trespassing on beauty - photography of industrial decay

trespassing on beauty - photography of industrial decay: "

Article by Kurt Keefner.

Let’s say you knew where something really beautiful was, but somebody kept it locked away because their insurance company told them to. It’s not in anybody’s home. You didn’t want to steal or damage it. The only thing you wanted to take was pictures. Would you trespass to do it?

A lot of people have been delving into secret places, abandoned places, seeking out the mysterious internal organs of our civilization. This passion is called Urban Exploration. Many urban explorers specialize in old factories and like to take pictures of them. This is the photography of industrial decay.

At first it was just the obsession of many isolated shutterbugs from America, Canada and Western Europe. But many of these photographers started posting their pictures of abandoned factories on Flickr. It became its own genre, similar to the way cat videos have become so big on YouTube. One such photographer, a Canadian named Chris Smart, saw an opportunity to bring these photos and photographers together in an internet community. Thus was born the Industrial Decay Network.

The IDN at first just supported an amazing photo blog. But then Chris had the idea to release the best photos in book form. Perhaps he could have hooked some mainstream publisher, but it’s not clear whether one would have been interested in an anthology of photos literally and figuratively from the underground, so in the spirit of DIY he went to a company that helps people publish their own books, Blurb, giving rise to three books (so far) IDN01, IDN02 and Chris’s own book Surface.

What is the appeal of these photos? At first glance you might think they’re just pictures of creepy old buildings with lots of puddles and peeling paint. Actually, that is part of the appeal: they’re immensely atmospheric and the photographers work to accentuate this characteristic. If you have a taste for dark beauty, you will find it here.

But the images are more than that. They are majestic, full of titanic spaces and distant vanishing points. They are like the ruins of Greek and Roman temples.

They also connect us to history and to the roots of our civilization. IDN and urban exploration generally are a corrective to our tendency to be cut off from the vital substrate of the world, barricaded behind our iPods and video games.

Lastly the factory machines have a steampunk quality, like Jules Verne. The technology in the IDN photos is often only 20-40 years old and has a vaguely science fiction-y quality to it. All of this truly fuels the imagination.

There’s a lot of this material out there, so dig in. The pictures on this page are from IDN02, which is in my opinion the best of the books so far. Happy exploring!

Kurt Keefner is a writer living near Washington, DC. He is working on a book about mind-body wholism. You can email him at kurt_keefner@yahoo.com

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Joan Colom and the lower parts of Barcelona

Joan Colom and the lower parts of Barcelona: "

Colom, born in 1921, self-taught man, started taking photographs in 1957. He is one of the elements in the so-called 'new vanguard' of Spanish photography, seeking inspiration in photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Doisneau, Walker Evans and Helen Levitt.

Over the course of three years, Colom visited the Barrio Chino (currently, Raval), which, in his own words, was 'the only place in Barcelona where I can see mankind'. Like today, the Raval was a neighbourhood of poverty and prostitution, In such a difficult environment, conflict and the manifestation of the most basic human needs were frequent. Colom used a technique all his own: he placed the camera around his waist and shot pictures, without looking, doing some lab work on them, later.

What is most impressive about Colom's pictures is precisely this sly and immediate character, this voyeur of humanity perspective, without ever falling into the exotic or the sentimental, but also without trying to give an epic or tragic dimension to the lives of those men and women. Hands groping buttocks, large breasts in 50s brassieres, flesh overflowing from clothes and looks. Dirty children, proletarians and proletarians' children.

This secrecy gives Colom's work a particular documentary value. In 1964, the photographer published a book with these pictures and texts written by Camilo José Cela, entitled Izas, rabizas y colipoterras. Controversy ensued - it was during the last years of fascist Spain; later, one of the women pictured filed a complaint. Colom gave up photography until the 1980s.

In the meantime, he had made two other note-worthy works: photographs of the El Born market, in 1963, and a series of photos about the gypsy neighbourhood of Sorromostro, one of the poorest in the city, which was being dismantled as Barcelona's coastal promenade advanced into the Poblenou area, in 1964. It consisted of images of the great engineering work progressing over the slums and the people who lived on the city's beach. Poblenou is, today, one of the most developed areas in the city, so Colom's photographs represent a critical memory of the city’s popular classes.

I have no idea what Colom thinks about the current development of the Raval. In order to host the 1992 Olympic Games, the most troublesome part of the neighbourhood was shattered, giving way to a fresher Raval, without a doubt more appreciated by its inhabitants; however, this change also implied the loss of housing for many families, driven to the suburbs. The Raval is still dirty, dark, working-class, with drugs and drunks and prostitution. It's an immigrant neighbourhood, where it is easier to fing an Islamic butchershop than a churreria. That gives it, in the middle of the city, a pleasant homely feeling, for those who don't have to suffer with its problems. Still, the pressure from the neighbouring Rambla is transforming it in an uneven way: it is being more sought after for luxury hotels. And by becoming more economically attractive, the population is beginning to suffer with the economic speculation.

The most controversial episode was a police operation in which over 30 people were arrested for being connected with a prostitution network. Criticism isn't aimed at the operation itself, but to the fact that it took place right after the inauguration of a new five-star hotel, very close to one of the streets where prostitution is dealt with openly. There, women from all over the world, from all ages, walk the same sidewalks as clients, tourists, students and families with children, without anyone being bothered by any of it. The bra models change, the hair-dos change. But there are still the same hands in the same buttocks, the same misery, now only two steps away from a luxurious hotel.

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Word War III: Google vs. Governments

Word War III: Google vs. Governments: "

In how many ways did Google respond to this week’s letter (PDF) from the data protection authorities of nine countries criticizing the company’s approach to privacy?

The first response came in the form of a statement from Google’s official PR operation.

Predictably, it was blander than bland. “We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it,” the statement suggested. “Of course we do not get everything 100 percent right — that is why we acted so quickly on [Google] Buzz.”

This is the happy-clappy voice of Google’s PR operation, a vast exercise in passive aggression designed to prop up the perception that Eric, Larry and Sergey really, really, really, don’t want to do evil.

Much more interesting was the verbal assessment a PR representative offered up to the Wall Street Journal.

“We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to the letter,” the spokesperson told the Journal.

Here, I think we’re getting closer to what Google really feels. The tone is tetchy. The underlying message is clear: Google would like the letter’s signatories to go forth and multiply.

Yet this response is also a problem for Google. The letter it received was signed by data protection bureaucrats in Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the UK.

You’ll notice that the US isn’t on the list. So ask yourself how the spokesperson who talked to the Journal would have responded if the US had been among the signatories.

Would she have taken the time to discuss “all these issues” once again? You bet she would. Would she have suggested that responding to the letter was pointless? I doubt it.

At this point, it’s fairly obvious that that Google has made at least three mistakes.

First, there’s the use of corporate weasel words in the original statement. When Google uses this voice to talk about important issues, it sounds just like most other large companies. The desire to disagree with something without provoking an equal and opposite reaction is a very specific form of corporate cowardice. My sense is that Google — as it grows larger — is starting to do this more often.

Next, there’s the US-centric view of the world that leads a spokeswoman to dismiss the letter during a discussion with the Wall Street Journal.

Google is not immune to the deep parochialism of Silicon Valley. Yet this is a company that generates over half of its revenues outside the U.S.

On this basis, it’s surely madness to dismiss the arguments of nine states whose representatives are deeply dissatisfied with Google’s position on privacy.

If you doubt this, listen to the supporting commentary offered by Jacob Kohnstamm, the chairman of the European Commission’s Article 29 working party on data protection. The letter, Kohnstamm told journalists, represents a “last warning to the online world”.

Finally, there’s the tedium-filled hope that the awkward squad will simply shut up and go away.

This, of course, will not happen. In the end, Google will become a regulated quasi-utility. It’s easy to suggest why this should happen, but profoundly difficult to imagine how. Yet where there’s a will, the political elites will eventually find a way.

The key challenge for Google involves slowing down the process. Arguably, this now matters more to shareholders than new product development. Regulated companies make smaller profits than you’d otherwise expect. For a company whose shares still trade at 25 times earnings, this is a fate to be avoided.

In this respect, Google has generally performed well so far. Unlike Microsoft in the 1990s, the company hasn’t allowed indignation to tip over into public aggression toward its opponents.

In no small part, I suspect that this is attributable to Eric Schmidt, who witnessed Microsoft’s fatal weakness for confrontation at close quarters as the chief executive of Novell and CTO of Sun Microsystems during the 1990s.

When dealing with critics in public, Schmidt frequently behaves as if he has listened to their complaints. This is a habit that Bill Gates never acquired.

Schmidt also delivers bullshit with aplomb. When he announced the launch of Fast Flip, he made it sound like the future of news. Clearly, it wasn’t. Yet tokens like these slow down the pursuing pack, sowing division among the ranks.

Subtlety comes naturally to Schmidt. Asked to respond to the latest of Rupert Murdoch’s copyright tirades a few weeks ago, Schmidt remarked dryly that it’s best to look at Rupert’s comments “in context of a business negotiation”.

This response worked well, combining economic rationalism with a tease for the assembled journalists and criticism of Murdoch’s vaudeville style.

In many ways, it’s a shame that Schmidt can’t be seconded to run Google’s PR operation. Arguably, he’d add more value to the company in this role.

This week, for example, Schmidt would probably have drawn attention to what I initially fancied to be Google’s third response to the privacy broadside it received on Monday.

On Google’s corporate pages this week, there was no missing the news about the Government Requests Tool, a new initiative from the office of David Drummond, the company’s top lawyer.

Among other things, the Requests Tool clarifies how frequently governments ask Google to hand over users’ personal data (mostly to assist with law enforcement investigations). The results can be interpreted as an index of governmental willingness to invade privacy.

Here’s the league table for the period between July and December last year in the case of signatories to Tuesday’s letter:

The connection between these rankings and the letter from data protection bureaucrats is clear. Eight of the nine governments that complain so vociferously about Google’s privacy policies also appear on this list of governments who take a keen interest in their citizen’s private communications.

The point is worth arguing. Governments might be keen on regulating Google, but they also represent a huge threat to privacy in their own right. Google itself acts as a restraining influence on their behaviour. This week, the company confirmed that it sometimes “refuses to produce information” or “tries to narrow” the requests for data made by governments.

If Eric Schmidt had been running Google’s PR operation, I suspect he would have used this league table as a riposte to the privacy commissioners.

But he isn’t, and it wasn’t. The fact that the privacy letter and Drummond’s tool became news stories on the same day appears to have been coincidence.

We know this because the ham-fisted spokeswoman who talked to the Wall Street Journal described the timing as “ironic”.

The best PR operators grab passing circumstances and impose order upon them. This week, Google failed to do either.

Photo Credit: Flickr CC: John E. Lester

This article first appeared on wired.co.uk
See Also:

• Google Privacy Practices Worse Than ISP Snooping, AT&T Charges …


• Google Chrome Beta Adds Privacy and Content Controls


• Google Wants Global Privacy Rules


• Google Tweaks Buzz After Overblown Privacy Backlash


• A Global Anti-Censorship Policy for Google


• Google’s Traffic Is Giant, Which Is Why It Should be Your ISP …


• China Stands Firm in Response to Google Threat


• Google, China and Censorship: A Wired.com FAQ


• Google Uncensors China Search Engine

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Dilbert for April 24, 2010

Comic for April 24, 2010: "

"

Nick Clegg, Britain's Next Prime Minister?

Nick Clegg, Britain's Next Prime Minister?: "

It was an offer that many ambitious young Brits would have pounced on. As a bright and energetic Cambridge graduate in the 1990s, Nick Clegg had caught the eye of his boss Leon Brittan, a former Tory cabinet minister working at the European Union in Brussels. Brittan thought his protégé had a future in Conservative Party politics, and offered to launch his career back in London. But Clegg had other ideas: he signed up instead with the Liberal Democrats, the perennial losers of British politics.

Crazy as it seems, the decision paid off. Barely 10 years later, the party, now led by Clegg, is set to win real influence for the first time in Britain's postwar history in this May's parliamentary elections. A virtual unknown only two weeks ago, Clegg scored a massive upset victory in Britain's first-ever televised debate against the two main parties' leaders, Labour's incumbent Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Conservatives' David Cameron. Since then, the Liberal Democrats have leapfrogged Labour to take second place in the polls. At times they've topped the 30 percent mark to run neck and neck with the Conservatives. Media handicappers have begun warning that the 'Clegg effect' might change British politics forever.

For the country's longstanding political duopoly, the implications are seismic: Clegg is now regarded as a probable kingmaker, if not more than that. Even if the surge weakens before polling day—a second TV debate last week resulted in a draw—a showing for the Liberal Democrats just slightly better than usual would be enough to place the party squarely at the balance of power between Labour and the Conservatives, with neither party commanding an absolute majority in Parliament. And finding little appeal in the two main parties, many voters seem ready to make a switch.

Hardly anyone saw this coming, least of all the Tories. 'Look at their posters,' says Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrats' leader in Parliament's upper house. 'They thought that all they had to do was to remind people that Gordon Brown was prime minister and that this was their opportunity to get rid of him.' The Liberal Democrats have traditionally been a left-leaning (but never socialist) party for the serious-minded—principled but stodgy. Since the 1920s it has been relegated to a minority role in Parliament by Britain's 'first past the post' balloting system, which gives the win to whichever candidate gets the largest share of the vote, thus avoiding the runoff contests that might favor a third party. Votes are often cast for the Liberal Democrat candidate merely as a 'none of the above' gesture of protest. In the last elections, in 2005, the party won only 63 parliamentary seats, less than 10 percent of the total.

But oddly enough, Clegg's success has been achieved without a distinctive, easily sold vision. His party's platform is a ragbag of policies, as hazy as that of today's Tories under Cameron. On the Lib Dem agenda: a 1 percent 'mansion tax' on properties valued at more than £2 million ($3 million); generalized support for green initiatives; a breakup of the big banks; and tax relief for low-income workers. In the past the party's survival has often depended on single, hot-button issues. Opposition to the Iraq War boosted the party's performance in 2005, and in the past year or so it has benefited from the popularity of Clegg's deputy, Vince Cable, a genial economist who takes credit for publicly warning of the financial crisis long before it struck.

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The Pope Should Be Questioned in Sex-Abuse Cases

The Pope Should Be Questioned in Sex-Abuse Cases: "

Detain or subpoena the pope for questioning in the child-rape scandal? You must be joking! All right then, try the only alternative formulation: declare the pope to be above and beyond all local and international laws, and immune when it comes to his personal and institutional responsibility for sheltering criminals. The joke there would be on us.

The cause of the Catholic clergy's sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?

The case for bringing the head of the Catholic hierarchy within the orbit of law is easily enough made. All it involves is the ability to look at a naked emperor and ask the question 'Why?' Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set—that of damage control. The question started small. In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being 'forgiven'? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law's own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.

In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police. But now, from Munich and Madison, Wis., and Oakland, come reports of the protection or indulgence of pederasts occurring on the pope's own watch, either during his period as bishop or his time as chief Vatican official for the defusing of the crisis. His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same. As I am writing this, plaintiffs are coming forward and strategies being readied (on both sides, since the Vatican itself scents the danger). In Kentucky, a suit is before the courts seeking the testimony of the pope himself. In Britain, it is being proposed that any one of the numberless possible plaintiffs might privately serve the pope with a writ if he shows his face. Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on 'crimes against humanity'; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

In Kentucky, the pope's lawyers have already signaled their intention to contest any such initiative by invoking 'sovereign immunity,' since His Holiness is also an alleged head of state. One wonders if sincere Catholics really desire to take refuge in this formulation. The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers. Its bogus claim to statehood is now being used to give asylum to men like Cardinal Law.

In this instance the church damns itself both ways. It invites our challenge—this is where the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights becomes relevant—to its standing as a state. And it calls attention to the repellent origins of that same state. Currently the Holy See has it both ways. For example, it is exempt from the annual State Department Human Rights Report precisely because it is not considered a state. (It maintains only observer status at the United Nations.) So, if it now does want to claim full statehood, it follows that it should receive the full attention of the State Department for its 'lay' policies, and, for that matter, the full attention of the Justice Department as well. (First order of business—why on earth are we not demanding the extradition of Cardinal Law? And why is this grave matter being left to private individuals to pursue?)

It is very difficult to resist the conclusion that this pope does not call for a serious investigation, or demand the removal of those responsible for a consistent pattern of child rape and its concealment, because to do so would be to imply the call for his own indictment. But meanwhile why are we expected to watch passively or wonder idly why the church does not clean its own filthy stable? A case in point: in 2001 Cardinal Castrillón of Colombia wrote from the Vatican to congratulate a French bishop who had risked jail rather than report an especially vicious rapist priest. Castrillón was invited this week to conduct a lavish Latin mass in Washington. The invitation was rightly withdrawn after a storm of outrage, but nobody asked why the cardinal could not be held as an accessory to an official Vatican policy that has exposed thousands of American children to rapists and sadists.

Only this past March did the church shamefacedly and reluctantly agree that all child rapists should now be handed over to the civil authorities. Thanks a lot. That was a clear admission that gross illegality, and of the nastiest kind, has been its practice up until now. Euphemisms about sin and repentance are useless. This is a question of crime—organized crime, by the way—and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting—and rotting from the head.

Hitchens, a NEWSWEEK contributor, is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.

© 2010

How Hillary Found Her Groove With Obama

How Hillary Found Her Groove With Obama: "

It was almost like one of those moments in a buddy-cop movie when the two partners who dislike each other at the beginning finally bond while taking on the bad guys. In mid-December Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were in Copenhagen, where the leaders of more than 100 countries had gathered to negotiate a new agreement to combat global warming, and the summit was on the verge of collapse. Clinton later described it as the most disorganized meeting she'd seen since her eighth-grade student council. It 'was just disintegrating right before everybody's eyes,' she recalled to NEWSWEEK in an interview last week. Clinton and her former political rival, now the president, found themselves up against most of the rest of the world. At the last minute Obama sought a one-on-one meeting with the Chinese leader to rescue some kind of agreement, only to be told that Premier Wen Jiabao and his team still weren't ready to meet (after two years of prior procrastination). 'No, we're going in now,' Obama declared, looking at Clinton. 'Absolutely,' she said. 'Let's go.'

Clinton's played the heavy with Iran, Russia, and even Israel—and her sometimes hawkish views are finding favor with the president.

The former political rivals suddenly morphed into a diplomatic version of Starsky and Hutch. 'I felt a particular responsibility since I had urged the president to come,' Clinton said. 'Because I knew nothing was going to happen unless we gave it our all.' Striding down the hallway, with the Chinese protocol officer sputtering protests behind them, America's two best-known politicians barged into the meeting room. There they found Wen conferring secretly with the leaders of Brazil, India, and South Africa; behind the scenes, Beijing had been trying to block all efforts to impose standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying progress on carbon reduction. Smiling and shaking hands, Obama and Clinton worked the room together, as they had each done so many times before as contending politicians. Then the president sat down and started negotiating, with Clinton sliding position papers to him as needed. When the Chinese finally caved, both Obama and Clinton knew that it wasn't just because they had crashed the meeting. Two days before, the secretary of state had flown in to Copenhagen by surprise to deliver a sweetener to help win over developing countries. In essence, it was a global bribe: $100 billion a year from rich nations by 2020 to help poorer countries cope with climate controls. It was political hardball, Hillary style, and it had helped to isolate Beijing. Now Obama was closing the deal Clinton had set up.

The two came away from Copenhagen with a partial triumph and a new sense of maturity—both about their relationship and their sense of how to lead. Clinton later called it one of 'the most extraordinary 48 hours she's spent in public life,' said her global-warming negotiator, Todd Stern—which is saying something for a woman who's lived through political tumult for 18 years, including several presidential and senatorial campaigns. Clinton told NEWSWEEK that it was important for America to be seen taking the lead in tackling seemingly impossible problems, particularly in an era with rising new powers at the table, if only to show what the country stands for. 'We can't just walk out of the arena and leave these important decisions to somebody else because it's messy, it's difficult, it requires compromise. That is what you have to do on the world stage today,' she said. 'We remain the strongest country in the world, but the way we exercise that leadership has changed dramatically.'

Copenhagen also provided further evidence that the sharp differences between Obama and Clinton over foreign policy on the campaign trail were, as many on both sides now acknowledge, largely political theater. In fact, their views of American power had never been that far apart. 'We're both, at bottom, problem solvers and practical, realistic people,' Clinton says now. 'As Mario Cuomo said, 'You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.'?' Critics dismissed the climate targets as vague and voluntary, and the administration faces a separate onslaught from global-warming skeptics. But since the summit, 120 nations have signed on and 75 have submitted carbon-reduction plans, Stern says.

It took some time after the election for Obama and Clinton to find their balance together. They had fought one of the fiercest wars in American political history, and the wounds were still raw in the early months of the new administration. Clinton's aides felt a chill from the advisers around Obama, especially loyalists like David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Valerie Jarrett. Though Clinton kept her head down while she mastered her brief as secretary of state—it was the way she took on every new task, methodically and tirelessly—she was also feeling a little deflated. Obama's plea to join his administration had been enticing: he had his hands full with the collapsing economy, the new president said, and he needed someone of her stature to handle foreign policy. The implication was that she would have the dominant voice when it came to dealing with the world. Instead, friends and admirers were baffled at her seeming lack of influence. She 'was not in the inner circle. That was clear,' says one aide who, like several others quoted in this story, did not want to be named discussing internal politics. Her bluntness abroad occasionally caused consternation in the West Wing, and Clinton, in turn, 'complained about a lack of dissenting voices in the administration,' says an old friend who knows her from her first-lady days. 'In the beginning she would say, 'They want this, they want that,'?' meaning the White House. 'It took a while for her to start saying 'we.'?' Clinton and Obama had already begun bonding on previous trips abroad, but in Copenhagen the 'they' truly became 'we,' Clinton aides say.

Today, the metamorphosis of bitter combatants into bona fide partners is not quite complete, but it is far along. Clinton herself says she and Obama quickly established a 'collegial partnership,' though she acknowledges that some of their aides 'may have taken longer to shake off the vestiges of a very hard-fought campaign.' Some friends marvel at the equanimity with which she accepted defeat and quickly allowed herself to be absorbed into the new administration. 'If you look at defeated presidential candidates, the ones who thought they had a chance, a lot of them go into deep funks,' says a former member of the Clinton administration who knows her well. 'Kerry, John McCain. Al Gore took a while, too.'

Some of Obama's most loyal aides have nothing but good things to say about their former political foe. 'The bottom line is the president has always had a very deep respect for Secretary Clinton's capabilities and contributions to the country,' says Denis McDonough, who is formally National Security Council chief of staff but plays a powerful role behind the scenes as a longtime Obama confidant. Obama was always one of her biggest fans, even in the immediate aftermath of the primaries, McDonough says, believing 'that she made him that much better a candidate' and would do the same for his presidency. National-security adviser Gen. James Jones credits Clinton with being 'one of the articulators of the overall strategy that we all adopted' on Iran and China.

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Goethe—The Star of Hope

Goethe—The Star of Hope: "

Von dem Geschick des Königs-Hauses scheint

Sie tief gerührt. Wer sie auch immer sei,

So hat sie selbst den König wohl gekannt

Und ist, zu unserm Glück, aus hohem Hause

Hierher verkauft. Nur stille, liebes Herz,

Und laß dem Stern der Hoffnung, der uns blinkt,

Mit frohem Mut uns klug entgegen steuern.

The fate of this royal house seems

To touch her deeply. Whoever she may be,

She appears to know the king himself well

And is to our fortune from a noble house,

Sold here into slavery. Be calm, dear heart,

And let us set our course with happy resolve

Toward the star of hope which shines down on us.

–Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, act ii, sc 2 (1786) in Goethes sämtliche Werke, vol. 3.1, p. 185 (K. Richter ed. 1990)(S.H. transl.)

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Goethe’s Iphigenie is a work that occupied him over many years and it exists in several forms; it clearly plays a central role in his intellectual life. And it’s interesting to see it in the context of the intellectual currents and countercurrents of his time. About this time, Mozart has composed and performed Die Zauberflöte and Beaumarchais is busy at work on Figaro. Goethe’s work can be placed alongside these two in many levels. He is consumed by the idea that humanity can save itself through the use of reason, that it develops social conventions which it can quickly outgrow and must therefore necessarily reform, that religion if left static and if appreciated only at a superficial level can be more a hinderance than help to humanity. On the other hand, Goethe’s work is highly stylized and soaked with earnestness; it lacks the lightness of tone and the humor which act as saving graces for Mozart and Beaumarchais. Still, Goethe’s work is as far as could be imagined from the Enlightenment’s countercurrent–the early Romanticists, with their stress of emotional rupture, natural language and political reaction (and in the case of Germany especially, an extreme nationalism). Goethe turns his back on the national; he stresses the universal, or at least the European common roots. He sees a humanity plagued by barbarity and always poised to sink back into it at times of political crisis. He praises as noble those who resist such a temptation, who are moved by a religious spirit but not captive to an excessive celebration of tradition, and who see in humankind the prospect of something greater and better than its current state. Iphigenie is about this civilizing force, and indeed the character of Iphigenie herself is its embodiment.

In the original Greek narrative, Agamemnon sacrifices his oldest daughter, Iphigenie, to the goddess Artemis, convinced that he must do so to succeed in his war against Troy. However, Artemis takes Iphigenie from the altar and delivers her to the shores of the Black Sea, where she is raised as a priestess. Believing that Agamemnon actually killed their daughter, Clytemnestra then murders Agamemnon. Their children (Iphigenie’s siblings), Orestes and Elektra, are so repelled by the murder of their father that they conspire to murder their mother. An oracle of Apollo then tells Orestes that he must go to Tauris to find his sister, that this is the only way he can lift the curse that has been placed upon him. That sets the bloody background for Iphigenie, a story which revolves around the house of Atreus, perhaps the most dysfunctional family in world literature.

As Goethe unfolds the narrative, however, injustice and inhumanity take the center stage. The people of Tauris, who are quite literally what the Greeks call “barbarians” (i.e., non-Greeks), have adopted the polar opposite of the rule of hospitality. They believe in seizing and sacrificing any foreigner who lands on their shores. Indeed, they make this a part of a sort of religious ritual. And Iphigenie, as a priestess, is involved in its performance. When Orestes and his trusty friend Pylades land on the shores of Tauris, Iphigenie discovers them and faces a dilemma. She is supposed to turn them in and then perform her role in the sacrifice. But she sees this law and religious ritual as unjust and repulsive. Still, instead of simply concealing the fact, she goes to the king and tells him the truth. She then persuades him that the law and ritual is perverse and should be set aside. In doing this, she risks death–both that of her brother and his friend, and her own. But her power of reason wins the day.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the play is this passage, quoted and translated above, an aside by Pylades following his initial encounter with Iphigenie. In it he sees deeply into Iphigenie’s character. She is moved by the fate of the royal house, he notes. At one level that is a reference to the house of Tauris, at another to the house of Atreus, but ultimately the house that moves Iphigenie is humankind and its fate. As a priestess she is tied to law and ritual, but she takes her charge critically and her concern for the fate of people overwhelms her religious charge. But in the following lines we see this civilizing principle is externalized, it is called a guiding star, and nautical references are introduced. This mirrors the Iphigenie legend in a marvelous way, since indeed the avoidance of barbaric cruelty (practiced first by the Greeks, then by the literal Barbarians) occurs through swift movement over great areas–the goddess Artemis snatching Iphigenie and whisking her to Tauris, whereas the humans aspiring to be more godlike learn the science of navigation through study of the stars. Thus the guiding star is an externalized image, but the employment of human reason allows man to gain hope from it.

Goethe received his patent of nobility in 1782, as he was working on the Iphigenie material. He selected as his coat of arms “the magnificent morning star, six-pointed, silver upon a field of blue.” And this passage from Iphigenie helps us understand what this symbol meant to him: hope in the context of human development and artistic creation.

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Listen to Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59, No. 1 (”Rasumovsky”)(1805-06) and especially the third, adagio, movement, here in a performance by the Highbury Quartet. T.W. Adorno, in an essay on Goethe’s Iphigenie cites the “star of hope” passage and comments: “Hope commands the suspension of artistic production, but without it, no art would come to pass. Consequently, hope is summoned in the literature only in a desultory fashion.” This expression of hope, he continues, is perfected in the adagio of this Beethoven quartet.

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How Madonna Makes It Easier to Turn 40: Kelley

How Madonna Makes It Easier to Turn 40: Kelley: "

I'm turning 40 in a week. But I have no plans … I was thinking of staying home and compulsively turning the lights on and off like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. What else is there to do? I don't want to be 40 but, as my dad says, what's the alternative? So I've decided to sulk. Really, this is not an elaborate public manipulation to get Steve Jobs to pity me and send me an iPad. Well, it's not just an elaborate manipulation, since an iPad would make me feel better. Seriously, the number 40 is sitting on my chest like a lead weight. Those of you who read my column regularly will know that I am extremely dramatic and unusually self-obsessed, even for a journalist. So trust me, I used to like nothing better than my birthday. Over the years, I've thrown parties in my own honor so elaborate, they make the Super Bowl halftime show look like amateur hour. People are still shaking their heads about my 27th at that bowling alley near NYU. There are drag shows that don't use that many feathers. So the fact that I'm willing to let this birthday go by without so much as a drink after work is a worrying sign that a nervous breakdown is looming. And I don't have time for a mental collapse—I have a toddler.

So just when I feel like curling up on the floor with some Dulcolax and a bottle of moonshine, who should come to my rescue? That's right, the Material Girl. I watched last week's Glee Madonna episode twice with my mouth agape. I have no idea what happened plotwise—somebody lost their virginity, somebody else didn't, I have to watch it again—but those production numbers rocked my world. Go ahead, roll your eyes, but 'Vogue' was the first EP I ever bought on CD (before that I used tapes—OK, tapes!). And I was 21 when Madonna's tour movie Truth or Dare came out. Already self-aggrandizing, I thought of that movie more as a career blueprint than as entertainment. At that point, my entire adult life was ahead of me and that movie made me feel like there was a place big enough in the world to hold my ambitions—that no matter how narrow our culture seemed to be on subjects of race and gender, there would be room for me to shine.

Flash-forward 20 years and I feel like the world is small and tiring. I feel old, and not just because I don't get Twitter, but because of the whole generational divide thing. Hipsters get on my nerves and there's no way to explain why without sounding like something out of Grumpy Old Men. And don't even get me started on our culture's chronic misuse of the word ironic. I miss the days when I was young and callow—narcissism is so much more flattering on the young. Back then, I thought, I'm going to be fabulous and live forever, consequences be damned. So it's hard to accept that what I believe now—every moment is precious, life is short, and there's no time like the present—may be true but doesn't exactly make me feel exuberant. Hearing all that Madonna brought my youth rushing back, not the bad choices and worse men, just the ambitious, hopeful part. Somehow the show made me realize that I probably need to stop whining, get off the couch, and just be fabulous. Madonna is once again my model for how to live life.

That's not because she's one of the most successful performing artists of all time or an amazing businesswoman, or even because she's the master of reinvention. But because she's still fearless. It's been 26 years since she writhed on the floor at the first MTV Music Awards and she's still pushing our cultural buttons on how girls are supposed to act. So many women seem vulnerable to the judgments of others, as if they'll blow away if somebody deems them unworthy or fat. But Madge doesn't she give a damn what anyone thinks. She started in Detroit and now lives in a English manor with the accent to match. That's self-confidence. Watch the video for 'Four Minutes' and wait for the line 'But if I die tonight at least I can say I did what I wanted to do. Tell me how 'bout you?' before you disagree. The woman is snarkproof. Is there another 51-year-old out there who can get away with naming his or her tour 'Sticky and Sweet'? At an age when most women are cutting their hair short, putting away the thongs, and preparing for hot flashes, Madonna remains as culturally relevant as she was when she sang 'Like a Virgin' and looks just as good in a corset. Oh, sure, people say she isn't what she was, but what's the alternative? You grow and change, or you die.

While lots of women are still struggling with work-life balance and deciding which dreams to defer, Madonna is still calling her own shots and adopting children. As she said in a 2008 Nightline interview: 'I may be dressing like the typical bimbo, whatever, but I'm in charge. You know. I'm in charge of my fantasies. I put myself in these situations with men, you know, and … people don't think of me as a person who's not in charge of my career or my life, OK. And isn't that what feminism is all about, you know, equality for men and women? And aren't I in charge of my life, doing the things I want to do? Making my own decisions?' So in honor of Madge, I've decided to throw off my mourning clothes, put on my thigh-high boots and take charge of my fantasies. I might even party like a rock star next week. Oh, and Twitter is stupid and hipsters are derivative lemmings.

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