“Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.”

“Hoewel naked short selling de laatste jaren een vlucht lijkt te nemen met de komst van hedgefondsen en zogenoemde riskarbitragefondsen (die speculeren op koersdalingen vlak voor de presentatie van cijfers of groot nieuws), is het fenomeen bijna vierhonderd jaar oud. Het eerste geval van marktmisbruik door naakt short gaan dateert uit 1609 en is uitgevonden door een Nederlander, de handelaar Isaac Le Maire, grootaandeelhouder in de Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC.”

Meer over Isaac le Maire.

“A film buff tells a friend that he’s finally broken “the code” - the mystery behind the character & story threads that bleed from one Quentin Tarantino movie or screenplay into the next. His friend is less than impressed. Starring Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic) and Selton Mello (Tarja Preta). A short film by Brazilian directing duo 300ml.”

(via)

“North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there — he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects: a slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

But, as Thoreau wrote, ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.’ Cary may cut quite a figure but as a person he is meaningless, so far. We find him in the Suit, but certainly he has not found himself, or ‘what to do’.”

(via)

“Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year’s novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food — a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour. His translator, Professor Jay Rubin, says reading Murakami changes your brain. His world-view has inspired Sofia Coppola, the author David Mitchell and American bands such as the Flaming Lips. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature.”

CCTV television headquarters, Rem Koolhaas.

New York Times, In Changing Face of Beijing, a Look at the New China:

“(…) Mr. Koolhaas has set out to express the elasticity of the new global culture, and in the process explore ways architecture can bridge the gap between the intimate scale of the individual life and the whirling tide of mass society. The image of authority he conveys is pointedly ambiguous. Imposing at one moment, shy and retiring the next, the building’s unstable forms say as much about collective anxieties as they do about centralized power.

He has carved out ample space for places of social exchange. The interior of the building is conceived as an endless loop of public activities, with cafes, viewing decks and galleries extending up through one leg of the structure and back down through the other, where it connects to an underground subway.

The architect sees the dividing line between public and private spheres as an active battleground, one that is constantly shifting and readjusting as society’s norms change and evolve. For now, however, it is not the architect who will determine the degree of openness at CCTV but the company’s government-appointed board of directors.”

Bijbehorende interactieve kaart met commentaar: Architectural Monuments in a Reshaped Beijing.

Beppie: Amsterdams meisje. 35 min, 1965. Johan van der Keuken, Ed van der Elsken. (YouTube)

“Documentaire over een tienjarig Amsterdams volksmeisje. Johan van der Keuken ontmoette Beppie toen ze op zoek naar buitenlandse postzegels bij hem aan de deur kwam. Hij besloot een film over haar dagelijkse leven te gaan maken en volgde Beppie tijdens gebeurtenissen die voor haar belangrijk waren. In de voetsporen van Beppie beleven wij haar grote en haar kleine avonturen: belletje trekken, patat eten, op school, de intocht van Sint Nicolaas, bij de kapper, in het badhuis, op bezoek bij opa en tante Miep en kerstfeest bij het Leger des Heils. Haar commentaar geeft onverbloemd Beppie’s visie op leven en dood, op de televisie, op de liefde en geld weer. De film maakte van Beppie een tijdlang een “ster”. Naast Johan van der Keuken deed ook collega-fotograaf en filmer Ed van der Elsken het camerawerk voor de film.”

Via Stefan.

Gezicht op Amsterdam in vogelvlucht, 1538. Cornelis Anthonisz. (ca. 1505 - 1561). olieverf op paneel, 116 x 159 cm.

Amsterdams Historisch Museum, De oude meesters van de stad Amsterdam:

“De stad Amsterdam beschikt dankzij schenkingen, legaten en aankopen over een collectie van ruim 1.000 schilderijen, gedateerd vóór 1800. Het is een van de rijkste verzamelingen ter wereld, waarin zeventiende-eeuwse schilders zoals Rembrandt, Hals en Vermeer met hun beste werken zijn vertegenwoordigd. In een gloednieuwe catalogus zijn al deze werken verzameld. Op 8 juli werd deze catalogus samen met de webcatalogus gepubliceerd. Klik hier voor de catalogus online.”

Webcatalogus Amsterdams Historisch Museum

“The year-long process taught me a lot about the civic sensibility of the modern American elite. Perhaps most illuminating: the donors had very rigid ideas concerning the capacity of poor people to change their behavior. When they met poor families (in Chicago and New York), they expected that their money would have magical powers. I exaggerate only slightly.

They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.”

Update. Meer problemen met de rijken: Age Of Riches. Challenges of $600-a-Session Patients.

“Our house is in an old quarry, and when we bought it five or so years ago, the previous owner told us that there was a tunnel built by the germans during WW2. He said it was big enough to drive into, and that his father had buried the entrance during redevelopments, but not before filling it with stuff that lying around the property (?). He showed me the rough location, and I’ve marked it on this little map with a red dot….

(…)

And that’s where the quest began…..”

(via)

Mevrouw M. had jeuk en krabde tot het hersenvocht naar buiten kwam, misschien een kwestie van perceptie. Hoogst fascinerend.

The New Yorker, Annals of Medicine, The Itch. Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies:

“The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.”

A lot about this phenomenon remains murky, but here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.

The new theory may also explain what was going on with M.’s itch. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in her scalp. And, for whatever reason, her brain surmised from what little input it had that something horribly itchy was going on—that perhaps a whole army of ants were crawling back and forth over just that patch of skin. There wasn’t any such thing, of course. But M.’s brain has received no contrary signals that would shift its assumptions. So she itches.

Interview (audio) met de schrijver, Atul Gawande, van het artikel.

Deputy Dog, How to safely board a train that won’t stop. (via)

“Internationally acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami is working on an extremely lengthy novel, but is cherishing every moment.

“Every day, I am sitting at my desk for five to six hours. I have been writing the novel for about one year and two months now,” he said in a rare interview as he describes his new work.”

(…)

Is the very long novel he is writing now also being written in the third person? He did not directly reply to that question, but gave one important hint about his new novel.

“It is about ‘horror.’ I have a hunch to produce a good novel. I think it will be an important work of mine.”

Now 59, Murakami said: “Like [Feodor Mikhailovich] Dostoevsky who wrote The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov and became productive as he got older, I’d like to do the same thing.”"

“Morality is an “acquired dialect”, which is a very useful metaphor. Like a dialect, it is conventional, and varies by geography. It is not inborn (although the capacity to acquire it, like that of language, is), and it doesn’t correlate with biology (a Sicilian raised in Japan would speak Japanese, not Sicilian). This is what Sayre-McCord refers to as social conventions. And these things evolve at the social level, not (in general) at the biological. So to explain why, for example, it is regarded as moral to marry a first cousin in Louisiana, but not in London, while marrying within “seven degrees of kinship” in Orthodox society, or marrying anyone with the same family name in Korea (but a first cousin of a different name is acceptable) are considered taboo; these things are best explained in terms of the historical process at the level of social institutions, conventions, economic and cultural factors, rather than biology.

But explaining why it is that humans are disposed to learn and accommodate themselves to these cultural rules is another matter. Moreover, it may be that some moral rules are in fact biologically based, or biased, or at least agreeable. (…)”

‘Qamile Stema, 88, a so-called sworn virgin, scolds relatives for not visiting her often enough.’

IHT, Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania:

“Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly sixty years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

Had she been born in Albania today, says the 78-year-old sworn virgin, who made an oath of celibacy in return for the right to live and rule her family as a man, she would choose womanhood.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

Sworn virgins became the patriarchs of their families, with all the trappings of male authority, by swearing to remain virgins for the rest of their lives.”

“Ich werde gleich in medias res gehen, was bei einer philosophischen Herleitung eines solchen Themas wie «Fussball – Brot und Spiele» nichts anderes bedeuten kann, als zu zeigen, von wo man das Thema weit herholen möchte – Philosophie ist ja die Kunst des «Weit-Herholens der Dinge». Den Sport weit herholen heisst für Europäer nichts anderes, als in unsere eigene Antike zurückzublicken, und zwar in ihrer Doppelgesichtigkeit als einer griechischen und einer römischen. Um meine These im Voraus zusammenzufassen: Wir haben im Sportgeschehen des 20. Jahrhunderts eine doppelte Renaissance erlebt – auf der einen Seite eine griechische Renaissance, die im Zeichen des Stadions steht, auf der anderen Seite eine Renaissance römischen Typs, im Zeichen der Arena. Der Generaltrend in der Sportkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts verrät den zunehmenden Sieg des Arena-Prinzips über das Stadion-Prinzip – was zugleich etwas aussagt über die Grundtendenz der Massenkultur im 20. Jahrhundert.”

De Nederlandse versie van de tekst Sloterdijks lezing verscheen in Trouw: Liggen of staan, dat is de kwestie.

““I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now,” she told me with a hint of pride, before going on to list her other negative achievements. “I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.” At 54, Dumas is a jovial and garrulous presence, with a tangle of blond curls and fair skin. She speaks English with a heavy accent, in a wheezing, thinned-out voice.

“I was so pleased when I read that Rossellini loved to lie in bed,” she continued, referring to the Italian filmmaker, a confirmed hypochondriac who, she discovered, would take to his bed for two or three days at a time, reading thick novels. “Now people do exercise, and they have hobbies, and they take holidays,” she said. “I am not one of those. I don’t go to a psychiatrist. I don’t go to a gym. I run away from my accountant, I run away from my dentist. They are all supposed to help you, but I like to stay in bed, where I have a chance to reflect, like Rossellini.””

(via)

“By Dr. Albert Einstein.
I respond with pleasure to your Correspondent’s request that I should write something for The Times on the Theory of Relativity.”

(via)

‘The telegraph room at the original Mundaneum in Brussels. (Mundaneum)’

IHT, The web that time forgot:

“On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”"

“Sardinian sheepherders, Japanese grandmothers and Seventh-Day Adventists in Los Angeles don’t seem to have that much in common. But within these groups there are some of the longest-lived people in the world.”

(…)

“Although the aging process isn’t fully understood, scientists do know that there’s a complex interplay of genetics and the environment that factors into health and longevity. And Buettner says he was able to identify shared patterns among people who live in Blue Zones.

“They didn’t take any supplements or pills or wine extracts,” he says. “They tended to live in houses and environments that nudged them into bursts of physical activity in kind of an effortless way.

“Okinawans sat on the floor; Sardinians lived in vertical houses; the Costa Ricans had gardens. So they were doing little things all day long that added up significantly over the years and the decades,” Buettner says.”

Excerpt: Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.

Zie ook: How To Live Forever. Is the secret to be found among the centenarians in an isolated region of Sardinia?