CHRISTINE PALMA
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” –Theodor Adorno
May 18, 2009 at 11:22 pm ·
Tonight I went down to Santa Monica to the Rand Corporation, a private think tank focused on issues of national security, for a lecture given by Richard Haas on his new book War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars. Richard Haass served under Colin Powell during the second Bush presidency.
During the Q&A, he made a good point about the Obama’s decision to retain troops in Afghanistan for nation building as falling under the war of choice heading. His point about wars of choice was that they deserved a national dialogue or at least a wider deliberation process, something absent during the second war in Iraq.
Though both Iraq wars aimed to reign in Saddam Hussein, and both were run by men named Bush, the two conflicts were drastically different were drastically different in planning and implementation. The first was a necessary war of limited scope that won broad international support and was well-executed. The second was a war of choice. Its ambitions were broad, its strategy poorly conceived and implemented. Key U.S. allies opposed the effort, and the country is still mired in ongoing conflict. As the world struggles to cope with the dangers posed by failed states, internecine conflicts, and religious extremism, the question of when the U.S. should go to war grows ever more urgent.
Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars, draws on his experience as a senior-level strategist during both Iraq wars to explain the lessons these wars have taught us, and how we can increase American military and diplomatic readiness for the next conflict.
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May 6, 2009 at 11:26 am ·
David Wilson is the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which opened in 1988. Wilson has also produced six independent films, most recently under the auspices of MJT in conjunction with Kabinet, an arts and science-based cultural institution located in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We were treated to lecture and film about philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov and Constantine Tsiolkovski, the father of theoretical astronautics. David Wilson also spoke about the early days of the Russian space program and he showed a silent film influenced by the writings of Tsiolkovski. As an aside, currently on exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology are five commissioned dog portraits of the first dogs launched into space by the Soviets.
From Wikipedia:
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (Russian: Никола́й Фёдорович Фёдоров; surname also Anglicized as “Fedorov”) (June 9, 1827–December 28, 1903) was aRussian Orthodox Christian philosopher, who was part of the Russian cosmism movement and a precursor of transhumanism. Fyodorov advocated radical life extension, physical immortality and even resurrection of the dead, using scientific methods.
…
Fyodorov was a futurist, who theorized about the eventual perfection of the human race and society (i.e., utopia), including radical ideas like immortality, revival of the dead, space and ocean colonization. His writings heavily influenced mystic Peter Uspensky and early rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Mankind’s Common Cause
Fedorov argued that the evolutionary process was directed towards increased intelligence and its role in the development of life. Man is the pinnacle of evolution, as well as its creator and director. He must direct it where his reason and morality dictate. Fedorov noted that mortality is the most striking indicator of yet imperfect, contradictory nature of Man and the deep reason for most evil and nihilism in man and mankind. Fedorov argued that the struggle against death can become the deepest and the most natural cause uniting all people of Earth, regardless of their nationality, race, citizenship or wealth (he called this the Common Cause).
Fedorov thought that death and afterdeath existence should become the subject of comprehensive scientific inquiry. Achieving immortality and revival is the highest goal of science. And this knowledge must leave the laboratories and become the common property of all: “Everyone must be learning and everything be the subject of knowledge and action”.
Transformation of past physical forms
The revival of people who lived in the past is not a recreation of their past physical form — it was imperfect, parasitic, centered on mortal existence. The idea is to transform it into self-creating, mind-controlled form, capable of infinite renewal, which is immortal. Those who haven’t died will go through the same transformation. The man will have to become a creator and organizer of his organism (“our body will be our business”). In the past the development of civilization happened by increasing human power using external tools and machines — the human body remained imperfect.
Fedorov points out that we need to breach the gap between the power of technology and weakness of the human physical form. The transition is overdue from purely technical development, a “prosthetic” civilization, to organic progress, when not just external tools, artificial implements, but the organisms themselves are improved, so that, for example, a man can fly, see far and deep, travel through space, live in any environment. Man must become capable of “organodevelopment” that so far only nature was capable of. Fedorov talks about supremacy of mind, “giving, developing organs for itself” and anticipates V. Vernadsky’s idea of autotrophic man. He argues that a man must become anautotrophic, self-feeding creature, acquire a new mode of energy exchange with the environment that will not end.
Fedorov repeatedly said that only broad scientific studies of aging, death, after death condition, only the science that strives to achieve a transformed immortal life, can really uncover the means to overcome death.
Wikipedia entry on Constantine Tsiolkovski:
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian: Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский;Polish: Konstanty Ciołkowski) (September 17 [O.S. September 5] 1857–September 19, 1935) was an Imperial Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory. He is considered by many as a father of theoretical astronautics.[1] His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers as Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko and contributed for early successes of Soviet space program.
Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about 200 km (125 miles) southwest of Moscow. A misanthrope by nature, he appeared strange and bizarre to his fellow-townsmen.
…
He was born in Izhevskoye (now in Spassky District, Ryazan Oblast), in the Russian Empire, to a middle-class family. His father, Edward Tsiolkovsky (in Polish: Ciołkowski), was Polish; his mother, Maria Yumasheva, was an educated Russian woman. His father was a Polish patriot deported to Russia as a result of his revolutionary political activities. At the age of 9, Konstantin caught a serious illness and became hard of hearing[1]. He was not accepted at elementary schools because of his hearing problem, so he was self-taught[1].
Tsiolkovsky theorized many aspects of space travel and rocket propulsion. He is considered the father of human spaceflight and the first man to conceive the space elevator, becoming inspired in 1895 by the newly-constructed Eiffel Tower in Paris.
He was also an adherent of philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, and believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.
Nearly deaf, he worked as a high school mathematics teacher until retiring in 1920. Only from the mid 1920s onwards was the importance of his work acknowledged by others, and Tsiolkovsky was honoured for it. He died on 19 September 1935 in Kaluga and was buried in state.
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April 26, 2009 at 8:42 pm ·
The high point of this year’s LA Times Festival of Books was Gore Vidal interviewed by Richard Rayner.
There was also Robert Alter in conversation with Jonathan Kirsch.
I attended a panel moderated by Nicholas Delbanco between Ron Carlson, Antonya Nelson and Marisa Silver on “big” fiction.
This years Festival of Books’ logo was illustrated by Eric Carle who wrote The Very Hungry Catepillar.
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April 25, 2009 at 8:27 pm ·
This was one of the finalists for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. It would have been my choice for winner. The writing is witty and funny and nuanced. Seven of these interconnected stories first appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
SYNOPSIS:
Ilka Weisz has accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a think tank in Connecticut, reluctantly leaving her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute’s director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths.
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April 12, 2009 at 8:55 pm ·
Weighing in at over 600 pages, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is beautifully crafted, but in the end I had serious issues with the plot development; it simply goes nowhere. There are several story lines to follow, which start out promisingly, but fatigue the reader with the wait for a resolution. This style worked well for Johnson’s earlier book Jesus’ Son which was made up of smaller vignettes that played up a poetically sparse prose style. Tree of Smoke could definitely have been edited down 100 to 200 pages.
SYNOPSIS:
This is the story of Skip Sands — spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong — and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
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March 24, 2009 at 5:24 pm ·
This novel follows several generations of a family cursed by ill-advised love choices.
This book was not a pleasure to read. So much so that at a certain point I cursed Junot Diaz for making me work so hard to get through his novel. I forced myself to finish it in one sitting. The choppy narrative I blamed on his penchant for throwing around Spanish phrases like salt. I often could not get the gist of the Spanish from the context. Adding to the morass, there was an excess of pop-culture references and profanity that failed to advance the narrative. The excessive pop-culture references felt like cheap bling, ornamental and hip for it’s own sake. The frequent use of long footnotes told of an interesting meta story, a political backdrop for all of the violence. I did not mind the long footnotes or this meta story, but was turned off by the narrative style. It was just like the rest of the text, as told from the voice of Yunior, an off-putting Dominican Republic youth. Yunior is unsympathetic, crude, unredeemed. Finally, take away the Spanish phrases, the urban slang, the profanity, the pop-culture references and you are left with a weak ending. No spoiler here. That this won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction points to how uneven and rarified judging is from year-to-year.
Synopsis:
Junot Díaz tells a brutal, but irresistible, story in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Through the eyes of various narrators, readers enter the frightening world of a Dominican Republic family living in New Jersey. The characters’ lives are overflowing with injustices, unrequited love, lost opportunities, physical cruelties, and as one narrator points out, an ancient Dominican curse called Fukú.
The background of the story takes place in the Dominican Republic under the fearsome dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, a man who, according to one narrator, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands for merely looking at him in the wrong way. Oscar, the character around whom this novel revolves, had a grandfather who was imprisoned for almost two decades because he refused to bring his oldest daughter to meet Trujillo. A few years after the doctor was sentenced, only one of his daughters remained alive. The rest of the family had been victims of the Fukú, a curse of doom that would continue to track down the doctor’s descendants.
Beli, the surviving daughter who would become Oscar’s mother, grew into a dark-skinned, tall, and big-breasted young woman—an object of lust and jealousy in her small Dominican village. Her tia (aunt) La Inca tried her best to raise Beli properly, but Beli was strong-willed and eager for more than her aunt could provide. In her naivety and desire for excitement, Beli falls in love with one of Trujillo’s men, hoping that he (referred to only as Gangster) would cure her boredom. Gangster, unfortunately, is a married man. His wife, even more unfortunately, is Trujillo’s sister. One night, Beli is beaten, many of her bones are broken, and she is left in a cane field to die. She doesn’t die, but she comes close. In order to protect her, her aunt sends her to New Jersey. There, Beli recovers and marries a man who sticks around only long enough to twice impregnate her. She has a daughter, Lola, and a son, Oscar.
Lola is strong, beautiful, and determined. Oscar turns out to be quite the opposite. He is very overweight and hides behind science fiction books (both reading and writing them) and in front of the screens of video games. Oscar longs for friends, especially girlfriends, but if his looks do not scare the girls away, his lack of social skills certainly does. He comes close, one time, with Ana Obregón. But it turns out that Ana just wants a friend to talk to. Ana already has a boyfriend, Manny, who often punches her in the face. At one point, Oscar takes a gun and waits for Manny to come home. Oscar wants to kill him. Fortunately, Manny doesn’t come home that night, but the idea of death has entered Oscar’s mind, and twice he tries to kill himself.
Oscar’s mom decides he needs a taste of his roots. So she sends him to La Inca in the Dominican Republic. Once there, Oscar falls obsessively in love with a prostitute who lives two houses down the block. Ybón is several years older than Oscar but enjoys his company. They spend a lot of time together in her house, at the beach, and at the movies. Word gets out, unfortunately, to Ybón’s suitor, a Dominican cop referred to only as the Capitán. Although Oscar and Ybón’s relationship is merely platonic (despite Oscar’s fantasies), Oscar is badly beaten one night and, like his mother before him, left to die in the cane fields. Oscar also survives and returns to New Jersey. Oscar is still young (in his early twenties by then) and vulnerable. While he heals, he can think of nothing but Ybón and plans his return.
When he gets back to the Dominican Republic, he tells Ybón he loves her. He wants desperately to have sex, which she finally agrees to, though she is extremely frightened that the Capitán will discover them, which he does. Oscar is beaten again, and this time he dies of his injuries. However, he does not die a virgin, which was one of his greatest fears.
Joyce Hart. ”The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Overview.” eNotes: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Ed. Penny Satoris. Seattle: Enotes.com Inc, October 2002. eNotes.com. 27 April 2009. <http://www.enotes.com/brief-wondrous-life-oscar-wao/overview>.
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March 19, 2009 at 4:23 pm ·
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell unravels the mystery behind success. It is shaped by a confluence of factors: family and community, birthplace, birth date, class structure, genealogy, ethnicity, practical intelligence, hours of hard work, work ethic, stick-to-itiveness, luck and timing. The result is humbling.
In looking at middle-class versus lower-class advantage, in Chapter 4, he discusses entitlement that comes from upbringing.
He writes, “In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.” … Laureau means it in the best sense of the term: ‘They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention… It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.’ They new the rules. ‘Even in the fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.’ By contrast, the working-class and poor children where characterized by ‘an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.’ They didn’t know how to get their way , or how to ‘customize’ – using Laureau’s wonderful term – whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.”
In Chapter 6, he presents a plausible reason for the failure of American primary and secondary schools and for their low ranking when comparison to Asian schools systems. Among other reasons, he faults long Summer vacations and less study time. He writes, “The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long… The Japanese school year is 243 days long.” This flies against the current trend arguing that our school kids are overburdened by too much homework.
Time plays another role in explaining success. He cites the ten thousand hour rule for the success of The Beatles and Bill Gates. In Chapter 2, he quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin,
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of master associated with being a world-class-expert ¬– in anything.”
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February 23, 2009 at 3:40 pm ·
Allen Salkin has a fascinating story in today’s NY Times (link) about high end pawnshops like Art Capital Group. Annie Leibowitz has borrowed about $15 milllion from them and for collateral, among other things, she has put up the rights to all of her photographs.
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February 10, 2009 at 5:59 pm ·
This photorealistic painting of a pile of The Wall Street Journal newspapers on a bookcase by Steve Mills and the concave intaglio-like sculpture by Yong Deok Lee were my overall favorites from Photo LA. Please scroll down for comments and other photos.
Steve Mills
(detail)
Steve Mills
Wall Street Journal 2
Oil on Aluminum Panel
42″ x 59″
The creamy paint treatment on aluminum panel intrigued me. Why use aluminum panel?
Ross Merrill, chief curator of conservation at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, writes in American Artist:
The most stable painting panel is an aluminum panel, such as Dibond (made by Alcon), that consists of a polyethylene and aluminum-skin core. Dibond does not respond to moisture or temperature changes, is exceptionally rigid, and is lighter than plywood.
From Wikipedia on Photorealism:
As a full-fledged art movement, Photorealism evolved from Pop Art[1][2] and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism[3][4] as well as Minimalist art movements[5][6][7] [8] in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.[9] It is also sometimes labeled as Super-Realism, New Realism, Sharp Focus Realism, or Hyper-Realism.[10] The Photorealist genre is predominately made up of painters.
Photorealist painting cannot exist without the photograph. In Photorealism, change and movement must be frozen in time which must then be accurately represented by the artist.[14] Photorealists gather their imagery and information with the camera and photograph. Once the photograph is developed (usually onto a photographic slide) the artist will systematically transfer the image from the photographic slide onto canvases. This is done by either projecting the slide or grid techniques.[15] The resulting images are often direct copies of the original photograph but are usually larger than the original photograph or slide. This results in the photorealist style being tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environs.[16]
20th century photorealism can be contrasted with the similarly literal style found in trompe l’oeil paintings of the 19th century. However, trompe l’oeil paintings tended to be carefully designed, very shallow-space still-lifes, employing illusionistic devices such as the use of shadows to cause small objects to appear to exist above the surface of the painting. (Trompe l’oeil literally means “fool the eye.”) The photorealism movement moved beyond this illusionism to tackle deeper spatial representations (e.g. urban landscapes) and took on much more varied and dynamic subject matter.
Yong Deok Lee
Yong Deok Lee
Untitled
Sculpture
This triptych was untitled. Yong Deok Lee is a Korean artist known for his concave sculptures. The images are carved into a flat plane.
YouTube turned up a few examples which gives an idea of the visual illusion created of 3-dimensionality when the viewer walks around his pieces:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaG271TqqE
These remind me of ancient Roman intaglio jewelry:
http://www.ancienttouch.com/roman-intaglios-cameos.htm
Other interesting pieces:
Jordan Eagles
New Blood
I asked and they said it’s made from real cow blood.
Damien Hirst
Cathedral: Orvieto
Diamond Dust and Silk screen with Glazes
42 1/4″ x 42 1/4″
$38,000
Real butterflies?
William B. Hoyt
Hours with Walter Evans, 2005
Oil on Canvas
32″ x 48″
$45,000
William B. Hoyt
Island Kitchen, 2008
Oil on Canvas
30″ x 32″
$35,000
William B. Hoyt
Aranciata, 2008
Oil on Canvas
24″ x 29″
$25,000
Chris Shelby, CGU
Reflections, 2008
Pastel on Paper
50″ x 30″
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January 12, 2009 at 2:19 pm ·
These were my favorite prints from Photo LA:
Soo Kim
Midnight Reyjavik, 2008?
Hand-cut C-print
25 x 25 ” (63.5 x 63.5 cm)
What is the story behind Soo Kim’s Midnight Reyjavik photo series? The title of the photograph above implies that it was taken at midnight on the longest brightest day when midnight is almost indistinguishable from noon. In fact, the shadows the structures cast are short. Soo Kim’s exacto knife cuts mainly in the highlight areas where you might expect white giving the image a blown out feel. She also turns architecture into lacey membranes inviting the audience to peer into the hive that is this city.
Some interesting facts from Wikipedia for Reykjavik, Iceland:
•Its location, only slightly south of the Arctic Circle, receives only four hours of daylight on the shortest day in the depth of winter; during the summer the nights are almost as bright as the days.
•Steam from hot springs in the region is supposed to have inspired Reykjavík’s name, as Reykjavík loosely translates to “Smokey Bay”.
•Most houses in Reykjavík use the geothermal heating system. It is the largest system of this kind in the world.
•The city has fostered some world famous talents in recent years, such as singers like Björk and Oddur Sigurjónsson and bands Múm and Sigur Rós.
Rob MacInnis
Fresh Faces 2
My dog died on January 2nd of old age. He taught me sensitivity to and awareness of the animal personality. I was still raw from this when I attended Photo LA. I was immediately drawn into Rob MacInnis’ work.
When you first encounter Rob MacInnis’ Farm Families series in the mural size, you are struck with a sense of the unhomely or uncanny. (Especially Fresh Faces I) Is it a trick, my friend asked, Are these animals alive or dead, How do they stand so still. In this particular “family portrait” (above) we have rare animals, including pygmy goats and miniature horses. I was also struck by the popularity of this print; I counted nine red dots next to the photo which means nine buyers.
If this print calls out to you, check out Rob MacInnis’ fascinating website - http://www.robmacinnis.com where you can see his body of animal portraiture work, as well as, watch a very good documentary on his work process. If I could afford it right now, I would get this print.
The press release notes:
MacInnis’ work focuses on the idea of the creation of identity within the photographic image. By foregrounding our innate compassion of animals, MacInnis explores the correlation between the reifying process of animal consumption and the fashion world’s depiction of the body.
MacInnis’ uses animals as portrait subjects, drawing parallels between the idealization of the human form in contemporary fashion photography and the subjugation of animals by humans.
The artist gives the animals an arena for self-expression as well as humiliation. His photographs reverse the traditional roles of animals in western society, setting them to a level on par with humans. The artist’s objective is to portray an alternative world where animals are not our possessions, but individuals whom we subject to the same idealization as we would a contemporary fashion model.
Rob MacInnis’ portraits demand immediate emotional reaction, drawing on the raw connection between viewer and subject and exposing the instinctive, compassionate union of species.
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