SPINE

Monday, February 27, 2012

Two Thumbs Up For the Past




The Artist wins the 2011 Oscar for best film.

It's a "French" film, directed by Michael Hazanavicius (French), and produced by the Hollywood Mogul, Harvey Weinstein.

It's also a “silent” film, or as some have said, a "love letter" to Hollywood’s silent movie era.

Anachronism, at least content-wise, wins. Yet, The Artist hasn’t been a truly popular film, in the sense that it hasn’t done even remotely well at the box office.

But in today’s culture, it is possible, with the help of the machinery of a “campaign” to make the micro look macro (and vice versa).

Frank Bruni claims that The Artist has been seen by a minority of film goers in the United States and abroad, and yet because of Weinstein's aggressive campaign, it gets to, not only win a nomination easily, but also, really wins the actual Oscar.

Kudos, says Bruni, to the Weinstein company for knowing how to “drag an imperfect contender toward, and possibly across, the finish line.

Thrusting the really unpopular into the category of the popular and the winner is, Bruni argues, has become a characteristic of 21st century Oscar campaign.

Could this also be a characteristic of contemporary political campaigns? How else could one explain the phenomenon of extremely anachronistic Republican contenders—some of them do speak like they have just crept out of a Cro-Magnon era, ideologically speaking.  

Of all the Cro-Magnon Republican candidates for a Presidential nomination, Mitt Romney looks Cro-Magnon. Bruni thinks he looks like the artist, and these days his thoughts are also sounding like blasts from the past.    

Yet the Mitt Romney campaign is lagging behind in popularity. Ought they to hire the Weinstein Company to “drag” Romney across the finishing line?

Interesting question, isn’t it?

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Thinking in Black and White


"It just wouldn't look right to have the world without color television in today's society."

The above is a sentence in a student-essay on the topic of technology and how it could both "free" us as well as enslave us to itself, simultaneously.

The one thing I like in the sentence is the stupendous conviction. The writer firmly believes in what she says.

But everything else radiated by the sentence is ripe for critical thinking.

The writer is technically stating the obvious: Color televisions are the only televisions available today in the market, is my guess. Black and white TV’s are out, aren’t they?

Perhaps, the child is implying something else?

Were you to be discovered with a black and white television set in your possession, you might be perceived as someone not belonging to this era, or you might simply be perceived as “weird”. Would you not you look askance at the owner of a flip-phone?

In the world of certain types of technology, I believe, the progression from old to new is mercilessly linear. In the world of audio-visuals, the march from black and white to color and silence to sound, among other marches, is irreversible such that black and white is now a subset of color and silence, as is demonstrated so exquisitely by the 2011 Oscar nominated film The Artist, is a part of the wholeness of sound.

However, what the writer of the sentence does is not just confine the statement to a specific context, but draw an absolute truth of “life”, as it were, from it.

And that is precisely where the trouble—of me accepting the sentence’s conviction at face value is—begins.

The writer believes, I feel, that the movement from black and white to color is a movement of progress in general. To have color is to be modern, but to have black and white is to be anachronistic. 

I feel the writer reflexively draws from the advancement in the field of technology an unexamined truth and applies it to the field of life.

The syllogism is faulty, reducing the sentence itself to black and white.
  
  

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Nudity and Class

Sex-arrested yet again: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in French police custody in connection with a prostitution ring.

The crux of the matter is as simple as Zola's characterization of the Parisian prostitute Nana: All Paris was likely to get in once Nana opened her thighs.

Straus Kahn, now a butt of jokes on French television--on the puppet show "Les Guignols", Strauss Kahn is caricatured as an oversexed skirt-chaser in leopard-print bathrobe--apparently dropped his pants or opened his flies, and every time he opened the gates, women got in (or so it seems).

Could several of the women at Strauss Kahn gatherings have been prostitutes? The French police asks. Did Strauss Kahn knowingly consort with prostitutes?

The gentleman's lawyer has argued a resounding "no":
People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude.
His argument: a majority of the women that Strauss Kahn consorted with at gatherings would be in the nude. Can you tell the difference between a classy lady and a whore when both are in the nude?

Great question! Makes you think about the philosophical query of whether clothes make the woman.

It isn't possible to tell a class female apart from a whorish one? Shows that Strauss Kahn never attempted to speak to any of the women. He simply came at them with his flies open? Surely one can tell somebody's "class" when one engages in a conversation? Or, maybe naked female's class can be ascertained through other means?

Strauss Kahn has always seemed to be in a hurry, to get it over with, as the case with the hotel maid in New York City demonstrated, and the case with the French journalist--his goddaughter--showed.

I wonder what my dearest friend T thinks of all this...She was an ardent admirer of Strauss Kahn and was resolute in her belief that the lowly maid from the Bronx had tried to frame Strauss Kahn on rape charges. Surely, T had argued, this French gentleman had class enough to distinguish between who deserved to suck his instrument?

Well, the latest sexarrest of Strauss Kahn proves that the Parisian gentleman is class-blind.

Caveat to classy ladies: Never appear in public in the nude or your class risks getting dissolved.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

What is Diversity, Really?


German intelligence: The story of Miriam and Christian Rengier, German expats in New York City, is heart-warming.
The Rengiers are affluent and highly educated and wanted to provide their kids with the best possible education money can buy. After shopping around for schools in Manhattan, they chose a Public over private schools on the following grounds: Private schools did not have diversity, whereas public schools abounded in it. Being white and “Germanic”, the Rengiers didn’t want their sons to experience more of the same.
They scoffed at the token diversity on display in private schools—in the choice of cafeteria food:
The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever, […] And I said, What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches? And she looked at me like I was an idiot.
The Rengiers said they wanted “real” diversity in the lives of their children, not simply a gastronomic one.
This isn’t just about how smart the Germans are in differentiating between “real” and “cosmetic”, but about how illuminating this whole ability to make fine distinctions is.


Wednesday, February 8, 2012

American Constitution Needs To Be Upgraded?

According to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the U.S. Constitution can no longer serve as a model for emergent and contemporary democracies:
 I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. 
Not only is this a sign that American prestige and power in the world of today is waning, but it also signals the continual displacement of the old by the new and is a poignant testament to the dynamism of change. Change is a process and things are always in flux. Let's bow to that.

What demoralizes me, however, is the language in which this history of change is being minted: It's the same old language of the Web and the market. Thus, for instance, a prominent legal scholar has attributed the decline of the American constitution's global influence to the following:
Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1. 
The scholar is referring to the the availability of "newer" and "sexier" and more powerful operating systems in the Constitutional marketplace.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

The Politics Of Breasts

I like what Gail Collins says in response to Susan Komen Foundation's misplaced (and now retracted) decision to withdraw funding of Planned Parenthood's breast-screening program (for low-income women). 

Collins laments the fact that not even breasts, which used to be one thing that didn't polarize people into a "red" and "blue" camp, is spared the bitter gourd-treatment of political partisanship. The golden era of breasts might be over. 

 It was an unifier once:
Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts — infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Oh, Shut Up, Tom

Indians like Tom Friedman.

They have liked him since he wrote "The World is Flat," announcing the emergence of a technology-driven multipolar world, where there are many economic centers.

Friedman saw India as one of the centers. So Indians thought, Friedman was pro-India.

I don't like/dislike Friedman, but having followed his train of thinking for years, I have ascertained that he is a place-holder, a mouthpiece, if you will, for this thing called global neoliberalism.

He is a neoliberal. There have been old American liberals galore who have praised India, albeit with a sting of condescension/patronizing. Imagine Senator Patrick Moynihan as an example.

Senator Moynihan would speak of the need to uplift India, through the machinery of aid and education.
The neoliberal like Friedman says India is not only uplifted, but it also is poised to overtake America as an economic powerhouse.

Well, he said that years ago and his prediction hasn't quite materialized. But the point is what Friedman says in praise of India, is really not a praise of India. It is a propaganda for the virtue of a particular kind of economy--the free market type.

Any nation that opens itself to the free market receives Friedman's praise.

Besides, in "The Flat World," it isn't India as a whole that caught Friedman's attention, but only an itty bitty part of it--the technology corridor of Bangalore. Friedman managed to blow that part into a whole.
In other words, Friedman's India in the book is Infosys Inc, not a nation per se, but an outsourcing giant that enabled American corporations to do business cheaply.

Tom Friedman and his ilk value one thing--the expansion of American business abroad, because they believe that a free-market economy and the wealth that it generates, is good for world peace. When people are busy making money or "innovating" something or the other (with an eye to making money), then they don't have time to do fight.

So, once upon a time, Friedman's solution for violence in the "Arab Streets" was to introduce the free-market into the street.

It didn't work, because as the Arab Spring showed, Arabs wanted more than peace and affluence, especially because the affluence wasn't trickling down to the general population.

When India and Pakistan were almost on the point of conflict, Friedman said that General Electric, not General Powell will prevent the border war. And the rumor is that General Electric did prevent the conflict from escalating: Some multinational bosses went to the Indian Prime Minister and said they would not be able to do business in a country with unstable, "warlike" conditions. India, it is said, went for peaceful negotiations.

Arabs seemingly couldn't care less for what Friedman says, but Indians do. And they continue to worship Friedman.

Consequently, Friedman visits India frequently and periodically updates us about the progress India has made as an agent of free market economy.

The updates are published in The New York Times and every time I read them, I bristle with the desire to speak back to Friedman.

I can't speak back to him in person because he is a celebrity opinion-shaper, but I have written back in my own small way in the comments section in The New York Times.

In light of the political unrest sweeping up, not only the U.S. but also the rest of the world, Mr. Friedman's insistence that spread of technology will free us to become partakers in the grand free-market economy fest, is tiresome and petty.

One wishes he would stop visiting the little nooks and crannies of an "underhyped" India—the garages and the shanty homes populated by brave new Indian (Americans) who are "returning" to India to serve the poor with cheap cell phones etc.—and spend more time on real political issues plaguing the nation of America.
Indians will remain the uncritical zombies that they have always been--since the colonial times.