The body transformed

One of the highlights of the Met's rather precious show "Jewelry: The Body Transformed" is a 19th century golden ear ornament from the Indonesian island of Sumba. The motif? Head hunters on the prowl.

It comes around

A book of gorgeous photographs chronicling our 2016 pilgrimage has just been published, Kailash Yatra: A Long Walk to Mt. Kailas through Humla. There's one picture where you can see me (and my lamented 
backpack, too!). And there's an abridged version of the talk I gave as part of our panel presentation at the ISSRNC conference, about how to encounter the mountain without "world religions" getting in the way.

Grasping

Exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism diagramming, 2018 edition (compare 2012 and last year), with Karl Barth raining on our picnic! Maybe "religion" of all sorts is - as the Barth quote spaced unobtrusively along top and right edge of the board suggests - Unglaube, unbelief, faithlessness? Religion is an umbrella that shelters us from the truth of revelation, and even Christianity only gets it right to the extent (and only as long as) water dripping through a cross-shaped tear in the umbrella disturbs our various efforts to stay dry...?!

Last stand

Just a week ago...

Hilma!

This was the first of Hilma af Klint's 1907 Paintings for the Temple to transfix my friend J and me at the Guggenheim today. At the behest of spirits who spoke to a group of five women of whom she was one, the classically trained and gifted af Klint produced strange and stirring series of images which scoop the "fathers of abstraction." She'd insisted they not be shown for a quarter century after her death and it took even longer for them to be rediscovered. They offer, the curators note, "a rare opportunity to rethink art history." They're also trippy! The giant paintings which start the show depict the stages of the life cycle (many of her works are in series or cycles, offering journeys of evolution and transformation); the one above is the last of those showing adulthood.

Subway blues

The MTA has a new app which gives you house seats for the tragedy.

Fish tale

Long before the turducken (is that still a thing?) Jonah was swallowed by a trio of fish, attested by this mosaic recently excavated at Huqoq.

Change of season

The never get through school

When the New School was but half a century old... (Reprinted here)

Prospect Park

Ready to go

With a little sigh, the CamelBak backpack which has been my constant companion for four years (including the year in China and a Kailas circuit!) gave notice today. Its edges have been fraying for some time, but the tear in the shoulder strap makes it clear that the end is near. Thanks for bearing with me.

Foliage

 The Lang courtyard trees seen from my office window and vice versa

Saber-rattiling Times

The Times has kicked off a massive series of articles under the scary name China Rules: How China Became a Superpower which reminded me - somehow I forgot - that they have never covered China as anything but a threat. When I was living there, the Times coverage was an important balance to the dearth of news (along with the Guardian, Los Angeles Times and South China Morning Post) but on its own it is terribly unbalanced. This series seems recklessly so, playing into a zero-sum understanding of US-Chinese relations the writers claim is the only thing on which Americans of left and right now agree. I've read the headliner "The Land that Failed to Fail," and its substories, appearing one a day all this week, "The American Dream Is Alive. In China," "How China Took Over Your TV," "How China Made Its Own Internet," How China Is Rewriting Its Own Script" and "The World, Built By China." Much more is on the wayover the next four weeks, culminating in the ominous "The Road to Confrontation," which should break about the week before Christmas. Indeed, the whole series seems to be describing a road to confrontation.

The double negative of "The Land That Failed To Fail" describes the problems with the project pretty well. The story is that China has found ways to succeed which Americans didn't know existed, but the storyline never gets far beyond the aggrieved negative. I'm as disheartened as anyone at the growth of the oppressive Chinese surveillance state, angered at industrial espionage and horrified at the return of "re-education" camps in Xinjiang. But China's amazing turnaround since the 1980s, lifting more people from poverty than any society in history, happened before - and is arguably being slowed by - the recent crackdowns. The articles note the shift but wind up replicating the narrative of Xi's Chinese Dream, with a monolithic China, a monolithic Chinese Communism, and a single leader at the helm of a monolithic party and state. A few things missing from the story so far:

diversity within China

sources of Chinese vitality that are neither communist not capitalist

what we might learn from China.

And, relatedly, ways we might need to rethink our own position: by what right do we claim to be the hegemon of the "Indo-Pacific"? And didn't the American Dream die on our watch, as we allowed social mobility to be undermined by ever greater inequality? (Not long ago the story was that even Britain has greater social mobility than we do, a story of domestic social and political failure of which China was no part.) As China has "failed to fail," we have failed to succeed. A story like this lets us blame our own failings on China, and, conceding little that the two societies might learn from each other, makes confrontation seem inevitable.

Fly away

Twitter, I gather, is where it's at. Actually, someone told me that nine years ago and I set up an account ... then never returned to it. I'm back, since this is one of the main way things like our Public Seminar posts are likely to circulate. Arts as social research tweeted and retweeted!

Neighbors

To get off our island from time to time, we've been renting a car and driving to inviting-looking mainland B&Bs we scope out online. This weekend we went to Connecticut. This completes an eight-state sweep which has taken us to New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Vermont - and of course Upstate NY and Long Island. (The shells were found on Hammonasset Beach on Long Island Sound.)

Hammonasett Beach

Our bubble

While nearby 12th St showed the devastation which a heavy sticky snow can wreak on trees still in full leaf, the Lang courtyard trees are fine.

First snow

By any means

The latest in our contributions to the Public Seminar "vertical" on New School Histories is out, a story you've seen many a time in this blog but meeting the wider public for the first time today! I'm a little miffed that an editor found a zingier title than my "Arts as Social Research," but she's internet savvier than I am. She's updated Public Seminar's byline,

too, you'll notice. How much pithier is Informing debate by any means necessary than the shapeless run-on predecessor open, critical, challenging, confronting the pressing issues of the day and fundamental problems of the human condition, expanding the project of the New School for Social Research! Best of all, she's a religious studies major.