Édouard Manet

I like the style of the impressionists, but I find a lot of their material insipid. Too many water lilies and boating parties. So of course I like Édouard Manet (1832-1883) better than any other painter of that era -- he could paint a sunny boating party when he wanted to, but he could also work in a much darker mode. Manet knew the impressionists, influenced and was influenced by them, and painted portraits of two of them, but he never considered himself an impressionist. Above, Dead Toreador, 1864. You often see jpegs of this painting that are nearly black and white, but so far as I can tell the original is more brown.

Actually I find Manet's work uneven, some of it downright clumsy. But his best paintings linger in my mind like afterimages of a blinding flash. Olympia, 1863. This is a portrait of Manet's favorite model in those years, Victorine Louise Meurent (1844-1885). Meurent had a good run for a while as a mistress of rich men and painters' model, but then she slipped into alcoholism, poverty, and an early death.

A Sea Fight, 1868. This looks a lot like his earlier painting of the battle between the Alabama and the Kearsarge, off Cherbourg, in 1864, so I suppose it was in some sense inspired by that famous battle. Manet had a huge range, from sunny boating parties to political propaganda to heroic depictions of naval warfare.

Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet (the Artists' Parents), 1860. They look like parents, with those parental worry lines.

A Vase of Peonies on a Small Pedestal, 1864.

Portrait of Alphonse Maureau, 1868. When men were serious about mustaches.

Effect of Snow on Petit-Montrouge, 1870.  I find this charming, and it doesn't look much like anything else I have seen of his.

The Barricade (Civil War), 1871. One of Manet's responses to the ordeal of the Paris Commune.

 Portrait of Monsieur Tillet, 1871.

The Port of Bordeaux, 1871.

The Viennese (Portrait of Irma Brunner), 1880. I love this painting, which rather sadly is hidden in a corner of the Louvre where nobody ever notices it. Honestly, the Louvre should just give away nine-tenths of their paintings so it would possible to tour the place without going mad.

The Escape of Rochefort, 1882. Manet painted this scene at least twice. Rochefort was Henri de Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort Lucay, an aristocrat who became one of the leaders of the insurrection by the Paris Commune. After the Commune fell he was tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to life at hard labor on the jungle island of New Caledonia. Nothing daunted, he and six other convicts escaped in a whale boat just four months later. He made his way back to Europe and lived in Geneva and London until a left wing government came to power and declared an amnesty for all the communards. He then returned to Paris and embarked on a new career as a conservative agitator; his newspaper, L'Intransigiant, was a mainstay of the anti-Dreyfusards.

House in Rueil, 1882.

A Bar at the Folies Bergère, 1882. Manet's last famous painting, summing up for many the ennui of the drinking life.

Sub Surfaces in Milan

A very clever advertising stunt, apparently.

What Republicans Believe

The key findings of a very depressing study of Republican voters from Democracy Corps:

• You can‘t understand the government shutdown unless you understand the GOP from the inside. 
• They think they are losing ground and Obama has won his socialist agenda. 
• Obama is big government - but much bigger — they believe he is building dependent minorities that will give the Democrats a governing majority. 
• They are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority—as Democrats use government to build dependency and therefore also their support with minorities. The race issue very much alive. 
• Obamacare is the end game for Republicans: Democrats have already built constituencies of dependence based on welfare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and illegal immigrants. Now add to that the uninsured. 
• The problem in DC is not gridlock; Obama has won; the problem is Republicans failing to stop him. 
• For Evangelicals, homosexuality is the defining issue and threat. 
• Evangelicals and Tea Party dominate the party—make up more than half of all Republicans. They are both cheered by the Tea Party (despite the fact that non-Evangelical Tea Party adherents are social libertarian) because the Tea Party will stand up to Obama, Democrats, and RINOs in the Republican Party. 
• Moderates are a quarter and they matter. They are very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party, which requires being both social and fiscal conservatives. The women open to splitting ticket if Republican candidates do not represent their views. 
• Climate is next and could prove explosive outside the party and divisive within the party as climate skeptics are a majority in the conservative factions.

Some of this is true: the nation is getting less white, less religious, more accepting of homosexuality. One evangelical man in Roanoke, Virginia described the town he grew up in like this:

It's like a bubble. It's like a Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogeneous.

If that is what you want, you are right to worry, because it is disappearing. (To the extent that it ever existed.) These people feel that neither party has represented them, and they are right. Democrats have supported immigration, integration, women's rights, gay rights, separation of church and state, changes to how history is taught in schools; Republicans have supported big business and free market capitalism. As I see it, these people are foolish to think that restraining the government and unleashing capitalism will help them defend their world, because I think it is really capitalism that destroyed small town America and its values. Certainly free market capitalism will never lead to a world where everyone is middle class and goes to the same pool; only a massive expansion of government power, with much higher taxation on the rich, would have any chance of bringing back a middle class America.

I see the Tea Party as the angry protest of a losing team. If these people would ally with liberals, they could fight for some of their action items, like preserving small towns and helping the middle class. But as long as they see brown people and gays as their main enemies, that can't happen.

SHUTDOWN: Day Four

My fieldwork for next week is cancelled, the layoff emails sent to my crew. I feel frustrated. More, I feel baffled.

What, exactly, is the shutdown about now? Obamacare is up and running; there won't be a one-year delay. Everybody says that a continuing resolution could pass the House at any time and might even pass the Republican caucus. John Boehner looks miserable. The only politician who seems to be enjoying this fracas is the President, who has been giving the fiery speeches his liberal supporters have long hoped for. The big winners are liberal comedians.

Some Republicans had been hoping that not raising the debt ceiling, threatening the country with default, would force the president to meet their demands in a way that the shutdown has not. But Boehner has now "signaled," as they say, that he won't let that happen. Good for him; I never though he was really evil enough to do such a thing. But now what?

The shutdown has not gotten the Republicans anything but egg on their faces; they won't throw the country into default; Obamacare is running. There is nothing left, it seems to me, but to knuckle down and negotiate the budget. Can we please end the shutdown fooferaw and get on with that? Congress needs to get back to work, and the government needs to get back to work, and my crew needs to get back to work. Delaying that for any longer is inexcusable.

A New Pain Reliever from Centipede Venom

Many biting insects use anesthetizing compounds to dull the nerves of their victims, so we don't notice we're being bitten and drained until too late. Now Chinese researchers have announced isolating a compound from the venom of a red-headed centipede that works as well as morphine in mice, perhaps even better:

Ssm6a is a protein fragment that blocks a pain-sensing channel called NaV1.7. Pharmaceutical companies are in hot pursuit of molecules that do the same thing. Because the channel resides mainly in the body’s peripheral nerves, compounds that block NaV1.7 shouldn’t cause dizziness, drowsiness or other side effects of current pain-relief drugs that affect neurons in the brain.

I wonder if it is addictive.

The Realm of the New: the Glowing Plant Project

Here is a story that brings together two of the most exciting things about our age: genetic engineering and the internet. The Glowing Plant Project is planning to ship 600,000 packets of the seeds for their glowing Arabidopsis plants, which will be the broadest ever distribution of a genetically-modified organism. There is nothing new about the technology of  inserting firefly genes into plants, which has been around for 20 years. We know it works. What these guys did was to raise $500,000 with a Kickstarter campaign to get a commercial project going, come up with a cool logo, and generally use the internet's magic to turn a laboratory discovery into a mass-marketed product. If you don't feel like waiting for the mass seed mailing, due next fall, you can order a single plant now.

Which raises the question: should the government regulate this sort of thing? Right now in the US, regulation of plant research applies only to plants intended to be eaten. So anybody can insert any sort of gene into a non-edible plant and sell it to whomever. Is that scary? I don't find these plants scary at all. As I said, this trick has been done in labs many times already, with no pernicious effects. But if we put out minds to it we could certainly imagine lots of bad things you could do with this technology. Is that a problem that requires a law?

Shutdown Quotes

America flirts with self destruction.

--Financial Times

We're not going to be disrespected, We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is.

 -- Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN)

It's to us Norwegians hard to understand that it can be happening in one of the most influential countries in the world that you can have such a dysfunctional government. It is kind of joke or disbelief. We laugh about it. How is it possible at all? Why would they do that?

--Anders Tvegard, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

It feels absurd to be showing up to work in an office that supports democracy abroad when our own government is a shambles.

--State Department employee who wrote in to Andrew Sullivan's blog

I've been trying to figure this out. It seems to me that Boehner could do whatever he wants with Democrats on the floor and still get about 180 or 190 of us. So why doesn't he do that?

--An unnamed Republican Congressman explains to Byron York that even under the Hastert Rule, the House could pass a clean continuing resolution if Boehner would let it

The whole concept is little surreal for our readers, trying to understand why the No. 1 country in the world cannot pass a budget. I come from Lebanon and our parliament is very ineffective, but ludicrous as it sounds, it is better than U.S. Congress when it comes to passing budgets.

--Joyce Karam, Al-Hayat

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

--Andrew Sullivan

Calcified Animals at the Lake of Death

Lake Natron in northern Tanzania is a frightening place:

Unless you are an alkaline tilapia (Alcolapia alcalica) – an extremophile fish adapted to the harsh conditions – it is not the best place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C (140 F), and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5 (like pure ammonia). The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in. Here, this has come from volcanic ash, accumulated from the Great Rift valley. Animals that become immersed in the water die and are calcified.

That is, turned to rock.

Photographer Nick Brandt, whose photographs of Africa I featured here, happened by and discovered the petrified birds and beasts along the shore. He says,

I could not help but photograph them. No one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake's surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake.

More at New Scientist.

Enjoying the Shutdown

The teenagers around my house are having the best time with the shutdown. They're spending all their time working on their plan for the coming complete collapse of government and society. They've been calculating how many grocery carts they'll need to steal to move all their belongings around, looking for solar panels they can expropriate, deciding what tools they'll need and how to get them, and so on. I haven't seen them this energized in years.

Even the Post!

At the Washington Post they so fetishize evenhandedness that they have a professional torture apologist on the staff, and they have run hundreds or maybe even thousands of editorials with the "both Democrats and Republicans need to stop posturing and compromise" tone. But even the Post has finally run out patience with the Republican House:

How about something cheerful?

To break your growing sense of hopelessness, I give you this feel-good story form the LA Times:

There is a crisis in California's schools. More than a quarter of a million children, most of them from poor and minority backgrounds, lack the technology they need to succeed in school. But what they need has nothing to do with mobile devices or educational apps. It's a technology nearly 800 years old: eyeglasses.

About 250,000 California schoolchildren don't have the glasses they need to read the board, read books, study math and fully participate in their classes. About 95% of the public school students who need glasses enter school without them. These students are likely to fall behind and to frustrate their teachers and parents. . . .

In 2012, we started Vision to Learn to help address this problem. The idea is simple. Instead of forcing families to go to where the glasses are — the eye clinic — we bring the glasses to where the kids are: the schools. We assembled a team of dedicated eye doctors and turned a couple of buses into mobile eye clinics. We travel to public and parochial schools in low-income communities in Los Angeles and screen each and every student. We fit those kids who need them with glasses and let them pick their own frames, something they really enjoy. Two weeks later, we return to deliver the new glasses free of charge. We recently completed our first full year and have helped more than 10,000 kids.

See? Even in Tea Party America, it is still possible for people to do good things.

RIP Tom Clancy

Thriller writer Tom Clancy has died at 66. For me, Clancy will always be the author of one strange but fabulous book, The Hunt for Red October (1984). Unable to find a major publisher, novice writer Clancy turned to the Naval Institute Press to bring this out. Presumably the professional literary people couldn't get past the leaden writing, which makes parts of the book seem like extracts from naval operations manuals. Only people who had spent enough years reading Defense Department prose to become inured to it could see past it to the amazing story, and to the sense it created of young men in control of awesome weapons and just dying to use them. I have tried to read a few other Clancy books in moments of boredom, but I have never finished one. His writing actually improved, but none of the others had the atmosphere that sucked me into Red October. There's some sort of lesson in that.

The Southern Strategy

The similarities between today's Republicans and the budding Confederates of 1860 are startling. Let Abram Lincoln explain:

What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum.

When you lose an election, and then threaten to bring government to a standstill unless your demands are met, you are not practicing democracy. You are practicing revolution.

Striking Images of Mars

Not abstract art, but NASA photographs of Mars. Above, "barkhanes" (sweeping sand dunes) near the North Pole.

Tracks left by sand whirlwinds.

South polar ice.

Dune field, Proctor Crater.

Population Booms and Busts in the European Neolithic

A major study of 7,944 radiocarbon dates from the European neolithic, led by British archaeologist Stephen Shennan, suggests that populations rose and fell dramatically between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago. The initial spread of farming across the continent, between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago, led to huge population growth, followed a few centuries later by a crash in which the population fell by at least 30 percent, and perhaps as much as 60 percent. After that event populations seem to have been fairly stable in some areas, but other saw further booms and busts.

Studies like this obviously depend on what sites archaeologists have chosen to investigate, and these are not really a random sample of the past. But in Europe there has been so much archaeology over the past 70 years, much of it driven by development pressure rather than the whims of excavators, that I think the record we have built up has real meaning. The evidence from Ireland is particularly clear; in Ireland the initial neolithic boom was followed by centuries in which it is hard to find any evidence of habitation in some areas. You can click on the figure above for a better view.

I don't know why this would be surprising. After all, the two thousand years of Europe's recorded history has seen two major population crashes. The first took place as the Roman Empire was falling in the fourth to seventh centuries, driven by the collapse of order, the decline in trade, and the spread of disease. Populations slowly rebounded, and around 1000 CE they entered a period of rapid growth that lasted about 250 years. Growth then faltered, and in 1348 the Black Death caused a second great crash. The population stayed low for a century or so before entering into another growth period. So why shouldn't the neolithic period have experienced population booms and crashes?

These rises and falls do not correlate very well with changes in the climate. Shennan et al. suggest that environmental factors may have been involved; for example, the initial neolithic settlers depended heavily on wild foods, which their rising population may have driven near to extinction. But I think we should not rule out epidemic disease as a potential cause.

Some Random Pictures of Philadelphia

Taken during my walk Sunday morning. As I was approaching this window to take a picture of the decoration, the reflection of the building across the street suddenly appeared, perfectly framed.

B'nai B'rith monument to religious freedom. Who are those people? Freedom and her son, Mischief? And why does their eagle look so cranky?

What's a historic district without some photogenic decay?

Another insurance company, but this one went a little overboard on the Egyptian tomb theme. Lousy pictures, but strangely the whole building was in shadow. . . .

I really liked these whatever-they-ares at the entrances to Washington Park.

Whose idea was it to install stainless steel kangaroos in the colonial historic district?

I confess I was startled to look down this nondescript alley and see a shrine to the Madonna.

Who was Rebecca Gratz, and why does she have her own club? What do they do there? What would people do in a club named after you?

I'm restless at home and ready to go someplace else now.

Yale's New Colleges

Big news from my alma mater, which has been planning for a decade now to build two new residential colleges to accommodate more students. They have just announced a $250 million gift from alumnus Charles Johnson, which means some of the ill-gotten gains of Wall Street will flow into construction and then into an increased number of people who can get the education Yale offers.

I was dreading the design, wondering what sort of post-modern horror the elite arbiters of taste would foist on tomorrow's undergraduates. But no! Architect Robert Stern went for a neogothic design much like the older colleges. Maybe there is hope for our civilization after all. Most of these pictures come from a video walkthrough at that link. The colleges have not yet been named, although I suppose one of them will have to be Johnson. Votes for the other?

They will be built just south of the Ingalls Rink -- too bad it wasn't necessary to tear that thing down to make room. They are supposed to help connect the main campus to Science Hill. I don't know about that, but at least they won't make the world uglier.

The King of Idu

There hasn't been much archaeology in Kurdistan over the past few decades, given all the political instability. But recently work has resumed, and now some results are being announced from a site called Satu Qala. Beneath a village still bearing the scars of an assault by Saddam Hussein's forces in 1987 are the remains of a city known around 1000 BCE as Idu:

The city thrived between 3,300 and 2,900 years ago, said Cinzia Pappi, an archaeologist at the Universität Leipzig in Germany. At the start of this period, the city was under the control of the Assyrian Empire and was used to administer the surrounding territory. Later on, as the empire declined, the city gained its independence and became the center of a kingdom that lasted for about 140 years, until the Assyrians reconquered it.

The inscription surrounding this reassembled sphinx says, Palace of Ba'auri, king of the land of Idu, son of Edima, also king of the land of Idu.

A horse in painted plaster. More at Livescience. 

Richard II's Jewels

One of the many fascinating documents preserved in the English archives is a very detailed inventory of the royal treasure, drawn up for Richard II in 1398-99. This lists 2,300 items, and in the new edition by Jenny Stratford it runs to 105 pages. Of those 2,300 items, only one can be identified today. This is the crown used by Richard's first queen, Anne of Bohemia. It was later given to the usurper Henry IV's daughter Blanche when she was married to Ludwig, son of the Holy Roman Emperor. It has been in Bavaria ever since.

It consists of a hinged circlet with tracery and blue enamel plaques supporting twelve finely worked fleurons into which are set twelve sapphires, thirty-six balas rubies, 132 pearls and thirty-six diamonds. It was valued in 1398-99 at £246.

Contemplate the lovely crown shown in the picture above, valued at £246, and then consider that the king's coronation crown, inherited from his grandfather Edward III, was valued at £33,584:

It was described as having two "great" (Oriental) rubies and an unspecified number of balas rubies, sapphires, emeralds and freshwater pearls and weighed 184 troy ounces, although it was the gems, not the gold, that made it so valuable.

What did that even look like? It is certainly not this crown, shown on Richard's head in the Wilton Diptych. No doubt it was too heavy to wear except during the coronation or some similarly august event. But what a thing it must have been.

Quotations are from Chris Given-Wilson's review of Stratford's book, in the June 28 TLS.

Richard Bram: Big Hair in Kentucky

For many years in the 80s and 90s Richard Bram covered the Kentucky Derby Festival, two weeks of parties and so on leading up to the big race. Now these photographs seem memorable mostly as a history of hair.

That is like the best mullet ever.

SHUTDOWN: Day One

Beyond exasperation with dumb Republican tactics and failure to do their jobs, here is what I seriously think about the mess in Washington:

The Republicans are trying to use the budget process to push their other, non-budgetary priorities. I think this is very dangerous. When they first came howling into Congress in 2010, they were all fired up to cut spending and reduce the deficit. I don't agree with that focus, but at least the budget crises of 2011-2012 were actually about the budget. Because they were about the budget, they were about numbers, which means that it was possible for the two parties to reach a compromise. The sequester was dumb but it did cut spending.

Now, though, the deficit is falling rapidly, and not even Paul Ryan seems very worked up about the debt. So the Republicans have moved on to other priorities. Since they control only one house of Congress, there is little they can do in the way of passing or repealing laws through the normal process. So their strategy is to use the budget, which they have to pass, to force through other priorities. For strange reasons of internal Republican politics, they have decided to focus on repealing the Affordable Care Act. This is the President's "signature achievement," the law that he hopes with place him with Roosevelt and Johnson in the ranks of welfare state heroes. He does not want to repeal it.

How could that be compromised? It can't. The law could certainly be modified, but no big piece could simply be removed (as some Republicans have been suggesting), because all the big pieces are needed to make the whole thing work.

This is a recipe for Constitutional crisis. What the Republicans are pursuing is revolutionary. Not since before the Civil War has an American political party ever threatened to blow up the budget and the economy in pursuit of non-budgetary goals. That doesn't necessarily make it wrong -- maybe our political system is so tangled with webs of interest and influence that real change is not possible through the normal channels. If they were doing this to force an end to drone warfare and spying by the NSA, I might even support them. But nobody should mistake the radical import of their actions.

Nor should anybody forget that they are undertaking this radical departure from American politics as usual for the sole reason of denying health insurance to people who can't afford it. For that noble goal, they are threatening the constitutional fabric of our democracy.

Real Conservatives are Dismayed by the Republican House

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative:

When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. . . . They are a barking-mad pack of ideologues, is what they are.

Dreher cites one of Russell Kirk's canons of conservative thought:

Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. . . . The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery. 

And then asks:

What are the probable long-run consequences of shutting the US Government down over Obamacare? Do the Congressional Republicans care? Do they care what kind of damage they are doing to the ability of Congress to legislate effectively on all kinds of matters? The damage they are doing to the economic stability of the United States? . . . I can’t see any good coming out of this, at least any good that stands to outweigh the bad.

But not everybody gets it. Republican hack Marc Thiessen has a column in the Post arguing that the Republicans are making a mistake by threatening a government shutdown, because nobody cares enough to make that a dangerous threat. Instead, they should threaten something much worse:

While Obama can let the government close and blame the GOP, he cannot allow the United States to default.  . . . the effects of default would be “catastrophic,” resulting in the “loss of millions of American jobs,” and would have an economic impact “potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.” Obama will not permit an economic crisis worse than 2008-09 and the “loss of millions of American jobs” on his watch. He has no choice but to negotiate with GOP leaders and cut a deal to avoid a government default.

That's some prudent thinking for you.

Museum Diplomacy with Iran

NBC News reports:

Here's one more sign of a thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations: A 2,700-year-old silver drinking cup, looted from a cave in Iran and seized by U.S. Customs officials a decade ago, was returned to Iran this week. Its value is estimated at a million dollars or more. The ceremonial drinking vessel from the 7th century B.C., cast in the shape of a winged griffin, has been sitting in a warehouse in New York for years. And for years, U.S. officials have been saying they couldn't return it to Iran until relations between Washington and Tehran were normalized. . . . On Wednesday, it went back

The vessel comes from what investigators have dubbed the Western Cave Treasure, found by looters in a cave near the Iran-Iraq border in the late 1980s. Several pieces have surfaced on the international market:

Federal authorities say a New York art dealer named Hicham Aboutaam brought the Pre-Achaemenid artifact into the United States in 2000, and provided Customs officials with an invoice falsely claiming that the piece came from Syria. Aboutaam negotiated a deal to sell the artifact to a collector for $950,000 — but when federal agents caught wind of the sale, they seized the artifact and arrested Aboutaam on smuggling charges in 2003.