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12-07-2004 "In his spirit, one can find today, on the Net, the manifesto of 'The Philistine Liberation Organization.' It maintains that real flowers 'wilt and need care' compared with plastic ones, that Barry Manilow's songs 'capture the meaning of life,' that a lot of French paintings 'look as if the artist needed glasses.'" Go to story "Until the final 15 minutes of its deceptively short hour-and-a-half running time, Hero is a marvel, one of the best films to be released in the United States this year. It concludes, however, on a note both emotionally unsatisfying and morally idiotic, one that offers a disturbing hint of the political mood in the world's largest country." Go to story Here's a similar conclusion made by another critic from the other side of the political spectrum: "One felt the general presence of those sentiments in the earlier works of Zhang Yimou (b. 1951), the most internationally prominent Chinese film director. In Red Sorghum (1987), Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1992) and The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) in particular: The films, each carefully and beautifully made, communicated an intense hostility to authority and repression and a genuine concern for the welfare of wide layers of the population. ... "In Hero, made two years ago but only now released in North America, the unfortunate tendency toward conformism and coming to terms with the status quo has reached new heights." Go to story And one that looks at the film in light of "human dignity": "Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic Seven Samurai tells how a band of masterless samurai comes to the aid of a village threatened by an army of brigands. It teems with Nipponese rude mechanicals, resounds with histrionics and robust laughter. And somehow reaffirms a sense of human dignity. In short, it's alive. There's more colour in the Japanese director's black-and-white epic than anything in the hyper-decorative Hero. An even earlier Kurosawa film, Rashomon (1950), lends to Hero its organising principle: a scenario relayed from several perspectives, like a narrative kaleidoscope." Go to story "I was motivated to try a different approach by 'Shifting Ears: A Symposium on the Present State and Future of Classical Music Criticism,' which I attended last month at Columbia University in New York. It was put on by the Music Critics Association of North America and the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia. "The symposium's message: Classical music criticism has to change." Go to story "Mengele was also a merciless critic of culture. The new music was cacophony to his ears. Contemporary theater and television produced, in his mind, nothing but 'thoughts of entrails.' And he believed that modern art was little more than 'the expression of pathological mental conditions, ignorance, lack of talent, malice, or whatever.' Anyone who gave serious consideration to this type of material, according to Mengele, was not entitled to be taken seriously themselves. 'And in architecture,' he wrote, 'things have remained essentially the same.' The Führer, Mengele believed, would have been amused by this concept of culture." Go to story "Awhile back, in the MLA ballot for At-Large Members of the Executive Council (2001-04), candidate Judith Butler wrote a statement of purpose that began:
"Two sentences, two subject-verb disagreements." Go to story "'It's all good fun but absolute nonsense', says Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh. 'The quest for the Holy Grail belongs with the quest for the ark Noah left on Mount Ararat or the fabled Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones is always chasing. There ain't any objective truth in any of it - but of course it's a dream for publishers, who know the world is full of gullible people looking for miracles and they keep on promising that this time the miracle's going to come true.' "'Only it isn't - but the money keeps rolling in.'" Go to story "The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity. "But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look." Go to story "At one point in the classic movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr asks: 'What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got?' The answer, for Lahr's Cowardly Lion, is 'courage.' We ask, albeit less poetically: 'What puts the dys in dystopia?' And we answer: a denial of biology." Go to story "Mahler's Tenth Symphony is one of the most troubling, paradoxical works in musical history. Unfinished at his death, its composition formed part of a legendary, if futile, attempt to ward off mortality. While working on the score, Mahler also underwent a profound personal crisis that led him to consult Freud. The Tenth is consequently the ultimate musical act of agonised self-revelation - though its psychoanalytic intimacy can only be approached through one or more of its completions, none of which may be an accurate reflection of Mahler's final intentions." Go to story "If we think of intellectuals as theorists such as Derrida, we are bound to take a dim view of them. But if we consider how many writers are publishing brain food – from polemical pamphleteering to popular philosophy, science and criticism – we might conclude that the intellectual climate is improving." Go to story "What is the main source of our troubles in the 21st century? If you ask the question at a barbecue this spring, you're bound to get one of two answers: American military adventurism or militant Islamic extremism. Australian sociologist John Carroll, in an ambitious display of sweeping polemic, asks us to consider a deeper 'metaphysical' alternative. The stench, he suggests, is coming from the carcass of Western humanism." Go to story "This is the worst consequence of efforts like Just Being Difficult? They defend an endeavor that profits only theorists and that only theorists esteem. In crude terms, if these theorists win, the humanities lose. The more their practices spread among graduate students and junior faculty, the more irreverence creeps in among science faculty, university administrators, the media, and the interested public. Theorists may preserve their own standing among their colleagues, but what about tomorrow's needs?" Go to story "From an evolutionary standpoint, religious behavior is pointless. Why do humans waste time, money, even their lives on it?" Go to story "Marx - philosopher, social scientist, historian, revolutionary and... British newspaper shareholder?" Go to story "'Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection....'" Go to story "The cosmos is filled with evil that seemingly has no redeeming value. Granted, some evils do lead to greater goods, sometimes goods that could not exist without the evils. Thus, the exercise of courage is a good that requires either an actual evil to stand firm in the face of or the illusion of an evil—and an illusion is a kind of evil, too. But many evils appear to serve no such purpose. Philosophers call an evil that a supremely good God would have insufficient reason to permit to exist a gratuitous evil. A particularly powerful form of the argument from evil against the existence of the God of Western monotheism is, thus, that there seem to be gratuitous evils, hence there probably are gratuitous evils, and so this God does not exist." Go to story "A glance at the fossil remains of these hominids shows that Neandertal bones are much more robust than those of modern Homo sapiens. The skulls of the two species also show several striking differences. One of the most noticeable Neandertal features is the unmistakably large, bony browridges that stick out over the eyes. Below the orbits, the face is more prognathic—the nose and jaw protrude farther in front of the braincase—than a human face. The prominent nasal bones in Neandertal skulls top wide nasal openings, suggesting that they sported large, aquiline noses. Unlike the smoother, rounded contour of the human skull, the back of the Neandertal skull has a distinctive bulge, often referred to as a chignon or bun. Overall, the Neandertal skull resembles what you might expect if someone took a human skull made of rubber, grabbed it by the face and back of the head, and pulled. "These comparisons attracted the attention of scientists who study the interactions between evolution and development from birth to adulthood—so-called "evo-devo." Put simply, they wanted to know: How do you grow up Neandertal?" Go to story "An English literature student called up David C. Page a few years ago and told him she was thinking of doing a thesis that would rebut feminist criticism and bring back a measure of respectability to him and his work. 'I didn't know I was in need of rehabilitation,' Page remarks one late September afternoon in his fourth-floor corner office at the Whitehead Institute on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. He retells the incident while resting his 'Save the Males' coffee cup on a circular conference table." Go to story "Ever felt you're missing the point with some of our biggest cultural heroes? Admit it - everyone can name at least one hip, wildly praised band, album, film, TV show or author that they've never really rated. In this special issue, Guide writers get personal and demolish some of the greats they hate." Go to story "Seven centuries ago, Giotto was famous for being famous. Jonathan Jones pays tribute to the world's first celebrity artist." Go to story
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