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Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

Feliz Cumpleaños, Ana

Rare as it may seem, this is a "call out" to my dear cousin from Lima, a painter of great talent, and more important, a human being of great sensibility and caring: Feliz Cumpleaños, Ana. . .
por Gimena, 2012

Vallejo Nocturno 1974- Ana & Javier

At La Mar in Lima, Miraflores

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- Sundat afternoon snacking

On Flann O'Brien

From TLS:

If the O’Brien character has an unusual relationship with death, birth too can be a complex affair, as in the case of John Furriskey from At Swim-Two-Birds, “born at the age of twenty-five” and equipped with a memory “but without a personal experience to account for it”. Author of one of At Swim-Two-Birds’ several novels-within-a-novel, Furriskey enjoys the solitude of the artist and a fraught relationship with his creations. Tension between the individual and the crowd is a constant feature of O’Brien’s work, as in his monstrous creation The Plain People of Ireland, who regularly gatecrash his newspaper columns with their vociferous and philistine blather. The art of being alone in the crowd is one O’Brien acquired in childhood: despite the presence in Avoca Terrace, Blackrock, of twelve children, the household has been described as a place of “profound silence”. Irish was the language of the home, a fact adduced by many critics to account for the sense that O’Brien handles English as a second, or even (inverting the usual Irish– English dichotomy) a dead language. O’Brien was a heavy but solitary drinker in later life, in but not of the crowd, and alcohol as social lubricant plays a large part in his work, from the stout-swilling students of At Swim-Two-Birds to James Joyce’s unexpected second career as a barman in Skerries in The Dalkey Archive.

Many of his brilliant juvenilia bear the stamp of the pub wit, such as Blather, a one-man orchestra of a student-paper thundering in a telephone box, with its mock-solemn headlines (“Whither Bettystown? Progress or Decay? Our Stern Attitude”), quipping bouts de rimes (“The poetry they write in Ranelagh / Gets banelagh and banelagh”) and ubiquitous photographs of Eamon de Valera. From here O’Brien graduated to the letters page of the Irish Times, which he used as a playpen for absurdist pranks, publishing long-winded and contradictory letters under a myriad of assumed names, until the far-sighted editor, R. M. Smyllie, invited him to contribute a column, “Cruiskeen Lawn”. This was in 1940, also the year of the traumatic rejection of The Third Policeman, the novel thereafter languishing in a drawer until the author’s death. Within a year of his winning James Joyce’s praise for At Swim-Two-Birds (“That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirit”), it seemed O’Brien’s career was over and his best work behind him; so at least runs the standard account. The photograph (above) of O’Brien standing by a road sign marked “Dublin diversion” hints strongly at the alternative fate that now beckoned. In a short story of 1954, “Two Into One”, one taxidermist murders another and dresses himself in his victim’s skin before ending up arrested for his own disappearance and murder; by now the mask of Myles the Dublin diversion had fused over the face not just of Brian O’Nolan, but of Flann O’Brien too, before the novelist’s unexpected re-emergence in the 1960s.

His centenary is as good a time as any to reassess the justice of this verdict, and the collection of essays, “Is It About a Bicycle?”: Flann O’Brien in the twenty-first century, edited by Jennika Baines (Four Courts Press), makes an honourable attempt to blast the author free of over-familiar mythology. In the early days of Irish Studies, the assumption was easily made that one became a writer of world importance by leaving behind specifically Irish concerns – a tendency Declan Kiberd has diagnosed in Joyce’s first biographer, Richard Ellmann. Critics have not been wanting to lead O’Brien down the same path, but something intractable in his work will always hold out against these designs. For a start, critics of the Irish Free State hardly come more steeped in the Gaelic culture to which official ideology paid such elaborate lip service. When the Free State did produce Irish-language authors of major achievement (as the parallel career of Máirtín Ó Cadhain also reminds us), it rarely knew what to do with them. O’Brien’s irritation at the chasm between Gaelic aspiration and reality shaped many early “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns, as when he marks St Patrick’s Day with a “Speak English Week” campaign rather than join in the witless Irish-language celebrations of other papers.

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Romney's Tax Adventure

From ThinkProgress:

Carlinhos Brown

Deseopolis

Deseopolis Tumbler

In Barranco

Vallejo Nocturno 2012-sundowner peace

Skin Game Beneath

Vallejo nocturno 2012- at the market

Bill Orcutt

The lovely Mamani Keita

What they got wrong

From Stephen M. Walt on the wrongs of the neocons:

. . .the neoconservative hypocrisy about democracy was exposed in 2006, when the United States refused to accept Hamas' victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. You don't have to like Hamas or its charter to concede that they won the election fair and square, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from ignoring the outcome completely. In fact, Abrams subsequently tried to foment a Fatah coup against Hamas in Gaza, only to have his putative allies routed and discredited. Another neocon blunder, in short. And isn't it a bit odd that this deeply committed apostle of democracy has no problem with Israel continuing to violate the human rights of the millions of Palestinians it controls via its illegal occupation of the West Bank and its continued restrictions on movement in Gaza? Why isn't he pressing Israel to either give these people the right to vote, or to let them have a viable state of their own so that they can vote there? Some neoconservatives (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz) have been sympathetic to such aspirations, but as far as I know Abrams is not one of them.

Finally, let's not lose sight of all the other things that neoconservatives got wrong. They were wrong about Saddam's WMD. They were wrong about his alleged links to Al Qaeda. They were wrong that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself. They were wrong that it would be easy to create democracy there once Saddam was gone. And given America's toxic image in much of the Arab world, they were wrong to believe that fostering democracy in the Arab world would create legitimate and pro-American regimes.

Weighed in the balance, therefore, the neocons got far more wrong than right, and it would be refreshing if they'd just man up and admit it.

Likud line of influence

From Maggie Haberman at Politico:

I noted after Newt Gingrich's lopsided South Carolina victory that the big question was whether Sheldon Adelson would play deus ex machina for his longtime friend, and now comes the answer — another $5 million from the casino magnate to the super PAC supporting the former House speaker, a source confirmed to POLITICO.

That brings the total (technically, per Jon Ralston, who broke the news, this is from Adelson's wife, but still) that Adelson has given to the super PAC to $10 million. Adelson and his aides adamantly denied a POLITICO report in December that he had discussed directing as much as $20 million to outside groups backing Gingrich.

An Adelson spokesman didn't respond to an email for comment.

But Adelson has now become the lifeblood of Gingrich's campaign in many ways, even if it's not through direct giving. Without the super PAC's ability to compete in the Florida air wars, Gingrich would likely have less of a chance in the Sunshine State. It's still Romney's to lose, but the extra $5 million closes the gap.

It's also notable since Adelson reportedly wasn't aware that the last installment of his money would be used on ads that laced into Romney's business, Bain Capital.

But per the AP's Beth Fouhy, an Adelson associate "said Miriam Adelson had asked the group to use her money on ads that support Gingrich and not on attack ads."

Lineas de Lima

Vallejo nocturno 2012- heart lines

The Republican plan for 11 million Palestinians is shorter. It is just, “Die quickly.”

From Juan Cole's blog:

The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state.

(The first thing the National Socialists in Germany did to the Jews was to strip them of citizenship, understanding that a stateless people is “flotsam” that no one wants and which lacks any legal standing).

Israel is in a race with time. The 11 million Palestinians are not going to go away, and those in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon have gained powerful new friends because of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Israel can only survive in some recognizable form if it achieves peace with the Palestinian people and with their supporters in the Muslim world, which means making arrangements for Palestinians to have citizenship in a state. Israel caught a break during its first 60 years because its Arab neighbors were largely peasant societies with low literacy, few modern organizational skills, and a significant technology gap.

That advantage is evaporating as Middle Easterners become more and more sophisticated. In the 2006 Lebanon War, Hizbullah and its backers (Iran and Syria) cracked Israeli communications encryption and so knew everything the Israeli army planned to do as soon as the orders were radioed. Hizbullah used micro-war techniques, including small rockets, the emplacements of which could not be easily found and destroyed, to force 1/4 of Israelis from their homes. Toward the end of the war Hizbullah was threatening to hit toxic gas storage areas in Haifa and it wasn’t clear that the Dimona nuclear facility was safe. Tiny Hizbullah, with only about 5,000 fighters, drawn from a religious group with only about 1.5 million members in Lebanon, is a harbinger of things to come. Arabs and Muslims are no longer push-overs, and will become less so over time.

It is unrealistic to think that little Israel, with about 7.5 million people (20% of them Palestinian-Israelis), can forever dominate militarily some 400 million Muslims in its neighborhood–Muslims who overwhelmingly side with the Palestinians.

The alternative is to make peace, and peace requires a settlement of the issue of Palestinian statelessness and a drawing of final boundaries in Israel’s land disputes with neighbors. (The firmest boundary is already that with Egypt, precisely because Egypt is the most militarily powerful of the neighbors).

Palestine was recognized as a Class A mandate after WW I by the League of Nations, and, like Syria and Iraq, was scheduled for statehood. League of Nations members France and Italy consistently pushed back against Lord Balfour’s attempts to interpret the Mandate as permitting the expropriation of the Palestinian majority. As late as the British White Paper of the late 1930s, the British envisaged a Palestinian state in ten years. Palestinian statehood was forestalled when the Jewish settlers (brought into Palestine by the British colonial authorities) engaged in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1947-1948 that left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians homeless and stateless.

As Hannah Arendt and SCOTUS chief Justice Earl Warren recognized, citizenship is the right to have rights. Without citizenship in a state, Palestinians never really own property or have any other civil or human rights, since if someone steals from them they have no state to back their claims. In almost all legal proceedings, they lack standing. Palestinians once given Jordanian citizenship have sometimes recently had it withdrawn. Palestinians in Lebanon cannot own property, vote, in most cases cannot get work permits or business licenses, and mostly are not permitted by other states to travel to them, since Palestinians don’t have a home country or proper passports and so are seen as an illegal immigration risk. Far from being “Arabs,” many Lebanese Christians reject that identity and they are not going to give citizenship to Sunni Arabs expelled from Mandate Palestine by the Israelis, since that would weaken the Christians’ own position in Lebanese politics. The Israeli supreme court even just declared that Palestinians married to Israeli citizens can never achieve Israeli citizenship. The stigma of being a stateless Palestinian can never be removed, and Palestinian families have no more right to stay together in Israel than the families of black slaves in the Old South (where Newt Gingrich still thinks he lives) had a right to stay together.

Now go to Cole's Blog to see how he looks at the Republican's uninformed positions

Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

From artcritical:

In contrast, the larger paintings might be self-portraits or perhaps renditions of the interior life of fictitious female protagonists. As the shape of a sole figure dominates the plane our perception shifts towards the individual. Anonymous and yet with a clear sense of presence, they seem to embody Hesse’s attempt to turn the inward outward and to give shape to something as ethereal and abstract as human emotions. It is this inherent notion of humanity that makes Hesse’s work, no matter how abstract, deeply personal. Hesse was not simply a minimalist; she was a distiller, able to filter out anything unnecessary that could distract from the essence of form, movement and spatial relatonship. In her early and later works alike, there is nothing too much or too loud. Her abiding ambition to achieve self-contained harmony can be traced to the spectres. Here, she is beginning to articulate the concerns that would characterize gestures to come.

Paul Behnke

roseangle 2011

Artist's Statement

I place a high value on spontaneity, the quick mark. However, my initial slapdash approach is punctuated by long spells of looking and deciding how to move ahead. The final work employs a unique visual language to communicate my reality to the viewer.

Crane

Vallejo nocturno 2012-another balancing act in Lima

Nuclear Capabilities

From Common Dreams:

Has Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb? That would seem to be the central question in the current bellicose debate over whether the world should simply cripple Iran’s economy and inflict severe pain on its civilian population or launch a preemptive war to destroy its nuclear capability while possibly achieving “regime change.”

And if you’ve been reading the New York Times or following the rest of the Fawning Corporate Media, you’d likely assume that everyone who matters agrees that the answer to the question is yes, although the FCM adds the caveat that Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The line is included with an almost perceptible wink and an “oh, yeah.”

However, a consensus seems to be emerging among the intelligence and military agencies of the United States – and Israel – that Iran has NOT made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defense establishments of the two countries – U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

You might think that you would have heard more about that, wouldn’t you? U.S. and Israel agree that Iran is NOT building a nuclear bomb. However, this joint assessment that Iran has NOT decided to build a nuclear bomb apparently represented too big a change in the accepted narrative for the Times and the rest of the FCM to process.

Yet, on Jan. 18, the day before U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived for talks in Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Barak gave an interview to Israeli Army radio in which he addressed with striking candor how he assesses Iran’s nuclear program. It was not the normal pabulum.

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: … confusion stems from the fact that people ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible.  Apparently that is not the case. …

Question: How long will it take from the moment Iran decides to turn it into effective weapons until it has nuclear warheads?

Barak: I don’t know; one has to estimate. … Some say a year, others say 18 months. It doesn’t really matter. To do that, Iran would have to announce it is leaving the [UN International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection regime and stop responding to IAEA’s criticism, etc.

Why haven’t they [the Iranians] done that? Because they realize that … when it became clear to everyone that Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, this would constitute definite proof that time is actually running out. This could generate either harsher sanctions or other action against them. They do not want that.

Question: Has the United States asked or demanded that the government inform the Americans in advance, should it decide on military action?

Barak: I don’t want to get into that. We have not made a decision to opt for that, we have not decided on a decision-making date. The whole thing is very far off. …

Question: You said the whole thing is “very far off.” Do you mean weeks, months, years?

Barak: I wouldn’t want to provide any estimates. It’s certainly not urgent. I don’t want to relate to it as though tomorrow it will happen

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Top Trends in Peruvian Foods

After a flurry of eating in Lima's great restaurants over the last couple of weeks, here's an article by Nicholas Gill from his instructive blog, New World Review:

Peruvian food is becoming a global phenomenon. The culinary scene in Lima and the rest of Peru keeps improving. Food festivals, such as Mistura, are expanding. Young chefs who have trained in top kitchens in North America and Europe are returning home to open restaurants. In the same regard in North America and Europe Peruvian chefs are being called upon to a greater degree to launch new restaurants. Gastón Acurio is not holding back on his expansion plans. Culinary ideas are being refined from every angle. Here’s what to expect from Peruvian food and restaurants in 2012:

1.) Amaz Opens: Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, in my opinion the best chef in Peru right now (he’s the chef of Malabar in Lima and has also had a hand in La Pescaderia and the menu aboard the MV Aqua riverboat in the Amazon) is opening this Amazonian bar and restaurant in Miraflores. Expect his already adventurous cocktails and food to be the most talked about restaurant in Peru this year. Av La Paz 1079 (entre Av La Paz y 28 de Julio,) Miraflores.

2.) Organic Produce and Sustainability Will Be Emphasized To a Greater Degree: Peru’s agricultural industry is booming, partly in thanks to the rapid growth in exports of organic produce. Farmers are opting to grow organically as they are seeing the long term benefits, though chefs are pushing hard too. At Nanka, Australian chef, Jason Nanka, and his Peruvian wife Lorena use mostly locally sourced organic produce and even have a small kitchen garden, in which grow many of their own herbs. Central has a rooftop garden as well. In Callao and now Barranco, La Pescaderia is showcasing sustainable seafood, including utilizing the otherwise discarded bycatch.

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