What Is It?

Obviously it's a plant of some sort. Anyone can see that. It's fennel, though that doesn't really matter.

For my question is about the background. What is it? And does it matter? If so, how?

Since I took the photo, I know what the background is. There's nothing particularly exotic or unusual about the background, but you can't really tell what it is from the photo; it's blurred too much. It's reddish and has several stripes, two whitish ones and a blue, perhaps others depending on how you read it.

It would appear to be a wall of kind, but beyond that . . . Is it indoors or outdoors? What's it made of? Is it painted? If not, what's the source of color variation?

And, as I asked before, does any of that matter? I don't think of this as being about anything particularly deep. In fact, it seems rather ordinary to me. But, I think, that's because it has become ordinary. On the one hand, 20th Century art has made us used to art that doesn't represent anything in particular, so we're not necessarily going to ask that background to BE anything except a background.

But the foreground image obviously does represent something, a fennel plant. So we've got this almost clash between a representational forground and an almost mysterious background. I say "almost" because photographers do this all the time. There's a word for it, that blurred background: bokeh, from the Japanese.

If the background were mottled greens below, perhaps with patches of blurred color, and blue above there would be an obvious interpretation: more plants and the sky. As the background is quite different from that, the interpretation is not obvious.

Nor really necessary. But, still, there's just a bit of ontological instability.

No?

Cabbage, Second Start

Grow Food Locally

From Eating the City and Town: Todmorden and Beyond by gmoke in Daily Kos:

Linköping, Sweden, a city of about 104,000 people is considering a vertical farm project to become self-sufficient in food (http://www.good.is/post/a-vertical-greenhouse-could-make-a-swedish-city-self-sufficient/) while Chicago is already building their first vertical farm (http://www.plantchicago.com/) and Berlin is planning the world's largest rooftop fish and vegetable garden (http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-agriculture/worlds-largest-rooftop-fish-and-vegetable-farm-planned-berlin.html).

In the US, Growing Power (http://www.growingpower.org/) in Milwaukee is probably the most successful urban gardening project. Today, 1% of the food consumed in Milwaukee is grown in the city but Growing Power wants to increase it to 10% within two years. They plan to build 100 acres of greenhouses for year-round growing and have begun a 20,000 backyard garden program. You can see their founder, Will Allen, talk about their work on CSPAN's Book TV (http://www.booktv.org/Program/13443/The+Good+Food+Revolution+Growing+Healthy+Food+People+and+Communities.aspx)

After the Rain

“Junk” DNA is not Junk

Here’s the opening paragraphs from an article in today’s New York Times:

Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.

Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.

The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.

I don’t know quite what to make of that.

I’m not at all surprised that “junk” DNA turns out to have useful functions. I’ve pretty much assumed that for some time, two or three decades at least.

Of course, I’m not a biologist, so my assumptions don’t count for much. Still, I do wonder why it’s taken biologists so long to figure this out.

Church at Dusk

Dumbo as Myth 3: Modern Times

It’s been a long way through, this analysis of Dumbo. Now’s the time to put it together. First I use a psychoanalytic framework to look at how the film ends, with the Dumbombers and, before them, those strange pink elephants. Then I take a detour through evolutionary psychology and arrive at the nature/culture problem which the film transforms into the relationship between the infant-mother relationship (nature) and circus work (culture).

From there we have to go outside Circus World entirely, into Pink Elephant Land, and into the countryside where we meet the crows. It is only by going outside the circus that Disney solves a problem that arose within the circus: What do you do with an unnatural elephant? But then all of culture is unnatural as well. Solving Dumbo’s problem is thus a proxy for solving all those many problems.

That solution, though, is a fragile thing, as I suggest at the very end.

A Little Crude Psychoanalysis

Not psychoanalytic thinking in any deep and rigorous way, but some ideas inspired by psychoanalytic thought.

First, that the human life-world begins in the relationship between mother and child. For the infant the world consists of mother and the rest. Second, that one’s mind and personality are organized as “layers” where the deepest layers emerge earliest and subsequent layers are built upon the earlier one. This is also, of course, a Piagetian idea, though he was interested in cognition and reasoning, not feeling and desire.

Dumbo, of course, centers on the relationship between Dumbo and his mother. They’re physically separated as a consequence of her attempting to protect him from taunts by a human boy. We don’t actually see and thus experience their relationship being restored until the very end of the film. I emphasize what we see because we can easily infer, after the film is over, that their relationship was probably restored sometime shortly after Dumbo’s triumphant flying act. But we don’t SEE that in the movie. What we see is a quick cut from the triumphal act to a bunch of newspaper and magazine covers depicting events that must have taken weeks if not longer. I mean, seriously, how long would it take to design a new bomber, test it, get it into production, and get it into use? That’s a couple of years.

Now, I’m not saying this either to argue that a lot of time has in fact passed between triumph and the scene we’re actually shown or to suggest that Disney is playing fast and loose with the facts. Of course he is. That’s ground zero for this kind of movie-making. This is myth and such matters are irrelevant (my inner Groucho Marx just said you mean ‘irrelephant’ don’t you?). All that matters is what happens on the screen and what happens is this:

Yellow to Yellow

Ngoma Kids

In a sense, all kids are ngoma kids. But some are more so than others. This post is about a few of them.

* * * * *

I met the first one over thirty years ago, when she was about two or so. A couple years later I was visiting her dad, David, who was laying down a boogie-woogie base line on the piano while I jammed on trumpet. Val joined in on tambourine and played it like her life depended on it. Nothing complicated, just straight rhythm, but with force and passion.

When we’d finished she launched into an a capella version of the theme song from the Broadway musical, Annie: “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” Again, passion and force. The music mattered to her.

I wonder, thought I to myself, if she’ll be able to make music with that force in 10 or 20 years? That is, would she be able to stay in contact with that energy as she grew up or would she lose the connection, never, perhaps, to reconnect?

* * * * *

About two weeks ago I was with some friends at the awards ceremony for a local garden competition. As we were standing around I noticed that Taz, Sparkle’s seven year old son, was doing some pretty vigorous salsa steps. And he seemed to be doing them in time, though there was no music playing for him to dance to.

I decided to test him. I started whistling the melody to a salsa tune I’ve been writing. I had no trouble at all synching with his moves and, after about 30 seconds, he pointed out to me that he was dancing to my whistling. He was on to the game. Of course he was. He’s an ngoma kid.

I asked Sparkle whether or not he’d be able to teach other kids to dance. She thought a bit and said, “yes.” Hmmm...

Cabbage Patches

Downsize the State: Nothing Succeeds Like Secession

The good people at the Second Vermont Republic are at it again, helping to organize The Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Self-Determination, with a keynote address by Morris Berman (Why America Failed).

The convention will be held in the Vermont State House, Montelier, VT, on Saturday 14 September, 2012, from 9AM ro 4PM (party afterwards!).

Occupy Secession has this to say:

Only in Vermont would it be possible to hold a statewide convention on political independence in the House Chamber of the State House, where the Governor, the Lt. Governor, Council of State, Congressional Delegation, and the vast majority of the members of the State Legislature are all unconditional apologists for the American Empire and vehemently opposed to Vermont separatism. Yet that is precisely what is about to happen in Montpelier, Vermont on September 14th. Not only that, it is the third such convention, the other two having been held in 2005 and 2008. There is no charge for the use of the most prestigious venue in the entire Green Mountain State, because it happens to be the People’s House....

At the end of the meeting convention delegates will be invited to consider endorsing The Montpelier Manifesto calling for the rejection of the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire as well as its rapid and peaceful dissolution. Not unlike the 1963 Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society, The Montpelier Manifesto is aimed at all citizens of the United States, not just those living in Vermont.

In the Neighborhood

Bryant Watch: Art as Making

A poem should not mean

But be. 

—Archibald McLeish

Someone, please, tell Bryant the Philosopher King Manqué that he needs to read Ernst Gombrich.

NOW!

He’s about to deliver a paper, "Towards a Machine-Oriented Aesthetics: On the Power of Art," in which he argues against the idea that art works express something and thus demand a criticism in search of meaning. Rather, art works ARE something and so demand a criticism that “is not so much about the work, as about activating the work as a machine with reference to the present.” I can live with that, sorta’. What bothers me is that he seems to think this conception of art is new or, if not new—for nothing’s ever completely new, is it?—at least it’s such an underappreciated and underdeveloped idea that he need not cite any precedent.

Bollocks!

The idea is old, and has been developed with considerable sophistication by Ernst Gombrich in his magisterial study, Art and Illusion (1960). Bryant’s ignorance of this work would be one thing if Gombrich had been an obscurantist provincial scholar laboring in, say, a community college in the Texas hinterlands. Alas, that is not the case. He labored in London, was arguably the most prominent art historian of the 20th Century, was certainly one of the most important theorists, and was noted for the clarity of his writing. A scholar who writes on this topic without mentioning Gombrich might as well write about phenomenology without mentioning Husserl or  Heidegger.

* * * * *

Fennel

Some Latour Litanies from Feyerabend

I’ve been reading around in Feyerabend’s last and unfinished book, The Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being (U. of Chicago Press, 1999). Here’s a few Latour Litanies I’ve found.

Rather than start at the beginning, that’s next, let’s leap to the beginning of Chapter 3, Parmenides and the Logic of Being, pp. 60-61 (only the first sentence is a LL, but I tacked on the other for good measure):

According to Parmenides the most basic entity underlying everything there is, including Gods, fleas, dogs, and any hypothetical substance one might propose, is Being. This was in a sense a very trivial but also a rather shrewd suggestion, for Being is the place where logic and existence meet: every statement involving the word “is” is also a statement about the essence of things.

Here’s the opening of the Introduction, p. 3:

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies.

Going on, p. 4 (middle sentence of three):

Indeed, there exist situation that endanger human life and that have to be dealt with. Bacteria, viruses, ferocious animals, illnesses of all sorts, adverse geological and meterological conditions, are examples.

p. 9:

Almost everybody admits that there are dreams, stones, sunrises, rainbows, fleas, murders, errors—and many other things.

What’s up with fleas?