Dazed mother of wounded child during Marine battle. Vietnam, 1965 Photographer: Paul Schutzer
Two years before he was killed in Gaza, the Life photographer Paul Schutzer was on assignment in Da Nang, Vietnam. ►click to continue
August 2010
Martin Buber, Photo by Paul Schutzer, Israel 1960
During his trip to Israel in 1960 Paul Schutzer took these photos of Martrin Buber on the same day. The light is superb, amazing consistency, each photo fit for a title portrait. The photos are scattered in the Life archive so it took me some time to reunite them. ►click to continue
I have been hesitant to write about this for two reasons. First, it seems to me the social fabric of the Jewish community is irrevocably broken. There is nothing one can say to remedy this deteriorating condition. Second, I am in the midst of the worst crisis of my life, it gets tangled up in everything I write and I am afraid I can’t be objective. But let me say this. It’s inconceivable to sustain a decent social structure without a free press. And I don’t mean the aggregators that steal content from other journalists like Shmarya (under the “moral” cover). I mean a serious investigative reporting. Looking at the money and influence trail with the detective precision. Writing about ideas, sustaining the artistic and intellectual current. Outside of the Israeli secular press the Jewish people are deprived of this vital institutions. I ran out of exclamation points.
In response to my call I received a number emails from the readers. There is a broad range of people with “diverse” (hate the word) backgrounds following the blog. One predictably frum reader writes: “I could be considered one of those cowards that you write about, I am always hoping you will post more on the subject of people who are committing a moral offense by not breaking with their frum neuroses.”
Bein frum is not a “moral offense”. Just like being a communist is not a moral offence, the beautiful abstract theory (a lie but who cares), a positive aspirational creed. Ultimately when a communist becomes a part of the organized communism he inevitably supports the institutions of the injustice and death. Being frum is OK, being part of the social fabric of the religious community in America c. 2000 is reprehensible. And yes if one calls himself frum he accepts the moral responsibility and contributes to the collective and individual injustice of that culture.
Chris Milk who made this crazy video with Gnarls Barkley, collaborated with Google on this - My home where I grew up in Moscow (click continue anyway there).
I would like to return to Nassim Taleb’s aphorisms:
- “You can be certain that a person has the means, but not the will, to help you when he says – “there is nothing else I can do” … and you can be certain that a person has neither means nor will to help you when he says – “I am here to help”.
- “We are most motivated to help those who do need us the least”
About the second aphorism. Recently I stumbled upon a pattern. When I asked several donor whales why do they keep wasting money on X, all amazingly said the same – “but he already done so much…” But of course, he has access to more money than you and your sponsors would ever see. So what is going on?
If you come for an interview, the worst thing you can do is to let the employer sense that you actually want or NEED the job. The worst thing a woman can do to a man is to let him feel that she is actually interested. Same works with charities, people instinctively seek someone who needs them the least and then beg them to accept the shekels. Hence the recommendation to avoid a weakness, not to be too needy when asking for things. Few people can actually fake it and since the success and failure are often cumulative (see above) it breeds the existential despair gap.
A related aside. I was listening to some radio sports show last week. They spoke about Brett Farve and wondered why is he so popular while his stats are actually mediocre. The answer is that he won a Superbowl, significantly he won early in his career and the aura of success lasted him even after his progressive stats declined. Similarly there are many quarterbacks with superior stats who never won a Superbowl (by chance or luck) and no one ever heard of them.
This is one of the reasons why the psychopaths are often recklessly succesful. They can completely impersonate the invincible, lucky, effortless vibe that people seem to crave so gluttonously. People assume those things are viral. A crazy head start helps.
photo via flickr/bassikgrooove
Time and place to be sure. Today there are plenty of dilettantes who go around saying that the eruption of information will bring about the explosion in understanding. They ignore the fact that we recognized only concepts and ideas that reflect our experiences, we then file the practical knowledge as the confirmation bias material. Occasionally we can reach a new understanding during a jam session between the beat of life and an artistic disruption. But no amount of information can lit what one hasn’t experienced. This is also true for the abstract science.
The root of the age-old dilemma, one can’t even teach his own child. Tarkovsky speaks about this in Andrey Rublev. This is also the essence of various Jewish legends when Rabbis reject angels who promise knowledge (but never wisdom) as a gift. The riddle of life, by the time you figure it out, it’s always too late. Or too early for others to understand what you mean. Its alway the wrong place and time. A minute too soon, a second too late. The confusion between knowledge and information. The bottleneck is the same and it only lets through a thousand grains of sand at the time.
Photo of the Old Dutch Burying Ground at Sleepy Hollow. Via flickr/darkbrilliance
Guardian - 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Ha-Joon Chang writes:
“Economists are not some innocent technicians who did a decent job within the narrow confines of their expertise until they were collectively wrong-footed by a once-in-a-century disaster that no one could have predicted.” Far from being an inward-looking, hermetic discipline, economics has been a hugely powerful – and profitable – enterprise, shaping the policies of governments and companies throughout much of the world. The results have been little short of disastrous. As Chang puts it: “Economics, as it has been practised in the last three decades, has been positively harmful for most people.”
John Gray continues:
“In the US, Obama’s economic policies are being shaped by the same people – many of them with close links to Wall Street – who dismantled Roosevelt’s curbs on the banking system during the Clinton era. American politics has been captured by a financial oligarchy, and there is no prospect of meaningful reform.”
I don’t like rap that much but this must be the best rap song ever. It’s most real because the Notorious B.I.G. was singing about the real threat that soon killed him.
There’s gonna be a lot of slow singin, and flower bringin
if my burgular alarm starts ringin
Whatcha think all the guns is for?
All purpose war, got the Rottweilers by the door
And I feed ‘em gunpowder, so they can devour
the criminals, tryin to drop my decimals
At the end of the video there is the reenactment of the last scene from the Scarface. Very adult langue warning. ►click to continue
I invite the regular readers to drop me an email, I would like to know who you are and what you are. Please put a face on the click.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to many government employees” – WSJ.
I don’t write about gadgets and gizmos but this seems significant. A while ago Google acquired Gizmo, the Skype competitor. They now integrated it into Gmail (rolled out in the last two days in USA). I used it this afternoon, it’s a real killer app. Certainly a killer app as far as Skype’s IPO is concerned. Skype opened up this market but they sadly stagnated for years under the terrible management and ownership of eBay.
The integration of Gmail, Contacts and most importantly Google Voice is impressive. You have the unmatched voicemail features of Google Voice and the Contacts. Most importantly Google Voice had to dial your phone to make a call and it can quickly drain your mobile minutes, but the new Gmail/Chat/Phone integration is a Skype like computer based client, a total bypass of a physical phone. And you can even accept incoming calls to your Google Voice number from Gmail Chat. Skype can’t do that. This is a game changer. Not to mention that the international Google Voice rates are a cent or two lower per minute compared to Skype. The sound quality was exceptional. Google really is the new evil Microsoft.
Minoru Yamasaki the American architect of the World Trace Center designed Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia before he was commissioned to design the WTC. There is this article going around published in 2001 in Slate:
“For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.
Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.
At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.”
This makes a lot of sense (except the idiotic assumption in the article that Bin Ladin was aware of the design symbolism). I have a photo of the courtyard I took from the Millennium hotel in 1999, I don’t feel like publishing it again now. It really does look like the black stone on an axis. In general there is a lot of cross-pollination in Architecture, for example as I wrote about the Leaked Proposal for the Masjid al-Haram Mosque in Mecca, the pointed arches that appear in the WTC and even in the new Mecca design and being touted as “Islamic” in fact have Roman or even Byzantine roots. Never mind the cultural symbols of the Hagar and Ishmael (boy that’s a schlep…)