December 2008 Archives

Gone to China. Light blogging ahead.

An artist friend of mine sent me a brilliant image he saw (and admired) a long time ago. He believes it was posted at Dark Roasted Blend. He can't remember when it was posted or whose image it is. Can anyone identify and/or date it?

The reason I ask: In the issue of The New Yorker of Dec. 22 & 29, 2008, there's an excellent illustration by Christoph Niemann for James Surowiecki's article, "News You Can Lose," on page 48 that, in conception, bears a striking resemblance to it. As you can see. I'm trying to find out whether this is a case similar to the copycat at work -- let's call it artistic channeling, to be charitable -- or mere coincidence. Or maybe Niemann posted that image himself. Anything is possible, right?

Postscript: Dec. 29 --Turns out Dark Roasted Blend posted the image recently, not "a long time ago." On Dec. 12, 2008, to be exact, per this response to our inquiry from DRB blogger extraordinaire Avi Abrams:

DRB has it on this page (scroll down), but we don't know what is the original source, as it came inside anonymous email. I tried to search for it using TinEye -- but it did not pick up the original either.

So could the concept for that illustration have filtered from DRB to The New Yorker just in time for the Dec. 22&29 issue? Possibly, depending on the magazine's production schedule. But possibly not. I finally got a bright idea and asked Christoph Niemann. Am awaiting his reply.

PPS: This just in, and I'm grateful to have it, so I can do him complete justice:

Dear Jan Herman,

Thank you for your note.

Obviously it is an awkward moment to have one's illustration displayed in the context of being conceptually similar to another picture.

Nonetheless, I can state with utter confidence that I haven't seen the (beautiful!) photo of the person with the book before. This is certainly not the first (or last) time I have found myself in a situation like this (and I can happily state that I have been on the other side of the equation more often).

I have built my whole career on coming up with original visual ideas. This is obviously impossible, given the amount of pictures that are being constantly created. But if I even have the faintest suspicion that an idea I come up with may have been derived from a concept I saw somewhere else, I run as fast as I can and will come up with something else.

I have of course quoted art in my work (e.g. making a visual pun on the Mona Lisa or a famous Delacroix painting), but I am much too dependent on people respecting the authorship of my own work to ever take advantage of somebody else's concepts.

Let me know if this answers your questions

Best regards

Christoph

Sure does. Bee-oooo-tifully.

Harold Pinter, who died two days ago at 78, received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005. Too sick to travel to Stockholm to accept the award, he gave his Nobel Lecture on video:

The lecture begins with a quotation:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Pinter moves from an analysis of "language in art" as "a highly ambiguous transaction" to an indictment of "political language," which is utterly unambiguous because politicians are not interested in truth but only in maintaining power. And so they turn language into "a vast tapestry of lies," none more so in recent times than the lies of American politicians.

He singles out the United States, citing its support for the Somoza regime in Nicaragua and the subversion of the Sandanista revolution that overthrew it as a prime example, not because he exempts the former Soviet Union's "systematic brutality," "widespread atrocities" and "ruthless suppression of independent thought" within its own borders and throughout Eastern Europe -- "All this has been fully documented and verified," he points out -- but because "U.S. crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all."

The invasion of Iraq is just its latest crime. He notes:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Inexplicably, he never mentions the war in Vietnam, a crime against humanity even greater than the war in Iraq.

Read the rest of Pinter's text.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Elisabeth Bumiller's Pentagon Memo takes note of the "semantic dance: What is the definition of a combat soldier?"

Even though the agreement with the Iraqi government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June, military planners are now quietly acknowledging that many will stay behind as renamed "trainers" and "advisers" in what are effectively combat roles. In other words, they will still be engaged in combat, just called something else.

Which leaves ongoing ...

The Cost of the War in Iraq
... and of course thousands of American soldiers dead, and tens of thousands wounded, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, and millions displaced.

But hey, as the lame duck Bullshitter-in-Chief with the shit-eating grin on his face has been saying, "So what?"

On that note, I take my cue from The Cutting Floor, Carl Weissner's collective novel. As he says, "... aw give it to Montesquieu."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Lately I haven't been paying much attention to "Countdown." Non-stop, over-the-top bluster can get on anybody's nerves, and Keith Olbermann has managed to get on mine -- even though his rants take guts and even though I agree with them. But whenever he has Jonathan Turley on the show, as he did last night, I pay rapt attention.

Olbermann began by asking Turley, a constitutional scholar and defense attorney, if he thought Cheney had confessed to a war crime on national television the other day in an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Here's Turley's reply and the rest of the exchange, which I've transcribed from the video segment (embedded below).

TURLEY: It's an interesting question, isn't it. It's like a type of Zen question: If someone commits a crime and everyone's around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime? And I think that's really the argument of this administration. It can't be a crime because no one's prosecuted us for it.

But it most certainly is a crime to participate, to create, to in many ways monitor a torture program. And indeed it's one of the crimes that defines a nation committed to the rule of law. If you have to create a new nation one of the first things you do is to disavow this form of illegality. So you have the vice president sitting there saying, "Yeah, we talked about it. They came to me. I supported it, and I helped put it through." The only problem is, what he is describing is most certainly, unambiguously, a war crime.

OLBERMANN: Except if, as you suggest, nobody prosecutes him for that. Which jumps ahead to the lasting legacy of what happens if the next administration does not press this. Do we let, you know, the international court at the Hague come in and take over all of our responsibilities for policing our own act here? Or where does this go domestically if he's made such a statement?

TURLEY: Frankly, Keith, that's what worries me the most, is that you can't talk about change without having some moral component to it. It's not just about creating jobs or lowering the price of gasoline. What occurred in the last eight years was an assault on who we are. And I think that president-elect Obama is going to have to decide whether he wants power without principle or whether he wants to start with a true change, to say that no matter where an investigation will take us, if there are crimes to be found, they will be prosecuted.

Now, right now, many leaders in Congress are trying to create a new commission that is designed to avoid any criminal prosecution. And those leaders happen to be Democratic leaders. But it will ultimately depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that's been committed in plain view.

OLBERMANN: A little less obvious perhaps, because there's no confession up front. But what was in that Senate report that the person who authorized all the abuse and torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, was President Bush. Could that be a war crime?

TURLEY: It most certainly can. That's the amazing thing about all of this. It's pretty much accepted by most legal experts. In fact, it's pretty hard to find one who says that it's not. Waterboarding goes back to the Spanish Inquistion. It wasn't some invention of Dick Cheney's mind. It's something we prosecuted Japanese officers for when they did it against our soldiers. The English send people to death for it. We prosecuted people, again, even earlier than World War II, in the Philippines. It is a well-established war crime.

It's not the law that's in question here. The question is, most importantly, whether the citizens of this country will understand that they can't simply treat Dick Cheney like some Darth Vader who controls their very thoughts and actions. It is equally immoral to stand silently in the face of a war crime and do nothing. And that is what the citizens are doing. There's this gigantic yawn as we hear about a war crime on national television being discussed matter-of-factly by the vice president.

And by the way, Keith, there was a hearing not that long ago that was equally shocking, with an administration official sort of casually comparing different types of waterboarding, like the stuff that Pol Pot used as opposed to the Spanish Inquisition. And I stood there in disbelief that in Congress we were having this rather pleasant conversation about American-style waterboarding.

OLBERMANN: But is that, what you are referring in there, the collective yawn, is that the legal general principle on which Dick Cheney is resting his case? That waterboarding is not torture. It is not illegal, therefore it would not be a war crime?

TURLEY: Well, in my view there is no plausible legal theory because there is existing legal precedent establishing that this is a war crime. That's why Attorney General Mukasey refused to answer the question. Because he could not answer the question at his confirmation: "Is waterboarding a crime, a war crime?" Because he knew that the cases establish that it is. If he answered that questioned, there would be serious repercussions.

OLBERMANN: All right. A hundred dollars to any Senator who asks Eric Holder that question.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

The Iraqi TV journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi who threw his shoes at the Bullshitter-in-Chief is not the first to do it. The difference is Zaidi missed. But as Ed Sullivan used to say, he put on "a really big shew." Too bad Señor Wences isn't around to comment.

You just read the special five-day, 16-blogger AJ conversation A Debate on Arts Education, right? OK, so maybe you didn't. Well, never mind. Here's the real thing: arts education in action, musically speaking. It's a work for trombone choir and tuba by a composer who writes that he dedicated it to the memory of "the public school teacher and band director who started me in music when I was twelve years old." Listen via Quicktime or via Windows Media. And for all you horn players out there, here's the score.

At the Council on Foreign Depredations Relations this morning I expected to hear what I thought would be a Southern-fried swan song from Laura Bush. Instead it turned out to be a speech someone wrote for her about women's rights, because today marks the 60th anniversary of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

She especially deplored the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan and by the junta in Burma. Such a humanitarian! I don't know what I was thinking. But then it occurred to me the declaration she was honoring hadn't made much difference to the Taliban or to the junta or, for that matter, to her husband.

Somehow the Bullshitter-in-Chief's track record on human rights, let alone on the U.N., went unmentioned. After the speech there wasn't even a peep about that from her interviewer (a CNN correspondent brought in for the occasion).

(Crossposted on HuffPo)

I don't know what took me so long. It's old news by now. But I'm still amazed. Here's a text in English about William Styron, chosen at random from this blog. (Actually, someone else chose it.) Now here it is in Spanish, in French, in German ... OK, how about Chinese?

Gawd! Put in any text you like. The translation takes no more than seconds. If the translated text is from a Web page, you can mouse over any particular sentence and have it highlighted in a pop-up box in the original language.

How good are the translations? How should I know? I don't read Chinese. But I do have some rusty French, some rudimentary Spanish, and a faint recognition of German -- and they looked intelligible to me.

Postscript: Supervert writes: "Google's translation service is just one of the many reasons they approach being a technological equivalent of the old-time conception of divinity. All-knowing and able to speak in tongues... Kicks the shit out of me too. And it all started with an algorithm cooked up by two dorky grad students in a dorm room."

PPS: Bill Osborne replies, "I always thought God was a bit dumb." And adds, "Hier are sum dokumenten you can tast the Programm mit." He offers a comparison of the Googlematic German and Italian translations of this original text in English with the idiomatic German and Italian translations. But he concedes that "even if full of errors and sometimes misleading," the Google service "will be a boon for an extensive correspondence I have going with someone who only speaks Spanish."

Malcolm Mc Neill's unpublished memoir about his longtime collaboration with William S. Burroughs, Observed While Falling, is just as spellbinding as the lost art of Ah POOK IS HERE, his current show at Salomon Arts (now extended through Jan. 16 ) in Manhattan. Mc Neill is one of those artists who can really write.

The memoir, which I've had the pleasure of reading, provides more than a lucid word portrait of Burroughs and what it was like to work with him. It is touching. Also clarifying. When it comes to Burroughs's ideas, I've never seen them put as well, except by le maître himself. Mc Neill can also be entertaining, and he's got an ear for dialogue.

Here's a funny little scene from a chapter called NOT-A-FU-cking-TWITCH!

...The money ran out in no time. There were days when I was flipping a coin to decide whether to buy milk for tea, or a pack of cigarettes. Inevitably I had to look for freelance work. It was my first New York summer and the apartment had no air conditioner. It also had no table. When I finally picked up illustrations for National Lampoon and Marvel Comics, I had to paint them resting on my knees. Bill suggested I work at the loft whenever I needed, and gave me a key.

He'd started a monthly column for Crawdaddy Magazine called Time of the Assassins and for a few months I also supplied illustrations for that.

I was at the loft one night finishing up one of them when he came home from a dinner party. He'd had a few drinks naturally. He came over and placed a piece of hash on the desk.

"Here! I got a present for you!"

"Well thanks Bill. I'll smoke it later."

"No man! It's not dope! It's aphrode-e-e-e-siac! Ted Morgan gave me a bunch of it. Got it down in South America. Says it really works."

"Great! I'll save it for a special occasion."

We talked about the picture for a while then he wandered off. Five minutes later I noticed it was very quiet. As I was packing up my stuff to leave I saw the back of his head on the other side of the kitchen counter. He still had his hat on. It wasn't moving. I figured he'd fallen asleep in the chair so I crept over to wake him. When I came around the corner of the counter, I found him very much awake; sitting in his boxer shorts staring intently down at his crotch.

"Not-a-fu-cking-twitch!" he said.

© Malcolm Mc Neill 2008

(Crossposted at HuffPo)