Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Geoffrey Chaucer, summer on May 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
A little something I worked up today with a camera and the ever-handy GIMP photo editor. I had some ambitions to push colour saturations in each picture to create a kind of gradient across the piece, but decided to stick with realistic colour instead. It was such a gorgeous Sunday — why try to improve it?
Posted in Foreign affairs, tagged David Frum, Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, shoddy intellectuals on May 26, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Mikhail Gorbachev: More dangerious than Stalin, according to Commentary magazine
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the tendency of neo-conservatives such as Norman Podhoretz to celebrate Ronald Reagan as a great president is more than a little disingenuous. Back when Reagan was actually in power, the neo-cons supported the president against his liberal and leftist critics but had their own problems with the Gipper, who they regarded as a weak appeaser all too willing to negotiate with an implacable enemy, Soviet Communism. This neo-conservative critique of Reagan was especially virulent in President’s second term when he came to the conclusion that Gorbachev was a sincere reformer worth doing business with.
In his book The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich acutely sums up this phase of neo-conservatism:
Podhoretz found much to like in Reagan’s rhetoric, but he warned against confusing words with actions. The two differed, often drastically. To take Reagan’s famous condemnation of Moscow’s “evil empire” at face value was “to fall victim to a campaign of disinformation.” In practice, Reagan had proven himself “unwilling to take the political risks and expend the political energy” to break with the Nixon-Ford-Carter policy of détente. Like his immediate predecessors, the president seemed obsessed with making the world safe for Communism, thus implementing “a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire.” Indeed, to Podhoretz, Reagan appeared “ready to embrace the course of détente wholeheartedly as his own.”
For all of his high-sounding talk, the fortieth president of the UnitedStates, Podhoretz reluctantly concluded, lacked backbone. Although he “seems to have a few strong convictions,” wrote Podhoretz in 1985, Reagan “invariably backed away from acting on them” if they threatened to “cost him more political approval than he might gain by tacking and trimming.” As late as 1986—three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall—Podhoretz was still insisting that “‘the present danger’ of 1980 is still present today, and the question of whether ‘we have the will to reverse the decline of American power’ still hangs ominously as it did then in the troubled American air.” As the end of the 1980s approached, the threat posed by Communism was becoming, if anything, greater than ever. That Reagan was apparently falling victim to Mikhail Gorbachev’s charm offensive was almost unbearable. In Podhoretz’s eyes, to parley with the enemy was to appease him.
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Media, Personalities, Philosophy, Popular culture, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized, tagged accessibility, blind, blindness, Chesa Boudin, Cyrus Habib, Democratic Party, Derrida, disability, Ellison, ivory tower, public interest law, public policy, Rushdie, Said, Spivak, T.S. Eliot on May 25, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Below is a fascinating interview of Cyrus Habib by Chesa Boudin; I am reprinting it from The Rhodes Project. I am proud to count Cyrus as a friend, and I have also had the pleasure of meeting Chesa on a few occasions. Apologies for my obscure Hegelian pun in the title of this post.
Chesa Boudin earned two master’s degrees from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship (Illinois, Merton and St. Antony’s, 2003). In April 2009, Scribner published his latest book, Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America. He is currently in his second year at the Yale Law School.
Cyrus Habib (Washington and St. Johns, 2003) an interview
Chesa Boudin
At the Bon Voyage Weekend in September 2003, my class of newly-selected Rhodes Scholars descended on the Jury’s Hotel in DuPont Circle. Cyrus Habib (Washington and St. Johns) was easily the best dressed member of the group. His Armani tie complimented his tailored shirt and crisp pinstripe suit. He had a penchant for details – manicured fingernails, a unique wrist watch, cufflinks, and matching accessories. No matter the setting, he had on perfect designer sunglasses and would often switch between several in the course of a day. This focus on the aesthetic may seem odd for an intellectual powerhouse like Cyrus – or for the introduction to this interview. However, his attention to visual detail is particularly noteworthy because Cyrus is completely blind.
As a child Cyrus was diagnosed with Retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that attacks the retina. In his case it struck one eye, and then the other. He was lucky to receive world-class treatment that prevented the cancer from metastasizing to his brain; he was unlucky in that it left him with no eyesight whatsoever and unable even to distinguish light from dark. Unlike someone blind from birth, Cyrus has an abundance of vivid visual memory from before he lost his sight. Since Cyrus lost his vision in 1989, he imagines everyone today with mullet haircuts and plaid polyester pants. While he can no longer see red or green, he has an acute visual image of those colors and knows not to mix and match them except during the Christmas season. And if Cyrus has a conversation about a skyscraper or a forest, he can actually picture the subject in his head, rather than understanding or imagining it through verbal context as someone blind from birth would have to do. These memories, combined with an uncanny sense of physical space allow him to navigate the world so smoothly that on first encounters he often passes as not being blind at all. Yet for the last twenty years his brain has not accumulated any new visual memory, leaving space to develop in other areas – his sense of smell and hearing, his memory, and his ability to master complex information quickly epitomize the word “extraordinary.”
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Frank Frazetta, portraits on May 18, 2010 | 3 Comments »
The nice thing about doing figure work but not doing portraits is that when your drawing goes south on you, there’s no one to look over your shoulder and say “Um, thanks Ian, but that doesn’t really look at all like me.” Having a reference is one thing, but a live person with a sense of identity can play havoc with your artistic morale.
The above picture started out as an exercise in reproducing a compelling self-portrait done by the great fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, who died last week. As I worked on it, I realized the eyes were too big, the mouth too pursed, the neck too thin. But since Frank has far cooler things to do now than look over my shoulder, I’m free to reassure myself that the drawing at least looks like someone might — perhaps a Christopher Walken-esque movie villain from the mid-1960s, the kind of character who works at a country gas station, speaks quietly, and has murder on his mind.
Posted in Animal rights, Environment, tagged elephants, poaching, PTSD, socialization on May 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
In Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s book, The Story of Babar, a young African elephant sees his mother shot by a hunter; he runs off, not deeper into the jungle, but (somehow) to Paris. There, he is taken in by a kindly and rich old woman, and learns the pleasures and virtues of urban civilization before eventually becoming homesick and returning to Africa, where he becomes King of the Elephants and helps his subjects adopt an improved lifestyle based largely on human ways. It is a delightful and amusingly surreal story that can be read to children as often as they like. They will learn the horrible truth soon enough.
