Raptorex Kriegsteini
A dinosaur that’s tiny
when compared to T. Rex has been named
Raptorex Kriegsteini,
by palaeontologists who have acclaimed
the parents of a Holo-
caust survivor who had bought the fossil.
From small beginnings follow
dread consequences that may be colossal.
Inspired by the story of the discovery in Inner Mongolia of a fossil that is thought to have been the ancestor of T. Rex, and has been named Raptorex Kriegsteini, after the man who bought the fossil and donated it to palaeontologists. William Mullen of the Chicago Tribune writes on September 18,2009
As he studied photos of a Chinese fossil sent to him by a private collector, University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno felt his skepticism giving way to excitement at seeing what could be a miniature relative of the most famous of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex.
The collector wanted Sereno to do the first scientific identification of the fossil, but Sereno balked unless the fossil was donated to science. The collector agreed, but with his own requirement - that it be named after his parents, both Holocaust survivors. That agreement three years ago ultimately opened the door to the discovery of Raptorex kriegsteini, a 'punk-size' precursor to T. rex introduced Thursday by Sereno and five colleagues in an article in the online edition of the research journal Science.
Raptorex was a big surprise to scientists. The 125 million-year-old dinosaur was a 9-foot-long,150-pound look-alike of its great indirect descendant, which was 43 feet long, weighed 13,000 pounds and roamed the Earth 60 million years later. Sereno calls Raptorex a 'blueprint for a predator, ' sporting a huge head, powerful jaws, outsize olfactory organs for acute sense of smell, tiny forelimbs and horselike rear legs to swiftly run down prey.'We have now leapfrogged in our understanding of how Tyrannosaurus rex and its tyrannosaurid relatives came to be on the strength of one specimen that was almost lost to science, ' he said. The specimen was illegally dug out of a fossil field in northeast China in the last decade and sold into an illegal international black market for fossils, Sereno said.
Seven years ago, Henry Kriegstein, a Massachusetts eye surgeon with an abiding love of dinosaurs, attended an Arizona fossil show where a dealer showed him photos of the fossil, still in the block of rock as it was when pulled out of the ground. It was for sale - legally, according to U.S. laws - and Kriegstein said he bought it for 'tens of thousands of dollars but well below $100,000.' Three years ago, after he began learning that it was possibly an extraordinarily important fossil, he decided to ask the widely respected Sereno to write the first scientific description of it, introducing it to the scientific record. That's when Sereno asked Kriegstein to 'give it up to science.' 'Henry said yes, but he said he wanted it named after his father and mother, ' Sereno said. 'They were Polish Jews who survived the death camps in Would War II and still live in New York today. He said he wanted to name the dinosaur after them as a way of giving them immortality after their terrible struggle to survive in World War II.' The deal was done, with the agreement that Sereno will return the fossil to China when he is done with it.
9/18/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Creativity Can't Make Up For Depression
Creativity cannot make up for depression
which it attempts to cure,
it can’t replace it with the kind of supersession
that made spurious lure
of Christianity when it induced some Jews
to make up for their loss
of their identity, condemned, they thought, to lose
unless they chose the cross.
No, creativity provides a transient high,
and then becomes a wraith,
for those who’re so depressed they find they cannot fly,
because they’ve lost their faith
in their ability to reproduce success,
which if it is not con-
stantly repeated is a letter whose address
appears to be, “Dear John.”
Inspired by an article (“In Praise of the Crack-U: A novelist peers through darkness to find glittering gems in writing and art”) , by the South African-born novelist Jeanette Winterson, lesbian lover of Julian Barnes’s widow, Pat Kavanagh, in the October 17,2009 WSJ (A report about her lesbian relations includes the information: Blessed with good looks that led many to compare her to Katharine Hepburn, she secured a nonspeaking part in Under Milk Wood. “I never got paid, but I did get to snog Richard Burton, ” she said) . Winterson writes:
The stories are well known; Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and went mad. Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Anne Sexton committed suicide. Emily Dickinson was manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf worked through alternating bouts of madness and depression for most of her life. The mad, bad and dangerous wild boys of high art and popular culture make great copy—whether it's Caravaggio on the run for murder after one of his rages, or Allen Ginsberg, naked and drunk, howling through Manhattan. The women—Plath, Frida Kahlo, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin—imploding like dark stars, are the stuff of obsession…. Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the poems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss, and one has meaning. The fierce crashes that happen to many creative people when a piece of work is done (read Hemingway on this) come out of the sense that however good the work, it has not answered the loss. The strange thing about creative work is that it can have enormous value for others while its maker is left ravaged. The ancient Greeks understood this as the price of an encounter with a god—the divine forces enter the human and use him or her as an instrument, only to be ultimately destroyed. But I do not believe that creativity is destructive or divine. I believe it is the part of us that gives shape and voice to our innermost reality. This is frightening. Encounters with the real, in particular what we really feel, are something we generally try to avoid. Art mediates the encounter, allowing us to get nearer to our longing and our loss, to risk more, to dare more. Yet for the maker, the exposure is not mediated; it is total and terrifying. That is why so many creative people cut themselves off from their own experience, using drugs or drink or sex or shipwreck to avoid absolute exposure to the pain of creativity. When Whitman turned to face his dark angel, to wrestle with himself, he was acknowledging his own loss, his own longing, his own unstaunched wound.
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Making Sense Of Sound
SENSE OF SOUND
In Plato’s time fools used to say
there are no rules for music that you play.
Being law-abiding when you write
a piece of music often won’t excite
the fools who will demand of you to break
its laws, while claiming that the word mistake
doe not apply to music. It is pleasure
that’s their bottom line, every measure
composed in any manner the composer
may wish. I do not want to be imposer
of any law that may inhibit your
ability to write, but I feel sure
that ultimately it is only fools
who break in music, as in life, all rules.
In music as in life there’s right and wrong,
and both of them, in order to last long,
must follow norms, as Plato once declared.
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Scarlett And Melanie
Scarlett O’ and Melanie,
presenting the dichotomies
of feminine near-felony
and law, would need lobotomies
to reconcile. If, frankly, dear,
you give a damn, you must decide
to which of them your heart is near,
allowing it to be your guide,
for if you choose them both the wind
will see that you are gone. Life ain’t
like Hollywood. If you have sinned,
don’t try to make out with a saint,
because there always is a clash
when opposites attempt to meet,
and if they do they tend to crash,
since those who cannot change must cheat.
Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Molly Haskell’s “‘Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind’ Revisited” (“Frankly My Dear: ” NYT, April 24,2009) :
Just as the dichotomy between Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley gave the movie a classic bipolar architecture, so Cukor and Fleming became, in Ms. Haskell’s words, the movie’s stylistic “yin and yang”: Cukor providing “the delicate gradations of feeling between lovers and family” while Fleming supplied the movie’s “bold, sweeping movement through time and history.” At the same time, Ms. Haskell observes, the art director William Cameron Menzies endowed the sprawling opus with a visual coherence: “The expressionistic landscapes and character positionings designed by Menzies and his staff keep certain images as touchstones, in the forefront of consciousness — like the horse collapsing on the bridge, the fire in the background, the use of the new moon, ” even as his masterful use of the new process of Technicolor worked to heighten the drama of the story. In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was “the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities”: “In ‘Gone With the Wind, ’ Mitchell’s only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Leigh, whose casting was less accidental than legend has it, invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” All three of these people, Ms. Haskell argues, were “possessed of fire-and-ice opposites that they projected into their lives and careers”: “Leigh, the mesmerizing mixture of bawdy sexpot and exquisite doll, echoed the Scarlett-Melanie sides of Margaret Mitchell, flapper turned matron. Mitchell, in turn, was attracted in fiction and in life to male opposites: the blackguard and the saint (she created one of each; she married one of each) .” As for Selznick, Ms. Haskell says, he liked to cast his protégées as “wide-eyed innocents” or “palpitating sexpots, ” who in turn were attracted “to good boy-bad boy opposites.” “The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement, ” she concludes, “is what gives the archetypes in ‘Gone With the Wind’ their extraordinary human resonance, ” and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, “that historical ‘costume’ story” never feels remotely past.
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Frankly, My Dear
Scarlett O’ and Melanie,
presenting the dichotomies
of feminine near-felony
and law, would need lobotomies
to reconcile. If, frankly, dear,
you give a damn, you must decide
to which of them your heart is near,
allowing it to be your guide,
for if you choose them both the wind
will see that you are gone. Life ain’t
like Hollywood. If you have sinned,
don’t try to make out with a saint,
because there always is a clash
when opposites attempt to meet,
and if they do they tend to crash,
since those who cannot change must cheat.
Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Molly Haskell’s “‘Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind’ Revisited” (“Frankly My Dear: ” NYT, April 24,2009) :
Just as the dichotomy between Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley gave the movie a classic bipolar architecture, so Cukor and Fleming became, in Ms. Haskell’s words, the movie’s stylistic “yin and yang”: Cukor providing “the delicate gradations of feeling between lovers and family” while Fleming supplied the movie’s “bold, sweeping movement through time and history.” At the same time, Ms. Haskell observes, the art director William Cameron Menzies endowed the sprawling opus with a visual coherence: “The expressionistic landscapes and character positionings designed by Menzies and his staff keep certain images as touchstones, in the forefront of consciousness — like the horse collapsing on the bridge, the fire in the background, the use of the new moon, ” even as his masterful use of the new process of Technicolor worked to heighten the drama of the story. In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was “the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities”: “In ‘Gone With the Wind, ’ Mitchell’s only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Leigh, whose casting was less accidental than legend has it, invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” All three of these people, Ms. Haskell argues, were “possessed of fire-and-ice opposites that they projected into their lives and careers”: “Leigh, the mesmerizing mixture of bawdy sexpot and exquisite doll, echoed the Scarlett-Melanie sides of Margaret Mitchell, flapper turned matron. Mitchell, in turn, was attracted in fiction and in life to male opposites: the blackguard and the saint (she created one of each; she married one of each) .” As for Selznick, Ms. Haskell says, he liked to cast his protégées as “wide-eyed innocents” or “palpitating sexpots, ” who in turn were attracted “to good boy-bad boy opposites.” “The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement, ” she concludes, “is what gives the archetypes in ‘Gone With the Wind’ their extraordinary human resonance, ” and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, “that historical ‘costume’ story” never feels remotely past.
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Prejudice, Paranoia And Narcissism
PREJUDICE, PARANOIA AND NARCISSIM
If paranoia can be rationalized
by means of prejudice, if follows narc-
issism has to be an idealized
agenda for a person who's an arse.
Rachel Shukert ("Greased, Frightening, " Tablet,5/11/12) writes about John Travolta:
Well, folks, it's been a big week in gay news. On the good side, President Barack Obama came out in support of same-sex marriage and Anjelica Huston sang on Smash. On the other, the press has been all abuzz over the lawsuit recently slapped on John Travolta by a masseur claiming the star attempted to coerce him into unwanted sexual acts during a session at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Two steps forward, one step back. That's progress, I guess.
Of all the tabloid press coverage on Massage-gate, there are two details that, er, popped up at me. One is the employment of positively J.K. Rowling-esque adjectives regarding the area in question: "solid eight inches … springy" making it sound like Hollywood's second-most famous Scientologist purchased his, ahem, wand straight from Mr. Ollivander's. (It chooses the wizard, you know.) The second is the still-unnamed masseur's assertion of how Travolta explained how he learned to Stop Worrying and Love Transactional Same-Sex Liaisons: By accepting that Hollywood is controlled by "homosexual Jewish men" who expect sexual favors in return for career-related ones….
But back to Travolta: Seen through this lens, it makes perfect sense why the Staying Alive star might articulate what he did the way he (allegedly) did: He posits a homosexual conspiracy to try to convince himself that he's not one (manipulated, sure, but that's what they do) and then tacks on the Jewish part to prove how it's extra sneaky—and impossible to resist.
And yet, I can't help feeling sorry for him in a way I never do for the Gibsons and Gallianos and Rick Sanchezes of the world. If true, it makes for a pretty sad picture to think of one of the biggest, most universally loved movie stars on the planet lying all alone in a hotel suite (and given his well-documented weight fluctuations, the empty chocolate cake wrappers lying on the floor make a particularly poignant touch—I mean, who hasn't been there?) lunging at a masseur's white-jeaned crotch (yes, in my head, he's wearing white jeans) and then blaming a David Geffen-led cabal for his actions when he gets shut down. If every prejudice is the rationalization of paranoia, paranoia is the rationalization of insecurity, and as the prophet(ess) RuPaul (for whom I definitely intend to leave out a custom Absolut vodka cocktail at my next Seder) likes to say: If you can't love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? Internalized homophobia and internalized anti-Semitism are just two sides of the same highly polished and wisely invested coin.
With a single (for the third time, alleged) prejudicial statement, John Travolta has neatly subverted the old maxim about paranoia, and in doing so, the essential emptiness behind prejudice itself. It's not that they aren't out to get you. It's just that "they" is usually "you."
Marc (Tracy?) adds that the fact that Travolta belongs to the conspiratorial Church of Scientology may be relevant:
So the nuts maybe don't fall so far from the tree?
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Beauty And Doubt
Beauty should be cause of doubt,
remaining as a paradox
within a fog that, with lights-out,
become its combination locks
which only should be opened for
the people that it may deceive
and all its images adore,
since they’re unable to believe
that lying very far beyond
the beauty that they worship lie
not icons of which they are fond
but feelings hidden from the eye,
felt only by the loving heart
that longs for union of the mind
with images that works of art
cannot portray till eyes are blind.
The image is to history
what certainty must be to doubt,
solution of a mystery
that true love can do well without.
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Gnostic Texts
Described as snobbish and elite
by Garry Wills,
what the Church wished to delete
provides me thrills.
I’m thinking of the Gnostic text
that, somewhat rude, is
opposed to those disciples vexed
by deeds of Judas,
proposing that he was opposed
to martyrdom,
which Christians have so long supposed
to be the bomb
that made so popular the myth
this text explodes.
Like Pagels, I am happy with
such Gnostic codes.
Inspired by “Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, ” by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King (New York: Penguin,2007) , and Gary Wills’s description of second century Gnostic texts such as “The Gospel of Juddas” as “elite and snobbish” in his book “What The Gospels Meant, ” reviewed by David Gibson (“What Jesus Really Did, ” NYT, March 2,2008) :
“What the Gospels Meant” starts straightforwardly with a helpful explanation of just what a Gospel is: “a meditation on the meaning of Jesus in the light of sacred history as recorded in the sacred writings.” Wills then parses the Gospel of Mark, the earliest account, as a “report from the suffering body of Jesus, ” written to comfort early Christians facing persecution. Matthew’s is the teaching Gospel, recounting many of Christianity’s most familiar sermons. The erudite Luke presents “the reconciling body of Jesus, ” a Gospel of poignant stories like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan that display the humanity of Jesus and the universality of his message. John is, as ever, the theologian, a prophetic voice from “the mystical body of Jesus.” Yet the paradox of modern Christianity is that the growth of biblical scholarship, and the fervor of believers in sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) , has done so little to affect the mass of biblical illiterates who proclaim their convictions about what Jesus would do while knowing precious little about what he actually did or, more important, what he meant. Neo-atheists aren’t much better, sneering at Christians but displaying ignorance about Christianity. And neo-Gnostics — academics and acolytes who claim to channel the rebel spirit of various early Christian offshoots — routinely confer on “elite and snobbish” (Wills’s phrase) second-century texts an authority they rarely grant to the canon. Such literalism sustains a fragile faith.
In this sense, Wills is a dangerous man. He does not create a foolish consistency out of differing Gospels, but underscores the attributes of each narrative to highlight truths more crucial than whether there were four discrete Evangelists, or whether three wise men actually followed a star in the East. The credulous will be shocked by his rationality, while skeptics will be scandalized by his respect for the faith. To be sure, Wills includes asides that will win few points with Rome, like his claim that the virgin birth “is not a gynecological or obstetric teaching, but a theological one.” And he throws in facts that can be mischievously tossed out at family gatherings or, worse, to the pastor after Sunday services — for example, that the crown of thorns was probably a wreath of acanthus leaves. (Wills also provides his own translations of the original “marketplace” Greek, though I’m not sure that killing the “pampered” calf or hearing that the Word became flesh and “bivouacked with us” will catch on.)
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Girl And Gun
“All that you need is a girl and a gun
if you making a film, ” said Jean-Luc Godard.
In the dark with a girl you can have as much fun
as a guy who’s been laid in a film that is noir,
but if, when you switch on the light, you discover
the girl isn’t loaded, walk out of the trailer,
and if she complains that you’ve been a bad lover,
take out a revolver with which you can nail her.
Inspired by Manohla Dargis’s review of Gustav Deutsch’s “Film 1st, a Girl & an Gun” in the December 2,2009 NYT (“The Old Clips, A Paradise Found and Lost”) :
“To make a film, ” Jean-Luc Godard once memorably said, “all you need is a girl and a gun.” (A little money helps.) In “Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun, ” the Austrian director Gustav Deutsch complicates this witty, deceptively simple formula with a wealth of found footage (material shot by others for other purposes) borrowed from film archives from around the world. As the title suggests, there are girls (voluptuous, ecstatic, threatened) and there are guns (hard, phallic, threatening) along with something of a narrative. If the narrative that Mr. Deutsch has created is rather less thrilling than his mostly silent and often glorious images, this is nonetheless a story well worth considering, and watching. Using material gathered from the likes of the Imperial War Museum (in Britain) and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction (at Indiana University) , he has fashioned something of an origin story about cinema itself. It’s a tale that begins with an unidentified image of a woman in buckskin shooting at some targets and ends with a cowboy bandit pointing his gun at the camera, an image appropriated from Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 short, “The Great Train Robbery, ” one of the most famous in cinema history. Tucked between these loaded images, as it were, is a vision of cinematic paradise, found and lost.
Tumult of a kind pursues the shooting woman (nothing new there) in the form of a mesmerizing, mysterious shot of what looks like an archery target in flames and some text (“at the first Chaos came to be”) from “Theogony, ” an epic Greek poem by Hesiod about the origin of the world. The archery target gives way to fiery orange images of billowing smoke and some electronic thrumming. (The intermittent score tends to underscore the obvious.) The thrumming turns to droning, the smoke turns to lava, followed by more Hesiod (“wide-bosomed earth”) , a woman with bountiful breasts, “Paradeisos” (Greek for paradise) and naked beachfront frolickers…
Women turn out to be the fly in the ointment in “a Girl & a Gun.” (“Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor” or so it says in Ecclesiastes.) Among the many images that follow, many beautifully and floridly tinted, are sleeping, dreaming and fornicating clothed and unclothed women. In one early section, a woman drowsing in a steam room seems to dream of both an undulating jellyfish and a swimming man. In another section, a woman watches a man spin four strange dials hidden behind a cabinet, as if he were initiating her into a secret world. (On the soundtrack, you hear “she dies.”) A world, a subsequent shot suggests — of a woman reading a newspaper with the headline “Cine Monde” — that has been made from images…With “a Girl & a Gun, ” Mr. Deutsch brings in Eros and Thanatos to a seductive if familiar end.
12/2/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Should Justice Be Blind?
JUSTICE: SIGHTED OR BLINDED?
"Don't take a bribe, " the Bible says, "because they blind
those who are instructed to administer
justice." Those depicting justice often bind
the Lady's eyes. This act appears quite sinister
to Torah's jurisprudence. Doing this might steer
your judgment to the left or right, and make you look
with a vision that's obscured, and raise the fear
that you might violate the laws within the Book.
The artists thought impartiality and sight
to be in conflict: that is why they blinded Justice.
Bible law prioritizes vision: what is right
should never be the least obscured. Renaissance trust is
based on impartiality, whereas clear vision
is in the Torah's point of view the major given.
A judge must use his sight, and make no blind decision:
all biases caused by his sight must be forgiven.
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