inkbluesky

singular bliss 

A Dilettante’s Guide to Art - 1001 Paintings You Should See Before You Die acknowledges the question “What is Painting?” The answer: “Who cares?”

 Maybe it was the hope that an old practice could remake itself in a new world. Whatever the explanation, painting managed to remake itself and painters rushed into the 20th century with purpose. They had discovered a new subject matter, painting itself, and they were hot to show off its possibilities. Painting took on a double task, not just to do what it was doing, but also to make a claim about what it should be doing. Painters started talking about painting within their own paintings.

That bit at the end of the article title was probably used for a little shock effect. Mr. Meis is very egalitarian in his view of art, but not to the point where if painting actually ended he or we would not care. Painting like rock and roll has had its share of people all too ready to declare it dead as an art form. Then wouldn’t you know a few people come along and reinvent painting and rock, or at least reinvigorate them. Those art forms can’t die or rather stop saying anything as long as someone comes along brash enough to say wait a minute I have something to add. Something a little new to say. Society and culture change if only slightly during the average lifetime and as long as that is the case painters will have grist for new thoughts new perspectives. Though there was and still is a trend in painting and film that should bother us. They have both become too concerned with themselves as subjects. I’m not talking about films about film making necessarily, but making films that are filled with sly and so so sly references to other films. Rather then taking ideas and trying to film them directors are inspired by other films of ideas. In many cases fourth or fifth generation removed from artistic and philosophical ideas that inspired the original. One of the best things that film schools to do to improve the next generation of film makers to make their classes read more and view fewer films. Work from the source, not a poor copy four generations and one medium removed.

Corruption is “Norm” Within Iraqi Government 

The report depicts the Iraqi government as riddled with corruption and criminals-and beyond the reach of anticorruption investigators. It also maintains that the extensive corruption within the Iraqi government has strategic consequences by decreasing public support for the U.S.-backed government and by providing a source of funding for Iraqi insurgents and militias.

 palapa hut fiji

If you’ve ever been to a landfill (consider wearing heavy boots and getting a tetanus shot first) its mostly what you would think a huge pile of garbage, but you can find things that might be useful like odd pieces of wood to build a table or small book case. Christopher Hitchens is a lot like a landfill, mostly useless junk, but on occasion he has says something worthwhile, God Bless Me, It’s a Best-Seller!

One of America’s most seminal books is William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he argues that the subjective experience of the divine can be understood only by the believer. I have just been finding out how true this is. You hear all the time that America is an intensely religious nation, but what you don’t hear is that there are almost as many religions as there are believers. Moreover, many ostensible believers are quite unsure of what they actually believe. And, to put it mildly, the different faiths don’t think that highly of one another. The emerging picture is not at all monolithic.

Very obvious, but rarely acknowledged.

Town Square and church by Cornelius Springer

The Curse of Modernity 

Contemporary social science has pretty well established that believers and unbelievers commit unbridled immorality in roughly equal proportions. Nevertheless, the assumption that one cannot be reliably good without God persists in the United States, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that a declared unbeliever almost certainly cannot be elected to national office. Around half the population identify themselves as born-again Christians and believe in angels, miracles, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the special creation of the Earth within the last 10,000 years. So if (as everyone seems to agree) America is in decline morally, an excess of skeptical rationalism is probably not to blame. Still, the modern world is undeniably more secular than the premodern one, especially among the educated, and that fact must surely have large psychological, if not behavioral, consequences. What have been, and will be, the effects of the Enlightenment on the individual and collective moral psychology of the West?

Statistically our prisons are filled with Catholics and Protestants, while atheists make up the smallest percentage of the prison population. I don’t know that the U.S. is in a particular period of  moral decline, but if it is the reason cannot be because of lawless Darwin reading disbelievers. That leaves millions of people afraid to look at the truth, at the way things are and come up with another explanation and even more challenging to come up with some other answers to our social and moral issues besides calls for yet another big tent meeting revival. Organized religion or better the true dogmatists have become the guy that keeps banging his head against the wall thinking that eventually he’ll see a different result.

purple loosestrife wallpaper

H/T to The Sideshow for this Categorically Unequal

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has become a vastly more stratified society. Among the world’s developed nations, it has by far the highest inequalities of income and wealth. The rise in inequality has been attributed to a variety of factors, including globalization, technological change, and market segmentation. Nonetheless, all countries compete in the same global economy and face the same technological and market conditions, yet the United States is unique among advanced nations in the degree to which it allows these large, macro-level forces to generate inequality.

[ ]… People are naturally prone to favor conceptual frames that advantage them and privilege their own access to material, symbolic, and emotional resources. Although everyone may prefer a framing of social reality that serves their interests, people with power and resources have more influence than others and their frames are more likely to be accepted and used in society.

It is difficult to appreciate this process. It is not something that most of us have felt or seen in a way that is easily defined, it is a tragedy that has played out over the generations. This stratification is every bit as tragic and hurtful as a bridge or mine collapse, but since it isn’t encapsulated in one event, one acute moment in time we can’t see the photo or read the one blurb that makes the story something that we can relate to. It is not about capitalism is bad let’s find something else. It is about making capitalism work in a way that has a soul.

rusty shadows

The GOP’s Bathroom Problem

The Nation — What’s up with Republican politicos getting arrested by undercover cops for soliciting sex in public restrooms? First, Florida state representative Bob Allen, formerly John McCain’s state campaign co-chair, was arrested in July after he offered a police officer $20 for the privilege of performing oral sex. And today, news broke that back in June, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), long the subject of gay rumors, was arrested in a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes cop investigating lewd conduct in the men’s bathroom. Both men are married–to women.

The problem here isn’t that a few people have committed some earth shattering crime, the problem is the sanctimonious hypocrisy that is at the center of these scandals. If you belong to a group of people that regularly shouts your purported moral superiority to everyone that doesn’t belong to the Kool Konservative Klub and then set about engaging in some pretty tawdry behavior then you’re just not just a fraud you’re swimming in the deep end of the delusion pool.

leaving port. in memory of my old friend who had one of the world’s best jazz collections, told great stories and gave truth to the myth that you can be tough as nails and have a kind heart.

Like the occasional hail storm we regularly get a credentialed journalist that takes a few pot shots at blogs. Recently it was Michael Skube in the L.A. Times. Jay Rosen shoots back, The journalism that bloggers actually do

Story jumps to last Sunday. Josh Marshall reads his name in Skube’s column. Strange, because Marshall’s blog isn’t representative of the charges, which are depressingly familiar. “The blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more,” Skube wrote. But there’s a lot more than bubbling opinion at Marshall’s bustling site, which includes TPM Muckraker, where two full-time investigative reporters work. Had the author ever seen it?

In an email exchange, the author tells Marshall, “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site.” Huh? Turns out an editor stuck Marshall’s name in there because the column didn’t have enough examples in it. Skube agreed to the script change, but this meant he had no idea what his character was saying.

Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it “journalistic malpractice.” And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube’s columns, there’s a teacher who doesn’t believe in doing his homework - any homework.

I don’t do journalism on this blog, but Marshall does and Steven Clemons. And since we’ve developed a terrible national habit of conflating editorialists with regular reporters Digby does such great analysis of the news that after reading her and then listening to some bonehead on TV you get the definite feeling that the broadcast media is in dire need of an overhaul - as an example, how in the world does a brainless smug twit like Glenn Beck get an hour a day to dribble over issues yet there is no broadcast equivalent of Marshall or Digby. Media criticism is a good thing, blogs included, but if Skube and others really cared about the state of modern journalism they might want to turn their attention to the huge failures of Faux and CNN and then work their way over to blogs.

As we all know by now where the Trilateral Commission leaves off running the world from their bunker under Gotham City, Japanese teen girls take over. The lash phenomenon here and here. I don’t know what to think, well except wouldn’t it make your eye lids tired lifting all that weight.