Repetition Foreign Policy

Looks like we are developing an Israeli policy towards terrorists. They attack us, we strike at some of their sites. They attack us, we hit back. This could go on for a while. Another attack eventually ensues. We launch some drone attacks on their sites. Then another attack occurs. Then maybe we invade somewhere, then we pull out. The rocket attacks resume, we retaliate on some training camps. This could go on for a while. We change Presidents, the same policy unfolds.

What to look for

When watching the decisions that appear from the political and social height, it is worth asking why certain obvious decisions are not made. Why was there no invasion? Why did so many people talk? Usually the invasions come quickly and the talk is regulated, so if it works the other way around, it is worth wondering about?

Yemen again

After the latest attempt to take down an airplane: two immediate conclusions present themselves. First, after 9/11 it is increasingly unlikely that an attack on an airplane will succeed, simply because passengers will not remain docile if an aggressive move is made on the plane.

The attitude learned from the seventies that highjackers just want to fly to Cuba or Libya, and so if you stay quiet, everything will work out, this attitude, which did not even last through the day of September 11^th, is now once again shown to be over. Passengers will jump anyone who makes a hostile move. Once it has been shown that any able bodied passenger will leap into the chest of a highjacker regardless of how much smoke is rising from his torso or what manner cutting implement he is holding.

The second conclusion has to be that there is some strong reason why the US does not invade Yemen, presumably because the Saudi's are opposed to it. Not that one would advocate such a move, but based on previous US excursions into small countries, Yemen would seem to be a prime target. It cannot be that the desert terrain has kept the US in check. That was hardly considered a reason for restraint before the US went into Afghanistan. It must be simply that some foreign policy concern is holding the US back from jumping on Yemen, a positive development for we hardly need a third messy invasion. There are surely elaborate plans on how to invade Yemen which have been simply shelved because some larger factor, i.e. Saudi Arabia or the general sense that US troops should stay very far way from Mecca, keeps us away from yet another crazy invasion.

Celebrity Contract

Looking at the Tiger Woods scandal from the vantage point of the ordinary citizen, one of the most curious aspects is the way in which a string of women came forward to declare that they had had sex with him. There clearly had been an implicit understanding between Woods and each woman, a bond or even contract that they would not go public with their relationship. So the interesting question is why did they do so and how did that sequence unfold? The string of "admissions" suggests a breakdown in the social code that protects celebrities generally.

There are any number of Hollywood actors and actresses with wholesome reputations who have for decades managed to preserve that impression despite behavior no different than Woods'. Usually the clean image of a celebrity is disturbed by the arrival of the police, as happened with Woods. But why did the local incident become a drawn out spectacle?

Why was there no long drawn out list of women after Hugh Grant got arrested? Surely his backseat tryst with Divine Brown could not have been the first time that he had stepped out on Elizabeth Hurley, yet there was no cluster of women all ready to confess that they too had slept with Hugh Grant. The same code of silence governed Eddie Murphy's reputation after he had been stopped by the police with a prostitute. Having had sex with a star used to mean not talking about it.

The silent agreement breaks down when the normal rules are not followed, such as when Mel Gibson makes anti-Semitic slurs, but if he had been merely slurring his speech nothing would have come of it beyond a DUI.

How many actors, sport stars, musicians have not been busted for drugs? When a celebrity gets arrested for possible drug consumption, it usually involves driving, but there almost never any investigation beyond that one interface with the public. No search warrant to look through the house. No wiretaps on all the other people who were at the party. None of the many possible steps the police could take to find out who was doing what with whom. And beyond the police's discretion, a vast code of silence prevents less known people from stating publically that they slept with, got high with, or did whatever with some famous person.

So what happened in Tiger Woods' case? Why did that code break down? Partially, because Tiger Woods did not provide a Hugh Grant apology the next day on a talk show. He did not cut the scandal off quickly as David Letterman did for himself and has done for other stars. But even beyond Woods' supposed mishandling of his own publicity, there is the striking way in which all those women felt that they had more to gain by telling their stories than by not. This shows something about the further democratization of fame, Andy's fifteen minutes and all, but really there is more, and as a total outsider to the circuit one can only guess what shifted in the discreet arrangement between stars and ordinary people.

Black Power

Toward the end of "Along the Watchtower"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU1uwBNSCF0

Jimi raises his fist in the Black Power sign, an archaic, almost scary, gesture now, but a clear effort back then to mobilize.

We ought not forget the moves that mattered when they did.

Robin Gladiator

The Guardian teases about Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe making what they suggest is a remake of Gladiator. All true, but on the other hand one could, given the rush to cash in on any thing that makes a buck, admire their restraint in waiting this long: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/dec/23/robin-hood-russell-crowe-trailer-review

Many times I have used the opening scene of Gladiator when teaching Tacitus. They are a compelling nine minutes which turn the students' attention to the text at hand.

Nutcracking

So this morning WPSU advertised that it was going to play Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite later in the day. Anyone who listens to classical music has heard this piece in the last weeks.
At what audience is the advertisement aimed? At those listeners who have not heard the Nutcracker all year and now finally get there opportunity? Are there people who regularly listen to NPR news and yet lack the Nutcracker?

Or is the radio station advertising the obvious? Something akin to a classic rock station advertising that they are going to play Springsteen's "Santa Claus is coming to town." We know they will. We drive around town with the expectation that at some point the Boss will ask Clarence whether he has been good this year. Christmas music just happens, maybe it is a guilty pleasure, maybe it is a mind-numbing torture—both perhaps, but what shocks is that WPSU has no better idea of what to advertise other than the obvious, The Nutcracker at Christmas—yes, anything else.

Is there no other Classical Christmas music? Haven't composers for centuries written music for this most sacred Christian holiday? Why not turn to something we have not all heard for the billionth time? Sure throw in the Nutcracker once or twice—the gods of mass marketing must be respected--but please try a little harder to find some interesting Christmas music.

Yes, I am grinching about the local radio station, but this kind of mediocrity is hardly confined to the WPSU. It is part of broader tendency to think that stating the obvious is good enough, that you don't need to try harder to be smart.

Tiger Woods' Lynching

We all understand the desire to get back at someone for their betrayal. Still the photoshopped images of a beatup Tiger Woods standing next to his wife as she smiles with a golf club in her hand have more the look of a lynching. Instead this time it is the white woman who attacks the black man herself. No mob of white men to "defend" her required, though there does seem to be a pack of grumbling guys gathering.

We all so strongly identify with celebrities that it is easy to take sides in their marital disputes, especially if we can make a parallel between our own deceptions as fans and what we imagine Elin Nordegren must feel. In the midst of all this projection and imagining, there is room enough for nasty violence to creep in the public representation of the marital scandal. Sure, everyone sides with the betrayed wife, Tiger Woods is up there with Prince Charles, yet I can't remember any talk of taking a stick to the Prince of Wales. I do remember there being jokes about Frank Sinatra arranging for Woody Allen to get whacked back in the Mia Farrow scandal. Still the pictures of Tiger Woods with a black eye, scars and his teeth knocked out suggest much more than a spectator's involvement in a celebrity sex scandal. They have a far more sinister connotation.

Professor Morrissey

The British pop media have been debating the incident in which Morrissey walked off the stage during a concert, because someone in the crowd had tossed a beer bottle on stage, hitting him on the head. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/nov/09/morrissey-walks-offstage The question was whether Morrissey was justified in refusing to continue the concert, thereby denying a crowd their 30-40 pounds worth of pleasure.

It is not too hard to imagine why Morrissey walked off the stage: he did not really want to be there in the first place. Twenty-five years after his youthful stardom, it must be no fun slogging around small venues in the north of England when you have become accustomed to Los Angeles. But the bills must be paid, and discs sold, so even aging dandies need to mount a well-lit platform to woo and wow the masses.

Professors can be a little like petulant rock stars, too, without the high pay, stimulants and groupies, of course. They, too, can grow tired of their audiences, they, too, can wish for anything but to teach the same course over and over again. Tom Jones may have enough work class grit in him to belt out "She's a lady" for decades on end, but lots of high strung professors get really sick and tired of teaching "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," or subject-noun agreement in both English and French. I bet even chemists run through the definition of a mole with the speed of Dylan revisiting an old tune.

But not all of aged stars, and professors, feel so. The key is never to blame the students—or the audience in Morrissey's case. It is a weary old saying but alas it is so: They are there to learn, as well as be entertained. That they can't properly form the passive voice should not be held against them. It is incumbent on professors to explain. And if they only know the lyrics to "Girlfriend in a Coma" and nothing else, then, sadly, Morrissey needs to show them once again how the song goes.

Instead of walking out on the crowd, you can turn your ire against the system that obliges you to teach the same courses over and over again. You can blame the university press that did not accept your manuscript last year. You can blame your spouse for not wanting to take that job in Oregon. Whatever you like, just don't blame the audience, even if they give you a hung-over explanation for why they did not turn the paper in on time. Beer bottles get tossed around on campus, perhaps not directly at professors, but some of it splashes out in the class room,--in the form of lethargy, lateness and all around ignorance. And in the end, professors have options old rock stars lack.

Plenty of old professors are pleased to have an audience. They may have no connection to the undergraduate life, but they are glad that folks are still showing up to hear them run through their greatest hits. Once they realize that the house in the Hamptons is not a natural born privilege, they don't mind singing "Luka" one more time-- with feeling.

Even though a make-up concert is the planning, http://www.nme.com/news/morrissey/48330 my analogy can only go so far: professors almost never leave a class halfway through their own lecture and Morrissey was always a bit of a whiner (unlike us academics).

Zaha Hadid

Went to the Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Always wanted to walk around one of her buildings, never made it to the fire station. And what an amazing treat this visit was!

There is all sorts of architectural theory that describes the connection between space and cinema, but this building does not leave the connection to chance; it is designed to bring the out the experience of walking through space as watching a move. Motion forward is like time unreeling on the screen. When you walk through the museum, you pass through galleries as if you were the camera capturing images.

The long staircases hold you in a steady line as you move up from one floor to the next. They are narrow and long, so that one wonders what would happen if the building were crowded. As it turned out, I was alone in the concrete cavern the morning I visited. A bright Sunday with no one else around; game day the young man at the entrance said. Indeed there were streams of orange glad couples heading toward the stadium, and no one turned into Zaha Hadid's museum.

So much the better

The place was spooky, like a fun house ride made at great expense with sophistication beyond anything the Jersey shore has to offer. But that is the thing about deconstruction in architecture—call it that for lack of more clever word. You keep comparing it to the set of Dr. Caligari. I almost felt I should have been dragging some damsel in distress over my shoulder as climbed up the stairs.

The curators certainly understood the fun house fright. The first floor showed the bubble gum tongue of Marilyn Minter, a huge tongue on a video licking a glass surface covered in bright sugar crystals. Between tongue, teeth, lips and bubble bursts, you had nothing on your mind but the bright-colored pleasures of the mouth.

Then the next two floors went pitch-black cinematic with dark, dark rooms at the end of the long stairs with Anri Sala videos splattering the reflected spot light off a cymbal. A huge wall of Keith Moon fantasy cymbal with drums set up around the place to hammer out there own beat untouched by human hands.

The drumbeat echoed through the cement rooms, a feeling familiar from walking around 3AM lofts full of bands. Made me think of Danceteria in the 80s but here every line of the room reinforced the disorientation. Remember it was Sunday morning 11:30, and yet the exhibition space made it feel like an all night disorientation, one in which you were remarkably lucid despite the drum banging out around eerie videos projected onto the walls. Incoherence very carefully crafted.

And through each stage you walked along a narrow path, as if you were in a fun house cart running along a track. Your every step anticipated by the design. Look here at the opening that makes three dimensions seem flat, Turn your head to see the vertiginous depth next to the staircase . Right away you realize how the corners of the open space are meant to confuse your sense of up and down, horizonal and vertical. Your perceptions are tampered with. We can easily compared the place to a Borromini church or Piranesi drawing but that does a huge disservice to the way the building grips your body whole like it were King Kong and you Fay Rey. There is no piety left to preserve here, no sense of symmetry to recover after it has been manipulated. You dance with the building, only with skill and experience can you stay ahead of its diva angles. For it never wants to overwhelm you, but it does expect a lot of turns, like a partner who knows the song far better than you, but who kindly grants the illusion that you are making the decision to spin and step.

WPSU Fund Drive

The most fearsome plague has descended upon us: another public radio fund drive. But this time don't just cave in. Don’t let the guilt trip take a bite our of you, don't automatically surrender to the threat that if you don't pay up, all you will have left is Rush Limbaugh and Christian rock on the dial.

Put your diva on, get a little radical—tell the whiners what you think, really think of their performance, all year round. How many times have you said you cannot stand one more "This I believe" segment. The national broadcast gave it up months ago, but here in Happy Valley we continue to be smothered with sentimental clichés.

Are you worried that Christine Allen's voice is not squeaky enough? You want to hear a women with an even higher pitch? One that will send dogs howling?

Do you think the folk show should be even goofier?

You want to hear more experimental jazz but not at ten in the morning, but perhaps at night after a whiskey?

Tell the programmers. They will trot out endless testimonials about how important NPR is, yet nary a voice mentioning how easily they cave in to perceived right-wing criticism. Sometimes the cosmopolitanism is unbelievably bland. To say nothing of the classical music selections organized around the birthdays of famous composers. Perhaps you have heard that Mozart overture 10,000 times already and you would not mind something else.

We live in a small town, there aren't that many people writing checks, you can have some influence. Maybe add a little heft to this tepid public radio station called WPSU.

New Decade Named

So the decade we are concluding has a name stuck to it, the 'noughties', a tag grounded in the two zeros of each year, but suggesting both nihilism (an old boyish favorite of mine) and mildly provocative behavior. The pretty English lady up the street likes to use 'naughty' a lot, so I have gotten used to seeing it in print, and this swift summary of fashion tries to herd all the naughtiness into a string of styles. The best thing about the Guardian's fashion history is the narrators voice--it speaks with fey ironic certainty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audioslideshow/2009/oct/20/review-decade-fashion

Lou Mastroianni

One of the weird things about growing up is watching how the past gets recycled. Today's NY Times video is on Fellini's La Dolce Vita. But before it comes on we hear a video clip of a band singing "All you need is love" for an advertisement. Then on to Marcello Mastroianni, who is presented as one of the great screen actors. If somewhere in your adult life, you discovered that life and marriage was not so simple, you watched Fellini, maybe more than once. So as someone who has run through all the Mastroianni and Deneuve and everyone else, it is more than a little distressing to see the NY Times explain, again, how excellent they all are. Is there some automatic erase function in culture? Nevermind remembering Homer, can we not remember the early 60s? The first time this phenomenon hit me was reading the New Yorker. They had an article in which they mentioned Lou Reed. But they could not just say, Lou Reed says . . . . Instead they wrote "the singer, song-writer, Lou Reed says. . . " As if Lou Reed were the same as Paul Anka. As if he needed an introduction. Did anyone reading the New Yorker really need an explanation as to who Lou Reed was? Apparently some (young) editor was concerned, and out of that little concern, I grew worried that Lou Reed, for all is obnoxious ego, was no longer self-evident—much like Italian cinema.

Time's a Revelation

In contrast to Allison Kraus's big time pop sensibilities, I always thought that Gillian Welch was the grad student, who tried not only to capture the tone of small town country music recording, but who wanted to write lyrics from within the consciousness of rural folk who had not yet caught up with modernity in the 1960s. So when I drive to the country to bring my daughter to a party in a new house with old furniture to meet a mother who speaks slowly to the sudden crowd of parents in her living room, I know that Gillian Welch is right to sing her cautious songs about that new fangled music. There are folks in long country roads who still hold onto their parents' way of talking. They may not sing that way much, except in church, but Gillian Welch moves us to listen like the young girl that the country grandmother of the country mother once was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_7Lr5Rb3Y

Drummers

As a boy in the 70s I thought that the guitar solo was the most important moment in a great song, ok, given the cult of Jimmy, Jimi, Pete and Eric that was unsurprising, but now it seems that that the drummer is carrying the song, at least in British bands. Was it started by the Libertines, in a fine Clash remake, wherein the drums and the charismatic leader singer carry the whole effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2oTuxXjbO4

We know that U2 have relied on bass and drum forever, but the Arctic Monkees are also completely dependent on their banging drummer. No more Stairway, its all in the pounding as shown in their celebrate video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF978AgLyaY

The Arctic video for Crying Lightning is, on the other hand, just an awkward copy of the Pogues' adaptation of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, something like Stonehenge on a boat

Mullet, Its History

Few investigate the origin of the mullet, and surely the history of this hybrid cut is older than this video, but it is worth noting that Bowie is a stage in its development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejQS9kQDXmk&feature=PlayList&p=D737F223BD384FE1&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=13

Scooters as a gateway drug

Saw some boys riding down the hill in the park near my house. They looked about 14, and were bearing down on the rough asphalt of a step incline. My first thought glancing over was "Those boys should be riding skateboards. They are way to tall for those scooters." But they were smiling and hot-dogging their way over and around the many potholes in the park's path. Ok, so they were old hands in riding scooters, but it was only a matter of time before they took to skateboards. Now all over town there are signs "No skateboarding." So the next step past scootering was already headed in the direction of illegality. Never mind Foucault's essay on the forced prohibition of skate boarding. Nothing wrong about skate boarding except that it's illegal. And from there, young boys slide down more than the curving hills of central PA. All that fun, comradeship, daredevil thrill seeking, the local police will tell you where it will lead. Why not just let'm have a smooth ride?

Borders and Elections

Borders can have a strange fascination. At times they seem so arbitrary, as if they were not based in anything belonging to the material world, and yet the more fake and imposed they are, the more likely that they are reinforced by soldiers with guns. Nothing like the Berlin Wall during the Cold War to make this point. Its irreality, the fact that it did not belong to Berlin's urban fabric, was everywhere apparent. Whenever it cut through a street, veered too close to a building, it showed itself as a false imposition, yet of course its very arbitrariness underscored the violence that continuously supported it. Without the eerie equipment of the East German border police, without the tank traps, barbed wire, and hidden machine guns, the border would have seemed like a baroque figment of some ancient diplomats' negotiation.

How much can we compare the US-Mexican border with the Iron Curtain? Certainly there is more movement across, and the security is no where as tight. The similarity lies in the double perspectives the border invokes. To see the border as a Mexican who cannot cross, gives the it a hard quality that Americans wandering over never see. Borders create divided consciousness through their selection process. I crossed over the Berlin Wall, whereas my German relatives could not and dared not—a matter of passports and fear.

The American exemption in Berlin and today across the Rio Grande means that border seems something like a folly, those illusionary ditches from English estates—you, the privileged spectator are only vaguely aware of its existence, but the other side sees a sheer barrier. This applies better to the US-Mexican border than to the German-German, where the military was omnipresent, yet as an eighteen-year old I also claimed an immunity, which let me walk past the turrets (nervously to be sure).

The difference between one person's passing and another's remaining creates the border's contradictions. It sets one group against the other, even if none of them is responsible for the border, a reality we will see in today's German elections.

Trailer for a Book

Maxim Biller is an obnoxious Schmuck which is why I can't help buying and even reading his books. His story last year in the New Yorker thrilled me. The more I read his stuff, the more I think there has to be something else he's written that I am missing.

This video is meant to make him seem like more of a nuisance than he really is, but it works and its hilarious. From the opening line he yanks on the ethnic chain: "Some people write about Indians, some people write about Eskimos, others about Germans, I write about Jews." The video makes sure you see the bitter, restrained faces of white haired German intellectuals biting their tongues, rather than telling him off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUpQwMPvulA&feature=player_embedded#t=187

Taking Control of Noise

As a boy, I always wondered about the truth in old people's complaint that rock music was just noise. There is an obvious truth to their complaint. If rock music was supposed to signify some kind of rupture with the past, then this question of the sound had to be part of it. If old style music was supposed to be an escape from the harsh reality of work, if harmony was supposed to transport you away from the grime and grind of modern life, then rock music took the opposite approach. It drove straight into the crash site.

So here's my thesis: the electric guitar marks an attempt to reverse industrial alienation. With the emergence of electronic music the grind of machinery was taken over by players who could rework the brutal sounds of factories and mechanical weapons. Blaring electrical music reinserted a human subject into technological sounds which to anyone raised on older music sounded dehumanizing. Theodor Adorno and countless others accustomed to old fashioned strings and horns failed to recognize the acoustic transformation, even if Adorno did understand that the new sound was quickly being absorbed into big business. The ease with which the blues went electric shows that industrialized music started when poor black people from the country hit factory jobs. The electricification of folk music was simply the recognition that the purveyors of acoustic instruments had taken up industrial labor.

So the next question is how does sampling signify the further disappearance of industrial experience and its replacement by a stream of endless media images. If innovation in contemporary music comes from transforming the sounds of everyday life rather than building on a tradition taught, then sampling must be a response to the further decline of virtuous performance in the face of its endless repetition through recordings. Why learn to play when you constantly have the best example at your fingertips? Are you going to compete with Clapton, Page etc, if you can hear their every twitch all day long? You may want to be like them, but air guitar and a stereo will let you indulge in the fantasy effortlessly. You don't have to recreate their sound with an instrument. Learning to play is an effort, after all.

Even dedicated, disciplined classical performers must face this problem: old quartets never die. Its hard to develop your own late Beethoven style if you are forever listening to the Guarnari Quartet. How do you sing Schubert if your mom already has three Fischer-Dieskau CDs? It's one thing to hear their music in your head as you practice yours, its another to have it blaring down the hall or even just sitting on your shelf, all packaged in perfection. That old chestnut that B.B. King developed his own style as he was trying to imitate Robert Johnson's may be true, but it could have only worked if King did not have a perfectly remastered set of Johnson's recordings in his bedroom. It's the gap, temporal and acoustic, between hearing a master and imitating him that allows your own style to develop. If the classic performance is forever in your face, you might as well just sample it.

Party School

After midnight the tragic consequences of being the number one party school appear, girls get raped, boys fall down stairwells. Only a fraction of the stories make their way into the newspapers, many more are hushed up, told years later in church basements or the next day to close friends and the occasional therapist. The accidental death of eighteen-year old Joseph Dado after leaving a party at 3am is the only the latest awful case.

Central PA has had a long drinking history. The Whiskey Rebellion did not start here for nothing. All those apple orchards planted two hundred years ago were not intended for baking pies. Hard cider kept the locals going through the winter, so much so that Europeans visiting in the nineteenth-century marveled at how falling down drunk rural Americans got after dinner. I have sat in archives reading the letters of nineteenth century college students, every other one promises mother or father that they won't drink this semester.

But it's not just the isolation, not just that there's nothing to do out here at night. The sudden opportunity to indulge, the encouragement provided by fraternities and football, this makes boys and girls binge like they never would around adults.

The suggestion by a group of university presidents that the drinking age be lowered spoke directly to the problem that kids have no experience and then suddenly too much. Still the public response was so muted that the story dropped from the media within a day of its appearance.

We are too invested in the contradictions of prohibition and consumption. You cannot do it until you are old enough to over do it. The university tries to teach students not to drink while it builds a public image around football. The contradictions are obvious to every freshman: just don't get caught is the bottom line. The problem is that too many kids cannot handle that double edged maneuver.

Finishing

While in grad school, I worked for a dear friend who ran a massive used book shop, a big red barn on the side of the road. I loved the smell of the place, the dusty piles, the rare finds and I was grateful for the extra money in the summer when I had no stipend. There were a few of us who did odd jobs there. My allotment was to schlep heavy boxes, mow the old farm field that surrounded the barn, befriend customers and occasionally run the cash register.

After a busy three-day weekend when I had filled in for a cashier who had suddenly quit, we were sitting around chatting and I asked my friend whom she was going to hire to work the register. She answered with a line taken from her parents, who also ran several used book stores: "The best clerks are grad students who think they are going to finish their dissertation." The point being that they never will, but they hang around forever trying. They are bookish and appreciative.

For me this comment was one of those moments when the curtain gets raised and you see the control room. I decide no matter what, I was never going to fall into this trap.

Mind you I really liked hanging out in grad school. We lived in a funky upstate town full of old hippies and the security that comes from being centrally isolated. I had lots of friends who were still hanging around Ithaca, didn't want to leave the lifestyle, thought the outside world was fascist, loved their girlfriend too much to apply for a job.

And to this day there are people, companies and institutions willing to give a place to those highly educated, almost finished academics. How many ABDs do the grading, the driving, weeding, and generally helping around the place without which relationships, stores and universities could not function? How many of us have been grateful just to be accepted and to be left a little time to write? But in truth, that's not enough.

Secure Reading

As high school kids we hung out in libraries all the time. Only two places in New York City would screen who got to use the reading rooms. The New York Public on 42^nd St had a rule that you had to be over 18 to enter, but no one really stopped us from ordering books there so long as we approached the librarian's desk earnestly with a hushed demeanor. Columbia University started checking ID cards in the late 70s probably from fear of crime. So as high school kids we shied away from Butler library. But once in a while we would sneak into the law school library where they had not yet placed any guards, probably because the stacks were modern and bright as opposed to Butler's gothic dungeon. By and large though, there were no restrictions on getting into the libraries of New York, and that a cluster of geeks would stop at nothing to find a back issue of the New England Journal of Medicine never entered the minds of library administrators.

Today institutional libraries require users to demonstrate that they have the proper credentials, but their motives are totally different. They are not trying to keep the place quiet or prevent muggings. It's not even the fear of terrorism. The real motive is financial.

The spread of security passwords has the effect of creating barriers that protect property, not unlike enclosures around common fields at the end of the eighteenth century when capitalist agriculture restructured the English countryside. Today, the more security barriers are strictly enforced, the more certain publishers are that their on-line services will not be accessed by those, who are not part of the fee structure.

After 9/11 there came a wave of security password protection on libraries. The occasional suggestion was made that terrorists would use free public computers to plot attacks, and librarians protested at the requirement that libraries track the books users check out. Once that requirement was dropped, the pass words still remained, and they exist now, one suspects, so as to allow libraries to buy and publishers to sell online journals, books, reference databases and the like.

The ease with which academics can research online is of course made possible by the passwords that protect the property of the publishers who sell their content to the library. Now admittedly there has been little file sharing of academic databases. How often does one download a pdf from a journal in order to spread it around the internet? Never. Passwords are the hedge around the academic field. Few wish to poach there these days. High school kids may sneak in, but they do so from their computers, not on foot past a hung over security guard.

So the next time you type in your user ID along with an eight symbol figure, know that you are entering a financial deal built upon the hysteria of terrorism.

The Loss of Strangeness

What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.

Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.

Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.

Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.

The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.

Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.

Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.

Harvard Bag

In the water soaked heat of August there is a leonine satisfaction in ordering a gyro at the corner Greek diner, then wandering over to the bodega for a gallon of water and a large Heineken. The nice Mexican lady behind the counter puts the water bottle in a plastic bag and then hands the beer, wrapped in its own little paper bag, to you directly. The assumption—you might want to drink it out on the sidewalk and the brown paper bag shields you a little.

"Is that allowed? Can you really drink a beer outside like that?" says my European friend, so accustomed to strict American police regulations that she can hardly believe a simple brown bag will allow you to consume the hops beverage under the open sky.

"Well, it works only so far as the police let you get away with it. There is an old guy over there in a t-shirt drinking something wrapped in paper. The police aren't going to bother him."

"So why did she give you a bag for your beer?"

"Cause, there is this veneer, if the police want to bother you, then the bag is no cover. If you are Skip Gates, and they happen to be looking for someone who looks like a professor with a cane, then they could easily use the open container wrapped in paper as an excuse to bring you in.

Even if they are not particularly looking for a professor, but they see you sitting on your front stoop with the can, they might still arrest you for disorderly conduct, because you look like Skip Gates drinking a beer."

"Too bad I went to Harvard," she said.

Not a steamy August in NYC

Ottoman Queens

Almost as enticing as the architectural remnants of a lost empire is its aftertaste.

The culinary heritage of the Ottoman Empire lives on ninety years after its political collapse. The polyglot neighborhoods of Queens certainly lack Istanbul's glorious temples but they have more languages and not a little of its food.

Astoria is ostensibly a Greek neighborhood, but its changing fast. Along with Brazilian immigrants and hipster refugees from Brooklyn, Ditmars Boulevard has a secularized Muslim feel imported from old Yugoslavia and Turkey.

It is as if the northeast corner of the Mediterranean has moved in around the old Greek ladies.

The vexed geographical question of Europe's boundaries shows itself in the careful phrasing of the store sign. The Balkans are "European" and thereafter comes the Middle East.

However, a hurried pedestrian might read the sign so that 'European' refers to both the Balkans and the Middle East.

What a generous idea of the shop owner: to advertise a European Middle East! Storefront diplomacy. Either way consumer satisfaction solves cultural conflict once again.

Who forced the door?

In the summer novel that the Skip Gates arrest has become, one wonders if the person responsible for jamming his front door will ever come forward.

Initial reports had suggested that someone had tried to burgle Gates' house while he was away. This would be robber was never noticed by a passerby it seems, or was he? Was the unknown door jammer hindered from entering Gates' house by the notice of another Cambridge pedestrian?

Will this supposed thief hold his own press conference?
Was he aware just whom he was messing with when he tried to force open Gates' door?
As the long string of consequences continues to unfold is there a moment to look back?
Can we ever know why the door was stuck and who had taken an instrument to it?
While all the participants of the beer summit eagerly look forward to moving on, is there anyone who can explain how it all started?

Repeating History

There are universities where no one, as far as I can tell, teaches the Italian Renaissance. There are Liberal Arts Colleges where the origins of the liberal arts does not merit a faculty member devoted to its study.

History is not a matter that is finished once it has been explained.

Some universities may feel that the Renaissance in Italy has been well covered, and it has, but the reality is that education requires repetition. Someone needs to repeat history.

Cutting edge academic work often means working on subjects few have considered before, and if we were racing for a cure to cancer or marketing the next new thing, who could disagree. However, the lessons of the Thirty Year's War or the many Sacks of Rome are soon lost on the next generation. Unless some grey hair takes it upon themselves to return to the well-trodden field, it will disappear.

The lesson that history is really a repetitive performance is shown most obviously in Holocaust studies, a vibrant historical discipline constant rediscovering arguments made decades before. So much has been written about the German killing of the Jews, that there is little that has not been documented, but since Daniel Goldhagen the cycle of interpretation has turned to the zero point. At first Goldhagen revived that old thesis that the Germans had been for centuries inherently anti-semitic. This argument had been already presented during the war by Hans Kohn, but it received a revival in the 1990s.

Now there comes Timothy Snyder's claim we have forgotten the Einsatzgruppen who in the first Nazi invasion of Poland and Russian slaughtered Jews, Communists and resistance fighters of any stripe. Anyone familiar with Holocaust studies has read about the devastation of the Einsatzgruppen, but apparently there are NPR listeners and general readers who are so focused on the horrors of Auschwitz that they do not recognize the massive killings carried out by the earliest Nazi campaigns against Jews.

Who could really have really forgotten this supposedly forgotten moment in the Holocaust? The Einsatzgruppen have long been recognized as the hands-on brutal beginning of the Holocaust.

Even Bernhard Schlink's The Reader recounts the example of a notorious photograph of the EInsatzgruppen killing heartlessly in Poland.

So who has forgotten? Presumably an undefined group of younger scholars who never learned the story in the first place.

The point is that history needs to be repeated in order not to be forgotten: this applies to the Italian Renaissance as much as it does to the Holocaust. Courses need to be taught that repeat already documented history. The obvious needs to be restated, repeatedly, not just for the worst, but also for the best moments

OK Michael Jackson

So what happened to all those mean people who hated Michael Jackson because they saw him as betraying everything he used to represent? They are all mourning his death now, it would seem.

I burned out on Thriller and stopped paying attention twenty years ago, and then suddenly last Spring I downloaded the same album for a party mix. Behold middle age.

But seriously there has been such a massive turn around about Michael Jackson, it cannot only be about speaking well of the dead, or even not realizing how excellent someone was until he died.

There has to be more going on here, some of it has to do with the way in which we are all trained to convulse through media, some of it has to do with a general realization that public opinion was harsh on Michael. The machismo that hammered him in the 1980s has worn off. Perhaps

Lost Theory

What a joy to find a long overlooked theory article! I know everyone writes that theory is over, but every now and then that old rush returns when I pick up an unfamiliar masterpiece written decades ago.

I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.

And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.

Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.

Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.

To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.

Twittering Up

Just joined twitter and right away it seems I am out of my depth. This constant updating seems appropriate for celebrities or fighter pilots sneaking in below the radar but I cannot (yet) take myself seriously enough to announce my breakfast to the world.

This network is all about the first person, the magnificently expanding subject who now is global, or at least the affluent and technological global, the small elite who stretch across the world at key nodal points.

Yet to ignore twitter is to fall behind—this has been the standard pessimistic argument for why one should be Modern, if you are not Modern , then you are forgotten. People have been arguing this point since the nineteenth century.

So first reactions: Twitter is ideally suited for Versailles and the court of the French king, where the rise and supping of the monarch was important news to the ten thousand who lived in his proximity.

Twitter is a new form of the levee. When we can read how Lance Armstrong was awoken by anti-doping control agents and what television program he watched before bed, he is acting not so very different than Louis XIV. Except of course the monarch would grant a duke the honor of actually entering the update, perhaps Lance, too, as a twitter aide.

Now we all get to experience ourselves as the sun king, so many sun kings, what is the value in such grandiosity when so many can sign up?

Here endeth the first twitter blog sermon

Facebook Cocktail Party

Because Facebook relies so much on the idiom of pop music, there are clear limits on what you can express. You quickly learn that people only want to hear happy news.

If your marriage is a mess or you got laid off, there is really no room for such talk on Facebook. Here even pop love songs have more range, for you can always find a tune about love gone bad on the radio, but Facebook lacks the anonymity of pop. Public performance of a sad song does not guarantee an automatic link between the singer's personal life and the lyrics. Of course the audience always wants to connect the song to gossip about the singer, but we know it takes some effort, some speculation.

On Facebook, any sad posting is automatically attached to us, so we suddenly become very bourgeois about what we write. Facebook becomes an upscale cocktail party, witty banter that always shields the speaker. Here the clichés of pop music come to our rescue. If you want to say something sad, you can phrase it as a familiar refrain.

But even here, we middle aged users don't announce anything too intimate. We don't wear our alienation on our profile page. No Mohawks, nasty body art or chemical excesses to be seen. What's most amazing: these good manners are entirely self-imposed.

Face the Face

Facebook is the pop song we all get to write. In the 60s everyone commented on how short pop songs were, that composers were allowed no more than four minutes. Now we are down to just a few characters, as the readers of tweetature know. The key change is that we all get to participate.

The democraticization of publishing your thoughts comes at the price of brevity. Everyone can put their inner monologue out for there but we don't get to go on and on like James Joyce. Instead we send out short bulletins from our lives. When we aren't borrowing from a pop song or Oscar Wilde, we are writing brief memos about ourselves.

Sometimes, when we are lucky, what's on our mind" sounds a line from a cool song, but we don't usually get to write hits. More writers doesn't mean more great one-liners, but at least we are having fun. Pop culture has become the archive and dictionary for our running self-commentaries.

World War One

June 28, 1914

The forgotten European catastrophe commenced today with the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

War came quickly with the Austrians setting an ultimatum against Serbia July 23, 1914
Austria declared war on Serbia July 28
Russia began to mobilize
August 1 Germany declared war on Russia
August 2 Germany declared war on France

the von Schlieffen Plan swings into existence

Summers are lovely. Few of us want to remember how the old world came to an end then

In the Battle of Somme from July 1, 1916 to November 18, 1916 something on the order of 420, 000 British troops were killed, 200,000 French soldiers and 450,000 Germans

These numbers overwhelm the casualty discussions of today.

Powerful Whispers

One of the classic images of the powerful: two men leaning their faces close to each other, so that the one can hear what the other is saying. Within the staging of this picture, the person listening is the more powerful, the person speaking is at his service.

The whisper could be a kiss, it could be Judas betraying Christ, but in political iconography the hushed words amount to the equivalent of a bow. The photographic close-up can portray power through small details. Presidents still stage massive baroque festivals such as the inauguration or helicoptering out to an aircraft carrier, but film allows the masses to look upon the intimate relations between politicians as if they were seeing power’s moment of truth.


The photographic image allows the viewer to share the proximity of the two speakers, that they are so close to another that one can feel the breath of the other. Whatever they are saying, and this information is always left out, it must be important judging by their posture. The more neutral the facial expression, the more important the message. A blank stare suggestions intense reflection upon what is being said, and a careful calculation of how to respond.

Hank Walker's famous poster of John and Robert Kennedy emphasized the fraternal balance between the brothers, their seated posture directly in front of each other, face to face. The usual relationship is reversed: the President speaks, the Attorney General listening. This conversation grows out of family intimacy, it has happened many times, often about ordinary things, but the pose here, the photographer's respectful distance, still show the hierarchy between equals.

As the court painter for the Gonzaga family, Dukes of Mantua, Andrea Mantegna used this whispering image in a fresco within the ducal palace. This “painted room,” camera picta, was an interior space, not open to the general public. It was intended to impress important guests, not the populace. After a visit to the palace, Milanese Duke Galeazzo Sforza was so taken with it that he wrote to the Mantuan that his room was the most beautiful in the world, and that he wished he had had his portrait on the wall.

In other words the painting in this room made one Duke envious of the other.

Mantegna places the reigning Duke Gonzaga seated in the far left corner of the painting. Surrounded by his family, the Duke can observe a line of courtiers approaching him, but his attention turns at that very instant to receive a letter from a messenger, who is bowing hat in hand at his side whispering a message. The conversation between Duke and messenger takes precedence over the reception, yet the ceremony continues. In other words, the Duke is often interrupted by messengers, and all the court participants take the exchange in stride.

Two levels of power are on display: first, the Duke receiving his subjects in his palace and then, second, the presumably important message from afar. Mantegna does not need to use loud images to celebrate the Duke. Anyone viewing the painting would already have gained some access to the Duke, thus the display of his rank could subtler.

The painting's political message is a favorite of photographers in Washington. The most recent version is the shot of Rahm Emmanuel whispering something important to President Obama. When it first appeared the image conveyed that finally again smart men were making intelligent decisions about policy. That there might be a Machiavellian quality to the political calculation was hardly a problem, for at least it was not a decision made on instinct. Sometimes the picture gets used to suggest a sinister side to the White House—does the chief of staff have too much power, but we are so familiar with the icon that we cannot help admire it.


If American viewers have imported an Italian appreciation of the hard calculations that the posture implies, it is not from admiring Mantegna, but rather from watching “The Godfather.” Brando raises his hand to hear the whispered request. As movie viewers we are allowed to hear the statement, as well as Brando’s response.

The great lesson of American politics: “He has been loyal, but what has he done for us lately.”

African Teacher

The beautiful church of S. Zeno Maggiore in Verona celebrates the city’s patron saint. Zeno came from North Africa, and the sculpture in the church shows him to be dark skinned with distinctive facial features. As the biography of Augustine makes clear, Italy and Africa were of course closely connected during the Roman Empire, so it makes fine sense that an African would lead the church in northern Italy. Still, given the current hostility towards African refugees, the story and sculpture’s presence does seem marvelous.

Struck with the grandeur of the church and the enigma of Zeno himself, I started reading up on the bishop once I returned from Italy. Studying is my way of extending the loveliness of travelling in Italy. The sensual wonder of great architecture reverberates in the tomes that describe its inhabitants and namesake.

Zeno preached in Verona during the period we would now recognize as the transition where the Roman Empire became Christian. Emperor Constantine’s conversion set a slow process in motion whereby the old temples were phased out. Reports from 332 and 346 indicate that temples were being demolished and taken over, however Constantine continued to appoint priests. Constantine passed a law banning offerings and closing temples on pain of death, however the law was rarely enforced. His successors Gratien and Theodosius were more energetic in confiscating temples and redirecting religious taxes for the military. For the state the appeal of taking over old houses of worship must have been similar to the motives felt by Protestant princes during the Reformation—suddenly a wealthy, well-landed institution falls into the hands of the government.
Zeno’s collecting sermons cover the decade around 360, a time when pagans still worshipped openly and proudly.

From his sermons you get a sense of the domestic life in the early Church in Verona.

The treatment of women in Christianity distinguished it from pagan practices. One of Zeno’s sermons deals with the question of adultery. Under Roman law only women were subject to judgment for breaking their marriage vows. Christianity introduces the possibility that women could publically object to their husbands having other sexual partners. Constantine had introduced a law forbidding married men from holding concubines in 326. Zeno preached that Christian laws were needed to punish adulterous men. He assures his audience that in his Christian community women would have the same standing as men.

Another issue for the Christian church at the time was the marriage between Christians and pagans. Church fathers acknowledged that in previous times Christians had married outside their religion, but they warned that those who did so were throwing the bones of Christ to the unbelievers, opening the temple of Gods to the devil. Zeno also preached in this vein, drawing tears to his eyes at the thought that in his community Christians were married to pagans. If a Christian wife refuses to accept her pagan husband’s beliefs, the house will be filled strife, God’s name cursed. If she does not respect his gods, will he understand her reserve as just a matter of faith?

Zeno warned that there were many pagan rituals in early Christianity. Church goers would still go out at night to pour libations over graves in order to satisfy the dead. Christians claiming to celebrate martyrs festivals would find a secluded place to hold a drinking bacchanal.

The sermons reflect the competition between sects and religions in the Roman Empire. He preaches against Jews as no longer being the chosen people, as blind. Andreas Bigelmeier writes frankly about the anti-semitism of the early church. The most serious conflict however was with the followers of the priest Arius of Alexandria, who taught that Jesus Christ was not equal in divinity with God the Father, but that he was the First Creation, a supernatural being between the eternally divine and the mortal. Arianism split the early church; it was far and away the most serious challenge to its teaching. As Christianity grew, the large masses that converted did not have the same intense devotion and rigorous understanding of doctrine as the first generations of believers. Zeno responded to the charge that he was too mild in reproaching heretics.

He preached against the excessive wealth of Christians in contrast to their neighbors who starved and froze during the winter. Like many, he used the familiar example of the wealthy Christian woman who spent much of the day in front of her mirror, applying makeup and arranging her hair. His sermons against luxury must not have been successful, for he returns to the topic often. He celebrated the Christian ideal of serving the unfortunate, ransoming the imprisoned, aiding the poor and the abandoned. The doors of Christian house stood open to the wanderer. The Verona church gathered every day to Zeno’s sermons. Easter was the most important holiday, the culmination of the year, for included by baptismal celebrations.

Best source on Zeno, so far: Andreas Bigelmeier, Zeno von Verona (Münster: Aichendorfflichen Verlag, 1904)
picture found at http://santiebeati.it/immagini/?dispsize=Original&mode=view&album=49300&pic=49300E.JPG

Chinese Cookies

As the Western media report with indignant glee about China’s attempt to censor individual computers by requiring filtering controls on all PCs sold in country, we should recall that “cookies” already track users movements and identity as they wander across the internet. The cookie stores information from websites in order to personalize your next visit. Some cookies are meant to expire, however there has been much criticism of Google for setting 2038 as the expiration date for its cookies.
See Daniel Brandt at http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

Legislation in the US and in Europe restricts the ability of intelligence agencies to attach cookies to computers that visit their sites, for the simple reason that both the CIA and NSA have been shown to have tracked users in the past.

When the NY Times reported December 29, 2005 that the NSA removed cookies it had set on computers and the CIA removed cookies it has “inadvertently” placed on computers, one should not believe that Chinese intelligence agencies were the first to surveille personal computers. That from which spies are banned, search engines are permitted. Google has a vast cache of information on search preferences of its users. Personal freedom from interference is invoked when restraints are placed on government tracking of computer uses, however another personal freedom, namely consumer satisfaction, justifies commercial profiling of computers.

Advertising and marketing is the key difference between the Google tracking and governmental surveillance. Search engines want to more smoothly address the consumer by knowing his or her preferences. US intelligence agencies do not wish to block an individual users access to dangerous web sites; like commercial search engines, they merely wish to track it. Let's be real, this blog exists on a Google server. That such marketing information might have further uses one can hardly doubt. The Chinese devices were supposedly intended to censor, or “filter,” access to web sites. Western readers no doubt instantly saw the analogy with a parent trying to prevent Johnny from looking at the wrong web sites.

The paradox of electronic media: we are constantly under surveillance, indeed we depend upon being identified when we use a web site. We enjoy the recognition we receive from the internet, that a web site “befriends” us. This same electronic acknowledgement depends upon our identities being stored by some very large cache.

Rather than blocking access to web sites that contain information threatening to the regime, a far more effective strategy is to lead consumers to sites that appeal to them. Before long they will be pulled away from critical sites and directed toward those that bring more immediate and less threatening satisfaction. Most internet consumers freely let themselves be tracked, they want to be recognized and simultaneously protected from Russia teenagers hacking and political fanatics plotting. American internet consumers are politically docile precise because we feel so free.

US Fascists

We aren’t back in the Weimar Republic, but the assault on the Holocaust Museum needs to be understood as a fascist maneuver aimed not just at the museum but at the White House as well. As a mild-mannered academic, I don’t like to think about Nazis in the American hinterland, nor ponder the unmentionable, but I want to trust that there are earnest officials in dark suits tracking fascists with guns should they approach government officials. These security personnel ought to be so thorough that they have monitored this posting as I edit it on-line-- another super-ego fantasy.

The eighty-eight year old man was giving his own version of a suicide attack, no doubt intended to send a message to the wrong people. A few years from now, we do not want to look back in order to reconstruct the resurgence of the American fascists, the gun fanatics who all supposedly signed up for the war in Iraq and therefore are no longer planning attacks on government buildings. We have apparently not exported all our terrorists to the Middle East.

We need to take our own native-born assassins seriously.

Forgotten Tyrannts

The most impressive church in Verona was originally built outside the city walls—S. Zeno, an imposing Romanesque structure. It is but a short walk from the city center, even on a hot day without a map it takes less than an hour. The high sweeping doors are covered in bronze reliefs depicting scenes from the life of Christ, many of which date back to the thirteenth century.

Inside is an imposing space. The nave is cool and wide, filled with enigmatic historic knights performing the sacred and the profane. The guide book will give a name to some of the knights and you have to take their word on the attribution, for it is not always clear who is doing exactly what in some of the scenes, but you come away with a clear sense that the church is a repository for important political events. It is easy to see that the abbey had long been a favored resting place for German emperors passing down from the Alps into the turmoil of Italian city state rivalry.

Today, in the piazza outside the S.Zeno there is a small market that sells socks and fruits. If you walk across the sun-filled place to a row of trees on the far side, you can find a café where old men have all found their shady seat to drink wine in the afternoon. If they may have left one table free, it is basking in the sun. The struggle between light and shade is all that occupies the piazza now, but if you sip your drink and stare across the plaza, you can easily believe that in 1238 the medieval emperor Frederick II celebrated the marriage of his natural daughter, Selvaggia, to Ezzelino da Romano in this place.

Ezzelino was a rising political power whom the emperor needed to court in his attempt to assert control over Italy. At the time of the wedding Ezzelino was not yet the hated tyrant , infamous for his cruel treatment of enemies, despised by an army of exiles, excommunicated by the Pope, and denounced in the vilest terms available to medieval Christianity. Dante imagines him in a river of boiling blood receiving his just punishment along with other tyrants. Ezzelino was notorious for burying his enemies in castle dungeons, sometimes bricking over the cells as the inmates pleaded for bread and water. His vicious nature grew with his power. If a castle’s defenders resisted his siege, he would have their eyes put out once he captured the place. Jacob Burkhardt opens is masterful book, Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, with the stark contrast between Ezzelino, the vicious usurper, and the worldly emperor Frederick.

As you sit before S. Zeno, you can think how the marriage between Ezzelino and Selvaggia unfolded across six days of feasting on the piazza. We don’t know much about Selvaggia other than that she was the described as the emperor’s beloved natural (i.e. illegitimate) daughter. Some years later, after Ezzelino was strong enough not to need the emperor’s approval, he married another. In footnotes, historians debate what became of Selvaggia . Ezzelino, we know for certain, was eventually caught exposed without many troops in a running battle outside Milan. Wounded in his foot, he died in prison. Verona, like many other cities in the region, declared a holiday upon receiving the news of Ezzelino’s death, at the time it was announced that the city’s freedom should be forever celebrated on that day. One wonders if it is still so remembered.

Photo taken from Wikepdia commons

Where to stay in Verona

A Germanist in Italy

The Hotel Aurora is located in the heart of the old city, directly on Piazza Erbe, as central to the loveliness Verona offers as humanly possible. Fairly priced with a friendly and helpful staff, this small hotel provides a delicious breakfast buffet, has a shady balcony for evenings overlooking the Piazza. Most impressively, the rooms have air conditioning, crucial in the summertime for over-heated tourists.

http://www.hotelaurora.biz/indexGB.htm

Just a reminder

Rock and Roll

"It’s dead. It’s a disease. It’s a plague. It’s been going on for too long. It’s history. It’s vile. It’s not achieving anything. It’s just a digression. They play rock and roll at airports. It’s advanced as it can possibly get. It’s too limited. It is too much like a structure, a church, a religion, a farce."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BZ2UoBZzEI&feature=PlayList&p=C2B9E57BE6B684DE&index=4

The augury of pop culture.

A basic premise of our society is that the young know a truth everyone else ignores at their own peril. The triumph of the sixties and rock music was so complete that even the hoariest conservative knows not to get caught out grumbling about “those kids and their music,” and succession of styles, punk, hip-hop, have been taken seriously by many who care not a wit about its content, simply because they do not want to miss out on the secrets they may reveal.

Even when youth culture is steered by studios, it presents its message always in the guise of subversion that might overthrow the uptight adults. This is not just cynical manipulation, it is also the real expectation that the tastes of the young do represent the future, that somewhere beyond the maneuverings of film-makers and recording executives there still remains a kernel of truth. If all the girls want to see Twilight just as they once all wanted to see Titanic, they are acting according to some principle that augurs the future.

The truth of teen tastes is easily equated with the invisible hand of the market. Even universities now run on this principle, what the young want represents truth and the future.

There are of course other modes of education: wherein the young receive knowledge garnered from the past or from those who have studied the world longer. The market approach to education means that universities teach what students want, as opposed to students learn what universities teach. The difference is crucial, for it shifts the presumption of knowledge onto the students.

Those who learn already know something the professors have forgotten. They know what courses matter, they already know how to organize an education.

According to this Liberal thinking, the function of the university is learn from its students, so that they can teach what the students already know they need to learn. This is the implicit rule behind so many university decisions.

If students don’t enroll in a class, then it must not be important. If a department does not have many majors, then it must not deserve to continue. Never mind that the subject may be difficult.

If they do not come, then we will dismantle the discipline.

The fetish of Trachten

Watch Bavarian television, you see long shows celebrating traditional clothes on women, children and men. Especially if children wear the old style peasant clothes, the moderator ( and by implication, intention and interpollation) delights in their willingness to follow their mothers’ wishes.

Women are surely the driving force behind Trachten, as with so many traditions. Trachten appear on regular shows, fashion brands on commercials.

If any channel ran prime time shows on Armani or Brioni it would seem crassly commercial, indeed against their interests. Main stream television wants to limit the amount of time spent on brands, only as news should they appear, as a supplement to commercial air time.

But Trachten don’t have their own commercial identity, they pretend to appear as a social phenomenon, removed from fashion.

Since the nineteenth century, their authenticity depends on not seeming to be a fad. Thus they are pushed along by a social consensus that sees them as an expensive alternative to upper-class fashion. This consensus operates from person to person, as a local identity, as a means of resistance against global, or at least national, uniformity.

Blue jeans have lost their rebellious quality, but Trachten still work as a communal movement.