 million to rectify. The space’s most notable landmarks are two large, blue mosaics that date from the system’s proud opening in 1904. “Bleecker Street” is carved out at their centers with a beaming, capitalized pride that mocks the dilapidated state of the station today.

Jarring as they may be, those mosaics weren’t what caught my eye one recent evening after work.

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“These are tears of joy. I can die a happy woman. Though I don't feel much like dying today… Think harder. Write faster. Please take your time and hurry if you possibly can.”
–from reader F.M. on a previously posted poem: A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman

Steep Sigh

Walt Whitman’s ready nearby
tucked humbly among authors
I keep close upon my night stand
for the waking of my
night eye

You'll see him in this drawing
I made years ago, still stacked
(a bedrock source) while others
cycled in & out of this small
proximate collection
like many million moments
that have blindly come and
slid by

Yesterday I found a poem
which said well some things
I've thought as days have
gone by;
…….;…of Whitman
and the subject he so expertly
unravels and so surely
pins and spins and
re-ties

And funny you should mention
tears since this morning
without reason I
………………….had a sudden sob-fest
returning from the dump
after dropping off our rubbish in
my weekly, sloughing,
drive-by

It might have been the singer
in the dashboard or
the adolescent female walking
sadly postured
plying the left shoulder as I
whizzed by
………………(a clone of my granddaughter?)
or— ……….who knows what existential lever
I'd leaned upon too deeply in a
steep sigh?

by Jim Culleny, 7/26/09

Night Table; drawing by Jim Culleny, 1997

Michael Blim

Heard enough about those “little green shoots” of economic recovery? Not finding them in your backyard garden? Not popping up in between the cement slabs on your stoop?

Perhaps this is because the only place the green is sprouting is on Wall Street and on the balance sheets of several mega-banks. The Dow Jones has hit 9,000 again. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan reported hefty profits. Seems like old times.

But these are new and perhaps even better times for the masters of the money universe. They now operate with a full and explicit federal guarantee against failure, and many have made back their government loans at little or no expense. Even though the banks and big financial firms working through them laid us low, the Obama Administration seems to have passed out “get out of jail cards” to their operators. Unless Andrew Cuomo decides to play spoiler, the miscreants who triggered the world financial crisis will be back living large in no time. This is also because the proposed Obama financial regulation regime is so weak that it is even described as toothless by that paragon of 18^th Century classical liberalism, the Economist.

Walk off Wall Street and you hit upon another world. Never mine no green shoots. There is instead massive die-off, as if the economic eco-zone had been ripped up by a financial Katrina and been left to molder.

The rot and decay of a near-dead economy lie all around us. There is universal acknowledgement that we will reach 10% unemployment in the fall. Every occupational category has been hit thus far, with rates of unemployment doubling since 2008 in computing, architecture, engineering, community and social services, health care technical services, construction, maintenance, repair, manufacturing, mining and transport. Already in double digits are food services, buildings and grounds maintenance, construction, farming, fishing, forestry, construction, mining, manufacturing and transport. In addition, state and local governments are laying off workers at unprecedented rates.

The unemployed are running out of benefits – an estimated 600,000 have run out of benefits since the recession began, and the rate at which workers will lose their benefits is growing exponentially as the stimulus package extension of benefits runs out.

I also counted 9 states and Puerto Rico as having forced furloughs of varying lengths on their workers thus far.

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By Alan Koenig

George “Cousin Georgie” Mayer, the last living member of my family to fight in WWII, died earlier this summer. In February of 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted and spent the entire war fighting in the Pacific theater under General Douglas MacArthur.

Georgie saw continuous action — except for two periods of convalescence after contracting malaria — and his eventual return to Chicago after an absence of three years is a hallowed chapter of family legend. He died after a thirty year battle with leukemia. What’s unusual about his story is we know how it got him.

In late August or early September of 1945, on only his second day in occupied Japan, a “deuce and half” truck from his unit pulled up and some soldiers asked Georgie if he wanted to visit Hiroshima. In one of those historically haunting moments in which future consequences are unknown, he accepted. While recalcitrant about many of his battle experiences, Georgie was more forthcoming about visiting Hiroshima, mostly because there wasn’t all that much to tell.

“There was simply nothing there. All day long we walked around in dust, nothing but dust.”

Highly radioactive dust. The first atomic bomb had been dropped only about four weeks before his unit’s macabre visit. By the time Georgie was diagnosed in the late seventies, the VA administration was tracking the soldiers from that fateful truck as well as many other luckless American military tourists. A strange corollary to the epochal tragedy of Hiroshima: The VA deserves credit for the intensive care they gave him over three decades, care widely believed by my extended family to have extended his heroic life.

*

Alan Koenig is a Ph.D. student, teaching fellow, writer, and political analyst living in Queens, NY.

*

The Owls is a literary experiment that cross-posts here by the generosity of 3Quarksdaily. “A Deuce and a Half” forms part of an ongoing project called “Stamps” featuring writing and images about places. Other recent posts in the Stamps project have included a photograph by Frederick Schroeder, a poem by Kirsten Andersen, and an essay by Sean Hill. If you would like to get updates from The Owls, send an email with the word “Subscribe” to owlsmag[at]gmail[dot]com.

Self-portrait with Masks (detail), 1899, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan

Elatia Harris

James Ensor, the Belgian painter, died in 1949, having done his last searing work half a century earlier. The man in the sea of masks, above, was wrapping it up in the studio even as he painted this self-portrait at age 40. In two decades of furious industry, he had cast himself as Christ, as John the Baptist, as an insect, a skeleton and a herring. Crucified, beheaded, rattling but undead, made a meal of by critics or simply subhuman, he spared a thought for how he might appear a century after his birth. My Portrait in 1960, below, is an etching on woven paper. It's no self-portrait — the actual sight of his remains would necessarily be recorded by some other guy. This is just a nudge.

Ensor kick-started Surrealism and Expressionism, driving Flemish painting forward from its roots in the Renaissance to its foundational place in Modernism. In him, Bosch, Bruegel and even Rubens found an heir who would poke holes through the possibilities of paint, and figure forth a vision powerful enough to impel artists a century later to engage with it en route to terra incognita of their own. And that's not all. While it is common to feel repelled by art considered in exquisite taste in the late 19th century, uncommon it is for an artist of that era to step neatly outside taste once and forever, offending a certain high idea of painting with lasting sureness of touch. As the song, Meet James Ensor, written by They Might Be Giants, urges us — “Appreciate the man.”

With the first major Ensor show in the United States in more than 30 years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York makes that very easy to do, through September 21. I have had a lifetime with James Ensor, one of my mother's art gods. Mother was a Southern lady, the kind that naturally thrills to the transgressive in art. And I am brought to my knees, again and again, by this painter so utterly uningratiating.

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“Psychological Science: The [Non-]Theory of Psychological Testing – Part 1” can be found HERE.

Q & A

Q. If Psychological Test Theory (PTT) is not a theory but a tautology, then what should be substituted in it's place?

A. How about replacing it with a scientific, or observational theory. *

The story so far

No modern science begins with the assumption, explicitly or implicitly, of the reality of Plato's World of Ideal Forms. The one exception is testing and measurement in the social sciences, particularly psychological or mental testing. What is not appreciated by many, if not most, social scientists is that PTT assumptions like True Score, or Latent Trait, are not like literary dramatic license that gives weight and impact to the narrative. From the point of view of the philosophy of science, they are indistinguishable from Plato's Ideal Forms, and have no place in modern science.

Mathematical argument is found in all modern science. The social sciences are no exception. Scientists use mathematical argument in three ways:

1. It is used as a way to analyze, understand, and communicate data from observation;
2. Mathematical argument helps one hypothesize about data not yet observed; and
3. In the service of supplementing 1 and 2, properties of mathematical inventions and constructions are used as convenient substitutes for the undetermined properties of observed or hypothesized data.

PTT, however, tends to use mathematical inventions and constructions, not as a supplement to mathematical argument based on observation, but as a near total substitute for it. This is the tradition handed down to Western civilization from Pythagoras, that is both praised and lamented by Carl Sagan in his book and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) video series, “Cosmos”.

“Pythagoras…developed a method of mathematical deduction…. The modern tradition of mathematical argument, essential to all of science, owes much to Pythagoras.” Pp. 149-150.

“In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment [emphasis mine], the embrace of mysticism…, they set back the human enterprise.” P. 155.

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By Namit Arora

I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years, from 629-645 CE, in the Indian subcontinent, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects like grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, and theology were taught. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars ‘in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj … Xuanzang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.’ [4]

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Hawks

East or west down the trail in fog
the bark of a distant dog

a meadow rolls off in that cloak
a cleft in its breast of a brook

deciduous trees to the north
a hawk in the fifth or the forth

scans for the twitch of a meal
not a stitch of remorse will it feel

as it falls on its prey like a bomb
with finesse and genetic aplomb

there are such people who prey
on an earth god created this way

by Jim Culleny; July 16,2009

Justin E. H. Smith

I am not all that fond of natural-law theory, as I tend to think that there are very few things about which nature sends us the loud-and-clear message: don't do it! In fact, I've narrowed the list down to just three: incest, coprophagy, and flying.

Now many readers will be surprised to see that last item tacked onto the list. After all, nearly everyone who can afford to do so flies on a regular basis, whereas sibling-marriage and shit-eating are nearly unheard of. But I fly roughly once a month, including an average of 2-3 round-trip transatlantic flights per year for the past 15 years, and every time I do it I think to myself: if there were a God, and he were to finally come and give us his list of rules, he would not tell us not to show cleavage, or drink alcohol, or any of the usual proscriptions. He would tell us, earth creatures, to get the hell out of the sky.

I am one of those irrational people, ridiculed by the sane, normal, and mature, who suffers from debilitating aviaphobia. By 'debilitating' I mean that I spend every minute of every flight convinced of imminent death. The suffering is so severe that even though there is no significant statistical danger of dying in an air disaster, I do fear that there is a real danger of physiological consequences stemming from the anxiety. People who don't understand will often tell me to learn a bit about the statistics of air accidents. Trust me, I know the statistics. Tell me the name of an airline, and I can list for you all of the fatal accidents in which it has been involved, when and where they happened, what was the mechanical cause.

There was a time when I could tell myself: that air disaster over there, in Indonesia, in Congo, in Siberia, has nothing to do with me. My sphere of concern has traditionally been North America between the Arctic and the tropical zones, the North Atlantic, and Western Europe. To some extent, I confess I still have a way of distancing myself from certain disasters: that was a Tupolev, I say. Anyone who gets on a Soviet-built airplane is just asking for it. But then I remember that my basic conviction about my own air travel is that I am asking for it too.

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by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it’s important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

Kiarostami’s career has been distinguished by relentless experimentation, particularly in recent years. His film ABC Africa (2001), about AIDS orphans in Uganda, includes seven minutes of nocturnal darkness. Ten (2002) consists of ten scenes shot in a car with cameras on the dashboard. In each scene, the actors drove through Tehran leaving the director and crew behind. Five (2003) has only five stationary shots depicting whatever passed in front of the camera.

Like Dreyer’s close-ups in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) or Michael Snow’s zoom in Wavelength (1967), Shirin (2008) will join a very small group of films known for their singular use of a particular device. However dry or coldly formalist it may sound on paper, Shirin is a deeply moving film that follows the emotional narrative of a female audience’s reaction to watching a period melodrama full of the kind of romantic love that seems to be in short supply in modern Iran. 

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As usual, I am spending the summer in Evanston. My children and grand-children live in Chicago and no amount of whinging about winter weather (which comes in three kinds—cold, freezing, and how the fuck does anybody live here) could convince them to leave for California. And now that California seems to be going down the drain perhaps that is a reasonable decision.

As usual, when I spend the summer in Chicago, I try to catch up on the restaurant scene. This is no easy task as new places spring up like poppies and many of them are very good. Some of the necessary work is done by a number of blogs. The best of these are Chowhound and LTH Forum. The cognoscenti recognize the letters as standing for Little Three Happiness—an ancient dim sum establishment on Cermak in Chinatown.

The bloggers on these sites are generally quite reliable unlike the Yelpers who are too often like the commenters on many blogs—full of ignorance and glad to display it.

So we generally arrive with some short-list of places we want to try and there is always the joy of returning to old favorites which gives rise, in turn, to conflicts about whether to go someplace old which we know will be good or hazard a new one with the possibility of disappointment.

While Chicago is known for its high-end gastronomical temples—Alinea being the best known example—many of the most pleasurable experiences are places that we refer to as “the dump” with context making clear whether it is the Chinese Dump (Sun Wah on Argyle) or the Pakistani Dump (Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon).

My rule of thumb for Chicago restaurants is Q=1/P (where Q = quality and P = price).

The second rule is that the exceptions to the above mostly end in vowels. These include Alinea, Tru, Charlie Trotter (well the first name ends in a vowel), and, most recently a fantastic new place L2O which I cannot decide is a French restaurant with Japanese overtones or a Japanese restaurant with French ones and is, in any case, a tribute to seafood.

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