What wisdom looks like these days
It looks like this
Meanwhile in London — speaking of wisdom …
Mandy Martin at Geelong Gallery
My wife Eva and I tracked down to Geelong last weekend to see an exhibition of the great Australian artist Mandy Martin. If haven't heard of her, you’re very likely to have seen her luminous mythic landscape of Australia in Committee Room 1 of Parliament House — the largest commissioned painting in Australia. I love looking at it when I’m there. She died recently and Eva taught her son Alexander in primary school. He was a fabulous art talent and a lovely kid. The exhibition was mostly of her early work which I’m not such a huge fan of.
And then it had “Luminous relic”. A 2017 installation consisting of a large, darkened room with one of her mythic landscapes. It’s an extraordinary thing because it is made to have images projected over it. And so she and the videographer have worked an extraordinary marvel. It’s just a painting, but somehow you can’t believe that it’s just an inanimate painting so complete is its transformation from industrial street scape to collapsing ice shelf. And her collaborator. Her son, Alexander!
I was so taken I took the video below (though I had to pan around the room as I couldn’t get far enough away to fit the whole painting). I then looked it up on Vimeo for a more professional video. I haven’t pasted it here because Vimeos “privacy settings” don’t display it. I expect you’re grateful to have your privacy so well looked after, but if you want to see it, it’s here. In the meantime here’s my video which gives you a bit of a sense of it.
Was COVID a lab leak and why does it matter?
Thanks to Gene Tunny for recommending this podcast. I’d largely ignored the culture war on whether COVID was a lab leak. And because the Republicans are so crazy I tend to discount their side of pretty much any culture war. But there you go. Given the shambles those in positions of authority made of COVID, one’s priors should be weakly held. So I claim no background on this, but I am drawn to those who seem to present their case without rancour and who draw your attention to the weaknesses as well as the strengths of their position. Matt Ridley certainly did that here.
Two books on the Teals: not the last of them …
An Inside Story review of two books about the Teals — and there’s another one on the way via my friend Tim Dunlop.
Frydenberg's entitlement, his intransigence in the face of new ideas, his inability to maintain civil connections with people who disagreed with him, and his failure to build strategic partnerships are symptomatic of the Liberal Party as a whole.
Simon Holmes à Court’s The Big Teal is a mini-memoir by one of the teal movement’s more important players. … Given his background and business interests you’d probably pick young Simon as a Liberal Party supporter. And for a while, he was. He relates how he went from being a supporter of Frydenberg’s to becoming an arch enemy of the Liberal Party’s boy wonder when he set up a pro-teal fundraiser called Climate 200.
Doing the right thing for the planet, and encouraging new businesses to do it, seemed like a no-brainer to a billionaire’s son, but would the Liberal Party listen? No, it wouldn’t. …
Though it was only started in mid 2021, Climate 200 managed to raise $13 million by election day. Thirteen million is peanuts compared with what the major parties raise, but every Climate 200 dollar invested in the teals paid dividends in the end. …
To protect its brand as an honest broker, as a supporter not a player, Climate 200 always remained at arm’s length from the political trenches of the teal campaigns. “Climate 200 has never started a campaign, nor chosen a candidate,” explains Holmes à Court. “Every campaign we’ve supported began within their community and showed us they had a head of steam before we chose to turbocharge them.” The puppetmaster slur peddled mainly by News Corp never got traction because it wasn’t true.
Asterisk Magazine launch
The indefatigable Scott Alexander alerted his readers to the inaugural issue of Asterisk Magazine this week. I don’t know if they’re an official outlet of Effective Altruism or close to that, but I like their summary of what they’re on about (with the exception of the dorky reference to Bayes theorem) and I found the first article I read from it first class.
Here’s their summary of what they’re about:
Asterisk is a quarterly journal of writing and clear thinking about things that matter. We’re for Bayes’ theorem, acknowledging our uncertainty, wild imaginations, and well-constructed sentences. We’re against easy answers, lazy metaphors, and the end of life as we know it.
And the article I read was titled The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation, a quite lengthy expose of just how the US and Russia have managed to have about ten times as many nukes as they could possibly need for deterrence (and the reckless way the Americans initiated the whole process).
This past summer, a bipartisan majority of Congress, with the blessing of President Biden, approved a massive military-spending bill that included $51 billion for nuclear weapons — nearly 20 percent more than allotted by the previous year’s budget, which itself broke previous records. …
The official rationale for this upgrade is that the existing subs, bombers and ICBMs are approaching obsolescence. Even if this claim were true (more about that later), it begs the question of whether the arsenal needs to be as large as it is. …
Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has.
Retrospective essay on Woody Allen’s films
Woody Allen’s biographer has a retrospective romp through Woody’s films.
His back-catalogue contains enormous variety and emotional breadth, which has allowed us to see so many sides of him. And as an auteur working with a highly unusual degree of creative control, he has always been free to make the film he feels like making (even if he later declares himself disappointed by the results). Studio executives are shown nothing and never permitted to visit the sets and Allen makes no concessions to taste, popularity, or anything else. Very few directors have been permitted that kind of artistic liberty. The studios put up with it all because his films have usually been cheap to produce, and because they realised that he was a valuable cultural commodity. Allen has even managed to remain indifferent to his critical reputation and box office returns, so long as they didn’t prevent him from making his next movie.
From the outset, Allen had a strong intuitive sense of how to make deceptively simple films layered with dramatic complexity. His films don’t employ casts of thousands, complicated visual and sound effects, or vast sets; they are usually short and intimate character-driven comic dramas shot on location (although those locations can be dazzling). Audiences went to see an Allen film not to immerse themselves in spectacle, but simply to hear what he had to say. If the fervor that attended Allen’s early work has abated in recent years, it’s probably because the later films (with the notable exception of Midnight in Paris) remind us too much of his classics. After 49 films, he doesn’t seem to have many unexpressed thoughts left.
