Another thing in space the human mind isn't designed to grasp, but cool nonetheless

This is quite cool:

Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence--In Space

Around a black hole 12 billion light years away, there's an almost unimaginable vapor cloud of water--enough to supply an entire planet's worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over.

The author's sophomoric idealism about the human capacity to fix problems through science, or rather because we seem to be smart enough to do other really cool stuff, much less so:

And it’s not as if this intergalactic water can be of any use to us here on Earth, of course, at least not in the immediate sense. Indeed, the discovery comes as a devastating drought across eastern Africa is endangering the lives of 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation.

Let's keep in mind the people who discover big clouds of water in space are academics who work in cloistered environments relatively sheltered from the messiness of the real world. We've got enough "sophistication" to solve plenty of abstract problems in a bubble. That's never been hard. Hell, some really good scientists figured out how to make small packages of rare elements level entire cities about 60 years back. The problem is, we used good science to level cities. The hard part will always be conquering ourselves, overcoming a human nature that causes egos to run rampant, silly ideas to abound and claim to-the-death adherents, the power struggles of the few to trump the necessary good of the many, etc. It's not just drought that's killing Africa. It's bad governance. It's corruption. It's historical disadvantages, some intentional, some not, that have created systemic failures. In short, it's human fuck-ups just as much as anything. There's a reason we've moved on from the project of modernism. Science writers like this should stick to their beat and spare us the inane moralizing.

General decadence, just because.

I'll start with another artist whose work is wonderfully summarized by Wurzeltod on her blog. Nazif Topçuoğlu is a Turkish artist who, like the previously mentioned Carla Bedini, creates work reminiscent of Balthus. However, his chosen medium of photography moves away from the stark formality of Bedini's painted forms, which often present as quite cold, and takes the implied sensuality of Balthus well into the realm of the explicit. He sometimes combines his already semi-scandalous models with distinctly grotesque elements, such as raw meat and severed...whatsits, to create art that is sometimes beautiful and certainly decadent.




Next, here's a cool song from Vermillion Lies that speaks for itself:

The BoA Blues

Another piece of doggerel by yours truly:

There once was a bank 'bore the name of its land,
Its coffers were deep, its edifice grand.
In good times it lent to all who came near;
In bad its execs found profits were dear:
They'd swapped and bargained and peddled and traded
With greedy investors who later grew jaded;
Good risk had turned bad and bad had turned worse,
Not a soul could be found to these debts reimburse,
And the surest of bets, the American Dream
Hadn't nearly the value that once it did seem.
Without jobs to pay for their bloated McMansions
Delusional debtors stopped economic expansions,
And the bank that had thrown money this way and that
Now filed foreclosures at the drop of a hat.
Homeowners once proud were now filled with fear
That a stay in Mom's basement soon would be near.
So they called up the bank and they begged and they pleaded
With low-level clerks--themselves quite defeated.
The United States Government offered them HOPE,
'Should have saved all the effort and offered them dope.
'Cause hope can kill profits, and the experts, they say
That this is what matters when you're B of A.
The moral, my friends, is abundantly clear:
...Or maybe it's not?...I'm off for a beer.

On the usefulness of hulking lawyers

From Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," in a part of the book in which he is describing his meeting with the lawyer and clerk of a certain money-lender who he hoped would facilitate his extended stay in London:

In fact, both were big, hulking men, and had need to be so; for sometimes, whether with good reason or none, clients at the end of a losing suit, or of a suit nominally gained, but unexpectedly laden with heavy expenses, became refractory, showed fight, and gave Pyment [the clerk] reason for saying that at least on this day he had earned his salary by serving an ejectment on a client whom on any other plan it might have been hard to settle with.

Yes, certain aspects of the legal profession remain -almost- this rough and tumble.

Pattern

Acquisitions

I just got a hold of two "escape maps," maps printed on silk and supposedly sewn into the jackets of pilots flying over enemy territory so that, in the event of capture, they could use them to find their way back to friendly territory. Silk was used to maximize conceilability, as it doesn't rustle under clothing and is lightweight and easily folded into just about anything. My maps are 50s, Cold War vintage, detailing the areas around Rome and Stalingrad. Just. Plain. Cool.

A bit like Balthus, but even colder.

I recently discovered Italian artist Carla Bedini, painter of beautifully dark portraits that remind me very much of Balthus, but with what looks to be a much more conscientious Gothic theme to them. Though she has quite a web presence, surprisingly, I can't find much in-depth information on the artist at all, at least not that's written in English, and disappointingly, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to buy prints of her work.

Here are some of her amazing works, reposted from gGallery, where you can find a number of other examples of her pieces.

Here's to Your "Health"?

A quick repost from an entry entitled "Evil cafe lurker" on Philosophy, lit, etc., a blog I just discovered:

Differences between Munich and Vienna are evident from the fact that Hitler disliked Vienna but loved Munich. He seems to have regarded Munich as his adopted home town (even though Vienna was the capital of his home country). Why did Vienna repel this monster while Munich attracted him? From what I can tell, Hitler hated Vienna's more cosmopolitan milieu. Also, Vienna showed more appreciation and support for its creative Bohemians (like Peter Altenberg) while Müncheners seem, for the most part, to have regarded their city's artistic, café culture with disdain and suspicion. This hostile stance reflects the incursion of rural and small-town Bavarian attitudes into the city, feeding a tendency in its inhabitants to be uncritical of tradition and to resent the apparently idle proto-hippies who challenged it. As Thomas Mann put it, Munich was 'the unliterary city par excellence. Banal women and healthy men – God knows what a lot of contempt I load into the word "healthy"!' (Quoted from p. 4 of Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large)

Nobody says it quite like Thomas Mann.

Forgivable Error

Factual inaccuracies in moralizing books are irritating and counterproductive for the books' causes. Today, I found myself reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions over breakfast. (No, I was not eating a "breakfast of champions," just some French toast.) This is my first time through the book, and I was rather surprised to hit two factual errors on the same page. The first: In some pithy commentary about the Germans after the Second World War, Vonnegut presents his depiction of the post-war German flag, shown below with the real German flag.














It's a pretty obvious error that even the most mediocre editing should have picked up. The second error is perhaps better described as merely an inaccuracy, as it isn't totally wrong. Vonnegut states: "After they [the Germans] got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people." Beetle production actually began before the outbreak of the war and was spearheaded by Hitler himself.

I realize this may come across as nitpicking; however, Vonnegut's work has been noted for its inaccuracy in other areas, such as the victim count he gives in Slaughterhouse Five from the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Such errors, even when casually encountered in a light-reading book, are jarring. But if your work is going to rely upon smugness, snark, and satire to get your point across (which Vonnegut does brilliantly 99% of the time), then it's absolutely necessary to be as factually correct as possible. To be otherwise is to sacrifice all credibility.

That being said, Vonnegut must be forgiven. Why? Because he wrote this a few pages later:

Roses are red,
And ready for plucking.
You're sixteen,
And ready for high school.

It doesn't really matter if he came up with that himself or not. I tried to figure out, using my usual sources, i.e., Wikipedia articles. I didn't find an answer, but I did find this humorous handling of the above "poem" from the Wikipedia article on Mind rhyme:

Mind rhyme is a kind of substitution rhyme similar to rhyming slang, but it is less codified. In mind rhyme, an intended word remains unsaid, and is “heard” only in the listener’s mind. For instance, in this traditional example:

"Roses are red and ready for plucking / She’s sixteen and ready for high school."

The text initiates a possible rhyme which is completed by the reader or listener. Unlike rhyming slang, where the discipline of lexicography is possible (e.g., “dogs” or “dog’s meat” has traditionally signified “feet”, in a multitude of contexts^[1]), mind rhyme is a one-off. In no other linguistic situation than in this immediate example will “high school” mean “fucking.”

Glad to have that cleared up in such an academically objective manner...

Saturday morning, I sat down to have my breakfast at the same local family restaurant where I've been regularly eating breakfast for about two years now. Generally, I go with a book and read for a few minutes before eating the same breakfast I've ordered each Saturday since I started going. This morning, my reading met with what I considered to be a pleasant interruption: an economic argument between two of the members of the family who own the restaurant; I believe they are brothers.

The argument was pretty typical. One brother was advocating for unions, fair pay, workers rights, etc., and the other kept asking, in counter, who was going to pay for all of that and how. The conversation was wonderfully peppered with Greek, and the two brothers, who were separated by an older gentleman who may have been a member of the family as well, carried on in a loud, animated manner while sitting at the front counter, seemingly oblivious of anyone else who may have been listening.

The conversation reminded me of some that have taken place in my family and many I remember from high school and my early college years. There was a time when I jumped at the chance of getting involved in such debates. That time has largely passed, a fact I was poignantly reminded of as I watched these two go at it.

One of the simplest reasons such debates are no longer appealing is that after graduate school in public policy and law school, the topics are simply played out. I've heard most of the arguments and been exposed to the vast majority of the facts upon which they rely. There's very little new that a layman can put on the table to make such a debate interesting enough to carry forward with. What continues to impress me is that average people can continue to get so worked up about such topics, not seeming to realize that everything either side says or could say has been said and said and said before.

More troubling, however, and I believe a great source of the vehemence with which such debates usually occur, is that the parties involved always act as though they are arguing from fact-based positions that necessitate a certain logical conclusion. While there are, of course, many economic and public policy arguments that can be made about the existence of certain sociopolitical and economic facts and the policy conclusions that those facts should imply, no one ever seems to come out and recognize that they are not actually debating these facts, but rather using them as as a smokescreen to advocate their own moral/political presuppositions. If that were not the case, then such arguments would be purely technocratic, and the only people who would get excited at all about them would be the bean-counters in the basement of every public policy school. The same holds true for the majority of apologetic arguments made on the behalf of religion(s), and it's painfully obvious in much of what comes out of judicial bodies such as the U.S. Supreme Court. This is why at the end of the day, there is no such argument that is actually winnable, no matter how impeccable the logic or well-stocked the factual arsenal of either side is. Political and religious arguments are, in the end, nothing more than a matter of choosing one set of values or principles over another. They have nothing to do with facts. Unfortunately, most people never even get to the point of choosing those values for themselves--they simply adopt the ones handed down to them by family or culture.

What I would love to hear for once, would be a conversation that starts out with the question, "What should we value?", and ends up with the question, "How do we best make the world reflect those values?" I won't be holding my breath.

Nudibranch!

Stop the clock, forget that it exists, or at least get out of your rut

In a recent New York Times Opinionator article, entitled "On Modern Time," philosophy professor Espen Hammer takes a look at the modern conception of time, how it differs from that of pre-modern cultures, and what, if anything, there is to do about some of the seeming disjointedness some people feel existing in a clock-driven world. This is a theme that's been visited often enough not to deserve any special mention here; however, the conclusion of his article veers a bit from the often sterile world of philosophy into something that seemed poignant enough to deserve a repost:

Most of our narratives are socially constituted. Becoming an investment banker is possible because such occupations exist in our society, and because there are socially constituted routes to obtaining that status. The investment banker is in possession of and identifies with the banker narrative: it largely determines this person’s identity.

Some narratives, however, are intimate and personal, based on experiences and commitments made by individuals independently of social expectation. These are the kinds of narratives that novelists often use. These are the ones that not only point beyond the deadening sequentiality of mere clock time but have the capacity to open new territories and vistas for human growth and authenticity. Discontinuity is the key here: the pregnant moment outside the regular flow of time when some unexpected yet promising or individually challenging event occurs.

We need these moments, and we need to be attentive to them. They are the moments when new possibilities emerge. The narratives that frame such forms of exposure to the sudden and unexpected will tend to deviate from the standard, causal “this because of that”-structure. They will have cracks and breaks, intimating how we genuinely come to experience something as opposed to merely “moving through” it. Falling in love is one such narrative context. While we can tell when it happens to us, the involvement it demands is open, promissory, risky, possibly life-changing, and sometimes deeply disappointing.

Experiences like this, which explode the empty repetition of standard clock time, offer glimpses of a different and deeply intriguing type of temporality that has the power to invest our lives with greater meaning, possibility and excitement than a life merely measured on a grid could ever provide.

I don't know that I entirely agree with equating "clock time" to standard cultural narratives, as Hammer describes. Temporality and cultural narratives may be interrelated constructs, but in the end they seem like very different animals. However, I couldn't agree more with Hammer that almost all of the meaningful experiences in life are those that are somehow unexpected and transcendent--those that are off the grid, at least breaking with the day-to-day narrative that most of us have constructed for ourselves in one way or another.

The Generation Gap

I'm 31. I spent roughly my entire time between 1999 and 2008 at one college or another, surrounded by people who were mostly my age or younger. I'm not married. I don't have any kids, and I don't own a house. For all intents and purposes, I consider myself young, and until recently it would have seemed absurd to talk about a generation gap between myself and other young adults (that is, young and more or less independent adults of college age or older). But over the last couple of weeks what I can only describe as a generation gap has started staring me right in the face--it's there; it's surprising; and there's nothing to be done about it!

The event that precipitated this observation was a concert I attended today at the Blue Room Cafe, in Hammond, which attracted a fair bit of local musical talent. Like most events at the Blue Room, the crowd is young--the Blue Room, after all, is a coffee shop, not a bar, and there's no alcohol to be found on site.

But looking around the crowd at the cafe, which spilled out into the hall, what I saw was something fairly remarkable: for the first time ever, looking at this group, I realized that there was no way I could ever blend with most of this crowd, not because of how old I looked (I can pass as quite young--for better or worse), but because it would have felt absurd.
Almost everyone there looked alike, a look best described simply as "scruffy." There were more stocking-caps than you could shake a stick at. Scraggly beards were the norm. Hair was mostly longish, but not really long. Flannels and working-class, rough cotton jackets. Skinny jeans. The look is certainly very "hipster," but different from what I previously identified as a look belonging to the hipster subculture. The dripping-with-irony hipster culture that started more or less ten years ago was very much a product of "my generation." The decision to start wearing trucker caps and aviator sunglasses to clubs was quite conscious. I don't detect the same sense of self-consciousness in these kids. This is simply the fashion of their time, no more, no less.

Moreover, while I'm not averse to going out in ripped jeans and old army jackets, to clad myself in the same manner as this crowd would simply feel like costuming. The skinny, skinny, "skinny jeans"? Plus a stocking cap? I simply can't relate--and that's coming from someone who's had about every hair color and style in the book, as well as who's gone through goth/punk, grunge, preppy, euro-pop, and just plain bland phases of dressing.

While I've primarily used clothing as an example of the generation gap, it goes for other fields of cultural production, as well, of course. The difference is, perhaps, that while musical and artistic trends come and go with time, quality in these areas speaks for itself, and while different generations might grow up with different musical or artistic contexts, for the open-minded person, new works can always be appreciated.

So the question I have to ask is this: Is such a generation gap the product of some sort of genuine cultural change that occurred in the last couple of years and had its impact more strongly on younger people (contradicting one of the positions expressed in my previous post that American culture had come to a point of only rehashing itself and not doing anything original), or...is noticing this just a symptom of getting older?

I admit it...

In the wake of Christopher Hitchens' death, I've been perusing the net for material related to him, and a statement he made in an interview with C-SPAN in 1999 caught my attention:

I like to think that I have a life, rather than a job or than a career. And it's all to do with reading and writing, the only two things that I was ever any good at, and public speaking, which I could also do. And that's something like living, but it's also what I am, who I am, what I what I love, and I'm fortunate at that, because there's nothing else I can do. It's not as if I could have been a lawyer or a doctor and I chose this. It chose me.

It's nice that worked out for him. Such statements are often heard by prominent artists, musicians, writers, etc. The question is, how much weight should anyone give to statements like this? Hitchens was the lucky one with the talent to make his passions into a viable career. For every one of him, how many others are there out there who are also believe, for better or worse, "It's not as if I could have been..." this or that. But we only ever hear from the successful ones. All the rest generally find that they have to be something else, because life demands it. I get a little irritated when those at the top of their field seem to portray themselves as the product of fate. Statements like this are utterly meaningless and completely misleading to most people. As much as I like Hitchens' work, if he had to be something else, he would have been--of necessity. I believe some, if not all, people do have a "calling." But it's rather shallow for those who happened to be fortunate enough to make a living through their calling to flaunt it as if it was the only thing they were capable of.

The Old Is New, and That's Not Bad

Today while eating my lunch in the Blue Room Cafe, as I do every day, I came across an article in Newcity, a local Chicago cultural magazine. The article was a review of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, a book by Simon Reynolds that came out earlier this year.
Retromania analyzes, in excruciating detail, pop culture's current tendency to reuse and recycle the pop of the not-so-distant past. I haven't read the book, nor am I likely to do so, but I find it notable that I came across this article hours after reading another article in an entirely different publication on the very same theme. In the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen discusses the fact that American culture has not significantly changed its face in the last 20 years or so, unlike in almost all previous periods throughout the 20th Century, when one could observe tide shifts in art, literature, fashion, and other cultural fields that left the styles of the previous generation, or even decade, seeming like relics, strange and inconceivable objects from another world. Obviously, he points out, some things have changed drastically, like technology (Walkman vs. iPod anyone?), but when clothing, music, and fashion are compared between, say, 1995 and 2005, the differences, relatively speaking, are minute. Sure, almost anyone can come up with an abundance of examples of trends in an area like music that have come and gone over the last 20 years, but, honestly, do the musical productions of the early 90s seem truly dated today the way the music of the 40s would have in the 60s or the the 70s in the 90s? Generally, the answer is no. Nirvana seems just as fresh and relevant today as the band did in 1993. Many cars produced in the 90s could easily pass for those produced last year if you didn't already know they were 20 years old. The styles simply haven't changed substantially. Why?

Andersen expresses various theories, such as a "loss of appetite" for newness, with Americans today experiencing such a deluge of information from every which direction, facilitated by technology, but also contributed to by the tremendous real-world political and economic changes of the last 10-20 years, that they are simply maxed-out on change. He laments this loss of appetite, theorizing that it perhaps points to a sort of American civilizational middle-age, a loss of vibrancy pointing toward a gradual decline of our cultural supremacy.

I'm very skeptical and quite unconvinced that the current cultural fixation on the old, even the recently old, in any way indicates a lack of creativity or cultural decline. My suspicion is more that consumers and producers of pop culture, for the first time ever, now have access to the complete cultural repertoire of the past, which has provided a fertile field for rediscovering and reprocessing the things that have come before us. What other generation has had the opportunity to become so effortlessly steeped in prior pop-cultural productions, independent of the whims of the current publishing, recording, or broadcast industries? None. High culture has always been almost universally available due to its embrace by academia and the intelligentsia, who ensure its continued propagation through the education system and other cultural institutions. On the other hand, pop culture has never received this kind of embrace from the cultural elite, meaning that until recently pop-cultural trends and products whose time had past, no matter how popular they were at their height, had most often remained the province of a few devotees who amass knowledge and material products from their preferred era in relative (and perhaps mocked) obscurity.

With the advent of the internet and the full development and population of easy-to-use data sources like YouTube, the cultural floodgates have opened, and now one and all have the opportunity to appreciate the things that our parents and grandparents went wild for. And many of us find that we really like the stuff! If anything, I see the recent glut of recycled culture as an encouraging sign that we are finally fully processing material that may not have been available to previous generations that rode the tide of the moment, with little consideration given in the development of their own pop culture to anything but the most recent cultural movements they were likely reacting against. Maybe we have simply moved beyond this sort of reactionary pop culture. Couldn't this signal that now an even more fertile field exists for the development of some truly revolutionary cultural innovations?

Five Years of Scribble

I don't know when I first developed a liking to Moleskine journals. I do know that I began writing in one on January 1, 2007 at 3:20 a.m.. The topic was law school.

Law school has come and gone, but the journal is still around almost five years later, though it's a little worse for wear. And it's almost complete. With any luck, and just a few pages to go, I'm hoping for a perfect five year record.

The Cool...and the Not So...

As Dr. Who might point out, some things are cool, like my new shoes--Adidas Samba's. They're more comfortable than my last two pairs of casual shoes put together (those being some Pumas and Converse All Stars), and they still have that classic-sneaker vibe. Yay.



















Other cool things? My OLD watch, the envy of every 10 year old in 1989-90: a Nintendo Mario Brothers watch (which, unfortunately burns through batteries like crazy due to the continuously moving LCD game display, but that's totally not the point).

Stuff that's not so cool? Gulden Draak...a great Belgian beer, BUT, what's with the new, plastic bottle condom in lieu of the good ol' fashioned white paint? And what's with the continuously increasing price? Sometimes I find myself hankering for the Euro's slide...

Chesterton Antiquing

Glitter and Doom

As something of a continuation of my previous post on some art I encountered while in Berlin this summer, I thought it might be interesting to link to an exhibition that was held a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I, unfortunately, missed.  Having been a fan of German Expressionism for some time now, I occasionally encounter links to the exhibit catalog on Amazon when looking for literature on the subject.  And, though the catalog looks fantastic, it also has a fantastic price.  Here are some excerpts from the special exhibitions page at the Met, which is still maintained:

Sonia, by Christian Schad (1928)

The Salon I, by Otto Dix (1921)

Anita Berber, Otto Dix (1925)

Not Lost, But Burried in Traslation

I recently bought the DVD of The American, the 2010 crime-drama starring George Clooney set mostly in the Italian countryside and a few small towns. The film moves slowly, in my opinion, and lacks many of the jolts normally found in crime films. The Italian countryside, and Clooney's character's inner conflicts the are at the forefront during the entire movie, and indeed, the film's atmosphere could very well overpower its plot. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons I like the movie so much, as I find myself often much less interested in a particular story and its development than in the story's setting and the way the character's personality types exist in it. Films that do a good job with such portrayals I can watch time and time again. After renting this one about three times, I finally bought the DVD.

After seeing a single movie for about the tenth time, however, there is an inclination to add a little bit to it. At this point, I often switch over to French with English subtitles, or French subtitles. My French isn't that good, so when watching it with English subtitles, I didn't notice anything remarkable. However, when I switched over to French/French today, something very interesting did occur. Not only does the French translation often not match the English (very predictable), the French dubbing doesn't even match the French subtitles. Sometimes the differences are remarkable. The subtitles have removed much of the more casual turns of phrase and substituted more formal language. Is this something particularly French, having to do with their fixation with the preservation of the language, i.e., "they can say what they want, but if you're going to put it in print, it had better be proper!"? I certainly don't think we do this with English subtitles, or am I wrong?

A Little Bit of Art

This summer, I went to Berlin on vacation. While the first few days of the trip were spent with my friend Jana's friends and family before, during, and immediately after her wedding, the last half of my stay I kicked around Berlin for hours and hours on my own, just exploring. A good deal of that time was spent looking at art. One artist with whom I was not familiar was Franz von Stuck, a painter whose life and work straddled the turn of the last century. Many of von Stuck's works have a very dark, decadent edge to them, while keeping with religious and mythical themes. His portrayal of Circe, below, caught my eye and dragged me across the room shortly after entering the Alte Nationalgalarie.



Here's another of von Stuck's works, portraying Salome, the biblical figure who supposedly demanded from her father, King Herod, the head of John the Baptist.


Appropriately coupled with the work of von Stuck, the Alte Nationalgalerie displays this great vanitas by Arnold Boecklin.



I don't have anything profound to say about these works. They're just damned good art that I can find myself staring at for hours on end.