Sean Costello

All Made Up

As a teenager, I had acne. Not the acute kind that could be cured by Acutaine, but the milder variety that didn’t go away even with copious use of Stridex pads and Phisohex. My spotty face eroded my self-esteem and made it hard for me to look people in the eye. But something positive did come out of those painful, pimple-ridden years: I discovered makeup and my life became richer for it.

When you start to ponder it, you realize that makeup is a profound product. It plays a special and intimate role in the drive for self-improvement. Clothes cover and festoon a large expanse of the body, but makeup interacts with that smaller, more expressive part: the face. It is a unique prosthetic, having practically no volume and no density, no beginning or end with respect to what it assists. It melts into the flesh, it intermingles with the self.

Women’s application of makeup is an update of the Narcissus myth. It cannot be applied; or at least not well; without looking in a mirror. The self-reflexive gaze required has elements of the lover’s gaze: Eyes and lips are focal points and demand the most attention and care. Thus, applying makeup is a ritual of self-love, a kind of worship at the shrine of the self, though it can also reflect insecurity and even self-loathing. At its best, it is an exercise in self-critique, and, if you’ll permit me to be grandiose, a path to self-knowledge.

I suspect that people who get upset about makeup are displacing anger about something else. “I have heard of your paintings, well enough,” Hamlet rants at Ophelia. “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” We know that Hamlet was really angry at his mother for marrying his uncle, but he took it out on poor Ophelia, who probably wore little more than some blush and a little lip gloss. Or maybe the anger Hamlet expresses is really aimed beyond the parameters of the play at another queen, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth, who didn’t stint with the foundation: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.”

If the makeup of the Virgin Queen was abundant but one-note (lots and lots of pancake), that of another, decidedly not virgin queen, Cleopatra, was both copious and varied. I imagine her makeup area resembling the ground floor of Bloomingdale’s. Among her more original innovations were green malachite and goose grease for her eyes, crushed carmine beetles mixed with ant eggs for her lips, and liquid gold for her nipples. The cosmetic industry has certainly dropped the ball on this one; where is “nipple gold from Chanel?"

My favorite time and place for makeup was the court of Louis XIV. The Sun King loved powder, not just on faces but on hair and wigs, and also launched the most ingenious of all cosmetic accessories: the beauty mark or “patch.” This was a little piece of velvet or silk pasted onto the face for decorative effect. As the patch grew in popularity over the course of the 17th century, it acquired specialized connotations. Each patch had a name, according to where it was placed on the face: In the middle of the cheek was agallant, on the nose, an impudent, near the lips, a coquette. Each also relayed a message about its wearer’s availability for amorous dalliance: Whether one was a flirt, a prude, a libertine, etc. Think of how simple the singles scene would be today if a beauty mark on a girl’s nose meant she was open for a one-night stand, and one on her cheek, that she wanted a ten-bridesmaid wedding. There were also patches, called recleuses, that had the more mundane function of covering pimples. Had I only had access to those when I was 16, my adolescence would have been less blighted.

by Paula Mrantz Cohen, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image: Shirin Neshat via:

The Elements of Style

Style

 

Not Style

via: here and here

Lovers Bridge In Paris

In the romantic capital of the world, lovers fasten padlocks to the railings of the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. The couple then toss the keys into the Seine river below, symbolizing their eternal love.

via:
[ed. Repost: March 23, 2011]

Cheap Words

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. & T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.). Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless.com—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon Octopus.com.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where rapid growth, not profitability, is the measure of success. Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about. (...)

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else. For Bezos to have seen a bookstore as a means to world domination at the beginning of the Internet age, when there was already a crisis of confidence in the publishing world, in a country not known for its book-crazy public, was a stroke of business genius. (...)

Bezos said that Amazon intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt cheap on the Internet. (Amazon says that its original business plan “contemplated only books.”)

Afterward, Doeren told his partner at Rainy Day Books, Vivien Jennings, “I just met the world’s biggest snake-oil salesman. It’s going to be really bad for books.”

Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. Two decades later, Amazon sells a bewildering array of products: lawnmowers, iPods, art work, toys, diapers, dildos, shoes, bike racks, gun safes, 3-D printers. Amazon’s code of corporate secrecy is extreme—it won’t confirm how many Seattle employees it has, or how many Kindle e-readers have been sold—so it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.

Origins, though, leave lasting marks, and Amazon remains intimately tangled up in books. Few notice if Amazon prices an electronics store out of business (except its staff); but, in the influential, self-conscious world of people who care about reading, Amazon’s unparalleled power generates endless discussion, along with paranoia, resentment, confusion, and yearning. For its part, Amazon continues to expend considerable effort both to dominate this small, fragile market and to win the hearts and minds of readers. To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world—and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales. But then it started asking a lot of personal questions, and it created dependency and harshly exploited its leverage; eventually, the book world realized that Amazon had its house keys and its bank-account number, and wondered if that had been the intention all along.

Recently, Amazon even started creating its own “content”—publishing books. The results have been decidedly mixed. A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history. Even in the iPhone age, books remain central to American intellectual life, and perhaps to democracy. And so the big question is not just whether Amazon is bad for the book industry; it’s whether Amazon is bad for books.

by George Packer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ian Wright

via:

Anatomy of the Deep State

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. (...)

As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.

How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

by Mike Lofgren, Moyers and Co. |  Read more:

Image: AP

Los Amigos Invisibles

Have some fun.

[ed. Repost: April 22, 2011]

Theophilus London

[ed. Repost: April 30, 2011]

via:

Gorillaz

[ed. A friend of mine hadn't heard of the Gorillaz so here's a small sample. The video of their complete performance at Manchester is here. If you don't have this DVD, definitely get it, one of the best concert videos I've ever seen.]

via:

Bruce Davidson, Subway, 1980.
via:

Why is Academic Writing so Academic?

A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.

Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.

Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called “Professors, We Need You!” The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”; as a result, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”

The response from the professoriate was swift, severe, accurate, and thoughtful. (...)

As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. But I have a lot of sympathy for Kristof, too. I think his heart’s in the right place. (His column ended on a wistful note: “I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career.”) My own theory is that he got the situation backward. The problem with academia isn’t that professors are, as Kristof wrote, “marginalizing themselves.” It’s that the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Martine Franck/Magnum

The Highs and Lows of High and Low

In his slim instructional volume On Directing Film, David Mamet writes “there are two subdivisions of the thespian’s art: one is called Acting, and the other is called Great Acting.” The latter, he argues, calls attention to itself in a way that’s more likely to be noticed and praised, while the former, though superior, is frequently all but invisible. Arguably, both approaches have their merits, depending upon the context, but it’s certainly true that some of the finest screen performances wind up being undervalued.

By the same token, there’s Directing and there’s Great Directing. The present age is extremely enamored of Great Directing, which tends to involve camera movements so ostentatious that even viewers without much technical knowledge can register their difficulty. Throw a complicated six-minute tracking shot into an episode of True Detective, and watch Twitter light up the instant it airs. That sort of tour de force can be genuinely impressive—Orson Welles didn’t exactly botch the opening shot of Touch Of Evil—but it makes it hard for people to notice work that’s equally sophisticated, but less showy.

High And Low rarely gets mentioned when cinephiles talk about the medium’s most masterful formal achievements. Even among Akira Kurosawa’s films, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood, and Ran are more likely to be cited for purely visual mastery, if only because they’re all more superficially dynamic. But few movies have ever been as subtly, methodically composed as High And Low, in which every shot reflects, to some degree, the dichotomy presented by its title. The film’s narrative is neatly bifurcated between high and low, both literally (meaning geographically) and figuratively. Kurosawa’s camera follows suit, employing wholly different modes in its first and second halves. It’s almost hard to believe that certain sequences were directed by the same man, much less that they belong to the same picture.

Most of High And Low’s first half is confined to a single room in the hilltop mansion of shoe-company exec Kingo Gondo—a room, Chief Detective Tokura points out, that can easily be seen with a telescope from the slums below. There are often as many as 10 characters occupying this room at once: Gondo; his wife and son; the chauffeur whose son was actually kidnapped; Gondo’s secretary; Detective Tokura; and three or four of his men. The director’s job is to ensure this crowded set doesn’t devolve into random chaos, and to block the action cleanly and neatly. Kurosawa goes much further, continually reframing his actors with small, decisive camera movements that don’t call attention to themselves, yet always clarify visually what’s most important at any given moment. At the same time, he isn’t afraid to just cut to a new angle when that’s the most effective choice—no shot is extended for its own sake, or intended merely to impress. Many of these tiny shifts in perspective are only perceptible to viewers who pay close attention, though their impact can readily be felt, even when they don’t register consciously.

Here’s an example: Kurosawa begins this shot with a panoramic view of the entire company, placing Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, wearing the dark suit) at the frame’s center, evenly flanked by the room’s other occupants. Everybody is clearly visible, but by far the least prominent person in the shot is the chauffeur, most of whose body is obstructed, significantly, by Gondo (Toshirô Mifune, seated at left). At this point in the film, the kidnapper hasn’t yet made his demands, so nobody knows that the chauffeur’s son’s life may depend on Gondo’s willingness to pay an enormous ransom. Nonetheless, Kurosawa is already foreshadowing that moral conflict visually, and at the end of the previous shot, Mifune and the two actors playing the technicians (to his right) actually get into place to create this composition, even though the camera is on the opposite side of the room.

by Mike D'Angelo, Dissolve |  Read more:

Image: High and Low

Olga Chagaoutdinova, Plants and fridge, 2007
via:

via:

Wet

Buddhist Economics

Buddhist economics is a spiritual approach to economics. It examines the psychology of the human mind and the anxiety, aspirations, and emotions that direct economic activity. A Buddhist understanding of economics aims to clear the confusion about what is harmful and beneficial in the range of human activities involving production and consumption, and ultimately tries to make human beings ethically mature. It tries to find a middle way between a purely mundane society and an immobile conventional society.

It says that truly rational decisions can only be made when we understand what creates irrationality. When people understand what constitutes desire, they realize that all the wealth in the world cannot satisfy it. When people understand the universality of fear, they become more compassionate to all beings. Thus, this spiritual approach to Economics doesn't rely on theories and models but on the essential forces of acumen, empathy, and restraint.

The Buddhist point of view ascribes to work a trinal function: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his aptitude; to enable him to overcome his self-aggrandizement by engaging with other people in common tasks; and to bring forward the goods and services needed for a better existence.

From the perspective of a Buddhist, Economics and other streams of knowledge cannot be separated. Economics is a single component of a combined effort to fix the problems of humanity and Buddhist Economics works with it to reach a common goal of societal, individual, and environmental sufficiency.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: via:

Milestone

Good morning, Duck Soup readers. I'd like to share a small milestone with you. Today we surpassed 250,000 page views after nearly three years of being in existence. A quarter-of-a-million page views! I know, probably about what the Huffington Post or The Atlantic gets in 10 minutes, but still, a very gratifyng and humbling metric for this little corner of the internet.

Clive Thompson, in his recent book Smarter Than You Think talks about the 'audience effect' and why blogging can be so satisfying. He makes the observation that:

"the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million."

I'd agree with that completely. The first time this blog got a visit I was stunned. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and all of a sudden Duck Soup had an audience! But delight quickly turned to horror as the realization sank in that, if people were going to return, there had to be something worth returning for. That responsibility is really the engine that's kept this thing going... that and just the pure pleasure of sharing (really interesting things!). Fortunately, the horror stage didn't last long, and I now consider Duck Soup a companion, an outlet, a small creative diversion that I hope adds something to someone's life, but beyond that don't have any pretentions about its relevance to anyone but myself. Still. This milestone makes me smile a little.

More recently, Roger Angell compared blogging to "a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window." I'd agree with that, too. Who cares where it goes? It's just the fun of making it and sending it sailing that counts.

Thank you all.

markk
Image via: