Finished REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST tonight.

Nature-ly

Ad in May 19 issue of Nature:

"Faculty Position in Mouse Genetics."
Contact Mount Sinai School of Medicine, N.Y., N.Y.

Line forms on the right.

-Benjamin Harris

Things that You'll Like and that Are Good for You Too

Things that You'll Like and that Are Good for You Too

-Clear magazine. A magazine of design and fashion, Clear is the most visually stunning magazine out there. This is Public Occurrences

THE END

THE END

Got my first solicitation from AARP today, "Welcome to US."

-Benjamin Harris

Benjamin Jones' Art: A Review of His Drawings in New American Paintings #52

Benjamin Jones' Art: A Review of His Drawings in New American Paintings #52

The most important quality for a work of art to have is the ability to move us, to make us feel.

By this standard Benjamin Jones drawings in the series New American Paintings, issue #52, succeed.

The most moving of the three works depicted is Leaving Behind, executed in 2003. In it a crudely drawn black and white stick figure contemplates a prone cartoonish teddy bear-like figure.

Contrasted with the contemplating figure, the teddy bear is drawn in color, a yellow body, one ear colored blue and red, the other brown and red.

Also in contrast to the contemplating figure, the teddy bear has, however crudely drawn, arms and toes on his feet.

The contemplating figure is little more than a head. There is no hair and just dots for ears and a nose. It has no arms, is dressed in a black variegated tunic with no hint of an underlying body and its feet are drawn as child-like, stick-figure clubs.

Significantly Mr. Jones has articulated the eyes of the figures, the proverbial windows of the soul. The contemplating figure is looking at the teddy bear and looking back at his childhood or perhaps at a child-like innocence lost, a state when he was more than a "brain in a vat," to a time when he was more complete and had arms and hands and fingers and toes and useful ears.

There is a bit of a sorrowful look on the contemplator's face but mostly it is a look of contemplation from a distance, of acceptance, but acknowledgment of loss.

In between these two figures is a disembodied head at the feet of the contemplator. There is no mistaking the look of anguish on the face of this head. It is drawn in the style and in the black and white spareness of the contemplating figure and so can be taken to be the contemplator at a slightly earlier period in life. The grief of the disembodied head is also what the contemplator has left behind, in addition to the teddy bear innocence.

The mouths of all three figures are clearly articulated and the teeth are aggressively portrayed. This aspect of the drawing does not work. There should be nothing of ambiguous intent in the depiction of bared teeth. They are universally recognized as a symbol of aggression, but here they are drawn alike on all three figures, one that is smiling (the teddy bear), one that is grieving, one that is contemplating. Teeth-baring aggression is not what is being left behind in Leaving Behind.

If Mr. Jones meant instead to convey the pain of words by the frightful teeth, that intent also is not realized, not the least because the symbolism of bared teeth without more does not convey the one-step-removed pain of words issuing from sharp-toothed mouths.

Mr. Jones has drawn this moving scene against an empty off-white paper background that enhances the dramatic effect of the theme by not distracting the viewer by superfluity. In this way, the drawing is reminiscent of those striking Chinese portraits done even more sparingly with fine tip against a bare background that is overwhelming in its emptiness.

Mr. Jones' skill in movingly expressing his feelings has already gained him recognition. According to his c.v. his work is displayed in several museums, including the Whitney in New York.

It is hoped that Mr. Jones, possessing the preeminent quality of artistic greatness, is dedicated and ambitious enough to generalize from the particular, that is to connect his soul to the condition of his fellows, to society's, to mankind's. That would be ambition indeed.

However, in the brief summary on his biography page in New American Painting, Mr. Jones writes, inter alia, the following:

.....isolation......not invited....exiled.....apart....

__

.....BAMBI.....choice+no choice.....cage.....freedom lost.....jail

__

.....Pavarotti's NESSUN DORMA.....

__

.....Capote's A CHRISTMAS MEMORY.....

__

.....CHINA.....

And so on. That kind of Rorschach test/word association summary of his life is (1) revealing of deep feeling and manifold experience, and (2) revealing of his lack of generalizing from those particular emotions and experiences, of not bringing them together into a coherent whole, or at least, wholes.

This disjointedness is apparent in Leaving Behind. The figures stand against an empty background, away from anything--history, society--that is larger than the self.

There is also no connection between Mr. Jones' art and the art of this time. There is no expression of how art history has informed his work, of how he got to this point as an artist. Again, it is conceded that this is to judge Mr. Jones' art by a very ambitious standard. The three paintings in N.A.P #52 are in every way indicative of an artist who lives and works apart. Connecting his disconnectedness would take Mr. Jones art beyond where it is now.

There is also no indication of Mr. Jones ability to draw or paint in his three N.A.P. works. If he possesses such ability and has just eschewed it in these works for effect that is one thing, the efficacy of which itself can be debated, but if he hasn't that ability it would be nonsense to say that that lack doesn't matter in evaluating a work of art. It certainly is not fatal but painting is non-verbal expression and clearly the impact of that expression can be enhanced or detracted by artistic skill. Can Mr. Jones draw?

He can express himself movingly. That alone makes his art worthwhile and stand out against much of the background of his contemporaries.

Benjamin Jones' art can be seen in the Whitney Museum, the High Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Atlanta, and at the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art in Orlando, Fl.

Leaving Behind is listed as not for sale in N.A.P.; his two other paintings are priced at $1600. He is represented by the Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta and can be reached at 404-815-1545.


-Benjamin Harris

NATURE-LY

NATURE-LY*

March 17, 2005 cover story article in Nature, "The DNA sequence of the human X chromosome," twelve pages long including charts and bibliography: co-authored by two hundred eighty two (282) people, including one "Jen S. Conquer," who Nature says is with "The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge Mass.", but which I have reason to believe is the porn pseudonym used by Technology Review editor Jason Pontin.

-Benjamin Harris

*see March 18 post, Success Has a Thousand Fathers...

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS...

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS...

"Publish or perish" being the whip on the backs of common laborers in the fields of scholarship it is customary for written works to be co-authored so as to pad as many resumes as possible.

So along with R.W. Apple's expense accounts and Donald Kuspit's incomparable eight scholarly quotes in one paragraph the cover article in the March 10 issue of Nature should be donated to The Smithsonian for most co-authors of a single article.

With the sexy cover headline of "Purple Haze, Casini's Titan images in detail" the accompanying article is co-authored by:

Carolyn C. Porco
Emily Baker
John Barbara
Kevin Beurle
Andre Brahic
Joseph A. Burns
Sebastien Charnoz
Nick Cooper
Douoglas D. Dawson
Anthony D. Del Genio
Tilmann Denk
Luke Dones
Ulyan Dyudina
Michael W. Evans
Stephanie Fussner
Bernd Giese
Kevin Grazier
Paul Helfenstein
Andrew P. Ingersoll
Robert A. Jacobson
Torrence V. Johnson
Alfred McEwen
Carl D. Murray
Gerhard Neukum
William M. Owen
Jason Perry
Thomas Roatsch
Joseph Spitale
Steven Squyres
Peter Thomas
Matthew Tiscareno
Elizabeth P. Turtle. I demand proof of that name
Ashwin R. Vasavada
Joseph Veverka
Roland Wagner
Robert West.

That's thirty-six. Seven others are named in the "Acknowledgments" section at the end of the article.

There are 143 sentences in the article. Reserving the last paragraph, containing three sentences, for the seven "and others" in the acknowledgments, and employing the arithmetic tool of "division" that works out to 3.9 sentences per co-author.

Congratulations to all.

-Benjamin Harris, et al

IDEAS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO SLAP YOURSELF ON THE FOREHEAD AND GO "WOW!": CISTERNS

IDEAS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO SLAP YOURSELF ON THE FOREHEAD AND GO "WOW!": CISTERNS

ABC NEWS reported on its website on March 14 of the success of a pilot project at a school in Los Angeles in using cisterns to collect rain water, thereby cutting its water bill to practically nil and raising the possibility of more widespread use of the ancient technology and, dare to dream, mitigating or ending L.A.'s, and other similar locales H2O problems permanently.

The idea came from a group called TreePeople and they convinced L.A. powers to build a 110,000 gallon underwater collection tank at Open Charter Elementary School. The ABC report says the sytem works by diverting rain water from storm drains, where it would go straight into the Pacific into the cistern where it is filtered of impurities and then hauled off by tanker trucks.

The report also noted that since half of all L.A. water usage goes to lawns a network of small cisterns located throughout the county could work ideally.

According to the report L.A. recently had a wet spell and eighty billion gallons of water was just literally flushed. A TreePeople spokesman said that when it rains just under half an inch that 3.8 billion gallons of water falls on the city. L.A. imports eighty-five percent of its water at a cost of $1 billion a year.

-Benjamin Harris

JOSEPH CONRAD'S "NOSTROMO"

JOSEPH CONRAD'S NOSTROMO

"The greatest novel in English of this century." So wrote someone named Walter Allen of Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.

I had never heard of the book although I think Nostromo was the name of the spaceship in the movie Alien, the one in which Sigourney Weaver gets into her spacesuit dressed in very small panties.

Oh yes, so I bought the book based on that blurb by the immortal Mr. Allen. That's pretty high praise considering that the twentieth century produced such as Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et al.

But query: what exactly does that mean for a book published in 1904? I assume that Mr. Allen wrote that sometime significantly after ought-four but it would be startling if he really did mean that the work eclipsed Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, etc.

On the other hand, if Allen wrote that tribute say, in 1915, that is almost damning by faint praise like what I used to say to a "between jobs" friend of mine that he was "one of the ten best unemployed filmmakers in all of Poughkeepsie."

Allen didn't say of the century, which could thus include most of the nineteenth, he said of this century so it had to be the twentieth. Very odd, very oddly ambiguous.

It's a fine book so far as I can tell after eighty pages but "the greatest novel in English of this [the 20th] century"????? Maybe this is why I had never heard of Walter Allen.

Hey, if you run your VCR in reverse you can make it look like Sigourney Weaver is getting undressed. Huh, how about that?

-Benjamin Harris

Graham Greene

Graham Greene

"There is no peace anywhere where there is human life..." Another Mexico (The Lawless Roads)

Christianity, alone of the great religions, is characterized by "the divided mind, the uneasy conscience, and the sense of personal failure."

Betrayal is apparently the central theme of Greene's oeuvre. Philip Stratford who wrote the introduction to Penguin's The Portable Graham Greene gives as examples Greene's character Scobie's "triple betrayal of his wife, his profession, and his God, which leads him to the self-betrayal of suicide." (p. xi).

That is the most original, insightful description of suicide that I have ever read.

Stratford again: "the significance of betrayal [for Greene]--for betrayal isn't worthy of the name if one doesn't love what one betrays." (p. xiii)

"...when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us..." (Journey Without Maps).

That is such a powerful, poetic expression of mankind's dichotomony, the mind and the soul.

-Benjamin Harris

Graham Greene

Graham Greene:

"...for surely we choose our death much as we choose our job." (The Future Strikes)

I chose death as my job.

-Benjamin Harris

Yves Klein Blue

Yves Klein Blue

The current issue of Artforum has a review of last year's Frankfurt exhibition of Yves Klein's work. There is a picture of the installation of Klein's blue rectangles (why not circles, ovals or triangles; why is everything in painting in parallelograms?) at the Schirn Kunsthalle.

When I was in New York a few years ago I stopped in at a gallery in Chelsea, as much to get out of the bitter February cold as anything else.

The gallery had a library of sorts and I plopped down on a chair to thaw out and picked up some of the magazines and books that they had to pass the time. A lot of them were on Yves Klein, maybe the gallery specialized in his work.

I had never heard of Yves Klein and it was there that I first saw International Klein Blue and what Klein did with it in his art.

Trying to put one's reaction to a work of art into words is almost oxymoronic. It is art's ability to go beyond the intellect and to the soul that makes it unique and language is a tool of intellect's creation. That is apologia for the following.

I was enchanted by IKB. Technically it is, the review in Artforum says, "a mixture of dry pigment and synthetic resin."

The magic of IKB is a combination of the color and it's texture. Klein hit upon a color of such complex beauty in itself that I think it would stand on its own as a creation. The viewer can get an idea of what a painting in IKB would look like from Artforum's photograph of the blue rectangles installment in the Schirn Kunsthalle.

The installation room is wonderfully constructed to show the power of the color. It is U-shaped with the base of the U squared off at ninety degrees angles. The visitor approaches the room and the eye is drawn to the U's base where, on a wall of the purest white a horizantally-oriented blue rectangle is hung. There is obvious religious symbolism here.

It is not clear to me from the photograph if the white of the walls is luminescent or if it an artifact of the camera's flash but the horizontal painting at the base of the U is surrounded by a cloud-like aurora of white.

The cloud does not obscure the horizontal painting at all and as I look at it repeatedly it appears to be a deliberate part of the installation, perhaps to give the painting, and the whole installation, an ethereal appearance. If so, that doesn't work for me. The paintings are magnetic enough without Hollywood special effects but if the cloud is the camera's artifact it's a weird, and to me, not understandable artifact.

Along each side of the U are hung two other rectangles each, these vertically oriented. The rectangles are all of identical dimension. The floor of the room is immaculate blonde hardwood.

The cloud aside, IKB's magic is apparent in this room. It is a thrilling, positive, "up" color, with some power but not aggression.

Klein took this wondrous color and not only made monochrome paintings out of it but also covered sculpture in it. There's a Venus de Milo in Klein's blue as well as a Nike of Samothrace and a Dying Slave. Klein also did facial casts of his friends and a globe in IKB.

It is in these sculptures that the other component of IKB's power, it's texture, comes through. The dry pigment absorbs light rather than reflects it and it's soft granulation transforms the sculpture much more completely than a coating of IKB paint would. The sculpture, already 3-d is recreated by a surface that is also 3-d and in this magical color also.

I don't know how seriously, or not, the art cognescenti take Klein's work but if art is quintessentially something that "moves" a viewer then it is great art to me.

-Benjamin Harris

Norwitch's Revenge?

Norwitch's Revenge?

It was Shaun Wright-Phillips whose shot set up Robbie Fowler's rebound putback in injury time that "crushed" Norwitch last Monday night.

Word came yesterday that "Wrighty" injured his knee sometime in the match and that X-rays revealed a tear of one of his knee tendons. Most likely he's done for the season.

With SWP gone and with Nicholas Anelka sent off to Turkey one has to wonder from whom Man City is going to get goals in its last ten matches. There's always Fowler I guess and an injury to a major star can often work psychological magic on his replacement(s) and on the whole squad but, as Norwitch's coach said following his team's catastrophe, "football is cruel." In normal circumstances City would be considered at present to be comfortably free of the relegation zone, but these are normal circumstances no longer.

You get three points for a win in English football and before the Norwitch crusher Man City manager Kevin Keegan said that City needed two more wins to secure a fourth straight season in the premiership. It's schedule is not impossible but it would have been an underdog going into most of it's remaining matches, maybe even including Monday's match at home against Bolton. Now, without SWP...

How "cruelly" ironic if the Norwitch City match knocked two teams out of the premiership.

-Benjamin Harris

"Nabakov on Bleak House"

"Nabakov on Bleak House"

In 1948, Vladimir Nabakov was teaching at Cornell and gave a famous series of lectures on literature. These are the introductory words from his lecture on Charles Dickens' Bleak House, as reprinted in the Bantam Classics edition of the book:

"We are now ready to tackle Dickens.
We are now ready to embrace Dickens.
We are now ready to bask in Dickens.
In our dealings with Jane Austen we
had to make a certain effort in order
to join the ladies in the drawing room.
In the case of Dickens we remain at
table with our tawny port."

"With Dickens we expand...We just
surrender ourselves to Dickens's
voice--that is all. If it were possible
I would like to devote the fifty minutes
of every class meeting to mute medi-
tation, concentration, and admiration
of Dickens. However, my job is to
direct and rationalize those medi-
tations, that admiration. All we have
to do when reading Bleak House is to
relax and let our spines take over.
Although we read with our minds,
the seat of artistic delight is between
the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the high-
est form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art
and pure science. Let us worship the
spine and its tingle. Let us be proud
of our being vertebrates, for we are ver-
tebrates tipped at the head with a divine
flame. The brain only continues the spine:
the wick really goes through the whole
length of the candle. If we are not capable
of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy
literature, then let us give up the whole
thing and concentrate on our comics, our
videos, our books- of-the week. But I
think Dickens will prove stronger."

-Benjamin Harris

Susan Sontag in Artforum

This month's issue of Artforum is the first since the death of Susan Sontag and contains three tributes, one by Arthur Danto.

I'm going to try to keep this post from branching off into fifteen directions but I need to branch a little. This is a branch. I've never seen or heard Arthur Danto in person but he writes like such a kind, generous-spirited person. Couple of examples: the art world seems to me to be extremely harsh, critical, personal and petty. That's all I'll say on that and it's just meant to contrast some things I've read Danto write.

Danto is the champion of the seriousness, indeed the genius, of Andy Warhol. Tough sell. In one of his books he wrote that when he said that Warhol was the closest thing to a philosophical genius in art in the twentieth century, Robert Motherwell, an artist who had some formal training in philosophy, was aghast and insulted. Danto wrote that apotheosizing Warhol as such "nearly cost me Robert's friendship." Just that, nothing more but that says a lot about the things that are important to Arthur Danto: friendship, human kinship, generosity of spirit.

In his obit of Sontag, he says "we were usually happy to be in one another's company when we were on some panel together or at the same dinner," although "we were often on opposite sides of an issue."

I was not on any of those panels, nor at any of those dinners but I believe Danto to be very generous to Sontag and to their relationship in that description. But then, as if that may have sounded a bit damning by faint praise he follows that right up with the conclusion to his tribute.

"But when, in the days after her death,
people told me about their difficulties
with her ideas, I didn't want to hear about
it. As often happens with a death, we
realize what our true feelings are. I knew
from the intensity of my grief that she
was irreplaceable as only someone we love
is irreplaceable."

That speaks for itself as to Susan Sontag, and as to her friend, Arthur Danto.

One more branch. In a post a few days before I got the new issue of Artforum I wrote of Dennis Dutton's little blurb in Arts and Letters Daily on the art of Henry Darger--"Does it move anybody?"--as reminding me of the difficulty that I had with Danto's and Clement Greenberg's definitions of art, or of "good" art anyway, that their definitions missed in not giving preeminence to the emotive, soulful ability of art. People are not just brains in a vat in Descartes famous conception. We have intellect and we have a soul and the ability of art to go right by the intellect into our souls is unique. That does not happen with philosophy or with mathematics or with logic. There can be soulful bliss and beauty in those fields but the ability of art to get us right in the heart is different.

I have never read any of Susan Sontag's work but perhaps I shall after reading what Danto says of her:

"We need an erotics of art, she insisted,
rather than a hermeneutics: a way of
responding to passion with passion rather
than stifling it under the apparatus of deep
interpretation, in the manner of heavy
explainers. 'Who any longer dares confess
pleasure in the presence of art?' the art
historian James Ackerman once wrote in
a letter to me, thinking of the way works
of art were now occasions for the dispas-
sionate subjection to what his professional
colleagues called Theory. I think Sontag's
argument would have been that that cannot
be why art exists. It exists to satisfy the
one set of needs that is uniquely human...
The difference between [aesthetics] and the
relation to art that Sontag exemplified and enjoined
was like the difference between sex education and
the Kama Sutra."

Just so.

I did see Susan Sontag live once, and on another occasion, of a fashion.

Several years ago I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. One of the exhibits I viewed was a series of five minute films he made of several of his friends. He simply kept the camera on their faces for five minutes. No script, no dialogue, just five minutes with the camera in their faces continuously. Five minutes is a LONG time in our Warholian fifteen minutes of fame culture as Warhol understood better than anyone else, and the effect was fascinating. It was a five minute psychoanalytic session.

I remember some of Warhol's friends being goofy at times, not knowing what to do for five whole minutes. Others didn't giggle or smile abruptly but seemed similarly shallow or at least not revealing of their substance.

Then there was this one of this attractive, black-haired young woman, that the camera seemed to me to reveal as the incarnation of Narcissus. That was the first and instantaneous reaction I had.

But there were other reactions, some of them contradictory with narcissism. Never was there so much activity in an inactive five minutes. The woman's eyes darted and flitted, they did not seem to want to make contact with the lens. She seemed restless, not of course, just physically BUT IN HER SOUL; distracted, but not obviously in a "serious"--a word she used a lot--way; I thought, "she was going to get her hair done or shopping when this nutty friend of hers asked her to pose for five straight minutes with a camera in her face and she's thinking "Can I go now?" It's so trite here but you could see the proverbial "wheels turning."

Afterwords, when I read in the pamphlet that the woman in was Susan Sontag I was delighted at having seen...historical footage. I didn't know what else.

The other thing that jumped out at me in the loop of her was that she was so--trite alert-- "striking." Not beautiful, but close to it; gorgeous hair, full lips, a pretty face,very soulful and deep looking, and those eyes that spoke so much and so little and of so many different things.

The photograph that Artforum uses to introduce the three eulogies to Sontag is perfect. She was forty-one at the time and dressed in a long-sleeved turtle-neck; she is lying on her back with her arms stretched out above her, her hands cradling her head. She looks in the photographer's direction but not at the camera lens, off into a world not the one she's physically in.

Reclined, her sexuality is more evident. Her lips, Angelina Jolie-luscious and inviting, her body open and ready to be pleasured (apparently not by a man of the male persuasion as I read in the three tributes). The line of her chin is nearly perfectly straight, strong but not in the least mannish. Her nose is well-proportioned to her face, her eyebrows symetrically and dramatically frame those restless eyes and at the edges that gorgeous black hair is now edged with gray.

The one time I saw Sontag live was at a symposium at N.Y.U. on David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge and his sensational claim that many Renaissance artists had used lenses to paint their humanity-defying realism. All manner of people spoke, Michael Fried, Hockney's optics collaborator Charles Falco, the head of the Met.

Apparently one of Sontag's catch-phrases, in addition to "serious," was "move one." "Move on" from interpretation, move on, or beyond, feminism, just move on. She got up at the symposium and said, "There seem to be three reactions to David Hockney's book. One, it's true and we always knew it. Two, it's not true. And three, it doesn't matter."

It was glib, pithy, funny and also flittingly dismissive. I heard in that the same narcissism that I had seen in Andy Warhol's loop, the same restlessness, the same "Can I go now?, the same "move on."

Norwitch/Man City and the Reason I Gave Up Sports

Norwitch/Man City and the Reason I Gave Up Sports

One of the reasons I lost my interest in sports, and it was a gradual loss over a period of several years, was the emotional involvement that I had in them. Truly, some of the best, and worst moments of my life were caused by my teams performances. I was embarassed for myself.

So gradually I withdrew, first it was the baseball season tickets to go, then the hockey, then the basketball (yeah, I had it bad), then the trips to see my alma mater play. And concommitantly my tv sports viewing dropped from--no exaggeration--about ten hours on college football Saturdays to zero. Zero. It's gotten to the point where if I am over at a house and a football game is on TV I get bored and antsy after about fifteen minutes.

I follow sports now the way that most women and some men do, I know the big events and players but not much else and I do keep track of my alma mater and my soccer team, Manchester City.

Even though I am now so far removed from fan(atic)-dom I still empathsize with my ex-fellow addicts, so Monday night's match between Man City and Norwitch brought back a lot of feelings.

Man City is mid-table in the English Premier League, Norwitch was nineteenth out of twenty teams. In English football the bottom three teams automatically get "relegated" to a lower division. There is no equivalent of it in American sports. Hard as it is to even imagine it would be like if the Tampa Bay Devil Rays finished in their customary last place and the next year found themselves playing the Toledo Mud Hens instead of the Yankees. It's devestating financially for the team and more so, I MEAN MORE SO for the fans.

Norwitch had just been promoted to the premiership this year so Monday night's match was a must-win for them to avoid a quick demotion. They were playing at home against a beatable opponent in Man City and an opponent that (1) has been erratic in its play in its own brief, three-year stay in the premiership and (2)had just sold its top goal-scorer to a Turkish club because of his own mercurial play.

The Canaries jumped on the opportunity. Inside 17 minutes they had gotten up 2-0 on Man City. 2-0 is A LOT in European soccer but before half-time City had tied it up. Norwitch had a great opportunity to retake the lead in the 71st minute but our, er, City's, goalkeeper made a great save.

The 90 minutes of regulation ended at 2-2. Soccer though adds on a few extra minutes at the end of each half to make up for delays caused by injuries and the like. The amount of time never amounts to more than 3-4 minutes but it was a few seconds too long for Norwitch.

City's best player, Shaun Wright-Phillips, took a decent shot on goal that the Norwitch keeper blocked but couldn't control and the ball bounded free. City striker Robbie Fowler was there to knock it home for the winner.

The reports of the match in the soccer press were full of those adjectives that I'd remembered and suffered through before. "Fowler Crushes Norwitch" was the headline on ESPN's Soccernet. "Norwitch Despair" was the title of Sports Illustrated Online's article. A "cruel" goal said another. It was awful. I remember, I KNOW, how the Norwitch fans felt and my heart went out to them. After I had read all the reports and got over my gape-jawed initial reaction all I could think was,

FUCK YOU, YOU CANARY BASTARDS!
WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF NAME IS "CANARIES" ANYWAY?
FUCK YOU, YOU TWEETY-BIRDS! GOOD LUCK IN THE COCA-COLA LEAGUE!

-Benjamin Harris

Why Are Paintings Rectangles?

Why Are Almost All Paintings Rectangles and Squares?

Why not circles or triangles?

Clement Greenberg was the most influential art critic in history and through him his philosophy of art became dominant in the mid-twentieth century. That philosophy had precisely to do with rectangles and squares.

It was Greenberg's philosophy that each of the arts should distill out its essentials, those things that it had and that the others didn't, and concentrate on advancing those differences.

For painting, and Greenberg was almost exclusively a "painting," not an "art," critic it was the canvas and the physical characteristics of the paint itself that should be emphasized, to the exclusion of figuration and beauty for example.

So with so much attention that got, and still gets paid, to the physical properties of painting art, why do we almost exclusively have paintings on parallelograms?

One can see how the format for painting would have evolved from cave walls to canvases by the demands of art's benefactors, the royal court, and later an aristocracy and still later a prosperous bourgeoisie, none of whom would want to trudge off to a cave to look at his likeness.

But that doesn't account for the shape. Mirrors were ovals, windows were sometimes; the circle had philosophic symbolism of eternity going for it. The triangle's solidity and stability was celebrated by the Egyptians in their greatest monuments.

In Philosophizing Art, Arthur Danto, a ying to Greenberg's yang, convincingly explains why so many paintings of the "New York School" were so huge:

"More likely, living as they did in lofts, out of necessity then rather than fashion, artists in their natural sensitivity to such matters must have felt a discrepancy between the size of their studios and the disproportionately reduced dimensions of the easel painting, and since nobody was going to buy things anyway, why not make things more suitably sized?"

Voila, sometimes the simplest explanations are the right ones.

But with so much experimentation going on at that time, when you had artists dripping paint onto canvasses lain on the floor of a barn, when you had artists making gargantuan sized works, to say nothing of what was to follow in the '60's,when you had all these rules being questioned and broken, why didn't someone think, "Wonder how this'd look in a circle?"

To state the obvious, I'm not talking about the odd painting here and there that may have been painted on a circular or oval canvas, although I've thought about it and I can't think of one prominent one, but I'm talking about a "school" or a "movement" that caught on, however briefly.

I don't think it exists. Whatever else they were doing they were doing it on parallelograms damn it.

The only other art of a culture other than the west that I'm even passingly familiar with is that of China and there of course you have the hanging scroll format. There may be simple reasons, involving ease of rolling for example, to explain why scrolls are rectangular rather than circular, but even Chinese canvas painting is still four-sided.

Talk about the need to "think outside the box." What would account for this?

-Benjamin Harris

Art: Emotion and the Intellect

Art: Emotion and the Intellect

Anybody who thinks about art even a little, those of us in the general public when confronted with an unfamiliar instantiation, and scholars who write about it for a living have been asking and attempting to answer--for the past century really-- the question, "What is art?"

Arthur Danto defines art as (1) being about something, and (2) embodying that something's content. I've read a lot of Danto and I don't know exactly what that means but it's Hegel's definition of art as Danto says. For Danto, art is philosophy. He has vigorously objected to that distillation of his thinking but that's what it is.*

Clement Greenberg by contrast was a Kantian art critic. For him, each art form had to find it's true essence, the one thing that seperated it from other art forms, and to work single-mindedly toward advancing and refining that thing apart. Famously-now infamously-Greenberg held that painting was defined by its physical forms: the frame of the canvas and the qualities of paint itself. This definition allowed Greenberg to be the first to identify the genius of Jackson Pollock.

Pop art, installation art, art "happenings", video, et al blew Greenberg's definition all to shit and as Danto notes Greenberg essentially stopped writing art criticism after the early 1960's.

Art is not philosophy either, however. Philosophy is a construct of, and appeals to, the intellect. What people think of when they think of art is something, however it's defined, that appeals to their souls, that "moves" them. That is not an adequate definition of art, it's not even an exclusive component of art, it might have to do with distinguishing good art from bad art but there is something to that that is closer to capturing what art is, or should be, than either Danto's or Greenberg's definitions. Its appeal should be to the soul not the mind.

Recently, Dennis Dutton, of Arts and Letters Daily, wrote one of his ever insightful blurbs on some articles on the art of Henry Darger. Dutton asked rhetorically whatever Darger's work is, "Does it move anybody?"

I haven't seen enough of Darger's art to answer that for myself but two things struck me about Dutton's comment. The first is what I've said above about the definitions of art that I've read, and second was the emphasis, also admittedly present in all serious writing on art, on the subjective component of art appreciation. "I don't know if it's art but I know what I like," is a cliche, and a crutch for those--all of us to some extent, let's be honest--who don't "get" a painting or an artist.

Clearly, art is "hard" today. There are no rules. I agree with Danto that that is a good thing but when there are no rules it's hard to judge. We can educate ourselves and read about art and the various schools and the creator's intent and the art historical context in which it was executed and so on and we can better appreciate art as a result. And as a result of all of that we can be emotionally moved by it. Greenberg went so far as to say that noone had the right to comment on, much less criticize, the art of his day unless he/she had this intellectual background for it.

There's much to be said for that view but not for Greenberg's ultimate conclusion which is the logical extension of the intellectual immersion view. It is elitist and exclusivist, to which Greenberg would say, "And your point is?" The point is that it elevates the intellectual over the emotional and who is Greenberg or anyone else to say that that's perforce true? You don't have to go back very far--to Nietzsche--in western thought to get to a profound contention of that principle, or you can go back as far as you want, to the Greeks, as Nietzsche did.

I love Jackson Pollock, I always have. I "understand" him better now than when I first saw his paintings but I always liked him. I can't say that he moved, or moves me, though.

I never "got" Roy Lichtenstein until I went to a lecture on him at a museum. After that it was like that place in The Wizard of Oz when the movie changes from black and white to color. I saw him in a whole different light and now I'm delighted by his work, his creativity, his playfulness and above all by the intellectual content of his work. But again, I don't know if I can say that I'm actually "moved" by him.

This is not a subtle or backhanded criticism of contemporary art. I don't know that I'm moved by the Mona Lisa. I get the mystery of her provenance, of the proverbial enigmatic smile, of Da Vinci's use of vague shading to produce the mystery, the importance of the background, etc. Very interesting, beautiful, wouldn't have missed seeing it for the world but-nail me to a cross-I wasn't moved by it.

Same thing with Guernica. Powerful, powerful depiction of the horrors of war, painted at the height of Picasso's groundbreaking painterly style. But I wasn't moved by it as I have been by some other art, and some other "art."

I have had a few soul-shaking experiences with art. This is switching fields, which might not be wise here but I'll come back to painting in a moment. I was moved the first time I heard Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, I forget which one. I had gone into a record store in college to buy some pop pap, i don't know what, and the Brandenburgs was playing as the store's background music. I had never heard them before and I was stopped in my tracks. I went up to the cashier and asked him what it was and immediately bought it, foregoing Alone Again, Naturally, or whatever I had come for. It "spoke to me," that's all I can say to describe it but familiarly enough to all of us who have had similar experiences.

Same thing when I first heard Sarah Vaughn sing. Stopped dead in my tracks and hooked right then.

Getting back to painting, a couple of years ago I was in a friend's apartment and she and I were about to go out to get some dinner. She had a copy of Artforum in her apartment and as she got ready to go i leafed through the magazine looking at the pictures. There was a small, no bigger than 2"x2," photograph of a large purple painting, just a monochrome, wall-sized. It moved me. The accompanying article was about the deterioration of the painting, which was in a museum in Texas somewhere and the efforts of conservationists to preserve it. My friend came into the room ready to go and I put the magazine down and we left for dinner but the painting stayed with me. It had spoken to me at a very deep level and I was very moved by it.

The greater distance I had from it the more it effected me and the more I reflected on it. Every time I went back to my friend's apartment I looked for it but couldn't find it. I mentioned it to her and we looked together and seperately.

It's effect increased on me over time. It made me soulful, introspective, sad in a way. It had mezmerized me, the more so with time. I looked for it on the internet, I even called museums in Texas. "Hi, I'm trying to locate a large purple painting that I saw in an edition of Artforum a while back. It was wall-size and it was deteriorating and there were efforts being made to preserve it?" I felt really stupid. Nobody knew what I was talking about.

I had not even remembered the artist's name but Rothko was one of the contenders. Eventually I found it on the internet in the Rothko Chapel outside Houston. Since then, I've read everything I could about it, got a picture book on it, read a lot about Rothko too. I "appreciate" the chapel paintings more and was more moved by them after reading about Rothko's history, his suicide and especially the time he spent on his monochromes, sometimes just sitting in front of an uncompleted one for hours. Just reacting to it.

Of all contemporary works of art certainly, maybe of any painting of any era ever, those Rothko Chapel paintings moved me. When I moved into my new apartment two summers ago I even had my walls painted in that same purple. I matched the color paintstakingly, mixing a little black here and some red there until I got it just right. At least I think so, and so did my 13 year old son. I had my painter seperate the segments of the wall with white borders to give the effect of canvases, because although wall-sized, the Chapel paintings are still canvases, not walls, and I gravely instructed him to paint only in horizontal strokes, as Rothko himself had done. It's the equivalent of my teenager lining his bedroom walls with posters of his bands, I know, but the point is, who is anybody to make fun of this very intense soulful reaction I had, and still have, to them? They moved me. I'm glad that I was moved by a respected painter like Rothko rather than by Thomas Kinkade (sp?) but that I was moved seems to be more important than by what. You shouldn't have to justify or apologize for feeling deeply, even if the object is considered low brow or maudlin.

Which brings me to the conclusion here. I am proud of my ephiphanies at the hands of J.S. Bach, Sarah Vaughn and Mark Rothko. Their works are among humankind's greatest artistic masterpieces but I am unmoved by others equally great and I have been, and still am, moved by some hideously low-brow art. I am ashamed that I am and have been but the catharsis I seek by this admission is not that they are equally "art" to the others, but the self-acknowledgment that there is nothing wrong with being deeply moved by anything.

I have long divorced myself from most aspects of popular culture. The process has been gradual and over a period of twenty-five years or so, but I now own no television, no computer and I rarely go to movies. I buy into the idea that that stuff rots my brain and I am glad I am a luddite.

BUT, I actually was moved by Alone Again, Naturally by whoever-that-was, that pop song about an obviously depressed guy who, among other things, stands up his girlfriend at the alter. I actually went to see him in concert in college. Oh god, I'm glad I write this blog pseudonymously.

I liked The Carpenters and I'm not going to justify it on the grounds that Karen Carpenter really did have a nice voice, I liked them because their songs were romantic and soft, OK?

And whoever out there says he or she doesn't occasionally hear an old song on the radio and go "ahhh" inside at a memory is either a lying mother-fucker or a Vulcan.

Actually most people do admit this, in fact they revel in it. That's why there are so many "oldies" radio stations and socials held for people of this or that generation to get together and listen to "their" songs and relive the good old days.

It's just people like me--and there are a lot of us--who don't like to admit this, who have, and who more importantly think of ourselves as having, "moved on" and who don't like to admit it.

I'm glad I've moved on, I'm glad I no longer listen to that music. I can make the case that life is about moving on and growth and opening oneself up to new experiences and the possibility of being "moved" by other things, especially "better" things; I think it's pathetic to go to an Eagles concert now and see "Nikon Don" Henley etched with age and flecked with gray, or God help us, Keith Richards. Leave it go.

But the feelings. Then. Those feelings were real, as real and pure when we felt them as any we feel now.

That is what art, however defined, however particular examples of it may not effect others, that is what art can do. Alone of all human creations. Move us, go directly to our souls.

*For example, in the chapter, "The Philosopher as Andy Warhol" in his book Philosophing Art, Danto writes, "Hegel had proposed that art and philosophy are two 'moments,' as he put it, of Absolute Spirit...In a certain sense, if he is right, there must be a basic identity between the two, and Hegel believed that art fulfills its historical and spiritual destiny when its practice is disclosed as a kind of philosophy in action." (p. 63)

-Benjamin Harris

Life on Mars

Life on Mars

I've started and restarted this post several times, not sure how to do it. I don't want to sound dumber than I can help it or more moon-beamy but on the other hand when I tried to write about it in neutral journalistic tones it was just redundant to what could be read elsewhere.

So, I'll just wear my emotions on my sleave. We're going to find life on Mars and sooner rather than later and it gives me goose bumps and will represent the most significant discovery in mankind's history and it's impossible to overstate my excitement at the prospect.

Three things happened this week. The first were reports from the European Space Agency that their Mars orbiter had found evidence that convinces them that there is a large, recently formed ocean of ice at Mars' equator. Scientists were struck by the similarities of the Martian sea to that covering Antarctica, where we know there's life.

The second of the week's events was additional evidence from the Europeans that volcanic activity continues to exist on Mars. As I understand it that augurs well for life for two reasons. One, we have discovered previously unknown and undreamt of life forms, tubular worms, that live off the heat and sulfuric excretions from the earth's crust at depths where sunlight, until then thought essential to life, could not penetrate.

Second, there had been tantalizing photographic evidence previously that volcanic activity on Mars had been so recent that it had caused liquid water to however briefly break the surface and run in rivers before evaporating into the Martian atmosphere. Everywhere on earth that we know of where liquid water exists life exists. Why would Mars be different?

The third development this week came from evidence found on earth. A NASA scientist examined a 30,000 year old chunk of ice under a microscope and saw frozen bacteria of an unknown form. When he thawed out the ice the damned bacteria starting swimming! They were still alive! Again, if that can happen on earth, why not on Mars? Even if there is no liquid water found on Mars (and there will be) we will find frozen life in the ice there, maybe even life that can be thawed out and made to "live" again.

It's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. Not only on Mars, but on Europa, and maybe in other places in our own little solar system and it makes me so excited I can't contain myself.

-Benjamin Harris

There Will Always be an England: Nature Magazine's Attributions

"Tell me what a man does and I'll tell you what he is," is an old English saying.

Nature magazine takes it one step further. Their attributions read, e.g.

"Virginia Trimble is at the University of California, Irvine..."

"At?" Yes, one assumes Ms. Trimble is a professor rather than a custodian "at" Cal-Irvine but it is a curious English circumlocution to accredit their contributors in that manner.

It can be a little jarring too. At the end of an article "The power of natural selection," Nature tells us that the author,

"Andrew P. Hendry is IN the Redpath Museum and Department of Biology, McGill University..." (emphasis added), which if literally true would indeed be a remarkable instantiation of the power of natural selection.

Their own staff writers do not always suffer the same vague description. "Heike Langenberg is a physical sciences editor at Nature," is one. "Allison Abbott is Nature's senior European correspondent" is another. But another article is authored by an outside scholar, Russell G. Foster, who the magazine alarmingly tells its readers, "is in the Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Charing Cross Hospital..."

Indeed.

-Benjamin Harris

Donald Kuspit, Quote Machine

Donald Kuspit, Quote Machine

Calvin Trillin once wrote of advising his friend R.W. Apple to donate his expense accounts to The Smithsonian, so laden with extravagances and excesses as they were.

Motivated by a similar concern for posterity's interest in the excessive I hereby nominate the following passage by Donald Kuspit from his book The End of Art for most authorities quoted in a single paragraph:

"According to Pater and Greenberg, aesthetic experience is heightened sense experience, separated from all other experience. It is inherently beautiful and affords pleasure. This was also the view of antiquity. In Plato's Philebus Socrates states: 'Thus pleasures are those which arise from the colors we call beautiful and from shapes; and most of the pleasures of smell and sound....such sounds as are pure and smooth and yield a single pure tone are not beautiful relatively to anything else but in their own proper nature, and produce their proper pleasures.' In the Tusculan Discussions, Cicero writes: 'There is a certain apt disposition of bodily parts which, when combined with a certain agreeable color, is called beauty.' St. Augustine agrees, using almost exactly the same words in On the Kingdom of God (xxii, xix). The idea survives in modern philosophy. Thus, for Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea (1818), the pleasure of beauty arises from 'disinterested...sensuous contemplation.' As the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne writes, 'the being of the work of art yields itself only through its sensuous presence, which allows us to aprehend it as an aesthetic onject.' Meaning is 'immanent in the sensuous, being its very organization.' More complexly, but in a related way, Hegel, in his Aesthetics (1835), writes: 'art has the function of revealing truth in the form of sensuous artistic shapes and of presenting to us the reconciliation of the contradiction [between sense and reason, between what is and what ought to be, between desire and duty]. Consequently it contains ifs end in itself, in this very revelation and presentation.' The beautiful work is one in which this aesthetic reconciliation seems inevitable. As Hegel says, 'the greatness and excellence of art...will depend upon the degree of intimacy with which...form and subject-matter are fused and united.' " (pp. 34-5)

-Benjamin Harris

Hack Job: Technology Review and Nuland's Attack on de Grey

What the heck is going on at Technology Review?

The "oldest technology magazine in the world" started out as the official MIT alumni magazine but over the last 15-20 years has deliberately transformed itself into a mid-major mass circulation magazine with articles of interest to scientists, private sector elites as well as educated and curious general readers. It has trumpeted its success in this transformation by citing its drastically increased circulation numbers.

If memory serves, the current February '05 issue, is the first under a new editor. If so, the new editor is a person named Jason Pontin. Whatever, the tone of the magazine, and perhaps its purpose has changed drastically.

That new tone, agenda-driven and personal, was what first caught the eye with its cover story, an article on human aging and a researcher named Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge University. Under a head-shot of de Grey is the title,

"living forever? Audrey de Grey thinks he can defeat death."
"Is he nuts?"

"IS HE NUTS?"? When was the last time that question or anything like it appeared on the cover of TR? Has it ever?

The article, which it is no exaggeration to call a diatribe, is preceded by editorials, the most prominent of which is one by Mr. Pontin titled Against Transcendence in which he writes the following:

"de Grey thinks he is a technological messiah."
"But what struck me is that he is a troll."

A troll.

Likewise, the words that the article uses to describe de Grey?:

"Whether one chooses to believe that he is a brilliant
prophetic architect of futuristic biology or merely
a misguided and nutty theorist..."
...

"In the photo [on his website] his eyes are...gently
warm...But I would see none of that warmth during
the 10 hours we spent together, though it reappeared
in the 15 minutes during which we chatted with
Adelaide de Grey [his wife]..."

Those are borderline ad hominem words, again at odds with anything I had ever read in TR before. They would get worse but before doing so would include another merely borderline description, a weird one given the magazine's MIT geekdom roots and audience:

"He was dressed like an unkempt graduate student,
uncaring of tailoring considerations of any sort,
wearing a hip-length black mackinaw-type coat that
was borderline shabby. Adorning his head was a
knitted woolen hat...crafted by his wife 14 years ago.
As if to prove its age, the frazzled headgear...was not
without a few holes. When he removed it I saw that
de Grey's long straight hair was held in a ponytail..."

Even de Grey's wife is subject to this kind of comment. She is described as "just as uncaring about her appearance or grooming."

There is no serious point to this. It is simply to create the image of de Grey as "an obviously odd and driven duck."

This is such unusual language for TR and so unusual to be coming from another scientist, Sherwin Nuland, a Yale Medical School professor. One feels sorry for the people so described, the comments are so personal and unkind.

Husband and wife are an "uncommon pair" and it is striking to Dr. Nuland that "neither of them has ever wanted to have children."

This personal decision of husband and wife gets tied by Dr. Nuland into what he says is behind de Grey's work, "self-interest--or what some might call narcissism...":

"de Grey has some interesting notions of human
nature. He insists that, on the one hand, it is basic
to humankind to want to live forever regardless
of consequences, while on the other it is not basic
to want to have children."

Dr. Nuland concludes his article with broad similarly ad hominem characterizations of de Grey's work and underlying purpose:

"[His] purpose is only secondarily to overcome
resistance to his theories. His primary aim is to
publicize himself...as a means of raising the consid-
erable funding that will be necessary..."
...

"He has safeguarded himself against the informed
criticism that should give him cause to rethink some
of his proposals. He has accomplished this self-protection
by constructing a personal worldview in which he is
inviolate. He refuses to budge a millimeter."

Nothing appears as factual support for this characterization. In fact, Dr. Nuland details the amazing achievement of de Grey, a computer scientist, in mastering natural science to the point of having published peer-reviewed articles in leading biogerontology journals co-authored by many of the greatest minds in the field.

Nuland accuses de Grey of "unhesitant verbal trashing of those who disagree with him." Likewise, there is nothing in the article to support this charge.

"But the most likeable of eccentrics are sometimes the most dangerous." that's the first sentence in the last paragraph of Dr. Nuland's article.

In another editorial TR says of de Grey:

"He dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects
Rip Van Winkle's beard; he has no children; he has few
interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks
too much beer...His ideas are trollish."

de Grey makes his arguments "loudly and angrily."

On de grey's idea for extending life span, "Is this absurd? Yes, of course it is."

TR vouches for the opinions of Dr. Nuland:

"Sherwin Nuland would not be satisfied by anything
less than rigorous scientific reasoning and evidence.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine a writer more qualified
to profile the eccentric de Grey."

"Indeed" indeed, since this is how Dr. Nuland himself describes his qualifications in the article:

"What would it be like to come face to face with such a man? Not to debate him--A TASK FOR WHICH, AS A CLINICAL SURGEON, I WOULD IN ANY CASE BE SCIENTIFICALLY UNQUALIFIED..." (emphasis added).

Dr. Nuland's is a hatchet job, written by one who is self-admitted to be unqualified to write any serious review of Dr. de Grey's work. The article is part of the new editorial policy of TR to advance their briefs even if degrading personal characterizations are necessary, and the science be damned.

-Benjamin Harris

Man City's Opportunity

manchester city can firmly position themselves among the top half of the premiership table and make a run at a spot in the champions league in their next three matches.

the blues play home against sixteenth place crystal palace on saturday, at bottom-inhabiting west branch albion on jan. 22 and then home against newcastle united which is two points under city on feb. 2.

boom. boom. boom. three wins, 9 points, hello europe! after all, this is the ONLY team that has beaten chelsea ALL YEAR.

but sports, fate, kevin keegan, nicholas anelka and maybe some cloud permanently hanging over the east side of manchester will prevent it.

team schizoid has beaten chelsea, tied man-u at old trafford, and tied arsenal at highbury in their last league match. they can play with anybody.

but they often play at the other team's level. they just lost to first division oldham in the f.a. cup and in the premiership have also been tied by relegation-threatened norwich and the aforementioned w.b.a. AT HOME and tied southhampton on the trot.

this is a team that plays in one of the best and newest facilities in all of europe and yet stinks up the joint more often than it rewards the faithful. i think i'm right that they won the same number of matches at eastlands last year as they did on the road.

the board gave kevin keegan 60 million pounds when they entered the premiership two years ago and king kev promptly wasted it on the likes of claudia reyna and, most abysmally, robbie fowler, among others.

everytime you think they have turned the corner, there's another corner. they were on one of their rolls a few weeks ago and then nicholas anelka ran his mouth about how he wanted out so he could play for a "big club" and compete in the champions league and the roll morphed into a tumble.

they are in ninth place and coming off a 1-1 draw at arsenal. they have three matches coming up that they can win, that a disciplined, professional, selfless, ambitious team WOULD win.

but they won't. if they win these next three matches i will walk to manchester and kiss kevin keegan's bum.

they will tie one or two or lose one outright, and the saturday night arrests for disorderly intoxication and domestic violence will swell on the east side.

and then they have their rematch with chelsea on the trot.


-benjamin harris

Foreign Policy Analysis: Deconstructing John Lewis Gaddis

Deconstructing Gaddis

Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis gives President Bush a thumbs up in Middle East policy in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

On the first page of his article, Grand Strategy in the Second Term, Prof. Gaddis states,

"George W. Bush...has presided over the most
sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since
the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt." (2)

Throughout the article Prof. Gaddis expands on the particulars of the President's historic paradigm shift:

"...the fact that more than three years have passed without [another 9/11-like] attack is significant."
"...the first and most fundamental feature of the Bush strategy--taking the offensive against the terrorists and thereby surprising them--has so far accomplished its purposes." (3)

"The military campaign [against Iraq] proceeded as anticipated..." (8)
...

"...on October 9, 2004, millions of Afghans lined up to vote in an
election that had no precedent in their nation's long history.
Had anyone predicted this three years ago, the response would
have been incredulity--if not doubts about sanity." (13)
...

"A conservative Republican administration responded by embracing a liberal Democratic ideal--making the world safe for democracy...if that does not provide the basis for a renewed grand strategic bipartisanship...then one has to wonder what ever would." (14)
...

"[Bush has achieved] far more...than any previous American administration has achieved in the Middle East." (14)

So, bravo, Mr. President. the war against Afghanistan was a success, the war against Iraq was successful and worthwhile, the war on terror generally has been pursued competently and efficaciously, and all this was done according to a "sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy" with bipartisan appeal.

Right? How could all of those statements be read otherwise?

They can't.

But that's not all that Gaddis says, nor is that the tone of his article as a whole.

It's not a matter of quoting out of context. Readers can read the whole article easily enough, it's only fifteen pages long. To quote out of context is to isolate specific portions of a piece that unfairly distort a clear, and different, meaning.

It is not that Prof. Gaddis makes one point that is clear when one reads the article as a whole. rather, it is that Gaddis SAYS things that are different.

Further he talks in code to avoid having one clear meaning attributed to him and he constantly jumps back and forth between similar sounding but completely different ideas so as to veil the bankruptcy of some of his ideas.

Consider the following, taken from the same first page on which appears the "grand strategy" quote above:

"Neither Bush nor his successors, whatever their party, can
ignore what the events of September 11, 2001, made clear:
that deterrence against STATES affords insufficient protection
from attacks by GANGS, which can now inflict the kind of damage
only STATES fighting WARS used to be able to achieve." (2)
(emphasis added)

This is a radically different statement than those at the beginning of this post and Prof. Gaddis does not so much as acknowledge the difference.

This is talking in code. Lubriciously, Prof. Gaddis has now completely recast the entire discussion.

First, according to the above, it is not a "war" that the U.S. is in. This is a crime problem, in which America must protect itself from attacks by "gangs."

This is in fact how Richard Holbroke and John Kerry conceptualized the terror issue according to the famous New York Times Magazine cover story near the end of the presidential campaign.

Gaddis clearly seperates state violence against America ("wars"), which can be defended by "deterrence," and murder by "gangs" which, in his view, september 11 only demonstrated can now be carried out on as massive a scale as previously only wars could.

This is not an isolated instance of careless wording by Gaddis. Later he writes,

"...the survival of the STATE SYSTEM itself could be at stake. Here lies the common ground...securing the STATE..." (7) (emphasis added)

These do not "clarify" the other statements that Gaddis made that are quoted at the beginning of this post. These do not provide "context" for their real meaning. These are in addition to, in contradiction with, and an obfuscation of, those statements.

The language itself, "the state system," "securing the state" is Stalinesque. This framework treats all "States" as existentially equal and with the same legitimacy in the fight against terrorism. Totalitarian or authoritarian, theocratic or democratic, they are all in this context equal: "Here lies the common ground."

the author of the times magazine cover story stated that according to Holbroke and Kerry the conflict as they saw it was not between one state, America, and Islam or particular states like Iraq and Afghanistan, or even with a general problem like "terrorism." Rather the fight was between "Civilization" and anarchy. It's the theme of the old tv show "I Spy" where the enemy was "CHAOS."

Gaddis continually weaves this "I Spy" framework in with other nearly identical sounding language that has a totally different meaning. In the next to the last page of the article he writes,

"What September 11 showed was that the United States
can no longer insulate itself from what happens in that
part of the world: to do so would be to ignore clear and
present danger." (p. 14)

Thus, he flips back to framing the discussion in the more comfortable and familiar way as a problem for the United States and away from the radical, crackpot notion that it is a problem of all "States" against anarchy.

Not only does Gaddis refrain from clearly articulating and taking responsibility for the "I Spy" framework but he doesn't even allude to its practical implications, which are staggering and frightening.

Gaddis even adopts Kerry's campaign speech assertion that he would never give some other body a "veto" over his authority as Commander in Chief:

"[Gaining multi-lateral support] will not involve giving anyone else a VETO over what the United States does to ensure its security and to advance its interests." (p. 7) (emphasis added).

But just as Senator Kerry said in the next breath that there SHOULD be a "global test" for U.S. intervention, so Gaddis says,

"It will, however, REQUIRE persuading as large a group of states as possible that these actions will also enhance, or at least not degrade, their own interests." (p. 7) (emphasis added)

This is not accidental language. Prof. Gaddis knows what "require" means. He knows that it's a command, a condition precedent to its referrent. He knows that it's different from something like "demonstrates a need for," or "makes desirable."

Neither did Sen. Kerry misspeak in the first debate when he used the phrase "global test." He simply coupled it with the reassurance that he would not give any other body a "veto" over his authority as Commander in Chief.

Here is one example of what Gaddis' "I Spy" framework means.

Saudi Arabia was the home of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers and of Osama bin Laden himself.

The kingdom was founded on and supports Whhabbism, one of the most radical strains of Islam.

Saudi Arabia is a brutally authoritarian monarchy that deflects internal dissent by allowing its mullahs to preach calls to violence against America and Israel. A member of the official Saudi delegation that visited President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas in the summer of 2002 was a religious leader who in April of 2002 had preached a sermon calling for the enslavement of Jewish women for the pleasure of Muslim men.

It is a country that places copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in prominent places in its airports.

It is a country that is regarded by most (I thought all until I read Gaddis) as one of the keys to solving the problem of Islamic terror.

Under Prof. Gaddis' "I Spy" framework Saudi Arabia has the same legitimacy in the fight against terror as does the United States.

"I Spy" also unifies all terrorists. the I.R.A, the Basques, the Chechens, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, they're all the same. They all threaten equally legitimate states which are part of a single "Civilization." In fact, this is the argument that President Putin made after the Beslan school massacre.

This is obvious nonsense, morally repugnant and strategically bankrupt. It is this though what provides Prof. Gaddis with the basis for his criticism of Bush's foreign policy "redesign."

First, Gaddis discusses the violence that the Bush administration has done to the distinction between "pre-emption" and "prevention," two long-used concepts in theoretical and legal discussions of war. Gaddis thus shifts his language back to the level of state-to-state theory and interaction.

The dangers of Bush's "conflation" mistake are many as Gaddis sees it:

"...the United States itself will appear to much of the world as a clear and present danger." (5)
...

"For the world's most powerful state to suddenly announce that its security requires violating the sovereignty of certain other states whenever it chooses cannot help but make all other states nervous." (5)
...

"As the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has pointed out, Washington's policy of pre-emption has created the image of a global policeman who reports to no higher authority and no longer allows locks on citizens' doors." (5) [ed note: He needed a political scientist as authority for that?]
...

"[The invasion of Iraq has resulted in] an unprecedented collapse of support for the United States abroad."(6)
...

"...Americans within a year and a half [of 9/11] found their country widely regarded as an international pariah." (6)

There are many points of note to be made on these quotes which are all taken from a section ironically titled "Speaking More Softly--and More Clearly."

First, using the pre-emption/prevention issue is not necessary to make his point, which is clear enough from the quotes above, that is, that the U.S. must act more multi-laterally in the future.

Second, he states that "John Kerry made it clear during the 2004 campaign that he would not have relinquished [the pre-emption] option had he won the presidency."

What I assert that Gaddis is doing here is once again using language to deliberately veil the true radical nature of his ideas.

The quotes above are very strident. Gaddis feels very passionately about the Bush mistake of conflating pre-emption and prevention. That John Kerry would have continued use of the pre-emption doctrine is not apposite to Gaddis' point, which is that Bush conflated that internationally accepted principle with a new, more controversial and dangerous one, preventive war. Of course he does not say that John Kerry would have continued THAT.

Third and most obvious, is the language that Gaddis uses. It is jarringly over-the-top and out of place with the language he uses in other sections of the article and simply schizoid when placed in the same article with his laudatory language of Bush.

Fourth, its content, Gaddis' "meaning" here, is just bizarre.

The United States is "WIDELY REGARDED" as an "INTERNATIONAL PARIAH."

The United States, in pursuing a course of preventive war, will appear, to "MUCH OF THE WORLD" as a "CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER."

Wow.

"Widely regarded," "much of the world;" not as bad as "universally regarded" or "most of the world," but still pretty bad obviously.

But, question: Who exactly? Who exactly does Gaddis allege feels this way?

France? Does Gaddis mean that the French think that the U.S. is a "clear and present danger" to them?

China? Do the Chinese regard us as an "international pariah?"

Prof. Gaddis, exactly which countries have the image of the U.S. as a "global policeman...[who] no longer allows locks on citizens' doors,"--as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry pointed out to you? Professor Ikenberry, can you help out here?

Russia? Does Gaddis believe that Bush's friend "Poot-Poot" is "nervous" that the U.S. may attack his country?

How about if we take it by continents.

Europe, who amongst you doesn't like Nascar... er... Who amongst you believes that America is a "clear and present danger" to you? Do i see one hand? Poland, I can't see you back there. Bulgaria, where are you hiding?

Prof. Gaddis, which country(ies) in Europe feel that the United States is a "clear and present danger?" There must be many, since, according to you, "much of the world" feels that way. Is there one?

How about Asia? Japan, the U.S., pariah or no? Cambodia? Tibet? Richard Gere, what say ye? Prof. Gaddis, who are we missing?

Australia?

Sub-Saharan Africa? South Africa, are you building underground bomb shelters and instructing your school children in the art of "duck and cover" for fear that Bush may drop atomic bombs on the beloved country? You're not?

South America: You Brazilians, Chileans, and Argentines, anybody battening down the hatches down there?

Gaddis' contention that the U.S. "has suddenly...announce[d] that its security requires violating the sovereignty of certain other states...," is wild. One imagines Bush and Cheney in the Oval office each morning, Cheney spinning a globe and a blind-folded Bush laughing malevolently and randomly pointing to some country and saying "THAT ONE!," and plans for the invasion of Luxembourg are put in motion.

Gaddis asseverates that "ALL OTHER STATES" are nervous about this. Is Gaddis' vcr permanently stuck on Dr. Strangelove? Did Michael Moore vet this article for him?

Who says something like that, much less writes it in a scholarly article?

WHICH COUNTRIES, Professor Gaddis, are "nervous" that the U.S. may willy-nilly decide to invade them randomly, "whenever it chooses?"

Prof. Gaddis well uses language to sugarcoat the strong medicine of his ideas. He is also a practiced user of the bogeyman overstatement masquerading as scholarship.

And of the straw-man argument. For example, he states that,

"The President and his advisers seem to have concluded"
that the international "status quo everywhere needed
shaking up. Once that had happened, the pieces would
realign themselves in patterns favorable to U.S. interests."
(p. 14)

Yes, one can see in one's mind's eye Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld sitting in their bunker the night of September 11 saying to each other, "I think if we just shock and awe the world a little and really shake things up the pieces will just naturally realign themselves in our favor."

And what, in the paragraph from which the above quote is taken, was just a "seeming" mode of thought on the part of the Bushies, becomes in the next paragraph on page 15, a FACT:

"The assumption that things would fall neatly into place after
the shock was administered was the single greatest misjudgment
of the first Bush administration."

How did we get from here to there?

This is what passes for foreign policy analysis these days.


-Benjamin Harris

FASHION AND SEX

FASHION AND SEX

i have this recurring argument with a friend. i contend that true fashion has more to do with art; he contends that it's all about sex. obviously, the line is a fine and often blurred one.

vogue's big spring fashion issue last year seemed to have more ads with more overt appeal to sex in the photography than i had remembered previously. from memory i think there was a talbot's ad with a leg-splayed model and a diamond industry ad of a model wearing jeans and one of her hands casually posed between her wide-open legs. on the ring finger of that hand was of course a diamond which lit up her crotch like a sun.

another one of the big designers, maybe calvin klein, was advertising a shorts set with a dead-on shot of the model with her legs spread.

off that issue of vogue i actually began a draft of a post on this subject but never finished it.

a couple of days ago i picked up an old copy of elle that one of the employees had left as reading material in the visitors waiting area. it's the august, 2002 issue.

the back cover ad was for anne klein. it shows a model leaning back on her elbows on a large red cube. she's wearing thick-strapped black sandals a white t-shirt and jeans. her right leg is up on the cube, her left leg is draped over the side. her legs are spread and the central focus of the shot is her crotch. it's a classic porn pose. there's no double entendre there. there's just one entendre.

then on page 148, part of a multi-page layout on shoes, is a model in another classic porn pose. she's kneeling on a leather couch wearing a frilly SHORT skirt. her butt is thrust out and she's wearing a pair of above-the-knee leather boots. which i didn't notice on first glance.

i'm not offended but i'm not showing that issue of elle to my friend. i ain't got no argument against evidence like that.


-benjamin harris

TRUE CRIME STORIES

"I AM BECOME DEATH" *

an englishman once said, "tell me what a man does and i will tell you what he is."

i grew up in a household influenced by that protestant work ethic. my town once flooded and one of the coal trains coming through was stranded on the tracks. my dad walked on the top of the boxcars to get to work . he was around newsprint all his life. he died of a rare cancer that only struck people in certain occupations, one of them being newspaper printing. tell me what a man does and i'll tell you what he is.

for nineteen years all i've done is murder cases. i know murder well and i know little else. i am still fascinated by every case i get. i never get tired of them . i can be obsessive-compulsive and murder is a good subject for my personality.

of course there is pathos in every murder, some more than others. but in evey case there is horror, violence, the end. you become very aware of the finality of death. survivors often parrot one of the religous sayings like "he/she's in a better place," or "we'll be together in the next life." i can't help feeling jaded when i hear that time and again when my work belies the sentiment and only reinforces the opposite, the finality.

you do your job for nineteen years, you immerse yourself in every case. you meet the next of kin. to do it for that long you have to develop some distance.

it's a little jarring looking at death scene photos the first time. but that quickly goes away. they're just pictures. for a very long time, i've been able just to look at them for their evidentiary worth, not for the broken human bodies that are the reason i have this job in the first place. i can eat lunch and study the photos without being bothered.

scene visits were once a different thing for me. seeing a "live" dead body made me squeamish. if i could avoid it i wouldn't view the body, but that is not possible at most scenes. but even this changed after one homicide call.

one sunday afternoon i had my baby boy alone at home and was just starting to watch a football game. i was relaxed and enjoying life when the beeper went off. i cursed. i was exasperated. i had to call around to friends to get someone to babysit. as i drove to the scene i got more aggravated at the imposition and by the time i got there i was in full bloom.

i remember it was a domestic murder. that frustrated me even more. i am not a very jealous person so when i hear that a MURDER has been committed out of jealousy i become contemptuous. "if i can't have him/her nobody will." that is the mantra of all "domestics" and i know i should be more understanding but it angers me to hear it. this murder was at the apex of that senselessness.

a mother came home from church with her two children. her estranged husband confronted her at the house. they quarreled. he pulled out a gun and shot her. right in front of the kids.

he then went inside the house and shot himself in the living room. i remember he had fallen awkwardly, his legs bent under him. the gun was large caliber, a .45. the bullet tore a big hole in his shirt. his eyes were open.

the cops had already turned on the tv set before i got there. i sat on the couch--his couch--propped my feet on his coffee table and watched the game on his television with his body right underneath me. i was angry at him for what he did, for the reason he did it, for what he did to his children and for ruining my sunday afternoon. "fuck you," i said to him in my head. "i don't give a shit about you."

i have never been that callous since, but the point is the work had changed me a little. i have not been as squeamish around the destroyed bodies since then. now i was able to contemplate a scene and a body in strategic terms alone. what can i do to make the case better? what problems can i head off?

that's good for my work but if the emotion of even murder is subsumed to analysis and rationality then emotionally and psychologically, murder becomes "normal"; it is one's job, it is part of one's routine and i wonder if that has effected my own morality and what i view as acceptable. tell me what a man does and i will tell you what he is.

we are the philosophical children of descartes and kant and the whole rationalist tradition. our criminal justice system is certainly built on that foundation. "feelings of bias, sympathy and prejudice must not influence your verdict in any way," is what every criminal jury is told. the pictures of the broken and wrecked human bodies, the anguish of the family, the terror of the witnesses, the jury is to detach themselves from all that.

and because they must at the end stage of the process, those at the earlier stages--the detectives, the prosecutors, the defense attoneys, the judges--must also detach themselves from it.

jurors can get back to their morally normal lives after a week or two. but we must go on to the next case. there is no return from the dark side.

maybe the long term effects of this work are not all bad. it has made me see shades of gray where previously i had only seen black or white, but maybe too it is a moral and emotional carcinogen like the newsprint chemicals that killed my dad.

i seldom have hatred toward the murderers. almost always, when it's all over, i shake their hands, sometimes we embrace. for my colleagues that is odd behavior but it is not that i condone what they've done. unless they're truly evil, i view the whole case as sad.

in my experience--in my opinion--the murderers who are truly evil are rare. if there were no drugs and alcohol, if there was no jealousy, if men's testerone level wasn't so high, if they didn't get into fights, if THEY could seperate the emotional from the rational and not react violently, if all those things could be changed then a lot of murders wouldn't happen and i don't think those who kill for those reasons are necessarily evil.

"not evil" does not mean "not immoral, or "not criminal" certainly, and i gladly seek to have them punished severely for what they do but i do seperate them morally from reggie who liked to beat old white women to death with his bare hands. i honestly don't think that is moral relativism but if you combine that view with the change in my emotions to corpses, i wonder if it hasn't had an effect.

a colleague told me one time that over the last few years he had begun questioning housewives in jury selection about their daytime tv viewing habits because he was concerned that those who watch those shows get exposed to so much aberrant behavior that murder wouldn't seem so bad or a defendant's bizarre story might be accepted as normal and he didn't want people like that on his juries.

i thought it was a brilliant point but if we have concerns about viewers of those shows, what about us? we don't just watch it on tv. aberrant behavior is our job. our minds force us to think a certain way. the body isn't just a horror but a piece of evidence. a witness's terror is not a primal human reaction but something that needs to be conveyed convincingly in court.

i remember thinking about my job one time and recalling president reagan and the iran-contra scandal. he traded arms for hostages but somehow, in his mind, a mind that his hand-chosen biographer found "unfathomable," he truly believed he hadn't. "who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes."

reagan was an actor. his career before politics was playing a role, "lying." as an actor that is what one does. you pretend to be someone you're not. you convincingly display emotions that are not really there. if one does that in one's job then it must become easier to do it in other area's of one's life. lying becomes normal. tell me what a man does and i'll tell you what he is.

it's obviously the same thing for people like undercover cops and intelligence agents. there too your job is to lie. your life may depend on how well you do it. when you can so successfully erase one of the first morality lessons we are taught, "thou shalt not tell a lie," it becomes easier to do it in all other areas of life.

in my own case i make compromizing my opponent an uncommonly large part of my work and i am successful at it. it's been enormously helpful and it's easy for me. i use friendship and collegiality to loosen lips and learn secrets. i plant disinformation. i flatter, ingratiate, and feign laziness to lull my opponents. i draw them into apparent confidences so that i can use the faux intimacy to my advantage. i enjoy it. but to do all of that successfully you have to compartmentalize your emotions. you have to be cold, even ruthless. you have to be a good liar.

but if those compartments are so tightly shut, if the emotions are so successfully subsumed to strategy then maybe there is a blunting of emotions in other areas of life and again, the prohibition against lying, a bedrock of my own morality growing up, no longer has anywhere near its old effect.

all of this has resulted in my creation of a new dictum, "the two most overrated things in the world are the truth and 'i'm sorry'." the latter is useless in my view, doing more good for the speaker than for the listener. the former is not black and white for me anymore. sometimes the truth is used as a sword to wound others. we'd never say "my, you're ugly," to another person and then justify it because it was the truth. there are countless examples like that. and just as many where there are morally gray areas between the truth and the lie.

i think all of this is true. i believe all of the examples and arguments are reasonable but i wonder about the cumulative effect of my job, of whether the circuit breaker on my outrage meter has been readjusted too high, of whether the necessary blunting of emotions in dealing with murder has effected my emotional ability in other areas, of whether my acceptance of lying and nuanced views of murderers have not taken a toll on other aspects of my life.


* from the bhagavad gita

-benjamin harris

PUBLIC OCCURRENCES

The Beginning of Hitler

The socio-economic reasons for the rise of Adolph Hitler--Versailles, the dominance of the military over German society, hyperinflation, etc.--are familiar to even non-historians thanks to William Shirer's book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. For Shirer though the whole thing was just too improbable, too bizarre for those causes to explain everything.

The Fuhrer himself, not even a German but an Austrian, a mere corporal, a failed artist and vagabond; the "weird assortment of misfits" who were Hitler's inner circle; the "crackpot economics" and other "intellectual" bases of national socialism. All of this did not make sense to Shirer for a nation "which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms."

Shirer details other events, coincidental happenings, bizarre twists of fate, innocuous, banal events that somehow came together to produce Hitler. They were not causes. They are "but for" events, evidence almost of a diabolus ex machina involved. It was as if all the parts of the toaster were put into the paper bag, shaken vigorously and out came the gas chambers.

Among this category of events, was the fortuity of his Hitler's last name. Hitler's father was born "Alois Schiklgruber," his mother's name because he was born illegitimate. The father lived under that name until age 39 when, bizarrely, the natural father, his own name having evolved from Heidler to Hitler, came forward to acknowledge paternity, whereupon Alois changed his name to Hitler.

"But for" this, Hitler would have been known as "Adolph Schicklgruber." As Shirer says,

 "Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous 'Heils.'? 'Heil Schicklgruber!'?...It is a little difficult to imagine."

You can sense Shirer's astonishment at the prominence of these chance events in his language and punctuation: "misfits," "crackpots," "Heil Schicklgrber!?."

And then he quotes from Mein Kamph and Hitler's own account of the beginning of his anti-semitism, which Hitler traced to one particular day, and one specific encounter, with one particular person, while walking in Vienna:

"I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black
sidelocks. Is that a Jew? was my first thought. For to be sure they
had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and
cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing
feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:
"is this a German?"...[from that day on] "wherever I went, I began to
see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became
distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Later I often
grew sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers."

The prominence of these events is psychologically unsettling because of their exemption from rational examination. Rational analysis must fixate on the details of a catastrophe if corrective action is to result. No retrospective analysis could identify and isolate the missteps to be avoided in the future, no seminars could get to the bottom of it, no historian could root it out, and hence the realization that despite our intelligence, despite our capacity for reflection, despite our capability for change--despite, in all, our ability to control our world and hence our fate, events like these show us, to our horror, that we are not in control of our destiny, that no matter what we do, sometimes there will be an event, of pure chance, of the stringing together of banal occurrences that perversely mutate into something monstrous.

There is fixation also on the details of incidents like Hitler's street encounter, not because of their significance in explaining, but just the opposite, because of their insignificance and inability to explain. We examine the details knowing their innocuousness, singly and together, and are incredulous, unable to rationally comprehend the horrific outcome that resulted. Irresistibly the reel is rewound and we see the endless ways the outcome could have been different if one banal detail were exchanged for the other.

What time of day did the encounter occur? Hitler used the word "apparition."  Was it then at night so that the man would have seemed more ghostly and menacing? If it had happened in daylight, would the encounter have turned out as it did?

How old was the man? Hitler's age, making the contrast in circumstances more threatening to Hitler? Would that have made a difference in the way Hitler reacted?

Where was the man going?

Where was he coming from?

Did he notice Hitler "staring" at him, "scrutinizing" him? If so, what did he think? We know what Hitler thought.

Where exactly did this occur? On what street? Why did Hitler go THERE that day?

Wherever the man was going, did he take his usual route or did he unexpectedly take a different one at the last minute?

None of these things is causal. That's what's maddening. You can't BLAME them so retrospective analysis can't proscribe against their recurrence, but change any one and astonishingly, maddeningly, the encounter doesn't take place.

Clearly anti-semitism would have come to Hitler, if not on this day then some other. But it did happen on this day, on that street, with that man. Who's to say that on another day the encounter wouldn't have struck Hitler so forcefully?

Who's to say that a delay of even a month or two months in the onset of Hitler's anti-semitism wouldn't have thrown off the timing of his rise to power?

Who's to say that if Hitler were known as Adolph Schicklgruber he wouldn't have become the Nazi leader?

And so, we rewind the film, and we become an observer of this developing catastrophe, to ache at the fall of each snowflake that we know is going to result in the avalanche, and as we're watching, we want to say "no," "don't leave now," "don't go that way," "don't look at him" and we find ourselves powerless to do any of that and to have to just watch as the nightmare unfolds, banal detail by banal detail.

And so I imagine that day. The encounter occurs not in daylight but at dusk. Hitler wanders but, attracted by the architecture of some building, heads in it's direction, toward the Inner City.

The man is in his home, preparing to go to evening services. He is a serious man, his countenance even grave. He heads out onto the street.

It is a winter day and so the days are short. Hitler is cold and, as he always was in Vienna, hungry. The man is well-set. Hitler will unconsciously contrast that with his own gauntness.

The man has a functional coat and a hat. Hitler's coat is worn, thin and ineffective.

As he walks, cold, hungry, tired, Hitler thinks of how Vienna is trying to break him, how he has come to hate the city for it's failure to recognize his talent as an artist, to provide him with the kind of job he feels himself worthy, to feed him, house him and protect him against the cold.

It is not late at night because Hitler, lacking proper shelter, would not have wanted to be out as the city got darker and colder.

The man is thinking of his religion. He is absorbed in thought and walks the same route that he has always walked to the synagogue. He looks at the ground a few paces in front of himself. Hitler just wanders, looking at his surroundings, the buildings and the people.

The man is in middle age, 40's-50's. An elderly man walking with difficulty with a cane might have engendered some sympathy in Hitler, or at least not have seemed as threatening.

Hitler is looking up to keep the building in sight but as he gets closer his view is blocked by the buildings nearer to him and he is unsure now where to turn.

Both men are lost in thought.

Hitler turns down the street. He randomly turns down this street rather than that street and randomly walks on this side of the street rather than on that side and now he and the man are walking toward each other.

The man walks purposefully if mechanically. Hitler walks slowly and aimlessly.

There is a corner in the street. Hitler turns the corner and the man is a few yards in front of him. Lost in thought, Hitler is startled. The man's thought is broken too and he looks up.

Hitler sees a larger man than himself, dressed in black, in clothes foreign to him. The man's hat and full beard make his grave countenance more alien and menacing. The soft gas light of the street lamps obscures the details of his face, making them mysterious.

The two men's eyes meet, Hitler's startled and wide-eyed, the man's sharp and penetrating. In the inadequate light Hitler sees only the eyes and the angular nose that dominates the face.

The two have to alter their strides slightly to pass each other, and they pass so closely they almost brush. As they pass the air carries their smell to the other.

The man continues on, just one of many daily encounters in a big city.

Hitler though is confused by what he has seen. "Is this a Jew?..."Is this a German?"  He pauses and then stops. He hears talking, in a foreign tongue.

The man has seen a friend and has stopped to talk. The man and his friend pivot and their positions change, so that now the man is facing down the street he just came, in Hitler's the direction.

After being startled, after being confused, after pausing and hearing men talking, after stopping, Hitler steps around the corner to look further:

"I observed the man furtively and cautiously..."

The man has already forgotten about Hitler and is now absorbed in conversation. Hitler is in his field of vision but only as a dark shadow in the background. The image doesn't consciously register with him.

Hitler continues to look and now "stared at his foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature."

The man ends his conversation with his friend and insouciantly walks away, his back now to Hitler.  Hitler continues to stare, oblivious to the man's friend who is now walking toward him. The friend sees Hitler staring down the street, but Hitler does not notice him.

The friend passes Hitler, still staring, and as he gets a few steps past he briefly turns and looks back at this strange little man staring down the street after his friend. He turns back around and continues walking.

Hitler's stare is still fixed on the man going to temple who gets farther and farther away and smaller and smaller in the distance. Hitler continues to stare. In the soft gas light and the deepening gloom of evening the man becomes just a black form on the streetscape. Hitler continues to stare. And the darkness gathers.


-Benjamin Harris

PUBLIC OCCURRENCES