29 November 2013
28 November 2013
COBRA Update (And No - this is not about the program for maintaining health insurance if you lose your job.)
In 1984 the British government established a special committee - COBRA (or Cabinet Office briefing room A) - that meets to address quickly political emergencies perceived or actual. The Guardian reports here on a newer, parallel COBRA, consisting of artists aiming "to engage critically and creatively with the increased use of aesthetics and performance by the UK government to promote, explain and justify its labelling of an event as 'an emergency'." The parallel entity meets whenever the official COBRA does in order to formulate a creative response to the the putative emergency.Yesterday The Guardian ran this story about an interesting graduate program in art and politics and featured a fellow, Theo Price, who both did the program and is a principal in the un-official COBRA undertaking.
Labels: dissent, Great Britain, Political Theory
Chris Hedges on Art & Politics ~ Just What You'd Expect
I generally find Chris Hedges actively unhelpful. Here he confirms my view. His view of art as necessarily concerned with "transcendence" is bunk. (To note only the most obvious thing, poetry is largely about articulating emotions, thoughts, insights.) But I suppose it makes sense since he is trying to connect art with politics. And his politics are unbearably moralistic. I suppose there is something to be said for consistency.
27 November 2013
Passings ~ Saul Leiter (1923-2013)
Labels: Obituaries
26 November 2013
Koudelka (Follow Up)
Labels: David Shulman, Israel, Koudelka, Palestine, politics, walls
Pope to American GOP ... Your Libertarian Views are Anathama
Labels: libertarians, political economy, Pope, Republicans
23 November 2013
Outlier - A Definition
Labels: Data Graphics, health, health care reform, political economy
Britten at 100
"In Britten I have found a new hero, a musically surprising and multi-dimensional citizen of the world." ~ Marin AlsopHere is a piece from npr on composer Benjamin Britten (and specifically his War Requiem) on the centenary of his birth. I did not know his music or politics at all.
Update (11/26): There also is a recent essay here from NYRB reviewing a troika of recent works on Britten. The essay is more straightforward about Britten's sexuality and his politics than the npr piece. And it comes down, I think, on the right side of the continuing debate about Britten's accomplishment and stature. That debate seems to be heated: " . . . [I]n Britten’s centennial year (he was born in 1913 and died in 1976), the “battle of Britten” . . . continues. Britten’s reputation—the need to decide once and for all whether he is great or overrated—is central to discussion of him, in a way that is not true for more acclaimed contemporaries (like Stravinsky) or lesser ones (like Finzi). A peevish, aggrieved tone persists on either side."
Labels: Art, gay politics, Music, politics, War
22 November 2013
Filibuster Repeal - Spinning the Data Graphics
So, as the WaPo suggests, which you find persuasive will depend on whether you think a nomination to the Federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals is equivalent to the Deputy Vice Assistant to the Ambassador to Fiji. McConnell seems to think 'yes'; Reid 'no.'
Labels: Data Graphics, politics, propaganda
21 November 2013
Politics, Movement and Electoral
18 November 2013
Missing Photographs
Steven Edwards starts his Photography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2006) by asking readers to entertain an interesting possibility - a world thoroughly devoid of photographs or photography. According to this report by Olivier Laurent at The British Journal of Photography, the French newspaper Libération published its entire 14 November issue without a single photograph. The editors reportedly withheld images as a statement about the precarious situation of photographers and photojournalism. Yet, even though this 'statement' is intentional and derives its force from the contrast to a world awash in images - the photographs we expect are missing, not nonexistent - it underscores the audacity of Edwards' counter-factual.
Labels: Media Politics, photojournalism
Solnit on Typhoon Coverage
Labels: disaster coverage, Media Politics, Rebecca Solnit
17 November 2013
Passings ~ Doris Lessing (1919-2013)
"She was political in the most basic sense, recognising the manifestations of power in its many forms. She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human . . . [S]he was everything a younger female writer might hope for: kind, helpful, interested, and with a special understanding of the position of writers from elsewhere within England. . . . And she was a model also for every writer coming from the back of beyond, demonstrating – as she so signally did – that you can be a nobody from nowhere, but, with talent, courage, perseverance through hard times, and a dollop of luck, you can scale the topmost storyheights."
Labels: literature, Margaret Atwood, Prizes
Chilean Ironies
Labels: Ariel Dorfman, Chile, democracy, irony
16 November 2013
Sunday! Music at Bop Shop Tonight
10³²K - Kevin Ray - Bass, Frank Lacy - Trombone and Andrew Drury - Percussion
Sunday November 17th 8pm
Bop Shop Records
1460 Monroe Ave
$15 donation requested.
This should be a great show. Highly recommended.
Labels: Bob Shop, Independent Purveyors of Books and Music, jazz, Local Event
Storyville (BBC): Pussy Riot A Punk Prayer
Question: "Does your father support you?"
Nadia: "Yeah, he's the best. I am who I am today because of him"That exchange comes @ 7:37. I hope my baby daughter Esme will say something like that some day.
Labels: Music, protests, Pussy Riot, Russia
GOP And 'Free Expression'
Labels: flags, freedom, Republicans, Speech on Campus, UofR
13 November 2013
What's Wrong With Nuclear Power?
"The question ... is why such an inherently flawed design as the light-water reactor (LWR) is still, after all these years, the preferred technology?So we have a flawed technology because the decision-making process was dominated by military not energy generating considerations. (Source: This story at The Economist.)
Most of today’s reactors, whether they use boiling water or pressurised water, trace their ancestry back to the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954. At the time, the LWR was just one of many reactor designs that existed either on paper or in the laboratory—using different fuels (uranium-233, uranium-235 or plutonium-239), different coolants (water, heavy water, carbon dioxide or liquid sodium) and different moderators (water, heavy water, beryllium or graphite).
The light-water reactor of the day, with its solid uranium-dioxide fuel and water for both moderator and coolant, was by no means the best. But Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of America’s nuclear navy, chose it because it could be implemented faster than any of the others, making it possible for Nautilus to be launched on time. The LWR also appealed to Rickover because it produced a lot of bomb-making plutonium as a by-product.
After that, the die was cast."
Labels: environmentalism, military, politics, Technology
12 November 2013
Pyotr Pavlensky's Painful Protest
"Red Square has seen a lot over the centuries, from public executions to giant military parades, but a performance artist broke new ground on Sunday when he nailed his scrotum to cobblestones in a painful act of protest" (source).So, I get why this guy nailing his nuts to the pavement is a protest. But why is it art?
Burtynsky, H-Two-Oh
Labels: aerial, Burtynsky, environmentalism, political economy, water
11 November 2013
Gerhard Richter on Models
(Oil on canvas; 152 cm x 152 cm; Catalogue Raisonné: 895-10.)
"When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate."~ Gerhard Richter*
Labels: Gerhard Richter, models, social science
10 November 2013
Passings ~ Norman Geras (1943~2013)
Labels: Obituaries, Political Theory
Passings ~ Jack Mitchell (1925-2013)
Labels: Obituaries
09 November 2013
07 November 2013
John Berger Collected
Labels: Berger, Dyer, John Berger, New Books
Passings ~ Editta Sherman (1912-2013)
Labels: Obituaries
05 November 2013
Awoiska van der Molen
I am continually impressed by the number of incredibly talented photographers out there in the wide world. Today, out of the blue, Awoiska invited me to be FB friends. I accepted, then followed the link to her web page - here - and discovered several remarkable series of images. I especially like the landscapes. What a fortuitous day.
Labels: Landscape, Women in Photography
Happy Birthday John Berger (5 November 1926)
![[JohnBerger.LaureVasconi..jpg]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MuWNJtJ8XS4/ReDS7UORbtI/AAAAAAAAALs/f4hVaPM55j4/s1600/JohnBerger.LaureVasconi..jpg)
John Berger © Laure Vasconi.
Critic and writer John Berger turns 87 today. I have written here repeatedly about, and in response to, his criticism and his politics.
Labels: Berger, birthday, John Berger
03 November 2013
The Politics of Josef Koudelka's WALL
"Koudelka’s pictures have an eerie, meditative texture. Many of them are structured around the glaring contrast between the Wall, always intrusive, harsh, ophidian, and the organic, still living world of hills, terraces, and valleys on either side of it. Paradoxically, these photographs are beautiful, almost too beautiful, to look at—despite, or perhaps because of, the raw wound they reveal."I've lifted the passage above from this post at NYRB that Israeli activist and academic David Shulman has written on a new book* by Josef Koudelka. Shulman, himself a member of an Israeli-Palestinian Peace group called Ta‘ayush (meaning roughly 'living together'), is intimately familiar with the politics surrounding what the Israeli government euphemistically calls "separation barrier." I admire both Koudelka and Shulman immensely and have posted on each frequently- see here and here respectively. Here are a baker's half-dozen images from Koudelka:
As Shulman attests these images depersonalize suffering. Does their beauty - and the fact that they are more or less wholly de-populated - deflate the all to common worry that photography aestheticizes suffering?
__________
* Josef Koudelka. WALL. (NY: Aperture, 2013).
Labels: David Shulman, euphemism, Israel, Koudelka, Palestine, walls
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
Labels: dissent, Legal, politics, prisons, Pussy Riot, Russia
02 November 2013
Contingent Faculty & Unions
This raises the obvious question regarding common complaints about the "spiraling costs" of College education. Once we determine the relative increase in administrative salaries (Deans and Dean-lets, Student Affairs Staff, etc.) relative to faculty salaries, we must then ask about the composition of faculty salaries. Not only are full-time, tenure/tenure track faculty not getting significant salary increases, but they are being replaced by very low wage, typically benefit-less contingent faculty. Where do those pesky cost increases originate?
01 November 2013
The NSA Apparently Has Zero Sense of Humor But Some Libertarians Do
Labels: Censorship, Humor, Legal, libertarians, NSA