Kinsley on Pynchon

You can't knock the names, though. Above all, there is the wonderfully Pynchonesque Valerie Plame.

—Michael Kinsley, from today’s op-ed on the “bewildering scandal of the moment.”

More on Arab TV

Studying a foreign language in middle school was a virtual Rosetta Stone for me: all of a sudden I was endowed with a pretty good framework to apply in English, too. So this cartoon, by Hindawi for al-Ghad, might serve as an eye-opener for those who pooh-pooh the medium. From right-to-left—this is an Arabic-speaking audience, after all—we see the three types of Arab television viewers: those primarily concerned with the news, those taking in the video-clips, and the reality TV fans, marooned in front of the set. [Via Abu Aardvark, of course.]

Annoying Baltimore

In the 17 August issue of the City Paper, Bret McCabe examines Friends and Friends of Friends, an “art book” that is the first publication from an outfit dubbed “Creative Capitalism.” The organizing principle behind the six-by-seven-inch, full-color Friends is that it contains images culled by the Creative Capitalists asking friends to ask their friends to submit work. But the plot thickens as the four-member design and editorial team talk further about the project in McCabe’s piece.

Peter Quinn, Richard Baxstrom, Todd
Meyers, and Gillian Quinn
[courtesy City Paper]

The group explains that the book is about “art as social network,” which is true enough. But credulity is repeatedly strained, beginning with a claim by Peter Quinn, one of the team‘s members:

What blew me away when it all finally started to come together was, Oh my god, this is actually what we intended. This is an uncontrollable aesthetic that is being created in this network of people that never would have worked unless they would have contributed it blindly to us. And that’s the kind of weird thing—the book is about the book.

OK—let’s accept that these folks were successful in recording this “uncontrollable aesthetic.” But, in this case, the book being about the book doesn’t add meaning. What we have here is an artist book, one where the consumer responds to the work as artwork—according to Jason Bottenus, another editor, “[t]here was no, ‘We want you to do work that is within this parameter to get into this book’”—more so than as a book proper. This oligarchic collection is curated as most exhibitions are, plain and simple. (I'm not disputing that this might have merit, mind you.)

But McCabe picks up the ball and runs with it: “It’s only once you start delving into the book and spend time parsing through its images that what it achieves is a subtle act of subversion.” He has difficulty describing what is happening here, other than free association—something that would take place with any artist book, organizing principle or no. And in the process of elevating this “product non-product,” he does the city’s readership a disservice. I often enjoy McCabe’s writing on music (and, indeed, admire many of the artists includied in the pages of Friends and Friends of Friends), but this puffery is of the kind we can do without.

Kaus on Roberts

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts appears to drive a Chrysler PT Cruiser. This may be the scariest thing I've heard about him.... Probe this issue thoroughly, Sen. Schumer!

—Mickey Kaus, in Slate

The new economy and the pursuit of happiness

Does it really matter what one wears? I sometimes think my life might have been different if I had chosen the other wedding dress. I was getting married for the second time, and until the overcast morning of the ceremony I dithered between a bland écru frock appropriate to my age and station, which I wore that once and never again, and a spooky neo-Gothic masterpiece with a swagged bustle and unravelling seams in inky crêpe de laine, which I still possess: hope and experience.

The black dress—and other strange clothes in which I feel most like myself—was designed by Rei Kawakubo.

—Judith Thurman

Katie Holmes in CdG (from the newsstand
issue of W, courtesy of style.com).

Thus begins a terrific piece of fashion writing in the July 4 issue of The New Yorker: Judith Thurman’s “The Conceptualist,” [not available online, alas] a profile of Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo, (Confession: this blogger would regularly visit an insanely beautiful men’s suit—constructed from two different fabrics, one sewn atop the other—from CdG’s 2003 collection at the Chelsea hobbit-hole store, only to be stymied at first by price, and subsequently by middle-age spread. Sigh.) The essay won me over from the very beginning in its unabashed declamation that fashion does matter, at least on a personal level.

The portrait painted of Kawakubo, aged sixty-two, is an interesting one: she hails from a radically normal middle-class upbringing, and has made her mark by challenging notions that high fashion must emphasize the female form—her architectural dresses oppose the ideal of a Chanel suit, the gold standard for a Japanese woman after she has sown her wild fashion oats. Most interesting is a portrait of a company that prospers by marketing clothes in guerrilla stores—boutiques opened without fanfare in incongruous urban districts, perhaps without any other retail outlet, and closed precisely one year later; an insightful passage describes Kawakubo’s creative process, one that

[B]egins with a a vision, or perhaps just an intuition, about a key garment that Kawakubo hints at with some sort of koan. She gives the patterners a set of clues that might take the form of a scribble, a crumpled piece of paper, or an enigmatic phrase such as “inside-out pillowcase,” which they translate, as best they can, into a muslin—the three-dimensional blueprint of a garment.

The evocative back-and-forth, which sounds a little like a Ouija board that transmits and receives, describes a process that must certainly be resistant to the usual strictures of the MBA, and is remarkable for that reason alone.

Over the past few months, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has been writing in support of his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. In his examination of the new economies of China and India (and its contrast with the U.S. economy), he stresses the need for our federal government to lead the way in improving our educational system, sometimes stressing our need to improve science and engineering studies, and at other times highlighting the need to train young adults in the art of learning itself. I generally agree with his globalist prescriptions. The world has cast its lot, and we are closer to the kernel of the capitalistic enterprise as never before: once one gets on the treadmill, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up, for the speed continues to increase, faster and faster. As Lady Thatcher is believed to have said, there is no [longer an] alternative.

But talkin’ about it and bein’ it—that’s two
different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be
free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.

—George Hanson

It now looks as though the late sixties were the golden age for having one’s cake and eating it, too: it was a time where one was able to drop out, at least for a time, and still retain one’s, er, “viability” in polite society. (Questions like “what are you going to do with that English degree?” had already begun to assert themselves in the mid-seventies, a time of economic malaise.)

I’m a big fan of Bennington College’s philosophy of education, one that they apply equally to students and to instructors: one shouldn’t eschew the mainstream—to the contrary, everyone is expected to be in the world, of the world—but they also instill a balance, so that graduates are equipped to work with the world on their own terms. There is a kind of “make ‘the man’ work for you, and not the other way ’round” ethos in play here, one that used to be more common (think Faulkner writing screenplays, or composer Charles Ives, working as an actuary for most of his life).

As the pace quickens, the forces of capitalism gradually eat away at the soul. (Friedman, tongue in cheek: if the French and German people are holding fast to their thirty-six-hour work week, then the Indians are willing to work a thirty-six-hour work day!) In the end, it takes more and more to hold onto one’s individuality, one’s happiness. But Rei Kawakubo’s work, and her story, are inspirational and hopeful.

Conference on the political economy of terrorism

Will someone kindly plow through this stuff [culled from a George Mason University School of Law conference on the political economy of terrorism] and summarize? There looks to be a lot of good material here:

• Analytical History of Terrorism
• Relevance of Rational Choice
• Religious Extremists and Terrorism
• The Importance of Culture
• Law and Economics Perspective on Terrorism
• Extremism, Suicide Terrorism and Authoritarianism
• Institutional Change
• International Political System, Supreme Values and Terrorism
• Terrorism as Theater: Analysis and Policy Implications
• Hiding in Plain Sight
• Designing Real Terrorism Futures
• Terrorism and Pork Barrel Spending
• The Political Economy ofFreedom, Democracy and Terrorism
• Terrorized Economies

[Courtesy of Marginal Revolution]

More smart political art

Foote Cone & Belding, founded in 1873, is the world's third-oldest advertising agency. According to their website,

This award-winning campaign (FIAP Grand Prix) was created by FCB Portugal for the Portuguese newsmagazine Grande Reportagem, and is intended to reflect the values and independent approach of insightful, smart, assertive journalism. All data is taken from reputable sources including Amnesty International and the United Nations.

It's ingenious and wonderfully designed, hard-hitting, and informative. Click-through for full-sized imagery.

[via Design Observer, with an assist from the way-cool World Flag Database, which has a visual search engine for the banner-impaired]

Angola
Red: People infected by HIV
Black: People infected by malaria
Yellow: People with access to medical care

Brazil
Green: People who live with
less than $10 a month
Yellow: People who live with
less than $100 a month
Blue: People who live with
less than $1,000 a month
White: People who live with
less than $100,000 a month

Burkina Faso
Red: Children who die before completing one year of age
Green: Children who die before completing the third birthday
Yellow: Children who reach maturity

China
Red: Working fourteen-year-olds
Yellow: Studying fourteen-year-olds

Colombia
Red: Banana exports
Blue: Coffee exports
Yellow: Cocaine exports

European Union
Blue: Oil consumption
Yellow: Oil production

Bull Moose on Hillary

From today's Bull Moose dispatch:

The ugly truth is that if Jesus of Nazareth himself returned and dared to run on the Democratic line the righteous right would tar him as a bleeding heart vagabond who couldn’t hold a job and that he needed a shave. No doubt a Galilee Fishingboat Veterans for Truth outfit would call into question Jesus’ miracle claims—financed with lavish funding from Rove’s buddies in Texas and maximum exposure on Fox News. Just imagine the book: Unfit to Save.

Cram Sessions 03: Sound Politics

I actually kind of like Chris Gilbert's enigmatic image—he's depicted in a City Paper profile as working in a bare office, save a framed portrait of "great Bolshevik" Nadezhda Krupskaya—but am unsure of his curatorial practice, which has steered him awry in Sound Politics, the third, and latest, CS excursion. Gilbert, a "Marxist of a fairly predictable variety," has mounted the Sessions in the hopes that they can serve as a launching pad, a coming-together place, a site for the forming of (political) fronts. And, by some measures, he has been successful: CS02, in particular, drew a lot of younger spectators and participants that have been scarce in the BMA's galleries. But the proliferation of eyeballs can't have led to the forming of fronts—the politics envisioned by the participants are less concerned with making a difference then they are with the mouthing of platitudes. Dont Rhine, founding member of Ultra-red , laments that "[p]olitics needs to be politicized" [from the transcript of a CS03 roundtable available at the museum, the source of this and all successive quotes].

This naïveté is rife in the rhetoric of the exhibition, where Ultra-red worries that AIDS activists have grown lax in their efforts to marshall support for fighting the disease: they long for the salad days of ACT UP where "radicalized, anarchistic formal strategies" were deployed in the trenches. Can real and constructive gains mean that activists have mistakenly used tactics on behalf of "the articulation of liberal demands"? (Rhine is less than rigorous, invoking the "proven" specter of sonic weapons as a motivation for the shopworn tactic of using sound to reclaim public space: I say that large demonstrations have lost their punch, having been effectively deployed by civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s, but to decaying effect since then.)

And then there's the continuing CS tradition of shambling installation (hailed by Gadi Dechter's review in the City Paper), which must frustrate hopes for front-forming: six of Renée Green's seven listening stations are outfitted with a single pair of headphones, not that the subjects' rambling pronouncements are focused enough to inspire (her defensive remarks on the topic of mixing the anti-globalization conversations with electronic music are way off the mark, too: the music highlights the lack of focus rather than competing with any message). Green claims that her piece "decenters Western thought" and opens up "diverse forms of pleasure and 'structures' of feeling." (Emphatically yes, and most definitely no.) The Red Crayola video piece wasn't operational during last Saturday's visit; program remarks illustrate that the Art and Language allies don't have an idea how to describe their work (and member Mayo Thompson seems to ascribe all cultural chaos from the 1970s to A&L's handiwork).

In the end, though, Gilbert and company can never come to terms with the primary paradox of the "potential" for the political uses of sound: while they note the characteristics of the medium's ease, low-cost, and "intellectual and affective investment," they shy away from pop music, its most powerful form. (To Gilbert's credit, he notes that Adorno was long flummoxed by the dynamics of pop.) And this—Henri Lefebvre is said to believe that "theorization is now part of and necessary accompaniment to listening"—is crippling, when "sound's customarily depoliticized condition" is characterized as "wallpaper or entertainment." Sigh.

On manliness

Contrary to what you might first think, pragmatism is a philosophy, not the dismissal of philosophy. And Teddy Roosevelt was more a philosopher than he knew. His advocacy of manliness reflects the difficulties of pragmatism and tells us something about our situation today. We have abandoned—not reason for manliness like the pragmatists, nor manliness for reason like their tender-minded opponents—but both reason and manliness. We want progress without a rational justification and without the manliness needed to supply the lack of a justification.

From Harvey Mansfield's "The manliness of Theodore Roosevelt," in The New Criterion; his essay is excerpted from A Modest Defense of Manliness, forthcoming from the Yale University Press (2006).

House concurrent resolution No. 29

WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!"

All hail the Idaho state legislature for "commending Jared and Jerusha Hess and the City of Preston for the production of the movie Napoleon Dynamite." [Via greg]

Political art

Even good political art tends to be tedious (say, Hans Haacke, for instance): no matter how smart it is, I tend to want to repair to the bar. And, of course, most of what passes for political art is a simple declaration of one's beliefs—often pacifist, or anti-Bush—and that generally looks like a bumper sticker, or not really art at all.

But the best political art illuminates the, ahem, power structure and how we relate to it: think Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a urinal that was submitted to frustrate the Society of Independent Artists—Duchamp himself was a member—a group whose slogan was "No juries, no awards." The artist magically transformed a simple, utilitarian object into a conundrum and a legendary artwork with the simple act of submitting the "fountain" with the required entrance fee: this elegant idea is a remarkable and art-historical twofer, elevating the ordinary and exploding the power structure of the artists' world itself.

Julia Kim Smith, Francesca Danieli, and David Beaudouin have produced a short film with similar staying power: entitled One Nice Thing, it implores political partisans from the national party conventions of 2004 to "say one nice thing about" Republicans or Democrats, depending on your political allegiance, and "really mean it." The nine-minute-and-twenty-second short surveys the Democrats and asks them to be nice to Republicans, and vice versa.

The results are far from surprising: you get folks who flat-out refuse to make nice, and folks who say their opponents are potential converts to the cause. Some identify individuals in the opposing party whom they admire (Lincoln is a favorite). Another tack involves citing family members who do not share political affiliations with the interviewee, and so on. Thoughtful answers are rare and, as a result, surprising (the best one? probably from former congressman and knucklehead MSNBC conservative pundit Joe Scarborough!). What results is not so much a list of what's right about politicians and politics as it is an illumination of what's wrong with us, a meditation on why we personally can't find common ground with our political opponents, a laser-like focus on how political opinion attaches to each individual's identity.

What do our political leanings, our political speech say about us? About others? One Nice Thing suggests that we carve out a little bit of time to think about those questions, and that each partisan might profit from this redemptive place. The film was an official selection of the 2005 Sedona International Film Festival & Workshop, as well as for the upcoming 2005 Maryland Film Festival. ONT deserves your support and some quiet contemplation: say one nice thing about your opponents today!