Vincent Gallo is one of the most disliked of current film actors, while George Clooney is one of the most admired, but most viewers of Essential Killing—American, Belgian, Sri Lankan, or Japanese—probably have more in common with Gallo’s “Mohammed” than they have with Clooney. Anyone can be targeted, victimized, have their eardrums blasted out, be forced to hide and kill in order to survive. All these are possibilities of human existence that, at the advanced stage of civilization we enjoy, are available to everyone. But to be George Clooney? He may make it look easy. It’s in the voice, however, that the deceptive quality of the Clooney figure can best be detected. Clooney, who is from Lexington, Kentucky, speaks with an unmarked accent, an accent of zero. His vocal deadpan (so soothing in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox [2009]) projects a reasonableness and an authority that do not impose themselves through any apparent violence. When he talks, it’s as if he were saying nothing. Such a talent makes him indeed The American.

more from Chris Fujiwara at n+1 here.

It’s impossible to know how Francesca Woodman’s photographs would strike us if she hadn’t thrown herself out of a window at 22. Her suicide makes every image feel portentous. Each is a memento mori, a harbinger of imminent death. She specialised in self-portraits and the suite of choreographed scenes she shot with a timer or a remote trigger seems in retrospect a record of her unravelling. We rarely see her face. She bleeds into the background in very long exposures and disappears into crumbling walls. Her limbs vanish behind wallpaper and blur into architecture. Her flesh is barely solid, melting into mist and yielding to the rigid surface of a windowpane. The new exhibition of her work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum prompts a series of unanswerable questions. Would Woodman’s fierce self-scrutiny have ebbed with maturity or would it have inflected her entire career? Did the monomaniacal intensity of her work propel her towards death?

more from Ariella Budick at the FT here.

From The New Yorker:

On Monday, the case of the century got even bigger. In challenges to the Affordable Care Act in lower courts, several judges gave the Supreme Court an escape hatch. These judges, including Brett Kavanaugh, a young judge sure to make Republican short lists for the Supreme Court, said that the Justices should kick the can down the road and put off a decision for a year or two. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that the Tax Anti-Injunction Act (a deeply obscure law) compelled the Justices to put off a decision on the law until it takes full effect, in 2014.

Across the ideological spectrum, the Justices, through their questions to the lawyers arguing for and against the upholding the A.C.A., declined the invitation for delay. They all (that is, the eight who asked questions; Clarence Thomas did not) seemed to recognize that there were legal and prudential reasons to resolve this issue now. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, the act “does not apply to penalties that are designed to induce compliance with the law, rather than to raise revenue. And this is not a revenue-raising measure because, if it’s successful, they—nobody will pay the penalty, and there will be no revenue to raise.” The Court, it now seems clear, will decide this case on the merits.

More here.

From The New York Times:

No sea monsters. No strange life. No fish. Just amphipods — tiny shrimplike creatures swimming across a featureless plane of ooze that stretched off into the primal darkness. “It was very lunar, a very desolate place,” James Cameron, the movie director, said in a news conference on Monday after completing the first human dive in 52 years to the ocean’s deepest spot, nearly seven miles down in the western Pacific. “We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he said, adding that such creatures still might be found. But on this dive he saw “nothing larger than about an inch across” — just the shrimplike creatures, which are ubiquitous scavengers of the deep.

His dive, which had been delayed by rough seas for about two weeks, did not go entirely as planned: his submersible’s robot arm failed to operate properly, and his time at the bottom was curtailed from a planned six hours to about three. It was not entirely clear why. But he did emerge safely from the perilous trip, vowing to press on. The area he wants to explore, he said, was 50 times larger than the Grand Canyon. “I see this as the beginning,” Mr. Cameron said. “It’s not a one-time deal and then you move on. It’s the beginning of opening up this frontier.” National Geographic, which helped sponsor the expedition to the area known as the Challenger Deep, said that Mr. Cameron, the maker of the movies “Avatar” and “Titanic,” began his dive on Sunday at 3:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, landed on the bottom at 5:52 p.m. and surfaced at 10 p.m. He conducted the news conference via satellite as he was being rushed to Guam in the hope of reaching London for the debut on Tuesday of “Titanic 3-D.”

More here.

Julie Davidow. The New Strain #3. 2008.

Gesso, acrylic, latex enamel, and enamel paint on canvas.

More here and here.

Ian McEwan in The Guardian (via Mark Trodden):

[T]he modern artefact bears the stamp of personality. The work is the signature. The individual truly possesses his or her own work, has rights in it, defines himself by it. It is private property that cannot be trespassed on. A great body of law has grown up around this possessiveness. Countries that do not sign up to the Berne Convention and other international agreements relating to intellectual property rights find themselves excluded from the mainstream of a globalised culture. The artist owns his work, and sits glowering over it, like a broody hen on her eggs. We see the intensity of this fusion of originality and individuality whenever a plagiarism scandal erupts. (I’ve had some experience of it myself.)

The dust-jacket photograph, though barely relevant to an appreciation of a novel, seals the ownership. This is me, it says, and what you have in your hands is mine. Or is me. We see it too in the cult of personality that surrounds the artist – individuality and personality are driven to inspire near-religious devotion. The coach parties at Grasmere, the cult of Hemingway, or Picasso, or Neruda. These are big figures – their lives fascinate us sometimes even more than their art.

This fascination is relatively new. In their day, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, even Beethoven were not worshipped, they did not gleam in the social rankings the way their patrons did, or in the way that Byron or Chopin would do, or in the way a Nobel Prize-winner does today. How the humble artist was promoted to the role of secular priest is a large and contentious subject, a sub-chapter in the long discussion about individuality and modernity. The possible causes make a familiar list – capitalism, a growing leisured class, the Protestant faith, the Romantic movement, new technologies of communication, the elaboration of patent law following the Industrial Revolution. Some or all of these have brought us to the point at which the identification of the individual and her creativity is now complete and automatic and unquestionable. The novelist today who signs her name in her book for a reader, and the reader who stands in line waiting for his book to be signed collude in this marriage of selfhood and art.

There is an antithetical notion of artistic creation, and though it has been expressed in different forms by artists, critics and theoreticians, it has never taken hold outside the academies. This view holds that, of course, no one escapes history. Something cannot come out of nothing, and even a genius is bound by the constraints and opportunities of circumstance. The artist is merely the instrument on which history and culture play. Whether an artist works within his tradition or against it, he remains its helpless product. The title of Auden’s essay, “The Dyer’s Hand”, is just a mild expression of the drift. Techniques and conventions developed by predecessors – perspective, say, or free indirect style (the third person narrative coloured by a character’s subjective state) are available as ready-made tools and have a profound effect. Above all, art is a conversation conducted down through the generations. Meaningful echoes, parody, quotation, rebellion, tribute and pastiche all have their place. Culture, not the individual talent, is the predominant force; in creative writing classes, young writers are told that if they do not read widely, they are more likely to be helplessly influenced by those whose work they do not know.

Such a view of cultural inheritance is naturally friendly to science.

Scott Long in A Paper Bird:

In the politics of identity, bisexuals are hated because they stand for choice. The game is set up so as to exclude the middle; bisexuals get squeezed out. in the “LGBT” word, the “B” is silent. John Aravosis, for instance, says that if you’re into both genders, “that’s fine” — great! — but “most people” aren’t. First off, that rather defies Freud and the theory of universal infantile bisexuality. But never mind that. The business of “outing,” of which Aravosis has been an eloquent proponent, also revolves around the excluded middle. It’s not a matter of what you think of outing’s ethics, on which there’s plenty of debate. It’s that the underlying presumption is that one gay sex act makes you “gay” — not errant, not bisexual, not confused or questioning: gay, gay, gay. I saw you in that bathroom, for God’s sake! You’re named for life! It’s also that the stigma goes one way only: a lifetime of heterosexual sex acts can’t make up for that one, illicit, overpowering pleasure. As I’ve argued, this both corresponds to our own buried sense, as gays, that it is a stigma, and gives us perverse power. In the scissors, paper, rock game of sexuality, gay is a hand grenade. It beats them all.

And this fundamentalism infects other ways of thinking about sexuality, too. Salon today carries an article about multiple sex-and-love partners: “The right wants to use the ‘slippery slope’ of polyamory to discredit gay marriage. Here’s how to stop them.” I’ll leave you to study the author’s solution. He doesn’t want to disrespect the polyamorists:

I reject the tactic of distinguishing the good gays from the “bad” poly people. Further marginalizing the marginalized is just the wrong trajectory for any liberation movement to take.

That’s true — although whether we’re still really a liberation movement, when we deny the liberty of self-description, is a bit doubtful. But he goes on, contemplating how polyamory might in future be added to the roster of rights:

Really, there are a host of questions that arise in the case of polyamory to which we just don’t know the answer. Is polyamory like sexual orientation, a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being? Would a polyamorous person feel as incomplete without multiple partners as a lesbian or gay person might feel without one? How many “truly polyamorous” people are there?

Well, what if it’s not? What if you just choose to be polyamorous? God, how horrible! You beast! What can be done for the poor things? Should some researcher start looking for a gene for polyamory, so it can finally become respectable, not as a practice, but as an inescapable doom? (I shudder to think there’s one gene I might share with Newt Gingrich.)

What, moreover, if sexual orientation itself is not “a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being,” one that people miraculously started feeling in 1869, when the word “homosexual” was coined? What if it’s sometimes that, sometimes a transient desire, sometimes a segment of growth or adolescent exploration, sometimes a recourse from the isolations of middle age, sometimes a Saturday night lark, sometimes a years-long passion? What if some people really do experience it as … a choice?

What if our model for defending LGBT people’s rights were not race, but religion? What if we claimed our identities were not something impossible to change, but a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it?

Robert Lane Greene in More Intelligent Life (for Sophie Schulte-Hillen):

Slang rarely has staying power. That is part of its charm; the young create it, and discard it as soon as it becomes too common. Slang is a subset of in-group language, and once that gets taken up by the out-group, it’s time for the in-crowd to come up with something new. So the long life of one piece of American slang, albeit in many different guises, is striking. Or as the kids would say, “Dude!”

Though the term seems distinctly American, it had an interesting birth: one of its first written appearances came in 1883, in the American magazine, which referred to “the social ‘dude’ who affects English dress and the English drawl”. The teenage American republic was already a growing power, with the economy booming and the conquest of the West well under way. But Americans in cities often aped the dress and ways of Europe, especially Britain. Hence dude as a dismissive term: a dandy, someone so insecure in his Americanness that he felt the need to act British. It’s not clear where the word’s origins lay. Perhaps its mouth-feel was enough to make it sound dismissive.

From the specific sense of dandy, dude spread out to mean an easterner, a city slicker, especially one visiting the West. Many westerners resented the dude, but some catered to him. Entrepreneurial ranchers set up ranches for tourists to visit and stay and pretend to be cowboys themselves, giving rise to the “dude ranch”.

By the 1950s or 1960s, dude had been bleached of specific meaning. In black culture, it meant almost any male; one sociologist wrote in 1967 of a group of urban blacks he was studying that “these were the local ‘dudes’, their term meaning not the fancy city slickers but simply ‘the boys’, ‘fellas’, the ‘cool people’.”

From the black world it moved to hip whites, and so on to its enduring associations today—California, youth, cool. In “Easy Rider” (1969) Peter Fonda explains it to the square Jack Nicholson: “Dude means nice guy. Dude means a regular sort of person.” And from this new, broader, gentler meaning, dude went vocative.

Andy Greenwald in Grantland:

[L]ike the Komodo dragon or Kirk Cameron, a few Golden Age shows remain in production even if their evolutionary time has passed. Larry David will keep kvetching as long as there's bile in his body, and the brilliant Breaking Bad has one more batch of crystal to cook. But with three full seasons stretching out before us like the red carpet at the Clios, Mad Men will be the last of the Golden Age shows to grace our flat-screens. With a typically outstanding new episode, the first in 17 months, due to premiere on Sunday, it's worth asking: Is it also the best?

The line of inheritance from first to last is almost too neat: David Chase hired Matt Weiner to the Sopranos off of the cigarette-stained spec of Mad Men, a script originally written by Weiner in an aspirational frenzy while toiling on the Bronze Age Ted Danson sitcom Becker. Weiner's infamous penchant for micromanaging and rewriting was learned at the foot of Chase, and Don Draper is a direct descendent of Tony Soprano; the two share a charismatic corruption, the last of the troubled titans. But this is where the comparisons end. The Sopranos, in all its digressive genius, was a show dedicated to the impossibility of change. Season by season, Chase built a red-sauce-spattered shrine to a lifetime of lessons learned on Dr. Melfi-esque couches: that people are who they are, no matter what. At its core, The Sopranos was Chase's grand F.U. to all the hard-worn stereotypes of Television 1.0, the boring brontosaur he'd finally managed to dump in the Meadowlands. There was no hugging in Tony's New Jersey. No learning or smoothing or straightening. Tony Soprano was Tony Soprano: an amiable monster. In the end, Chase argued with nihilistic aplomb, it doesn't much matter how the Satriale sausage was made, just whether it was spicy or sweet. And when he began to feel revulsion toward his audience's bloodlust, he denied them even that: The finale's fade to black ensured Tony would be stuck with himself for eternity. To Chase it was a fate worse than prison or a slug to the head from a mook in a Member's Only jacket; a karmic feedback loop in the shape of an onion ring.

Mad Men is different. It's less dark and more expansive than its ancestor because, unlike Chase, Weiner isn't asking questions that he's already convinced himself can't be answered. Where The Sopranos was angry, Mad Men is curious. Even at his grief-wracked, whiskey-bloated nadir last season, being Don Draper wasn't a life sentence because Don Draper doesn't exist. He's merely a particularly dapper suit that Dick Whitman is trying on for size. On Mad Men, identity is what's fungible, not nature.

From Himal Southasian:

The year 1971 was a landmark in Southasian history for many reasons. It included the birth of Bangladesh but also the war fought by Pakistan and India. It was perhaps the only such conflict involving the three most populous Southasian countries, clashing for the first time since the end of colonial rule. High-level politics and the tumultuous times spawned a number of books on war, international relations and human rights. However, an uncanny silence has remained about one aspect of the war – the sexual crimes committed by the Pakistan Army and its collaborators, the Razakar militia, against Bangladeshi women. It is only now, 40 years on, that some of that silence is being broken.

Bina D’Costa’s new Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia takes on the mammoth task of placing violence against women during the war in a larger political context. While what D’Costa calls the ‘original cartographic trauma’ of the Subcontinent has been well researched, gendered nation-building narratives have been given little consideration. Yet D’Costa proposes that any theorisation of nation-building in post-Partition India and Pakistan, or post-Liberation Bangladesh, is incomplete without a gendered analysis. Recognising that women have largely been silenced by state historiography, feminist scholars and activists in Southasia – Veena Das, Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia – have attempted to explore this sordid aspect of war. That rape has been used as a weapon of war has been well documented. One of the more famous examples is American feminist Susan Brownmiller’s investigation of rapes committed during the two World Wars, in Vietnam and then in Bangladesh, which emerged as the 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, women and rape. The idea of defiling the enemy population by raping its women and impregnating them, often while their helpless and ‘feminised’ menfolk watch, is based on notions of honour, purity and emasculating the opposition. These notions of defilement also led to the sacrificial killing, sometimes by their own families, of women who had either been raped or even simply exposed to the potential of sexual violence.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Abdellah Taïa in the New York Times:

In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone’s blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me — not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth. A “zamel.”

Like everyone else, they urged me into a terrible, definitive silence, there to die a little more each day.

How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion — Islam — how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me — something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters. To be categorized for victimhood like those “emo” boys with long hair and skinny jeans who have recently been turning up dead in the streets of Iraq, their skulls crushed in.

The truth is, I don’t know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me.

More here.