Sunday, January 31, 2016

Day 168: Book Excerpt: Focus- The Hidden Driver Of Excellence



A friend reports, “I visited some cousins in New Jersey recently and their kids had every electronic gadget known to man. All I ever saw were the tops of their heads. They were constantly checking their iPhones for who had texted them, what had updated on Facebook, or they were lost in some video game. They’re totally unaware of what’s happening around them and clueless about how to interact with someone for any length of time.”
Today’s children are growing up in a new reality, one where they are attuning more to machines and less to people than has ever been true in human history. That’s troubling for several reasons. For one, the social and emotional circuitry of a child’s brain learns from contact and conversation with everyone it encounters over the course of a day. These interactions mold brain circuitry; the fewer hours spent with people—and the more spent staring at a digitized screen—portends deficits.
Digital engagement comes at a cost in face time with real people—the medium where we learn to “read” nonverbals. The new crop of natives in this digital world may be adroit at the keyboard, but they can be all thumbs when it comes to reading behavior face-to-face, in real time—particularly in sensing the dismay of others when they stop to read a text in the middle of talking with them.6
A college student observes the loneliness and isolation that go along with living in a virtual world of tweets, status updates, and “posting pictures of my dinner.” He notes that his classmates are losing their ability for conversation, let alone the soul-searching discussions that can enrich the college years. And, he says, “no birthday, concert, hangout session, or party can be enjoyed without taking the time to distance yourself from what you are doing” to make sure that those in your digital world know instantly how much fun you are having.
Then there are the basics of attention, the cognitive muscle that lets us follow a story, see a task through to the end, learn, or create. In some ways, as we’ll see, the endless hours young people spend staring at electronic gadgets may help them acquire specific cognitive skills. But there are concerns and questions about how those same hours may lead to deficits in core mental skills.
An eighth-grade teacher tells me that for many years she has had successive classes of students read the same book, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Her students have loved it—until five years or so ago. “I started to see kids not so excited—even high-achieving groups could not get engaged with it,” she told me. “They say the reading is too hard; the sentences are too complicated; it takes a long time to read a page.”
She wonders if perhaps her students’ ability to read has been somehow compromised by the short, choppy messages they get in texts. One student confessed he’d spent two thousand hours in the last year playing video games. She adds, “It’s hard to teach comma rules when you are competing with World of WarCraft.”
At the extremes, Taiwan, Korea, and other Asian countries see Internet addiction—to gaming, social media, virtual realities—among youth as a national health crisis, isolating the young. Around 8 percent of American gamers between ages eight and eighteen seem to meet psychiatry’s diagnostic criteria for addiction; brain studies reveal changes in their neural reward system while they game that are akin to those found in alcoholics and drug abusers.7 Occasional horror stories tell of addicted gamers who sleep all day and game all night, rarely stop to at or clean themselves, and even get violent when family members try to stop them.
Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.

~~Focus- The Hidden Driver Of Excellence -by- Daniel Goleman

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Day 167: Book Excerpt: The News: A User's Manual



In its more serious moods, the news seeks to explain the world to us, which means attempting to sift through the dramas, hyperbole and clamour of every new day in order to direct our attention to the handful of developments that could turn out truly to matter. There is so much we might find engaging (a couple has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge; several bits of Tasmania are on fire; a Mexican industrialist has shot and killed a rival), but what in the news is really worth focusing on?
We are the inheritors of an idea, endorsed by both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum, that the most fundamental reality of nations is their financial state – and that economic reporting should therefore be recognized as the most important facet of all news output.
...
Economic data can rupture the sense of scale we ordinarily rely on to make our lives feel meaningful or hopeful. Our sense of purpose can be crushed by the unimaginable dimensions of the system in which economics reveals us to exist: one where world GDP stands at $70,000,000,000,000, where the global bond market is worth $100 trillion and the derivatives market $791 trillion, where world debt is measured at $50 trillion, EU debt at $17 trillion and US debt at $16 trillion (spending a dollar a second, a trillion dollars would take 31,000 years to run through); where a billion people live in poverty while an elite made up of the wealthiest 2 per cent owns more than half of all wealth. Such figures have some of the numbing quality of the statistics of astronomy, when it informs us that the Milky Way contains 400 billion stars or that it would take 93 billion light years to cross the universe. Our minds are not well fitted to contemplate our condition from such perspectives. Our aspirations become laughable, if not absurd, played out against such a canvas. We grow newly humble and supine before a sense of our utter nothingness.
...
In the more ambitious news outlets, our eyes are regularly directed towards a variety of key indicators on the economic dashboard, including the money supply (M1, M2, MZM), central bank reserves, factory orders, the consumer price index (CPI), building permits, jobless claims, the deficit, the national debt and, most significantly of all, the GDP.

The numbers can be disorientating. To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42.

Like blood to a human, money is to the state the constantly circulating, life-giving medium in which some of the most telling data about the future is carried in encoded forms. Sampling it is the task of the great government financial labs: the Office of National Statistics in Britain, the Department of Commerce in the United States, L’Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques in France and the National Statistical Office of South Korea. Every week, their statisticians will survey the economy; in the UK alone, taking in data from 6,000 companies in the manufacturing sector, 25,000 service firms, 5,000 retailers, 10,000 construction businesses and 4,000 government projects in agriculture, energy, health and education. With gigantic computers helping them to process their harvest of information, the statisticians will publish some astonishingly abbreviated yet deeply resonant findings. The GDP figures might, for example, inform us that the financial value of all work done across the entire country over the previous quarter had risen 1.1 per cent or (heaven forbid) dropped 0.5 per cent, figures beneath which will lie tens of thousands of meetings, anxieties, quandaries, ploys, boardroom discussions, early morning commutes, sackings, initiatives, launches and disappointments, all now harnessed to and confined within a mere two digits.
Distillation is familiar from other areas of science – the discipline to which economics aspires. In chemistry, too, we are invited to look beneath the confusion of physical reality to uncover a mere 118 elements which underlie matter and can, with an almost artistic grace, be ranked according to their chemical properties, atomic numbers and electron configurations into the columns of the periodic table.
~~The News: A User's Manual -by- Alain De Botton

Friday, January 29, 2016

Day 166: Book Excerpt: Modernity At Large


As with mediation, so with motion. The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.

Thus, to put it summarily, electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themselves migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope, as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But few i mportant films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further afield. And few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities. In this sense, both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between massmediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In the chapters that follow, I show that the work of the imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.

Ever since Durkheim, and the work of the Annees Sociologiques group, anthropologists have learned to regard collective representations as social facts-that is, to see them as transcending individual volition, as weighted with the force of social morality, and as objective social realities. What I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that there is anything new about the role of the imagination in the contemporary world. After all, we are now accustomed to thinking about all societies as haVing produced their versions of art, myth, and legend, expressions that implied the potential evanescence of ordinary social life. In these expressions, all societies showed that they could both transcend and reframe ordinary social life by recourse to mythologics of various kinds in which social life was imaginatively deformed. In dreams, finally, individuals even in the most simple societies have found the space to refigure their social lives, live out proscribed emotional states and sensations, and see things that have then spilled over into their sense of ordinary life. All these expressions, further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human SOcieties, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performative intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of ritual. All this is the surest sort of knowledge bequeathed to us by the best of canonical anthropology over the past century.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation.

~~Modernity At Large -by- Arjun Appadurai

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Day 165: Book Excerpt: Trade and Contemporary Society along the Silk Road


A survey of travelogue literature shows a surprising number of illustrations of the Leh bazaar, perhaps more uniformly acknowledged as an important site than any other single place in the Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.

This may be because it was the only focal point in Leh; the sights of Srinagar may have simply provided more varied sights to visitors. As Rizvi points out, in the trading networks of Central Asia the “most vibrant of the trading stations” were towns between inhabited and uninhabited sections of routes, where traders would rest and refuel before continuing onward, or the “first sizeable settlement reached by caravans” after inhospitable terrain. In this region such locations included the towns of Yarkend, Khotan, Kashgar, and Leh. Thus, according to Knight again, (this time in the summer and early fall) in Leh, there is such a motley collection of types and various costumes, and such a babble of different languages, as it would not be easy to find elsewhere. Savage Tartars in sheepskins, and other outlandish men, jostle with the elegant Hindoo merchant from the cities of Central India, and the turbulent Mussulman Pathan scowls at the imperturbable idolaters from the Celestial Empire. Leh in September is, indeed, one of the busiest and most crowded of cities, and the storekeepers and farmers who have to supply this multitude must make a very good profit for this time. Leh is therefore a very cosmopolitan city, even in the dead season; for there are resident merchants and others of various races and creeds. Small as is the permanent population, at least four languages are in common use here - Hindostani, Tibetan, Turki, and Kashmiri -while several others are spoken.

The social impact of the presence of such international diversity in the small community of Leh will be discussed later; however we can conceptualize the bazaar space as an important cultural contact zone with a variety of forms of cultural expression and social interaction. This type of diverse international bazaar scene was not only found in Ladakh, but common in most of the cities linked to Ladakh along the trade routes of Central Asia.

This town was the site of the palace of the Ladakhi King Sengge Namgyal, who ruled during the early seventeenth century, in what is called the Golden Age of Ladakh. His father, Jamyang Namgyal, is also remembered as one of the key historical figures in Ladakh’s history, although there are differing versions of his life. David Snellgrove has written that the King Jamyang Namgyal was forced to marry the daughter of the invading ruler of Baltistan, Ali Mir. While this implies that the marriage of Jamyang Namgyal and Gyal Khatoon (Ali Mir’s daughter) was a sign of colonization by Balti powers, Ladakhi history accounts have a different version. One Ladakhi text relates that rather than being invaded by Baltistan, the Ladakhis tried to invade Baltistan under the direction of Jamyang Namgyal, who was captured by the enemy. While a prisoner of war in Baltistan he developed a relationship with Gyal Khatoon and was subsequently peacefully released. Despite the subtleties of the story both accounts agree that the couple had a son, named Sengge Namgyal. The dates of Sengge Namgyal’s rule are a site of further dispute; however most authors agree that this period from the last few decades of the sixteenth century to the first few decades of the seventeenth century was a key time in the monarchical era of Ladakhi history. The Leh palace, which Ladakhi royalty inhabited until their fall from power, was constructed at this time along with many important Buddhist monasteries that still function today, including Hemis, Chemre, and Tashi Gong.

Leh became an important power center of Ladakh and during this time period the Leh based royal aristocracy/nobility comprised approximately three percent of the total population.

The rule of subsequent Ladakhi kings can best be characterized as a series of conflicts and alliances with foreign powers. During the reign of King Deldan Namgyal, 1620-45, Moghuls attacked from Kashmir and were defeated in Ladakh. In the times of King Delek Namgyal, 1645-75 the Tibetan army invaded and Ladakhis paid tribute to the Mughal emperor for military aid from the Mughal army in Kashmir under Fidai Khan. The war during the reign of Delek Namgyal actually involved several international political powers of the times, since the Tibetan army was commanded by the fifth Dalai Lama, whose political power was backed by the Mongols and the Mughal army represented the power of rulers in Delhi and Srinagar. As part of the political agreement with Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for protection, King Delek Namgyal became Muslim, although his descendents were Buddhist. Delek Namgyal is attributed with the construction of Jamia Masjid of Leh in 1666-67, a Sunni Muslim mosque that continues to occupy the site of original construction at the end of the main bazaar road under the Leh palace. The original form of this mosque, now obscured by recent construction, was influenced by the architectural traditions of Central Asia and Tibet. These patterns of international contact and alliances with neighboring Asian countries continued under King Deskyong Namgyal (1720-39), who was married to princess from Mustang.

In Ladakh, the final reigning local monarch was Tsepal Tundup Namgyal (1808-30), who constructed Stok palace. Political conditions are generally thought to have deteriorated during the rule of this king. Descriptions of the royal family and Leh elites were written by two English employees of the English East India Company, William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, who traveled to Ladakh from 1819-25 (published as Moorcroft and Trebeck 1841). Many of these descriptions were soon outdated, however, with the advent of the Dogra regime in Ladakh and subsequent stationing of a British officer in Leh in 1867. This policy change was the result of a number of political changes taking place in the geopolitical landscape surrounding Ladakh, especially to the east, where the fermenting political issues change in Chinese Turkistan, or Chinese Central Asia was a site for the power struggles of the Great Game.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century the politics of the Great Game managed to continue to radically alter trade interactions between Chinese Central Asia and British South Asia. Ladakh, poised in the middle, continued to be involved with traders from both regions. By 1870 the British government and the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir’s government had jointly agreed to free transKarakorum trade of duties, which increased the importation of pash-mina from Chinese Central Asia and Western Tibet to the Punjab region. While this may have decreased the importance of the Ladakh region as a production center, it increased the importance of the regional trade routes, markets, and traveling infrastructure. The establishment of the British Agency in Leh reportedly quadrupled trade going to British India within four years, in spite of the trade restrictions on the Chinese side. Among other goods, fine carpets continued to travel from Chinese Central Asia producing centers through Ladakh to South Asia and ultimately sometimes to European markets. In the Sunni mosque in Leh today one can view a pair of long carpets, spectacular specimens of nineteenth-century carpets transported along the trade route, which were offered by two traders Khwoja Hydershah and Nasar-Ul-Din-Shah and brought on camels from Yarkend in approximately 1861.

Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century seeds of change were sown that would ultimately lead to the end of many trading networks through Ladakh. The strengthening of Chinese power in Chinese Turkistan, weak position of the British trade in Central Asia, and increased resistance to British involvement in the sub-continent signified great changes were about to come. Ladakhis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were immersed in this cosmopolitan world of diverse social customs, political interests, and economic arenas. This diversity would shape not only an entire society, but families and individuals as well.

~~Trade and Contemporary Society along the Silk Road -by- Jacqueline H. Fewkes

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Day 164: Book Excerpt: On The Grand Trunk Road



On South Asian roads, where the chance of being accidentally blind-sided is high, horn-honking is an act of courtesy. Should it ever become an Olympic event, the Indians would have a leg up for technical prowess, but the Pakistanis, who like to wire snippets from Western popular songs into their steering columns, would score well for creativity. Once, stuck at the Khyber Pass, I listened to a Pakistani truck driver push his way through a traffic jam leading into Afghanistan by using a horn that played at deafening volume the refrain from Never on Sunday. Cars and trucks peeled out of his way just so they wouldn’t have to listen to the damned tune anymore.

Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.

Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shootouts, bomb explosions, and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”

Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modem heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.

In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.

We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modem truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.

~~On The Grand Trunk Road -by- Steve Coll

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Day 163: Book Excerpt: Film Voices



RIC GENTRY : I understand that it was your father who originally inspired you to work as a cinematographer.

VITTORIO STORARO : My father was a projectionist with a major Italian company. He encouraged me into a school that taught photography. I was about fourteen years old, so I really didn’t have a very good idea of what this was about. It was something my father thought he might do but he never did, so he influenced one of his sons into photography as a continuation of his own ambitions. Much later, however, I discovered that photography allowed me to express myself. I can say today, very truly, that I don’t see myself doing anything but trying to express myself through light.

“Photography” originally meant “writing with light,” and it is the term I prefer for what I do. It’s writing with light in the sense that I am trying to express something within me: my sensibility, my cultural heritage, my formation of being. All along I’ve been trying to express what I really am through light. When I work on a film, I am trying to have a parallel story to the actual story so that through the light and color you can feel and understand, consciously or unconsciously, much more clearly what the story is about.

RG: This “parallel story” that you speak of complements the director’s vision?

VS: Of course. I believe that making a film can be compared to conducting an opera. Whether the director is the author [of the screenplay] or not, he is still similar to the conductor. The orientation, the language, the style that we are going to seek for the story originates with him. What is really very important for me is the relationship between the main author, the director, and the coauthors: the composer of music, the art direction, the costume design, the photography, and so on. As the photographer, I listen to what his feelings are, how he thinks about the material that is before us, what his concepts are. Then I read the script with all of that in mind, trying to visualize his concepts in terms of a style. Essentially I am trying to continue our dialogue. Then I suggest to him what can be done to augment his concepts in the photographic area, how the story can be represented in an emotional, symbolic, psychological, and physical way. If we reach an agreement, if we really know in which direction we are going, I go back to the script and, scene by scene, apply to it, in a specific way, the general concept that we have established, the principle that guides me in lighting any single shot. Of course, step by step, day by day, I can make changes, always trying to come closer to what the visual concept is. It will take you through the picture as it is made, as it evolves. Because you can see something along the way that is more attractive, more beautiful, but that is not right for the picture you’ve set out to make.

You should always be very strong in resisting these distractions. You must select only the right kind of light, the right kind of tonality, the right kind of feeling, the right kind of color for the story. This is my approach, and the work I do with the script has helped me a lot, usually. Also, from the moment I begin a picture, I also try to find stimulations, corroborations through external sources, such as images, museums, films, music, people, locations, costumes, that add to my feelings about the material. I am always trying to come closer to my original impressions of what is photographically needed. The first few days of any new picture are very difficult, very frightening, because you are taking a step forward. You are starting over, and until you know what you want to do, there is incredible pain and suffering. Yes, it is like being born. I remember every first screening of every picture I’ve ever done. There is an incredible emotion as you sit and wait for the screen to be lit by an image. Then it is magic, when you see an image moving. It almost doesn’t matter at this moment what kind of image it is. That you can see it and it is there is something very powerful, magical. Until then, it is all very painful. Until the light beaming through the positive stock breaks the obscurity of the room and you can see an image. After that, you can analyze what you think of it, whether it is good or bad, but that moment in the screening room is an incredible moment. Sometimes I think you live for that moment.

~~Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script -edited by- Gerald Duchovnay

Monday, January 25, 2016

Day 162: Book Excerpt: The Recursive Mind



Although nonhuman animals have little or no ability to produce anything resembling human speech, they may have surprising ability to understand it. One of the more remarkable instances comes, not from an ape, but from a border collie. His name is Rico, and he is able to respond accurately to spoken requests to fetch different objects from another room, and then to either place the designated object in a box or bring it to a particular person. In experimental trials, he was given 10 objects randomly selected from 200 objects that he knows, and chose correctly in 37 out of 40 trials. Rico collects the designated object from a room in which there is no person who might cue him about the correct selection, which rules out any “Clever Hans” effect. If he is given an unfamiliar name of an object to fetch, he will choose the one object among the otherwise familiar selection that is novel. Four weeks later, he demonstrates that he still knows the name of this object, indicating what has been termed “learning by exclusion.” This ability to apply a label on a single trial is known as “fast mapping,” and has hitherto been thought to be restricted to humans. Rico’s exploits may not come as a surprise to people convinced that their pet dogs or cats can understand them.
Rico’s performance is somewhat comparable to that of Kanzi, a bonobo raised by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Kanzi is unable to speak, but as we shall see he has acquired an impressive facility to communicate by using manual gestures. What is interesting here is that his ability to understand spoken language far exceeds his ability to produce it. He can respond correctly to quite long sentences. For example, when asked, “Would you put some grapes in the swimming pool?” he immediately got out of the water, fetched some grapes, and tossed them into the pool. When visiting his friend Austin, a chimpanzee, he was told, “You can have some cereal if you give Austin your monster mask to play with.” He responded by finding his mask and giving it to Austin, and then pointing to Austin’s cereal. His ability to respond to such commands is not perfect, though. In one controlled study, he was given a list of 660 unusual spoken commands, some of them eight words long, and responded correctly on 72 percent of them. Kanzi was nine at the time, and did a little better than a two-and-a-half-year-old girl called Alia, who managed to get 66 percent correct.
These examples suggest that comprehension of speech far outstrips production, also a common observation in children acquiring language. They also suggest a surprising ability to break sentences down into words, hitherto considered a uniquely human capacity. Although this is something that seems natural to most of us, there is virtually nothing in the acoustic signal that tells us where one word ends and another begins, and it is really only experience with the language that enables us to break a sentence down in this way. Doyoufollowme? We become aware of this only when listening to a language that is completely foreign, when all the words seem to run together in a meaningless babble. When we teach children to speak, we help them to separate the words with an exaggerated form of speech known as “motherese.” The surprise, then, is not just that Rico and Kanzi were able to respond correctly to words, it is that they were able to pick them out at all. One must also suppose that they are not unique among their species—presumably, other apes and mammals are capable of the same thing, given the right conditions of learning. Keep talking to your cat.
It is unlikely, though, that the understanding exhibited by Rico and Kanzi—one hopes they might one day meet—meets the definition of true language comprehension. The identification of key words may be sufficient to provide the correct response most of the time. All Rico needs to know is the name of the object and the name of the recipient (box or person), and the rest follows. Although the sentence “You can have some cereal if you give Austin your monster mask to play with” involves recursion (specifically end-recursion), Kanzi probably did not need to parse the sentence in order to understand what he needed to do. He just needed to pick out the words cereal, Austin, and mask to have a pretty good idea of what was required.

~~ The Recursive Mind : The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization -by- Michael C. Corballis

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Day 161: Book Excerpt: Journeys On The Silk Road



In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha acknowledges that those who study the text can expect to be disparaged and held in contempt. The Buddha encourages forbearance and persistence with the promise that such persecution will be beneficial. Perhaps devotees took heart in such words; the oldest known printed book was created against a backdrop of suppression of Buddhism in China. Just two decades before Wang Jie commissioned his sutra, attempts to eradicate Buddhism saw monasteries destroyed, bronze statues melted down for coins, land confiscated, monks and nuns defrocked, and foreign monks sent packing. Not until the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s would Buddhism experience a crackdown so extensive. The persecution reached its peak in 845 under the Emperor Wuzong, a Daoist who issued an imperial decree attacking the Buddhist faith. He condemned it as foreign and idolatrous. It had seduced people’s hearts, corrupted their morals and robbed them of their gold and their strength to work. When men stopped farming and women stopped weaving, people went hungry and cold, yet the lavishly endowed monasteries rivaled palaces in their grandeur, according to the decree. In short, Buddhism was an evil that needed to be eradicated. Buddhists were not the only ones who felt the imperial wrath. Nestorians, Manicheans and Zoroastrians were also targeted as pernicious foreign imports, unlike home-grown Daoists and Confucians.
The emperor’s actions were driven as much by economics as ideology. The monasteries were wealthy but paid no taxes. And the emperor needed money, especially after a war against the Uyghurs two years earlier had further emptied already depleted imperial coffers. The suppression of Buddhism was short. The emperor died in 846, possibly—and ironically—because of the long-life potions he consumed. But during his six-year rule many of China’s estimated 4,600 temples and 40,000 shrines were destroyed, and more than a quarter of a million monks and nuns returned to lay and taxpaying life. Gold, silver, and jade were confiscated, and sacred images made of iron were turned into agricultural tools. Only images made of less valuable materials—clay, wood, and stone—were left alone.
Von Le Coq suspected he had found evidence of the suppression when he made a grisly find near Turfan in the winter of 1904–05. In a ruined Buddhist temple he uncovered the piled corpses of more than a hundred murdered monks. The dry desert air had preserved their robes, desiccated skin, hair, and signs of the fatal wounds. One skull had been slashed with a saber that split the victim’s head down to the teeth.
Although the next emperor was more favorably disposed to the faith, Buddhism never fully recovered in China. Its golden age was over and its long decline began. Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas escaped the extensive destruction. This was largely because the oasis was effectively cut off from China, having fallen under Tibetan control. Tibet, which had conquered a number of Silk Road towns, seized Dunhuang around 781. The caves thrived under Tibetan control. The Tibetans had only recently become Buddhist and brought the zeal of the newly converted and their own art forms, creating nearly fifty caves. Tibet continued to control the oasis for the next seventy years—providentially this coincided with the worst of the persecution. The locals resisted the Tibetans, but the invaders were not ousted from Dunhuang until 848, three years after the persecution ended. As a result, much of the Buddhist art destroyed throughout China survived intact at the caves. No one knows when the printed Diamond Sutra arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but it found refuge in a place that escaped the religious crackdown elsewhere.
...
The key that unlocked the Library Cave for Stein was the translator monk Xuanzang. His versions of Buddhist texts were among the first batch of scrolls allowed (albeit furtively) out of the caves, a discovery that proved astonishing to Abbot Wang and convenient for Stein. However, the printed Diamond Sutra was not the work of Xuanzang but of an even earlier monk named Kumarajiva, who translated the sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese around 402. Although Xuanzang is revered for his sixteen-year trek to India and back, Kumarajiva is the most highly regarded of China’s four great translator monks. His free-flowing translations remain the most popular even today, partly because they go beyond Xuanzang’s literal versions.
The Diamond Sutra, usually divided into thirty-two verses, has been translated many times into many languages. Six Chinese translations alone made between 402 and 703 survive. There were also early translations into Tibetan, Khotanese and Mongolian. But centuries passed before the words of the Diamond Sutra became known in the West. The first significant English translation, penned by a German scholar named Max Müller, appeared only in the 1890s, little more than a decade before Stein arrived in Dunhuang. It took more than half a century for the next major translation to appear when scholar Edward Conze, a Marxist turned Buddhist, published his translation in 1957. In recent years, translations of the Diamond Sutra have gathered pace, including versions by prominent Vietnamese author and monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Western Tibetan Buddhist monk George Churinoff and American writer Red Pine (Bill Porter).
The Diamond Sutra is one of the most revered texts in Buddhism. It was among the most popular sutras in China during the Tang dynasty, the era when Wang Jie commissioned his scroll. Its enduring popularity is in part because of its brevity—it can be recited in forty minutes. It is shorter than the Lotus Sutra but longer than the Heart Sutra, two other popular and influential texts. Some sutras can take hours, or even days, to recite. The Diamond Sutra has a special place among Zen Buddhists (known as Chan Buddhists in China) whose founding father, Huineng, is said to have achieved enlightenment when as a poor, illiterate youth he overheard a man reciting it.

~~Journeys On The Silk Road -By- Joyce Morgan & Conrad Walters

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Day 160: Book Excerpt: India Grows At Night



The troubled history of third world countries after the Second World War shows that state formation must precede nation-building and economic development, and not the other way around. The Government of India Act, 1935 was the starting point in forming the contemporary Indian state. India’s constitution makers were so impressed with its liberal nature that they took almost 250 articles verbatim from it and inserted them into their new Constitution. But the state that has emerged is not a European import. It has been built on the day-to-day practice under the bright Indian sun for over eight decades after 1860 of a liberal rule of law, and four decades of gradual parliamentary growth. Two, it contains the legacy of Mughal rule which influenced some British colonial institutions that continue till today. Three, it follows the classical conception of the Indian state whose main purpose is to protect the ‘ordered heterogeneity’ of Indian society. Despite the appearance of a centralized modern state, contemporary India is in fact loosely structured, segmentary, with considerable sharing of powers with the regional states. The regional kingdom was a central reality of Indian history and its contemporary expression is today’s linguistic state. Not unlike other subcontinental empires—Mauryas, Guptas, Mughals and the British—the Centre continues today to negotiate the proper relationship with the states through a ‘new federalism’. Four, it recognizes the pre-eminence of the primordial loyalties of a strong Indian society, which has always limited the potential for tyranny by the state, but also undercuts the individualism inherent in our liberal Constitution. While pushing for some social engineering via affirmative actions on behalf of the historically disadvantaged, the contemporary state, like the ancient Hindu king, also protects the customs of the heterogeneous, self-regulating orders of the diverse groups of Indian society as another expression of the ancient principle of ‘ordered heterogeneity’.
State formation is a continuing process. India’s has also been influenced positively by seventeen years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule and negatively by sixteen years of Indira Gandhi’s. Early on, it was impacted by the death of Subhas Chandra Bose in August 1945, who might have taken the state in an authoritarian direction. But also the demise of the decisive Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in December 1950, who if he had lived longer might have set the tone for a stronger liberal state. Despite its flaws, I believe India is more than Ramachandra Guha’s ‘phipty phipty’ democracy. My Egyptian adventure made me realize that India does, indeed, offer lessons for aspiring democracies. It has kept generals out of politics, a thought uppermost in Egyptian minds but non-existent in Indian minds. Indians live together in peace with greater liberty than in almost any other developing nation. The nation is secular and plural and has given space to the minorities and the low castes, and they do not feel insecure. And over the last two decades it has also become a rapidly growing economy which is lifting millions out of poverty.
Some years ago, Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-American political commentator, coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’. The expression was designed to describe a class of states that did hold free and fair elections and saw an alternation of political parties but lacked many of the other attributes of liberalism—most important, they did not respect civil and political rights. There is no imminent danger of India joining the ranks of those states, and that too is an achievement. Democracy is now solidly anchored in India, and so a degree of accountability is assured. The trick is to make that accountability a daily, hourly reflex at all levels. Not easy!
INDIA’S CODE WORD
Some nations possess a code word which, like a key, unlocks their secrets. That word is ‘liberty’ in America’s case; égalité, ‘equality’, in the case of France; for India it is ‘dharma’. Some of the best and the worst deeds in these nations can only be understood when seen in the light of these words. Dharma can mean many things as we have seen—duty, law, justice, righteousness—but mostly it is about doing the right thing. The ideal that still exists in the Indian imagination is of a ruler guided by dharma. The outraged reaction of the people to the corruption scandals in 2011 was: ‘Dharma has been wounded.’ Just as America’s founding fathers were obsessed with liberty, so were many of India’s founders attached to dharma, so much so that they placed the dharma chakra, ‘the wheel of dharma’, at the centre of the nation’s flag. They were clear that the nation-building project was a profoundly moral one.
Like P.V. Kane, I too regard the Constitution as a ‘dharma text’ and this is where I began my quest for a strong, liberal state. India’s code word is important to my project. Fixing India’s democracy entails not only the reform of institutions but also the moral core underlying our democracy. It requires a change in people’s mindset, what we have been referring to as ‘habits of the heart’. Early on in the freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi discovered that the liberal language of western constitutional morality did not resonate in a deeply traditional society. But the moral language of dharma did. So, like a consummate myth-maker, he resuscitated the universal ethic of sadharana dharma from the dharma texts. His project was not unlike that of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, who had also embarked on a programme to build ‘habits of the heart’ based on ‘dhamma’ (dharma in Pali), consisting of edicts which he had engraved on pillars throughout his empire. Both men understood that nation-building entails myth-making. Gandhi was surprised to find how quickly his ‘dharma campaign’ resonated with the masses. He may not have been able to end untouchability but he did breathe life into the movement for freedom, which had hitherto been a forum for westernized debating.
It may seem strange to want to invoke tradition, especially when that tradition has been responsible for so much unjust hierarchy and social injustice. But it is a question of how one reads the past. Nation builders and revolutionaries have always known that history is ever ready to be used in the service of the future. Gandhi was aware that dharma is a pliable concept. So, he deliberately side-stepped the hierarchical concept of svadharma and the social concept of duties specific to one’s caste, and evoked instead the universal values of sadharana dharma. This sadharana dharma, as already discussed, is no ‘respecter of persons’, and is consistent with the ideal of ‘blindfolded’ justice conceived in our Constitution. Dharma, after all, has given coherence to people’s lives for centuries, reduced uncertainty and provided the self-restraint needed for a successful polity. By appealing to tradition, I am deliberately trying to break the present divide in India between the vast majority of the Indian people who are religious and lead traditional lives and modern secularists, especially of the left, who tend to dub such religious people as superstitious, bigoted and communal.

~~India Grows At Night -by- Gurcharan Das

Friday, January 22, 2016

Day 159: Book Excerpt: The Iconography and Ritual of Siva At Elephanta



The earliest European references to Elephanta date from the sixteenth century, although several earlier travelers are known to have been in the immediate area. Marco Polo visited the nearby town of Thana around 1292-1293, upon returning from his famous stay in China. in his account, Polo remarked that "Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own, and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody." The use of the term "Idolaters" would seem to indicate that the region was predominantly Hindu.   
Shortly after Polo's visit, in 1322, a Franciscan friar named Odoric from Pordenone in northern Italy visited western India before going to China. He too stopped in Thana, where he noted the recent martyrdom in 1321 of four Friars Minor, whose executions had been ordered by a Moslem governor. Odoric also notes that Thana was a great place in days of old, for it was the city of King Porus, who waged so great a battle with King Alexander. The people thereof are idolaters, for they worship fire, and serpents, and trees also. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by force of arms, and they are now subject to the Empire of DILI [Delhi].
   
The earliest recorded European visit to Elephanta itself was apparently made in 1534 by Garcia da Orta, a Portuguese physician and scientist, in the company of the Portuguese sea captain Martim Afonso de Sousa. Orta included his record in his remarkable book, Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas da India (Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India), published at Goa in 1563. After describing cave-temples on the island of Salsette, he surveys Elephanta briefly as follows:   

       
Another pagoda, the best of all, is on an island called Pori, which we call the Isle of the Elephant. On it there is a hill and in the upper part of it is a subterranean house worked out of the living rock, and the house is as large as a monastery. Within there are courts and cisterns of good water. On the walls, all round, there are sculptured images of elephants, lions, tigers, and many human images, some like Amazons, and in many other shapes well sculptured. Certainly it is a sight well worth seeing, and it would appear that the devil had used all his powers and knowledge to deceive the gentiles into his worship. Some say that it is the work of the Chinese when they navigated to this land. It might well be true seeing that it is so well worked and that the Chinese are sutis. It is true that, at the present day, this pagoda is much defiled by cattle getting inside but in the year 1534, when I came from Portugal, it was a very fine sight. I saw it at the time when Bataim was at war with us. Soon afterwards the King of Cambaya ceded it to [Governor] Nuño da Cunha.

A more detailed description of the Elephanta cave is found in the logbook of Dom João de Castro, who later became the fourth Portuguese viceroy and a governor of India. He visited the island between December 12 and 18, 1538. His enthusiastic chronicle, Roteiro de Goa a Diu (Journey from Goa to Diu), written when the armada was enroute from Goa to the fortress at Diu, is regarded as "the first, careful scientific description of these shores." He first notes the topography of the island, then its myriad of birds and wild groves, and the lifelike statue of an elephant from which the island takes its name. He then observes the remarkable quality and variety of carvings in the temple, that seemed impossible to be made by human hands. Castro made measurements of the temple and remarked on the "two huge, ferocious guardians" flanking each door of the shrine; that within this chapel was an altar "with a large ball (obviously the linga*) that must symbolize the world''; in one of the other chapels that encircle the interior, a man is shown from the waist up with three faces and four armsin one right hand a hooded cobra is held, in the left the shape of a rose, in another the world is raised ("o mundo alevantado"), and the remaining hand is broken; in another chapel is a giant-like man with eight armstwo of them are raised to support the sky of the chapel ("o ceo da capela"), another holds a sword aloft, the fourth holds a bell shaped object, the fifth holds a boy by one foot with the head down, the sixth has a vase-like shield ("vaso como escudela") and has a covering of ashes ("nele emborilhado"), a chain of skulls of little boys, and a cobra, and the other two arms are broken; another chapel has a large bodied woman like a giantess, entirely naked, with a breast only on the right side, "thus like it is written of the Amazons"; and he briefly notices the cistern and the east wing. He seems to have been overwhelmed by the incomparable novelty and history of the cave, an understanding of which was beyond him. He does not posit any identifications of the reliefs, nor does he mention the existence of any inscription or plaque.
The next Portuguese account of Elephanta is by Diogo de Couto, an official chronicler at the time. It was written in 1603 but with reference to a visit he made to the monument some fifty years earlier, that is, perhaps only ten years or so after Castro's trip to the island. His account is more detailed than the latter's, and he mentions that an inscribed stone was removed from the entrance and sent to the king of Portugal. He observed a bright lime and bitumen coating over the whole temple interior.

~~The Iconography and Ritual of Siva At Elephanta -by- Charles Dillard Collins

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Day 158: Book Excerpt: Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction



The case of Holocaust denial differs from many contemporary free-speech issues. With Holocaust denial the focus is on fact, on whether specific statements about the past are true or not. Today, though, many conflicts centre on questions of respect and disrespect rather than opinions, truth, and falsehood. So, for example, in 2004 in Birmingham in England, the first production of the play Behzti (which means ‘dishonour’) by the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti was disrupted by Sikh rioters, who found it offensive. The plot centres on acts of sexual abuse and murder that take place in a gurdwara, a Sikh temple. The truth or falsehood of what was portrayed was not the issue. What disturbed the opponents of the play was that it disrespected the sacred nature of the gurdwara. This is a common response of religious groups to what they consider blasphemous depictions of their holy figures and places in novels, plays, and cinema. It is not a question of truth, but of whether there should be topics and places that are out of bounds for writers on the grounds that religious (and other) groups will find inappropriate treatment of such topics deeply offensive.

Mill would presumably have defended the performance of the play on the grounds that it expresses views that might be for the benefit of humanity and that it would be wrong to prejudge this. Furthermore, the indirect censorship of the play significantly restricts the playwright’s ability to follow her chosen path in life, despite not directly harming others. But Mill’s general stance on free speech is insensitive to the precise point at issue here, which is the alleged sanctity of certain symbols, a recurrent theme in religiously motivated attempts to prevent expression that disrespects this.

A further ground for censorship in some regimes may be that the viewpoint censored is actually true. This is not something that Mill considers in On Liberty. False views might be relatively harmless to a powerful government, but if, for example, knowledge of how the anti-corruption (and pro-democracy) protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were slaughtered or incarcerated became widespread throughout China, this might be a trigger for political uprising. This might well be the justification for Chinese authorities censoring, with the aid of some Western Internet Service Providers (ISPs), what appears on Internet search engines in China. In other words, Mill’s argument that censors assume infallibility may be beside the point here. What the censors in this case are presumably doing is preventing large numbers of people from learning the truth of the matter, not censoring a view which they sincerely believe to be false. It is the truth (or even an approximation of the truth) that is considered dangerous in this context.

More generally, once we move away from Mill’s implicit assumption that all forms of expression assert facts that may be true or false, then the limitations of his approach become even clearer. Debates about censoring pornographic images, for example, the subject of a later chapter, are not typically debates about the truth or falsehood of what is depicted. Hardcore video pornography aspires to accurate representation of the acts performed in front of the camera. The ‘cumshot’, where a man visibly ejaculates, is a mark of authentic arousal here. It dispels the suspicion that the actors are engaged in a series of choreographed movements while remaining unaffected by the actions they are performing. It exploits photography’s documentary potential to connote truth, to denote facts. It is hard to see how Mill’s arguments could be transposed here, unless we take pornography to be asserting a general position about, for example, the availability of women (or men) for sex or, as some feminists have argued, that it wrongly gives the message that all women desire sexual subjugation and directly encourages crimes such as rape. In such a case the general assertion is delivered via a specific instance, the part standing for the whole.

It might seem to follow from Mill’s views about free speech and the value of falsehoods sincerely expressed that we should actively strive to provide a platform for those with whom we strongly disagree. This is a public way of subjecting our views to the toughest test, the collision with sincerely held error. Whether or not inspired by Mill, some people have argued along these lines. For instance, in a debate in 2007 on the topic of free speech at the Oxford Union Society, the President of the Union, Luke Tryl, justified his invitations to Nick Griffin (of the British National Party) and David Irving by claiming that for a proper debate it was important to hear all views, even if they were obnoxious.

Many people believe there are strong arguments for not giving such speakers a platform. This might literally be a platform, as in the invitation to the Oxford Union Society, or it might be a metaphorical platform, such as being given space in a reputable newspaper or interviewed about their views for a radio or television programme. Those who take the ‘No Platform’ stance (e.g. in the form ‘no platform for racists’ or ‘no platform for Holocaust deniers’) argue that it is morally wrong for anyone to give such people credibility by allowing them access to these channels of communication, channels that often come with an implied stamp of respectability. For instance, by inviting Irving to speak at the Union Society this might be seen to be endorsing his credentials as an academic historian, and so might lead him to be taken more seriously than he should be.

On the other hand, those who invited Irving stressed that the Oxford Union has a long history of inviting controversial speakers, including, in the past, Malcolm X, and that an invitation to that particular platform carried with it no endorsement of the views of the speaker whatsoever. Speakers are often selected on grounds of notoriety rather than on the likelihood of an intellectual contribution to an important debate.

Similarly, at a zoology conference, the organizing committee might well decide that it would be inappropriate to allow a Young Earth Creationist, someone who takes the Bible as a literal account of the origin of life, to speak from a platform alongside reputable scientists, because this would seem to imply that the Young Earth Creationist’s views were scientifically respectable, which they clearly are not. Richard Dawkins cites a wry comment from a scientific colleague on this topic. Whenever a creationist invites him to a formal debate about the evidence for evolution, this scientist replies, ‘That would look great on your CV; not so good on mine.’

~~Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction -by- Nigel Warburton

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Day 157: Book Excerpt: The Art-Architecture Complex



We enter a dark space to the whirr of a sixteen-millimeter film projector, and a pencil of white light cuts across the empty room to a distant wall. It registers as a dot, yet slowly the dot becomes an arc, and a small section of a cone is carved out of the space. As the thirty minutes of the film elapse, the arc grows into a circle, and a full cone of light is described in the room; then the process begins again. During the time of this describing we cannot help but touch the light as though it were a solid and investigate the cone as if it were a sculpture—cannot help but move in, through, and around the projection as though we were its partner, even its subject. Such is the experience of Line Describing a Cone (1973) by Anthony McCall, a classic of “structural film.”
Fast-forward thirty-three years. Again we enter a dark space, but there is no sound, as the projector, now digital, is silent. There are two such machines, located above us, with the projected figure, also double, on the floor at our feet. This figure is far more complex than a line describing a cone: it has no obvious beginning or end, and its development cannot be readily anticipated; in fact it can scarcely be understood. As a result, over the sixteen minutes of this projection, we tend to observe the tracing on the floor more assiduously than we do with a horizontal piece like Line Describing a Cone, in order to tease out the logic of its configuration in time, a logic that also defines the moving veils of light that fall from above—though we know this correlation more than perceive it. Gradually (it requires more than one iteration), we see that one of the two figures is an ellipse that contracts and expands while the other figure, a wave, travels toward it; there is also a line that rotates through the wave, complicating both forms. At the same time a very slow filmic wipe connects the two figures such that the one is always eclipsing the other, making breaks, which produce apertures in the veils of light, and forging connections, which produce closures, in the process. Gradually, too, we see that, in the course of a cycle, one figure turns into the other: ellipse becomes wave and vice versa. This is the experience of Between You and I (2006), one of several vertical projections McCall has made since 2004.
Between the first series of films represented by Line and the second represented by Between, there was a long hiatus in this work (largely due to the falling away of support for structural film in the art world of the 1980s and 1990s); nonetheless, McCall calls them all “solid-light films.” Solid light is a beautiful paradox, one that conjures up the old debate about its nature (i.e. is light a particle or a wave?), and McCall invites us to play with the paradox—to touch the projections as if they were material even as our hands pass through them with ease, to see the volumes as solids even though they are nothing but light. The play is sensuous, to be sure, but it is also cognitive, for we are prompted to ask (as McCall does, rhetorically, here), “Where is the work? Is the work on the wall [or the floor]? Is the work in space? Am I the work?”
In effect this is also to ponder, “What is the medium?” It is film, evidently enough, but film denatured, stripped bare, reduced to projected light in darkened space. At the same time film is expanded here, in the sense that it is made both to draw lines and to sculpt volumes. In the process it is also questioned, particularly in the recent projections, which are digital and so, technically speaking, not filmic at all (they have none of the slight flicker of the early pieces, for example); the vertical pieces disrupt the horizontal orientation of cinema as well. “I was certainly always searching for the ultimate film, one that would be nothing but itself,” McCall has recalled, and this ambition is in keeping with the modernist project of artistic reflexivity and autonomy. Finally, however, what is disclosed here is less any essence of film than the recognition that mediums do not operate in this way—that they are not so many nuts to crack, with a meat to eat and a shell to discard, but a matrix of technical conditions and social conventions in a differential relation to the other arts. Thus this search for the “ultimate film” implicates other mediums, too, which, like Richard Serra and others before him, McCall shows to be arrayed in an aesthetic field, one that significant practice always works to reconfigure and to renew.
Of course, the first art implicated here is cinema, even though McCall pares away most of the attributes associated with it, not only illusionistic space and fictional narrative but also the spectatorial precondition of this imaginary “elsewhere” (as he calls it)—that is, the viewer fixed in place (seated in fact), with eyes locked on the screen, and mostly oblivious to apparatus, ambience, and audience alike (the cone of projected light in particular). It is “the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space,” McCall has asserted of Line, and it “exists only in the present.” This here-and-now-ness holds for his other films as well, and yet, as suggested, the effect is not to deliver film into a stable state of autonomous purity but to place it in correspondence with various arts—cinema first (especially in the horizontal projections), then sculpture (especially in the vertical projections), but other mediums and disciplines, too.
“The body is the important measure,” McCall says of the dimensions of his projections. Not only do they assume its scale, but they also incite us to move with the light—to play and/or to experiment with it—as it moves in turn; again, we interact with a McCall film as though we were somehow its subject. This bodily reference is one key connection with sculpture; another is that the films also carve volumes out of space. Non-traditional genres are elicited as well; for example, when the projectors engage the floor, the films implicate installation, too. On this score, beyond sculpture and installation, the solid-light films invite us to think about the architectural parameters of the given venue, which they both obscure and illuminate in ways that make us sense the space haptically as well as optically—that is, to feel our way around it with our hands out and our eyes wide open. One could say more about the rapport of the projections with other disciplines. Again, just as the films sculpt space, they also trace lines, and so implicate drawing as well. In fact they are drawings in light, literal photo-graphs in motion (which is, after all, what film is), and so photography is also engaged. In many ways the great pleasure afforded by the work comes as we move from an experiencing of the different phenomenologies of these media to a puzzling over their provisional ontologies and back again. Sensuous and cognitive, the space of the solid-light films is thus philosophical, too.

~~The Art-Architecture Complex -by- Hal Foster

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Day 156: Book Excerpt: Age Of Empire



If the rise of working-class parties was one major by-product of the politics of democratization, the rise of nationalism in politics was another. In itself it was plainly not new (see The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital). Yet in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed. Its very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word ‘nationalism’ itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals and socialists and in favour of that aggressive expansion of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ (Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. Though it originally described only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word ‘nationalism’ proved to be more convenient than the clumsy ‘principle of nationality’ which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830, and so it came to be used also for all movements to whom the ‘national cause’ was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demanding the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group. For the number of such movements, or at least of leaders claiming to speak for such movements, and their political significance, increased strikingly in our period.
The basis of ‘nationalism’ of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves emotionally with ‘their’ nation’ and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it ‘patriotism’, and the essence of the original ‘right-wing’ nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with the tradition of the French Revolution. But elsewhere nationalism had no necessary identification with any colour in the political spectrum. Among the national movements still lacking their own states we shall encounter those identifying with the right or the left, or indifferent to either. And indeed, as we have suggested, there were movements, and not the least powerful, which mobilized men and women on a national basis, but, as it were, by accident, since their primary appeal was for social liberation. For while in this period national identification clearly was or became a major factor in the politics of states, it is quite mistaken to see the national appeal as incompatible with any other. Nationalist politicians and their opponents naturally liked to suggest that one kind of appeal excluded the other, as wearing one hat excludes wearing another at the same time. But, as a matter of history, and observation, this is not so. In our period it was perfectly possible to become simultaneously a class-conscious Marxian revolutionary and an Irish patriot, like James Connolly, who was to be executed in 1916 for leading the Easter Rising in Dublin.
But of course, insofar as parties in the countries of mass politics competed for the same body of supporters, these had to make mutually exclusive choices.
The new working-class movements, appealing to their potential constituency on grounds of class identification, soon realized this, insofar as they found themselves competing, as was usually the case in multinational regions, against parties which asked proletarians and potential socialists to support them as Czechs, Poles or Slovenes. Hence their preoccupation as soon as they actually became mass movements, with ‘the national question’. That virtually every Marxist theorist of importance, from Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, via the Austro-Marxists, to Lenin and the young Stalin, took part in the impassioned debates on this subject during this period, suggests the urgency and centrality of this problem.
Where national identification became a political force, it therefore formed a sort of general substratum of politics. This makes its multifarious expressions extremely difficult to define, even when they claimed to be specifically nationalist or patriotic. As we shall see, national identification almost certainly became more widespread in our period, and the significance of the national appeal in politics grew. However, what was almost certainly more important was a major set of mutations within political nationalism, which was to have profound consequences for the twentieth century.

~~Age Of Empire -by- Eric Hobsbawm

Monday, January 18, 2016

Day 155: Book Excerpt: Collapse



Japan’s long history of scientific forest management is not well known to Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800. When I first visited Germany in 1959, I was astonished to discover the extent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban.
But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surprising, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It has the highest population density of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains, while most people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable sources of timber. Because of that forest mantle, the Japanese often refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” While the mantle superficially resembles a primeval forest, in fact most of Japan’s accessible original forests were cut by 300 years ago and became replaced with regrowth forest and plantations as tightly micromanaged as those of Germany and Tikopia.
Japanese forest policies arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis paradoxically brought on by peace and prosperity. For almost 150 years beginning in 1467, Japan was convulsed by civil wars as the ruling coalition of powerful houses that had emerged from the earlier disintegration of the emperor’s power in turn collapsed, and as control passed instead to dozens of autonomous warrior barons (called daimyo), who fought each other. The wars were finally ended by the military victories of a warrior named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1615 Ieyasu’s storming of the Toyotomi family stronghold at Osaka, and the deaths by suicide of the remaining Toyotomis, marked the wars’ end.
Already in 1603, the emperor had invested Ieyasu with the hereditary title of shogun, the chief of the warrior estate. From then on, the shogun based at his capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo) exercised the real power, while the emperor at the old capital of Kyoto remained a figurehead. A quarter of Japan’s area was directly administered by the shogun, the remaining three-quarters being administered by the 250 daimyo whom the shogun ruled with a firm hand. Military force became the shogun’s monopoly. Daimyo could no longer fight each other, and they even needed the shogun’s permission to marry, to modify their castles, or to pass on their property in inheritance to a son. The years from 1603 to 1867 in Japan are called the Tokugawa era, during which a series of Tokugawa shoguns kept Japan free of war and foreign influence.
Peace and prosperity allowed Japan’s population and economy to explode. Within a century of the wars’ end, population doubled because of a fortunate combination of factors: peaceful conditions, relative freedom from the disease epidemics afflicting Europe at the time (due to Japan’s ban on foreign travel or visitors: see below), and increased agricultural productivity as the result of the arrival of two productive new crops (potatoes and sweet potatoes), marsh reclamation, improved flood control, and increased production of irrigated rice. While the population as a whole thus grew, cities grew even faster, to the point where Edo became the world’s most populous city by 1720. Throughout Japan, peace and a strong centralized government brought a uniform currency and uniform system of weights and measures, the end of toll and customs barriers, road construction, and improved coastal shipping, all of which contributed to a trade boom within Japan.
But Japan’s trade with the rest of the world was cut to almost nothing. Portuguese navigators bent on trade and conquest, having rounded Africa to reach India in 1498, advanced to the Moluccas in 1512, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. Those first European visitors to Japan were just a pair of shipwrecked sailors, but they caused unsettling changes by introducing guns, and even bigger changes when they were followed by Catholic missionaries six years later. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including some daimyo, became converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, rival Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries began competing with each other, and stories spread that friars were trying to Christianize Japan as a prelude to a European takeover.
In 1597 Toyotomi Hideyoshi crucified Japan’s first group of 26 Christian martyrs. When Christian daimyo then tried to bribe or assassinate government officials, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.) In 1614 Ieyasu prohibited Christianity and began to torture and execute missionaries and those of their converts who refused to disavow their religion. In 1635 a later shogun went even further by forbidding Japanese to travel overseas and forbidding Japanese ships to leave Japan’s coastal waters. Four years later, he expelled all the remaining Portuguese from Japan.

~~Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed -by- Jared Diamond

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Day 154: Book Excerpt: The Shock Of The New



For the late nineteenth century, the cradle of modernism, did not feel the uncertainties about the machine that we do. No statistics on pollution, no prospect of melt-downs or core explosions lay on the horizon; and very few of the visitors to the World’s Fair of 1889 had much experience of the mass squalor and voiceless suffering that William Blake had railed against and Friedrich Engels described. In the past the machine had been represented and caricatured as an ogre, a behemoth, or – due to the ready analogy between furnaces, steam, smoke, and Hell – as Satan himself. But by 1889 its “otherness” had waned, and the World’s Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid, and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources. The machine meant the conquest of process, and only very exceptional sights, like a rocket launch, can give us anything resembling the emotion with which our ancestors in the 1880s contemplated heavy machinery: for them, the “romance” of technology seemed far more diffused and optimistic, acting publicly on a wider range of objects, than it is today. Perhaps this had happened because more and more people were Jiving in a machine-formed environment: the city. The machine was a relatively fresh part of social experience in 1880, whereas in 1780 it had been exotic, and by 1980 it would be a cliché. The vast industrial growth of European cities was new. In 1850, Europe had still been overwhelmingly rural. Most Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans, let alone Italians, Poles, or Spaniards, lived in the country or in small villages. Forty years later the machine, with its imperative centralizing of process and product, had tipped the balance of population towards the towns. Baudelaire’s fourmillante cité of alienated souls – “ant-swarming City, City full of dreams/Where in broad day the spectre tugs your sleeve” – began to displace the pastoral images of nature whose last efflorescence was in the work of Monet and Renoir. The master-image of painting was no longer landscape but the metropolis. In the country, things grow; but the essence of manufacture, of the city, is process, and this could only be expressed by metaphors of linkage, relativity, interconnectedness.
These metaphors were not ready to hand. Science and technology had outstripped them, and the rate of change was so fast that it left art stranded, at least for a time, in its pastoral conventions. Perhaps no painting of a railway station, not even Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, could possibly have the aesthetic brilliance and clarity of the great Victorian railroad stations themselves – Euston, St. Pancras, Penn Station, those true cathedrals of the nineteenth century. And certainly no painting of a conventional sort could deal with the new public experience of the late nineteenth century, fast travel in a machine on wheels. For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
At first, only a few people could have this curiously altered experience of the visual world without taking a train: the crackpots and inventors with their home-made cars, and then the adventurous rich, veiled and goggled, chugging down the country lanes of Bellosguardo or Normandy. But because it promised to telescope more experience into the conventional frame of travel, and finally to burst the frame altogether, the avant-garde of engineering seemed to have something in common with the avant-garde of art.
As the most visible sign of the Future, the automobile entered art in a peculiarly clumsy way. The first public sculpture ever set up in its praise stands in a park at the Porte Maillot in Paris. It commemorates the great road race of 1895, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, which was won by an engineer named Émile Levassor in the car he designed and built himself, the Panhard-Levassor 5 – which could go at about the same speed as a jumping frog. Nevertheless, Levassor’s victory was of great social consequence, and worth a memorial, since it persuaded Europeans – manufacturers and public alike – that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine and not with its competitors, electricity or steam. In all justice there should be a replica of the Levassor Monument set up in every oil port from Bahrein to Houston. Yet it looks slightly absurd to us as sculpture today, suggesting the difficulties artists faced in transposing the new category of the machine into the conventions of traditional sculpture.
It is a stone car – an idea that seems Surrealist to a modern eye, almost as wrong as a teacup made of fur. Marble is immobile, silent, mineral, brittle, white, cold. Cars are fast, noisy, metallic, elastic, warm. A human body is warm, too, but we do not think of statues as stone men because we are used to the conventions of depicting flesh with stone. (When these conventions are violated, as in the second act of Don Giovanni when the statue of the Commendatore comes alive, the effect is always spectral or comic.) The problem for Jules Dalou, who designed the Levassor Monument, was the lack of agreed conventions for depicting a headlamp or a steering wheel. Such motifs were too new, like the machine itself, so no exact representation of a car in stone could be as visually convincing as the car itself.
Yet the cultural conditions of seeing were starting to change, and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too. The most spectacular thing about it in the 1890s was not the view of the Tower from the ground. It was seeing the ground from the Tower. Until then, the highest manmade point from which Paris could be seen by the public was the gargoyle gallery of Notre Dame. Most people lived entirely at ground level, or within forty feet of it, the height of an ordinary apartment house. Nobody except a few intrepid balloonists had ever risen a thousand feet from the earth. Consequently, the bird’s-eye view of nature or townscape was an extreme and rare curiosity, and when the photographer Nadar took his camera up in a balloon in 1856, his daguerreotypes were not only snapped up by the public but also commemorated, in a spirit of friendly irony, by Honoré Daumier. But when the Tower opened to the public in 1889, nearly a million people rode its lifts to the top platform; and there they saw what modern travellers take for granted every time they fly – the earth on which we live seen flat, as pattern, from above. As Paris turned its once invisible roofs and the now clear labyrinth of its alleys and streets towards the tourist’s eye, becoming a map of itself, a new type of landscape began to seep into popular awareness. It was based on frontality and pattern, rather than on perspective recession and depth.
This way of seeing was one of the pivots in human consciousness. The sight of Paris vu d’en haut, absorbed by millions of people in the first twenty years of the Tower’s life, was as significant in 1889 as the famous NASA photograph of the earth from the moon, floating like a green vulnerable bubble in the dark indifference of space, would be eighty years later. The characteristic flat, patterned space of modern art – Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Seurat – was already under development before the Tower was built. It was based on other art-historical sources: on the flatness of “primitive” Italian frescoes, on Japanese woodblock prints, on the coiling and distinct patterns of cloisonné enamel. When Gauguin’s friend Maurice Denis wrote his manifesto "The Definition of Neo-Traditionalism" in the summer of 1890, it began with one of the canonical phrases of modernism: that “a picture – before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some sort of anecdote – is essentially a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.” Denis was invoking this principle in order to bring painting back to a kind of heraldic flatness, the flatness of banners and crusaders’ tombslabs and the Bayeux Tapestry, in which his ambition to cover the new churches of France with Christian frescoes might prosper. The Eiffel Tower had nothing to do with his interests; but the idea of space that it provoked, a flatness that contained ideas of dynamism, movement, and the quality of abstraction inherent in structures and maps, was also the space in which a lot of the most advanced European art done between 1907 and 1920 would unfold.

~~The Shock Of The New -by- Robert Hughes