Shunya's Notes

Food, Inc.

If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert's review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.

The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That's true even if you're eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.

The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They're grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They're fattened so fast they can't stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.

All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor's fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy.

A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World

I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.

The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans in Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.

Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can't also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what's clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.

The collection also provides a window on how Westerners (mostly Americans, here, it seems) thought of Others in those days, how little they saw as they looked on so earnestly. What struck me generally, as I watched and sampled many videos, was the way that things have changed as much as they have remained the same.

The full range of videos is definitely worth perusing. Here are a few random highlights that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Slumdog Millionaire: A Review

This weekend I gave in to the hype and saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire. I entered the movie theater prepared only with the lowest of expectations. And so I was only mildly disappointed. The film has obvious and broad appeal as the quintessential underdog story, and while the cinematography succeeded in capturing something true about the texture of urban India, and the child actors were fabulous, the movie on the whole was just downright silly. (I might warn of plot spoilers ahead, but the movie is so devoid of surprises that there's no need.)

There has been a certain amount of criticism from Indian audiences clamoring (predictably) that the film Slumdog Millionaire fails in the way of all popular Western media, depicting only India's filth and poverty. But I don't see this as it's failing. After all, filth and poverty are undeniably part of the reality of India, and there's nothing wrong with situating a story there, as Mira Nair creditably did in her breakout film Salaam Bombay! In fact, the lives of the destitute, as any who live in extreme conditions or on the frayed edges of bare survival, provide fertile fields for real drama and deep inquisitions into the human condition, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be reaped as such, in much the same way as we regularly do stories situated in Europe during WWII and the Holocaust or the Antebellum South.

But even with the richest ingredients to select from, the storyteller can choose to whip up something fine and substantial, or to make cotton candy: sweet, light, and fun in the moment, but empty and ultimately unsatisfying (plus, eating it hastens tooth rot). And that's what Danny Boyle has done with this well-intended, hackneyed, feel-good flick. Now I've been known to enjoy my cotton candy as well as anyone—even to crave it on occasion—but what baffles me are the critical accolades this film is receiving from every corner. After winning four Golden Globes and literally dozens of of film festival and other international film awards and nominations, it's now considered by some to be the front runner for the Oscars.

Slumdog has its moments, to be sure. Like almost any Bollywood flick, this one too lurches between moments of pathos and bathos, flashes of insight and ingenuity engulfed the next instant by kitsch. But equally like most Bollywood flicks, the problems with Slumdog come down to dishonest storytelling: Veering away from human complexity and difficult truths to replace them with kitsch or stereotype; resorting to gratuitous displays of unwarranted emotion, violence, chase scenes, plot twists, and whatnot to tease, pull, or otherwise manipulate a response from the audience. Characters are uni-dimensional, with true blue heroes who are incorrigibly good, and bad guys who are horrifically bad. Moral "dilemmas" are conveniently black and white, so heroes and villains never need suffer a crisis of conscience—except, of course, when that villain is the hero's darker brother, in which case he is allowed a final change of heart, just before he dies, preferably in a hail of bullets. "Heroines" are absolute non-entities with a single character and role, which is to remain dolled up and precious, and finally to serve as the hero's grand prize at the end.

With two hours to hold onto us, Slumdog Millionaire managed to pack in every one of these devices. And on top of that, it suffered from bad acting, notably on the part of lead actor Dev Patel. Poor Patel was plainly not up to this role. I was even willing to accept that these uneducated slumdwellers spoke passable English, if only for the purpose of making an English-language film. But Patel's British accent and body language never for a moment allowed me to believe that he was acquainted with the life of the slums. He didn't even try. But, it gets worse....

Sita Sings the Blues

Sita Sings the Blues is a Ramayana-inspired animated film told from the standpoint of Sita, who is depicted as an Indian Betty Boop. It is written, produced, designed, and animated by Nina Paley (I haven't seen it yet but the concept is intriguing, as is the way Paley came to it).

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose [American] husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told."

Watch the trailer, a clip from its early production phase, and a standalone short film that's a precursor, The Sitayana, on Sita's trial by fire.

Pangea Day

This afternoon I spent four hours glued to my computer screen watching the live stream of the Pangea Day broadcast, a global film festival hosted simultaneously in Mumbai, London, Cairo, Kigali, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, showcasing short films from new talent all over the world. Interspersed with the short films were video montages of people speaking about universal human experiences—love, anger, sorrow—and short commentaries on human nature and human experience by scientists, activists, and others. The thrust of the event was to promote human understanding by simply presenting a broad sweep of stories that humanize the Other, that break down the categories of "enemy." And as it meandered toward it's final minutes, the focus drew increasingly toward the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

It proved to be a most rewarding way to spend a Saturday. The films, especially, were frequently touching, thoughtful, and moving in surprising ways. I was drawn into the sense of a global experience of discovery that was unfolding at a million points simultaneously across the world, as millions watched and learned and cried together. And (it must be said) laughed together.

But the coup de gras was during the final moments when a Palestinian and an Israeli member from The Bereaved Families Forum stood up together and told their own stories of loss and forgiveness, and this was followed by excerpts from the documentary Combatants for Peace, by the young Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, previously known for her excellent documentary Control Room (2004).

Indeed, the entire Pangea Day event was organized in fulfillment of Ms. Noujaim's dream. When she won the TED prize in 2006, in which the winners are asked to make a wish that the TED community can bring to reality, she asked for a global day of film to break down the barriers and misunderstandings that divide us.

I believe that over the coming days the organizers will post the event highlights along with all of the films, speakers, musical performances, and more, incase you missed them or want to see them again. Or read their blog. Or check out the viewers' stream of consciousness (you may need to click "View the Latest Media").

Thanks, Ms. Noujaim, for your brave and beautiful dream.

My Daughter, the Terrorist

I stumbled upon this documentary film from 2007 (haven't seen it yet). It explores "what happens to a population that has experienced more than a generation of warfare," and "how people become suicide bombers, a choice that seems completely incomprehensible to most of us":

In Sri Lanka's brutal civil war, some rebel women end their lives as suicide bombers that have killed hundreds over the years. A Norwegian documentary film that follows two 24-year-olds training to do just this has enraged the Sri Lankan government, but raises important questions about the conduct of war and its consequences.

The women are from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), often called the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group that has been fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamil ethnic minority since the 1970s. The demand has arisen, they say, in reaction to abuses and discrimination by the Sri Lankan government.

A third of the Tigers are women.

More here.  (Watch the trailer; the movie is not yet available in the US.) From the movie site, I also discovered the relatively new Society for Terrorism Research (STR), which invited a screening of this film at its first annual conference last year.

The Society for Terrorism Research (STR) is an international, multi-disciplinary organization of theoretical and empirical researchers in such behavioral sciences as anthropology, biology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and others. Its mission is to enhance knowledge and understanding of terrorism. Research on terrorism should include and integrate theoretical frameworks and findings from multiple disciplines. Thus informed, more effective policies worldwide will be able to reflect diverse models of complex causation.

Sounds promising, even though Scott Atran is conspicuous by his absence from its governing, advisory, and journal editorial boards.

Standard Operating Procedure

Spring is in the air but we know you well, discerning reader. You're not into vacuous rejoicing. We applaud your instinct to hold the scents and scattering blossoms of spring as oh! so flippant. You yearn for the falling leaves of autumn and pine for the voluptuous bouts of sorrow and depression that define true thinkers. Well, there's light at the end of your springtime tunnel! Standard Operating Procedure, a new film by Errol Morris on the horror of Abu Ghraib, has arrived to plunge you into the bluest of autumnal blues at a theater near you:

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America's image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few "bad apples"€? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news. But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it. Many journalists have asked about "the smoking gun"€ of Abu Ghraib. It is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib—€”and the subsequent coverup—could happen?

Inspired Imagery

The last two times I put up some of my original paintings (Family Pictures) and some faithful copies (Second Hand Art). Today I have picked two paintings which are somewhere in between. These paintings are based on photographs I found in magazines. But they were painted from memory - I did not have the originals before me when I executed the paintings. As the originals were photographs and mine are paint and brush versions of the same and because I added and subtracted from the original compositions, the end products are not really copies. However, since I borrowed the basic idea, I hesitate to call them true originals.

(As usual, please click on the pictures for a larger image.)

One bleak February in Nebraska, I was struggling with a painting that was going nowhere. Both the weather and the creative mind block were cause for some frustratration. I wanted to put the work aside and start something fresh but couldn't come up with a good idea. Then during a trip to the local library while browsing through an issue of National Geographic, I fell upon an article on Rajasthan, the colorful desert state in central India. Rajasthan is not far from Delhi and the photographs in the article made me painfully nostalgic for the hot, arid summers of northern India in the surrounding gloom of a midwestern winter. I could not check out the magazine. I made a quick sketch of the picture on a piece of paper and later transferred the image on canvas. What transpired was a very satisfying piece of art work that progressed with speed and enthusiasm. I finished the painting in high gloss varnish which lent it a luminous overtone. It is framed in antique gold frame and hangs in a room that gets the afternoon sun - resulting in an attractive glow. It always pleases me to look at this painting because I remember how happily I worked on it.

As evident from my previous paintings, I like to use bright, bold colors. From time to time I would toy with the idea of making something muted using shades of black, grey or brown - like a charcoal drawing or an ancient sepia tinted photo. But I never got around to it until I came across a photo (painting?) in a science journal (I don't remember which one). There was a picture of a man and a boy in identical, old fashioned top hats and long coats standing by what looked like a canal. The entire picture was in varying shades of brown. I found in it the perfect template for my two toned ambition. Again, I made a rough sketch of the figures and started the painting with much anticipation. But much to my surprise and dismay, even though I felt I was doing a pretty decent rendition of the original, nothing looked right. The hatted and coated man and boy, who looked quaint in the photo, looked comical on my canvas. While the original was "dark and moody," mine looked "dark and muddy".  Rather than abandon it, I decided to change a few things while giving up the hope of a strictly two toned painting. I modernized the man's clothing and gave him an umbrella, suggesting rain. The little boy was changed to a little girl in a bright yellow slicker to contrast with the dark clad man. I drew a lamp post on the side to introduce some more yellow and that allowed me to add it also to the sky. And lo and behold, the painting gained a focus and acquired a mood .. and still retained the look of an old photograph!

Richa Arora - A Delhi Artist

It is always interesting when practitioners and students of science cross over to the world of literature and the arts.  Is their artistic endeavor superior to more traditionally trained artists? I do not know. I can only speak for myself. The scientific perspective in art and literature invariably impresses me. The clear eyed precision scientist-artists bring to their craft confers a particularly satisfying uncluttered quality to their work.   

On my recent visit to New Delhi, I visited one of the city's well known art galleries. Among the gallery's many works, I came across an exhibition of paintings by young Richa Arora. Her work is bold, interesting, clean and impressively confident. I had the pleasure of meeting Richa who was present at her show. She graciously gave me the permission to post some of her pictures on my blog. I hope the readers will enjoy her paintings as much as I did. And perhaps leave some comments for her.

A few words about Richa Arora:  Richa graduated from Delhi University in 1999 with a major in physics. Changing trajectory, she decided to pursue a career in art and has trained with Rameshwar Broota at Triveni Kala Sangam since 2002. She has participated in several group exhibitions in major art galleries of Delhi. Her solo exhibition is currently on at Triveni Kala Sangam. After graduation, Richa vacillated between a career as a pilot or an artist. In the end she chose flight of fancy over flying and we are glad for that.

Richa has this to say of her own work:

"For me art is an unending journey into new possibilities. Sometimes celebrating life's spectacles, sometimes questioning its various frames of meanings. I as an artist am always in search of new frames of mind....  What I paint does represent the natural world, but does so by capturing something of its immutable, intrinsic qualities rather than by imitating its external appearance. My work depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced ways, keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject."

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Note: This post appeared on Accidental Blogger in March 2006 soon after I met Richa.  I thought it opportune to introduce the readers of this blog to her works while the after-glow of the recent lively debate here on what constitutes good art is still fresh in our minds. Richa's work is abstract but she is no "dripper." As is evident from my description, I find Richa's meticulously executed art quite compelling - so much so that I acquired one of the paintings shown below for my personal enjoyment.

An interesting aside on artistic intent and viewer perception. (Thankfully there was no meddling, officious art critic to explain things). What I saw as the subject of the painting I purchased is not quite what Richa had in mind, I found out later. Although we were not that far apart in our interpretations - my more playful and prosaic version was different from Richa's romantic one. But that didn't spoil the fun for me - I continue to see what I saw before and it still makes sense.

Also, let me note that Richa Arora is no relation of Namit Arora, the sage administrator and editor of Shunya's Notes. So please feel free to comment on Richa's work without the constraints of politeness.

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All the paintings are all oil and acrylic on canvas.  From left to right (please click on images for an enlarged version):

Integration, Ascent, Cross Beam I, Crystallization I, Cross Beam II, Contours of Blue, Substratum, Crystallization II & Towards the Beyond

 

Jack the Dripper

Does art lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, or should it have minimal standards? Who decides what is art and what is only a visually appealing painting, photograph, or sculpture? What makes a sketch end up on a museum wall and another behind a refrigerator magnet?

Many years ago, during a visit to the SF MOMA, it struck me powerfully that the idea of art in the US had gone seriously amok -- we have become, to quote Milosz, "indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself." The world, I felt sure, will one day wake up and realize that much of abstract modern art -- in particular the abstract expressionism of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Kandinsky, etc. -- has been the greatest sham in the history of art. I stand with the British art critic Craig Brown who too is "astonished that decorative 'wallpaper', essentially brainless, could gain such a position in art history alongside Giotto, Titian, and Velazquez."

I am certainly not for a frozen aristocracy of art. The world evolves, so too must art. New forms, mediums, techniques are not only inevitable but desirable. Yet, art to me is not about medium or technique. Art lies in the stories it tells, in the insight it reveals into the heart of the human material. Great art reflects the very depth of our being and experience. At the least, art is a mirror held up to us, to evoke a thirst, disquiet, longing, etc. -- something we can try and articulate in words. What we each see in that mirror varies of course and this is to be welcomed. Subjective appreciation flows out of our diverse experiences of life.

But what is fundamentally different about abstract expressionism is its disjunction from the "mirror test". Pollock, using his "drip technique" -- poking a hole in a tin of paint to get a drip line -- danced around the canvas, dripping paint on it using what has been called "action painting", stopping only when he would consider it finished. How did he know the painting was finished? His response: the same way he knows he has finished making love.

According to one supportive art critic, Pollock represents a "progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content". Kudos to Pollock for liberating the canvas from the tyranny of social and moral content. Imagine that! How dare a painting make demands on us, push us into self-awareness or confusion! Isn't it enough to be an eye candy? Poof! The expectation of human interest -- as in a mirror held up -- is gone. It's fine to do that, but why is this still called great art and collected by our best museums? With such scant invocation of intelligence, what distinguishes the painting from pretty wallpaper?

This is partly a sign of the times. Like our political leaders, we get the art we deserve. Art got hitched to the market decades ago. Mass culture, with its fads, trends, and movements, engages and stupefies ever larger audiences. "New money" consumers seeking the gloss of sophistication have to be smartened up and guided to the right acquisitions. Enter the academy and its scholars, who identify, analyze, and document art trends, classify and judge art and artists. Innovation and radical breaks become ends in themselves and are justified in the academy's jargon. Staid and serious practitioners are rarely interesting; tortured, flamboyant, alcoholic artists make better copy, playing into the stereotype of creativity and genius. Better still if the results do not even challenge or offend, or do so sensationally -- the audience then is the largest, and they don't feel inferior about their own interpretations, because none is now privileged over any other! With sage gravity, the works are deemed "abstract", instead of what they at best are -- the most creative decorative smudges in the world.

As Marla Olmstead showed a few years ago, even a four-year-old can paint like Pollock and command huge sums. Other children don't paint like Marla. Perhaps what she shares with Pollock is a freakish instinct to combine color, shapes, and lines on canvas, all detached from attempts to "mirror" human experience. We can marvel at this instinct but why call the output great art, stuff it in our best museums, and insult the intelligence of their visitors? The malaise in the American art academy is reflected rather well by critic Mia Fineman who defends abstract expressionists in this Slate article:

In the 1950s, artists like de Kooning and Pollock proposed a radically new way of thinking about painting: as the direct trace of the artist's physical engagement with the materials. "... the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act -- rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."

[The abstract expressionists] were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock's drips or de Kooning's arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.

... skeptics profoundly miss the point of the art they're trying to debunk. Yes, anyone can pick up a brush and slather paint on canvas in a drippy style that evokes Jackson Pollock. But it took an artist like Pollock to step back from his own work, which at the time looked unlike anything that had come before, and say, with bold conviction: "This is it. This is what modern painting looks like." In other words, Pollock taught us how to see art in a new way.

Is that all we expect from our best artists? The bold conviction to drip paint and call the result modern painting? To see art in a new way, without the new way being significant? How fatuous, to claim that "a painting can represent nothing more than the process of its creation"! I have no problem at all with painters who produce such works. But art critics -- both lay and professional -- ought to demand a lot more from art. Subjectivity of appreciation isn't an excuse to not strive for our very own aristocracy of art.