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  • Joe Biden, The Running Mate

    Bidenobama_3 I don’t know about anyone else but the upcoming presidential election has been looking more and more lackluster to me. Even my good Dem friends and numerous uplifting e-mail messages from the Obama campaign (asking for money) are not lifting my Democratic spirits. Of course, I consider the potential presidency of Sen John McCain an unmitigated disaster. But Obama’s bruised candidacy has also left me a little jaded and deflated.  (That explains the paucity of political posts of late)  In any case, the presidential campaign is now entering the next stage with the announcement of Obama’s running mate today and McCain’s to come next week, followed by back to back party conventions.

    Sen Obama has put Sen Joe Biden of Delaware on his ticket. Biden is widely believed to fill in the  two (perceived) gaping holes in Obama’s political resume – foreign policy and experience. Biden definitely has considerable heft in both those areas. One of the youngest members to be elected to the US Senate, Biden has been a senator since 1972. As a long standing member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden ought to have a good grip on how law and order work at home and abroad. I suppose Obama chose Biden partly to neutralize McCain’s condescending charges of empty-suit inexperience aimed at Obama. Also, with his working class Catholic background and the personal tragedies he has endured, Biden may bring the required street creds to the ticket to soothe over the nerves of the now famous blue collar workers in the Appalachian regions of PA, W.VA, western NY and Ohio who are still leery of Obama’s authenticity as an American and who voted in droves for Hillary in the primaries.

    Blessed with excellent speaking skills, one area where Obama doesn’t need help from Biden is soaring oratory. A good debator and interlocutor, Biden though sometimes likes to talk … and talk and talk. Some suspect that he may suffer from a touch of logorrhoea .. or wind-baggery in common parlance. In fact he talks so much that sometimes he says things that are not always politic. We once discussed Biden’s careless running off at the mouth on A.B. and had some fun at his expense in the comments section. Wrote Dean:

    The stream of comments emerging from the NYT’s story and blog post about Sen. Joseph Biden’s “Oops!,” his bathetically racist remarks about Sen. Barack Obama, includes just a few tributary themes. Some commentators wish the media would “get over it” and report real news, others note Biden’s chronic “foot in mouth” condition, others figure he doesn’t stand a chance in a presidential race, anyway, and there are even those who don’t understand how his “obviously positive comment” could be taken otherwise. The bland commonality of such opinions reflects one of the boring, if also inevitable, aspects of democracy conducted in the public sphere. Yes, we get the “foot in mouth” joke and its variants, and the irony of readers who take the time to complain that the story is nothing but a waste of time is glaring.

    It will be interesting to watch Senator Biden use some choice words about Bush-Cheney and McCain-Running Mate. But let us also hope that his rhetorical flourish doesn’t inadvertently embarrass his "“first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” presidential running mate, at least not until November 4, 2008.

  • Champion of the Working Class

    John McCain’s campaign has gleefully painted Barack Obama as an elitist in the same vacuous mode as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Is McCain then the "man on the ground" who knows all about the travails and tribulations of the American working class? Depends on how one defines "working class."

    • Do working class folks know how many homes they own?
    • Does one have to make at least $5 million to qualify as rich (that is, not working class) in a nation where less than 2% of households earned an annual income of $250,000 or more as recently as in 2006?
    • Will the working class which includes those earning minimum wage, pick lettuce in Yuma, Arizona for $50 an hour? McCain doesn’t think so. (Basic minimum wage in Arizona in 2008 is $6.90)

    SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Now, my friends, I’ll offer anybody here $50 an hour if you’ll go pick lettuce in Yuma this season and pick for the whole season. So — OK? Sign up. OK.

    You sign up. You sign up, and you’ll be there for the whole season, the whole season. OK? Not just one day. Because you can’t do it, my friend.

    • Does the working class comprise a bunch of whiners and the bad news about the US economy is all in their imagination?

    Meanwhile, here is how the Democratic Party plans to deal with disgruntled members of the working class lest they decide to rain on their parade.

  • Back to School in Texas

    Apropos of my recent post on the reckless decision by a Texas school district, see the the following editorial cartoon by Nick Anderson in today’s Houston Chronicle.

    and082108color.jpg

  • Nandalal Bose: An Indian Modern Master

    An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showcases the works of Nandalal Bose, an Indian painter who was at the forefront of the Indian modern art movement. A life long student of art, Bose’s education was influenced by the Tagore family of Bengal, artist Abanindranath Tagore in particular. Bose drew the inspiration for his subject matter from Indian history, mythology and the landscape of Bengal. His style was also shaped to a large extent by Japanese paintings and pen & ink drawings, Mughal miniatures and and later the Buddhist paintings of the Ajanta caves. He went on to become the head of Kala Bhavan, the art school, a part of the once famous Vishwa Bharati University at Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore. The winner of numerous awards and honors, a significant collection of Bose’s works is housed at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. A brief history of his life, work and the history of the Indian modern art movement in the New York Times.

    Bose_eveningWord is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show called “Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helps us to do.

    Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.

    In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.

    Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. Ernest Binfield Havell, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present.

    This mission really took fire, however, in a social circle gathered around the Tagore family in Calcutta. One of its members, the artist Abanindranath Tagore, taught at the Government School and developed a type of painting based on Indian rather than Western models. His uncle, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, opened an experimental university at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Devoted to the study, preservation and regeneration of native culture, it would be a modernist seedbed.

    Into this venturesome environment came a young painter named Nandalal Bose, first as one of Abanindranath’s prize students, later as a teacher and director of art at Rabindranath’s school. From the start Bose understood the concepts behind the school: the idea that an aesthetic was also an ethos, that art’s role was more than life-enhancing, it was world-shaping.

    For a slide show of some of Bose’s paintings on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, see here.  More about the artist here.

    Santhal_dance

  • Russia, Georgia, and American Impotence (Joe)

    I haven’t read that much on the Russia-Georgia conflict.  The Russian invasion of Georgia.  Whatever you want to call it.  So as far as what actually happened, it’s not entirely clear to me.  But anyhow, one of the most interesting (and worrying) aspects of the conflict is the role of the United States.  Take the counterfactual that the U.S. had not invaded and occupied the Middle East (or at least Iraq, the focal point of our resource-allocation).  It may not be clear exactly what would have happened, but isn’t it safe to say that things would have gone differently?

    We’re overcommitted and everybody knows it.  So we tell Russia that we don’t like what they’re doing, and they know that we’re not going to do anything militarily.  Meanwhile, Russia’s pretty tight with China, so that at least cuts into our economic leverage.  Let’s say they force a regime change in Georgia.  Georgia stops trying to join NATO.  Other states (similarly situated to pre-conflict Georgia) understand this to mean that the U.S. won’t be protecting them even though Russia’s a bit unhinged. 

    At the same time, this doesn’t speak only to Russia.  No one doubts that we’re ready to "bomb bomb bomb Iran," but if anything pops up anywhere else in the world?  We’ll stand by and watch, and lack leverage in diplomatic efforts. 

    Isn’t this at least a plausible lesson to glean from current events?  (And then if I’m right about that, isn’t it a talking point that Democrats should be using to hammer away at George Bush’s War and John McCain’s Permanent Occupation?)

  • Great Music You May Have Missed (Andrew)

    Milesdavis The music of Miles Davis’ electric period, which began in roughly 1969 and continued on to his death in 1991, used to be criticized as crude and unfocused in comparison with his earlier masterworks like Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue, and the albums of his two great quintets.  Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, with their moody, chaotic, sprawling tracks and huge bands of multiple pianists, guitar players, and saxophonists were criticized as indulgent, dull, and uninspired.

    This older assessment, by critics like Stanley Crouch and Jack Chambers, has become a minority viewpoint, to say the least.  Among many other musicians, trumpeters like Dave Douglas, Roy Hargrove, and Nicholas Payton clearly show the influence of "electric Miles" in their sound.  Critics have published books that treat this music as seriously as any other part of Davis’ career.  And record companies, desperate to sell anything in their vaults, particularly to a jazz audience actually inclined to pay for meticulously-created re-issues, has released lavish, expanded box sets versions of early 70s LPS like Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, On the Corner, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

    Cellar_door The one I’d humbly like to bring to your attention is a 5-disc live album called The Cellar Door Sessions, recorded in 1970.  What’s wonderful about this music is its embrace of the funk.  Whereas Bitches Brew tends to emphasize texture and a kind of haunted, ambient quality, The Cellar Door Sessions is held together by a 20-year-old Motown bass prodigy named Michael Henderson.  Since each of these tracks is sprawling and free-form, Henderson’s endlessly energetic grooves keep the whole affair moving and full of surprises  And the individual soloists are ferocious!  Who knew Keith Jarrett could rock an electric piano so hard?  Saxophonist Gary Bartz repeatedly builds himself into an explosive lather.  And on the last disc, fusion guitar god John McLaughlin joins the group to add yet another voice. 

    Unlike some of the other reviewers of this set, I find Davis’ trumpet a bit overshadowed by his young-turk superstars.  But as perhaps the greatest talent scout in jazz history, only he could have the wherewithal and audacity to put together a band playing this splendid combination of rock, jazz, and unvarnished funkiness.  Long live the electric Miles revival!

    P.S. If you’d like to listen for yourself without investing the $65-100 for the set, check out this Kevin Whitehead review on NPR.  I’m not crazy about the selections Whitehead chose to play, as they don’t highlight the great soloing as much I’d like, but it does give you a flavor.

  • Anti-Motivational Art

    Came across some funny anti-motivational posters (via Shunya’s Notes).  Also discovered that the website lets you create your own parody posters. I designed a few using some photos in my computer archive. Click for enlargement and let me know what your message would be for these photos.

    Head_start_2 Dumber_than_a_rock_poster                             Genius_poster

  • Ethan Leib: Freakonomist

    Fellow blogger and law professor Ethan Leib, whose views on friendship and the law were discussed here at some length a while ago has a gig as a columnist on NYT’s Freakonomics blog. Ethan’s first post is up and it is about the legal aspects of friendship, natürlich.  At least two more articles authored by Ethan will appear in the coming week. One of them will further expand on his thoughts on friends-in-law and the other will be about juries. Do visit Freakonomics and check out what Ethan has to say.

  • A Summer Break in Brixen

    My short vacation last week took me to the beautiful little town of Brixen in the south Tyrolean region of northern Italy.  Here are some photos inside and outside the historic Elephant Hotel where I stayed, the hotel’s gardens and of the main cathedral in the town square. Although we didn’t meet, I learnt that the Pope was vacationing in Brixen at the time we were there. The souvenir shops were resplendent with commemorative papal merchandise. 

    (click on thumbnails for enlargement)

    Hotel_elephant

    Brixen_elephant_hotel_002_2 Brixen_elephant_hotel_003

    Brixen_elephant_hotel_005 Brixen_elephant_hotel_020

    Brixen_elephant_hotel_021

    Brixen_elephant_hotel_007_2Brixen_elephant_hotel_018 

    For more on the history and politics of the area and other photos, please see Abbas Raza’s post on 3 Quarks Daily.

  • The Girl From Foreign

    The reviews on Amazon and in the Washington Post of The Girl from Foreign, Sadia Shepard’s journey into the past to resurrect her Jewish Indian grandmother’s lost identity, has left me curious enough to put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. I plan to check it out in the near future. The story is common enough – a member of an obscure and tiny religious minority community getting absorbed into a larger religious group on account of marriage and in the midst of great political upheaval losing touch with the home on whose shores she believed her shipwrecked ancestors had landed two thousand years ago. Shepard’s book recounts a family story which is a patchwork of all three Abrahamic faiths and hopscotches across three nations in search of roots.

    From the Washington Post:

    Girl_from_foreignBesides being a personal memoir and a portrait of a family that includes the world’s three major monotheistic religions, "The Girl From Foreign" is a meditation on how our individual memories inevitably slip away, either into oblivion or into that dull collective consciousness we call history.

    The main, organizing event here occurred in 1947, when India at once gained its independence from Britain and split into two countries — Hindus remaining primarily in the main body of the subcontinent; Muslims peeling off to the west and east, to form Pakistan. (Decades later, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.) The average American, if there is such a thing, might remember 1947 as part of the beginning of the Cold War. But Indians have the nerve to be fascinated by the events that occurred in their own country that year, the public history that overlaps, vividly, with their personal memories.

    Little Sadia Shepard and her younger brother, Cassim, grew up first in Denver, then Chestnut Hill, Mass., in what she considered to be a wonderful and normal life with three terrific adults: her American dad, a tall, rangy, white Protestant; her beautiful Muslim mother, who was born and raised in an affluent home in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan; and her sweet maternal grandmother, who raised the kids and kept the house while the adult couple ran an architectural firm. This grandma has a set of slightly dissonant memories: "A very long time ago," she tells young Sadia, "your ancestors left Israel in a ship . . . and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion." Sadia’s nana had spent her early adult years as a Muslim wife in a beautiful beach house in Bombay. But she was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Her prayers, years later, are Muslim, but in her childhood she was a Jew.

    For those who are curious about the history of Judaism in India, please see my review of Who Are the Jews of India? by Nathan Katz.