A few years ago, I “wrote that”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/17/acquis-fiction/
Nearly every corridor in every building of the Commission, Council and Parliament has two or three examples [of EU official art] along its walls – spectacularly bland and uninteresting prints and photographs, always with the twelve stars on a blue flag in there somewhere. The art is contentless and affectless because any strong statement, or even conveyed sense of geographic location, would probably offend somebody in one or another of the member states. There’s something about the EU that seems completely inimical to lively cultural expression.
Now a Czech art-prankster has “put this theory to its test”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9eb2dae-e2a4-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html, and found that member states are indeed liable to get offended.
Sited prominently in the headquarters of the EU Council in Brussels, a flagship work of art – which was designed to demolish national stereotypes by mocking them – has caused diplomatic outrage. Not only that, the piece turns out to be the work of a single Czech artist despite having been billed as the collaborative effort of all 27 member states. … As countries digested depictions of their character, such as a Dracula-inspired theme park (Romania), a rudimentary lavatory (Bulgaria) and a flooded land with minarets poking through (the Netherlands), the Czech presidency was forced into a public apology. … Other national depictions in the artwork include: Luxembourg as a lump of gold on sale to the highest bidder; France emblazoned with the word grève , or strike; Denmark made of Lego; and Sweden lying within an Ikea flatpack. Britain is simply missing – supposedly a reference to its euro-scepticism. But some diplomats appear in little doubt of what action they would like to see, namely the removal of the eight-tonne “modern art installation” from the bleak and lofty but all-too prominent atrium of the council’s main building.
In fairness, the artist seems to have gone out of his way to prod national sore spots – other depictions include Germany (autobahns making up a rather thinly disguised swastika) and Poland (a group of monks erecting the Rainbow flag). Pictures below.
I just discovered that Daniel Pinkwater has a regular podcast [that’s the link to the site, but I prefer to get it through iTunes], which includes readings of his old books! He just got through chapter 3 of Borgel, which is drop-dead my favorite novel that isn’t Melville’s Confidence Man. And he’s reading other stuff with it. There’s this screamingly hilarious, alliterative bit about Bugsy Schwartz, M.D.-to-be. “I was looking after this broad with … a stomach ache.” You have to listen.
What are your favorite podcasts that I probably don’t know about? (I have this weird problem where iTunes decides it doesn’t like certain podcasts after a while and won’t download them anymore. Example: I can only download Rachel Maddow at work because my home mac doesn’t do that stuff anymore. I click. It tries for a second then gives up. Very strange.)
God, I don’t want to read such a thing (you reasonably protest, and I can offer no cogent counter-argument.) Then, after you read it, you come back and complain: after all that hemming and hawing, you don’t even say whether Nietzsche has an unsatisfactorily one-dimensional account of power, in your considered opinion, or not?
Very well: it is my opinion that Nietzsche’s philosophy of power is precisely isomorphic, in dimensionality, to the subject matter of this work of art, “Monster Attack”, by young Eli Kochalka. It is the greatest work of art ever. Ergo, Nietzsche is a very sophisticated theorist of power!
I suggest you click on the Monster Attack link and leave it at that.
A month ago I proposed an online reading group for G.A. Cohen’s _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. (“US Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-20 , “UK Amazon”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-21 ) It is time to get started. I’ll kick-off a week from today with a post covering the introduction and chapter 1, “Rescuing Equality from ….The Incentives Argument”. We’ll then cover a chapter a week (plus the general appendix) with, I hope, other people sometimes taking the lead. Remember the rules: a condition of commenting is that you’ve actually read the text under discussion (violators will be deleted).
I mentioned last week that I’m reading Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Powells, Amazon). The final chapter, “Banning Parties,” has a valuable discussion of the normative implications of party bans, which speaks extensively to the Israeli example.
First, contra arguments such as those contained in this typically disingenuous post by Jamie Kirchick, it draws a clear distinction between banning hate parties (which Rosenblum argues is, within certain limits, a reasonable form of democratic self-defence) and banning parties that are threats to national identity (which Rosenblum argues is not a form of democratic self-defense). Rosenblum speaks to the rationale for Israel’s ban on the Kach party, which called for the forced ‘transfer’ of Arab ‘cockroaches’ from Israel, and sought to ban Arab-Jewish intermarriage. [click to continue…]
The Lori Drew case, in which a US woman set up a Myspace account under the name “Josh Evans” to torment a teenage girl who had fallen out with Drew’s daughter, and drove her victim to suicide, has some legal implications of interest to bloggers. Drew was ultimately sentenced to jail, not for her cruel prank and its fatal consequences, but for “unauthorized access to a computer system” by virtue of the false name under which the account was created. On the face of it, the same offence is committed (at least under US law) every time a commenter on a blog or noticeboard uses a sockpuppet to evade bans or blocks, or to post under multiple identities in violation of contractual terms.
Toward the end of the Miner’s Strike in 1985 I was accompanying some student march to County Hall, shaking a collecting tin, when I was confronted by a balding middle aged man in, I kid you not, a bowler hat and pin stripe suit:
(Angrily) “What are you complaining about now? I’m not going to give money to bloody students, the state already pays for you”
(Cheerfully) “Oh no, I’m not complaining about anything.” (I didn’t go into what I suspected was our agreement on the immorality of the state subsidizing the passage of the most privileged children in society into its elite, but I conveyed that complex message with a grin). “I’m collecting for the striking miners”.
(Surprised) “Oh”. He looked me straight in the eye, with genuine sympathy. “They can’t win you know. But..” he produced a 20 quid note and placed it in my tin “at least they might give this bloody shower in charge a run for their money”. (One of the lessons of collecting for the miners was never to judge a person by the way they dressed.)
Memory triggered by:
from Randy Newman’s wonderful Harps & Angels. You have just a few days left to hear it in its proper context. I hope.
Unless there’s some heroic parenting, on the other hand, my daughters have their entire lives to hear this in its proper context (particularly recommended for Laura).
… scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. “The mind is a limited machine,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.” … This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. … This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. … The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. …
The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus. … In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and things stimulate the nervous system of the individual to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life. The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.
One of the inevitable consequences of any Middle Eastern conflict is the collateral damage caused by the unprovoked and disproportionate attacks which tend to be launched by Michael Walzer on his own credibility (this joke first made on CT here). His latest is a waffly piece of blah in the Even The Liberal New Republic, on the general subject of “proportionality” and collateral damage to civilians.
SPOILER ALERT: don’t click on the “read more” link if you don’t want to find out whether or not he decides that the State of Israel is broadly justified in its latest actions. [click to continue…]
One of the safer predictions I’ve made in recent years is “this”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_partisanship_save_citizenship (in _The American Prospect_):
[O]nline activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is … making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions
I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details behind the crisis in English cricket. But it has prompted a South African friend of mine to email asking me what I knew/thought about Pietersen, and that in turn has prompted a bit of a mea culpa. I have found it impossible to enjoy Pietersen as a player since he qualified for England because, at some point around the time he qualified I heard him say something incredibly stupid and unpleasant about the racial quota system in South African cricket — something to the effect that he, himself, couldn’t thrive in a system which gave systematic preference to non-whites. Wikipedia bears out that he did indeed make such comments, and suggests that he believed he was dropped from the Natal team for quota reasons.
Why a mea culpa? Because I’m sure that numerous sport stars, some of whom I am sure I enjoy and perhaps even revere, have obnoxious political opinions, and wrongheaded views of the source of their own superior capabilities. Big money sport, and the attention lavished on the very successful, encourage vanity, and make it hard to see the role of luck in differentiating between one’s own, and others’ level of success. KP was just in a position in which it is natural for him to air these views because, unlike most sportsmen, he had to explain why he was changing his nationality.
There are brilliant exceptions both to the politics (Mike Brearley, David Sheppard, bizarrely enough Brian Clough) and to the vanity (the extraordinary Flintoff, as it often appeared most of the Australians under Waugh), and I’m not suggesting that all or even most stars are anything like the one of the great white hopes of English tennis (I had a schoolfriend who hated tennis, but used to watch Wimbledon just for the joy of watching a fascist lose), but KP is, I imagine, rather unexceptional. So my initial hint of pleasure in his downfall gave way to a sense of guilt that I had singled him out for dislike.
I was in touch with Astra Taylor about her documentary Žižek!quite a long time ago, or so it seems. She has a new film called Examined Life consisting of what might be called philosopher-in-the-street interviews. The talking heads include (to reshuffle the list alphabetically) Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Sunaura Taylor, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek.
Here’s the trailer:
I haven’t seen the film yet — it’s only showing in NYC now, it seems — but would welcome a screener DVD. It’s not like I’m going to bootleg it out of the trunk of my car or anything. I don’t even have a car, if that makes the folks at Zeitgeist Films feel any better.
A Long Island doctor is demanding that his estranged wife give him back the kidney he donated to her seven years ago. Dr. Richard Batista’s lawyer Dominic Barbara says his client would also be satisfied with the value of the kidney: $1.5 million. Newsday reports that Batista married wife Dawnell in 1990 and that he donated the kidney in 2001. According to Batista, their marriage was on the rocks then, but “My first priority was to save her life. The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.” Dawnell Batista filed for divorce in 2005. Dr. Batista told WCBS 880, “She had an affair, then would not reconcile, then handed me divorce papers as I was going into surgery trying to save another person’s life.
All in all the very archetype of a wacky organ donation story, right down to the mandatory quote from Arthur Caplan.
Truly wonderful. Via “PNH”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, “mock-authoritative citation rules”:http://www.pmla.org/altsource.html for public restroom graffiti, alien communications and much else besides. Suggestions for more such rules welcome in comments.
. You have just a few days left to hear it in its proper context. I hope.