Saturday, February 22, 2003


A Confession
Friedrich -- I own hundreds of books I will almost certainly never get around to reading. Before I die, I will almost certainly buy and own hundreds more books that I will never get around to reading. I'm not sure why, but I needed to get that off my chest. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 22, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Another Web Crawl
Friedrich -- I don't know if you kill quite as much time in front of the computer as I do. But I'm stunned these days by how many good sites and blogs there are. Even given my own relatively-limited set of interests, there's 'way too much to keep up with. Which leaves me feeling like a bad friend, breathless and apologetic. (I  wonder whether young people will have such qualms. They're growing up in a time of media and information excess; it's now just a matter of simple fact that there's never enough time or energy for what's available and desirable. Will they ever be able to imagine what it was like when there were only three TV networks, a finite number of books and magazines, and no internet, no local Borders and no nearby videotape-rental store?) Old fart that I am, it bugs me that I can't manage to make more mention of, just for a very few examples, Cinderella Bloggerfella, PublicInterest, Colby Cosh, Glenn Frazier or Steve Sailer. First-rate and provocative stuff keeps coming from all of them, and at a dazzling rate. In any case, apologies (and gratitude) to many, many sites and people. That said, today I'm singling out a few (which doesn't mean I wouldn't like to single out a whole bunch of others too). *Plep and Cronaca are both pig  heaven for arty websurfers. Postings feature lots of links of interest to culture buffs, often wittily chosen and described.  Cronaca (here) has more interest in the art market, in archaelogy, and in art-news headlines, while Plep (here) is more meadering and whimsical, its entries often arranged by theme (lately: tea, and architecture). They're both witty and idiosyncratic resources.  I don't know how the brainiacs behind them get the time or energy to do the sheer amount of good, entertaining and helpful work they do. *Alaina Alexander is an interesting and thoughtful person who has led a challenging life, and who gives her good times and bad times some moving thought on a small network of sites. She's a young black woman who has studied opera and law, and who has faced family and academic ups and downs, and she's direct and down-to-earth about her experiences in ways I find sweet and engrossing; I'm even touched by the way she uses the web to explore and express different sides of herself.  Here she and some friends discuss one of my favorite themes: the challenges of making a living as an arty person. Here she talks about what it was like for her to bail out of law school. And here she gives her personality-kid/diva side a chance to frisk. I'm not a fan of me-blogs generally, but Alaina's sites -- which, taken together, are like a still-in-process memoir -- I've come to respect, and to enjoy a lot. *Here's a bizarro web-art treat. Eyeball this here.  Web projects like this one makes me muse all kinds of things about the digital universe and what's maybe... posted by Michael at February 22, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, February 21, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part V
Michael: Here’s yet another installment in my (ongoing) attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#4, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire] was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with Mr. Harris’ claims of “economic and social transformation” (overstated), “bourgeois wealth and power” (obscures critical conflict between rurals and urban bourgeoisie), and “bourgeois responsibility for the creation of a revolutionary proletariat” (largely a consequence of Napoleon III’s activities) in Parts II, III and IV. Now we’ll deal with his next claim: Did the bourgeoisie shun “exposes of economic realities” and did they possess a “deep fear of revolution in any form”? The claim that the bourgeoisie couldn’t handle economic realities is a little hard to understand. The bourgeoisie were professionals or business people; generally, I think it’s safe to say they had a pretty clear idea of economic realities. Presumably, however, Mr. Harris is implying by the word “expose” that the bourgeoisie (being, in his opinion, morally stunted creatures) disliked being exposed to ridicule or moral criticism. Well, nobody likes to be ridiculed or criticized, but the urban bourgeoisie, anyway, seems to have born up under such criticism fairly well. To select one example of this out of many in 19th century Paris, I would call attention of the career of political and social caricaturist Honore Daumier, whose humor came chiefly at the expense of the urban bourgeoisie. H. Daumier, News bulletin: Scenes of Paris life since we played the moral comedy entitled "The Stock Exchange" H. Daumier, To Anyone With Capital To Lose The readers of Charivari and the other publications for which Daumier drew were,... posted by Friedrich at February 21, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Thursday, February 20, 2003


Bulletins from the Sickbed
Friedrich -- I'm home with the flu, and am feeling even more scatterbrained and stupid than usual. Hey, why fight it? So, a bit of this 'n' that. * I caught up with Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone on DVD, and can recommend it. Horror fantasy from a Mexican film poet/intellectual whose movies ("Cronos," "Mimic," "Blade 2") I generally like. This one's set in a boy's boarding school way out in the middle of nowhere during the Spanish Civil War, and it's a little "Zero for Conduct," a little Fritz Lang, and a little post-'60s trash fantasia. The storytelling isn't of much interest, but the movie is a gorgeous and spooky film-buff tone poem. Where did all these gifted Spanish/Latino filmmakers come from, by the way? There's Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama, A Little Princess), Alex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango, 800 Bullets), Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), the guy who made "The Others," which I loved ... Spanish and South American directors used to be awful, with very rare exceptions. These days there's a ton of them, apparently all bursting with talent. Odd the way these waves happen. The British cinema used to have little to brag about apart from Hitchcock, Ealing and Carol Reed. Then in the '80s, it was like a whole bunch of them popped out of the womb knowing how to make movies. Why? How? *Saw a fascinating small piece in a U.K. magazine called Digital Photography Made Easy (a first-rate how-to mag, perfect for morons like me) talking about holographic computer memory. Can't find a link to it online, so I'll type out a passage from Cliff Smith's article: The commercial release of such devices is closer than you think. Researchers at IBM claim they will have small holographic units available by 2003, with the first devices storing 125 Gb at transfer rates of 40Mb per second. They believe that, before long, 1,000 Gb units will be avilable that can transfer 1Gb of data per second -- that's fast enough to record a DVD movie in about 30 seconds. And these holographic storage devices are apparently the size of sugar cubes. Heavens! OK, let's say the IBM people are being 'way too optimistic, and we finally get only half of what they promise, and a couple of years later than expected. Still! That means you'll be able to take a few lifetimes' worth of photos with your digicam before having to download them onto your computer. It means you'll be able to record hours and hours of high-quality video onto teeny-tiny devices. Oh, why aren't I younger? Ten or so years ago I visited the editing suite of a Major Motion Picture that was one of the first to be edited on computer. They'd put all their footage onto video and thence onto hard drives -- I seem to remember they had something like 100 hours on 90 Gb. Though image quality wasn't great -- about standard VCR level -- they were just... posted by Michael at February 20, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Wednesday, February 19, 2003


Web Crawl
Friedrich -- A few of the goodies I've stumbled across in recent days... Daniel Libeskind's proposal for the WTC site has been widely praised. Brian Hanson and Nikos Salingaros take a different view. This is the complete version of an essay that 2Blowhards was proud to run an excerpt from a couple of weeks ago. Brian Micklethwait likes reading Nick Hornby, Susan Isaacs, and a few of his own short stories. Eddie Thomas and Aaron Haspel are kicking up a lot of entertaining dust on the question of Hegel: Classical Liberal or Writer of Gibberish? Jim Ryan is up to installment eight in his not-to-be-missed introduction to the conservative philosophy of John Kekes. Paul Mansour has turned up an excellent City Journal essay by the British new-Classicist architect Robert Adam about skyscrapers. Sasha Castel recommends the tenors Ramon Vargas and Frank Lopardo. Andy at Blog Lodge is enthusiastic about "All the Real Girls," David Gordon Green's first movie since "George Washington." Alexandra Ceely has some reflections about Buddhism and art. I dimly recall from the days when I was interested in anarchist social criticism that Paul Goodman was a poet as well as much else. (And, hey, "Communitas," a book about city planning he wrote with his architect brother Percy, was pretty good.) Mike Snider recommends some of Goodman's sonnets. What is it with women and comic books? Let alone graphic novels? Polly Frost has set off an interesting conversation by asking these questions. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- Wendy Kohn on Christopher Alexander
Friedrich -- The subject matter of Christopher Alexander's 1977 A Pattern Language (here) and its followup The Timeless Way of Building (here) is architecture, but they're also among the most provocative and useful books about the arts generally I've ever read. I'm far from alone in feeling this way. "A Pattern Language" especially has been phenomenally popular, outselling almost all other books on architecture year after year since its publication. I've talked to poets who found the book eye-opening; software designers have conferences where they discuss Alexander's concept of "patterns"; I've even met architects who have told me they didn't really "get" architecture until they read the book. I once gave a copy of Alexander's perfectly amazing book on Turkish rugs to a theater-critic friend, and it blew his mind; he was babbling about it (and about the new thoughts it was making him have about the theater!) for weeks afterwards. A visit to Alexander's website, here, will give you an OK taste of his mind, but it's probably more fun to sample what reader/reviewers on Amazon have had to say. Here's a typical Reader's Comment: "The book's main idea is much more powerful than that. It applies to almost every aspect of life, not just to architecture. This is definitely one of the best books on my shelf. It has really changed the way I look at...everything." Great stuff, and stuff that hits many brainy and interested people on a deep level. Yet neither book -- both of them concerned with what you might think of as harmless and useful topics such as beauty, usability, and evolved form and knowledge -- is used in architecture schools. Why? As far as I can tell, quite simply because the official architecture world is demented. Alexander (along with such thinkers and writers as Tom Wolfe, Jane Jacobs, Nikos Salingaros, Lucien Steil, Leon Krier, Philip Langdon, and William Whyte) is part of a dissident strain in architecture that's trying to bring the building crafts (and, yes, arts) back to their senses. Why should the academic (ie., "avant-garde") establishment be open to this? Christopher Alexander It'll be fun to see what gets made of his next publication, The Nature of Order, which is due out in July. This is his magnum opus, a four-volume, several-thousand-page-long monster in which he's summing it all up -- beauty, science, order, nature, pattern itself. (The book's publication has been put off several times before, so let's see if it actually is published on time. Its Amazon page, in any case, is here.) On this occasion, Wendy Kohn has written a good introduction to Alexander and his work for The Wilson Quarterly. It's readable here. Sample passage: Yet Alexander’s own colleagues in the American architectural establishment will have nothing to do with him. After warmly embracing Alexander early in his career, his most natural audience has effectively airbrushed him out of its current canon. In the past 15 years, few undergraduate or graduate architecture programs have included A Pattern... posted by Michael at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments

Politics and Relationships
Michael: I have decided to steal your excellent idea and write about the topic of politics and relationships (hey, you snooze, you lose). The topic came up in a comment by Laurel on your post, “Free Reads -- Chris Bertram” in which she discussed breaking up with her boyfriend over Iraq. In my own relationship with my loving wife, politics isn’t much of an issue because (1) we agree and (2) my wife sees no reason for me to waste time discussing something we agree on when I could be doing household chores or driving the kids somewhere. But even turning my memory back to my misspent youth, I could only remember one relationship in which I’d had heated political disagreements, and those only seemed to lead to sex, so in retrospect I’m not sure if we were really arguing or conducting foreplay. To try to get a more objective view, I conducted a lightening poll on entirely unscientific grounds among my employees. These were the results: of 6 people surveyed (3 men, 3 women) 3 considered political differences to have been an issue in one or more of their relationships and it was a factor in one breakup. On the other hand, disagreements over religion had played a role in 4 people’s relationships, and it had led to at least 4 breakups. So it would appear—if this ludicrous survey is an indication of anything—that religion is a much better relationship-buster than politics. Another topic for future blogging. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Tuesday, February 18, 2003


Free Reads -- Chris Bertram
Friedrich -- Do you have a strong opinion about whether or not the US should take Saddam out? I don't know that I do. It seems to me that while there are good arguments to do so there are also good arguments to abstain from doing so. I'm not sure which side I tip towards and I'm not sure it matters (even if, in a pinch, I choose to root for the home team). Saddam's a really, really bad guy -- but war isn't a prospect that thrills me. Shallow soul that I am, my strongest opinion has less to do with whether or not to go to war than with how the public debate's being conducted by both sides. I'm annoyed by the generally low level of it -- the name-calling, the hysteria, the contempt, the accusations of moral idiocy ... Sheesh. Chris Bertram, who tilts antiwar, is one of the few observers I've found who's doing a first-rate job of keeping the good points from both sides in full view, and in his excellent posting today he does a far better job than I ever could of spelling them out. And you know what? They're all worth wrestling with. Sample passage: Americans, having actually been attacked by Al-Qaida on September 11th are naturally disposed to accept a much lower standard of proof for such [an Iraq/Al Qaeda] connection than Europeans and, even if skeptical, are likely to be sufficiently risk-averse to act on the supposition that there might be something in it. Europeans, by contrast, seeing the public case for war being erected around propositions they think dubious (at best) are likely to become more anti-war the more the Al-Qaida line is pushed. The Al-Qaida argument bolsters support for war in the US, but undermines it in Europe. Talk about level-headed. The rest of Chris's posting can be read here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 18, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments

Policy Break--Told You So
Michael: An editorial in the New York Times of February 18 opines that The most hawkish figures in the Bush administration never wanted to bring the Iraq issue before the United Nations. With last Friday's show of resistance in the Security Council to early military action against Baghdad, it's easy to imagine some of them saying "I told you so," and urging President Bush to bypass the Council and prepare for an invasion joined only by Britain and a narrow coalition of smaller nations. That would be a damaging mistake. As I noted on September 17 of last year—five months ago—anyone could see how the game of “inspections” was going to turn out: According to a NY Times editorial for September 17 on “The Iraqi Chessboard,” Saddam’s unconditional offer to allow U.N. inspection “could open the way to resolving the crisis peacefully and should certainly be tested.” Of course they admit that Saddam may just be trying to jerk the U.N. Security Council around on his program to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but they opine that “[i]t shouldn’t take long to tell whether Iraq will really give inspectors a free hand, or will follow its invitation with limitations that render it meaningless.” Really. We seemed to go on for years back in the middle-1990’s with an impotent game of cat-and-mouse inspection; how long d’you suppose the Times means by “too long” in this instance? Granted, the eagerness with which the French and Germans have defended Saddam’s right to continue his long-running role as neighborhood psychopath has proved a bit of a surprise, but the way “inspections” would pan out was never in much doubt. I guess today’s question is how long opponents of military force will cling to the fig-leaf of “inspections” as a way of doing nothing about a problem while appearing to do something. Based on the Times’ record to date, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to drop the leaf. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 18, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Monday, February 17, 2003


Safe Bets -- Hard Core?
Friedrich -- I don't know why it's taken me this long to develop this hunch, but in any case I've finally gotten around to it. Here it is. Forgive the lengthy setup -- I can't figure out a way to get to my point without going through some preliminaries. Remember how, decades ago (centuries ago!), back when putting nudity and sex onscreen seemed new and exciting, it wasn't uncommon to hear that what many directors really wanted to do was shoot a real movie -- real script, real techies, real budget -- starring real, recognizable actors that was also a hardcore sex film? Here and there, a few directors got close to that goal, with pictures like "Last Tango," "The Last Woman," "Going Places," "In the Realm of the Senses"... Actually, "In the Realm of the Senses" was a hardcore art/sex movie, although I don't think the actors were well-known. (I recall that the girl was really good and that the guy was pretty bad.) But, as can be deduced from such recent movies as "Romance," "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Center of the World," "Baise-Moi" (hardcore indeed, but the art side of the equation was weak), "Y Tu Mama Tambien," and "Lies," the dream lives on. Will it never come to pass? I'm betting that it will, and any day now. Why? I think the answer to that question has to be "Why not?" What with the supercharged eroticism of the mass media, the easy availability of porn, the web, the "empowerment" of girls and young women, the ease and cheapness of the new digital tools -- how could it not happen, and soon? Heck, with projects such as Jennicam, Isabella @ Home (which I recommend, and which can be seen here), Grownup Girl (also recommended, and here) and Natacha Merritt's Digital Diaries (sample-able here, buyable here), these kids these days are more than halfway there already. Come to think of it, why should anyone -- particularly edgy digital youth -- care about a big, dumb, overexpensive medium like the movies anyway? That's a place to do action, animation, and stars, not to take chances. Though I'm told that Natacha Merritt wants to become a director. I wonder what kinds of movies she's hoping to make. Isabella, Grownup Girl, Merritt: In charge, and why not? Still, this is the generation for it. Kids today seem almost bizarrely uninhibited. They're square in many of their attitudes, but sexual matters seem to them to be little more than a hoot, just another set of buttons to be pressed and icons to be clicked on. Sex? Hey, it's about horsing around, posing for the camera, acting out fantasies from ads and videos, and feeling hot. Which also suggests that sex may simply not mean all that much to them. All the old religio-artistic significance? Finito, as far as I can tell. The taboos have been lifted once and for all, everybody's "in charge of" their own sexuality, whatever the hell that means, eroticism... posted by Michael at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Fear and Memory
Michael: I thought you might be interested in an article in the March edition of Discover magazine, entitled “Can the Brain Conquer Fear?” by Steven Johnson. Although it focuses on the specific mechanics of fear-coded memories, what I found most interesting was the discussion of the brain’s multiple memory storage systems. As Mr. Johnson explains: We’re accustomed to describing someone as having a good or a bad memory, as though memory were a single attribute that covers the entire range of storing and recalling information. We now know that the brain’s memory systems are far more diverse than this. There are systems devoted to explicit or declarative memories, like your childhood recollection of that pet python, and systems devoted to procedural memories that usually involve physical movement, like learning how to ride a bicycle. And then there are emotional memories. If you watch the activity in someone’s brain using a modern fMRI scanner, you see a different profile depending on which kind of memory the subject is conjuring up. If something—say a movement in the bushes—reminds you of a previous encounter with danger, you’ll have a double reaction. You’ll consciously summon up a declarative memory of the previous scary event, which was originally laid down by your brain’s hippocampus. (“There I was walking down the path and I suddenly realized I had stepped right next to a rattlesnake”). You’ll also unconsciously access an emotional memory, which is routed through your brain’s amygdala. The declarative memory is rich, detailed and slow—it takes a second or two to appear. The emotional memory is virtually instantaneous, and its impact is felt indirectly via increased blood pressure, sped-up heart rate, elevated hormone levels and other physiological responses. The existence of these two different memory systems explains why fearful people often aren’t very resourceful; their amygdala, having identified a dangerous situation, either falls back on what appears to be its default remedy—simply hunkering down and freezing—or on some other remedy that got them through this situation in the past, like screaming for help. (Interestingly, while there are many neural pathways leading from the amygdala to the neocortex, there are very few running back the other way, so it is difficult for your rational mental processes to win an argument with your amygdala.) And while the amygdala can be trained to associate the scary memory with a more intelligent response, simply explaining to the sufferer the irrationality of his or her phobia or the inadequacy of his or her reaction is a waste of breath. (Remember, the amygdala isn’t listening.) I don’t know if the mechanism of other emotional memories is similar to that of fear. If they were, however, it would tend to explain a lot of neurotic behavior, and to suggest that trying to modify emotional memories/reactions via “talking therapy” may be fighting an uphill battle. The very existence of multiple memory systems (which suggests the possibility of multiple, parallel versions of many of one’s mental processes) also suggests that classical models of mental... posted by Friedrich at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Moviegoing and DVD Journal: "Demonlover"; "Brief Crossing"; "Barbershop"; "High Heels and Low Lifes"; "New Best Friend"; "Storytelling"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- For no good reason at all, I found myself rushing around town checking in on arty French movies, then returning home to watch DVDs. Hey, maybe I'm still a film buff after all, and maybe youth isn't yet entirely spent. Or maybe I was just making a futile effort to recharge my already-expired film buff MetroPass. I'll try to spare you the wordy reviews. (Or so I say as I launch into them.) Olivier Assayas' Demon Lover was as sociologically observant and as conceptually thought-through as anything I've seen or read recently. It's basically a thriller about industrial espionage starring Connie Nielsen as an ambitious corporate lawyer. (Gina Gershon is in two or three scenes, and the two names -- Connie and Gina -- explain why I was at the movie in the first place.) But it's really a poetic essay about where we are and where we're going -- imagine "The Matrix" and "Run Lola Run" as seen by Antonioni. Everything is permeable, everything interpenetrates, everything is virtual -- finance, cities, deals, architecture, relationships. Even narrative form, which Assayas seems to have laid out as a computer game rather than a traditional act-by-act structure. You advance from level to level, with the rules of the game seeming to change with each advance. It's all very brilliant, though the film did leave me thinking, If only it had been a comedy! Sarah Pratt Then on to Catherine Breillat's recent (and apparently never-to-be-released-in-this-country) Brief Crossing. I'm apparently almost alone in loving some of Breillat's movies. I guess I understand why; most people seem to find them chilly, off-putting, and obnoxious. But they make me really excited and enthusiastic. Offputting? Surgical? Yes yes yes, I want to cry -- all that and more! It seems to me they deliver goods (mainly about women and sex) next-to-impossible to find elsewhere. Have you caught Breillat's "Romance"? It's the picture of hers that's most completely realized, and I'd be eager to hear your response to it. Breillat works territory I'm fond of, which is the novella-like narrative of sex, religion and despair, and does it from a neurotically narcissistic female point of view. Yippee! Most of her films seem to be made from 15 page screenplays and to exist for the sake of one good 20-30 minute passage. Still, in "Brief Crossing," as in her recent "Fat Girl," it's one heckuva passage. "Brief Crossing" is about a 30ish Englishwoman and a teenaged French boy who meet on a ferry crossing the English channel. For 2/3 of the movie, Breillat is doing little but setting the tone, getting you used to the scale and content of what she wants you focused on (minute emotional shifts underlain by anguish, fury and lust, basically). Then comes the amazing 20-30 minutes, when the boy and the woman are playing with emotional dynamite. He's foxy, cocky, Latin, and scared; she's Anglo, bitter yet still yearning. What a performance by Sarah Pratt! (Who has only... posted by Michael at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Sunday, February 16, 2003


Free Views -- Virtual Fireworks
Friedrich -- An instant mood elevator: Virtual fireworks! I find the colored haze and smoke they leave behind especially beautiful, mere pixels though they may be. Viewable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 16, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Free Reads -- Gay Oscar
Friedrich -- Thinking about the topic of gays and movies, I recall that Andrew Sullivan has posted a note from a film-buff friend of his spelling out just how gay-friendly this year's Oscar race is. It's readable here. Hey, maybe the ceremony will be a little livelier than usual. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 16, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments