by David Schneider

Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying:

Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, 'In the heezy.'

Wazzup!

For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a 'troubled asset.

That's right. At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama's delivery – mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist – was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming. (Even as he reaffirmed Michelle's right to bear arms.)

Disarming, because journalists and Big Media – in a crisis for survival – are now reckoning with their role in the great failures of the Bush Administration, in the failures of the economy, and the failures of their own profession. All are connected. And as Obama was happy to take the heat, as well as dish it (“Sasha and Malia are not here tonight. They're grounded. You can't just take a joyride to Manhattan.”) – because he took responsibility – he opened the possibility for the press corps to say to one another, like Hardy berating Laurel (though with a sheepish grin), “Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into.”

The American press might have been on “suicide watch,” as Frank Rich wrote yesterday, since Stephen Colbert's monologue three years ago (surely a critical event in media history). But the news industry had been in a severe depression long before Wall Street laid its latest egg.

Print newswriting methods are like the internal-combustion engine: their basic mechanics and operating principles have been little altered for a hundred years. For pistons, gears, sparkplugs and the carburetor, journalists have the lede, the quote, the counter-quote, vocabulary set and wordcount. They're all housed in an engine-block called the inverted pyramid, a structure whose wide use in American journalism dates back to the mid-19th century. This structure has its essential uses, but I think it also has, over the long-term, determined the way we receive, process, and use information, with negative aspects.

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I am not usually one to feel nostalgic. It is not my nature. But there is something about the idea of an ancient academy or a very old university that makes me long for the past. Perhaps I have been deceived by the romantic image of Demosthenes running on the beach with pebbles in his mouth, speaking beautifully over the roar of the Mediterranean waves. Or maybe the seal of the University of Heidelberg has fooled me into actually believing that a typical seminar in 1386 was conducted by a man wearing academic regalia seated in front of an ornate chancel. Whoever this important man was, he probably spoke with eloquence. At least I hope he did. I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.

Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, “spirit,” one really and cynically means, “weariness.”

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by Evert Cilliers

A few weeks ago I closed my account at Bank of America and opened an account at a credit union instead.

I cut my ties with one of the banks responsible for our economic crisis — one of the banks whose actions have caused countless Americans to lose their jobs and their homes, and caused many children in the third world to go hungry.

I felt clean. Moral. New.

Now I have a dream. What if millions of Americans disassociated themselves from the banks that have brought us grief?

The four biggest US commercial banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — possess 64% of the assets of US commercial banks.

These are the banks that are said to be too big to fail.

But what if millions of Americans moved their accounts from these big banks, and put their money into smaller local banks or credit unions instead?

Wouldn't these big banks then become small enough to fail? Isn't this the punishment they deserve for causing all of us so much grief?

I urge you, I implore you, I beg you to move your account from a big bank to a small bank. It is the quickest, simplest way to solve our entire financial crisis. Instead of getting a bail-out, the banks can then be allowed to fail. These banks caused us grief; let's kill them.

Vote with your money. Take it away from them. Why should you leave a single cent of your money in their greedy hands?

This is the best and most practical solution, because it is a democratic solution, executed by the citizenry themselves. It'll work way better than waving a pitchfork or a teabag.

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by Gerald Dworkin

What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.

–Nietzsche

It is easy enough to look back to the beginning of the century and see many ethical views that we now believe to be profoundly mistaken. Views about the rights of women, about who should vote, about separate but equal, about the rights of children to work in oppressive conditions, about the rights of patients in medical experimentation. To take only the latter, in 1963 researchers injected live cancer cells into nursing home residents, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, to determine whether the immune systems of sick individuals could identify and eliminate foreign cancer tissue as those of healthy people. Although the researchers were correct in thinking that no harm could come to their patients from the injection the fact remains that no consent was asked for.

It is much harder to look at out contemporary views and try to predict which of them will seem as mistaken 100 years from now as those above. Possible candidates include– eating meat, thinking of homosexuality as in some ways sinful or immoral, allowing the extremes of inequality of income and wealth that exist in contemporary America, allowing receipt of medical care to depend on income.

When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the defending the rights of women, a contemporary , Thomas Taylor, mocked her by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (animals). The idea being that the logical implication of granting rights to women is that they be granted to animals and since the latter is absurd so is the former. So one persons drawing the logical conclusion is another person's refutation of one of the premises.

Henry Salt, in Animals' Rights, informs us that Thomas Taylor's “A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes…designed to, throwridicule on the theory of human rights…ironically lays down the proposition 'that God has made all things equal'” and “furnishesus with a notable instance of how the mockery of one generation may become the reality of the next.” (Henry Salt, Animals' Rights [1892], “Bibliography of the Rights of Animals”).

Bernard Williams advanced a thesis which might be called the relativism of distance; where distance here means is moral and conceptual rather than geographical. There had to be a possibility of a justification to those who lived with institutions which we, now, see as unjust, for them to be unjust. This is the relativism part. The fact that we see slavery now as the essence of an unjust institution does not mean that if we were transported in a time machine to 4th century Athens we could frame an argument for this position that would make sense to the slave-holders of the time. It's important to note that this is not simply a question of whether our arguments would persuade. People whose self-interest would be harmed may , for various reasons, not be persuaded they are wrong but that does not mean they are not wrong.

As Tom Nagel puts it, ” Williams believed that political theory, too, should be in a sense local, rather than universal, because it must be addressed to individuals in a particular place and time, and must offer them a justification for the exercise of political power that has persuasive force in the light of standards that are accessible to them. ”

Now one might take this in a stronger or a weaker sense. The weak sense is that those not persuaded are not to be held responsible for their support of unjust ( by our lights) institutions they are not be blamed for what they could not be expectedto see as wrong. The strong sense, which Williams seems to have held, is not just that they are not to be condemned but that the institutions are not unjust. It is not that they are just either. If one wanted to talk like Nietzsche one woulds say they are beyond justice or injustice.

But, and here comes the non-relative part, for Williams, none of this does has any implication that now, for us ( all of us), there is any doubt that slavery is unjust and that those who now support it, or condone it, are fully responsible for their mistaken views.

I believe that the issue of what might be called “moral anachronism” is a fruitful one to think more about. When do the concepts we employ in moral discourse, and the empirical situation we find ourselves in now, make it– and here the rightnotion to use is crucial– too difficult, too crazy, impossible, meaningless, pointless– for we and them to understand one another sufficiently for a certain kind of criticism and evaluation to be possible? When does the fact that our current understandings and commitments were not historically present in an earlier period get people off the hook for behavior that, today, would be universally viewed as outrageous?

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It was my fault. I’d been traveling abroad and didn’t want the real world invading my vacation bubble, so I was checking e-mail and world headlines superficially. Bea Arthur’s death and swine flu penetrated my consciousness to about the same depth. Sometime during those lazy days I followed a link or two and saw a stray headline reading “Arlen Specter to Leave Republican Party.” Amused, I logged off and continued blithely on with my day.

So silly of me. I’d assumed Specter—a centrist who not infrequently dissented from his party—was merely abandoning the Republicans, not defecting to the Democrats. I’d assumed he was primarily interested in taking a stand against the more outrageous elements of his cohort, and therefore would be loath to yoke himself to a different side with just as many disgraces in its ranks. I’d assumed he was breaking free to announce an allegiance to what’s been his de facto political philosophy for years, that of independents, and I’d assumed that as an independent Arlen Specter might be a real example of political valor So, so silly.

Perhaps we should be grateful for Specter’s candor—he split because his pollster gypsies spun his fortune and he knew he wouldn’t have survived a Republican primary challenge next season, when he’s up for re-election. Then again, he didn’t even try to conceal those motivations. But what crushed me and what made my jet-lag headache even worse when I returned home and read what was really happening was the lost opportunity Specter represented for independents.

Specter himself said switching parties will make little practical difference—he’ll continue to vote the same idiosyncratic way he always has. The newspaper graphics that listed the suddenly “realigned” Senate, with Specter’s “1” appearing in the tally of seats for donkeys and not elephants, means next to nothing, then, and odds are he’ll exasperate his new allies as much as he infuriated his old ones. (They’re already suspicious in fact.) There was zero news fiber in the whole affair, except for people who use politics to keep score.

If the name “Democrat” or “Republican” meant so little to Specter, why not ditch them? He could have made the same points he felt he needed to make about the GOP having lurched “far to the right since [he] joined it under Reagan’s big tent” in 1981. Leaving the party and remaining independent wouldn’t have had quite the emotional impact of joining the enemy, true, but walking away still would have done real damage to the ideologues in his old party.

To be crass, if Specter’s mostly interested in his own political prospects, refusing the Democrat label would have secured him far more power. He would have had both sides courting him; both sides would have had to come to him if he’d announced he wouldn’t pre-define himself and caucus with either side. It would also have signaled to both parties that snubbing or pummeling moderates might not be smart tactics. Instead, Specter heard the bad news about his polls, wet himself, and twelve or so hours later was holding up his jersey for a new team, flush with a huge signing bonus.

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From the indispensable psychology and neuroscience blog Mind Hacks, some information on Christian Nold and his “emotional cartography.” Writes Nold:

Nold goes on to ask, “How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?” That's more of a forecast than a description of his current work. He's predicting a technology that allows people to read the emotions of others in real-time. His current maps essentially measure only stress, and the results are published retrospectively and not in real time.

But it raises a number of interesting questions and possibilities. Before we go there, however, it's worth mention that, while Nold may be science's first “emotional cartographer,” literature's been there already. Take William Blake's London:

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Blake's cartography isn't only emotional, although it's intensely emotional. It's also economic, political, and psychological (the “mind-forged manacles” evoking everything from learned helplessness to crushing social convention.) The cagey old printer even manages to inject a little epidemiology into his mapmaking. The youthful harlot's curse sounds a lot like a venereal disease, one that condemns the unfaithful husband and his family to death. And the “marks” of “weakness and woe” that Blake inventories form the contours of his map. The wounded soldier's bloody sigh on the palace wall reduces to zero the geographical distance between the suffering of the battlefront and the comforts of the wealthy.

And all in sixteen lines.

So maybe Christian Nold hasn't caught up with the poet yet. But he's done something interesting, and there's more to come. The “emotional maps” aren't his only work, either. He's also created the Newham “Sensory Deprivation” Map, which is where the illustration above comes from. By switching up the senses people use to perceive the environment, he's helping map our geography in a new way. A very nice idea.

So what would happen if we could read the emotions of those around us in real-time? What if we could tell that the crowd around us at rush hour was overstressed, that the people at our bar band gig really liked the crazy rockabilly number we threw in, that our academic audience was becoming skeptical of our Blake-As-Cartographer thesis? Would people on the street feel more personal responsibility for the well-being of the throng around them? Would presenters and performers lose the willingness to challenge their audience? Would anybody even care?

Would politicians be even more eager to say anything the public wanted than ever before?

Nold's work can veer in any number of future directions. It could lead to new forms of psychological epidemiology, or to conceptual art works. Or to new ways of seeing the world around us, a breaker of mind-forged manacles. But he needs to be vigilant, to prevent his work from descending into an entertainment, a crowdsourced “mood ring” for the 21st Century, played with and then forgotten.

He can do it, if he gets the right support. And draws the right inspiration from cartographers like William Blake.

Michael Blim

The minutes of the night tick down as I write this column. Soon I will have my morning reward. My column will come out on 3QD, and I will hear the thud of the Boston Globe against the front door.

My column will come out, but with the Boston Globe?

Ask The New York Times Company, its owner. For the past month, they have been threatening to close the Globe unless its workers give back $20 million in wages and benefits by May 1. For the past two days, the Times company has extended the deadline by one day. As I write, the Times company has put several hours back on the clock at the same time it is waving its official plant closing notice as required by the state in the faces of its employees.

The Globe, once the Sulzberger flagship for its New England media armada, and a cash cow to boot, is now losing a million dollars a week. It is the last paper of record in Boston, and has garnered dozens of national awards, including seven Pulitzer prizes since 1995. The 2007 prize was won by reporter Charlie Savage’s exposure of President Bush’s abuse of so-called signing statements, pithy bits of prose attached to his approval of laws that skewed or set aside whole provisions of legislation he could not summon the courage to veto. The 2003 prize was won the Globe’s spotlight team for their uncovering of the sex abuse scandal in the local and national Catholic churches.

These were hardly prizes awarded for art criticism, however valuable those forms of recognition may be. They were what newspapers do that no other institution or platform in America can yet do, which is to generate facts about and attention to serious, yet undiscovered problems in everyday life.

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by Colin Marshall

Though certain cultural circles customarily and wrongfully dismiss science fiction as an altogether inferior breed of narrative, the genre's bad reputation isn't wholly unearned. Just last week, I heard veteran sci-fi novelist Robert Silverberg publicly assert that, in his field, “character is necessarily subordinated to speculation”; rarely has the fatal flaw of one subset of fiction been so succinctly stated. While the disease that withers human inhabitants to ciphers is indeed widespread and devastating, it hasn't quite contaminated every crevice of the sci-fi landscape. Witness, to name one of these exotic and wonderful instances, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, a futuristic, fantastical journey into an impossible planet's orbit that nevertheless remains the most gripping cinematic narrative of the 1970s.

The film is, I would submit, Tarkovsky's finest, though the great director would have argued with me. He reportedly came to consider Solaris his least successful project, owing to what he saw as its inability to break the shackles of its genre. Though no viewer then or now would call it anything other than a science fiction film, perhaps only Tarkovsky himself, his mind's eye fixed on the less conventional visions he would later realize, could lump it with the day's rockets-and-aliens potboilers. What to him may have been a not-entirely-successful attempt to imbue relatively insubstantial material with stronger human resonances is to others a set of Tarkovskian themes brought closer and made more comprehensible by interaction with a familiar cinematic context. This is not to minimize the impact of the films that followed — the ultra-personal Mirror and The Sacrifice, the supremely textural Nostalghia, the much more distant science fiction of Stalker — but to appreciate the unexpectedly positive hybridization effects of two entirely distinct entities, a phenomenon of which almost any science fiction writer would approve.

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The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance
of philosophers and physicists.–Robert Lanza and Bob Berman


The Problem of Time
Jim Culleny

Then was now once while now always is
the train leaving the station

and Is (itself) is pretty much
a matter of interpretation
as murky as the dilemma:
to be or not to…which was
well explored long before today
(today being exactly when
Hamlet was written anyway).

Tomorrow maybe I’ll figure it all out,
though by then it’ll be almost yesterday again

which before tock has ticked will
seem like a month or two ago
or year or even an eon or so
, which it undoubtedly is

Fettuccine alla gricia, a common pasta dish in Rome, has four ingredients: the noodles, olive oil, bits of cured pig's cheek, and grated cheese. Most trattorias offer it. It's not innovative, nor is it usually presented with much elegance. It's simply an oily plate of flat, yellow noodles with some reddish brown bits of guanciale and a shower of pecorino. The pleasure it gives is hard to describe. The word delicious somehow seems too refined and cerebral, tasty insufficiently hyperbolic. Scrumptious is close, but kind of pretentious. Anyway, a good alla gricia is lipsmackingly, profoundly pleasurable to eat.

There's a difference between eating and dining. In Rome, you eat. By eating, I mean the straightforward, carnal pleasure of gnawing things that taste good. A perfect example would be another common speciality: abbacchio scottadito, which is grilled very young lamb sauced with a lemon wedge. There's usually a rib, a bit of shoulder or leg, and a chop. (Incidentally, Urdu speakers call a chop a “champ,” which has always struck me as charming, and oonomatopoetic of lipsmackingness.) Abbacchio scottadito is variously salty, gamy, fatty, and cartilagenous. It tastes extremely, intensely lambish. Impossible not to chew the bones.

Not that you can't dine in Rome: at La Rosetta, Rome's most celebrated fish restaurant, you can wear your Lanvin suit, sit with the multinational haute-bourgeoisie, and have a spaghetti with seafood that costs forty-two euros. But I had a superb (superb!) spaghetti alla vongole for eight euros at a random neighborhood restaurant. By the way, you can make this at home very easily: fry a tiny bit of minced garlic, add some white wine and the smallest clams you can find, cover till they open, and mix with some high-quality pasta (I recommend Martelli, if you can find it; I can't anymore) and a bit of chopped flat-leaf parsley. End of story. But try getting dime-sized little vongole outside of Italy that are as fresh and sweetly saline.

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[Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, especially the victims.]

Justice

There is no justice except that for which you are willing to fight. There is no freedom except that which you claim as your own, and for which you are willing to suffer and fight. There is no unalienable right except that which you can articulate, and, with others, arrive at a consensus on its value and utility. Justice is not a reality, external to the human condition, that acts upon this world, its institutions, and its inhabitants; Nor is justice a cosmic balance sheet that compensates for our losses in the world we experience by allocating credits that are redeemable upon our death. Waiting for justice to be dispensed can be a wait for an eternity. You have to seek it, fight for it, persevere, and hope there might be some measure of fairness in the end. You have to pick your fights carefully. Sometimes you find justice and feel vindicated; You may find an incomplete measure of justice and wonder if it was worth the fight; There are times when the bad guys win and you're fucked. This makes the human condition, to some extent, tragic. This can also make the human condition redemptive, if in the search for justice, regardless of the outcome, we learn important lessons about ourselves, our institutions, and the world around us.

The Case of the Predator Psychiatrist

Nathan Kossik phoned me and asked if he could come over that evening. He said he had a very serious problem, he needed to talk to me, and could use my help and advice. He didn't want to discuss anything over the phone. I told him to come over after my kids were in bed. Nate was my neighbor and one of my best friends. We both went to graduate school, married, and started a family. Nate was an aspiring architect and in his second year at a local architectural firm. His wife Gertrude did not work outside the home for pay, at that time. Gerti was pursuing a nursing degree, part-time, at a local community college.

Nate came to my house alone. I had assumed he would come with his wife, Gerti. It's hard to describe his state except to say that he was very, very upset. He was devastated, heartbroken, angry, very concerned about his two children, and worried sick over his wife. Nate and Gerti were both in psychotherapy with the same psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph R. Dorsey, of Hopewell Junction, NY. They started together in marriage counseling, but they stopped seeing Dr. Dorsey as a couple. Instead they continued with separate individual appointments. This went on for two and one-half years. Nate and Gerti came from dysfunctional working class families. They were striving for a normal, middle class life through education and pursuing decent professional jobs. Nate and Gerti had two beautiful children who were school mates and regular play mates with my own kids. Some time before, Nate confided to me that his wife's father was an abusive alcoholic, who terrorized his family and sexually abused Gerti as a child. Gerti was also sexually abused by her neighbor. She had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist about 5 years earlier as having severe mental problems. The only thing Nate remembered about the diagnosis was that it included the phrase 'schizoid tendencies'.

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Vonderwelt takes the elevator down two flights below the ground floor. In the Bemidji Room there's a man wearing a turquoise bolo tie. He has a long grey goatee and is talking to an audience of a dozen people or so about a recent summer spent arrowhead collecting with his wife. “We took the camper out near Flagstaff,” he recounts. “Great arrowhead country out there. Mitzi and I were in heaven.” Alas, Vonderwelt says to himself, I'm with my people.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

I am sitting inside a white cube, watching things familiar but different. I know this music, but there are no lyrics, nothing to anchor the sound flowing round and through me. These soldiers, their rhythms, they seem to be preparing for an event I was once at. Perhaps India's Republic Day, which I remember attending with my kid brother when he was about six, both of us sitting in grass in front of the VIP enclosure with passes that Captain Kumar had arranged for us while he was serving as ADC to the President. Perhaps the Beating of the Retreat, which is held in front of the old Viceroy's Palace, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and which ends with a spectacular drum detail, no two drummers in the same uniform or from the same regiment, North and South Block reverberating together, silhouetted by the camel brigade, whose mounted guards point submachine guns into the air as the flares come sailing down to close the ceremony. It is, of course, another country, another time, and these memories have been triggered by a haunting new video work by Shahzia Sikandar entitled Bending the Barrel (no still available).

There is something uncanny about the angle and depth of Sikandar's camera. The marching band is moving past without making much progress, as if depth had been flattened for framing the scene into a Mughal miniature painting. The music emanates from their instruments but the moment is intercut with other scenes — we are there but no longer there. Before there can be boredom there is a new anomie, introduced by Krugeresque text fragments that overlay the image plane, not with slogans, but with the impersonal and passively-voiced militarese that cannot but be recognized as the public pronouncements of the Army's leadership. This is an acute, biting piece, crafted without polemic, so much more powerful for being all quotation, all documentation, all juxtaposition.

The conductor's back is to me, his musicians stare at their sheets of music. They are seated on an elevated bandstand whose steps were coated last night in chuna, lime, to shine back in the sun a brilliant, almost blinding white, outshining the musician's spats and their neelam-washed white tunics. Framed by Sikandar, the musicians at first appear anonymous, ordered, regimented. But now and again she swoops in. At first this causes me to worry that some amateurism had caused a camera shudder. But she is neither zooming nor panning, but shifting frame, capturing in perfect detail a particular Army bandsman staring directly back at the recording lens, a new composition, a new picture within the picture. This is the delirious pleasure of experiencing cinema through the eyes of a miniaturist, who like others of her craft, can see, and can desire to see the whole as well the individual parts of creation with the same detail, the same interest. Sikandar's way of seeing is elucidated by her film-making, and newly educated, I want more of this vertigo.

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Douglas Henry Daniels, One O’clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 274 pp.)

Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, xi + 274 pp.)

by Todd Bryant Weeks

The Oklahoma City Blue Devils, the ne plus ultra of all the territory bands, still command legendary status among generations of jazz musicians, scholars, critics, and collectors. The band’s undiminished reputation is based, in part, on the paucity of recorded evidence (a sole 78) but also on the illustrious assemblage of players who passed through the group’s ranks between 1923 and 1933. Many of these musicians (Walter Page, Buster Smith, Eddie Durham, Hot Lips Page, Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young among them) were virtuosos who made definitive statements on their instruments, and in the process helped to redefine the notion of what it meant to swing. As a working big band, the Blue Devils could reputedly tackle complicated ensemble passages with the kind of precision and assurance unmatched in the highly competitive dance halls of Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and other towns from the Mexican border to Omaha. That they apparently worked from head arrangements only made them all the more remarkable. Several Blue Devils went on to become key members of the Bennie Moten Orchestra, and, in what is now the stuff of legend, Motenites went on to become Basieites. Accordingly, for those whose idea of swing begins and ends with Basie, the Blue Devils may be said to sit at the center of the big band Vorstellung. In addition, their commonwealth approach to running a band—the musicians shared equally in all profits and expenses—has long endeared them to writers who champion the notion of jazz as a democratic process.

Given the dearth of research on southwestern jazz, aficionados have long awaited the publication of these books. The more problematic of the two is One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma Blue Devils, by Douglas Henry Daniels, a professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daniels’s narrative, interwoven with band members’ biographies, is a kind of patchwork of stories and assorted facts that occasionally cohere into a more composite picture of the Oklahoma City music world in the 1920s and 1930s. His previous jazz book, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young, demonstrated his facility with obscure sources (e.g., parish records in backwater communities like Woodville, Mississippi) and this new work is equally research-intensive. His genealogical research, which unearthed new data on Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, and others, lends depth and authenticity to the book. He exhaustively plumbed the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, Kansas City Call, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and lesser-known papers such as the Sioux City Journal, the St. Louis Argus, and the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He also interviewed Blue Devils Buster Smith, Leonard Chadwick, Le Roy “Snake” Whyte, and Abe Bolar extensively. Through this painstaking research, Daniels traces the band in its various incarnations from their early days in the dance halls and lodges of Oklahoma City to their final, infamous gig in the mountains of West Virginia. The author provides illuminating accounts of each musician’s early history, such as singer Jimmy Rushing’s 1920s Los Angeles period and his family life in the African American Oklahoma City neighborhood known as “Deep Deuce.” Here Rushing worked in a confectionary–sandwich shop operated by his father before becoming floor manager at the Blue Devils’ Oklahoma City headquarters, Slaughter’s Hall. On this gleaming dance floor, the youthful, trimmer “James” Rushing set the tempos for the musicians and demonstrated the latest steps for the dancers.

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By Maniza Naqvi

While Israeli F-18s created sonic booms and closed the open skies above; and the barbed wiring for the fences and the pre-fabricated planks for the wall surrounding Gaza steadily settled down as the facts on the ground; and while Colin Powell droned on about the “roadmap for peace” on CNN; and the searing heat of the day closed in; I made my way through the streets of the crowded city to the Arts and Crafts Village at the Gaza Municipality. It was the June of 2002.

I hated being in Gaza. Even though it was for a short time with the date for departure certain and with the ease of getting out assured, even then, I hated being there. I couldn't breath. The fear of the Israelis with their killing machines, overhead and all around, created an uncontrollable feeling of illness. I was eager and relieved to leave Gaza which I was going to do in a few hours and I was feeling guilty because my colleagues would stay on in this pressure cooker atmosphere. I was anxious about the upcoming ordeal at the check point for entering and leaving Gaza. Here insolent, battle geared and almost to the last one, oversexed and beautiful Israeli, boys and girls maybe no more then eighteen or nineteen years old, heavily armed and in military uniforms did mandatory time in the Israeli Defense Force as prison guards of the concentration camp of Gaza. Every young Israeli citizen does service in the military. This is how Israel has raised and trained its young. It has made them golden, muscular and cruel. Their job it seemed was to insult, humiliate, harass and terrorize anyone going in or out of Gaza. Any reference or suggestion to their being prison guards of a concentration camp with one and a half million inmates was only met with a cold almost vacant eyed stare of contempt, guffaws and a longer wait.

Weary, sweat soaked Palestinian men, women, the elderly, the sick, and children all waited outside in long lines of desperate people making futile attempts at getting out to their menial jobs as farm hands and construction workers on the now Israel owned land and settlements. They waited alongside the checkpoint barricades and in the crosshair of sharp shooters’ weapons trained on them. The foreigners, like me, trying to get in and who waited inside the checkpoint seemed merely to be essential menial workers too, who were part of a bigger more complex establishment which enabled the occupation to continue. Officials, bureaucrats, aid workers of international agencies took on the task and responsibility from the occupier of feeding and keeping alive an interned population of over 1.5 million people.

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Edward B. Rackley

Even the most subtle and complex artists can’t escape the crudity of synopsis. Grazing the critical literature surrounding Herzog’s films and career, two stock phrases repeat incessantly: ‘man vs. nature’ and ‘Heart of Darkness parable’. These signposts may guide the uninitiated, but as always the map is never the terrain.

Generically speaking, Herzog explores the complexity of man/nature relations in dozens of films and documentaries; his antipathy towards romanticism and Cinema Verité is well known. To reject both fantasy and empiricism as story telling vehicles, where does that leave a director? Because it blurs fact and fiction, Herzog’s method of documentary cinema is rogue. To contrast his approach with Cinema Verité, in interviews he cites the Heideggerian concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ (remember ‘unconcealment’, fellow philosophers?). The work of the author lies in finding friction between the facts, enough to create light or 'illumination' according to Herzog.

‘The truth of accountants’

In 1999 Herzog released a twelve-point manifesto called ‘Lessons of Darkness’, borrowing the title of his silent recording of devastated oil fields in Kuwait following the first Iraq war. Much of the manifesto is tongue in cheek, Point Three captures Herzog’s balancing act between fact and insight, where fact is a “rock beneath which greater truths hide.” Facts are superficial truths, the “truth of accountants,” the snapshots of tourists. To film facts and reject fabrication is to confuse fact for truth; such orthodoxies “plow only stones.” Illumination, the goal of successful cinema, happens because “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

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by Morgan Meis

A friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets you into a narrow hallway along the left side of the train car. You would prefer the train with a rudimentary toilet that flushes by means of a foot pedal, in which, as a man, you can watch yourself pee straight down through the rusty tube onto the track rushing by in a ruffle of wooden slats below. Clickety-clak, clickety-clak. “Do not use the toilet while the train is in or near the station,” says the sign.

Europe is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane won’t do it, the fly by is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness of the American plains. That’s when the immensity of it gets to you, that’s when you understand something about space. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train.

You sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. Benjaminian in temperament, they think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time. Thomas Mann said it like this, “All good things take time; so do all great things. In other words, space will have its time. It is a familiar feeling with me that there is a sort of hubris, and a great superficiality, in those who would take away from space or stint it of the time naturally bound up with it.” That’s an extremely European thought. I’m not sure it’s even true, but I like that fact that he said it. Of course, Thomas Mann was Europe. I suppose then, by logical extension, that Mann was a train.

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Part Two: The Data Deluge
(Link to Part One)

By Daniel Rourke

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability…

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment…

A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

Human beings are often described as the great imitators:

We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are.

This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them.

When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different.

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“I’d like piano lessons,” said my daughter, and, yes, of course, I said, that would be terrific. She was only six. How could she know that she was giving me permission to relapse into yet another time-wasting obsession, with the possibility of acquiring yet another library on a subject? Now, under cover of being a good parent, I could once again dive into a literature, slip off to internet chat rooms late at night, wander into stores that had been around forever but that I had never had an excuse to explore, and contemplate an expensive purchase. But mainly I like to read about that kind of thing.

“Of course,” I said, benevolently, the noble father. But I was thrilled; such interests had been largely off limits since donning the responsible hoodie of the parent. In earlier years, I had been there with photography, wooden boats, ice hockey, tube amplifiers, all pursuits offering a deep literature, and the chance to spend money. Right away, I knew full well where I was headed: Worst of all are the Internet forums, where I will undoubtedly cruise late at night, recklessly picking up useful-seeming advice from strangers hiding behind screen names. (Why does Dennis care quite so much about the grey market, one must wonder?)

Not all interests spawn literature of equal quality. The literature of the tube amplifier and the literature of hockey are as one in their paucity. Tube amplifiers are lacking an oeuvre, certainly, because, well, they just kind of sit there. The dearth of good hockey writing is a little more mysterious, but it may be a sport that knocks the lyricism out of people.

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Gambling and science and story-telling have a complicated relationship. I have to admit upfront I’m biased: In my science days, I picked up some statistical reasoning skills, and even those modest skills were enough to more or less murder my fascination with gambling, a fascination tangled up with my (former) ability to fashion stories around winning gamblers. I’m a little bitter.

I had always vaguely known that red and black don’t politely take turns on the roulette wheel (“You go.” “I insist.”), and that aces and face cards had no choice but to be dealt out of the deck randomly; but I’d also been pretty good at pooh-poohing the word randomly. I’d written it off with a sort of anthropomorphic bluster, as if good old comfortable human order was winking at me beneath the gamblers’ binary gibberish of red-black-black-red-black, etc. If I just looked harder—why right there, a pattern! I suppose it’s the same rage for order that makes people hear voices in radio static and see the Virgin Mary ex nihilo in macaroni.

Honestly, I never gambled much, and only infrequently, but like many males I thought I would have been a pretty cool gambler, and successful. I like to stay up late and have drinks in disreputable places, after all. It didn’t help my career as a gambler that I’m not hard-wired for the neurological jolt that gamblers get when they win money, the maladaptive endorphin rush that wipes out the memory of their losses, even if the winnings don’t come close to covering. (A gambling joke: “I hope like hell I break even tonight. I can’t afford to lose any more money.”)

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