To the consternation of some privacy advocates, Google unveils its funky new satellite map feature. I’m not too worried yet — the images are apparently between 6-12 months old…but wait, isn’t that Berk and I frolicing in Riverside Park? (Direct link via Supercres.) Update: In keeping with the meme (seen at Girlhacker), here’s home from above. This satellite image is at least a year old, as attested by the missing Columbia School for Social Work across the street — it’s been completed since last summer.
Category: World at Large
Et Tu, Denzel?
“This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms, Quite vanquished him: then burst his mighty heart.” Denzel Washington’s Broadway turn as Brutus open to solid reviews. Between this Julius Caesar revival and Twelve Angry Men and Hurlyburly and the Richardson-Reilly Streetcar, among others, there are a lot of plays in town right now I wouldn’t mind catching at some point.
Rooms in New York.
“Even before he had established himself as a delineator of New York places, the artist had already pinpointed a New York state of mind. That state is not so much ‘loneliness,’ as the maudlin cliche about him would have it, but a tougher and more unsparing isolation that touches on the traps of modern urban existence, one in which individuals must become inured to life’s insults and injuries.” Art critic Avis Berman previews her new book on Edward Hopper’s New York for the Sunday Times.
Self-Ordained Professors’ Tongues.
An event of note last night here at Columbia’s Miller Theater: Music critic Greil Marcus, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, and Oxford poetry scholar Christopher Ricks came together to contemplate Dylania old and new. Marcus began by speaking on the many lives of “Masters of War,” including Dylan’s Gulf War I Grammy performance and the recent “Coalition of the Willing” episode at a Boulder, Colorado high school. Wilentz followed by discussing Dylan’s debts of gratitude (and debt to history) in the recent Chronicles. And Ricks punned his way through a priceless disquisition on Blonde on Blonde and the differences among poetry, prose, and song, finishing his remarks with a defense of “Just Like a Woman,” which apparently has been deemed misogynistic in certain academic corners. (I asked the panel about the mixed reception to Masked & Anonymous, and Wilentz & Marcus in particular praised it as an underrated film…I’ll probably have to see it again at some point.)
All in all, it was quite an interesting evening of Dylanology, although I must admit, I was a bit put off by some of Ricks’ comments in the Q&A session — He called “Masters of War” (and, for that matter, “The Death of Emmett Till“) self-absorbed and overly tendentious songs, which I think there’s a good deal of truth to, but then proceeded to castigate the audience for indulging its generally anti-Bush sentiment (via some mild chuckling) during Marcus’ Coalition of the Willing anecdote. Ricks began by deploring knee-jerk political responses in either direction as a typically American (and occasionally Dylanian) vice…ok, fine, that’s a criticism we’ve all heard before. “Fist fighting is here to stay,
It’s just the old American way.” But Ricks then went on to bemoan the tribulations faced by his poor right-wing friends in Massachusetts, who thought — correctly, in Ricks’ view — that “John Kerry didn’t deserve the presidency.” (As you might expect, this gave the smattering of right-leaning folk amid the audience a chance to clap vociferously and to indulge anew the currently-popular fallacy that they’re an oppressed minority.)
Yes, unfortunately, the decline of civility in debate and the “MacNeill-Lehrerization” of every issue into two opposite and irreconcilable poles are lamentable repercussions of the way politics is practiced today, as Jon Stewart famously noted on Crossfire several months ago. (Or, as Bob once put it, “Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull…Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.“) But that doesn’t mean that Americans’ opinions of the war in Iraq aren’t well-thought out and hard-won. Ricks treated the issue as basically six-one, half-dozen-the-other, that to voice an opinion about the Iraq War is somehow irresponsible and — worse — uncouth. (Whatsmore, I had no idea what anybody’s politics were until Ricks began complaining about the presumed incivility in the room, at which point the audience immediately bifurcated into lefties and righties.) In sum, incivility is a serious problem, sure. But, for that matter, so is war.
The Q&A aside, though, the evening made for an eloquent appreciation of the many gifts of Bob Dylan, gifts further illuminated by the warmth and regard with which Marcus, Wilentz and Ricks held these songs to the light and uncovered some of their fragile tendrils of meaning and allusion. And if nothing else, the conference made for an excellent excuse to go home and delve into Bob’s back pages for the remainder of the evening, and listen to old songs with new ears.
Requiem for a Diplomat.
R.I.P. George Kennan 1904-2005. The nation has lost one of its senior diplomatic statesmen, at a moment when men and women of his wisdom, judgment, and foreign policy experience are needed in the public arena more than ever. He will be missed.
Spin, Spin Sugar.
It’s been Extreme Makeover time lately for the GOP, with Antonin Scalia acting chummy in hopes of landing the Chief Justice spot, Boss DeLay dismissing the recent allegations of incessant boondogglery, Karen Hughes coming out of mothballs to sell the Islamic world on Dubya, and the administration trying to sell the rest of us on pre-packaged news. I’m not buying any of it.
King of the Underworld
Despite feeling kinda rotten, I did venture out to the movies on Saturday night (armed with a hefty bag of throat lozenges) for an impromptu double feature. At the top of the bill was James Cameron’s IMAX extravaganza Aliens of the Deep and, all I can say is, if Cameron wants to make Battle Angel Alita using this funky 3-D technology, hail to the King. Granted, I haven’t seen a 3-D movie since the days before Captain Eo. Nevertheless, the effect was much improved, and made what could have been a staid underwater documentary comprised of what look to be outtakes from The Abyss into a riveting, jaw-dropping wonder.
I’ll admit, I was also fond of Cameron’s central conceit here, which is that our best bet for finding life in this solar system — at Europa, say — would be of the kind inexplicably thriving around thermal vents in the darkest, deepest parts of the ocean, where the sun never shines (and thus photosynthesis never takes place.) And what strange life it is! Innumerable swarming shrimp scuttle between ice-cold and boiling-hot water with nary an antenna twitch. Strange symbiotic tube worms ensnare food for their inner bacteria, which digests for them. Ethereal jellyfish float by, improbably yet undeniably alive. And, thanks to the 3-D, it seems you can reach out and touch all of these creatures just before your eyes — in fact, you can see them better in their natural habitat than any human being possibly could. It’s really quite amazing.
Like I said, I don’t know if Aliens of the Deep would be everyone’s cup of tea — most of the film just involves young astrobiologists and underwater explorers enthusing over their wild and crazy jobs in tiny little subs. But, whenever a strange new animal popped up on the screen, and particuarly when the camera hurtles past the moons of Jupiter on its CGI-way to far-flung Europa, I thought to myself, “Now, that’s Edutainment!”
Walt Nixon World.
“Bringing Kutler to the library was going to be like Nixon going to China.” The Nixon library in Yorba Linda — the only presidential library under private management — incurs the wrath of the historical community by spiking a conference on the Vietnam War that would undoubtedly have been critical of Tricky Dick. Whatsmore, “historians still did not have access to about 800 hours of tapes and 50,000 documents withheld by the Nixon estate on the grounds that they deal with personal or political, rather than presidential, matters.” That represents a significantly larger gap in the historical record than 18 and a half minutes.
We are Dancing Mechanic.
“In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the ‘age of the robot.‘” And to think I was geeking out over the Roomba just a few weeks ago.
Orange Crush.
A federal judge dismisses a case brought against chemical companies by Vietnamese plaintiffs for the manufacture of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. I’m torn on this one. While the fact that the companies settled a similar lawsuit by American veterans for $180 million makes them seem rather shady, I think their reasoning is probably sound — the decision for the defoliant’s use was ultimately made by the US Government. (If it can be proven that these companies covered up the harmful side effects of Agent Orange to the US, then the government should be bringing the suit against them — either way, though, it seems to me the responsibility for deployment of Agent Orange rests in Washington.)
As Dangerous Meta similarly noted, Judge Weinstein’s argument that Agent Orange wouldn’t be included in the Geneva prohibition against chemical weapons seems like a reach. “‘The prohibition extended only to gases deployed for their asphyxiating or toxic effects on man,’ said the decision…’not to herbicides designed to affect plants that may have unintended harmful side-effects on people.’” Hmmm…so long as side-effects of a given chemical are “unintended” (which itself is an open question regarding Agent Orange), it can be used in the field? That opens the door to a lot of horrible and underhanded trickery in wartime. Despite what some Dubya-appointed freakshows might think, we should be trying to make the international restriction against chemical weapons more, not less, stringent.