Moreintelligentlife.com

MEXICO'S HIDDEN BLACKS

Alexis Okeowo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:01:02 +0000

The black descendants of slaves in Mexico struggle against entrenched racism. Alexis Okeowo explores the so-called first free slave town in the Americas ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The first time I felt deeply uncomfortable being black was when I was a kid. My family had just moved to Alabama, and I was in a car with my father and my brother. A white woman with a harshly lined face and brown frizzy hair yelled out a racial slur as we drove by. Dad immediately put the car in reverse and drove over to her as she pumped gas at a filling station. "What did you say?" he demanded. She glared at him and refused to respond. Shocked into silence, my brother and I didn't say anything for the rest of the drive home.

The second time was in a quaint town in Mexico. I am a journalist living in Mexico City and I had decided to take a trip to Veracruz, where hundreds of thousands of African slaves had been brought by Spanish colonialists five centuries prior. I wanted to visit Yanga, a place that called itself "the first free slave town in the Americas". The town was named for Gaspar Yanga, a slave who had led a successful rebellion against the Spanish in the 16th century.

I had only just learned about Afro-Mexicans, the isolated descendants of Mexico's original slaves, who reside on the country's rural Pacific and Gulf Coasts. After months of research and a visit to the remote Afro-Mexican community on the Pacific Coast, where most of them live, I felt compelled to visit the Afro-Mexicans in Veracruz on the Gulf Coast. I ended up spending most of my time trying to figure out Yanga.

As I arrived in town, I peered out of my taxi window at the pastel-painted storefronts and the brown-skinned residents walking along the wide streets. "Where are the black Mexicans?" I wondered. A central sign proclaimed Yanga's role as the first Mexican town to be free from slavery, yet the descendants of these former slaves were nowhere to be found. I would later learn that most live in dilapidated settlements outside of town.

The next morning, I walked the few yards from my hotel to the town's library, my shirt sticking to my back in the heat. I had been told that the librarian was the best source of information about Yanga's history. While walking, I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the blinding sun, and also from the gaze of people in the roadside shops and central square. I had grown used to the attention in Mexico City, where blacks are a rarity, but this time it was different. The stares were cold and unfriendly, and especially unnerving in a town named for an African revolutionary.

"Mira, una negra," I heard people whisper to one another. "Look, a black woman."

"Negra! Negra!" taunted an old man with a shock of white hair under a tan sombrero. Surrounded by a group of men, he gazed at me with a big, toothy grin. He seemed to be waiting for me to come over and talk to him. Shocked, and suddenly transported to that one afternoon in Alabama, I shot him a dirty look and headed into the library's courtyard.

The notion of race in Mexico is frustratingly complex. This is a country where many are proud to claim African blood, yet discriminate against their darker countrymen. Black Mexicans complain that such bigotry makes it especially hard for them to find work. Still, I was surprised to feel like such an alien intruder in a town where I had hoped to feel something like familiarity.

Afro-Mexicans are among the poorest in the nation. Many are shunted to remote shantytowns, well out of reach of basic public services, such as schools and hospitals. Activists for Afro-Mexicans face an uphill battle for government recognition and economic development. They have long petitioned to be counted in Mexico's national census, alongside the country's 56 other official ethnic groups, but to little avail. Unofficial records put their number at 1m.

In response to activist pressure, Mexico's government released a study at the end of 2008 that confirmed that Afro-Mexicans suffer from institutional racism. Employers are less likely to employ blacks, and some schools prohibit access based on skin colour. But little has been done to change this. Afro-Mexicans lack a powerful spokesperson, so they continue to go unnoticed by the country's leadership.

"What we want is recognition of our basic rights and respect of our dignity," Rodolfo Prudente Dominguez, a top Afro-Mexican activist, said to me. "There should be sanctions against security and immigration agents who detain us, because they deny our existence on our own land."

If you have not heard of Mexico's native blacks, you are not alone. The story that has been passed down through generations is that their ancestors arrived on a slave boat filled with Cubans and Haitians, which sank off Mexico's Pacific coast. The survivors hid away in fishing villages on the shore. The story is a myth: Spanish colonialists trafficked African slaves into ports on the opposite Gulf coast, and slaves were distributed further inland. The persistence of this story explains the reluctance of many black Mexicans to embrace the label "Afro", and why many Mexicans assume black nationals hail from the Caribbean.

Colonial records show that around 200,000 African slaves were imported into Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries to work in silver mines, sugar plantations and cattle ranches. But after Mexico won its independence from Spain, the needs of these black Mexicans were ignored.

Some Afro-Mexican activists identify themselves as part of the African diaspora. Given their rejection from Mexican culture, this offers a more empowering cultural reference. But with no collective memory of slavery (it was officially abolished in Mexico in 1822), or of any time in Africa before then, Afro-Mexicans are considerably removed from their African roots.

"Bienvenida, welcome!" called out Andres, the librarian, as he guided me into a chair. Andres is not black, but he was the first person to make me feel comfortable in Yanga. He acted as if my presence was perfectly ordinary, probably because he is accustomed to African-American visitors who are curious about his research into slavery in Mexico.

During my visit, he was in the middle of teaching an art class to young children. He told me about the slave trade and African culture festivals in Veracruz while gluing together paper-maché masks. The kids smiled shyly at me.

"There's a lot of racism here against blacks, isn't there?" I asked him, still confused about the town's hostility.

"No, not really, we're all poor, that's the problem," he answered, brushing back his brown curly hair and laughing.

Before he finished his sentence, a black Mexican woman came up to us. She exchanged a few words with Andres, and then delicately took my hand in hers.

"Bienvenida", she said, before leaving.

After leaving the library, I decided to explore. I stopped in an office to ask directions from a group of Mexican men, who flirted valiantly before wishing me well. I wandered aimlessly, nearly melting in the heat. I brooded over Mexico's contradictory feelings about race. In a place where everyone is considered "mixed race", owing to the country's long colonial history, skin colour is clearly a symbol of status. Many Mexicans are generous and kind to me, viewing my otherness as interesting and lovely. Yet black Mexicans are often mistreated and ostracised. I think about this unsettling tension when I occasionally pass a black Mexican in Mexico City, and she gives me a slight, genuine smile.

(Alexis Okeowo is a writer based in Mexico City.)

Picture credit: Cornell University Library

TINA MODOTTI, VIEWER AND VIEWED

Yael Friedman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:44:08 +0000

Devotees of communism evoke a grim picture of stern and ascetic men and women in sparsely furnished rooms, free of bourgeois luxuries. And then there is the glamorous Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and political revolutionary. An exhibition of 35 of her photographs now on at New York's Throckmorton Fine Art gallery, "Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky", recalls the life and talent of this rare seductress.

Modotti was 16 when she left Italy for California, where she began her transformation from factory worker to bohemian ingénue. In Los Angeles, she met and modelled for Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography, who soon became her lover and mentor. He left his wife to be with Modotti, and in the early 1920s they ventured to Mexico, a country then brimming with artistic and political excitement.

Still reeling from a decade-long revolution, Mexico's politics were volatile. Painters and muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had joined with a host of radicalised expatriates to help lead the struggle for political and social reform. Modotti embraced this fusion of art and politics, and collaborated with the muralists in creating work with political intent. But Weston had little time for art in the service of politics. He rejected what he described as “too much sentimentality over the proletariat. Too much deification of the Indian.”

Taken between 1923 and 1930, Modotti’s sepia-tinted portraits of Mexican workers and expatriate revolutionaries are indeed romantic—beautiful, sturdy and idealistic. Yet we get the sense that her subjects aren't merely symbols—vacant and projection-ready—but real people. These photographs feel intimate and real.

Modotti could be heavy-handed in her political messaging, as with the still life "Bandolier, Corn and Sickle" (1927) and "Hands of a Washerwoman" (1928). But her elegant modernist compositions compensate for any overt symbolism. We are left with arresting shapes, forms and textures, the kind that are familiar to Weston's fans.

With time, Modotti's life grew more difficult and her health deteriorated. After she was falsely accused of helping to assassinate her Cuban revolutionary boyfriend, Julio Antonio Mella, she was expelled from the country. She lived in exile in Europe, and eventually made her way to Spain during its civil war. After the collapse of the Spanish Republican government in 1939, she returned to Mexico under an alias. In 1942, while riding in a taxi after a friend’s party, she suffered a heart attack and died. There were rumours of murder—was it the Stalinists? Her lover, Victorio Vidali? But most attributed her death to the hardships she had endured.

"Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky" is on view until March 6th at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York City

~ YAEL FRIEDMAN

Picture credit: "Woman of Tehuantepec (Carrying Jicapexle)", 1929

THE FEED: FEB 8TH

The Editors — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:25:29 +0000

Today's links:

An infuriating case for Mr Good Enough (Salon)

The Stonehenge saga (Guardian)

George Packer v Twitter (New Yorker)

The e-book price experiment (Wired)

Today's quote:

"I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to." ~ Douglas Coupland, interviewed by Deborah Solomon (New York Times Magazine)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

THE Q&A: ROB WALKER, CONSUMER, THINGAMABOB CONNOISSEUR

Ariel Ramchandani — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:15:12 +0000

Remember burying a time-capsule as a kid? These care packages to our future selves usually included a letter and any valuable possessions we could bear to part with: stickers, a mood ring, a key chain. How much would you pay for that mossy stuff now, and the letter explaining them? How much would those objects be worth to a stranger? The value of such things is complicated, and largely subjective. This is why I still have my Breyer horse collection, and why I would pay real money to have any of those time-capsules back.

Rob Walker, author of the book “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are” as well as the “Consumed” column for the New York Times Magazine, understands our compulsion to sentimentalise things. Together with Joshua Glenn, a fellow object lover (his books include "Taking Things Seriously"), Walker began the "Significant Objects Project", an experiment that tests the malleability of an object’s value. The project involves scouring thrift shops and yard sales for cheap thingamabobs, and then asking writers (such as Luc Sante, Lydia Millet, Ben Greenman, Neil Labute, Christopher Sorrentino, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker) to contribute stories about them. These objects are then posted on eBay with their invented stories (and a disclaimer about their true provenance).

The first volume of “Significant Objects”, which debuted over the summer, swiftly proved Messrs Walker and Glenn’s theory that stories add immeasurable value to objects. So for the second volume, they have “decided to do something useful with the information,” Walker says. This time proceeds will be donated to 826 National, a non-profit that tutors young people in writing and storytelling. The sale ends this week; over $1,700 has been raised so far.

The short stories in this new collection are lovely. Some allude to an object’s brush with fame (James Dean and Michael Jackson make cameo appearances); others suggest heartache, loneliness and the occasional bar fight. Each story casts a strange spell on the objects, and on our perception of them (something Leanne Shapton managed beautifully with her book last year, "Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry"). Here Rob Walker answers a few questions over e-mail about what it feels like to sell other people’s junk for profit.

More Intelligent Life: “Significant Objects” has picked up some speed. So when does this project end?

Rob Walker: Volume 2 (cycle of 50 stories with proceeds to 826 National) will end the week of Feb 8th-12th. Or that's when the last five stories are published, each auction lasts a week, so the last auction closes February 19th.

Our last week of Volume 2 is a team-up with Underwater New York, another online lit project—we'll actually be selling found objects that the editors of UNY got from the beach of Deadhorse Bay, Brooklyn. The writers that last week are Deb Olin Unferth, Chris Adrian, Kathryn Davis, Robert Lopez and Tom McCarthy.

We are planning a Volume 3, another batch of 50 stories, raising money for a different nonprofit, Girls Write Now.

MIL: Where did the original idea come from?

RW: Both Josh and I already spend too much time thinking about value and objects, I guess. There is one minor detail of interest in the back story of S.O.: I broke a coffee cup I'd bought as a souvenir on a trip with my now-wife, early in our relationship. I was very sad to have ruined it, but I realised it only had value to me—it was just a coffee cup from some diner—because of the story behind it. This got me thinking about whether stories for worthless-seeming objects could be invented, and whether that would increase their value. That led to conversations with Josh that culminated in Significant Objects: We would buy cheap thingamabobs from yard sales and thrift stores and the like, recruit creative writers to invent stories about them, then put the object up for auction on eBay with the invented provenance as its description. (It's important to note that we were explicit about the invented nature of the Significance; there was no hoaxing.)

MIL: Are you surprised by the results?

RW: We expected that the stories would increase the value of the objects—but we were very surprised by how much. The first round involved 100 objects/stories, and in the end we sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.51. (The money went to the writers in Volume 1, by the way.) That's a Significance Markup of more than 2,700%. While nothing we bought cost us more than $4 (and most were a buck), several objects sold for more than $100. We did not think the prices would go that high. I still have old e-mail exchanges between Josh and me from the first week, as we were very excited to see auctions reach, say, $15.

The average prices seem to be a bit higher in Volume 2, perhaps because of the charity angle (easier to rationalise spending $50 or $100 on a tchotchke if the money goes to a good cause?) or possibly because we just have more readers as time goes on, and thus more bidders, and thus higher prices.

Another surprise was that recruiting writers didn't turn out to be as hard as we'd imagined it would be. In fact we've had lots of volunteers.

MIL: Do you have a particular favourite object, story, or both?

RW: Oh that's very hard. I'm tempted to start naming stories and objects but the problem is I won't be able to stop. I'll mention one recent stunt we did: We recently sold a "Mystery Object." That is we had a story (written by Ben Greenman) but we did not disclose what the object was. We just showed a picture of the package we'd be mailing it in. It sold for $103.50. I thought that was pretty great. (We revealed the object after the auction ended.)

MIL: Do you think that we find some items inherently more valuable? Have you noticed that certain types of items pull in good money, or is it completely story dependent?

RW: Well, I'd say results on that have been somewhat mixed. A few items I do think were particularly cool—the Hawk Ashtray that William Gibson wrote about, the Smile Mug that Ben Greenman wrote about, and several others. But on the other hand we got decent prices even for stuff that I at least found aesthetically suspect—a crumb sweeper, for instance. I would say the object itself is a factor, and so is the story, but also probably the author (a famous author's story is likely to get more attention because of his or her fan base, which might lead to more bidding). I think the story of the project itself plays some roll. Some of our regular readers just love the idea of the project.

MIL: Why are we are willing to pay more for something with a story?

RW: People value stories, we're drawn to stories, we like to hear them and I think crucially we also like to tell them. Surely one of the things that makes people want to own these objects is the idea of some random weird figurine on the mantle, and being asked, "What's that?" and having this amazing answer to give about how an author wrote this story about it, and winning it on eBay, and so on. Josh has observed that often it's the oddest knick-knack on the shelf that has the best story. I think we play into that tradition. (If tradition is the right word there.)

MIL: How do you think the auction format changes the amount people are willing to spend?

RW: The truth is we used eBay simply because it was convenient and easy, we weren't really thinking that part through. But having done this for a while, I think the usual observations about auctions apply—our bidders can be competitive, and the transparency of the whole process works to gradually convince observers that, well, other people are bidding and playing along, which sort of gives them permission, or an excuse, to join in, too.

Another element of this that I've been thinking about a lot lately is that because the auctions are online, and the whole project is online, I wonder if that hasn't worked in our favour, and made the project into something it wouldn't have been if we'd, say, done a single-event live auction. I think for some of our readers and bidders anyway, they recognise that they are really part of this. Some have even sent us pictures of their purchases in their "new homes", and it's great for us and for the writers to see how things get displayed and so on. So I think all of that adds to the value of the project overall, which in turn makes every artefact of the project more valuable.

Perhaps this will sound odd, but I believe the value we've created with this is quite genuine—who wouldn't want to own one of the actual Significant Objects?

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: Significant Objects

JUST MARRY HIM?

Adelle Waldman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:40:22 +0000

Lori Gottlieb is raising a furore among women with her new book "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough". But her original article in the Atlantic provoked some sympathy from Adelle Waldman, whose response is republished here ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The Sex and the City movie was not the only big event in the public conversation about women and marriage last spring. For the thinking woman, the vapid romance flick likely took a backseat to the real head scratcher: Lori Gottlieb's controversial essay, "Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough", published in the Atlantic in March.

Don't wait for true love, Gottlieb argued--not if you are a woman in your 30s and you want to have a family. Romantic passion is not as important as a second pair of hands for diaper-changing and meal preparation. A single mom in her early 40s who got pregnant by artificial insemination, Gottlieb has earned some street cred on the subject.

If I had read her essay five years ago, I would have been scornful. Now, I'm 31 and a lot more sympathetic. I'm no longer able to write her off as one of those bitter marriage-crazed women I was sure I'd never be.

Gottlieb gets a lot right about what it's like to be a heterosexual, middle-class, single woman in her 30s, and how different it is from being a heterosexual, middle-class single woman in her 20s. What took me by surprise is the extent to which the change is palpable, even for women like me, who haven't been planning their dream wedding since girlhood; who are in fact ambivalent about babies and marriage.

The truth about turning 30 is that the question of marriage, and by extension dating, becomes much more angst-ridden. "Every woman I know," wrote Gottlieb, "no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure--feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried." I think panic overstates it, let alone desperation, but Gottlieb is right that something big changes for women around that age.

Dating, however little fun you thought it was in your 20s, becomes even more fraught. It is not just heartbreak over a particular guy or general loneliness that keeps you up at night. Those will still be there, but on top there will be a new worry, the one about winding up alone. When you were younger, that sounded preposterous and melodramatic--because no matter how upset you were in the moment, deep down you believed you'd find your Mr Right eventually. Now, it seems like "eventually" may be too late.

*****

This is a sad moment of reckoning, perhaps especially for smart, independent-minded women. Surely such anxieties over finding a husband belonged to a different sort of woman: someone more conventional, more girlish, less interesting. As a woman who was never on a marriage track, I and many of my friends held up being contentedly single as a virtue, something to aspire to. Many of us believed we needed to learn how to be okay on our own before we could be ready to settle down. Serial monogamists seemed a little weak, somehow.

But alas, biology does not wait for professional, personal and psychological fulfilment. And suitable husbands rarely appear on the scene the very moment their presence is desired.

Meanwhile, it's not just the woman who gets older, but her parents too. Younger women can readily laugh off hints about grandkids, but as the years pile on and the parents' health grows less robust, it sinks in that they won't be around forever. Their desire to know their grandkids becomes more poignant.

These realisations, rooted in biology and unmoved by career ambitions and other pursuits of fulfilment, can lead to a gradual change of perspective. Our earlier attempts to find contentment on our own, once seen as the height of sophistication, can now appear a tad immature. It turns out that all of life is not quite like college, designed primarily to foster personal growth. Those women who were so uninterestingly preoccupied with marriage in their early 20s now seem somewhat smarter in retrospect. Or at least more shrewd.

Even women who are absolutely sure they don't want marriage and kids find that dynamics of dating change. The power tilts increasingly towards men, who have a larger pool of single women at their disposal. Many of us who were once cavalier about being on our own soon discover the urge to assert that we are single by choice. We are more eager to trot out stories of the rejections delivered; the suitors left wanting. We are terribly off-hand in describing our doubts about having children to men (oh how laid back and unpresuming we sound). In other words, we are left wondering whether this isn't simply a different brand of husband-hunting.

*****

Perhaps I sound like a bitter single woman, one who messed up and has discovered it's too late. But that's not at all true. I'm glad not to have married any of the guys I dated in my 20s, and I'm happy with my boyfriend (whom I met when I was in my 30s). I'm not trying to imply that women in their 20s ought to marry at any cost to avoid a terrible fate; I simply feel that it's better to be honest about the negatives than to pretend that there are none.

Unlike Gottlieb, I do not advocate settling. I still believe that if marrying a certain man doesn't feel right, then there is something wrong.

Yet I think Gottlieb has done something important in writing so candidly about her own romantic regrets. She debunks the vapid "You go, girl!" form of empowerment, which often harms women by suggesting that they shouldn't settle for less than everything. As a television series, Sex and the City dramatised some of the challenges (and perks) of looking for love as a mature woman. Unfortunately its big-screen culmination delivered a very Hollywood ending--fluffily satisfying, but hardly representative. Gottlieb, in contrast, tells her story as if she were speaking to a roomful of adults, who can be trusted not to faint at bad news.

"Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough" (Dutton), by Lori Gottlieb, out now

(Adelle Waldman has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice and the New York Observer, among other outlets. Based in New York, she is working on a novel about unmarried women.)

HP

iliving_admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:10:15 +0000

THE FEED: FEB 5TH

The Editors — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:35:39 +0000

Today's links:

Alan Lomax's Haiti (WSJ)

The dying market for classical music (New Yorker)

Kids don't tweet (Washington Post)

Today's quote:

"I had specific instructions. I had been given, along with my first batch of letters, a yellowing carbon of a standard form letter…At first, I dutifully retyped this form, over and over again, uncomfortably scrawling my own name at the bottom, as instructed, then tossing the letters in the trash, also per office protocol. But as the months wore on, I found myself increasingly unable to ignore the raw emotion of the letters." ~ Joanna Smith Rakoff, "My adventures answering J.D. Salinger's mail" (Slate)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

300 YEARS OF MEISSEN

Cornelia Rudat — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:11:26 +0000

"What comes to your mind when you think of Meissen porcelain?" asked Christian Kurtzke, the young, charismatic CEO of the Meissen porcelain manufactory near Dresden. Addressing a group of journalists on the eve of the company's 300th anniversary celebrations, he swiftly answered his own question: prim cups and plates covered in a flowery blue pattern (ie, the Blue Onion design, also known as Zwiebelmuster or "Saxon design", which the company invented in 1739). When I asked my son, his reply was more direct: "Porcelain? For grandmothers."

The formula for the first European hard porcelain was founded in January 1708 by a team of chemists and mining experts headed by Johann Friedrich Böttger working for the King of Poland, the Electoral Prince of Saxony. They were commanded to recreate what the Chinese had originated centuries before. The Meissen Porcelain Manufactory opened its doors on January 23rd 1710, and has since survived several wars, various owners, communism and financial crises. (The latest hasn't had too dramatic effect on Meissen's bottom line, Kurtzke insists, even though the export market to Russia collapsed by two thirds.)

Three centuries on, the state-owned Meissen factory employs 800 skilled workers-potters, designers, painters-and continues to mine its own kaolin, quartz and feldspar. The formulas for its porcelain and paints remain top secret. Meissen table services are sold in limited editions, and its figurines are still popular gifts (the pug is the big hit among British customers; Italians prefer the harlequins).

For me, "Meissen" evokes something less tangible. Growing up in East Germany, the name always described something unspeakably rare and valuable, elusive under communism. My parents own one small vase made of real Meissen porcelain, which they inherited from my grandmother, a Dresdner. This precious piece always commanded great admiration and respect in our household. We were not allowed to touch it.

When Kurtzke assumed his role as head of Meissen in September 2008, he knew he needed to update its slightly dusty image. A Berliner educated in America and a former strategy manager at Boston Consulting Group, he will oversee the launch of several new product lines this year, which are clearly meant to appeal to more contemporary luxury tastes (ie, the new Fine Dining series includes "eight exclusive Meissen arrangements for sushi, pasta, or espresso"). The company is also inviting large-scale architectural commissions for porcelain wall tiles (painted and unpainted). One of the first clients is Berlin's five-star Adlon Hotel, which intends to cover the walls of one of its suites in modern Meissen tiles.

The company is also moving into the jewellery market, though these pieces are only available in a few shops in Germany, Milan and St Moritz. The hand-made pieces, made of porcelain, gold or silver and precious stones, sell for between several hundred and several thousand euro. Jacqueline Schröder, the regional manager at the flagship store on Berlin's Unter den Linden Avenue, showed me the exclusive cuff-links of red gold with the Meissen trademark of two crossed swords. President Obama received a pair from the prime minister of Saxony when he visited Dresden last year.

Surprisingly, I was able to find something beautiful, simple and suitable for my budget: a fine white espresso set for two. Now I am also the proud owner of Meissen porcelain, which I not only get to look at but also use.

Meissen has planned an array of events to celebrate its 300th anniversary

~ CORNELIA RUDAT

THE FEED: FEB 4TH

The Editors — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:06:34 +0000

Today's links:

James Rosenquist's lessons for life and art (More Intelligent Life)

In defence of Tiger, the "sex addict" (Slate)

Sotheby's sells Giacometti for record $104.3m (Wall Street Journal)

The neuroscience of humour (New Scientist)

Today's quote:

"It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free... The reason is simple: If they don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either." ~ Reflections of a Newsosaur, "Stop the exploitation of journalists"

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

THE Q&A: DAN CHIASSON, POET

Erin DeJesus — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:42:26 +0000

Dan Chiasson’s poetry is “unsettled and unsettling,” wrote Kay Ryan in the New York Times. “So much in Chiasson is uncomfortable and misproportioned. So much suffers. At the same time, his poetry is mischievous and meant to be understood playfully.” Ryan made those observations in 2005, just after the release of Chiasson’s second collection of poetry, “Natural History”. But her description remains apt. In “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon”, published by Knopf on February 2nd (and out in Britain later this year), Chiasson applies his analytical, nervous, literary and often playful sensibility to the poignancy of parenthood.

"It's very easy to identify with your child," Chiasson says over the phone from his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. "It's also very weird because there are things about your child that you'll envy in a way. So there's a split consciousness. You can see yourself as the child and you can see yourself as the father."

In new poems, such as "Man and Derailment" and the multi-part "Swifts", Chiasson juxtaposes childhood memories of his own father with a decidedly adult consciousness. (In the former, a man takes his son to a ravine to view a train crash; the child internalises the scene by wondering "how he would remember the scene / and, once he knew his father better, later, / and later, knew himself better, what it would mean.")

Chiasson is also a regular contributor on poetry to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He teaches poetry classes and workshops at Amherst and Wellesley colleges in Massachusetts, and received a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 2008.

He recently spoke to More Intelligent Life about the urge to address his readers through verse, his role as a poetry co-editor at the Paris Review and how a game with his young son inspired his latest book.

More Intelligent Life: You've said that you started writing rather late in life, in your mid-20s. How did you first become conscious of this need to create poetry?

Dan Chiasson: I was probably conscious of it all along. I dabbled—I think most teenagers write poetry [laughs]. But I was in graduate school, getting a doctorate [in English from Harvard University], and I was aware that because what I really wanted to write was poetry, I was writing very bad prose. My essays were too full of adjectives and decorative language, and they were too personal. And I really needed to find a place where I could explore beauty in language. So that was around 26, and then I just threw myself into it.

MIL: When you sit down to work now, how do you construct your poems?

DC: These days, I'm conscious of working in a line-by-line way. I can never move on to the next line until I'm totally positive that the line I've been working on is right. Of course, sometimes I'm wrong about that, but if in the moment I just feel like it's right and it's ready, I go on to the next line. If the poem is really coming together I sit down to it as much as I can over the course of however long—a week or two weeks—so it becomes sort of an immersion. I don't have the luxury of getting too immersed because I have a job and a family and so on [laughs]. So part of my brain gets totally immersed and the other part is left to function. I don't think I've ever had more than one poem going at a single time.

MIL: Are you very much aware of the reader when you're writing? There's a line in the poem "Swifts" that I love: "And you, reader, I see you nod your head, / treelike, appraising these lines; / I find your standing there— / not disgusting, but not inspiring either."

DC: I'm aware of the reader insofar as I'm also a reader of my own poems. So I'm aware of myself of having this curious split identity. The main reasons I like those lines—I think they're kind of funny. But one rationale for them is that I think, as a writer, almost instantly when you finish a line, you become its reader. And also I love Walt Whitman, and Whitman will often address the reader in a very direct way, as though he's speaking directly to you across the ages. And I wanted to do a version of that. I wanted the reader to feel addressed.

MIL: A children's game was the inspiration for "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon". Since you write each poem one at a time, were you conscious of the theme from the outset?

DC: I had written probably a third or so, the first section of the book—and this has happened to me a lot: I get an idea, I decide I want to write something other than poems—and what I decided I wanted to write was a children's book. I thought of this idea for a children's book that I called "The Moon Keeper's Son", and it was about a little boy whose father is a lighthouse keeper, only it's on the moon, and he has to go up and spend time with him. And then I sat down to write a children's book and I realised I had no way of knowing how to do it. Then I just did what I always do: I wrote a poem. And what I ended up doing was not calling the poem "The Moon Keeper's Son" but having the boy in the poem "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon" reading this story, and drifting into it and out of it.

My five-year-old son—this is going to follow him his whole life, but it's true: what I got the title from was that he used to run around in his bedroom when he was about two years old and say, "Where's the moon?" Then he would find it—"There's the moon!"—and then he would seem very depressed because you don't really want to win that kind of game, because the game's over [laughs]. Then he developed this kind of contrivance where he would put his hands over his eyes and then take it away. I felt that was some sort of symbol for the impulse for writing or reading poetry, where you want to arrange for yourself mystery and paradox, and you want to have an alternating clarity and paradox. So that's the reason I titled the book the way I did.

I sort of see it as a metaphor. One thing is that games are dangerous as a kid; it's also fun to disappear, reappear, play hide-and-seek. So there are a lot of other versions of this in the book. There are poems called "Hide-and-Seek". I guess that's the big thing in it, this child's tendency to want to be pursued and how that changes in adult life.

MIL: In addition to the childhood themes, there's also an organic feeling in the new collection. It's very close to nature.

DC: When I started writing these poems, we had moved outside Boston—we live in the country, sort of—and I just got interested in country matters, things that you really don't notice at all when you live in the city, and you get really attached to them. So that was really the interest behind it. And I'm always interested in nature in poetry because it's one of the oldest things you can do in a poem. So in a way, when you're writing a nature poem, you're not really writing about nature, you're writing about this long human history of other people writing about nature. You're more in touch with the tradition of poetry than you are with the outside world that you're purportedly observing.

MIL: Let's talk quickly about The Paris Review. What are the things that you take into consideration when you're selecting work for publication?

DC: I literally don't formulate a checklist of things I like in poems. What I do is really test my own attention, and see whether something gets and holds my interest. And that usually means that it does something I've never seen done before or has something that feels so authentic. Really, you just want to be surprised. That's the great thing about poems: they give these little shocks of surprise.

"Where's the Moon, There's the Moon" (Knopf), by Dan Chiasson, is out now in America

~ ERIN DEJESUS

Image credit: Random House

RETURNING TO TIBET

The Economist — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:45:01 +0000

Much of Lhasa was ransacked by Tibetan rioters in 2008. Life in Tibet is finally returning to normal, sort of. The Economist's Beijing correspondent reports on his first visit back ...

From THE ECONOMIST online

In Lhasa the authorities want to project an image of life returning to normal after the riots of March 2008. In some ways it is. The extensive wreckage I saw during my last visit, which happened to coincide with the riots, has long since been cleared. Ethnic Han Chinese whose shops were wrecked and merchandise piled up and burned by Tibetans are back in business. After the violence I had seen Tibetan pilgrims turned away from the Jokhang temple in the heart of Lhasa by gun-waving troops. Now they are flocking to it again, prostrating themselves on the paving slabs outside (two small boys among them wearing sacks to protect their clothing from the wear of countless obeisances).

That I have been allowed to return is doubtless part of the authorities’ efforts. An occasional visit by a journalist gives the impression that the city is open. It is still far from it. Numerous previous requests to go there since the unrest had been turned down (though, it must be said, it was rarely easy for journalists to get permission to go, even before the rioting). Tourism—a crucial driver of the city’s economy—has yet to recover fully. The upheaval unnerved Han Chinese who might have visited from other parts of China. Jittery officials did not help by tightening restrictions on foreign tourists, including a requirement that they be escorted by guides.

My own official guide took me today to Sera monastery, about 3km (2 miles) north of the city. I had tried to visit this important centre of Tibetan learning just after the rioting, only to be detained by police standing guard outside. Sera, and Lhasa’s two other large monasteries Drepung and Ganden, have long been at the forefront of Tibetan dissent. A protest by Sera monks outside the Jokhang temple on March 10th 2008, and a subsequent demonstration by colleagues demanding the monks’ release, were part of the build-up to the violence (directed mainly against property rather than people) in Lhasa four days later.

The police presence outside Sera is hardly less evident than it was on my last, abortive visit. This time I got through with my government escort, but even beyond the police cordon (through which, it seemed, pilgrims were allowed to pass) the ancient monastery itself was teeming with security officials. I probably saw more of them than I saw monks. Half a dozen people in plainclothes accompanied me, along with one of Sera’s senior monks, Qamba Tashi.

The monk enthusiastically described the monastery’s religious artefacts, but was clearly reluctant to give away much of anything about life in Sera today. There were, he said, 500 monks at Sera. A report in the official media last year suggested that there could have been twice as many there when the riots broke out in Lhasa (in which very few monks were seen participating). Some 500 “visiting monks and lodgers” were expelled after the unrest, the report said. Qamba Tashi said that no monks from Sera itself were punished after the riots, though “some” of the temporary residents had been. Again, no details. Visitors would have included long-term students; Sera is one of Tibetan Buddhism’s highest centres of learning.

In downtown Lhasa, approaches to the city’s two main temples, Jokhang and Ramoche, are guarded by clusters of riot police in camouflage uniforms and helmets, armed with batons and—some of them—rifles. Others are stationed on rooftops overlooking the square in front of Jokhang, a large open area surrounded by shops selling Tibetan handicrafts that is often the starting point of any unrest in Lhasa. A foreign tourist describes seeing police get upset when another foreigner took a photograph that included such police in the background.

China needs to be careful if it wishes for a return to normality in Lhasa. There is little sign that it has understood how a massive influx of tourists in 2006, following the inauguration of Tibet’s first rail link with the rest of China, helped fuel the riots. The resulting boom brought with it a large number of ethnic Han immigrants and left some Tibetans feeling marginalised. Extra security measures adopted since the riots are likely to put a lasting damper on tourism here. But they will do nothing to make Tibetans happier.

(This is the first instalment of a correspondent's diary in Tibet, published in The Economist online.)

Picture credit: luthor522 (via Flickr)

A TEMPESTUOUS TOLSTOY BIOPIC

Alice Gregory — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:01:20 +0000

The director Michael Hoffman is a master at embellishing stories with period trappings; he has proved as much with films like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Restoration". "The Last Station", based upon Jay Parini’s 1990 biographical novel of the same name, recounts the final, tempestuous months of the life of Leo Tolstoy, incarnated on screen by Christopher Plummer. Hoffman endows this adaptation with misty steppes, waxed moustaches, peasants bundled in swaths of linen and an ample supply of those droshkies without which no character from any of Tolstoy’s own novels would have gotten very far.

Trappings aside, the plot itself is a knotted one, with almost enough characters to warrant one of those genealogical charts that Tolstoy himself so often provided. We gain access to the writer’s private life by way of Valentin Bulgakov, a naïve young scholar (played by a baby-faced James McAvoy), who is hired on as Tolstoy’s secretary. In contrast with Valentin’s vulnerability (he’s a virgin with a nervous cough), Tolstoy appears luminous, his greatness blinding, complete with a biblical white beard and gauzy robes. Upon arrival at the estate, Valentin is immediately pulled into a venomous struggle between Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), and the author's scheming disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). The two vie for the rights to Tolstoy’s work: the countess is wary of seeming greedy as she grasps for her inheritance, while Vladimir, a commune leader, conspires to transform Tolstoy into an icon.

Soon Valentin finds himself not only mediating the battle between Sofya and Vladimir but also arbitrating the larger war between Sofya and Tolstoy himself. Mirren is marvellous in the role of this drama queen, who breaks plates, spies on business meetings and even attempts suicide in an effort to win her husband’s attention and affection. After an especially violent fight, Tolstoy screams to Sofya, “You don’t need a husband, you need a Greek chorus!”

But the notoriously fraught marriage also includes moments of “terrifying happiness” (Tolstoy's term, and perhaps one of the finest descriptions of love), which punctuate the equilibrium of discord. Tolstoy and his wife have pet names for each other and enjoy what appears to be a regular and hot-blooded sex life. Valentin takes cues from the marriage’s undeniable passion in his pursuit of the rosy-cheeked Masha (Kerry Condon), a commune worker who all but defines “spunk”. Like any good costume drama, "The Last Station" is a golden-lit, tryst-ridden film, teeming with stifled lust that quickly warms to full-blown carnality.

Hoffman has accomplished a great deal with this film: he depicts the extent of Tolstoy’s celebrity, reveals the man's heated home life and divulges the slimy legal dealings that preceded his death. But the film's most spectacular success is its portrayal of feminine will. The women of "The Last Station" galvanise their men to greatness. Without Masha, Valentin would have been a sad milquetoast, afraid to stand up to Vladimir and unsure of his alliances. Without Sofya, in old age, Tolstoy would have become a mind without a body, and perhaps more importantly, his books would not be what they are today: tenderly edited masterpieces of equal head and heart.

~ ALICE GREGORY

Image credit: Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren; photo taken by Stephan Rabold (courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

THE FEED: FEB 3RD

The Editors — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:10:54 +0000

Today's links:

But wait: art is recession proof (The New Republic)

Is "Fela!" on Broadway a bit minstrelsy? (The New York Times)

Phew, content is king (Wired)

Today's quote:

"My day starts at 8 in the morning. I have meetings through the day into the evening and very often dinners and benefits at night. This is nonstop. You go for every half hour, every 15 minutes, from one curator coming in to talk about an exhibition or an acquisition to one or two people discussing a donor issue or a fund-raising issue... It's like a marathon." ~ Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on his first year (Wall Street Journal)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

RAE OF LIGHT

Tim de Lisle — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

When a pop star dies an untimely death, the audience knows what to do: weep, gnash teeth, and buy their records. We’ve had too much practice, most recently with Michael Jackson and Stephen Gately. But when a star is bereaved, there are no conventions to fall back on.

Corinne Bailey Rae was still basking in the success of her debut album, which sold an estimated 4m copies and won no fewer than ten awards, when she lost her husband, the jazz saxophonist Jason Rae, to a suspected overdose. That was nearly two years ago. The difficult second album could have become impossible, but here she is returning with “The Sea”. Her palette has moved on from light retro soul to something darker and heavier, drawing on her background in a hard rock band. But you know instantly that it’s her, because the songs are still lit up by that radiant voice: gentle, involving, never overdone. It could become the template we need for converting grief into pleasure.

"The Sea" (Virgin) by Corinne Bailey Rae, out now

~ TIM DE LISLE

SEVEN HOURS OF WILSON PICKETT

Sean Howe — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:02:18 +0000

You’d be forgiven for wondering if six CDs of Wilson Pickett is overkill. You know the big hits: “In The Midnight Hour”, “Land of 1000 Dances”, and probably one or two others. Hard-driving soul music—it really got you moving at your cousin’s wedding. But while you’re discerning enough to realise that his “Mustang Sally” trumps that version from The Commitments, you’re really not sure if seven-hours-plus of his screaming hyper-virility is what you need to spend your money on.

“In the Midnight Hour”, in 1965, was the song that sealed Pickett’s legend, and deservedly so. Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler brought the "Wicked" one to Memphis, borrowed Stax’s house band (Booker T. and the MG’s) and suggested the off-kilter backbeat (a delay on the two and four beats). The result revolutionised soul music. Stax shut its doors to Atlantic soon after (why give away Booker T. and the MG’s?), but for years afterward, nearly every uptempo song on the Stax label borrowed that rhythmic trick.

And nearly every subsequent Wilson Pickett hit carried some of its DNA—the ballads never sold quite as well. But one of the great revelations of Rhino's new six-CD "Funky Midnight Mover: The Atlantic Studio Recordings (1962-1978)"—and there are many—is the strength of the slower album tracks. Pickett could plead and cry with the greatest of them.

In 1967 and 1968, Pickett was grabbing as many songs as he could from the pen of his new guitar player, Bobby Womack; the tender melodies tended to nudge Pickett’s baritone into higher registers, and the exhortations and grunts he threw into the song’s margins took on a wholly different meaning. There’s an enormous range of emotions in “It’s A Groove”, “I’m Sorry About That”, “I’ve Come A Long Way”, “Trust In Me”, “Jealous Love” and the dozen or so other Womack/Pickett collaborations. On “I’m in Love”, for instance, the exuberance that Pickett telegraphs is simply indescribable:

"Funky Midnight Mover" continues long past the point of Womack’s departure (who, having given away all his songs, was forced to round out his own solo debut with covers like “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Moonlight In Vermont”). Over the course of the next ten years, Pickett found new collaborators (Duane Allman contributed blasts of guitar to a muscular "Hey Jude"; producers Gamble & Huff set his voice against swirling Sound of Philadelphia strings), and further expanded the range of his music. He never turned his back on the ballads—a previously unearthed rendition of Bill Withers' "I Hope She'll Be Happier With Him" is breathtaking.

Of course, "Wicked" Pickett never forgot how to shout, either, and the glory of “In the Midnight Hour” never faded.

"Funky Midnight Mover: The Atlantic Studio Recordings (1962-1978)", Wilson Pickett (Rhino), out now

~ SEAN HOWE