a stable for idols

Camille Paglia provides yet more evidence that religion is increasingly the center around which the future of the humanities will revolve.

To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

Via 3qd

they're having some rad screenings up there today

How is it possible that Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died on the same day? We should all stay home and give thanks toward the cinema heavens.

just stooges to our senses

Think you're not easily manipulated?

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

and I have trouble with a pencil

This Japanese rice art is phenomenal:

Each year since 1993 the farmers of the Japanese town of Inakadate have been creating massive images with rice by growing a purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice alongside the local green-leafed tsugaru-roman rice.

sunday short stack

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." - Bertrand Russell

• That's Dr. Brian May to you.
• Maybe Dr. May has something to say about the UFOs over England.
• Planet Hiltron shows us what celebrities would look like if they lived in Nebraska and worked in the accounting department of the local paper mill.
• French women don't get fat because they choose not to have kids.
• Ovid in Ovid, Colorado
• That's it. I'm the victim of a scam.
• Our distant cousin has won the Olaudah Equiano Prize for Fiction.
• The home of hip hop gets historic landmark status.
• The Top 10 Weirdest and Funniest Japanese Condoms
• Damn. Now what's my excuse?
• If you could be any animal, what would you be?

no country for old men

ville spontanee

I'm into this Neighborhood Project over at LAist. Today's entry is downtown's Fashion District, "a funky cross between New York’s Canal Street and a Middle-Eastern bazaar (but with Mexicans)."

another sign of the apocalypse

I love the photos over at Bluejake. They make me nostalgic for my New York days. However, the latest photo description contained a phrase that just should NOT EXIST:

...to the East is Ridgewood, in Queens, which is apparently where all the artists priced out of Bushwick have been moving.

What the hell is going on over there??

this is a warning from god to the world

Just a little apocalypse for your hump day morning...

is that my belt?

You can now check out the trailer for the latest Wes Anderson film, The Darjeeling Limited.

theresa duncan (1966-2007)

I often looked to Theresa Duncan, aka Wit of the Staircase, as someone who had all the things I wished I had.
She seemed to live this charmed, glamorous, sensual life, but now she's dead by her own hand and her partner of 12 years, artist Jeremy Blake, is missing and presumed dead. There is so very little that makes life less difficult.

strip away the audible

It seems to be a summer tradition to revive the age-old question: Where is the novel that can capture the essence of rock'n'roll?

Some have been better than others, a few have been excellent, but none have truly convinced. And here's why:

a) Writing about music is hard enough at the best of times; try writing about music that doesn't exist. The basic inescapable flaw in every rock novel is the fact that the reader can't hear the music and thus struggles to identify with the artist. Strip away any audible, self-evident sign of talent - ie the songs - and most rock stars are simply posturing bores. Hardly the stuff of great fiction.

b) Good novelists have a tendency to get sloppy when they write about popular music - it's an exercise in cultural slumming that almost inevitably lends itself to unoriginal plots and indulgent writing. From their names on down - Ormus Cana? Bucky Wunderlick?! - the characters rarely ring true, apparently hell-bent on playing out the author's own fantasies rather than attempting to illuminate what this great rock and roll circus actually means.

c) Rock novels are pitched at an enormously demanding readership. If the atmosphere and language isn't spot on, we turn off. If we don't share the musical tastes of the writer, we struggle to engage: think of Iain Banks' patently awful prog rock band Frozen Gold in Espedair Street. We're so acutely aware of the tiniest rituals of a gig or the peculiarly nuanced language deployed by musicians that an author has to avoid a minefield of cliche while still creating something familiar enough to convince - and that's a tough tightrope to walk.

tell us how you really feel

Via Slate: "And the L.A. Times' Robert Abele breathes contempt for [Captivity]'s once-acclaimed director: 'Roland Joffé … has seen his career go from bewailing 'The Killing Fields' of Cambodia to slobbering over the hell-maze of a hooded kidnapper/ murderer. It's the movie business equivalent of encountering someone you once knew begging for money on the street.'"

one little fish changed him

If I were in Brooklyn right now, I wouldn't need a car, but I would also be happy to accept Jonathan Ames's - uh, the Herring Wonder's - invitation to the literary bout of the century, an event I'm sure will soon be as infamous as the Gore Vidal/Norman Mailer smackdown. New Yorkers, mark your calendars. The e-mail promises card girls and costumes.

awaiting fate

Last night, as I pulled out of my employer's parking garage, my car made a thunkety sound and died. No efforts would get the engine to start again even though it was happy to turn over as many times as we asked. I now await word as to my future from the Russian mechanics. Please send any good car karma my way.