Washington Journal I: Handjob

Albrecht Durer loved hands. There is the famous drawing of the hands praying which is blown up as a promotional poster at the entrance to the extensive show Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery. Durer was, like Rembrandt, a great self-portraitist. The show parenthetically features a precocious self-portrait Durer did of himself when he was thirteen which contains the inscription, “I drew this after myself in front of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was a child.” And the exhibit also features the famed drawings of his left hand, with the wooing gesture, the obscene gesture (he gives his viewer the finger) and a pointing gesture. When he paints Lucretia stabbing herself Durer emphasizes the hand that does the dirty work. He painted the hands of his patron the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and he painted an elderly man’s aged veinous hand. Hands obviously had great meaning for Durer who as the curators point out was the “German equivalent of Leonardo in Italy.” But why do we admire Durer? His purported greatness is a part of the received wisdom of the ages and seeing the magnificent exhibition on display in Washington is a unique opportunity to think about his work. The series of engravings "Melencolia I,” (1514), “Knight, Death and the Devil” (1513) and “Saint Jerome in His Study” might be said to have derived from the Durer’s Bergman period such is the depth of their raw emotional power. The famed “The Great Piece of Turf” (1503) and "Wing of a Blue Roller” (1512) both demonstrate Durer's talent in the service of natural themes. “The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I” (1518) reveals the artist in both watercolor and technicolor. “The Visor for a Helmet” of 1519 with its almost surrealist imagery is a dreamscape. The fact that he was the son of a goldsmith is usually offered as an explanation for the delicate and detailed craftmanships which characterizes his style. But technique alone cannot account for the power of Durer’s work.

The Legend of Apsara Mera

Every traditional martial art deploys katas which are combat against an imaginary opponent. Katas distill fighting style in such a way that aggression is transformed into beauty, which takes the form of choreography. And katas also comprise a narrative usually concerning a series of struggles or obstacles that are overcome. In this sense many katas resemble ballets and operas. Imagine Wagner's Ring cycle as simply a very complex kata with an orchestral accompaniment! The Royal Ballet of Cambodia’s  “The Legend of Apsara Mera,” which was recently performed at BAM reflects both the Eastern tradition of the kata, turning martial arts technique into dance movement while also displaying the leitmotifs of the fertility cycle, the relation between god and man, the search for immortality and the mythical origins of a civilization that are characteristic themes of Western opera and classics of enthno-anthropology like Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Indeed the final section of the opera which concerns the wooing of the goddess Apsara Mera by Prince Kambu presents the myth of the founding of the kingdom of Cambodia. For a country that has had its share of revolutions, the costume design of the ballet, with its shimmering gold mail, which seems to defy gravity, revolutionizes one’s view of antiquity. The current production was choreographed by Her Royal Highness Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, the daughter of the late King Norodom Sihanouk. One wonders if his mythic and embattled reign will someday be represented in the repertoire of the company.

Screaming Papal Address: Salutationes veris

Innocent X (Velazquez)

Hope springs eternal and with the onset of spring and summer there’s the perennial belief that staring out at the vastness of the ocean will bring some kind of insight, inner peace or simply relief. Such thoughts should immediately be banished from the mind. No one has ever profited from walking along the silky sands of some windswept beach. Such experiences produce little more than a desire to smoke pot. You find the intelligentsia in left bank cafes but you find another demographic on these beaches and that is THE IMPENETRABILIA. These are the folks who respond “I can’t complain” when you ask them how they are. They are either so emotionally traumatized or self-satisfied that they offer no access to their inner lives and are condemned to spend their remaining days on earth lying on beach blankets with their Styrofoam coolers, employing the ever diminishing list of superlatives that are used to describe cresting of waves or cloudless skies. Spring is also the time of year when people start to eat in the growingly ubiquitous outdoor cafes. Beauty is again the Scylla and Charybdis on which these unwary travelers will run aground. Sitting in some expensive outdoor restaurant and fecklessly hoping that lusty thoughts will be reciprocated is a cardinal sin. Such behavior is cause for immediate excommunication.

With Liberty and Justice For All

The quotation of the day in Wednesday’s Times was taken from President Obama. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.” In the piece from which the quote was taken “Amid Hunger Strike, Obama Renews Push to Close Cuba Prison," (NYT, 4/30/13), the president is also quoted as saying “The notion that we’re going to keep 100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity…All of us should reflect on why exactly we are doing this? Why are we doing this?” There are a lot of talk about exceptions. Exercising the public safety exception was debated in terms of Mirandizing the surviving Tsarnaev brother in the Boston marathon bombing. But it’s precisely at times like these in which Constitutional guarantees, due process and adherence to the Geneva Conventions are truly tested. It’s nice to discuss the Bill of Rights in a law school classroom, but the power of the document is vindicated when it's exercised with respect to those for whom we would like exceptions to be made—those we fear and hate. Dismantling Guantanamo is undoubtedly a nightmare, but any country that is capable of landing on Mars, can certainly work out the logistics of the human rights debacle posed by the detainees.

The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?