In the City of Tainan, Hai-an Road is a remarkable setting for contemporary public art installations: it started out as an attempt to create an underground shopping mall slicing down the middle of a residential neighborhood in an ancient part of the city, one of the oldest settled by the Chinese in Taiwan. But after tearing down people's houses, literally right down the middle, it turned out that the water table in Tainan is simply too high for an underground mall to remain dry. So what happens next? The displaced residents do not get their homes rebuilt. You've got these half torn down houses, some with the a sink sticking out of a wall, and a very enterprising curator Du Jhao Hsian, decides to that the ruined walls are perfect for a street gallery . And here you see one of the most famous "installations" called "Blueprint." Hoping to revitalize the neighborhood by creating an artspace out of an urban planning disaster, the city agreed and now Hai-an Road is hoping to become a bo-bo center of consumerism. Well, in these photographs, a wedding photographer and bride and groom have discovered that contemporary art can offer a beautiful backdrop to fabricate wedding memories! Residents I hear had little say in the matter. They were paid off to go live somewhere else. You can't live in art, even if it's public!

blog growth

over the past twelve months, this humble blog has grown from 246 average daily hits to 1287 average daily hits (almost a five-fold increase), from moving a monthly load of 52468 KB to a whopping 390849 KB per month (almost eight times what it used to be), and all in all, it served 34670 people who clicked on higher-yearning 287283 times. for all the details, see this annual report with monthly (and even hourly) breakdowns, generated by webalizer.

hot tubs corrupt

absolute hot tubs corrupt absolutely is the lesson I'm learning in Irvine, California. After our trip to Los Angeles last weekend, I realized that my world view was being imperceptibly but definitely changed by living in CLUB ED, otherwise known as University Hills. Silver Lake, my former LA neighborhood never looked so unplanned to these Irvine-saturated eyes.

I'm also reliving my own childhood because there are at least four recent immigrant Chinese children in our rental apartment neighborhood who saw away at their violins on the hottest sunniest summer days. From scales to Turkey in the Straw to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to Bach's Minuet in D major, I am serenaded while I write this book on academic populism with the out of tune tunes of my own optimistic immigrant childhood as my background music.

Happily fulfilling my parents' fantasies of being a well-tempered all around spelling b winning math and science genius while mastering string instruments, I didn't know why I had to practice violin while other children played outside in the sunshine. I just knew it satisfied the older generation to hear me sawing away upstairs. They could hear that my hands and mind were occupied and not doing the devil's work. And the Chinese hate aerobic exercise. Being out of breath is not good. Little tiny movements, up and down the neck of a stringed instrument discipline the mind and prepare you for a life of Carpal Tunnel syndrome.

I'm sure that my young violin-playing neighbors are wondering, like I did why they have to practice violin day and night too while other children play Xbox and swim in the pool, soak in hot tub and ride around idly on bikes. Not one of them has the makings of an Itzhak Perlman, but I'm sure most of them will do really well on their SAT's and most of them will get into good colleges, go on to graduate degrees, make a shitload of money, drive up real estate prices in neighborhoods with "good" that is high testing public schools, put hot tubs in their pristine back yards, install wall to wall carpeting in their 4000 square foot homes...hire Mexican gardeners to cut their lawns, trim the bougainvillea. And they will feel as if they succeeded in clawing their way in to the good life, and they too will learn to have contempt for the poor, the underachieving the non-violin playing majority who didn't score above 1400 on their boards.

"Left" Anti-Intellectualism Must be Denounced

- and it is, here at LiP , by way of Nick Woomer (this is a print version). Lisa Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti think that action is not enough, and certainly not enough if it is accompanied by knee-jerk anti-intellectualism.

And they cite Adorno here as the one who was willing to denounce the student movement's actionism in 1968. I suppose his sin of calling the police on the 68 student protesters has finally been redeemed. Anti-intellectualism tries to exact revenge on the mind for what Adorno calls "an original sin" -- the radical division of mental from physical labor.

It feels good to lash out at those with the least power -- intellectuals -- anti-intellectuals of Left and Right are playing right into reactionary politics by attacking those whom they believe to free from the demands of survival INSTEAD of attacking the exploitation of monopoly capitalism. As long as radical democracy cannot make a place for the intellectual, it won't be radical enough for me and I won't sing along to their anti-globalization tunes. The weakness of the notion of pluralism is precisely this -- it can't account for the exclusion of the intellectual or scapegoat -- upon which so many immanent communities depend to seal their bonds of allegiance.

the skinny on Roberts and it doesn't look good

Well, I respect the folks at Daily Kos who have now presented the most comprehensive overview of what is at stake in the Roberts nomination. Read it here. I'm afraid that if Armando and "Categorically Imperative" are correct, if John Roberts joins the Supreme Court and this will "fundamentally change the nature of the United States."

I think it is very unlikely that an opposition will be able to stop this nomination. The only thing that can be done is to emphasize the fact that we will have a(nother) justice who sits on the Court who believes "right-wing's royalist aspirations." Royalist would be one thing -- but I believe the concentration of powers -- judicial, legislative, executive and in the end economic has another name. It is an "F" word and we're almost there already.

We shouldn't be hysterical about it because we can call this a Fascist country and not be put in jail. But that's about all the positive spin I can put on this.

Attack Evolution

is the strategy of a movement that wants to overturn materialism in the name of metaphysics. So let us deal with this on a more serious note. Reason has been entirely instrumentalized as engineering, and science reduced to positivism: the poor teaching of science and the lack of an education in philosophy have led to the commonly held assumption in the US that one can either "believe" in evolution or in creationism. No one knows how to reason and no one values reason.

Proponents of Intelligent Design have not emerged from nowhere. The Center for Science and Culture has "transformed the debate [over evolution vs. intelligent design] into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion." Once again, the Right has been disciplined on their talking points. Because we cannot remember or teach our students to remember the legacy of religious opppression and the positive aspects of being liberated from fear, tyranny and superstition, and we have replaced "grand narratives" with "self-interest" we are indeed left to inherit the wind.