Artes Visuales
>Una extraordinaria entrevista con Lucien Freíd – que casi nunca habla públicamente de su vida. Habla de su abuelo Sigmund, de Picasso, Francis Bacon, la reina, los mafiosos asesinos mellizos ingleses Kray. EX TRA OR DI NARIO.

How much do you think we can really know about a person from a portrait?
LF: Many people are inclined to look at portraits not for the art in them but to see how they resemble people. This seems to me a profound misunderstanding, which is nevertheless very interesting. For instance, when I was working on a self-portrait a few years ago, I was very pleased when the cleaning lady said she thought it was me when she came into the room. I like it if people say very contradictory things about my work: 'it's very ugly', 'it's very beautiful', 'do you get your models from an asylum?'

Telegraph UK, 24 sept. Quite often I wanted to hit people


Autores

>Leonard Cohen --quien Bono llama “nuestro Byron” – publica un nuevo libro de poemas, Book of Longing. Entre los versos hay una versión del poema de Constantine Cavafy's “El dios abandona Antonio”.

You who had the honour of her evening,And by that honour had your own restored - Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving. Alexandra leaving with her lord. As someone long prepared for the occasion; In full command of every plan you wrecked - Do not choose a coward's explanation that hides behind the cause and the effect.
Telegraph UK, 24 sept. Words by Leonard Cohen

>Una subasta de objetos que pertenecían a Lawrence de Arabia recaudo 264.00 libras

Guardian, 28 sept. Lawrence of Arabia mementoes fetch £264,000


> Una critica negativa de la nueva novela de John le Carré.

“Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. le Carré renders Salvo’s story with none of the nuance or chiaroscuro that distinguished his cold war Smiley novels. Instead, his detestation of the West’s neocolonial ambitions has led him, as it did in his 2004 novel, “Absolute Friends,” to write a high-minded but highly simplistic, black-and-white thriller, pitting some very good guys (i.e., Salvo and Hannah) against some very bad guys (in this case, a consortium of British politicians and multinational corporations, intent on mounting a coup in Congo to rob that long-suffering country of its mineral wealth).”
The New York Times, 26 sept. A Translator Searching for Words of His Own

> El critico de arte, biógrafo, hombre de letras australiano Robert Huges ha publicado sus memorias tituladas Things I didn’t know.
Hughes is, by his own rather defiant declaration, "completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense." He is, "after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today." He quite properly refuses to apologize for this: "I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area -- other than sports -- in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm." How right he is, and how vigorously he argues his case -- which is to say the case for informed judgment independent of fashion -- in this splendid book
Washington Post, 24 sept.The Standard Bearer
> El novelista ingles, Julian Barnes (El loro de Flaubert, La historia del mundo en diez capítulos y medio) acaba de publicar su novela # 20, una novela titulada 'Arthur and George'. A diferencia de Salman Rusdie o Martin Amis –novelistas ingleses de su generación—Barnes es difícil de clasificar. No tiene un tema o un estilo llamativo. Este perfil en el Telegraph UK explora, justamente, ese tema.

Telegraph UK, 23 sept. The inscrutable Mr Barnes

> Otras critica extremadamente favorables de la nueva novela –The Road-- de Cormac McCarthy, uno de los grandes novelistas estadounidenses de todo los tiempos. El periodista de guerra y escritor Michael Herr dijo una vez, “McCarthy solo se puede comparar con nuestros mejores autores, con Melvilla y Faulkner.” Apuesto fuerte: para mi gana el Nobel en Octubre.

Los Angeles Times, 24 sept. Unhappily ever after; NY Times, 25 sept.The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation


Ciencia

> El biólogo e historiador Jared Diamond popularizó la idea de que el colapse de la población de la Isla de Pascua fue causada por un abuso extremo de los recursos naturales de la isla; que en su obsesión de elevar a los Tótem la población destruyeron el ecosistema. De esta forma Diamond convierte la isla más remota del planeta en una metáfora para nuestro planeta.
American Scientist reporta sobre una teoría alternativa: una plaga de ratas.

American Scientist , oct/nov. Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island

> Avances en la neurociencia demuestran correlaciones directas entre la biología y el comportamiento moral. ¿Qué consecuencias tiene esto para la idea de voluntad propia?

Science & Spirit, sept. Ethics on the Brain

> Una critica del ultimo libro del biologo James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, que postula que la humanidad esta al borde de un cataclismo ecológico.

American Scientist, sept-oct. Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Gaia!

Cine


>Una breve nota en el Telegraph UK argumenta que el cine noir esta resurgiendo y que hasta la nueva pelicula de James Bond, Casino Royal, comparte características del género.
The cold-eyed man in the tuxedo is bathed in shadow; a gun hangs from his hand. Over his shoulder, a love-struck brunette in a ballgown gazes at the back of his head. One look at this image – a teaser poster for the forthcoming movie, Casino Royale – confirms two things: Bond is back, and so too is film noir.

Telegraph UK , 23 sept. Film noir is coming out of the shadows


> Un excelente ensayo en The Atlantic argumenta que el glamour en el cine ahora es el campo de los superhéroes. Atrás quedaron las Greta Garbo y Fred Astair para ser reemplazados por Spiderman y Batman.

If that sounds crazy, it’s because we tend to forget what glamour is really about. Glamour isn’t beauty or luxury; those are only specific manifestations for specific audiences. Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific, emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience’s hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy. The elements that create glamour are not specific styles—bias-cut gowns or lacquered furniture—but more general qualities: grace, mystery, transcendence. To the right audience, Halle Berry is more glamorous commanding the elements as Storm in the X-Men movies than she is walking the red carpet in a designer gown.

The Atlantic, oct. Superhero Worship


>La película del cómico Sacha Kohen, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” que se estrena en los EE.UU. el 3 de noviembre. El gobierno de Kazakhstan esta demente con furia ya que el personaje ingenuo, bruto, racista y misógino “es” de Kazakhstan. Hasta han pedido una audiencia especial con Bush para protestar la película.

Kazakhs Shrug at ‘Borat’ While the State Fumes


Cómics / Novelas Graficas

>La revista literaria universitaria Virginia Quarterly Review esta publicando, en entregas, la autobiografía de Art Spiegleman en formato comic.

Virginia Quarterly Review. Portrait of the artist as a young %@?*!

Ideas

> El biólogo ingles Richard Dawkins –autor del El gen egoísta—sacó un nuevo libro titulado The God Delusión.Allí destruye sistemáticamente a las religiones. Argumenta que fomentan a la guerra, el abuso de los niños, etcétera…
El reportaje incluye extractos del libro y un video de una entrevista con el biólogo.

BBC 2, 22 sept. The God Delusion


> Una ácida critica de Chomsky en el Wall Street Journal.

WSJ, 26 sept. Who Is Noam Chomsky?






> Una fascinante nota en el New York Times que relata una nueva disciplina académica que mezcla el urbanismo, la geografía, geología.

NY Times, 24 sept. Take Nature, Add Humans, Observe Results

Internet

> Un ensayo que traza los origenes de la cybercultura en la cultura hippie. Cita al visionario McLuhan, escribiendo en 1964
“Today we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” Buckminster Fuller proposed the idea of a Comprehensive Designer, a creator who would embody “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”
NY Times, 25sept. A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google

Insólito

>WIRED reporta que se han desclasificado algunos documentos que muestran que están leyendo los agentes del NSA, la agencia de seguridad nacional de los estados unidos.Entre los títulos están:"NSA in the Cyberpunk Future: A Somewhat Educated Guess at Things to Come" (1996), "I Was a Cryptologic Corporal" (1983), "Inference and Cover Stories" (1993), "Handy-Dandy Field Site History: Fifty Years of Field Operations, 1945-1995," "The Fallacy of the One-Time-Pad Excuse" (1969), "Meteor Burst Communications: An Ignored Phenomenon?" (1990) and "KAL 007 Shootdown: A View From (redacted)".Un título, particularmente interesante y disponible on-line es:"Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence"Este logro fue un producto del llamado Freedom of Information Act que permite solicitar documentos oficiales al gobierno de los estados unidos.El insólito y excelentísimo sito The Memory Hole se dedica a desenterrar tales documentos, y de hecho este descubrimiento sobre cual escribe WIRED fue hecho por The Memory Hole.No se lo pierdan. Es un festín para curiosos, paranoicos, historiadores y periodistas.
WIRED, 27 sept. Peek at NSA's Secret Reading List


Literatura
Se descubrió un poema inédito de Robert Frost, uno de los grandes escritores estadounidenses del siglo XX (Leyó un poema en la inaguaración presidencial de J.F.K)

Los Angeles Times, 28 sept. Obscure Frost poem is found