Obama's notes during his first briefing

via wulffmorgenthaler.com

GREECE'S MAELSTROM OF VIOLENCE

REUTERS

A riot policeman in flames runs to escape during a riot in Athens on Dec. 12: Dashed hopes and opportunities

The Revolt of a Disappointed Generation

By Manfred Ertel and Daniel Steinvorth

The violent unrest that followed the shooting of a 15-year-old boy has driven Greece to the brink of a political crisis. The rioting marks an explosion of rage by the country's young people who have few prospects of carving out a place in a society where all initiative is stifled.

The mood in the jam-packed auditorium was reminiscent of the student protest movements of 1968. Hundreds of young people thronged their way into the dark room, sat on the steps or stood on tables. They shouted "murderers" and "pigs" -- and thunderously applauded calls for revenge. Cigarette smoke and the smell of sweat hung heavily in the air.

Jorgos Barutas, 29, had to struggle to make himself heard. The computer engineer, sporting a five-day beard and steel-rimmed glasses, stood at the foot of the steep rows of seats and shouted up to the audience with a throaty voice. "We have to hold out until the government steps down." Applause. "We have to transform the protests into a political movement." Applause. "We have to formulate political objectives." Followed again by thunderous applause. Barutas stepped down from the stage, feeling satisfied, and the students poured out of the hall.

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SOLIDARITY WITH ATHENS

Police Squash Violent Hamburg Protest

While police and demonstraters continued to battle on the streets of Athens over the weekend, German police broke up a large sympathy protest after it grew violent.

Scores of German riot police confronted an estimated 950 protesters in Hamburg over the weekend who were expressing their sympathy for student protesters in Greece by marching under the banner of "Solidarity is a weapon."

Police reported that the protest actions -- which allegedly included numerous members of the far-left anarchist scene -- were broken up on Saturday after they escalated to rioting, with special police units and journalists being pelted with bottles, iron rods and fireworks. Four police officers were reported injured.

Photo Gallery: Rioting Continues in Athens, Hamburg:

12/22/2008

1 of 12

Protest actions, some violent, continued to bring chaos to the streets of Athens over
the weekend as police battled street-fighting sparked by the Dec. 6 police killing of
15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

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Merry Christmas

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7002

7002 from HOTEL on Vimeo.

The vacuum echo of sound silently retreats from the milk bottle manifest. Hidden away in the shadow of light the leading role is cast for unseen immorality as the logic of thought lurks fallow in your cerebral membrane. A milliard bacteria are keeping time to tennis play, drawing shapes in rhythmical sequences under the soles of innumerable shoes. Do you ever think about what that means? How life’s myth gains shape the moment our concluding thoughts stop our senses. Under the screeching sound of hand breaks we translate our perceptions, 7002 is a film made for the unconditioned senses.

In the past Hotel & Duvel have earned their credits creatively in the concrete jungle and in the present they stretch the boundaries of street and urban clichés. They’re responsible for a film that will engage the minds of future thinkers. Life is not linear for those who walk the asphalt with a free state of mind.

7002 had its première in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in September 2007 and was screened at several international filmfestivals. For more information please contact info@project7002.com

2007, 10 Min, 35mm, 16:9 Anamorphic

Written & Directed by Ferry van Zijderveld and Jay Sunsmith Sound Design Duvel D.O.P. Lennert Hillege Gaffer Luuk Zonnenberg Production Manager Remke Annnema Editors Govert Janse and Joris van Grunsven Art Director Jaqueline Oostveen and Seabert Deuling Styling SELCYA Food Styling Claartje Lindhout Producer Julius Ponten Executive Producers Sasha Dees, Philip Powel Co Producer HOTEL Produced by Triomf & John 106

© Hotel & Triomf 2007. All rights reserved. This film is protected under national and international copyright laws. Reproduction or broadcasting of (parts of) this film, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Hotel. info@project7002.com

How Jewish is Hollywood?

A poll finds more Americans disagree with the statement that 'Jews control Hollywood.' But here's one Jew who doesn't.

So I've taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that's what we do best. I'm weighing several slogans, including: "Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!"; "Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible"; and "Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all."

December 19, 2008
Joel Stein
I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

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Victor & Susie: a snail tale made of type

Posted by Mark, 15 December 2008

Victor and Susie is a new children’s book from design studio Brighten the Corners, illustrated entirely from type. The story concerns Victor – a snail with a hole in his shell – and Susie, who decides to help him get better…

“The main idea was to stress the images and text equally,” explains the book’s author, Billy Kiossoglou of BTC, “and play with the fact that they’re both made out of the same ‘ingredients’, which are simply arranged and subsequently read differently. Children’s books often treat text and images like they belong to altogether different worlds and we wanted to avoid that.”

Kiossoglou also wanted to create a narrative that evoked the sense of rhythm and pacing found in comic books. “I didn’t want to rush the story,” he says, “but allow time for dialogue, and let Victor & Susie have the odd exchange about little things that weren’t really crucial for the story.

“Keeping the conventional third person narrative in the text, as opposed to speech bubbles, meant a parent could read the story to a child, while at the same time, the text treatment was sufficiently unobtrusive, not to annoy a ‘trained’ adult comic reader.”

And as for the type used in the book: “There’s quite a bit of Futura, for its good circular Os and Cs, VAG for it’s rounded edges, a few Greek letters when I needed them, and anything which suited the shape I was looking for,” Kiossoglou explains.

Victor & Susie is a pocket-sized 72 page edition, printed on recycled paper. The comic book is available in bookshops or from the Brighten the Corners online shop (£5).

Designed and published by Brighten the Corners
Written and illustrated by Billy Kiossoglou
Typography by Frank Philippin

U.S. Plans to Sign Nuclear Pact With U.A.E.

Wall Street Journal

• DECEMBER 12, 2008, 12:00 A.M. ET

Proposed Cooperation With Middle Eastern Nation Would Face Hurdles in Congress on Proliferation Fears

"This is a real counterexample to what Iran is doing," said the senior U.S. official Thursday. "We're seeking commitments from nations within the Middle East that they're going to rely on the markets for nuclear fuel."

By JAY SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration plans to sign its first nuclear-cooperation agreement with a Middle Eastern nation within the next few weeks, according to a senior U.S. official, raising concerns among congressional critics who say the deal could fuel nuclear proliferation in the region.

The proposed deal with the United Arab Emirates has attracted attention because the U.A.E.'s largest trading partner is Iran. The U.A.E. has served in the past as a transshipment point for technology with military applications headed to Iran.

The move could place President-elect Barack Obama in a political tight spot with a Middle East ally by forcing him to decide whether to push Congress to ratify the agreement. He hasn't taken an official position on the deal. An Obama spokesman declined to comment. The Bush administration has championed the nuclear agreement with the U.A.E. as a model for promoting peaceful nuclear energy while guarding against weapons proliferation.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, ranking Republican in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation this week that would set conditions before Congress could approve the agreement. It would require that the next president certify the U.A.E. has taken extensive measures to cut off the flow of financing and sensitive technologies into Iran.

The U.A.E. says its nuclear-power program will have extensive safeguards to protect against nuclear materials being diverted. It has pledged to purchase nuclear fuel for its reactors from outside suppliers, rather than developing its own fuel. It says it would store nuclear waste externally. Also, it has agreed to allow monitoring and snap inspections by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency.

In recent months, the U.A.E. signed agreements with two American engineering companies -- Thorium Power Ltd. of Virginia and CH2M Hill of Colorado -- to oversee the development of its nuclear-power program. The U.A.E. has also hired a 30-year veteran of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, William Travers, to help run the U.A.E.'s nuclear regulatory body.

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Chop Shop

Dir: Ramin Bahrani

My Winnipeg

Dir: Guy Maddin

Ella Fitzgerald (live in Berlin -- 1968) -- Summertime

Sofa Surfers - Can I Get a Witness

Change.gov - The Official Web Site of the The U.S. Presidential Transition

From the begining -- Obama's campaign was tech-driven -- setting new precedents for all campaigns to follow. Indeed, the campaign's use of internet was instrumental in galvanizing support among the young and the technocrats.

Somewhere along the line I even read the term: "GeekPower"-- although not a new term -- but rather used for the first time in a positive, even proud (well, I was) connotation. As a follow up, now apparently the Obama team is going to take the White House Full Digital -- another first. Follow this link to the transition team's website, Not only providing detailed information about the team members with unequal transparency, but also encouraging participation by everyone with their suggestions, and their particular stories. Another first -- and truly welcome CHANGE.

Cathrine Opie - American Photographer

New York

September 26, 2008–January 7, 2009

Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black-and-white.

The exhibition, a major mid-career survey, gathers works from Opie’s most important series starting with the series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), that celebrate queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Houses (1995–96) Opie explores her interest in domestic architecture through portraits of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions, in which each facade retains as distinct a character, as do her portraits of friends. Domestic (1995–98) offers a flip side to these works, moving inside to document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities.

Freeways (1994–95), the first of her black-and-white series, offers a richly formal meditation on the Los Angeles highway system. Her impulse to document structures as icons and relics of human presence, especially those of Southern California, continues with Mini-malls (1997–98), which focuses on billboards, signs, and architectural elements identifying various ethnic and cultural groups in Los Angeles shopping centers. This series inaugurated the ongoing project American Cities (1997–present), an extended group of panoramic black-and-white series that so far has explored Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and St. Louis.

Opie then looked toward more natural settings and the communities that exist there. Icehouses (2001) focuses on the way architectural structures accumulate human history but are at the mercy of the natural landscape on which they depend. In Surfers (2003) the subjects are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, forever suspended on a tranquil sea, primed to catch the perfect ride that may never come. Recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life. In In and Around Home (2004–05), Opie’s family becomes a microcosm for political and social issues at play on a wider level, its status as a queer family becoming subtly apparent over the course of the series.

This exhibition is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. The Guggenheim Museum gratefully acknowledges the Leadership Committee for Catherine Opie: American Photographer. Organized by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography, with Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator.

How Muslims Made Europe

Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215

by David Levering Lewis

Norton, 473 pp., $29.95

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

Charlemagne's rule included at its high point most of France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, the west of Germany, Italy as far south as Rome, a strip in the north of Spain, and parts of Hungary and the Balkans. At nearly three and a half million square miles, it was larger than the continental United States. Charlemagne imposed Catholic orthodoxy on the pagan Saxons in the east at the point of a very sharp sword, massacring thousands of those who resisted, and suppressed heresy within Frankland with equal vigor. He created monastic centers of learning, drawing scholars from across his empire and beyond; and after the centuries of ignorance that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Gaul and Germania, the works of men like the Northumbrian Alcuin (poet, theologian, and restorer of the classical curriculum) created a Carolingian Renaissance.

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These achievements perhaps entitled Charlemagne to his self-conception as Rome's heir in the West, author of a Renovatio Romani Imperii, an imperial restoration. .........

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Urban Planning

July 9, 2007

Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s 1974 short story “I Bought a Little City” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.

Subscribe to the monthly fiction podcast to hear a a story from the New Yorker archives chosen by a current fiction writer. This and other podcasts are available through iTunes, or through our Feeds page.

Barthelme’s story “I Bought a Little City” can be found in the collection “Sixty Stories.” Buy the book from Amazon.

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out

		Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) November 19, 2008–February 2, 2009 The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor An Evening with Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist's lush multimedia installations playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality. MoMA commissioned the Swiss artist to create a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum's Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the space or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist.

Opening from individualEye on Vimeo.

Relaunching Capitalism

November 13, 2008

Author:	Lee Hudson Teslik

This weekend's gathering in Washington of the G-20 industrial and developing economies, billed by some as the second coming of the historic Bretton Woods conference, seems likely to produce more modest ends. Bretton Woods came after years of preparation and five years of world war; it created a global economic order more or less from scratch, establishing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The G-20 summit comes after less than a month of planning and won't involve finance ministers, whom analysts say would be needed for any broad new framework to be crafted. The most likely outcome, reports the Financial Times, will be general agreements about coordinating fiscal stimuli--not insignificant, but hardly an overhaul of the global financial order.

All the same, analysts will watch the summit for signs of possible regulation to come, and to gauge the mood of the world's leading policymakers at a time of economic distress. Over the course of 2008, the global economy has seen wild swings in equity and commodity prices, currency upheavals, and severe credit market turmoil, events detailed in a new CFR.org timeline. In the United States, the private investment bank model, which served as a driving force behind the financial successes of recent decades, eroded completely. Firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, riddled by financial uncertainty, voluntarily subjected themselves to greater oversight in exchange for access to short-term loans from the U.S. government. Washington also greatly expanded its own financial burdens, nationalizing the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and establishing pools of money to backstop struggling financial institutions.

Other countries and international institutions made similarly sweeping moves. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and other European leaders agreed to make large sums of money available (Economist) for recapitalizing banks--and possibly taking equity stakes in them as well. China, for its part, announced a $586 billion stimulus package that CFR's Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal write sends a clear signal that Beijing is redoubling its focus on economic growth. The World Bank and IMF have both expanded (Guardian) the amount of money available to smaller countries that find themselves in financial distress, though some countries, including Argentina and Pakistan, hesitated to take this money even when they found themselves on the brink of loan defaults. And dozens of countries, spanning every inhabited continent, have staged some form of economic intervention, from guaranteeing bank deposits to banning short sales of equities to adjusting the interest rates at which they lend money to banks. An interactive graphic from the Financial Times surveys the scope of these interventions.

The question now is whether the G-20 meetings will lead to more global coordination. The most important point, said panelists at a recent meeting cohosted by CFR, the Economist, and NYU's Stern Business School, is to provide a safety net for firms that are "too big to fail"--those whose collapse poses such a risk to the global economic order that it is worth the cost to taxpayers to keep them afloat. The panelists said this list should include any firm with a balance sheet tallying more than $1 trillion, and a handful of other companies of systemic importance (such as those that manage so many financial contracts that by collapsing they could bring down larger firms). Still, all three panelists noted the risk of regulatory overreach--a point echoed in a Washington Post op-ed by C. Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bergsten also issues a more direct warning about the G-20 summit. Should conflicts emerge over regulation, he writes, the summit could undermine confidence, mitigate regulatory gains made to date, and send markets "into a new tailspin."

Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.

Religulous (2008)

Dir: Larry Charles (Borat)
Written by: Bill Maher
Official Site

Swear Off Market Fundamentalism

FPIF Op-Ed

Robin Broad and John Cavanagh | November 14, 2008
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco

"As long as U.S. officials continue to refuse to face the reality of a post-market fundamentalist world, they will further contribute to the crisis. The Bush administration should start working with President-elect Obama's advisors immediately to open up a genuine global dialogue aimed at closing down the financial casino and replacing it with rules and institutions that put people and the planet first."

Foreign Policy In Focus

www.fpif.org

(Editor's Note: This op-ed was originally published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on the IPS website.)

With the global economy facing severe recession, lame-duck President Bush is hosting the leaders of 19 other major countries in Washington this weekend to try to prepare a coordinated response.

A noble goal. But, alas, Bush is the wrong host. Washington is the wrong venue. His guest list is too selective. And Bush has already made it clear he is still clinging to erroneous policies that created the crisis in the first place.

The United Nations offered to host the summit, which would have been appropriate. This crisis has truly gone global, hitting not just financial markets but also workers, businesses and consumers in all countries — rich and poor alike.

But Bush opted instead for his own turf and his own invitees, which include leaders from rich countries and some larger developing countries. It is not quite the "Coalition of the Willing" that Bush used to try to rationalize his buildup to the Iraq War, but it's certainly not a fully global coalition either.

Bush's reluctance to face a more representative group reflects his elitism as well as his discredited views on how to solve the crisis. In a recent statement, he actually stated with a straight face that the goal of the summit should be to preserve "free markets, free enterprise and free trade."

Yes, while his own Treasury secretary is busily nationalizing much of the U.S. banking sector, Bush is suggesting that the solution somehow remains the further deregulation of financial and trade markets.

The outgoing president appears unable to give up his belief in the "market fundamentalism" that has dominated the U.S. policy agenda for the past 30 years. With strong U.S. backing, institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have pushed governments to lift regulations on trade, finance and investment and sell off state enterprises throughout most of the developing world.

The results of this free-market theology have been devastating for poor people, farmers, workers and the environment, and made the world more vulnerable to financial volatility.

In the midst of the current crisis, the IMF has already approved new loans to crisis-ridden Hungary and Ukraine, and is deep in negotiations with Pakistan. All these loans contain some of the failed "free market" conditions.

This is outrageous, not only because of the double standard (the IMF doesn't suggest such policies for richer nations), but also because the agency knows better: Recently released IMF data show that countries like China and India that have kept some government controls on the financial sector and limited the extent to which their economies are tied to global markets are weathering the storm relatively well.

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Robin Broad is a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. John Cavanagh directs the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. They wrote "Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match.

The Iran-Saudi Cold War

Bahman sent this

November 6, 2008

James Brazier, Guest Contributor

There has been no Western outcry against Saudi Arabia’s mediation between the Taliban and the Afghan government. On the contrary, the Mecca talks were accompanied by senior British and U.S. officials indicating that such discussions were an evitable part of ending the war in Afghanistan. Only one country has denounced the meeting as an unacceptable capitulation to terrorism and extremism: Iran. This position reflects the untold story of Iran’s tussle with Saudi Arabia for regional influence.

The talks, held at the behest of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, took place in Mecca during the final three days of Ramadan, which ended on September 29. Those present included Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief Prince Muqrin and his predecessor Prince Turki al-Faisal; Nawaz Sharif, the leader of Pakistan’s opposition and a man with very close links to the Saudi monarchy; and Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the foreign minister of the former Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Though the talks were exploratory and did not mark the start of a formal peace process, in the days afterwards U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that negotiations would ultimately be part of the end of the Afghan conflict likening this to the situation in Iraq, where the U.S. sought peace with Sunni Muslim insurgents. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the departing British commander in Afghanistan, declared that the war could not be won militarily. Karzai said the Afghan people were sick of the conflict. All this implied that the Taliban could be accommodated in a negotiated settlement.

The prospect of some sort of Taliban rehabilitation received a much frostier reception in Tehran. Iran’s Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki urged the U.S. against talks, saying that the Taliban’s extremism could not be confined to the Middle East and West Asia. Iran’s ambassador to the UN said that negotiations would make Afghanistan even less stable. The chairman of Iran’s parliamentary foreign policy and national security committee said the talks would spread terrorism.

Iran despises the Taliban for three reasons. The first is sectarian. Iran is a Shia theocracy, whereas the Taliban are Sunni extremists who view Shias as heretics. In August 1998 Taliban fighters slaughtered thousands of Shia Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif. The Hazaras were closely aligned with the Northern Alliance, an Iranian-backed rebel coalition dedicated to fighting the Taliban; the conflict between these sides saw more than a million Afghan refugees flee to Iran.

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Live election coverage from Washington Post

Election Day Special -- The End of a Subprime Administration

"He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

"We create our own reality… We're history's actors."

Foreclosed

The George W. Bush Story
By Tom Engelhardt

They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Indeed.

From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing "new product."

Read the full Tomgram

A Husband in Paris

photographs and text by
Katarina Radovic

The series of images A Husband in Paris was set out as a playful comment on the idea of marrying abroad for papers, due to political isolation in economically underdeveloped countries. This was a starting point in my work, which, during the course of its progress, acquired a number of other meanings related to the choice of place and the characters photographed.

The scenario is the following: I myself took up the role of a young woman from Eastern Europe in the search of a husband in Paris, the model of a Western “city of dreams“. Walking across the city districts within the period of several weeks, I approached candidates asking them whether they would be willing to “marry me” and what it would look like. After a short introductory “sniffing“, they happily agreed to pose together with me for a snapshot, in which we played the role of a potential couples.

The aesthetic complexity of these staged images surpasses the strictly political aspects and stretches to romantic relationships between possible marriage partners as well as the seduction of the young woman who, in her appointed role, does not hide that she is “in the hurry”.

However, not every type of “marriageable material” would do; the selection of candidates was based on their look, origin, style, profession, etc. This work stands at the intersection of private (aspirations and limitations) with the more global issues (societies in flux and transition, fictive marriages and their socio-emotional consequences), reflected as such in the informality of snapshot aesthetics. The set poetic rules and the hilarious approach however reduce a certain uneasiness and explicitness of the initial idea, turning it into a light and spontaneous game of revealing latent possibilities in human relationships interwoven with cultural differences; and offering visual descriptions of human needs, expectations and illusions.

Good Dick (2008)

Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2008

Official Selection - Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008
Official Selection Jackson Hole Film Festival
Official Selection Newport Beach Film Festival 2008

Director: Marianna Palka
Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Eric Edelstein, Mark Webber, Martin Starr, Tom Arnold

Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937

opens on Sunday November, 2, and remains through Jan. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.



Miró, Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: October 30, 2008
Art Review | Joan Miró at MoMA

Amputate tradition, torture the past, terrorize the present. The impulse to destroy was part of what made early Mart the guerrilla movement it was.

Cubism sentenced illusionistic art to the Death by a Thousand Cuts. Dada unleashed an anti-aesthetic Reign of Terror: Beauty? Off with its head. Decay? Let’s have more. Surrealism, a slippery business, let the killer instinct run amok. Tossing manifestos, dreams and libidos like bombs, it aimed to bring Western civilization to its knees and keep André Breton in the news.

So in 1927, when Joan Miró said, “I want to assassinate painting,” he wasn’t saying anything new. What was new was the way he carried out his cutthroat task. That process is the subject of “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937,” an absorbing, invigorating and — Miró would be mortified — beautiful show at the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition illustrates, step by step, exactly how Miró stalked and attacked painting — zapped its conventions, messed up its history, spoiled its market value — through 12 distinct groups of experimental works produced over a decade. If, in the end, painting survived, that’s neither here nor there. The story’s the thing. Crisp, clear and chronological, the show reads like a combination of espionage yarn and psychological thriller set out in a dozen page-turning chapters.

In 1927 Miró was 34. He was a successful artist and an early devotee of Surrealism, working in a polished, fantastical-realist mode. But he had a restless temperament and lived in provoking times. The high-flying 1920s were winding down, the political climate was growing tense. Surrealism, he discovered, had limitations. He was ready for a radical change in art, but he realized that he would have to create it himself. He decided it would take the form of a crime. Painting would have to go. He would deliver the blow.

How to start? With dissection, which entailed taking painting apart, piece by piece, and throwing out essential things. This is what we see happening in the seven stark abstract paintings that open the show, all done in Paris in January to mid-February of 1927. The pictures look intact enough, with their handwritten phrases and clouds filled with dots, until you notice that something is missing: paint, or all but a minimal amount of it. Most of each picture is raw, untouched canvas on which the words and clouds drift like flotsam from a ship gone down.

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The best speech of 2008 Campaign

I have to admit that the speech I will probably remember from this election is not delivered by Obama -- It is delivered by Mccain. Had more of this person surfaced during the campaign -- things may have turned out differently. The clip has speeches by both candidates during the Al Smith Dinner in New York. Although Obama is more than able -- Mccain's speech is intelligent and funny -- making jabs at his opponents -- but mostly at himself. Result is I think a speech that will be remembered. Here is the Mccain that many remember and like -- and I must say, I like him too.

Nouriel Roubini on Charlie Rose

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Warren Buffet on Charlie Rose

Scents and sensibility

Jonathan Meades
Published 02 October 2008

Perfumes: the Guide
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Profile Books, 384pp, £20

Luca Turin is a biophysicist and a street fighter in scientific academe. He has been a whistleblower on neurophysiological experimental malpractice and is the proponent of an olfactory theory which, while initially denounced as rogue science, is now increasingly acknowledged as the new orthodoxy. He is also a consultant "nose" to the perfume industry, though one who is sufficiently bolshie to bite the hands that have fed him: this is always a good sign.

His wife, Tania Sanchez, is described as a "perfume collector and expert, and a journalist". I guess I might describe myself in the same way, though the "expert" component is a loose fit. Still, there are 34 perfumes in my house as I write this, ranging from regional obscurities such as Écume d'Arcachon and Sent Bon de Bayonne to classics: Jicky, Mouchoir de Monsieur and Pour un Homme - all three of which meet with Turinia's endorsement.

I cannot tell you how much that means to me, for this highly excitable couple have set themselves up as The Measure, The Ultimate Arbiters. They aspire to be perfume's Parker, Pevsner, Pudlo. And, yes, they absolutely adore alliteration. It constellates in their oeuvre along with outré simile, hyperbole, quasi-synaesthesiac prose, in-jokes, arcane scholarship, unwitting mock-heroism, tireless exuberance, and a self-referential hermeticism that sites perfume at the very centre of the world.

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Sotheby's Private View: Impressionist & Modern Art, New York

Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, to be held 3 November, 2008

Join specialists Simon Shaw, Emmanuel DiDonna and David Norman as they introduce eight highlights from the Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, to be held 3 November, 2008. Highlights include rare masterpieces by the modernist Kazimir Malevich and the impressionist Edvard Munch, as well as seminole works by Degas, Picasso, Monet, Modigliani and Matisse.

The man who knows too much

He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib... No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist'. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington

• Rachel Cooke
• The Observer,
• Sunday October 19 2008

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. 'Brad Pitt loved this place,' says Hersh with a wolfish grin. 'It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter's den!' When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It's not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers.

By the time I look at Hersh again - the full panorama takes a moment or two - he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever.......Read more

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) Richard Rorty

Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999).

The other day – as I watched George W. Bush, our Neo-Conservative, Market-Fundamentalist President announce the purchase by the US government of 250 billion dollars of equity in nine of the largest US banks – I had a near-realization. That maybe, something BIG is afoot -- not exactly a birth of something – but rather a sudden death, the terrible end of something that we never thought would end in our lifetimes. It felt more or less (although I know this is not accurate or even similar—but that’s how it felt) like the day I stood in Brandenburger Tor – beer in hand – and awestruck as the Berlin Wall was torn down by ordinary German citizens from both sides of the iconic wall that defined and symbolized an era. This brought me to Rorty’s piece and the bigger picture: Where are we today in America? Where do we want to go? Some excerpts follow: (read the complete version) (HT)

“The left's hostility is partially explained by the fact that most people who admire Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as much as I do - most of the people who either classify themselves as 'postmodernist' or (like me) find themselves thus classified willynilly - participate in what Jonathan Yardley has called the 'America Sucks Sweepstakes'. Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United States. They see our country as embodying everything that is wrong with the rich post-Enlightenment West. They see ours as what Foucault called a 'disciplinary society', dominated by an odious ethos of' liberal individualism', an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism and Republican presidents. By contrast, I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country - despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office - is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented.



The right's hostility is largely explained by the fact that rightist thinkers don't think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles Especially if one teaches philosophy, as I do, one is expected to tell [5] the young that their society is not just one of the better ones so far contrived, but one which embodies Truth and Reason. Refusal to say this sort of thing counts as the 'treason of the clerks' - as an abdication of professional and moral responsibility. My own philosophical views - views I share with Nietzsche and Dewey - forbid me to say this kind of thing. I do not have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth'. I think that the so-called postmodernists are right in most of their criticisms of traditional philosophical talk about 'reason'. So my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left.”

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