by Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

On January 25th, three days after his 85th birthday, legendary artist Shozo Shimamoto died of heart failure. A memorial event titled Shozo-ism was held  at Hotel Novotel Koshien, Osaka West in Japan on March 13th. Another memorial is ongoing. Quoting Shozo’s first son, Takashi Shimamoto “please visit Shozo’s soul, he would be so excited to see you.”

Artists from all over the world have been meeting Shozo’s soul for decades. Some two hundred mail artists from thirty countries are currently communing with Shozo at the San Francisco Art Institute exhibition Gutai: Experimental Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Winter Burning Sun.The show runs until March 30th, and includes a room filled with works by mail artists honoring Shozo Shimamoto.

The exhibition at SFAI was curated by artist John Held, Jr. and Andrew McClintock, co-founder and publisher of the San Francisco Arts Quarterly, and was arranged well before Shozo Shimamoto’s death. John Held, Jr. has been meeting Shozo’s soul since the early 1980′s in various projects. Some in real time, others in mail art land. The latter is where I met Shozo, also in the early 80′s. At the time I had no idea he was a co-founder of one of the most significant avant-garde art movements in postwar Japan. That movement was/is Gutai.

Gutai is often translated as “concrete”. An alternate is “embodiment”. A group of young artists from the Kansai (Osaka-Kobe) region formed the Gutai group in 1954 under the guidance of older established artist Jiro Yoshihara. Yoshihiro was simultaneously CEO of Yoshihara Oil, a successful company which manufactured edible oils from soybeans and cottonseed.

Jiro Yoshihara was a self-taught artist. Pre WWII he painted in styles associated with modernism, including surrealism. During Japan’s descent into militarism, modernism was suppressed. Unlike some prominent artists working in the modernist vein Yoshihara didn’t switch to producing state-approved propaganda. He withdrew to a rural agricultural community where his work became private and inward.

Postwar, when much of the Japanese art world still considered European painting the vanguard, Yoshihara realized the importance of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Pollock’s highly kinetic techniques made painting a gestural performance– a concept also present in traditional Japanese art forms such as calligraphy.

Jiro Yoshihara encouraged young artists to directly engage their bodies with their materials. He also told them to “challenge, not imitate”* and “not to fake, or not to follow any others”**.

Like many avant-gardists of the period, Yoshihara was attempting to forge a new and independent artistic identity in the shadow of Japan’s recent totalitarian past and the ensuing occupation by the U.S.

Shozo Shimamoto joined Yoshihara’s studio in 1947 at the age of nineteen. When the idea arose to create an art movement inspired by Yoshihara’s concepts, Shozo suggested the name “Gutai”. When the Gutai group published its first journal in 1955, it was printed at Shozo’s house. The official Gutai manifesto was written by Jiro Yoshihiro in 1956. Among other things, it contained these lines:

Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other.

One of the earliest Gutai exhibitions was held in the Ashiya pine wood in Osaka. At the First Open Air Exhibition of Modern Art: to Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun, the sculptures and paintings of the Gutai group were displayed in the open air, subject to weather. Shozo Shimamoto exhibited a perforated metal sheet painted white on one side, blue on the other. In the evening a lamp was lit behind the sheet; the effect echoing the starry sky above. The work was called Ana– the Kanji character for “hole”.

Shozo Shimamoto began working on his series Ana in the late 1940′s; an early piece apparently won him his place in Yoshihara’s studio. The Ana works employed various methods of surface erosion, a technique which began with an accident (an unintended tear) then blossomed into conscious exploration.

As well as producing works on canvas, paper, and less traditional surfaces Gutai artists utilized music, film and recorded sound. They also threw their bodies into their work, staging eye-popping art events such as Kazua Shirago’s Challenging Mud; in which the stripped-down Shirago dove into several tons of a wet mix of plaster and cement, twisting and flourishing his body like a paint brush.

Walk This Way

At a Gutai exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo, Shozo Shimamoto presented Please Walk on Here, a twisting path of wooden boards on a system of springs. It was very difficult to walk on. At the same space in October, 1956, he staged Bottle Crash Experiment. A canvas was placed on the floor with a rock in the middle. Bottles of pigment were flung at the rock, shattering color every which way.

Then there was Cannon. In which plastic bags of color were loaded into a five-meter cannon and shot onto a huge canvas…

The artists of Gutai, along with artists working in avant-garde groups and collectives in postwar Tokyo, expanded upon and in some cases anticipated such now-familiar art memes as conceptual art, action painting, installations, earthworks, happenings, and performance art.

Gutai, as well as Tokyo’s avant-garde movements, attracted international attention and strongly influenced experimental artists in the west. The influence flowed both ways in a snap, crackle, Pop of creative electricity.

Mail Art and Beyond

In 1972, Gutai founder Jiro Yoshihara died. During his final years he produced a series of paintings focused on circles, which have been described as “reminiscent of satori, the enlightenment of Zen”.

After Yoshihara’s death the Gutai group, which had become less active and prone to factionalism, broke up. Many of Japan’s postwar avant-garde groups came and went in the blink of an eye. The Gutai group lived far longer than most.

Shozo Shimamoto continued to be tremendously productive, his works and performances reaching audiences in many countries. The spirit of Gutai continued to inspire him, including its ethos of artists putting their bodies on the line. Example: Shozo invited other artists to draw, write, or place objects on his shaved head. Films were projected on it as well. The collaborations were photographed. Shozo also turned his dome project into mail art. Sending photo copy pictures of his head to mail artists, with invitations to decorate. He laughed when copies of his copies reached him with the same invitation.

A few words re mail art. Definitions are legion, as are mail artists. This is from a piece I wrote in 2002:

Mail art started simply, roughly five decades ago. A handful of artists, when sending each other mail, began making their envelopes and post cards an extension of their work. Not only did they trade art by mail but they played with the very process, adding fantasy postage stamps, sending serial image postcards and building elaborate visual jokes. Some projects were like chain letters, travelling from artist to artist– collaborations that crossed thousands of miles and took years to complete. Over time more and more artists joined in. By the early 80′s, mail artists numbered in the hundreds of thousands…

Mail art was a travelling show, visible to all along the way. It leaped out of the gallery and into everyday life. Though mail art sometimes appeared on gallery walls and enhanced artists’ careers, careerism was never its main point. Love moved mail art. It was fun. It was free. Motivations increasingly inexplicable in the culture at large.”

By the mid 1970′s, Shozo Shimamoto was secretary general of the Artists’ Union (AU) in Osaka. He was a chief representative for mail art, which he felt embodied the spirit of Gutai. He wrote the following about Gutai and mail art in a book of his work titled AH, published in 1981 by the Japan Art Press Center:

…I was determined to refuse or defy the expression of authority as seen in works of art not only in Europe but also elsewhere in the world. What inspired me and encourage me most in this effort was “GUTAI” (pronounced “gootie”), whose spirit is embodied in the activities of “mail art”, a form of expression campaigned for by the Artists Union today.

As said, I met Shozo via mail art in the early ’80′s. At that time almost anything could make it through the mail. No War on Terror raged; fear of odd objects had not yet infected the post office. I received many wonderful– and sometimes outrageous– things from mail artists around the world. And surprise surprise, most delicate non-enveloped pieces arrived in fine condition. Including a piece by Shozo Shimamoto from his series focused on the Japanese character for “A”.

While corresponding with Shozo, I was working on a series of copy-art portraits of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong). The portraits, retrospectively titled My Own Private Mao, were collaged from vintage propaganda from the Peoples Republic of China, plus various pop culture sources– including porn from American and Japanese mens’ magazines. I was struck by the similarities between propaganda and pornography, such as the use of rote images to stoke/stroke desire for a state of perfect satisfaction. Some of my pieces countered Warhol’s comment-free celebrity portraits of Mao (though China has recently detected some comment ), others riffed on abstraction by recombining Mao’s features (wart and all) ad infinitum. The latter involved extensive recombinations of photo copies. Think copies of copies of copies. A technique inspired by being broke; I wanted to use every copy I made, even the test ones.

In the mid 1980′s, Shozo Shimamoto arranged a show of my Mao series at the AU gallery. Afterwards he sent me a photo of the show with a letter commenting on its popularity and requesting that the works remain in the gallery’s archive. It was tremendously exciting to see the Maos displayed in a country so far away.

Over several years, Shozo Shimamoto sent me a number of things. Including AH, the book containing his thoughts on Gutai and mail art. In those days it was hard to find much information about Gutai in English.*** But Shozo’s work, as displayed in the book, conveyed much about its spirit. Though somewhat mysterious due to cultural differences, the book still spoke volumes. Often about beauty detected in, and added to, common and  damaged sources.

The gestural “hand” of Shozo, as displayed in reproductions of pieces he’d painted, or applied color to in some other fashion, was bold and generous. The colors themselves were dazzling. Pictured works included examples from his “A” series, and from a shorter series called Uzamaki (Whirlpool), which he made by pouring colors onto canvas and letting the colors separate according to their individual density.

Eventually I drifted out of mail art (though I still do an occasional piece) and concentrated on individual pieces and later, on writing about the gold dust twins of political corruption and real estate fraud. But I have a collection of works by the mail artists with whom I corresponded. Shozo Shimamoto’s book is a particularly treasured item. For the last 10 years I’ve kept my collection in archival boxes in a climate controlled storage unit. Safe as houses.

But as we all know post-housing bubble, houses aren’t safe…

A few years ago a storm caused a partial roof collapse at the storage facility. My unit wasn’t severely damaged but did get some flooding. Among the damaged items, Shozo Shimamoto’s book AH.

At first I thought it was a goner. But as I turned the book’s damp, water-stained pages I determined to save it. It was still a thing of beauty. Many of the pages were stuck together by rain water; I slid sheets of wax paper between ones that weren’t and waited till the book was totally dry. Even then some pages were still melded together and despite being handled delicately, tore when separated. Water damage was visible throughout. Yet the more I looked at the book the more the damages started seeming like additions, not ruination. As if a collaboration had taken place between nature and Shozo Shimamoto.

After the storm Shozo’s book lived on my desk. I often found myself looking at it.

Last Autumn I learned that an upcoming show in San Francisco would be honoring Shozo Shimamoto and Gutai. Curators John Held, Jr. and Andrew McClintock were inviting mail artists all over the world to contribute. This was good news; I was glad to get a chance to honor Shozo. Not only because he’d been so generous to me, but because he influenced me deeply in the past and thanks to his collaboration with nature, was doing so again. My contribution to the show included copies of the “damaged” pages from AH.

A few weeks after I sent my contribution off to San Francisco, I received a letter from John Held, Jr. telling me Shozo Shimamoto had died.

When researching this piece I learned that over his lifetime Shozo Shimamoto produced a huge body of work. Of which I’ve only referenced a tiny amount, mainly pre 1990. I also came across some of his writings, thankfully in English translation. Such as Art is Astonishment and Potatoes with Worms are Ticklish. Then there’s this exchange from an interview posted at the Associazione Shozo Shimamoto in Italy:

Interviewer: While reconstructing the Gutai years, you said that the driving force was the idea that art is supposed to be completely free. What meaning exactly does the word free hold in your concept of art?

Shozo: During the war, freedom did not exist for us. After the war we were given our freedom back and were initially taken aback by it, but we later learned, more than anything else, the extraordinary nature of freedom. Life is full of problems, but freedom is the key to happiness. It was a tremendous pleasure to express freedom through art.

In the same interview Shozo talks about his commitment to pacifism, which he expressed through many major art projects. In 1996 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by artist and publisher Bern Porter, who was also a committed pacifist. Before WWII, Porter worked as a physicist on cathrode ray tube technology. During the war he did uranium separation work on the Manhattan Project. He quit after Hiroshima was bombed.

As well as translations of Shozo’s writings, I came across excerpts from the Gutai manifesto written by Jiro Yoshihiro. Including these words about the beauty found in damaged things:

Yet what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life?

I’m very grateful to have met Shozo Shimamoto in the land of mail art and to have encountered him again through the pages of his collaboration with nature. I’ll continue to visit his soul. Which mingles with the spirit of Gutai forever and ever.

*Asia Art Archive Chair Jane DeBeoise in conversation with art historian Reiko Tomii, on the occasion of a historical investigation of Shiraga Kazuo’s work, Challenging Mud.

**Whitestone Gallery, Jiro Yoshihara  

***These days it’s much easier, thanks to burgeoning interest in Gutai and other avant-garde movements active in postwar Japan. Along with Gutai: Experimental Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Winter Burning Sun at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC just wrapped Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, and the Guggenheim Museum is currently presenting Gutai: Splendid Playground.

by David Solomonoff

Recently sci-fi author Karl Schroeder speculated that advanced alien civilizations might be difficult to detect because their advanced technology had become indistinguishable from nature. Biomimicry is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems — and may give us insight into how such an alien civilization could evolve.

One example of biomimicry is an an indoor navigation system (IPS) developed by researchers in Finland.

Many fish and migratory birds can detect differences in magnetic field strengths, which vary around the globe, allowing them to navigate over extremely long distances. For first time in any animal, scientists have isolated the individual magnetic cells in a rainbow trout that respond to these fields. The magnetism was tens to hundreds of times stronger than researchers expected, suggesting that the fish may be able to detect not only the direction of North based on magnetism, but small differences in magnetic field strength for detailed information about precise latitude and longitude.

Now researchers from the University of Oulu in Finland have created an indoor navigation system using the Earth’s innate magnetic field to ascertain your position to an accuracy of between 0.1 and 2 meters. Every square inch of Earth emits a magnetic field which is modulated by man-made concrete and steel structures. If you have a map of these magnetic fields, and a magnetometer (compass), accurate navigation is very simple indeed — all you need to make a magnetic field map, or to navigate one, is a modern smartphone.

Almost every smartphone has a built-in magnetometer, just so your phone knows which direction you’re facing in — but this sensor is apparently sensitive enough to create magnetic field maps that have an accuracy of 10 centimeters. IndoorAtlas, the company spun off by the university to market and sell the tech has an API so software developers can create apps that react to your movements. Uses could range from the banal — displaying targeted advertising on your smartphone when you enter a store — to artificial vision for the blind and for robots in low-light environments.

But ultimately the effect of such extensions to our senses will go beyond the immediate applications – they could create a radically different body image and sense of self.

by David Solomonoff

Detail, Amazing Stories cover, Malcom H. Smith, 1948

Space.com reports “Space tourists may soon be able to pay their own way to the moon onboard old Russian spacecraft retrofitted by a company based in the British Isles.

“The spaceflight firm Excalibur Almaz estimates that it can sell about 30 seats between 2015 and 2025, for $150 million each, aboard moon-bound missions on a Salyut-class space station driven by electric hall-effect thrusters.

In another private spaceflight initiative, the nonprofit B612 Foundation announced a campaign to fund and launch a space telescope to hunt for potential killer asteroids — a campaign they portrayed as a cosmic civic improvement project.

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation’s chairman and CEO, estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars would have to be raised to fund the project, but said he was “confident we can do this.”

William S. Burroughs said that “language is a virus from outer space.” At io9, George Dvorsky speculates at another type of danger from space – malware from an ET civilization:

…We should probably be more than a little bit wary of receiving a signal from a civilization that’s radically more advanced than our own.

When we spoke to SETI-Berkeley’s Andrew Siemion, he admitted that SETI is aware of this particular risk, and that they’ve given the issue some thought. When we asked Siemion about the possibility of inadvertently receiving or downloading a virus, he stressed that the possibility is extraordinarily low, but not impossible.

“Our instruments are connected to computers, and like any computers, they can be reprogrammed,” he warned.

Like Siemion, Milan Cirkovic also believes that the risk of acquiring something nasty from an ETI is very real. But he’s a bit more worried. Alien invaders won’t attack us with their spaceships, he argues – instead, they’ll come in the form of pieces of information. And they may be capable of infiltrating and damaging or subverting our computing networks, in a manner that’s similar to the computer viruses we’re all too familiar with.

“If we discard anthropocentric malice, it seems that the most probable response is that they have evolved autonomously in a network of an advanced civilization – which may or may not persist to this day.” If this is the case, speculated Cirkovic, these extraterrestrial viruses would probably just replicate themselves and subvert our resources to further transmit themselves across the Galaxy. In other words, the virus may or may not be under the control of any extraterrestrial civilization – it could be an advanced AI that’s out of control and replicating itself by taking over the broadcast capabilities of each civilization it touches.

After the end of the Cold War it seemed like the Space Race was dead, replaced by a much more Earth-bound and risk-adverse attitude. Humanity’s first encounter with an ET could be the accidental introduction of a terrestrial biological virus into an alien biosphere via a contaminated unmanned probe – or even a human-generated computer virus. But the rewards always outweighed the risks – both in terms of knowledge and resources to be gained – and the self-actualization from taking on big challenges. The fact that space exploration is back in the news reflects a return to a heroic and transformative vision of humanity as much as it does technical accomplishment.

by Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

I loathe presidential election years. Let me count the ways.

1. Everything is subject to partisan spin. If pollen triggers hay fever, flaks din that the other party did it. The media echoes the act. (The story of O is getting an extra loud yodel!) Worse yet, so do boots on the ground. Hitherto charming intelligent friends hit the social media streets loaded with dogma. Your email gets clogged with petitions urging you to tell the left/right fanatics in the White House/Congress/Temple of Dagon that you won’t tolerate their war on business/women/the cosmos.

2. Politics trump friendship. I know someone who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 (as I did) and was cut dead for a decade. His friends blamed him for Al Gore’s defeat. Go figure why they didn’t blame Gore.

3. Presidential elections turn thoroughly modern Millies & Mikes into medieval hysterics. The devil is supposed to have left the secularized building. Yet he surfaces every four years as the candidate of the other party. Quoting a friend in New Jersey: “Vote for whoever you like. But don’t tell me the other guy eats babies.”

4. There is no real humor in Mudville. Only partisan sallies. (Did ya hear the one about Sarah Pelosi?) A true sense of the absurd is an unwelcome guest at partisan parties. Could be worse tho. Totalitarians 86 it. Like, totally.

5. In election years the effort to shape reality by limiting language and subverting meaning ramps up. (See Newspeak for basic theory.) The publics’ flirtation with “outsider” candidates such as Donald Trump and Herman Cain reflects weariness with parsing and PC patter. Better a plainspoken zany than one who hides his strobe light under a bushel.

6. Brain dead hyperbole becomes the norm. This year’s zombie meme: “The War On”. Followed by whatever will rile The Base. But is limiting funding for morning-after birth control or raising taxes on the wealthy really the same as being bombed to smithereens or starving in the rubble of a ruined country?

7. The social issue boom-car pounds 24/7. This year’s divisive device doesn’t have much sub woof. Same sex marriage matters to its fervent supporters and opponents but frankly my dear, most people don’t give a damn. They don’t gasp with admiration or outrage when candidates strike a pose pro or con, they just wish they’d stop voguing for the media. The economy is a dry subject (dangerous to boot) but anything about sex– Hoohah!

8. None of the above tops the horror the horror of hearing candidates wax folksy on TV. When these ultimate entitled elitists drop letters from words, call people “folks”, and reference decisions made by “American families sitting round the kitchen table” my flesh creeps. I recently saw VP Joe Biden doing the populist doo. My hands were full of hot pots (I was in an actual kitchen) and I couldn’t reach the remote in time. Move over Chucky, Pinhead, and assorted killer clowns. The nightmare of Farmer Joe is seared in my brain.

According to pundits, coolness is a major factor in this year’s presidential race. If so, Ron Paul should have done better in the primaries. He doesn’t do dialect. On the leftover front, if Mitt promises to keep droning away in characterless cadences he just might get my vote. I hate candy corn that much.

by Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

Farewell Christopher Hitchens. Gone but not forgotten. A memorial for Hitchens (he died in December) was held in late April in New York City. The New York Times announcement of the event touched on some high points of Hitchens’ career, including his 20 year stint as columnist at Vanity Fair. It also mentioned that Hitchens “had no compunction about jabbing his pen into sacred figures, like Mother Teresa, or ripe targets, like Henry Kissinger.” Not mentioned was the jab Hitchens gave President Bill Clinton. But then, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wasn’t a jab, it was a dissection. CSI with razor wit and moral scalpel.

No One Left to Lie To was originally published in 1999. Other editions followed and– silver lining to a cloud– it’s been reissued in light of Hitchens’ death. I just read it for the first time. A word of caution; reading No One Left aloud while a passenger in a moving vehicle is extremely dangerous. (It should probably be outlawed like texting while driving.) While zooming along the Thruway recently, my husband almost swerved off the road laughing as I read Hitchens’ skewer of a scene from Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village…

One morning back in 1986, Bill, Hill, and child Chelsea were sitting round the breakfast table in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. Hill was explaining to Chelsea that Daddy was going to run for governor again. Saying that if he won “we would keep living in this house and he would keep trying to help people. But first we have to have an election”. The nasty part (besides the necessity of an election) was that bad people would be telling lies about Daddy to try to stop him from being re-elected:

‘Like most parents, we had told her that it was wrong to lie, and she struggled with the idea, saying over and over, “Why would people do that?” I didn’t have an answer for that one. (I still don’t.)’

It Takes a Village was published in 1996. That Hillary was still pondering why people lie at that late date seems to support Christopher Hitchens’ perception of her as “quite devoid of reflective capacity”.

When No One Left to Lie To first appeared a major flash point was Hitchens’ assertion, which he swore to in an affidavit during the impeachment process, that Sidney Blumenthal, prominent journalist and senior advisor to Bill Clinton, tried feeding him (Hitchens) a line about Monica Lewinsky being a delusional stalker who’d been “threatening” the president. (This was before Bill’s precious bodily fluids were found on Monica’s blue dress.) Blumenthal swore under oath he said no such thing.

Incidentally– or not– the question of Blumenthal as a Clinton funnel to the press arose again during the 2008 presidential race via a rumor that Blumenthal, who was affiliated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was leaking negative info about Barack Obama.

Sidney Blumenthal and Christopher Hitchens were professional friends. They also shared a background on the left. Hitchens was deeply disappointed in Blumenthal’s willingness to toss aside ethics and ideology in order to protect Bill Clinton. In general, Hitchens was appalled by the willingness of so many liberals to do likewise. The calculating fealty of party hacks wasn’t surprising. What bothered him profoundly were the delusions and moral evasions of those who felt that in protecting Clinton, they were protecting progressive liberalism.

The dissection of Bill (and Hill) by Hitchens in No One Left to Lie To was particularly irksome to Clinton defenders because it didn’t come from a member of the vast right wing conspiracy, but from someone who believed Clinton’s policies, foreign and domestic, betrayed liberal ideals. Hitchens also believed Bill Clinton’s political character was rotten to the core and that his sex scandals reflected that rot. Hence they were not purely personal and were open to scrutiny.

Finally, Hitchens believed the protective coloring Clinton received from the left helped him pull off the biggest lie of all; his lionization as Man of the People.

Clinton’s non-qualifications for that title are laid out extensively in No One Left. Among other things, Hitchens cited Clinton’s wag-the-dog bomb drops in Sudan and Iraq, his pandering to the middle class while whittling down welfare, and his embrace of capital punishment (in particular, his personal oversight of the execution of brain damaged Rickey Ray Rector) in order to dodge the Dukakis soft on crime bullet. Financial corruption and cronyism? No need to cover miles of familiar ground. Let’s just say Hitchens ran it down.

As for the sex scandals, Hitchens stressed abuse of power. As Arkansas attorney general and governor, and as president of the U.S., Bill Clinton consistently hit on women who were beneath him socially and susceptible to pressure. After the lovin’, Bill (and Hill) were never reluctant to go to war against inconvenient women. Enlisting official colleagues and political connections as needed.

One of the most searing sections in No One Left to Lie To deals with Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of nursing home operator Juanita Broaddrick in 1978, when Bill was Attorney General of Arkansas (the state’s chief law enforcement officer) and making his first run for governor. Hitchens lays out a convincing case for believing Broaddrick. Read it and weep. Or not.

Disclosure: In the 1970′s, I did volunteer work at several rape crisis centers. As a councilor, most of the stories I heard were totally believable. A few seemed to contain elements of falsehood. When Broaddrick first went public with her charges in 1999, I didn’t immediately assume Bill Clinton’s other scandals made him capable of rape. But after seeing Broaddrick tell her story on TV, reading pro and con accounts, and comparing her to women I’d known as a councilor, I believed her. My own experience of rape (in the 70s, most rape crisis centers were staffed by rape survivors) made that conclusion extra disturbing.

Also disturbing was how little the possibility that Broaddrick’s story was true mattered to Clinton’s defenders on the left. These were the people who were supposed to be pro-woman. Saying rape wasn’t about sex but power. Decrying the social stigma that kept women silent. Urging them to come forward, promising support and belief. Juanita Broaddrick might well have asked “Ain’t I a woman?”

The chapter in No One Left titled Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office? closes with this: “the mute reception of Jaunita Broaddrick’s charges illuminates the expiring, decadent phase of American liberalism.”

Before wrapping the chapter, Christopher Hitchens had a high time describing how presidential candidate Al Gore dithered and dissembled when a woman in the audience at a 1999 campaign event asked him if he believed Juanita Broaddrick.

When Hitchens was good, he was very very good. But he did have bad hair days…

Hitchens’ anti-religious writings too often read like screeds. One picks up a whiff of obsession. And his support for the war in Iraq was rife with the same types of moral evasions he derided in Clinton’s enablers. Hitchens’ passion for truth-above-all went south. That 9/11 was used by the Bush administration as an excuse to launch a war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack mattered not. If the American public was manipulated into supporting that war through lies about WMD and images of incipient mushroom clouds, the end justified the means.

This from the man who wrote Why Orwell Matters.

Which by the way, is an excellent book. And as the memory holes open around our feet, a perfect election year read.

by David Solomonoff

Recently two new digital cameras were announced, the Lytro, a new “light field” camera that creates refocusable digital photos, and the Holga D which is “inspired from the extremely popular cult of Holga and other toy cameras”.  More than two new gizmos boasting a few more megapixels, these two devices illustrate two radically different visions of how humans use technology – and how technology uses humans.

The initial appeal of the Lytro is the elimination of shutter delays and the need to focus. But the true impact of light field photography will be when computational photography goes mainstream and the key technology inside – an array of micro-lenses that slice up a 3D scene into multiple images – turns up in more devices.

So the long-term benefit of light field photography is not in the creation of images that humans will actually view, but rather in the potential to convert patterns of light into raw data that can be analyzed by computers. The uses could range from facial recognition for law enforcement to astronomers looking for evidence of life on distant planets.

The Holga D was first announced as an open hardware project on the blog of industrial designer Saikat Biswat. Currently only a highly-detailed concept rather than a shipping product, he has had a huge amount of interest in funding and building it.

The appeal of the Holga D is exactly the opposite of the Lytro. It emulates an inexpensive, analog, film toy camera, known for the unpredictable images caused by flaws in its lens. It lacks a display so as to recreate the delayed gratification – and risk – of analog photography. “Your photographs remain mysterious until you download the images,” boasts Biswat.

The resulting images from the Holga D or the analog film cameras that inspired it, will sometimes be beautiful and sometimes awful – to the humans who view them. A musical analogy would be to when musicians first began to experiment with distortion and feedback effects. These effects are now standard – built into amplifiers and effects pedals with great reliability and precision. But the excitement when neither the performer or audience quite knew what would happen next is harder to duplicate.

The goal of the Lytro is that of a greater-than-human technological omniscience coming from a certainty of purpose. It’s the certainty that a programmer gets from a list of requirements before embarking on a software project. The Holga D exploits risk and unpredictability for a type of artistic exploration that doesn’t require advance knowledge of the end result. It’s more like life in that way.

In the end one wonders if the experience of the Holga D might benefit the user in a way that the Lytro never will be able to.

by Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

I rarely come on all Catholic. I don’t feel entitled. My Catholicism was acquired via conversion; defending the faith seems best left to those who’ve held it in their heart all along and whose knowledge is more profound. Plus, I’m not a good Catholic in practice. Raised an atheist, I never set foot in a church until well into adulthood. I believe– but I’m deficient when it comes to habits of worship.

Then there’s my reluctance to attend church locally. Complaints by victims of pedophile priests were swept under the rug for decades by the Albany Diocese. (I live in the Albany, New York area.) Unlike better Catholics who rise above the failings of human beings and connect with the eternal Church, I get hung up on the actions and inactions of its temporal leaders. My bad. I mean that sincerely. I only hope God cuts me some slack for being slack.

Being a slacker doesn’t mean I don’t notice that anti-Catholic bigotry has become a ho hum staple of pop culture. Not to worry tho. The Church has outlasted many a meat dress. Far more disturbing are the anti-Catholic actions of our government. As in, the effort by President Obama and his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to force Catholic institutions to provide employee coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs– medical procedures antithetical to Catholic belief.

For the record, I agree with the Catholic Church about abortion. I don’t agree about before-the-fact contraception. This in no way tempers my being appalled by Obama’s attempt at a massive, unconstitutional expansion of government power into the realm of religion. Never thought I’d see the day when an American president, with the backing of many in his party and much of the mainstream media, would attempt to annex Catholicism. Or for that matter, any religion. Hubris, much?

The Church has clashed with, and outlasted, other big-headed heads of state with a sex beef. Prime example, Henry VIII. The Church has also clashed with war lovers. See George Bush II.

Dubya and crew were steamed when the Church wouldn’t declare the Iraq war a just war. Neoconservatives were all over the media, crowing that polls showed American Catholics were overwhelmingly for the war. In 2003, neocon Catholic pundit Michael Novak flew to Rome and tried to make Pope John Paul II see the light. No go. The war didn’t jive, theology-wise. A few years later, Pope Benedict XVI didn’t buy it either.

To Dubya’s credit, he never tried to force Catholic institutions to arm their employees.

In the 20th Century, Catholicism was targeted by totalitarian regimes– the most extreme practitioners of thuggery against religious freedom. Those regimes are gone; the Church is still standing. In the 1980′s, the Church stood with Eastern Europe as it moved from communism to democracy.  In Poland, Pope John Paul II threw the Church’s weight behind Solidarity, the labor-based mass movement that contributed mightily to the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time, conservatives called Catholicism their new best friend.

The Catholic Church never makes the right or the left happy for long. Just when the right thinks it has the Church in its freedom loving pocket, she goes and makes some annoying pronouncement about unfettered greed, economic disparity, and the rights of workers. And harps on the suffering of civilians bombed in the name of preventative war. Just when the left is priding itself on its love for humanity, the Church says something about our responsibility to protect the helpless and how there’s nothing more helpless than an unborn baby. Then tallies the huge number of unborn babies who’ve died on the altar of reproductive rights.

Back to the hubris thing–

Rush Limbaugh has a ginormous head. He recently opened it and spewed forth some trash talk about Sandra Fluke, former president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice at Georgetown University. Rush’s spew was in response to Fluke’s testimony in Congress as to why the Obama administration should force Catholic institutions such as Georgetown to provide coverage for medical treatments that violate Catholic beliefs. Ever the political opportunist, Rush is Catholic-friendly this election cycle.  With friends like that…

Rush Limbaugh is merely a meat dress. You can turn him off. Same goes for trash talkers on the other side. Turning off government-gone-wild is a whole lot harder. But thankfully, not impossible. Remember Solidarity and smile.

by David Solomonoff

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics today launched a consultation on the ethics of new types of technologies that ‘intervene’ in the brain, such as brain-computer interfaces, deep brain stimulation, and neural stem cell therapy.

Often developed for treatment of conditions including Parkinson’s disease, depression and stroke, they could also be used in military applications to develop weapons or vehicles that are controlled remotely by brain signals. Commercial possibilities in the gaming industry include computer games controlled by people’s thoughts.

“These challenge us to think carefully about fundamental questions to do with the brain: what makes us human, what makes us an individual, and how and why do we think and behave in the way we do,” Thomas Baldwin, Chair of the Council’s study and Professor of Philosophy at the University of York.

“For example if brain-computer interfaces are used to control military aircraft or weapons from far away, who takes ultimate responsibility for the actions? Could this be blurring the line between man and machine?” he said.

by David Solomonoff

With the closing of a specialty record shop in New Jersey, the New York Times announced the death of doo-wop, a form of R&B most popular in the 1950′s and early 60′s which featured  harmony vocals and romantic lyrics. Doo-wop was most often performed by African and/or Italian American working class youth and combined gospel and operatic elements.

As recently as the late eighties and early nineties, I remember doo-wop groups singing a cappella on street corners in the West Village for tourists.

Though the Times tends to dismiss almost anything working class and romantic as destined for the dustbin of history, they neglected to note some innovative musicians who performed or were heavily influenced by doo-wop including Brian Eno, here performing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” made famous by the Tokens in 1961:

… and Frank Zappa, who began his career singing doo-wop and continued to incorporate it into his music throughout his career:

by David Solomonoff

Former Virginia Govs. George Allen (R) and Tim Kaine (D) now face a feline foe. Hank’s a former street cat and political independent who advocates a job creation platform and “milk in every bowl.” According to his Twitter account, Hank is also passionate about the creation of a Privacy Bill of Rights and the protection of consumer data.

Such campaigns have even been successful in the past — Bosco Ramos, a black Labrador-Rottweiler mix, served as mayor of Sunol, Calif., from 1981-1990.

via HuffPo