JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A report on European anti-Semitism is suppressed by the EU:

The report found that “the anti-Semitic incidents in the monitoring period were committed above all by right-wing extremists and radical Islamists or young Muslims,” according to details of the report recently published by the Financial Times. The report also pointed to an increase in left-wing anti-Semitism.

E.U. Parliament member Armin Laschet, of Germany, is among those saying the study should be made public. He and other members of the E.U. Parliament are prepared to fight for its release.

“It must have been withheld for political reasons; it cannot be scientific or quality reasons,” Laschet said. “It is possible to discuss afterward whether it is good or bad, but if you don’t publish it, then this is suspicious.”

In the United States, members of Congress also are calling for the report’s release, including Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), who sent high-ranking E.U. officials a letter calling for publication of information contained in the report.

And why would this report be suppressed?

Critics who want the first study made public say the Vienna-based Monitoring Center was not prepared to deal with the sensitive subject of anti-Semitism among Muslims, who make up Europe’s largest minority.

Europe has presumed to lecture the United States on how it should conduct itself, yet their own behavior suggests weakness in confronting bigotry, an inability to communicate enlightenment values to an immigrant population — Europe has learned little from its own sorry history.

This might lead to something good: here is a site on which nearly 30,000 people have signed on to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. As the site creator says in a NYT column:, “it’s all about quantity, not quality”.

Why would this lead to something? Because the surest way for people to take an interest in real art, rather than the cold body supported by theoretical blatherings that is all the rage in many quadrants of the art world, is to do it yourself. As you engage in an art form you begin to realize how hard it is, how nuanced and complex and mysteriously rich art can be. If, amongst the thousands that play at this OCD version of art, there are just a small percentage that use the exercise as an entry way into the magnificent halls of true art, then an audience can be accrued.

If people are exposed to art at all in colleges now, it is through ideological filters that imparts the impression that paintings are supposed to be illustrations of ideas rather than expressive acts.

One reason Kirk Varnedoe was a good curator was that he had wanted be an artist and took studio courses seriously. One reason poets are often so good as intermediaries in writing about paintings for the public, is that they are artists. You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate art. But it doesn’t hurt for an audience to have an experience of the medium, get the sensual thrill, feel the daunting task, to help appreciate what others have done.

This site is a visual arts variant.

The NYT has the following stats, to encourage advertisers, on its web site:

Every one of NYTimes.com’s readers completes a brief questionnaire at registration, providing information about their age, gender, household income, ZIP code and more. From this registration data — unique among online news sites — as well as from third-party research, we know that NYTimes.com users are educated, wealthy and professional/managerial.
July 2003

Active Readers*: 11MM
New Members*: 397,000
Unique Visitors**: 8,283,000
Page Views**: 265,719,000

Male: 54%
Female: 46%
Median Age: 44
Graduated College: 73%
Professional/Managerial: 37%
Avg. HHI: $86,648

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Of course, when I filled out the questionnaire I said I was 16 years old, with an income of $750,000, and had a Phd in Charbroiling from Hamburger University – but I’m sure everyone else who filled out the questionnaire did it accurately…

My own highly scientific survey of readers of Jolly Days indicates that not only are my readers “educated, wealthy and professional/managerial”, which one would expect, but in addition, readers of this weblog are a select group: “leaders of the free world”. So there, NYT.

John F. Burns, the NYT Bureau Chief in Iraq, was on the Charlie Rose show today. The interview left me with a feeling of great admiration for Burns both as man and journalist. Rose conducted a wonderful interview, allowing this bright, dedicated, decent journalist a chance to, as best he could, tell the truth.

If a journalist is successful at his enterprise, it is an amazing feat: they are swimming in a dangerous and ambiguous environment, a country at war, in which, although not a combatant, they can be targeted; they need to search out the facts, seek the elusive truth, without getting conned, and with all that, finally try to maintain an objectivity about the context that people far away in their homeland have a hard time retaining themselves.

Well, Burns has been able to do it.

Burns’ conclusions – as best I can paraphrase them:

We have inserted our country into another country of 25 million. We have given Iraqis hope. The mass of Iraqis want us to stay until there is stability. They have lived with a monster for many years and have a hard time adjusting to the fact that the U.S. can’t will them a new government and life; Burns felt that a MacArthur type occupation, where a truly strong American military leadership oversaw the beginnings of a new Iraq, would probably have worked better. However, our current more aggressive stance in Iraq is receiving some positive responses from skeptical Iraqis.

Burns said our military leadership, the U.S. Generals who run things there, are remarkably capable as leaders, and extremely forthright in their briefings. They understand the difficulty of the task, are honest about our failures, but are deeply committed.

Burns said that our credibility as a nation is at stake. We can’t, must not leave, until the Iraqis have begun on a road to a better government and life. If we leave too soon, we will be despised both as failures and invaders.

In a profession that is so often disparaged, in part the fault of journalists themselves – incompetence, advocacy and mediocrity in the ranks – Burns stands as a man to be honored. Burns’ truth telling is bracing and eloquent, implicitly expressing the nobility of our actions in Iraq, without cheerleading – though he could have easily succumbed to the journalist’s cozy cynicism about the uses of power.

So it is late afternoon and I go into the kitchen for a snack and flick on the kitchen TV and there is Oprah.

Oprah is playing Santa Claus, giving gifts to the audience. But the scene is hardly communicated by saying that. You would need a team of psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and sociologists to figure out this fascinating spectacle.

First, Oprah isn’t giving just one gift, some middle of the product line tchotchke, to a lucky audience member, as most TV shows do. She is giving, one gift after another, cashmere sweaters and high end consumer DVD videocams to everyone, every single person in the audience. Oprah said the total value of the gifts was 1.5 million dollars. Remember, this is a small studio audience – what, seventy five people? So each audience member would be receiving roughly $20,000 in gifts.

But what really had me watching with fascination was the reaction of the audience. You could describe the reaction of the all female audience as a mass consumerist orgasm. Gasping, shrieking – it was merchandising and consumerism as group porno – mass delirium without true feeling.

What to make of this? The studio audience consists almost entirely of white women, and all the women in the audience appeared to be upper middle class. This audience was standing nearly throughout the show, dancing in place with staring bulging eyes, as though they were at a revival meeting. When Oprah went over to “comfort” a woman who seemed on the verge of fainting and so just had to sit, the woman looked up at Oprah, with tears in her eyes, I mean flowing tears, the way one would meekly look at a diety.

Call me cynical, but this is what I’ll bet was behind this largesse: could be wrong, but I’ll bet all the goods, which were prominently named and endorsed as wonderful, were being advertised in Oprah’s magazine. Beyond the advertising revenue, I wouldn’t be surprised if Oprah got a cut of the sales generated from the items displayed. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the gifts were all given gratis by the named companies – cheap advertising, given the clout Oprah has with the public. (I lasted about a half hour; could be something like this scenario was acknowledged later.)

After each commercial Oprah would come out from behind a curtain, high-fiving the audience, self-celebrating her generosity with her stupefied admirers.

There was no sense that these women in the audience had any true connection to their feelings. The smiles seemed forced, designed to comply with the madness of crowds, formed from a consensus group arousal. There was a deep emptiness, a soullessness, underneath this materialist orgy. Strange to say perhaps, but all this actually felt very sad.

Interesting article on the culture wars…and blogs…

It’s not just the large numbers of readers that these sites attract that is so significant for the conservative cause; it’s also who those readers are. Just as Fox News is pulling in a younger viewership, who will reshape the politics of the future, so these conservative sites are proving particularly popular with younger readers. “They think: ‘If it’s not on the web, it doesn’t exist,’ ” says Goldberg. FrontPage’s web traffic shoots up dramatically during the school year, as lots of college students log on.

Equally important, these sites draw the attention of journalists. “Everyone who deals in media – and they’re not all ideologues on the Left – is reading the Internet all the time,” says FrontPage editor David Horowitz…The Internet’s power, observes Mickey Kaus, the former New Republic writer whose Kausfiles blog has become indispensable reading for anyone interested in politics, “is due primarily to its influence over professional journalists, who then influence the public.” Judges Andrew Sullivan: “I think I have just as much ability to inject an idea or an argument into the national debate through my blog as I did through The New Republic.”

Lileks mentioned on his weblog that he would prefer, over all the suggested designs for the World Trade Center memorial, a statue.

When I first saw the designs for the memorial in the NYT I got into the logic of the various proposals. The designs each had clever, clear – almost too clear – conceptual references to the tragedy. But after reading James’ remarks I thought about it…I know what he means.

If you remember the controversy around the Viet Nam War Memorial, it had something of the same issues involved. The final design was elegant and somber – it was conceptually strong. But the memorial itself was negative in feeling. It was as though the memorial was saying: we don’t approve of war, and here is the result, all these dead human beings.

The Viet Nam Memorial was a self-celebration, in some sense, of the “humanity” of the audience and more especially of the designer and the committee that made the decision. The veteran’s groups, perhaps not sophisticated in art, but in touch with the fact that something was wrong, demanded a sculpture. They countered: there was good reason, if not to be triumphalist, at least to honor the sacrifice of these fallen soldiers in something other than a purely melancholic framework.

Conceptual art, minimalism, has this problem: a unidimensional quality that doesn’t inhabit ambiguity. The best to which such work can aspire is cleverness and an astringent elegance. Sculpture can have a human quality.

(I don’t agree with James’ “allegorical” suggestion – allegory itself is a kind of faux conceptualism. Expressive is the way I’d put it.)

The proposed designs are more securely insulated from direct criticism – they are safer choices for the committee making the final decision – but they won’t be more expressive of the tragic event in our national memory than a sculpture.

[ via Terry Teachout ]

Edward Rothstein wrote today about a Tony Judt article that appeared in the New York Review of Books. I cancelled my subscription of many years after reading Judt’s article. Judt had come to the brilliant conclusion that Israel should be dissolved and a binational state established.

It took awhile, but Rothstein finally got to the point:

Perhaps then, despite Mr. Judt’s embarrassment, the binational experiment might first be tried elsewhere? Say between Iran and Iraq? Or Pakistan and India? Or France and Germany? Until then attention might return to the real world and to the details that inspire such proposals of despair.

Rothstein is exactly right: “a proposal of despair”.

The “embarrassment” to which Rothstein alludes:

But the notion that by renouncing one’s identity — by assimilating or converting — a root cause of hatred might finally be eliminated is also a familiar response to anti-Semitism. Could that lie behind the binational impulse as well? Mr. Judt practically acknowledges as much when he suggests that Israel embarrasses some Jews and inspires what he refers to as misdirected attacks on them.

Right — “misdirected attacks on them”. Judt doesn’t want to be seen as one of those “ghetto Jews” who believes in the right of the Jewish people to have their own state. It’s annoying for Judt to be criticized by his European buddies — so just dismantle the Jewish state to accommodate Tony’s discomfort.

(See my original comments about the Judt article here.)

I just heard Arnold talking about the budget crisis. The story was played as his “threatening the legislature”. If you don’t issue a bond, I’ll go over your head and have the people vote on it, Arnold said. (Why this is a threat exactly, I’m not sure.)

Some things of note:

I liked the way Arnold defined the issue simply: raise taxes or issue a bond.

Arnold said about cutting spending (paraphrase): “I am not going to cut help for blind people.”

The above comment supports my instincts about Arnold: he is not experienced, but trumping that, he is motivated by pride. Pride can be a good thing. He doesn’t want to be someone who “cuts spending for blind people.” He wants what he does to correspond to his standards.

That might not be of note except for this: most politicians will do whatever will serve them in the polls; will do what will get them reelected. What they do is less important to them than how it impacts their careerist ambitions.

So far, so good, Arnold.

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And in today’s paper: Arnold paroled a man whom Gray Davis, for political reasons, and against the recommendations of his own parole board, had refused to parole. But, at the same time, Arnold blocked the parole of a man who had killed a woman on a drunken driving spree. Arnold is not seeking the counsel of polls but is guided by his own feelings of right and wrong.

Again, so far, so good.

Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General of New York State, should get some sort of award for stomping the cheats in the mutual fund industry. He has done more good by his persistence as an attorney general in one state than the Fed has done in the years it was supposed to be overseeing this incredibly important part of the economy. People have their futures lashed to the foremast of this industry.

On the other hand, who wouldn’t have known it? Special deals, behind the scenes manipulations; who would work in the stock trading business if money wasn’t all that mattered? So they see an opportunity, they take it. This means someone has to be hovering, up close and personal, to make sure things are done as they should be done. Better government oversight. Forget the mind numbing invocation: “get the government out of our lives” – rather, get the government to operate efficiently and be immune to special interests.

Thanks Eliot.

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And what else, an article in the business section of the Times yesterday indicated that the government proposed changes to the mutual fund industry won’t do it. The article referred to “stale price arbitrage” as the practice that was causing the problem: betting on the horse race after it has been run. “Fair price trading”, a type of trading that both Vanguard and Fidelity utilize, doesn’t allow the sort of abuse that is currently being prosecuted. The prices are always current when the trades are made, not posted just once a day.

But the fix proposed would simply involve higher redemption fees. “Market timing”, trading in and trading out frequently, raises costs to all shareholders, as the cheats make some guaranteed money. Higher redemption fees are supposed to discourage such practices. But, according to the article, higher redemption fees would actually discourage the average investor, who wants liquidity for emergencies, and would only reduce the bloated profits of the cheats. But the cheating would still be attractive and possible.

Did you see the Victoria’s Secret special? I managed about five minutes. It wasn’t even sexy. The show had the feeling of a parade in the rec area of a medical facility for the terminally tall, disturbingly thin and perennially cranky – what is going on with those evil model stares?

Why are all the models tall and thin? Focusing solely on one physical type makes no sense. Clothes drape well on tall thin people, that is why these genetic anomalies are popular in the world of fashion. But these women were wearing next to nothing – you didn’t have to worry much about “draping”, there was nothing to drape. Why not include more variety in physical type – athletic women, Rubenesque women, etc.? Beauty comes in many shapes and sizes.

The shots of the backstage area, with the bird like models even more undressed than they were onstage, surrounded by makeup and assorted crew fussing with them, looked like a convention of ostrich wranglers tending to their show birds.

The most lasting impression: Naomi Campbell. She is still gorgeous. Watching her walk away from the camera on the runway, with just about nothing on, was a sight to behold.