United States
>I was a foreigner everywhere
>
Curtis Brown considers the many lives of Omar Sharif @ Bidoun.
Omar Sharif represented Egypt in the 1964 Olympics for the game of contract bridge, according to one of the more benign rumors circulating about him on the internet. The secular trinity of Google, Google Books, and Wikipedia are uncharacteristically useless in confirming or denying the story, but the fact is, it just can’t be true, because bridge isn’t an Olympic sport. Bridge players have tried for decades to make it one, and in the late 1990s, the Olympic Committee recognized as it as one of two “mind sports,” along with chess. But the committee, which apparently finds curling perfectly tolerable viewing, has yet to be persuaded that the bridge is, in any conceivable sense, watchable. After considerable digging, I was able to trace the source of the rumor to a 1966 story in the Washington Post, which reported that Omar Sharif had captained the United Arab Republic’s bridge team for the World Bridge Olympiad of 1964. So much for the legacy media: there was indeed something called the World Bridge Olympiad, held every four years between 1960 and 2004, but the United Arab Republic — the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria — ceased to exist in 1961.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Still, there is something apt about the bogus story. If anyone could have turned contract bridge into a spectator sport, it would have been the Omar Sharif of the swinging sixties. He was religiously devoted to the sport, occasionally refusing films if they interfered with his bridge-playing schedule. And he tried valiantly to bring attention to the game, even forming a barnstorming “Omar Sharif Bridge Circus,” a caravan of crack players who traveled the world playing tournaments and exhibition matches. Truly, there has never been a more beautiful, more glamorous bridge ambassador than Omar Sharif. The only way he might have given the Olympic Committee something to watch is if he had agreed to compete, like Olympians in the age of Pindar, naked.
>Beyond the individual
>
 |
| Greg Salvatori @ GRGphoto |
Alison Powell on alternative paradigms of thinking @ New Public Thinking
I composed many of these thoughts while I was taking a very long walk through the forest last week, and I’ve left this post mostly as it was when I jotted it down on my return. I hope you think of it as a kind of walking lecture, that meanders through some things I thought were important. I was inspired by Andrew’s insistence that we should ‘re-narrate’ our experience, and this is one of the things that I hope public thinking can do.
I was really struck on my walk by the changes in the forest since the last time I’d been there – changes that were all the result of climate change – which is of course, only one of the complex problems that w are faced with at the moment. Climate change is hard because it requires us to consider the interests of people very unlike us, in a historical or geographical moment we can’t understand. So I started to think about the importance of public thinking as being linked to two things:
First: Thinking Beyond the Individual
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Second: Thinking Beyond the Present
>A dream that we can see and feel
>
David Ulin on the landscape of Los Angeles @ Design Observer.
During the late 1980s, when I was first feeling out my relationship with Los Angeles, I used to visit from New York on a semi-regular basis, staying with a friend in his duplex in West Hollywood. Back then, I knew nothing about Southern California: The whole region was a question mark, or more accurately a sprawling emptiness, an outline with just the broadest strokes (Melrose Avenue, the area around my friend’s apartment, the Venice Boardwalk) etched in. All these years later, I’ve come to think of this as somehow representative, since even after nearly two decades of living here, I still find the place elusive, difficult to see except in pieces that often confound my sense not just of what this city is, but of what cities are, how they grow and operate, the processes by which they are made.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
L.A. is, after all, among the most constructed of urban environments, a landscape almost completely dependent on technology to survive. Such an imperative is rooted into its very history: Perhaps the most important act in the development of Los Angeles — its creation myth — is the 1904 real estate deal in which, equipped with secret knowledge of a plan to irrigate the arid San Fernando Valley with water from the Owens River, a cabal of civic leaders including Henry Huntington, E. H. Harriman and Harrison Gray Otis bought up huge swaths of the Valley at cheap prices; the arrangement ultimately yielded profits of more than $100 million. The story is an almost perfect metaphor, with its insider intrigues and hidden agendas, and its tension between vision and corruption, by which L.A. is revealed as a territory of overlapping surfaces, where private and public aspirations collide. Still more, it is the incubation point of the modern city, streamlined and speed-obsessed, built on stolen water and expansive freeways, a landscape of celluloid and light. Were it not for the Valley land grab, there would be no need for the vast civic infrastructure without which Los Angeles could not exist, nor for the mythologies by which the place has come to define itself. “I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it,” Raymond Chandler would write forty-five years later in his novel The Little Sister. “It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.”
>The world no longer believes in suffering
>
Atif Rafay, a convicted murderer, reflects on freedom and punishment @ The Walrus.
Once upon a time I saw a documentary featuring black and white footage of Glenn Gould, shot soon after his first recording of The Goldberg Variations, in which he had taken such extraordinary liberties — excessive liberties, some thought — with Bach. Although by then in his mid-twenties, the pianist gave the impression of being still almost a boy, still very much the prodigy. Seated outdoors, he answered his interviewer reluctantly, as if unused to conversation. Shifting around in the chair awkwardly, as if also unaccustomed to furniture, he spoke in quick runs, punctuated with abrupt halts. But gradually enthusiasm overcame diffidence. As he warmed to his theme, he became himself: voluble, playful, precise. The nimble fingers danced his ideas for the camera; the face radiated happiness and confidence. “I’ve often thought that I would like to try my hand at being a prisoner,” he said later in the film. “I’ve never understood the preoccupation with freedom as it is reckoned in the Western world… to be incarcerated would be the perfect test of one’s inner mobility.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I had known Gould’s recordings and writings for more than a decade when I heard this declaration, but though I had been incarcerated for just as long I didn’t think I understood freedom. I felt, rather, that prison had left me bereft. If I had been changed, it was not for the better.
>Icon of the new
>
 |
| Justine Frischmann @ Sensitive Skin |
Petr Fischer on the paradoxical image of America for Europe @ Eurozine.
“Business–Answer–Solution” reads the advertising banner of the subsidiary of a foreign company in the centre of Prague. At first sight, the banner is not particularly interesting, in this case meaning that it is not particularly surprising. Surprising things are those that capture our attention, that shock us in their particular way. This corporate motto repeats the famous, infinitely repeated mantra of aggressive global capitalism, its focus purely pragmatic: give us a problem and we will come up with a solution that profits both you and us. “Win-win capitalism”, one could say in today’s international newspeak.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What is interesting – in other words disconcerting – is the fact that the banner covers the window of a small shop situated directly behind the National Museum, a building that – as in every other European city – symbolizes a certain perception of historicity cultivated on the old continent at least since the nineteenth century. The National Museum preserves the history of the Czech nation, and the people who work in it analyse and reflect on Czech national existence, its peculiarity, uniqueness, difference or connectedness. This activity is not governed by the pragmatic slogan of performance, of completed things, of faits accomplis; rather, it is ruled by a different three words, directed at thinking and its incessant, uncertain movement: Discussion–Question–Searching.
>Sexuality is a funny thing
>
 |
| Bea Fresno @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Ally Mookerjee on the complex identities of South-Asian lesbians @ Zooch.
Sometime in the summer of 2009, I learned of a shadowy online entity named “Pink Aag.” Its purported mission, the Web site claimed, was to be a matchmaker for South Asian lesbians.
It said, “Whatever type of woman you are looking for—high femme, femme, dyke-y, sassy, androgynous, soft butch, stone butch, openly out, out-to-degrees, privately gay, artsy, scientific, literary, career-minded, family-orientated, a mixture of any of the above,” [visit us]. Its slogan, “If she’s queer, you can find her here!” sounded like the uninspiring punch line for a downscale pet shop.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Unsurprisingly, it’s ceased to exist. I found it remarkable though, for nothing else other than its diverse, if somewhat tacky, taxonomy of lesbians. Reality, as it turns out, is far less colorful and heterogeneous. The South Asian lesbian scene, in New York City, for instance, is anything but motley, inclusive, and diverse.
>Life consisted entirely of small economies
>
 |
| Steven McPherson @ Itch/ |
Geoff Dyer remembers the poverty and pleasures of a being an only child @ Threepenny Review.
My mother often quoted with approval the maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Unfortunately she thought this was intended as exhortation rather than warning. The mother’s instinct to indulge her only child was thereby reinforced by a higher authority. I was so spoiled that on the day my parents unexpectedly came to pick me up at primary school in the middle of the morning—I was about eight at the time—I told the teacher that it was probably because they wanted to buy me a toy. In fact it was to go to Shropshire where my grandmother was dying. I was also spoiled because I was such a sickly thing. I spent so much time away from infant school that the truant officer visited our house to see what was going on. What was going on was that I was always ill. When I went into hospital to have my tonsils and adenoids out—a panacea in those bountiful days of the NHS—my parents brought me a Beatrix Potter book each day. I missed having brothers and sisters but I liked the way that I didn’t have to share my toys with anyone else. It also meant I got more presents at Christmas and on my birthday.
 |
| Geoff Dyer on Amazon |
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )This kind of pampering was balanced by the way that my parents had grown up in the depression of the 1930s. They have spent their lives saving. My mother worked as a dinner lady—serving school dinners (i.e., lunches) in the canteen of the school I went to until I was eleven. Later, after I had left home, she became a cleaner at a hospital. My father worked as a sheet-metal worker. They have always been able to make more money by saving than by earning. It has never been worth their while to employ anyone to do anything for them. On the one hand, then, I was spoiled constantly—because I was an only child, because I was a skinny, sickly little boy; on the other, life consisted entirely of small economies, of endless scrimping and saving that became second nature. If I grew up having everything I wanted, that is partly because my desires soon became shaped by the assumption that we could not afford things, that everything was too expensive, that we could do without almost anything. Many times, when I asked my dad if I could have something that had taken my eye in a shop, he responded by saying, “You don’t want that.” To which I wanted to reply, “But I do.” And then, after a while I stopped wanting things. (I now wonder if my father was unconsciously using “want” in an earlier, archaic sense of “lack,” a distinction capitalism has since pledged all its energies to rendering obsolete.)
>My own unasked-for notion of freedom
>
David McConnell recounts his time teaching in prison @ Granta.
My cynical, chain-smoking superior had one of those ruined faces that many over-qualified teachers end up with. A lifelong backlog of unimparted knowledge must corrode the flesh. He seemed glad to present me with at least one morsel of wisdom: ‘The inmates and the COs in here are exactly the same people. Exactly. Switch the jumpsuits for the uniforms – you’d never notice any difference. It makes me want to puke when I hear military types or cops talk about “the bad guys”. Self-serving crap.’ In fact, the COs – don’t call them ‘guards’ if you want to get along – were much less sympathetic than the prisoners. Petty obstruction and malice were their only amusements. None ever smiled except at somebody else’s misfortune, and even then it was a brief, pinched smile, full of self-loathing.
As soon as you’ve crossed the causeway to Riker’s Island you feel the oppressive lethargy hanging over the place. It’s as thick and as isolating as the fog around Skull Island in King Kong. Only instead of the bellowing of a giant ape, you get the roar of the planes going in and out of LaGuardia. Lessons, conversations, thoughts, words of wisdom all come to a stop until the noise fades. My superior made a sarcastic grimace and stubbed his cigarette out on the yard’s immaculate concrete. He nudged the butt through a drain with his toe. ‘If you smoke, make sure you get rid of the butt or they’ll come down really hard on the poor kid who was supposed to sweep up.’
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
David McConnell on Amazon Our school was a tinny double-wide trailer. Students were issued a stub of a pencil which had to be turned in after class. If anybody got out of hand I was authorized to have them do push-ups, boot camp style. I never did, but knowing I could piqued a sadistic streak in me which I suspect all teachers have.
>Memory, anticipation and immediate experience
>
Tim Culvahouse on the racial geography of New Orleans @ Design Observer.
Cities, being by-and-large large, rarely have well-defined fronts. Chicago has one, facing Lake Michigan. To my mind, the clearest front of Manhattan is the wall of buildings surrounding Central Park — an appropriately inward-facing front.
New Orleans, however, has a decided front, the Mississippi River face of Jackson Square, the former Place d’Armes, with St. Louis Cathedral flanked by the Cabildo and the Presbytere and the square itself embraced by the counterpoised arms of the Pontalba Apartments. It is a picture postcard front, not only because it appears ubiquitously on picture postcards, but also because, other than on postcards, one rarely encounters it head-on. The only conveyances that regularly arrive on Decatur Street at the front of the square are the mule-drawn carriages that offer languorous tours of the Vieux Carrè, the present-day French Quarter.
 |
| Tim Culvahouse on Amazon |
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Pretty much everyone else approaches Jackson Square from Canal Street, where the St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street streetcars run, along with many of the city’s bus lines; and along and beyond which are most of the city’s major hotels. From the streetcar stop, you walk downriver along Chartres (char’-turs) Street through the Quarter, arriving at the Square sidewise. Still, you have that postcard view in your mind as you sidle up to the Cathedral along the face of the Cabildo, even if it’s your first time there.
>The task of public philosophy
>
 |
| Trey Speegle @ The Morning News/ |
Andrew Taggart on the value of public philosophy to left politics @ New Public Thinking.
On Sunday, February 13, I received an email to this effect:
I enjoyed reading your recent essay [“In the Land of Bloombergia,” Counterpunch, 9 February 2011] critiquing the critique of your Mayor Bloomberg. I have much the same thoughts when I read a lot of left critiques of our cultural and political elites. It usually doesn’t take creative genius to perceive that these elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, whereas it would take some real inspiration to propose something original that we all could do about it.
After running through a list of failures from healthcare reform to the War on Terror to the “corporate welfare scheme,” the writer concludes on a Leninist note, asking “what we can DO about such things.”
The final question resonates on two levels. Like most of us, he is exasperated by what little has been done since the end of the Cold War to fundamentally change the world order, and his words, like ours, are laced with a touch of fatalism as if to say that there is not much that can be done. It feels as if the war against capitalism and statism has been lost on both fronts and as if, in our obsessive criticisms of the status quo, we were expressing—interminably, Sisyphusianly—our sense of collective trauma as well as our acute feeling of resentment.
But there is a second way of interpreting his question. On this construal, his utterance is an accusation, in Kantian terms “a tribunal of reason.” Radical leftist politics, he seems to be asking, what have you done for us lately? But in asking that leftist politics say what it has or has not done to improve our political situation, he is demanding that it give an account of itself.
« Previous Entries
altimoniere 