This text, which will appear on 3QD as a four-part post, was begun as a musing on the theme of series and repetitions in modern and contemporary art inspired by a challenge issued by an art historian colleague of mine. This post includes the intro and a consideration of the first of three artists who dealt with this theme.

Repetition and Remains: Three Centuries of Art’s Multiform and Manifold re-

Introduction: Reintroduction?

In dealing with serial work in the visual arts, it is nearly impossible to know where to start: while some series have a clear linear progression, be it narrative or strictly formal, others do not, and still others seem to vacillate depending upon how one chooses to delimit any given group of works. I would therefore like to take my cue from Ferdinand de Saussure’s arbitrarity principle and, shifting it from the linguistic realm to the visual realm, begin with three (ostensibly unrelated) works I’m particularly intrigued by. My interest in them stems from the questions each work raises—questions that deal with the very nature of seriality and repetition as it appeared and has proliferated in the visual arts from the late nineteenth century up to the present day.

Simply put, a series may be defined as an evolving sequence consisting of a number of parts. Such a structure invariably implies a progression, movement or narrative—although such ideas seem much stronger in representational work, and decline as one moves through the increasing abstraction of the twentieth century and beyond. Even this most simple definition introduces several problematics: first, quantity—are just two works enough to constitute a series? Or, instead of a pair, is a trio the minimum requirement? And just how does one define a single work? What about diptychs, triptychs, and poliptychs? What about modular works? And if, “synecdochally,” a part reflects the whole, just how is such a relationship best dissected for meaning as it applies to both formal and conceptual content (if the two can even be cleaved from one another)?

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My Doorstep

Welcome to my space. Come in, take off your boots, and make yourself at home: especially if you haven't got one any more. Warm yourself by my fire. It's going to be a long, cold winter. You know it and I know it. It's 7 degrees in the South Bronx this morning, as I write, but for about a quarter of an hour the rising sun comes romping westward down the street into my window, casting everything in gold, shining out the trash-strewn streets and sparse-shelved bodegas and vacant lots and abandoned baby carriages. For a moment.

Wall Street sure laid us one ginormous goose-egg. (I guess now we know what the inverse of that image on the Right looks like.) But tomorrow it'll all crack wide open. Hope you like your Humpty-Dumptys sunny-side up. I know I do. I used to take them scrambled, but now I know on which side my bread is buttered.

You're probably scrambling, hunting down that endangered species known as a job, scientific name JobIS bonUS. I feel your pain. Someone recently wrote that the Internet, as advanced as it seems, is still in the hunter-gatherer stage. Well, I've been a-huntin', and a-gatherin', and I've got laid in these weeds all kinds of Easter eggs for you to enjoy. It's better than a game of Boggle.

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In November of 1970, a thirteen-year-old girl arrived, accompanied by her mother, at a California family aid office. The girl, who is known publicly by the name “Genie,” walked hunched with her hands raised in front of her like paws. According to Susan Curtiss, author of Genie: a Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child, she weighed only 59 pounds and spat incessantly. In addition to her decrepit physical appearance and bizarre social habits, Genie seemed incapable of producing normal language – only ever uttering a few isolated words.

For the ten years leading up to that day in November, Genie had been confined to a single room – strapped, by day, to a “potty chair,” and, by night, to the inside of a sleeping bag. During that time, Genie had very limited human contact, and – of particular interest to the psychologists who studied her for the eight years to follow – almost no exposure to language. This fact – the occasion of Genie’s tragic abuse – gave scientists the opportunity investigate a question that could never have been probed through direct experimentation: does one lose the ability to acquire a first language?

Cases like Genie’s suggest that the answer is yes. While children who were deprived of linguistic stimuli up until age six have gone on to possess normal language, others, like Genie, whose deprivation continued past this point, have not had the same success. Genie did learn the meanings of many words, but she was never able to piece them together into sentences with normal syntax. Instead, she formed statements like “Applesauce buy store” and “I like elephant eat peanut.” Although controversies remain regarding Genie’s case (for instance, allegations of inconsistency in the documentation of Genie’s progress), the apparent linguistic limitations of so-called “feral children” offer strong evidence for a “critical period” after which it is impossible to acquire normal language.

The critical period hypothesis, which refers exclusively to first language acquisition, in turn suggests that children possess certain innate faculties which are crucial for (and, perhaps, specific to) the acquisition of language. This notion, which was brought to mainstream attention by Steven Pinker in his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct, is accepted in some form by most psycholinguists. However, a related question – one with even greater practical relevance – remains a point of controversy: does one lose the ability to acquire a second language?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

“I have a thing with airports…”

“Be more specific, Kris.”

“Ok, let me start again.

“I first began to think about this after I saw the video of Robert Dziekanski getting killed in Vancouver… remember? He was the Polish guy who got Tasered by the police because he was acting all ‘agitated’ after hours and hours of being stuck in the international arrivals area where no one could tell him what to do.

“He was moving to Canada to be with his mother… he got on the plane, landed, but something went wrong. He got stuck in the no-man’s land between luggage and immigration, or immigration and luggage… you know how it goes. He did not speak enough English to get himself sorted out, so he was left to his own devices, he got frustrated, and eventually he got killed.”

“What did they shock him for?”

“Oh, who knows… they probably didn’t know any better… you have to understand, Canadian police… well, let’s just say that the best and brightest probably aren’t the ones patrolling airports at 1:30 in the morning. Someone gave them Tasers and they use them like toys. There were four of them, one of him, and rather than figuring out a way to talk to him or to put him down another way, they got their Tasers out and zapped the poor guy instead. I think they told him to put his hands down on a table, but he put his hands up instead. He didn’t speak a word of English, so… you know…

“I remember watching the news the next morning… the police were giving their own version of the story…. ‘he was agitated… public safety… officers acted as they were trained… will review…’ you know how they talk. I don’t think that this is different in any country—I remember watching the Brits try to explain themselves after they shot that poor Brazilian on the tube. Cops always say the same things after they screw up…

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On somehow failing to rent
my apartment for Inauguration.

Little boys crave taking sides for battles and banding together into little gangs, yet whenever I begged my father to tell me which side we wanted to win in football games on television (about as far as my notion of being a warrior extended then), he would shrug his shoulders. “I just want to see a good game,” he’d announce.

He served as a black-robed judge for a quarter century, and seemed to think that professional ethics bound him to maintain a strict judicial neutrality even on the Minnesota Vikings versus the Chicago Bears. “No, dad, come on! Who should win?” Who do we want to inspire us? Who should we give ourselves to?

“As long as it’s a good game, that’s all I want.” He’d eat some peanuts.

I hated that he left my brother and I so unmoored about our loyalties. We could have cheered for the local team and found solidarity with everyone else, or picked a division rival and defined ourselves as iconoclasts. We sat out.

Because I never had practice either immersing myself inside a crowd or fighting upstream against a crowd, I never understood crowd dynamics as a child, especially what makes people band together and willingly commit to someone or something. What inspires them? Why do they cheer? Willing commitment became an oasis for me, but like most oases it had qualities of a mirage. After undergoing such torture with my father, I never could judge if people were genuinely passionate about “their” team or just posing.

And this shouldn’t be dismissed as a trivial case. Trivial cases are practice for real life.

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A quiet, global community of researchers want to change how psychologists think about the mind and culture — or to put it a bit more precisely, they want to call attention to some almost forgotten ones. They publish their research in Culture & Psychology, whose founding editor is Jaan Valsiner. Professor Valsiner was kind enough to furnish us an interview via email. The text has been edited for style.

Jonathan Pfeiffer, 3quarksdaily: How does cultural developmental psychology help us to understand changes in human life, either from moment to moment or over the course of one's lifetime?

Jaan Valsiner: The idea of cultural developmental psychology is best captured in this photo. What do you see in it? Of course it is very ordinary; this is a toy gadget for children (but note the inscriptions we call “graffiti” on the sideboards — an arena for public art?). In it you can see the world of adults, who invent such objects, build them, and take their children to the neighborhood park “to play” and deeply believe they are doing their best for their children, as the latter now can learn the “right ways” of behaving. But, of course, what they create in actuality are opportunities to act in new ways that are more challenging than the “right ways.” You can observe that when children play with this kind of slide and do many other things with many other toys, thus experimenting with the “contrarian movement.” They climb up the part of the structure where they are “supposed” to slide down. Any object of furniture is a culturally designed object that suggests to its users — children or adults alike — some socially preferred courses of action. Yet by that suggestion, these objects call forth counter-action to the opposite, resistance to suggestions, and in one word, creativity. If there were no people — children or adults — who would constructively “disobey” the socially suggested ways of being, then no new technologies or social changes could be possible.

Cultural developmental psychology is a basic science of human development from birth to death, covering the whole life course, that investigates the construction, use, and abandonment of the whole range of cultural tools in the dynamic life course of human beings: language, physical objects of everyday life, symbolic objects in public and private settings, and social roles people assume (mother, father, policeman, tax accountant, beggar, president, criminal, etc.).

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1. Casino Capitalism — making money from money with other people's money

What financial toilet is our government trying to flush us out of? Here's the best explanation I've read of the cause of our trouble — toxic mortgage-backed derivatives — by independent trader Jeffrey Carter:

“The collateralized debt obligation that is talked about is like you selling your car to Joe, but not getting any money today for it. Joe is going to pay you next year. As soon as Joe gets your car, he rents it to Jim. Jim doesn’t pay him, but offers to pay him monthly for the use of the car. Jim sells the car to a chop shop. The chop shop pays Jim a commission, and sells pieces of the car at a profit to Tim, Tom, Dick, and Harry. Harry buys Dick’s pieces, and puts together a new car — but has an accident. How is Joe going to collect? Who really owns the car? Of course it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. The government is going to bail out everyone, or pick a person in the chain.”

Sounds like quite the merry malodorous mess, doesn't it? In fact, it's so stinky that Goldman Sachs, while they were selling these derivatives, were also shorting them — i.e. betting their own money that the poopscoops they were selling to trusting pension funds were bound to lose their value.

And they call Bernie Madoff a crook. “Casino capitalists” is the kindest, gentlest name for what Wall Street people have become. They don't produce anything, they don't back entrepreneurs, they don't start factories, they don't create useful products, they don't build stuff, they're not actual dinkum kosher capitalists. They just use other people's money to make more money out of money. In other words, they borrow-and-bet. The bottom-feeders of capitalism. Parasites. People who have decided that the best use of their entire lives is to make money off money with borrowed money.

And boy, have they coined it. The financial companies' share of corporate profits in 2007 was 40%. Think of that — 40% of profits came not from doing anything except play around with money. And now we know that what they bet on — and with — is mostly crap. How much ca-ca? In 2006, Wall Street earned $62 billion in bonuses. To earn that much, they parlayed derivatives or debt or crap all over the world to a degree that people say now starts at $85 trillion. The Iraq War will cost us around $1 trillion, so we're talking 85 Iraq Wars of debt here. (The derivatives market itself is supposed to be $500 trillion.) Poor Barack Obama: he thinks he's going to save us from $85 trillion of crap by printing an extra one trillion.

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by Saifedean Ammous

By now, anyone who has followed the Israeli massacre of Palestinians will be accustomed to the absurd reality that the life of a Palestinian is worth about 100th to 1000th the life of an Israeli, depending on the news outfit. “Respectable” media outlets like the Guardian and the BBC will give every one hundred dead Palestinians the same space they give to one dead Israeli, whereas crappy propaganda outfits like the NY Post, NY Times, the New Yorker, CNN and Fox News, will give every 1,000 Palestinians the same space they give one Israeli. This has become normal.

But today, this racist arithmetic was taken to absurd levels by the folks at the Associated Press who decided that it also applies to demonstrators in New York.

I was part of a demonstration on Sunday that had thousands and thousands of people show up and protest the Israeli mass-murder of Palestinians.

I was at the front of the march when we turned on 58th street. I stopped on the sidewalk to chat with police and to examine the crowd. It took the back of the demo some 20-30 minutes to get to the corner of 58th after the front had reached it.

I spoke to the chief policeman at the demo and asked him for a crowd estimate. He said 20,000 was a reasonable estimate, though he would not confirm that this would be the police’s final and official estimate. Since he is the one who will be issuing the crowd estimate, it’s safe to assume it would’ve definitely exceeded 15,000. It certainly could not go as low, as… I don’t know… 150.

So imagine my surprise as I come home, turn on my computer, and find this article by Karen Matthews, for the AP, claiming that there were 150 people in the demonstration. I’ve managed to get pictures and videos that show incontrovertibly how utterly nonsensical this article is.

This CNN I-Report video was made by someone who heard the crowds chanting from 50 floors up (which should give you an indication of the numbers) and took out their camera:

Note that in this footage the camera cannot show both the beginning and the end of the demonstration. Even from this height, the demo was too long to be caught in one frame. Also note that the crowd that appears around the 00:20 mark is different from the crowd that appears at the 1:10 mark, since the first crowd had two giant Palestinian flags spread on top of it while the second group doesn’t. These are two ends of the demonstration, not the same crowd pictured again. Once you take that into account, you will realize that this truly was a huge demonstration.

But what is even more ridiculous about this is how a pro-Israel demonstration on the same day managed to get not only far more (and far more favorable) coverage on the media, but also a precise (and probably exaggerated) count of the demonstrators. By all accounts, the pro-Palestine demonstration dwarfed the pro-Israel one, as testified by people who saw both, people who went to the pro-Israel demo and then saw the video above, and people who saw videos of both.

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by Gerald Dworkin

I have been thinking recently about lying. I don't mean I have been thinking of telling a lie. Many of the lies I tell do not need to be thought about very much. “I am fine.” “Not at all. I think that color is quite flattering.” “Let me pay. My university will reimburse me.” “Yes, Dr. Phillips, I floss every day.” I mean I have been thinking about what is a lie and is it ever okay to tell one and why, if we think lying is wrong, so many of us are liars.

This thinking is not occasioned by some personal crisis of character, or being faced with a difficult decision to tell the truth. I am a philosopher and have just finished teaching a graduate seminar called “The Truth about Lying.” That seemed a cool title last year when I had to propose one for the catalog. It seems to me now, well not quite a lie, but more like false advertising. If I really knew the truth about this difficult subject I would, as they say, be rich.

I wanted to think about this topic because it seemed to me to have a number of features not shared by other moral concepts– such as murder, cruelty, theft, or promise-breaking. First,while almost all of us would refrain from these acts, most of us lie on a daily basis. (As do doctors– at least if you think prescribing placebos is lying. In a recent survey 45-58% , depending on how the question was phrased, prescribe them on a regular basis. If it's any consolation, the sugar pill seems to have been replaced by vitamins.) Second, if any of us were to act cruelly when this was pointed out to us we would either deny that was an appropriate description of our action or admit we were cruel and, at least, feel guilt or remorse. Whereas many of us are prepared to defend our lies–indeed, to glory in them sometimes (“Boy, did I have you going! Gotcha.”) Third, there seem to be contexts in which not only does the fact that something is a lie not count in any way against what we are doing, but seems to count in favor–poker, spying, lying contests, getting someone to a surprise party, lying to the murderer at the door about where his victim is hiding.

There seem to be very large differences between people as to what they regard as a lie. A , who makes a mistake about the day of the week, says, ” Damn. I lied. It's Tuesday not Wednesday.” But many people distinguish between being wrong and lying. B, who believes that today is Tuesday ( it is actually Wednesday) says to C, “Today is Wednesday”. Some people think that B lied; others that he tried to lie but failed. Some people think that gross exaggeration– “I haven't eaten for over a year”– is a lie; others do not. Now most ethical concepts have borderline cases– is not returning the lost wallet theft? is failing to rescue the drowning child murder?– but with lying it sometimes seems that the borderline is the whole territory.

Another interesting feature is that some people make a sharp moral distinction between lying and other ways of misleading by what one says. If you ask me what happened to your mail, and I say “Someone stole it from your box”without mentioning that the someone was me, some people will say “Well, at least you didn't lie” as if that somehow makes what I did less serious. The medieval Catholic Church elevated the idea of equivocation– saying something true but meaning it one way rather than another, as in the Saint found who reported to would-be persecutors “That Saint is not far from here,”– to Clintonian heights. Many people—myself included—see a difference between lying to someone and failing to tell them something that they have an interest in being told.

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[Below is my translation of Georgics, the first section of Antonio Gamoneda's book Libro del Frío (Book of Cold.) Gamoneda, born May 30th 1931, was winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2006 and it is difficult to overstate how largely he glowers over the world of Spanish and Latin American poetry, though he is little known in the U.S. He was born in Oviedo but by the time he was three lived in León, and has lived there ever since. The town and its landscape figure greatly in his poetry, both aesthetically and as it was there where he saw Franco's repression first hand, during the Spanish Civil war.

I will follow next month with another section from the book and a short essay on translating Gamoneda.

Please bear in mind that individual poems begin and end between ———–. They are two, sometimes one sentence poems that each receive their own page. For space and blogging comfort, I have smushed them.]

Alan Page

Georgics

———–

It is cold by the springs. I climbed until my heart was tired.

There is black grass on the hillside and purplish lilies in the shade, but ¿what am I doing before the abyss?

Under the soundless eagles, immensity lacks meaning.

———-

Between the dung and lightning bolt, I hear the shepherd’s cry.

There is still light on the sparrowhawk’s wings as I climb down to the damp pyres.

I have heard the snow’s bell, I have seen purity’s fungus, I have created oblivion.

———–

Faced with the vineyards scalded by winter, I think on fear and light (a single substance in my eyes,)

I think about the rain and the distances cut through by wrath.

———–

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//
Black Sunday Shoes
Jim Culleny

Grandpa was stiff and stark
as the handle of an old world hoe
but grandmother must have had her dreams
……………………..
At a window in a stuffed chair she sat
fingering a rosary gazing down Roessler murmuring
Hail Mary’s through the pane
bead by bead
……………………..
At other times in that chair
she stroked her long greyblack hair
……………………..
with a stiff brush then rolled and pinned it
into a persistent bun
……………………..
as sun streamed through the top sash
through laddered blinds
……………………..
and stroked the red rug with light
well into the room
……………………..
A clock ticked somewhere
a door slammed.
……………………..
She boiled chicken
served tea with milk and
called me Jeemy in sentences
loaded and laced with Slovak
so my green ears tasted the sounds
of the foothills of the high Tatras of the Carpathians
as if they were dining on poems in Matiasovce or Staraves.
……………………..
In her kitchen a crumb-haloed
babka loaf next to a knife on a plate
sat upon a brown enamel table
laid out like a detail in a peasant tableau
painted by a Slovak Van Gogh
……………………..
She placed her plump hand on mine
my small palm lying still
a five-spoked hummock on a mesa
……………………..
~ ~ ~
……………………..
In the plush back seat of Matkovsky’s
two-ton Chrysler returning from mass
on wide whitewalls rolling
in the time before seatbelts
in the time before TV
in the days before e-Babel
in the days before stillness disappeared
she leaned forward in the seat
her ample cantilievered bosom
secured by straps and clips
buried beneath a modest sequined bodice
one hand gripping the loop over the door
peering through another window
which opened upon scenes passing
of another of her dreams which
(perhaps)
she lived in real time in her new world
having long shaken the dust of childhood
and Slovakia from her high-topped
stout-heeled
……………………..
black
Sunday
shoes
……………………..

by Colin Marshall

To modern Western viewers — and even to a lot of modern Eastern viewers — the films of Yasujirō Ozu, with their rigorously mannered appearance and undeniably narrow topical range, feel neither accessible nor relevant. What a shame that is. The Ozu enthusiast’s typical response to dubious uninitiated friends is that, behind the aesthetic formalism, deliberately restrained acting and unshifting focus on the midcentury Japanese household lies a great artistic bounty. But that sounds wrong, somehow; these qualities don’t build a wall meant to keep out the unworthy viewer, nor do they simply emerge as the by-products of a peculiar authorial process. They’re the very architecture of Ozu’s style, the struts supporting, the spaces accommodating and the entryways leading us into what’s so stunningly effective about his films.

Ozu was a craftsman. The analogy is hardly unique to me — best of luck finding a film writer who hasn’t made it — but it clicks so well that employing it is irresistible. From the late 1920s to the early 1960s, Ozu directed over fifty films, refining (and occasionally expanding) his cinematic technique with each one, using similar elements every time but honing the skill with which he united them. Save for a few very early projects, all of his movies are, broadly speaking, thematically and compositionally alike. In his exceptional book on the filmmaker’s life and work, Japanese film scholar Donald Richie observes that Ozu “had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution,” that “the conventionality of the events in the Ozu film is even by Japanese standards extreme” and that these films “are shot from an almost invariable angle, that of a person sitting on the tatami matting of the Japanese room.”

That a stationary camera, mundane subject matter and the same elements revisited over and over (Ozu even recycled character names from script to script) comes as a turn-off to filmgoers today is perhaps unsurprising. But just one viewing of an Ozu film — practically any Ozu film — should suffice to make a solid case of why these aren’t necessarily negatives. Ozu’s priority was not showing his audience the world, nor showing them experiences alien to their own, nor forcing them to observe from unconventional vantage points. He was concerned with one element above all else, an element compared to which all the others were merely unwanted opportunities for distraction.

That element is character, and at the center of 1958’s Equinox Flower, the onetime black-and-white stalwart’s debut in glorious Agfacolor, stands one of Ozu’s most fascinating. Portrayed by former matinee heartthrob Shin Saburi, the middle-aged Wataru Hirayama starts the film looking like just another of Ozu’s upper-middle-class patriarchs. But he’s quickly humanized at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, when he’s called upon to deliver an impromptu speech. He expresses admiration for the bride and groom, a couple who managed to come together without their parents’ hands arranging it, and half-jokingly nods toward his envy, his own marriage having been of the “unromantic” arranged variety. When a colleague later visits Hirayama’s office and confides his worry about his uncommunicative daughter who’s moved in with her boyfriend, Hirayama readily agrees to help out by visiting the bar at which she works and having a talk with her.

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Nothing kills the enjoyment of music for some people faster than trying to analyze it. But I’m obsessed with solving the mystery of Arthur Alexander. His body of work is small. His songs are musically and lyrically simple, even simplistic. Almost nobody but the most dedicated music lovers remember his name today. Yet he was the only songwriter to win pop music’s Triple Crown: His songs have been covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, arguably the three most respected songwriting acts in rock and roll history. Dusty Springfield, Ry Cooder, Roger McGuinn, and dozens of others¹sang them too.

I’ve been wondering about these tunes for 45 years now, since I was ten years old. Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding them, But I’m not there yet. After all, his chord progressions were basic. His lyrics seem banal on paper: “Every day I have to cry some/wipe the water from my eyes some.” “Oh my name is Johnny Heartbreak …” “Me and Frank were the best of friends …” But by at least one objective measure – the artists who covered him – he was the greatest rock songwriter who ever lived. Subjectively, his best songs are impossible for me to resist as a listener and indescribably rewarding to sing.

So who the hell was this guy, and what made him so good?

He had a brush with R&B stardom as a singer, but really made his name as a songwriter in the 60’s. Yet even after the Beatles and Stones covered him he had trouble collecting royalties. He lived out the next 25 years as a bus driver, interrupted only by one small hit in the 70’s. Then he then enjoyed a brief comeback in 1993² before dying suddenly.

I was first introduced to Alexander, like many of my generation, by the Beatles’ cover of “Anna.” That track is a great reminder that, before he went on his odyssey from musician to activist to martyr to Apple icon, John Lennon was one of the great rock and roll singers. Alexander’s songs lean to melodrama, and Lennon milks this one for all it’s got. Alexander’s simple vocal patterns leave singers a lot of room to fill the space, and Lennon's able to pull out tricks Alexander hinted at in his original recording, like the Buddy Holly-ish pseudo-yodels that punctuate the bridge (“oh-oh-oh-oh …”)

That’s one of Arthur Alexander’s secrets: His lean song structures make them a pleasure to sing. And his recordings provide suggestions rather than instructions. Where other writers fill every measure with musical and lyrical acrobatics, Alexander’s are spare frames singers can hang their hearts on.

Emotionally, each song has a story arc. If you wrote songs using the Syd Field screenwriting method they’d turn out a lot like Alexander’s. They’re three-minute mini-operas full of conflict and resolution. Take “You Better Move On,” which the Rolling Stones covered in 1964: A poor boy’s talking to his wealthier rival, and he humbly admits he can never give his love the good things he wants her to have. But then he turns on his competitor … “I’ll never let her go,” he says, “I love so.” Then the air fills with tension. “I think you better go now,” he says quietly, “I’m getting mighty mad.” Soft-spokenness can be more menacing than a raised voice, and Arthur Alexander knew that.

Sound corny? Lame? Yeah, maybe. But listen to this cover by Mr. Ironic Distance himself, Randy Newman (before Newman launches into his own “It’s Money That Matters” ):

There’s no distancing in Newman’s performance or Mark Knopfler's accompaniment, no sense of anything but the drama in each moment. That’s the best thing about Arthur Alexander’s songs: They’re irony-proof.

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By Namit Arora

Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.’ He asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ Marco Polo documented this episode in his famous book, The Travels, along with a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today:

The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king—except his is studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night. Marco Polo calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon, produces ‘most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.’

The sole local grain produced here is rice. People use only their right hand for eating, saving the left for sundry ‘unclean’ tasks. Most do not consume any alcohol, and drink fluids ‘out of flasks, each from his own; for no one would drink out of another’s flask.’ Nor do they set the flask to their lips, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths.’ They are addicted to chewing a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with ‘camphor and other spices and lime’ and go about spitting freely, using it also to express serious offense by targeting the spittle at another’s face, which can sometimes provoke violent clan fights.

They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’ For instance, they protect the oyster divers ‘against predatory fish by means of incantations’ and for this service they receive one in twenty pearls. The people ‘worship the ox,’ do not eat beef (except for a group with low social status), and daub their houses with cow-dung. In battle they use lance and shield and, according to Marco, are ‘not men of any valor.’ They say that ‘a man who goes to sea must be a man in despair.’ Marco draws attention to the fact that they ‘do not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin.’

Their temple monasteries have both male and female deities, prone to being cross with each other. And since estranged deities spell nothing but trouble in the human realm, bevies of spinsters gather there several times each month with ‘tasty dishes of meat and other food’ and ‘sing and dance and afford the merriest sport in the world,’ leaping and tumbling and raising their legs to their necks and pirouetting to delight the deities. After the ‘spirit of the idols has eaten the substance of the food,’ they ‘eat together with great mirth and jollity.’ Pleasantly disposed by the evening entertainment, the gods and goddesses descend from the temple walls at night and ‘consort’ with each other—or so the priest announces the next morning—bringing great joy and relief to all. ‘The flesh of these maidens,’ adds Messer Marco, ‘is so hard that no one could grasp or pinch them in any place. … their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect.’ For a penny, however, ‘they will allow a man to pinch [their bodies] as hard as he can.’

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For his birthday, my father asks me to hypnotize him.

“Just tell my body to tell itself to heal me,” he says.

This sounds too complex a method to be undertaken by someone like me. I imagine that when I tell his body to heal itself, Dad’s insides will play a game of telephone, his brain passing instruction to his bones, bones to blood, blood to cells, and so on, and so anatomically forth, until the original message garbles and wends its way stomach-ward, where it beds down beside the remains of my father’s most recent meal. I’m bad with telephones. This isn’t a call I want to make.

But for nearly a year now, my father’s been dealing with a condition that doctors will classify one day as morbidly urgent, and as a simple but mysterious allergy the next. All we know, all we see, is that his skin is overwhelmed by sores of parable proportions, and if he’s allergic, then he’s allergic to the world, because touching just about anything sets his skin to shudder and flash with heat. In response, he restricts his diet, handles dyed objects with gloves, and institutes a uniform of billowy white clothing. I can never decide if he looks like he’s about to go on safari, or be baptized, but this indecision hardly matters, as I’m not certain either would be of any use.

—-

I’m not a good candidate for a hypnotist, as inopportune laughter is a specialty of my personality, and while the practice no longer ranks as a pseudoscience, I’m still uncomfortable with being placed in a position of authority over Dad’s brain, and given the opportunity to do so, would prefer to take him for a dip in the Dead Sea, or a skeptic’s tour of Lourdes.

We wouldn’t go to the faith healer I once saw on a painful whim of an experiment, with a woman willing to be paid for her services in exchange for the tutoring session of her son. Beyond the cold I came down with soon after my visit, this experience was notable only for two items:

1. Outside the home, there was a garden with a statue, and a dog affectionately licking its stone hand, obviously convinced of realities unobservable to myself.

2. In tutoring the healer's son, I assisted in the writing of a paper that demanded the use of many synonyms for fakery. False. Forgery. Ersatz.

—-

I'm still not sure how to feel about that particular waste of time. I never expected to benefit, and some would say that this was precisely the problem. But that lack of expectation, truthfully, is something of an effort, as I’m vulnerable to the guilty pleasures of superstition and the colorful terrain of the paranormal, and have to occasionally remind myself of the dangers that come with believing too much. So while reading reports about financial experts flocking to psychics in record numbers, and avoiding the magical thinking that often slips in with the New Year, I also have to note just a few elements that usually accompany such preoccupations: hysteria, distraction, a willingness to exploit the exploitable. Better than to note might be to watch the British documentary, Dispatches: Saving Africa's Witch Children.

Tell-tale signs of a dark servant under the age of two, according to a popular book in Nigeria written by supposed prophetess Helen Ukapbio of Liberty Gospel Church, are high fevers, declining health, and disrupted sleep. She herself is a mother of three, and her own offspring have unsurprisingly avoided this diagnosis.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

As long as I have lived and thought about it, Delhi has been metastasizing, growing like a cancer outwards, drawing more and more people inwards, cutting its trees, widening its avenues, adding more and more floors per plot and cars per family. It may boast an imperial legacy stretching back a thousand years, it may once have been home to Khusro and Ghalib, and to styles of thumri singing and kathak dance, but for much of the later half of the 20^th century, Delhi has been preoccupied with building itself into the massive and global city that it is now still becoming.

The walled city of Old Delhi, the one with the Red Fort from which generations of Mughals ruled, and which was eventually sacked by British troops in 1857, is but a kernel of the whole today. By 1911 its walls were being dismantled by the imperial architects Lutyens and Baker, the better to be integrated into the New Delhi they were creating. At partition about a million people were freighted into the city from all parts of what had become Pakistan, and they were allotted plots in new neighborhoods to the west and south of Lutyens’ Delhi. By the 1950s, different kinds of urban elites were pooling their resources to invest in housing societies, which bought up agricultural land along a southern ring, stretching from the Army Cantonment in the west through to the Yamuna River to the east. They swallowed whole farming settlements into the south Delhi that they built, creating newly urbanized villages that sometimes suddenly irrupt its urban fabric today. Seventeen million people now live in the National Capital Region, which encompasses the informational suburb of Gurgaon to the far south, as well as the unhappily named New Okhla Industrial Development Area, NOIDA, the city’s more intellectual Left Bank, which is accessed via multiple utilitarian bridges across dispiriting stretches of the shriveled and fetid sludge that is the Yamuna.

What kind of art should be associated with this great and emerging city today? This difficult, pressing, and largely unasked question has found a bold new answer in the form of its first public arts festival, named 48°C.

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by Katherine McNamara

the tragic vision

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: “the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape upon his shoulder to give him stability while thinking and composing his coming speeches….”

Here is Obama, for three years a community organizer in Chicago, during the mayoralty of the great Harold Washington, the hope of black people. Suddenly, Washington dies. The young man goes to the wake and sees the skull beneath the skin.

“There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. The entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what that presence had meant.

“The loyalists squabbled. Factions emerged. Rumors flew. By Monday, the day the city council was to select a new mayor to serve until the special election, the coalition that had first put Harold in office was all but extinguished. I went down to City Hall that evening to watch this second death. . . .

“But power was patient and knew what it wanted; power could out-wait slogans and prayers and candlelight vigils. Around midnight, just before the council got around to taking a vote, the door to the chambers opened briefly and I saw two of the aldermen off in a huddle. One, black, had been Harold's man; the other, white, Vrdolyak's. They were whispering now, smiling briefly, then looking out at the still-chanting crowd and quickly suppressing their smiles, large, fleshy men in double-breasted suits with the same look of hunger to their eyes — men who knew the score.

“I left after that. I pushed through the crowds that overflowed into the streets and began walking across Daley Plaza toward my car. The wind whipped up cold and sharp as a blade, and I watched a hand-made sign tumble past me. HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON, the sign read in heavy block letters. And beneath the words of that picture I had seen so many times while waiting for a chair in Smitty's barbershop: the handsome, grizzled face; the indulgent smile; the twinkling eyes; now blowing across the empty space, as easily as an autumn leaf.”

Amid desolation, beyond irony, the writer has assented to the tragic sense of life. He does not give way to hopelessness; he observes what exists and must be engaged with, not wished away. He will bend his will like the arc of a bow to a higher purpose, which is, he recognizes, as real as, but of a different nature than, worldly power. Shedding only some of his skepticism (he notes wryly), he embraces — is embraced by — a Christian faith carried in traditions of the black church: its embodiment of the Word as agency, and so, its spur to social change.

“Out of necessity,” he would write, “the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation.” His hard-won knowledge, as radiant as his smile, is that “the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.” (He knows they see that he “knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs,” but that part of him would always remain “removed, detached, an observer among them.”)

What he loved was the thisness of the community. “You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away — because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.”

Obama's beloved community was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Church of Christ, which, for years, he attended every Sunday at 11 a.m. You can imagine his grief at the sacrifice which a media-amplified politics demanded of him, his forced parting from Wright, the man who had given him his beautiful shield against desolation, the audacity of hope.

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by Beth Ann Bovino

This was a record-breaking year, though there was almost no good news. As it came to a close, most welcomed its departure. Unfortunately, we expect more tough times ahead in 2009, with no turn around likely until later next year. The current financial crisis has deeply frightened consumers and businesses, and in response they have sharply pulled back spending, making the recession even more severe. Moreover, the usual recovery tools used by governments, monetary and fiscal stimuli, are relatively ineffective given the circumstances. The economy won’t likely reach bottom till spring of next year, with risk of an even bigger recession more pronounced.

The National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. has been in recession since last December, only surprising those living at the North Pole. The downturn is expected to approach the slump of 1981-82 and be even longer, bottoming out in the spring of next year, which would make this the longest postwar recession. After a strong rebate-check related second quarter, four consecutive quarters of negative growth is expected through the second quarter of 2009, with risk that the fourth quarter will be down 6% based on current data. Employment dropped for the eleventh consecutive month in November, with 2.1 million jobs lost over last year, the biggest 12-month job loss since the 1982 recession. Financial markets remain in distress. Housing is still in recession, with November housing starts falling to the lowest pace since World War II. Not surprisingly, both business and consumer confidence remain weak.

The spendthrift habits of American consumers are a likely casualty of the crisis. Consumers and banks are becoming more cautious, and we expect household debt to decline from record levels, relative to income and to assets. The household saving rate is likely to increase, how much will help determine how quickly the economy revives.

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by Norman Costa

[Part 1 of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” can be found here.]

The Meaning of War

There is nothing about war that is to be celebrated. As an art, a force, or an institution, war is the killing of people and the destruction of property in the name of, and in the service of, a people or a nation state. I recommend Christopher Hedges' “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” It is a searing account, of not only the devastation of the acts and scenes of war but, of the disability, suffering, and destruction that follows war. The best book on war is still “The Iliad”, by Homer. Beginning with the first part of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” I wanted to tell a story about one soldier's war that had many facets: heroics, cowardice, sacrifice, selfishness, futility, redemption, atrocity, generosity, suffering, loss, randomness, meaning, and enigma. For my father, it was all of the above in terms of what he experienced and what he observed. For reasons that I can't explain, his first combat experience in the Battle of Graignes (Part 1) was THE defining event of his life. No other vet with whom I spoke had the same transforming experience in Graignes as my father. I am very proud of his military service, and so is he; but it was not without the blurring of the distinction between the light and dark elements of his own human nature. He confided to me an act that I have never disclosed before to anyone. We were talking about the reprisal executions by the Germans following the Battle of Graignes. In particular, he was talking about the execution by bayonet of the wounded paratroopers who were being tended by the local priest and his priest friend. He told me that he and others shot their own German prisoners. I don't know how many, or when in the battle it happened. The GIs had no resources to guard, feed, or give medical assistance to any prisoners. In his mind they had to kill the German prisoners or else they would put their own situation in further jeopardy. However, he allowed no excuse to the Germans for killing the wounded American soldiers. He said, “They had the resources to take and keep prisoners. We didn't.”

His story was the same as for many Americans who went to war: pride, opportunism, adventure, being 'young and dumb', patriotism, obligation, duty, 'having more balls than brains', breaking the boredom of life, anger, rage, and fight. Let's not forget the absence of a real sense of their own mortality before they experienced combat. After the war, his story was still the same for many veterans, except the American culture after World War II had no tolerance, nor understanding, for the severe costs to the returning GIs that would last them a lifetime. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the WWII veteran was a sentence to a lifetime of grief, sadness, dissociation, repression, anxiety, self destructive behavior, depression, and a sense of isolation from loved ones and family. For some it ended in suicide. One GI who took his own life was a Medal of Honor winner for extreme heroism as a medic and saving many lives at the risk of his own during the worst of a three hour battle. He was a friend of my father for many years.

There is another reason I am telling his story. I want to be able to understand my own. There's an old Irish saying, “You can't tell your own story until you've told the story of your father and grandfather.” So this telling is also a part of a very personal journey.

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by Shiban Ganju

Jack arrived in the hospital a few minutes after midnight. Next morning he was dead.

Death visits a hospital in sobs, shrieks or stoic silence. It stumbles with stroke, burns with feverish sepsis, crashes in with a fractured torso, stuns a teenager with drug overdose, rams the chest with a heart attack, relieves agonizing cancer, or just sneaks in sleep with stealth. In all its forms, death is a process.

“The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed” (T S Eliot)

But Jack’s death was different.

He was healthy just two weeks back – he did no drugs, he exercised, he worked, he voted and he was in love. And now he was on life support. Plastic tubes and wires connected his body to bottles, monitors and an armory of medical gadgets. With his chiseled nose, calm countenance, eyes shut, long dark black hair sprayed on the white pillow, he looked pristine – even on the ventilator. His face reflected the golden hue of bile seeped into his skin. The feeble pulse, high fever, low blood pressure and delirious thrashing of limbs foretold gloom. The air of death hung heavy over his bed. And he was only thirty-three.

The process of death unravels in the molecules deep inside the cells and shatters emotions on surface. Irrespective of the first cause, the processes have a broad similarity. But all death is not dangerous. Some part of us is dying all the time without any harm to our physique or emotions.

Body cells have a life span: red blood cells live one hundred eighty days, platelets live for a week, intestinal lining rejuvenates in one to seven days. Approximately fifty to seventy billion cells die every day. Even in children under fourteen, twenty to thirty billon cells vanish daily. With this continual destruction and proliferation, in one year, we probably replace cell mass equal to our body weight.

Our cells also disintegrate with a programmed protocol that paradoxically keeps the body in state of health. Scientists call it apoptosis. When something goes wrong inside the cell, cell generates an appropriate biochemical signal, which triggers a sequence of biochemical processes: scaffold collapses, cell shrivels, nucleus condenses, DNA fragments and its membrane blisters. Enzymes dissolve the contents of a cell and break it into small sacks. Roaming scavenger white blood cells mop up the debris.

This process is protective and apoptosis gone wrong can unleash havoc like cancer. Apoptosis does not damage the body, which differentiates it from another form of cell death – the harmful necrosis. Infection, physical injury, poisons and lack of oxygen can provoke a cascade of reactions producing toxins that irreversibly damage the cell and also its surrounding tissue. Examples are: heart attack or paralytic stroke due to lack of oxygen and staphylococcus bacteria grinding normal tissue into an abscess. The sequence of chemical events in necrosis differs from apoptosis.

Necrosis can damage a single organ, which may not cause death unless the organ is life sustaining like heart or brain. Both these organs are extremely vulnerable to oxygen deprivation; a few minutes of anoxia or absence of oxygen damages the heart muscle, which looses it strength to pump oxygenated blood into the brain cells. Neurons deprived of oxygen collapse fast – within four to eleven minutes – causing irreversible brain death. The sequence of anoxia can also initiate from the respiratory center in the brain stem – the part of brain at its junction with the spinal cord, where the neck meets the skull. The center controls the depth and speed of respiration. Any damage to this center- as in head injury or stroke- will depress breathing and cause anoxia, which then damages other parts of the brain, heart and the rest of the body. Irrespective of the initiating event, anoxia seems to be one of the prominent determining events of cell death.

What happened?

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