Populism seems to become stronger the more intellectuals criticize it.Footnote 2

SINCE THE 1980S THE RISE OF SO-CALLED POPULIST PARTIES HAS GIVEN rise to thousands of books, articles, columns and editorials. Most of them are of an alarming nature, as these new populists are generally seen as a threat to liberal democracy. Though authors are not always sure what exactly characterizes these parties, they do agree that parties like the Austrian Freedom Party (FP), the French National Front (FN), or the Dutch List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) are populist. Another point on which most commentators agree is that populism is understood as a pathological form, pseudo- and post-democratic, produced by the corruption of democratic ideals.Footnote 3 German scholars in particular consider right-wing populists, in line with the theory of Erwin K. Scheuch and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, to be a normal pathology of western democracies.Footnote 4

The aim of this article is to make a threefold contribution to the current debate on populism in liberal democracies. First, a clear and new definition of populism is presented. Second, the normal-pathology thesis is rejected; instead it is argued that today populist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of western democracies. Indeed, one can even speak of a populist Zeitgeist.Footnote 5 Third, it is argued that the explanations of and reactions to the current populist Zeitgeist are seriously flawed and might actually strengthen rather than weaken it.

In the public debate there are two dominant interpretations of the term populism, both are highly charged and negative. In the first, populism refers to the politics of the Stammtisch (the pub), i.e. a highly emotional and simplistic discourse that is directed at the gut feelings of the people. In more prosaic terminology, (p)opulists aim to crush the Gordian knots of modern politics with the sword of alleged simple solutions.Footnote 6 Though this definition seems to have instinctive value, it is highly problematic to put into operation in empirical studies. When is something emotional rather than rational, or simplistic rather than serious? Moreover, sloganesque politics constitute the core of political campaigning, left, right and centre.

In the second meaning, populism is used to describe opportunistic policies with the aim of (quickly) pleasing the people/voters and so buying their support rather than looking (rationally) for the best option. Examples are lowering taxes just before elections, or promising financial advantages to all people without any additional costs. But who decides whether policies are sound or honest, rather than populist or opportunistic? As Ralf Dahrendorf perceptively noted, the one's populism, is the other one's democracy, and vice versa.Footnote 7

Despite the fact that both interpretations of populism are widespread, and seem to have some intrinsic value, they do not go to the core of what is generally considered as populism in the academic literature. In fact, both phenomena are better covered by other terms: demagogy and opportunism, respectively. While conceptual clarity and definitional consensus are not much closer within the academic community, most definitions of populism have at least two points of reference in common: the elite and the people.Footnote 8 In other words, populism says something about the relationship between the elite and the people. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have summarized this key relationship clearly and forcefully: the people versus the powerful.Footnote 9 But this still leaves the question of what populism is: an ideology, a syndrome, a political movement or a political style?Footnote 10

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people versus the corrupt elite, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volont gnrale (general will) of the people.Footnote 11 Populism, so defined, has two opposites: elitism and pluralism. Elitism is populism's mirror-image: it shares its Manichean worldview, but wants politics to be an expression of the views of the moral elite, instead of the amoral people.Footnote 12 Pluralism, on the other hand, rejects the homogeneity of both populism and elitism, seeing society as a heterogeneous collection of groups and individuals with often fundamentally different views and wishes.

Though populism is a distinct ideology, it does not possess the same level of intellectual refinement and consistency as, for example, socialism or liberalism.Footnote 13 Populism is only a thin-centred ideology, exhibiting a restricted core attached to a narrower range of political concepts.Footnote 14 The core concept of populism is obviously the people; in a sense, even the concept of the elite takes its identity from it (being its opposite, its nemesis). As a thin-centred ideology, populism can be easily combined with very different (thin and full) other ideologies, including communism, ecologism, nationalism or socialism.Footnote 15

Populism is moralistic rather than programmatic.Footnote 16 Essential to the discourse of the populist is the normative distinction between the elite and the people, not the empirical difference in behaviour or attitudes. Populism presents a Manichean outlook, in which there are only friends and foes. Opponents are not just people with different priorities and values, they are evil! Consequently, compromise is impossible, as it corrupts the purity.Footnote 17

Contrary to other definitions,Footnote 18 populism is here not defined on the basis of a special type of organization, i.e. charismatic leadership, or as a special style of communication, i.e. without intermediaries. While charismatic leadership and direct communication between the leader and the people are common among populists, these features facilitate rather than define populism. Indeed, the current success of populist actors cannot be separated from the general trend towards strong party leaders and more direct communication between party leadership and party supporters, which has developed over the past decades.Footnote 19

It is important to note that although this definition is broad, and open to many usages, this does not mean that all political actors are (at every time) populist. Despite the move towards a more catch-all profile, the ideological programmes of most mainstream parties still accept the pluralist worldview of liberal democracy. In fact, many of the quintessential contemporary populists do not always use a populist discourse. For example, the Flemish Block (VB), which now claims to say what the people think, initially referred to the people as the intellectual proletariat,Footnote 20 while the late Pim Fortuyn openly acknowledged that his lifestyle and some of his views were far too progressive for his supporters, i.e. the people.

A lot has been written about the vagueness of the term the people in the usage of populists. Some commentators have argued that the term is nothing more than a rhetorical tool that does not truly refer to any existing group of people. Others have given a class interpretation to it, arguing that populists mean not all the people but only a certain class segment.Footnote 21 Paul Taggart rightfully rejects the class interpretation, and tries to clarify the use of the term the people by introducing an alternative term, the heartland. According to him, the heartland is a place in which, in the populist imagination, a virtuous and unified population resides.Footnote 22

The concept of the heartland helps to emphasize that the people in the populist propaganda are neither real nor all-inclusive, but are in fact a mythical and constructed sub-set of the whole population. In other words, the people of the populists are an imagined community, much like the nation of the nationalists.Footnote 23 At the same time, the notion of the heartland does not overcome the main problem of the people, its vagueness. It is as unclear, and has consequently been used differently from populist to populist, even within one country. For example, for the British Conservatives the British heartland used to be Middle England, while the extreme right British National Party refers to the native British people.

What is often clearer is who and what populists are against. In liberal democratic systems, where political parties are the main actors in the process of representation, it comes as no surprise that in the propaganda of populists, anti-party sentiments play a prominent role.Footnote 24 In an often implicitly Rousseauian fashion, populists argue that political parties corrupt the link between leaders and supporters, create artificial divisions within the homogeneous people, and put their own interests above those of the people. However, as populists are reformist rather than revolutionary,Footnote 25 they do not oppose political parties per se. Rather, they oppose the established parties, call for (or claim to be) a new kind of party; i.e. they express populist anti-party sentiments rather than extremist anti-party sentiments.Footnote 26

To clarify the concept further, let's briefly look at various misunderstandings about populism. Although populists can be emancipatory, they do not want to change the people themselves, but rather their status within the political system. Populists (claim to) speak in the name of the oppressed people, and they want to emancipate them by making them aware of their oppression. However, they do not want to change their values or their way of life. This is fundamentally different from, for example, the (early) socialists, who want(ed) to uplift the workers by re-educating them, thereby liberating them from their false consciousness. For populists, on the other hand, the consciousness of the people, generally referred to as common sense, is the basis of all good (politics).

Populism is not necessarily opposed to technocratic measures, particularly if they can help to do away with (established) politicians. Indeed, one of the most successful populist movements, Social Credit in Canada, argued for a largely technocratic regime. In their view, the people should be consulted about the broad parameters of policy while experts should produce mechanisms to bring this policy about.Footnote 27 What is central to this view is that the experts do not alter the wishes of the people; they should just ensure that the people's wishes are implemented in the best possible way. This trust in experts, and the simultaneous distrust of politicians, can also be found in the ideas of contemporary populists, most notably Silvio Berlusconi and Pim Fortuyn.

Finally, some popular views in the literature need nuance rather than rejection. Firstly, various authors have argued that populism is reluctantly political.Footnote 28 I believe that this statement needs further qualification to be fully accurate. If one looks at certain populist actors, such as Filip Dewinter (VB) or Jrg Haider (FP), one cannot seriously argue that they are reluctantly political. They dont even necessarily claim this themselves. Rather, the heartland of the populist leaders is reluctantly political (see below).

Secondly, much of the literature argues that populism is a phenomenon of (social) crises. With respect to the recent populist movement, the alleged crisis is the result of the transformation to a post-industrial society, as well as the inadequate way in which social democracy has tried to deal with it.Footnote 29 Perhaps crisis is too harsh a term, but the populist heartland becomes active only when there are special circumstances: most notably, the combination of persisting political resentment, a (perceived) serious challenge to our way of life, and the presence of an attractive populist leader. However, what sets the populist heartland apart from other protest-prone groups is their reactiveness; they generally have to be mobilized by a populist actor, rather than taking the initiative themselves.

In the following analysis I will focus primarily on the populist Zeitgeist that has been characteristic of liberal democracies since the early 1990s. Examples will be drawn mostly from political parties in Western Europe, and at times also from Australia, New Zealand and North America.Footnote 30

Obviously, the phenomenon of populism is hardly new to politics in liberal democracies. Indeed, the US People's Party of the late nineteenth century is considered to be one of the defining populist movements. Even in post-war Europe there have been various populist phenomena: most notably the Italian Common Man's Front of Guglielmo Giannini (late 1940s), the French Union for the Defence of Merchants and Artisan of Pierre Poujade (late 1950s), the Dutch Farmers Party of Boer (Farmer) Koekoek (1960s), or the Danish Progress Party of Mogens Glistrup (1970s).

While all these parties are generally categorized at the right of the political spectrum though they are far from identical in ideological terms in the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s the populist critique came mainly from the (new) left. The main actors were the militant students in 1968, the New Left and New Social Movements in the 1970s, and the Green or New Politics parties in the early 1980s. In classic populist fashion, the early Greens despised politics and the political elite. In all ways ideological, organizational, and participatory they presented themselves as the exact opposites of the established parties. At the same time, Green parties represented the people as a whole, often championing the common sense and decent values of the people.Footnote 31

Today, populism is again mainly associated with the (radical) right. The most noted examples of contemporary populists in academic and media articles are radical right parties like Jrg Haider's FP, Jean-Marie Le Pen's FN, or Pauline Hanson's One Nation.Footnote 32 Increasingly, non-radical right parties are also included in the category of right-wing populism, most notably Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia or Pim Fortuyn's LPF.Footnote 33 This is not entirely illogical, because of the right's focus on the nation and the radical right's nationalism. The step from the nation to the people is easily taken, and the distinction between the two is often far from clear.Footnote 34

However, populism can also be found on the (radical) left.Footnote 35 One of the most (in)famous left-wing populists in post-war Europe is the French former businessman Bernard Tapie, who had a scandal-ridden political career in both the mainstream Socialist Party and the outsider Radical Party. Left-wing populism is generally strongest among outsider parties, such as the (East) German Party of Democratic Socialism, the Scottish Socialist Party, or the Dutch Socialist Party.Footnote 36 These left-wing populist parties combine a democratic socialist ideology with a strong populist discourse. They present themselves no longer as the vanguard of the proletariat, but as the vox populi (voice of the people).

In the United States populism has deep roots in mainstream politics, going back to the nineteenth century.Footnote 37 While populism has traditionally been associated most strongly with the Democratic Party, Republicans have been known to use it as well. In the last decades various observers have claimed the importance of populism in both the victory and the defeat of American presidential candidates, ranging from Reagan to Clinton and from Bush Jr to Gore.Footnote 38 In addition, various third-party candidates have run successful populist campaigns, most recently Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan.

While populism has been less prominent in mainstream politics in Western Europe, the last decade or so has seen a significant change in this. Various mainstream opposition parties have challenged the government using familiar populist arguments. For example, during the 2001 UK parliamentary election campaign, Tory leader William Hague referred to the New Labour leadership as the condescending liberal elite. He also frequently used the term metropolitan, arguing that the New Labour elite in London was completely out of touch with the feelings and concerns of the English people in the country (i.e. Middle England).Footnote 39 This is similar to the classic populist distinction between the corrupt, metropolitan, urban elite and the pure, indigenous, rural people.Footnote 40

That populism is neither reserved for the right-wing nor for the opposition can be seen, among other places, in Great Britain. As Peter Mair has forcefully argued, Tony Blair's New Labour has been a champion of mainstream populism, both before and after taking power.Footnote 41 Indeed, an interesting example of the broad and varied use of populism can be found in the struggle between the Labour government and the Countryside Alliance. Both use strong populist rhetoric: While the Alliance argues, similarly to former Tory leader Hague, that the Labour government are an alien(ated) elite that threatens the way of life of the (real) English people, Labour presents itself as the champion of the (true) English people against the privileges of the (upper class) elite.

Another prime exponent of left-wing government populism is Steve Stevaert, former vice-premier of Flanders and current leader of the Flemish Socialist Party. After having been criticized for his gratis politics by Flemish-nationalist leader Geert Bourgeois, who quoted an American legal scholar in support, Stevaert answered: I understand that Geert Bourgeois likes to support his standpoints by authority arguments, but I rather base myself upon the wisdom of the people.Footnote 42 His party colleague Frank Vandenbroucke, then minister of social affairs and pensions, even openly called for a left-wing populism with foundations.Footnote 43

In conclusion then, at least since the early 1990s populism has become a regular feature of politics in western democracies. While populism is still mostly used by outsider or challenger parties, mainstream politicians, both in government and in opposition, have been using it as well generally in an attempt to counter the populist challengers. Indeed, leading left-wing (vice) prime ministers, like Tony Blair or Steve Stevaert, have voiced some of the most pure examples of contemporary populism. This raises the question why western democracies are faced with this populist Zeitgeist now.

In finding the answer to the question of why so many people support populist ideas and politicians today, a first avenue to take is so obvious that it is often ignored: we should not a priori dismiss the charges anti-political establishment actors formulate.Footnote 44 Maybe the arguments of the populists are true and that could explain why they are so successful.

First of all, are the elites today more corrupt than they were before the 1990s? Obviously, this is a difficult question to answer, given that corruption is not just a contentious concept, it is also by definition a shady affair on which it is hard to get reliable, comparative data. According to most experts, the existence of party-related corruption is hardly new. What may be new, however, is the likelihood that a scandal will be produced once the evidence of corruption has been exposed.Footnote 45

Secondly, is it true that the people and the elite today stand further apart than they used to do in the past? According to Klaus von Beyme, (t)here are many tendencies in modern democracies which strengthen the separation of a political class from its basis, such as public financing of parties, monopolization of political activities, the co-operation of government and opposition.Footnote 46 It is particularly the latter aspect, i.e. the process of cartelization within European party systems, that has received a lot of attention from both academics and populists.Footnote 47

It is also true that politicians of all parties have become more similar sociologically (middle class) and politically (moderate).Footnote 48 At the same time, this can be said of the electorate too, though to a somewhat lesser extent. So, while accepting the continued social biases of legislative elites, it seems unlikely that the social distance between the bulk of the elites and the bulk of the citizens has increased significantly over the past decades.Footnote 49 In conclusion, though there is certainly some truth to the claims of the populists, perceptions seem to be more important than facts.

This change in perception is undoubtedly closely related to the changed role of the media in western democracies. Even if we only limit ourselves to the post-war period, we can note significant changes in the importance, role and range of the media. In short, more important than the actual increase in sleaze and corruption in politics, is thefdifferent way in which politics is reported upon in the media (i.e. a focus on the negative and sensationalist elements of news). There are two main reasons for the change in the way (much of) the media report upon politics today: independence and commercialization.Footnote 50

Traditionally, most of the western media were tightly controlled by political parties; often newspapers were part of the individual subcultures. This already changed somewhat with the introduction of radio and, most notably, television even though in many countries the established parties originally held a tight grip on public broadcasting. Since the late 1960s most media have gained increasing if not total independence from political parties. At the same time, public media (most notably television) has been challenged by private media, which has led to a struggle for readers and viewers and, consequently, a focus on the more extreme and scandalous aspects of politics (not just by the tabloid media). This development not only strengthened anti-elite sentiments within the population, it also provided the perfect stage for populist actors, who found not just a receptive audience, but also a highly receptive medium.Footnote 51 As one commentator noted with reference to the Austrian case: Haider needed the media and they needed him.Footnote 52

More positively, and perhaps paradoxically, another reason why people have become more receptive to populism is that they have become better educated and more emancipated.Footnote 53 As a consequence of the egalitarianism of the 1960s, citizens today expect more from politicians, and feel more competent to judge their actions.Footnote 54 This cognitive mobilizationFootnote 55 has led citizens to stop accepting that the elites think for them, and to no longer blindly swallow what the elites tell them.

This also explains why contemporary populists profit so much from their role as taboo breakers and fighters against political correctness.Footnote 56 Political correctness and taboos are hardly new phenomena in liberal democracies, although one might argue that they have been more strictly enforced in recent years (most notably with reference to racism). But because of the emancipation of the citizens, they have become contentious issues.

For decades, authors have noted a development towards apolitical or non-ideological politics in western democracies.Footnote 57 This development has been most pronounced in the former consociational democracies (e.g. Austria, Belgium, Switzerland), which have given rise to some of the strongest populist challenge(r)s. As these countries have become largely depillarized since the late 1960s, they transformed into depoliticized democracies,Footnote 58 in which administration has replaced politics (in modern parlance: governance instead of government). Not surprisingly, it is here that the populist call for the repoliticization of the public realmFootnote 59 and their role as taboo breaker have found the most receptive audience.

Finally, there are a variety of broad developments that have altered societies and politics in western democracies, and often beyond, which have also had an effect on the fate of populism. As these are well-documented, I will only shortly note their relationship to populism. First, the development toward a post-industrial society has dealigned many voters, increased the importance of divisions, and thereby created space for new, less ideological parties.Footnote 60 Secondly, the end of the cold war has changed the political relationships both within and towards liberal democracies. Most importantly, democracy has lost its arch-enemy, to which it was always compared favourably, and real existing democracies are now being increasingly compared unfavourably to the theoretical models. Thirdly, globalization, whether actual or perceived, has become presented as a serious limitation to the power of national elites.Footnote 61 Moreover, while mainstream politicians tend to explain the negative economic developments as inevitable consequences of globalization on the one hand, they also claim the positive economic conditions as the results of their own economic policies, on the other. They thereby weaken their main argument against the populist challenge, i.e. that a complete primacy of politics is unrealistic.

Several of these factors combined, most notably the changed role of the media and the emancipation of the citizens, have also led to a demystification of the political office. More and more citizens think they have a good understanding of what politicians do, and think they can do it better. While this does not necessarily mean that many people also actually want to do it better, by actively participating in various aspects of political life (see below), it does mean that the relationship between the elites and the citizens has changed significantly, and possibly irrevocably, over the past decades.

Max Weber has famously distinguished three types of authority: traditional, legal and charismatic.Footnote 62 Liberal democracies have overcome the traditional type with the notable exception of constitutional monarchies and real, i.e. legal, authority is meant to be based on competence. Indeed, it was on the basis of their presumed competence that politicians (most notably ministers) used to be held in quite high esteem in western democracies.

The emancipation of the citizens, as well as other factors mentioned above, has undermined the elite's competence, or at least the citizens perception of it,Footnote 63 and thereby also their (legal) authority. Consequently, more space for the third type of authority emerges: charisma. And while charismatic leadership is not the same as populist leadership, there are important similarities, and it should not be surprising that populists will be among the main winners of this shift to charismatic authority (see also below).Footnote 64

Much of the academic and political reactions to the populist challenges have involved calls for more or real democracy. Just look at the burgeoning literature on all kinds of more or less new types of democracy, such as deliberative democracy, digital democracy, e-democracy.Footnote 65 At the political level, the following statement by Romano Prodi, the EU Commission president, is exemplary: People want a much more participatory, hands on democracy. They [want to be] fully involved in setting goals, making policy and evaluating progress. And they are right.Footnote 66

At a conference on democratic disillusion in Paris, on 11 October 2002, Philippe Schmitter pointed to the schizophrenia among the elites of the established parties, who try to both close and open the political system. Indeed, one sees a combination of cartelization, i.e. closing of the party system by cooptation of challengers, and democratization, e.g. the opening of the political system through the introduction of elements of direct democracy (e.g. referendums) or e-governance.

However, deliberative democracy or a participation revolution were the answers to the populist demands of the New Left, the New Social Movements, and the Green and New Politics parties. But there is a fundamental difference between these populists and the current populist Zeitgeist. This can best be illustrated by the heartland, i.e. the interpretation of the people, that the populists refer to. The populism of the New Left referred to an active, self-confident, well-educated, progressive people. In sharp contrast, the current populism is the rebellion of the silent majority. The heartland of populists like Berlusconi or Haider is the hard-working, slightly conservative, law-abiding citizen, who, in silence but with growing anger, sees his world being perverted by progressives, criminals, and aliens.

In short, the contemporary populist revolt is in many ways the opposite to that of 1968 and further. While the populists of the silent revolution wanted more participation and less leadership, the populists of the silent counter-revolution want more leadership and less participation.Footnote 67 As Robert Dahl has argued

it is an all too common mistake to see democracy simply as a matter of political participation, and to assume that if some people in democratic countries say they value democracy it must be because they receive enjoyment or satisfaction from actually participating in political life. And if it turns out that they do not particularly enjoy participating in political life and do not engage much in it, then it might seem to follow that they do not care much about democracy.Footnote 68

The current heartland of the populists does support democracy, but they do not want to be bothered with politics all the time. Indeed, nearly a half-century of surveys provides overwhelming evidence that citizens do not put much value on actually participating themselves in political life.Footnote 69 True, they want to be heard in the case of fundamental decisions, but first and foremost they want leadership. They want politicians who know (rather than listen to) the people, and who make their wishes come true.

The heartland of contemporary populism is thus focused primarily on the output and not on the input of democracy. What they demand is responsive government, i.e. a government that implements policies that are in line with their wishes. However, they want the politicians to come up with these policies without bothering them, i.e. without much participation from them.

In contrast to popular misperceptions, the populist voters do not strongly favour any form of participatory democracy, be it deliberative or plebiscitary. Indeed, one of the few empirical analyses into the democratic views of supporters of populist parties concludes: supporters of populist parties are not systematically supportive of expanding democratic processes.Footnote 70 Indeed, one could argue that populists (both leaders and followers) support referendums mainly as an instrument to overcome the power of the elite. They see it as the only possibility left to ensure that the wishes of the people are reflected in the government's policies.

But the current plebiscitary transformation of democracyFootnote 71 does not only fail to solve the perceived crisis of democracy, i.e. the populist challenge, it can actually strengthen it. By using a similar, popular democratic discourse to justify the changes, the critique of the populist actors is legitimized.Footnote 72 More importantly, these actions raise the expectations of the populist heartland. And when these expectations are not met, which has been the case in most instances,Footnote 73 the populist protest will be even stronger. Consequently, dissatisfied voters will prefer the original over the copy, as Le Pen has famously remarked, given that the copy has already proved to be untrustworthy.

Another misperception is that populist voters resent the establishment because they are different. Populism is neither about class, except perhaps the rejection of the political class,Footnote 74 nor about social representation or paritary democracy. Supporters of populist parties do not want to be ruled by the man in the street in socio-demographic terms. Just look at the flamboyant individuals that lead most of these movements; one can hardly say that Pim Fortuyn was an average Dutch citizen!Footnote 75 What the populist supporter wants is the problems of the common man to be solved, according to their own values (often referred to as common sense), and they accept that this will have to be done by a remarkable leader. Or, in the words of Paul Taggart, populism requires the most extraordinary individuals to lead the most ordinary of people.Footnote 76 Incidentally, it is in this exceptional character of the leader of some, but definitely not all, populist movements that charismatic leadership plays a role.Footnote 77

Interestingly, the populist leader is not necessarily a true outsider. People like Berlusconi, Fortuyn, or Haider were, already before their political career took off, well connected with sections within the economic and political elites, without being truly part of them. But rather than a counter-elite,Footnote 78 which better fits the textbook populist, they would be best described as outsider-elites: connected to the elites, but not part of them.

Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose the pure people against the corrupt elite?Footnote 79 As argued above, I disagree with this view, and believe that both the populist masses and the populist elites support true representation. In other words, they reject neither representation per se, nor the lack of social representation. What they oppose is being represented by an alien elite, whose policies do not reflect their own wishes and concerns.Footnote 80

In the populist mind, the elite are the henchmen of special interests. Historically, these powerful, shady forces were bankers and international financiers (often alleged to be Jewish). But in contemporary populism a new class has been identified, that of the progressives and the politically correct. This new class theory originated within North American neo-conservative circles of the 1980s.Footnote 81 In the following decades populists from all ideological persuasions would attack the dictatorship of the progressives, or in Fortuynist terms the Church of the Left.

Rather than representative democracy, populism is inherently hostile to the idea and institutions of liberal democracy or constitutional democracy.Footnote 82 Populism is one form of what Fareed ZakariaFootnote 83 has recently popularized as illiberal democracy, but which could also be called democratic extremism. Despite all democratic rhetoric, liberal democracy is a complex compromise of popular democracy and liberal elitism, which is therefore only partly democratic. As Margaret Canovan has brilliantly argued, populism is a biting critique of the democratic limitations within liberal democracies.Footnote 84 In its extremist interpretation of majoritarian democracy, it rejects all limitations on the expression of the general will, most notably the constitutional protection of minorities and the independence (from politics, and therefore from democratic control) of key state institutions (e.g. the judiciary, the central bank).Footnote 85

To a large extent, populism draws its strength from the confused and often opportunistic democratic promises of the political elites. In this age of egalitarianism the defence of the elitist aspects of liberal democracy becomes more and more like political suicide. Consequently, politicians left, right and centre are emphasizing almost exclusively the importance of the popular aspects, i.e. the democratic side. Typical are the debates about the (alleged) gap between the citizen and politics (note the homogeneous categorizations) or the democratic deficit in the European Union.

In most countries these debates started among the political elites, without any indication that the masses were much concerned about them. However, after years of reading and hearing about dysfunctional national and supranational democracies, more and more people have become both sensitized to the problem, and convinced that things can and should be better. The problem is, can they be better (i.e. more democratic) within the system of liberal democracy? As soon as more radical demands are made, the answer from the mainstream politicians is often that they are not feasible because of constitutional provisions or international commitments. Thus, a vicious circle is created, which can only be broken by either giving in to the populists, and creating a more populist (and less liberal!) democratic system, or by resisting them, and instead explaining and defending the democratic limitations of the liberal democratic system.

The aim of this article has been to make a threefold contribution to the current debate on populism in liberal democracies. The first contribution has been a clear and original definition of populism, which can also be employed in empirical research. I have defined populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people versus the corrupt elite, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volont gnrale (general will) of the people.

Secondly, the normal-pathology thesis was rejected, and instead it was shown that populist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of contemporary western democracies. I have called this the populist Zeitgeist. True, most mainstream parties mainly use populist rhetoric, but some also call for populist amendments to the liberal democratic system (most notably through the introduction of plebiscitary instruments).

Thirdly, I have argued that the explanations of and the reactions to the current populist Zeitgeist are seriously flawed. Much of the recently proposed solutions have been inspired by the populist critique of the New Left in the 1970s and 1980s, which differs fundamentally from that of the 1990s (in supply and demand). In sharp contrast to the earlier period, contemporary populists favour output over input and leadership over participation. Consequently, these reactions are not just flawed, they can become counter-productive, i.e. strengthening the populist challenge rather than weakening it.

So, are politics in liberal democracies destined to stay populist for ever? Hardly! True, there are some structural tensions within liberal democracy upon which populists can feed. But populism is also episodic;Footnote 86 not just the individual movements, but the whole dynamic. When explicitly populist outsider groups gain prominence, parts of the establishment will react by a combined strategy of exclusion and inclusion; while trying to exclude the populist actor(s) from political power, they will include populist themes and rhetoric to try and fight off the challenge. This dynamic will bring about a populist Zeitgeist, like the one we are facing today, which will dissipate as soon as the populist challenger seems to be over its top.

However, because of the structural changes, and the consequent move away from legal authority and toward charismatic authority, as well as the demystification of politics in Western liberal democracies, populism will be a more regular feature of future democratic politics, erupting whenever significant sections of the silent majority feels that the elite no longer represents them.

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The Populist Zeitgeist | Government and Opposition ...

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warned on Monday during an online press conference that one of the greatest threats Israel faces in the new year will be charges of apartheid by U.N. groups with sports the first area affected. Their effort will be to get organizations to take Israel out of sporting and cultural events, he said.

To counter this expected trend, Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs would devote considerable resources in 2022 to countering those efforts, he said.

The concern here from the foreign ministry is that you have three or four different legal proceedings in which allegations of apartheid have been made and that at least one of them may end up endorsing these allegations, Yuval Shany, professor of international law at Hebrew University and research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told JNS.

He said Israel faces charges of apartheid at 1) the U.N.s Commission of Inquiry, which has an open-ended mandate to look into allegations of Israeli discrimination; 2) the Geneva-based U.N. Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which is reviewing a Palestinian Authority complaint against Israel accusing it of apartheid; and 3) the International Criminal Court (ICC), where certain Palestinian groups have submitted allegations concerning Israeli practices in the West Bank being a form of apartheid.

All of these tracks are aimed essentially at obtaining a legal, or quasi-legal, finding that Israeli practices amount to systemic discrimination or a form of apartheid in international law, he said.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS that the Commission of Inquiry is the primary threat. The commission was established by the Human Rights Council following Israels 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip last May. Neuer said it has become standard practice for the United Nations to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes after each round of fighting, but this time the commission is unprecedented in its scope.

It will investigate so-called systematic discriminationmass discrimination within Israel and the territories, he said. Its quite clear that its going to accuse Israel of apartheid. This inquiry has no end, meaning it doesnt last six months or a year. It will be reporting twice every year.

Neuer said the new mandate in which the commission is authorized to continuously investigate Israel is inspired by the zeitgeist in America where accusations of systemic discrimination have become the fashionable trend. He sees the focus on racism as a modern form of anti-Semitism, noting that Jews have been attacked throughout history as being opposed to whatever society identified as the highest virtue. Today, in 2022, anti-racism is the highest virtue, and so its not accidental that Israel is accused of being intrinsically racist, he said.

Shany, who noted that the apartheid charge has been leveled at Israel for some time, wouldnt speculate as to why its gaining momentum now. He agreed that its possible that the political temper in the United States is a contributing factor but said its probably a combination of many reasons.

Pnina Sharvit Baruch, a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and head of its program on law and national security, told JNS that Israels opponents have at least one practical reason for pushing apartheid charges.

She said the two reports that will be produced by the Commission of Inquiry and the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination are designed to push the new ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to prioritize the investigation against Israel started by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda. Khan is more pragmatic than Bensouda, she noted, and based on his own comments, Im not sure he would like to put our case at the top of his priorities, she said.

So this would be an attempt, first, to push him into pursuing the investigation and, second, to try to persuade him to include in the investigation also claims about apartheid because apartheid is one of the crimes against humanity included in the Rome Statute, she explained, referring to the treaty that established the ICC.

Of course, more generally, its part of the campaign against Israelto try to get more countries, organizations and companies to boycott Israel, to divest from Israel under the whole idea of the BDS movement, she said.

She doesnt see a way to stop these U.N. bodies from condemning Israel, noting that the United Nations has appointed South African Navi Pillay, known for her hostile views to Israel, as head of the Commission of Inquiry. She said its a disturbing development. Apartheid had been considered going too far, and now theres an attemptit might succeed, tooto put it within legitimate criticism against Israel. I think thats very bad for Israel.

As for Lapids belief that sports and cultural events would be the first target, Shany agreed that Lapid was right in pointing out that this is going to put wind in the sails of the BDS movement and basically render cultural, educational, sports relations with Israeli counterparts as politically unacceptable in the eyes of increasing segments of the population.

Neuer went further. He said in the United States, during the recent Gaza conflict, legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned Israel. (She had tweeted: Apartheid states arent democracies.)

During that time, Jews in America were being attacked on the streets in Los Angeles, in New York and elsewhere, and that was in connection with the war that was happening in Israel, said Neuer. Accusing the Jewish state of being an evil apartheid state is a means to delegitimize and demonizeand even physically attackJews. I think this cannot be underestimated. Exclusions from certain international bodies would be only the tip of the iceberg.

The post Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 appeared first on JNS.org.

Originally posted here:

Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 - Cleveland Jewish News

I was in my twenties the first time I heard the concept of the chosen family, and its hard to overstate how much it resonated with me.

Yes! I thought. Forget my biological family, I want to spend my life around people who love and accept me for who I am the family I choose!

Related: Activism is the secret to Megan Rapinoe & Sue Birds relationship

Then again, Im gay, and Id come from a conservative Catholic family with parents who had an extremely difficult time with my being gay. Plus, this was the 80s and early 90s, at the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and Id seen so many people with the disease cruelly judged or rejected by families who claimed to love them.

It didnt help that this was also the height of the pro-family conservative movement and that term, pro-family, had been coined specifically to reject LGBTQ people and our rights.

In other words, at that point in my life, almost every time I heard the word family, it was literally defined as an institution that excluded me.

In a way, my gay friends and I had no choice but to create our own families build our own 28 Barbary Lanes from the Tales of the City books. Some, like the drag families featured in the landmark documentary Paris is Burning, even featured literal parental figures drag mothers.

And trust me, those chosen families saved a lot of lives.

But thirty years later, the landscape of the chosen family looks different to me. For one thing, most biological families are far more accepting of their LGBTQ members now at least in America and Western Europe.

This has mirrored my own family, which went on to become very gay-supportive. Not long ago, pre-COVID, my elderly father laid down the law with the other folks at his retirement home: he refused to sit with anyone who didnt support same-sex marriage.

But the concept of the chosen family itself also never really lived up to its hype.

The idea definitely went big-time. Friends and Sex and the City defined the late 90s zeitgeist, not Leave it to Beaver or Little House on the Prairie.

In fact, culturally speaking, Id say we LGBTQ folks completely won the family argument, and the prevailing message in mainstream American entertainment is now way beyond even that of Friends and Sex and the City. The new message is fairly consistent: the cool people leave their families and go off to have exciting (if neurotic) single lives in the city, while the boring, stupid people get married and have kids.

Basically, the traditional family is oppressive and dysfunctional an outdated paradigm that should be mocked and rejected. In its place, we should all now assemble our own families of choice.

But even though we won the argument, Im not sure we won the war. Without the bonds of culture and tradition, how strong are chosen families anyway? Do they really last?

I think about my own chosen family from back in my twenties. At the time, I thought wed be tight forever.

But things changed. Some members of my circle both gay and straight had kids and their children became their top priority. In other cases, people changed cities or took in aging parents. We all moved on with our lives and hey, my husband Michael and I eventually left America to travel the world as digital nomads.

Im still friends with most of my chosen family from way back when in some cases, very good friends. And as world travelers, Michael and I have since made another solid circle of close nomad friends.

But I see now that the role these people play in my life isnt really the same as family.

As for the larger LGBTQ community, people dont seem to be any less lonely and isolated than before we started boldly forging all these chosen families. In fact, theres some evidence that coming out makes a gay person more depressed, not less.

In fact, all Americans seem more lonely and anxious than ever.

And, sure, there are a lot of obvious reasons for Americas current epidemic of anxiety and alienation economic pressures, cynical TV executives and political operatives, and (especially, IMHO) social media, which is literally designed to turn people into frustrated addicts.

But Im increasingly convinced the deconstruction of family is also at least part of the reason why America is so messed up.

Its a very strange thing, being old enough to see an obscure fringe belief you once completely identified with and totally championed go on to become a dominant cultural belief and suddenly youre able to see that, along with its essential truths, the concept also contains some real flaws and limitations.

Sure, the concept of the chosen family has been great for the privileged class, and the young and attractive people who have the money or connections to shield themselves from the brutalities of life. Now they have even more resources to focus on themselves and their own personal happiness.

But what about the elderly? The disabled and the neurodiverse? Addicts? The misfits and oddballs? And children? When chosen families go mainstream, and everyone is picking and choosing their family members, what happens to the folks who take more than they give? Are they simply on their own the responsibility of an impersonal government?

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: I think for a very long time, traditional families in America completely failed their LGBTQ members. They failed women too. Many families are still failing these groups. In traditional countries and cultures, the problem is far, far worse than in America.

It also must be said: despite having been treated so poorly by family, many LGBTQ people and women do the lions share of caring for elderly parents. Ironic much?

I also hope it goes without saying that I acknowledge that some families and family members are so toxic and abusive that they should be completely rejected.(At the same time, it feels to me like some people are now defining toxicity and abuse so broadly that the terms sometimes feel meaningless and some of these folks have ended up pathologizing frustrating-but-normal human interaction. But your mileage may vary.)

Where has my reassessment of family come from anyway?

More than anything, it was that decision Michael and I made to leave America. Before I knew it, I was confronted by something I truly hadnt expected namely, when it comes to family, America is a massive outlier compared with the rest of the world. Outside of the United States, most people have a completely different relationship with their relatives.

They also seem, well, happier. Theres always the danger that Im seeing the rest of the world through rose-colored glasses. And families in the rest of the world are definitely changing too becoming less traditional, less tightly woven over the decades.

But not nearly as fast as in America, where massive, sweeping changes have happened in only a few generations.

The rest of the world also really does seem to be far less anxious and neurotic than my home country.

As a result, Ive come to think that maybe family isnt the oppressive, horrible, irredeemable, dysfunctional institution I once thought.Or, rather, yes, maybe it is, some of the time especially for LGBTQ people, women, and, frankly, anyone who feels different.But there are also benefits to the family that I didnt appreciate back in my twenties benefits that simply arent replicated by a chosen family.

Living for months at a time in countries like Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Romania, and Czechia, Ive heard many local friends talk about their families that vast, complicated network of relatives who are an integral part of their daily lives.

Everyone complains about the obligations and responsibilities they feel toward this tangle of people, and weve definitely heard people express frustration and exasperation over what seems like genuine slights and real injustices.

But Ive heard so many good things too so much actual love. In the best-case scenario, theres always someone looking out for you. And no family member is ever left behind.

And since theyre talking about extended families, the messages they receive are often surprisingly diverse. After all, even more conservative families tend to have an eccentric aunt or a free-thinking uncle.

For better and for worse, the bonds of culture and tradition really are strong. Amid these interconnected family relationships, people gain a real sense of identity and a feeling of rootedness even if, yeah, they probably lose some personal freedom. Life is definitely less about self-expression.

This leads me to what may be the real problem with American families: unlike the rest of the world, American families underwent a massive social change in the 1950s from a rich, complicated extended family model, to a smaller nuclear one.

One father, one mother, and their kids preferably living in the suburbs.My own biological family minus extended relatives a few years back.

It makes sense this change happened in America, because Americans see themselves, first and foremost, as individuals. I couldnt see this when I lived in America, but now that Ive left, this sense of American individuality feels so overwhelming that its almost hard to put it into words.

And the nuclear family did give many Americans a new kind of freedom and a lot more opportunities, at least for white men.

It was also great for the American economy; its a big part of the reason why America is a superpower right now. After all, all those individual white families had to have their own house and a lot of their kids got to have their own bedroom too. And they had to fill all those rooms with stuff.

Corporations loved the nuclear family because it was an opportunity to sell more things to Americans and make even more money.

But in the end, the nuclear family ended up being absolutely terrible for American society. In a way, it was the worst of both worlds creating an emotionally stifling environment while depriving people of any sense of identity or culture. I think the nuclear family was worse for women too, isolating them from what had previously been, yes, a blatantly unfair social order, but also a rich social network of female interaction and respect.

In what universe does it make sense for a couple and, often, mostly the mother to raise their newborns almost entirely alone?

Maybe this is what LGBTQ people like myself were really rebelling against back in the 1980s: not family per se, but the nuclear one.

But in a way, the chosen family wasnt so much a rebellion as it was the natural next step, after nuclear families, in an increasingly individualistic and self-centered America. And, of course, it was a way for corporations to make even more money. Now every single person needed to fill their whole house or apartment with things.

Like the nuclear family, chosen families also came with huge limitations.

Look, the extended family model is far from perfect. And even now, some form of the chosen family still has a place in the world.But things arent black-and-white. I see now that traditional family networks evolved the way they did for a reason.

So whats the solution? How do we make American families functional again?

First, I think progressives need to stop with the wholesale demonization of all things family-related. In Hollywood, it may be emotionally satisfying for writers who feel misunderstood by their own families to ridicule them, but its simplistic and patronizing. And when radical leftists say really stupid, politically disastrous things like Abolish the family! more moderate progressives need to be very clear and say, Thats a kind of bigotry, and these people dont speak for me.

The rich, complicated social networks Ive witnessed in other countries seem more interesting to me now than yet more trite smugness about how horrible and oppressive family is.

Its hard to overstate how stupid this meme is, politically and otherwise.

As for conservatives, well, they need to start actually supporting families financially, I mean, with policies like paid parental leave, and affordable child care, housing, and health care.They can also start to see that egalitarianism is good for everyone. Lets face it: conservatives bigoted, exclusionary pro-family rhetoric is a big part of the reason America is now in the mess its in.

The childrens author Judy Blume once wrote a book titled Places I Never Meant to Be. That title describes the way I feel right now. How in the world did I someone who couldnt wait to replace his biological family with his newly chosen one become this person who is now saying, Hold on now! Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But here I am. Life surprises you. Ive surprised myself.

In the end, the chosen family didnt solve all of societys problems, and it even created new ones. Who knew?

But Americans still have a choice. We can now pick and choose from the best of both models.It would be nice if this time we finally got the answer right.

Brent Hartinger is an author and editor, and the Brent in Brent and Michael Are Going Places, a couple of traveling gay digital nomads. Subscribe to their free travel newsletter here.

See original here:

The chosen family isn't working like we thought it would - LGBTQ Nation

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREENS corruption by neoliberalism is that they simply cannot grasp how completely theyve been seduced. At its heart, the problem is one of generational experience and perspective. The younger generation of Greens, the ones currently in control of the organisation, simply have no experiential connection to the zeitgeist out of which their movement was born. Their entire adult lives have been lived in the shadow of the neoliberal revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. What came before the revolution has been dismissed by its architects and disciples as existing outside the realm of common sense. Those who preach the values and aspirations of those pre-revolutionary times offer news from nowhere and no one is listening.

They could, of course, learn the origin stories of radical environmentalism by entering imaginatively into the historical circumstances out of which it was born. Historians do this all the time. Watch Mary Beards television series on Ancient Rome and it will soon become clear how thoroughly an intelligent and inquisitive human-being is able to not only comprehend, but also inhabit, the past. Beard talks of being captured by the history of the Roman world from the moment she read Tacitus chilling judgement of his own people: They make a desert and they call it peace.

The problem with the generations that have grown up in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan destroyed the post-war social-democratic settlement, is that they have been convinced the past has nothing useful to teach them.

Like the early cartographers who wrote Here Be Monsters in the blank spaces of their maps, the neoliberal ideologues tell frightening tales about the times before their Year Zero. Anxious to dissuade those contemplating their own voyages of historical discovery, they warn that only bad and mad things lie beyond the well-charted shorelines of the present. Sadly, they have been remarkably successful. The past remains one of the very few foreign countries that millennial influencers have no interest in visiting not least because they do things differently there.

One of the principal reasons for the neoliberals success is that their own ideologically-inspired break with the post-war world was strengthened immeasurably by the natural inclination of young people to dismiss the world in which their elders were raised as hopelessly pass. Ordinarily, such youthful disdain is reserved for the fashions, art and music of the recent past so lacking in the manifestly superior tastes of the present. What the Neoliberals merged so successfully, however, was this essentially harmless generational scorn with their own deep ideological hostility towards the ideas and institutions of the entire modern era.

When Baby Boomers like Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford condemn the younger generations of Greens for abandoning the foundational beliefs and principles of the Green Movement, all these younger Greens hear is an ideological version of Taylor Swift cant hold a candle to Joni Mitchell. Or, Where is your generations Godfather? Wheres your Catcher in the Rye? Your Sergeant Pepper? Social-democracy, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson, Earth Day 1971: Catherine and Sue might just as well be touting the virtues of a dusty vinyl version of Greatest Hits of the 1960s and 70s. Okay Boomer.

Lacking a firm grasp of recent history, the generations at the end of the alphabet do not understand that while their parents and grandparents might have laughed at the RSA Generations stuffy conformism, and marched against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and Apartheid sport, they had nothing but admiration for the extraordinary structures of social care which these earlier generations had built. Moreover, they were full of gratitude for the fact that their own lives would be fuller and more prosperous as a result. The Boomers grew up in the shadow of fascism and genocide. They knew what the generation preceding their own had beaten back and they loved them for it.

Discouraged from accessing the past, the younger Greens will struggle to understand the extraordinary exhilaration of encountering their own movement for the first time. New Zealand was the first nation to encounter a green political party. Inspired by the Club of Romes Limits To Growth, the Values Party spoke, for the first time, of constructing a future guided by humility and restraint. To hear Tony Brunt and his successors talk about limiting economic growth, and expanding the time in which people could simply be themselves, was to envisage a world beyond tomorrow. This was news from a somewhere humankind had yet to reach.

The worst crime against History which the Neoliberals have committed, however, is to convince young people that the past was a stinking cesspit of privilege, prejudice and oppression. That their ancestors were monsters wiping out indigenous peoples even as their axes and machines laid waste to the forests, lakes, rivers and streams which had sustained them for millennia. By painting the past as a hellscape of irredeemable horror, the tiny fraction of one percent who lord it over the rest of humanity, Paul Simons loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires are robbing us of the means to rescue the future.

Is there horror in the past? Is it full of murder and rapine? Of course it is but no more than the horror that daily disfigures the present. Nor are evil deeds all that the past has to show us. Amidst the horror there is heroism. Amidst the murder and rapine there is also empathy and courage, creativity and love.

Human-beings do not suffer injustice meekly, they rise against it again and again and again. Down through the centuries reformers and revolutionaries have dreamed dreams and seen visions. Slavery was abolished. Women were enfranchised. Children were removed from coalmines and cotton mills.

When the armed constabulary invaded Parihaka in 1881, not all Pakeha cheered nowhere near all. In the end, Apartheid fell. Eventually, gay sex was decriminalised. The past is not simply a catalogue of horrors. It is also an endless source of inspiration and hope.

The Neoliberals would shut the younger generations off from that hope and inspiration. The neoliberals would have us believe that this is as good as it gets. They have almost convinced James Shaw and Marama Davidson that the future can only be reached with tiny steps. On a warming planet that is rapidly running out of time, that is deadly advice.

Catherine and Sue, and all those who stand with them, are right: this is no time for tiny steps. Humankind has made giant leaps before all the way to the moon. But the booster rockets that push us towards the future are fuelled by the knowledge of what human-beings have achieved in the past.

Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanitys past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword.

Never has that need been greater.

Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clios liberating sword through neoliberalisms black and befouling heart.

See the original post:

News From Nowhere If the Greens are to have a future they must listen to their past - thedailyblog.co.nz

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Wes Andersons latest film, The French Dispatch (20th Century Studios), was such a dizzying, fast-moving, visual feast that it begs to be viewed again on physical media, if only to pause on each impeccably art-directed frame to catch details you missed. In that context, the movie could be about anything, really, and wed just be content to look at it. But it does happen to be about the golden age of American literary magazines, full of archly drawn intellectuals, all of whom are portrayed by a stunning roster of A-list stars delivering Andersonian dialogue in the deadpan manner weve all come to know and love.

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The Crime of the Century (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) B-movie classic involving an ex-con exposing the titular misdeed.

Dancing With Crime / The Green Cockatoo (Cohen Media Group) Innocents get mixed up with murder in this double feature of classic British thrillers.

Double Door (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) 1934 family drama about rich New Yorkers in the grip of a matriarchs domineering ways.

Expresso Bongo (Cohen Media Group) The movie that launched the pop career of British icon Cliff Richard, and yes, its got lots of bongos, daddy-o.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema V (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Hard-boiled is the new happy with these vintage downbeat classics: The Midnight Story, Outside the Law, and Because of You.

Gambit (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) If you can get past Shirley MacLaines semi-yellowface (her character is Eurasian), she and Michael Caine have fun with this twisty comedy caper.

Golden Earrings (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) A spy finds love in this WWII drama starring Ray Milland and Marlene Dietrich.

A Hard Days Night (The Criterion Collection) The Beatles became movie stars with this one, and its no wonder. (Now in 4K.)

Impasse (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) 1969 World War II action film with Burt Reynolds hunting for hidden treasure in the Philippines

Journey to Shiloh (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Seven men go on a cross country trek to fight the Battle of Shiloh in this 1968 Civil Warthemed western (which features one of Harrison Fords earliest screen appearances).

Juice (Paramount) A new 4K steelbook highlights Tupacs acting debut, which charges up this teenage crime drama that also features a young Queen Latifah.

Laughing Heirs (Kino Classics) 1933 Max Ophuls comedy about a wine estate heir who wont inherit a thing if he touches a drop of alcohol.

The Lover (Capelight Pictures) Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai star in the Marguerite Duras adaptation that had arthouse audiences coming back for more forbidden love-affair action; when it was released in 1992, it was one of the first Western films since Sessue Hayakawas silent-screen heyday to present an Asian man as a sexual romantic lead.

The Mafu Cage (Scorpion Releasing) Karen Arthurs oddball cult film with Carol Kane, Lee Grant, and a house full of primates.

Marias Lovers (Kino Lorber) Nastassja Kinski has a lot of men on hold in this romantic drama from Andrei Konchalovsky.

The Naked Ape (Code Red) A 1973 experience of a film with live-action and animation exploring the evolution of humanity. (Features a postThe Rifleman Johnny Crawford and a pre-Dallas Victoria Principal, both game.)

The Piano (The Criterion Collection) Jane Campions masterpiece, starring Oscar-winners Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin, alongside Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill. (Now in 4K.)

The Pink Jungle (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) James Garner and George Kennedy fight for diamonds and a woman in South America.

The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Walt Disney Home Entertainment) The one that started it all, just so you know who to blame. (Now in 4K.)

Red Angel (Arrow Video) Yasuzo Masumaras searing 1966 anti-war film still packs a wallop

Rich and Strange (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Early Alfred Hitchcock drama about a couple who find that an inheritance leads to more trouble than they expected.

The 7th Dawn (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) William Holden leads a cast of characters caught up on opposing sides of a Communist insurgency in Malaya after World War II.

Shake Hands with the Devil (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) James Cagney fights with the I.R.A. against British forces in this 1959 historical drama

The Sherlock Holmes Vault Collection (The Film Detective) Even before Basil Rathbone famously took over the part, the legendary sleuth was already a cinema staple in these four British features from the 1930s.

Sparrows (MVD Visual) New restoration of a 1926 social-issue drama starring Mary Pickford.

Three Women (Kino Classics) Not to be confused with the Robert Altman film of the same name, this silent Ernst Lubitsch drama concerns a mother and daughter involved in a love triangle.

Through the Decades: 1960s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) A dizzingly varied collection of films in one 60s-themed box the highlight is Arthur Penns Mickey One, an existential-neurotic-jazz gangster drama with Warren Beatty, but theres lots to enjoy here, including Who Was That Lady?, The Notorious Landlady, Under the Yum-Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam, Lilith (starring Beatty and Jean Seberg), Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Genghis Khan, The Chase, Luv, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life), and Hook, Line and Sinker.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) Youll want this assortment for the two Barbra Streisand movies (The Owl and the Pussycat and For Petes Sake) and the rollicking Jane FondaGeorge Segal heist comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, but theres plenty more to enjoy here, including A Walk in the Spring Rain, $ (Dollars), The Anderson Tapes, Brother John, The Horsemen, early Stephen Frears comedy Gumshoe, and The Stone Killer.

New TV

Naysayers might have originally decried the series as a gimmicky spin-off from a beloved movie franchise, but here we are at Cobra Kai: Season 3 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) with Season 4 new on Netflix and the show continues to build an audience while cleverly retweaking everything we thought we knew about the iconic characters played, then and now, by Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and the rest of this talented ensemble.

Also available:

Billions: Season 5 (CBS/Paramount) The battle of wills in the world of high finance never ends!

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Liberation Hall) A priest on trial for heresy in this 1958 TV adaptation of the Thornton Wilder novel starring Hume Cronyn and Judith Anderson and directed by Robert Mulligan.

Inherit the Wind (1999) (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott remake the classic play and film for TV.

Go here to see the original:

What's New on DVD in January: The French Dispatch, Her Smell, Martial Arts Classics, and More - TheWrap

These days, it seems, bad news is painfully easy to find. The good stuff often takes a bit more digging. Thats where GPs expert writers and editors come in, keeping their fingers on the pulse of the industries they cover to tap into all the exciting product news breaking now and waiting for us on the horizon.

With that in mind, we tasked our teams with ID-ing the most interesting trends in their areas of expertise, and wow, theres lots to celebrate and anticipate. Just a few examples to whet your appetite: microdosing mushrooms or LSD is becoming a legal way to level out, you can order coffee beans via text message, digital audio quality has never been better, and holy crap a lot of rad EVs are coming this year.

So hey, quit the doomscrolling and do some pleasant perusing of whats good in outdoors, fitness, style, wellness, food & drink, home, tech, audio, motoring and watches below. It wont erase the bad news, but it just might make things easier to ride out.

They say threes a trend, right? In that case, we are officially declaring the outdoor industrys push toward endemic recycling incorporating factory scraps into new products just that. The micro movements inspiration is, of course, Cotopaxi. The seven-year-old Salt Lake City-based brands colorful packs and jackets are legendarily scrap-sourced, with 94 percent of its products containing repurposed, recycled or responsible materials. More to the point, it has an entire series dubbed Remnant, currently composed of 21 different bags made with fabric sourced from other companies larger production runs.

The practice makes both environmental and business sense, which may explain why at least three other prominent brands have somewhat mimicked it. First theres Nemo Equipment, which assembles the Chipper Reclaimed Closed-Cell Foam Seat aka butt pad from leftover sleeping pad foam. On a larger scale, youll find Fjllrvens Samlaren collection. Named after the Swedish word for gathering, the very limited series features unique color combinations, including a Pink-Air Blue Knken pack, which we are crossing our fingers comes back in stock.

Most recently, we have Arcteryxs ReBird program, a sweeping effort to rethink sustainability that includes an initiative to collect end-of-roll materials and upcycle them into new products. This stuff seems to sell out even faster than Samlaren does, perhaps because it truly doesnt skimp on performance: the lightweight, ski-ready Rush Jacket Rebird features Gore-Tex Pro Most Rugged, after all. That fabric is so high-performance, its no wonder Arcteryx isnt letting an ounce of it go to waste.

As curious creatures, we humans been tracking ourselves for a pretty long time. We've created almanacs, cave paintings, the Manpo-kei and more to document our exploits, bringing ever-better technology to bear with every passing year.

Until recently, breaking down our bodies activities has been fairly hands-on: the pedometer, the wireless heart rate monitor, the accelerometers embedded in phones all record various data, but they still demand a degree of user engagement. The advent of Fitbit and its ilk introduced passive tracking monitoring biometrics in real time, with minimal effort, to hone our pursuit of physical perfection (or something like that). And now, thanks to brands like HidrateSpark and Whoop, were seeing a truly friction-free movement on the horizon.

The HidrateSpark PRO sets hydration goals, employs an LED smart sensor to record water intake and glows to remind you when its time to take a swig, pretty much autonomously. The Whoop 4.0 with Any-Wear clothing technology is more advanced but just as unobtrusive. Users can hide the sensor pod on various points of their bodies to track physical activity, heart rate, stress levels and more. The unit never turns off charge it on the go with the battery pack, and digitize your metrics, 24/7. Theres no screen, no buttons, no effort (other than the initial setup, and, well, your workouts).

Different as they are, both products signal the dawn of a new era in fitness one where we can comprehensively keep tabs on our bodies, without breaking a sweat.

GORP Takes to the Streets

Arcteryx, Salomon, Patagonia, Snow Peak, And Wander, The North Face. Do these brands sound familiar? Probably so if youre prone to long, treacherous hikes across rough terrain. But for fashion-minded folks, these labels represent a new subset of the industry growing with each passing season: GORPcore, an adaption of the acronym for good ol raisins and peanuts, a popular snack mix people take on the trail.

XT-6 Trail Running Shoes

$190.00

The term encompasses technical outerwear for city-oriented types. No, the conditions in a place like New York City cannot compare to the Pacific Northwest, where trails like the Alpine Lakes or the Badlands are located, but youll find people wearing the gear within city limits nonetheless. The trend can be traced back to the early 2010s, when trendsetters turned their attention toward the elderly or the unknowingly boring for inspiration. Then, it was normcore, embodied by gray sneakers, high-end chinos and crisp, plain shirts. The TL;DR of it all: think of someone dressed head-to-toe in humbly priced pieces, or a designers rendition thereof.

Now, a $339-dollar Arcteryx jacket outweighs a silky bomber by a well-known Maison; fleeces are fighting suit jackets off the shelves; Salomon sneakers are converting lifelong Nike and Adidas loyalists. It's a signal that function and form can not only coexist in the menswear space, but drive the conversation.

Microdosing Goes Mainstream

Lets break microdosing down into its two parts: micro, meaning small, and dosing, a reference to the way you dole out a certain substance over time. The word has upended the medical and psychedelics industries respectively over the past half-decade, but it's all coming to a head now.

Substances once perceived as mere gateways to hallucinogenic (often great, occasionally bad, sometimes horrible) trips like mushrooms or LSD are now breakthrough therapeutic treatments in their own rights, capable of aiding those battling depression, PTSD or addiction with one to 10 percent of the amount needed to trip taken daily for a mild, nearly unnoticeable impact. Over time, though, consistent ingestion can lead to transformative change.

Psilocybin, the compound in mushrooms that triggers trips, is still fully illegal in almost every state. Oregon, in late November 2020, became the first state to legalize it for medicinal use. In Denver, Detroit, Somerville, Massachusetts and Oakland, California, psilocybin mushrooms are merely decriminalized, essentially meaning the police cannot enforce laws against possession or consumption.

In Texas and Pennsylvania, bills to further research the compounds potential to treat mental illnesses are nearly law. Plenty of research has already confirmed the likely upsides of both mushrooms and LSD, but professional, state-level assessments could convince even more states to pass similar, medicinal-first legalization plans. That could save thousands of lives, and help millions establish healthier habits and exist with less anxiety, new research reveals.

Sandbagging, Microwaves and Convenience

If describing food as "convenient" sounds a bit like a dog whistle (lazy, bad), know that, as of 2022, it's not. More time at home means more time in the kitchen and, after a year-plus spent indoors, no one should be ashamed to admit they could use a little more help.

The Everyday Set From Anyday

Help like Fellow's new text-to-order coffee bean service, Drops, which asks that you reply to a text with a number indicating how many bags you want. David Chang, self-proclaimed master of the art of sandbagging in the home kitchen, played a part in a pair of new releases: an absurdly good instant noodle released under his Momofuku line and cookware meant not for the stovetop, but the microwave.

Shit, a podcaster came up with a new dried pasta shape to optimize sauce carrying capacity. Making convenient also good isn't entirely new. (Ever heard of an Instant Pot? How about air fryer?) But it's easy to argue we've never seen low- and high-brow merge quite like this.

If you're not a gamer, you probably didn't know there's a whole product category dedicated to gaming furniture and accessories. Brands like Razer and Secretlab have dedicated their entire existence to help gamers achieve win after win.

Embody Gaming Chair

$1,795.00

In the past couple years, we got hints that gaming would become more pronounced outside of the gaming sphere. Razer made a mouse to help with the recent surge in working from home, and Herman Miller released a gaming chair with Logitech G.

In 2022, gaming gear continues to extend far beyond these niche brands, entering almost every aspect of the cultural zeitgeist and becoming more approachable. Mavix released an entry-level gaming chair to complement its pricier options, maintaining its gamer-friendly features minus the huge investment.

And if there's one release that solidifies the category's staying power, it's Ikea's Uppspel collection. The line was designed in collaboration with Republic of Gamers, an Asus-owned brand dedicated to PC gaming. It's filled with stuff to make gaming more comfortable, from chairs to desks, and while no one needs gaming-specific furniture, it's just a hint at what's to come.

The March of the Microchips

For decades, devices that compete on the open market have shared some very, very similar components inside. Until Apple's M1-chip initiative brought to its apex with the new MacBook Pros Mac and Windows computers alike ran on the same Intel chips. In the land of smartphones, meanwhile, virtually every Android phone, from Samsung or Google or LG, has historically had a Qualcomm chip of some sort at its heart.

Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro

But the times are changing. Apple's M1 chip is the loudest example, but this past fall Google announced it's heading in the same direction with its "Tensor" chip that powers the Pixel 6. Amazon is already on its third generation of in-house Graviton chips, used to power the computers at its cloud data centers. Tesla is preparing to produce its own chips as well. Facebook ("Meta," if you must) is on the war path too.

What does this mean? For you, the humble end user, the direct effects may not be completely clearly microchip related. On the upside, a device that's designed as one piece from silicon to screen can reach new heights of efficiency. That means better battery life, more horsepower and less bulk all at the same time.

On the downside, cross-compatibility could take a nosedive. Devices that used to share some common DNA increasingly won't. This could leave developers in the lurch to prioritize one evolutionary path over another. As if they aren't under enough pressure to do so as it is.

From a broader perspective, it illustrates a world-historical concentration of capital in the hands of tech mega-giants. Companies that once made their bones running goofy college websites or delivering books through the mail have ascended to architecting products on a scale that, just decades ago, required the cooperation of entire industries. That kind of centralized planning comes with its benefits, but not all of them are for you.

The Commoditization of Lossless Audio

Audio quality took a big hit in the '90s during the age of Napster and the iPod when compressed digital files (which take a lot of details out of the music, especially on the high and low ends) were all the rage. But over the past four decades there's been a steady resurgence of high-quality audio, largely thanks to old-school analog formats (like vinyl) becoming en vogue again and, more recently, lossless audio becoming easily streamable.

Last year was a banner one for lossless audio. The two biggest music streaming services on the planet, Apple Music and Spotify, both announced lossless streaming tiers. While Spotify's service has yet to appear, Apple's lossless tier made waves by rolling out to all paying Apple Music subscribers at no extra cost. Now you can stream lossless (or CD quality) for $10/month, which is half the price that some legacy lossless streaming services (like Tidal) are charging.

This move by Apple subsequently forced the hand of every other lossless streaming service out there Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz and Amazon all lowered the barrier of entry to their lossless streaming tiers. Now it's not only easier than ever to listen to high quality music streams, but it's also affordable.

An EV for Everyone

So far, buying an EV has meant buying a Tesla or buying a not quite-as-good alternative to a Tesla that is expensive and not that conducive to most peoples lifestyles. But an avalanche of EVs will enter the market in 2022 many on new dedicated EV platforms. And if youre in the market for a new vehicle, there should be an EV that meets your needs.

Luxury options will increase dramatically. Want range and performance? The Lucid Air will deliver more than 500 miles of range and 1,100 horsepower. Want that performance from an off-road EV? The Hummer SUT arrives very soon, and it will accelerate as quickly as a Porsche in WTF mode with off-roading specs that beat the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. Just want the luxury car you would have bought but electric? Stay tuned for new offerings from Mercedes, BMW and Audi that are just that.

Want an electric truck? You can hop on the Rivian bandwagon with the new R1T or keep things a bit more traditional with the Ford F-150 Lightning arriving next year. Want something relatively affordable? The VW ID.4 is out. And Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Kia and Hyundai are launching electric crossovers. Oh, and the starting MSRP for that F-150 Lightning is under $40,000 before the potential tax credit.

Hurdles remain for mass-adoption EVs charging infrastructure isnt where it needs to be yet if you dont have a Level 2 home charger but the right option should be out there if youre willing to leap into the future.

Lean, Green Machines

While 2021 wasn't the first year we noticed a trend toward, shall we say, a more "verdant" timepiece, it was certainly the year in which the green watch firmly took hold. As horological veteran William Massena once explained, the watch world is on a roughly three-year product development cycle, so while entirely new models take quite a while to develop, habillage, or "dressing up" is much quicker and easier to execute. (Read: Take that watch that already exists and make it green! Because everybody else is doing it!)

While it would've perhaps been unthinkable just a few short years ago and certainly 20 or 30 years ago watches with colored dials are back in a big way. Something that isn't black, white or silver or, heaven forbid, blue! seems like it might just be the next big thing. Rolex launched a new series of "Stella" dials in their Oyster Perpetual line, and for the first time (perhaps ever), an OP became nearly impossible to buy at retail. Then came a green Datejust with what looks like either pot leafs or palm fronds on it (depending how much weed you smoke), and the entire Internet lit up.

Patek did the same thing, turning its 5909 annual calendar into a lean, green machine (and making it in steel, no less), which earned the timepiece a spot in our GP100. (The brand did the same for a short, final run of the famed 5711 pure unobtanium if there is such a thing.) Who knows what's next? If green is "in," anything seems possible. Is this the end of boringly bland watch dials a window into a brighter future? Color us intrigued.

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10 Fascinating Trends to Watch in 2022 - gearpatrol.com

The year ahead holds some interesting possibilities for the watch world. Each year sees watch brands celebrate any anniversary with a round number, but 2022 marks a big one: the iconic Audemars Piguet Royal Oak turns 50. This and other factors suggest that the already white-hot category of sport-lifestyle watches represented by the Royal Oak will further heat up in 2022.

The Royal Oak created a new genre of watches in 1972 by offering a steel luxury watch with a sporty style more so than a sporty purpose. Watches with similar traits (integrated bracelets, prominent bezels, polygonal shapes, etc.) like the Patek Philippe Nautilus followed, along with an army of wannabes. This type of watch will be in the zeitgeist even more in 2022 than it already is.

The year ahead will see Royal Oak designer Gerald Genta's own Royal Oak auctioned, Patek Philippe is expected to replace its outgoing 5711 with a new Nautilus, and the Vacheron Constantin Overseas has an anniversary of its own. But what does this mean for the industry in general? Aside from much fanfare from those brands, we expect the concept to trickle down to more affordable brands, as we've already seen it begin to.

The year won't only be about the Royal Oak, though, as we expect other trends to continue: it's about time for green dials to follow blue and go mainstream; and shrinking median watch sizes may settle around 39-40mm. Can we expect more balance between vintage reissues and fresh, forward-looking designs? Watch consumers are surely starting to itch for that.

The year ahead will hopefully be full of interesting watches, and even surprises (we like those). To whet your horological appetite, below are some of the watches we'd like to see and some of what we expect in 2022.

The Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 is discontinued, but it would be insane for Patek to simply stop making one of the most successful watches of all time at the height of its popularity. The Nautilus collection, however, lives on, and there'll have to be some new version with a new reference number to replace the 5711 eventually. We don't expect it to be a radical departure.

Expectation for the outgoing 5711's replacement will be part of the general zeitgeist of 2022. It's perfectly plausible, however, that the brand will stay silent for a year or longer on whatever it's got in store for the collection, and simply let the hype build.

There are a few reasons to expect something new from the Vacheron Constantin Overseas. Firstly, the Overseas' progenitor, the "222" from 1977, has its own 45th birthday in 2022. Secondly, the Overseas is Vacheron's answer to the Royal Oak and Nautilus, but it doesn't have the same overinflated prices, hype and availability issues, and it therefore has the chance to fill a market niche.

What can we expect from the Overseas? The upgrades the line got in 2016 are still looking fresh, but they leave a gap between 37mm and 41mm sizes. A 39mm automatic version (ok, maybe some with variations or complications, too) would be in-line with current tastes and trends. To make it more than just a new size of an existing model, vintage cues that reference the 222 would help it feel more special and deliberate.

Yes, the Porsche Design brand is also turning 50 in 2022, and its catalog is wide open to include a reissue of its inaugural product: the world's first all-black watch.

Though Porsche Design hasn't leaned in to the rest of the industry's vintage reissue bonanza and remained resolutely modern in its designs, the anniversary presents an opportunity. A reissue would be cool, but we'd be equally happy with a modern interpretation perhaps with relatively "vintage sizing." The brand recently seems more open to smaller case sizes as evidenced by its 39mm Sport Chrono.

Only a couple Rolex watches remain that haven't yet gotten the latest movement upgrade. With a compelling backstory and a pretty funky look for the brand, the Milgauss remains one of Rolex's most distinctive watches. It's about time for it to get some love and attention.

While the people fantasize about amazing new Rolexes, like a "Coke" (black-and-red-bezel) GMT Master II or even a titanium Yachtmaster, modest and very subtle tweaks and upgrades to existing watches are generally what you can expect. Rolex's 3230 movement for the Milgauss would be the minimum we'd expect, but something like a new colorway (there are currently two) would make an even bigger splash.

We're just going to keep hammering at this until we get it: for god's sake, Tudor, a Black Bay Fifty Eight GMT is a no-brainer! Will hit happen? We think eventually it will. The simple formula of the Black Bay GMT in the Fifty Eight's 39mm size would be celebrated, but Tudor regularly surprises us. We might not get exactly what we want this year, but we can't help but dream.

Someone pointed it out recently: Omega hasn't yet brought much green to its sport watch collections. Everyone else is doing it, the trend seems set to continue, and the brand hasn't been afraid of color in the past, so why not?

Although the Seamaster Planet Ocean might seem like a good candidate, with a precedent of colorful iterations, it'd be particularly cool to see it on the more versatile Seamaster Diver 300m. It's pretty well established that just about any watch that also looked good when it got a blue treatment can also look great in green, and the Seamaster Diver 300m fits the bill.

For Only Watch 2021, Girard Perregaux teamed up with Bamford Watch Department on something rather unexpected. It was like a reissue of the funky LED driver's watches the brand made in the 1970s, but with a very modern case in carbon fiber and titanium.

The one-off creations for the Only Watch auction often portend future releases, so it seems possible that Girard-Perregaux has something like a collection in the works in a more accessible execution such as stainless steel or titanium. It would fit the industry's general vintage reissue trend but sure would be interesting to see from the prestigious brand otherwise firmly rooted in mechanical watchmaking.

A while back, Citizen released some of its very cool and affordable Promaster "Fugu" dive watches with automatic movements. Unfortunately, they were only available in certain regions, and not in others like the United States. We thought they'd arrive eventually, but we're still waiting.

It's currently hard to find any automatic watches on Citizen's US site (aside from a couple weird, high-end ones) despite that the brand owns Miyota, one of the biggest producers of automatic movements in the world. Citizen has the chance to fill a market niche and compete with Seiko dive watches, and maybe this will be the year we'll finally see it happen.

This is the last thing about integrated-bracelet watches, I promise. The IWC Ingenieur collection was last overhauled in 2017 to reference its conservative 1955 roots, but the resulting dressy watches don't add much to the brand's catalog. Why not bring back the Ingenieur of 1976?

Redesigned by Gerald Genta (him again) with all the sporty style that made the Royal Oak successful (and introduced the same year as Patek's Nautilus), the Ingenieur gives IWC the chance to offer something hip with legitimate provenance at a competitive price.

Shortly after I pleaded with G-Shock to offer an online watch customizer, news emerged on G-Central that the company's financial report mentioned plans for such a program "starting with Japan." The program is called "My G-Shock," and we can only hope that we'll see it more widely available in 2022 with all the models, colors and options we dream of.

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10 Watches We Hope to See in 2022 - gearpatrol.com

Intense, Retina-searing Colours

If there ever was a visual riposte to uncertain, challenging times that manifested through the reflective microcosm that is the world of design, then the recent rise in the use of dramatic, eye-searing colours was definitely it. Intense gradients and blazing hues showed up across advertising campaigns, album and book covers, identity systems and editorial design that made it almost impossible for the viewer to look away.

It was no coincidence that we felt the need to go full-tilt bright last year in some of our colour choices. Hope and optimism go a long way, and colour as a visual identifier of this sentiment seems like a choice many people and organisations will continue to make, says Jason Little, co-founder and executive creative director of For The People, who designed the identity for the Sydney Film Festival 2021. Its like theres all this pent up energy waiting to be released, and this is definitely an avenue to express it.

We cant wait to be safe and free again, so we pour that intention, that hope into our work and the colour choices, says Zuzanna Rogatty, senior designer at Collins. In a way, this ballsy use of colours also points towards a clear intention to make brands unignorable, Zuzanna explains. I hope it is actually a movement, a characteristic of the zeitgeist, a colour uprising, and not only a trend.

The use of provocative, complex hues is definitely here to stay. Theres always a long tail to these things, right? says Jason. While its been brewing gently for a while, lately, colours have become emblematic of the current, get-up-and-go creative landscape, and it promises to be something well see a lot of in 2022. Jason adds: And maybe the late majority and big tech will be right in this space by 2024, who knows.

Continued here:

Five design trends set to visually shape 2022 - It's Nice That

The term Stand Alone Complex can be loosely defined as a social phenomenon where unconnected actions combine to create a group effort, though it isn't maintained by a ringleader or ruling body. It propagates without instruction or leadership, with random humans moving toward a collective goal without conscious intent, eventually becoming a coherent whole. Essentially, in the words of the Stand Alone Complex fandom wiki, One could say that the Stand Alone Complex is mass hysteriawith purpose.

While we have all been swept up in mass hysteria at one point or another, for a galaxy of different reasons, what can be said is that when the momentum gets going, there's fairly little anyone can do to stem the tide. We can easily equate this to a stampede. When enough participants get spooked and start charging, even if there is a sizable amount of protest from within their ranks, the whole mob will run clear off a cliff without hesitation.

But what makes mass hysteria unique, is the many forms in which it can appear. My favorite example of this is the Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518, where anywhere from 50 to 400 people inexplicably danced in the street for the better part of two straight months (though there is considerable debate over who actually kicked off this flash mob, and if the rumors of a dozen or more people dying each day were simply made up). While intense speculation has persisted in the centuries since, based on the collected records from documentarians, there has never been a definitive explanation for what happened.

Another well-known example of mass hysteria came packaged as the infamous Satanic Panic (which took root in the 1980s and has never really gone away). This mass reporting of unsubstantiated cases of ritualistic abuse, trafficking and sacrifice has come to include tens of thousands of investigations throughout the world over the decades. Not a single one has confirmed the existence of these ritualistic cults engaging in satanic sadism. Yet, the panic remains entrenched in international culture and rhetoric, with little sign of ever fully dissipating.

However, when we recognize a Stand Alone Complex, the results can get fairly more complicated. Probably the best modern example which could be classified as this phenomenon is the decentralized hacktivist movement, Anonymous. The emergence of these self-identified vigilantes utilizing the ambiguous moniker became news in 2007. The one-two punch of online predator Chris Forcand's arrest in Canada, and the 2008 launch of Project Chanology against the Church of Scientology threw this movement onto the world stage. In the succeeding years, in the wake of continued activity and notoriety, investigations from journalists, and international law enforcement and intelligence bureaus continually prove that Anonymous members can operate entirely exclusive of one another if they desire it. And fun fact, when I was 18, I actually attended a few protests supposedly organized by Anonymous. But to the actuality of that, I only have assumptions since the organizers were faceless online, and masked in person.

It is quite difficult to prove that these actions were the work of a loose collective, or whether random people are throwing a label on their movements as a means of brand recognition in order to legitimize their actions in the eyes of some, and to possibly cover their actual tracks. Anonymous has come to be used in music, television, and merchandise to a degree that it is now an indelible part of our collective culture, for better and for worse (depending on your stance towards them).

But the main point that I am driving at is that Anonymous now exists as an entity which is self-sustaining, fueled by our contrasting idealism and hysteria, and continues to survive merely by the weight of its cultural impact. Whether or not those who claimed allegiance to their collective are still active, or ever were, many see the publized actions of the group as all the evidence they need in order to believe in their existence and efficacy. While others will maintain stark skepticism for the very same reasons, maintaining that private organizations, government branches, or individual power players are using the zeitgeist in order to manipulate and misdirect public opinion and information.

This uncertainty towards a shadowy entity on the periphery of our society, manipulating its many tiers, is exactly the framework which is utilized within the classic anime series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Based on the 1989 manga by Masamune Shirow, as well as the 1995 Mamoru Oshii feature film, Stand Alone Complex is an original adaptation by Kenji Kamiyama which is set in an alternative storyline to that of its source material. While it still utilizes many of the same characters, settings, and designs, it manages to inject a considerable amount of original material into the existing ethos of the Ghost in the Shell universe.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex mostly takes place in Japan during the years 2030 and 2032. After humanity develops the ability to cyberize themselves, utilizing prosthetic body parts and cybernetic brains, the boundaries between what is human and machine is ever more blurred. The proof of humanity against artificial constructs usually boils down to someone's possession of a ghost, or essentially the concept of the human soul. In the wake of society evolving and restructuring around this massive singularity event, we follow Public Security Section 9, a clandestine counter-cyberterrorism squad of former military and police personnel, who are responsible for mitigating threats which cannot be handled by mundane security efforts. Through their normal activities, they uncover widespread and amorphous conspiracies which pose threats on an international scale. Though paradoxically, the closer they get to the truth, the more dangerous and untenable their situation becomes.

The series is largely set in the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, and follows Section 9 through two major cases which threaten to unsettle Japan's balance between its population and its government: The Laughing Man and the Individual Eleven. While there exists considerable overlap, as well as wide divides between these cases, for this video, we're going to focus on the former case.

The Laughing Man is an enigmatic hacktivist reportedly responsible for the largest acts of cyberterrorism in modern Japan, where numerous corporations were hacked and blackmailed. Unaware whether The Laughing Man is a domestic or foreign terrorist, or even if it's a solo hacker or a team, the police have chased this ghost for six years with little to show for it. Togusa, the rookie of Section 9, is contacted by an old friend still investigating the case. In the wake of his friend's mysterious car accident, Togusa discovers police corruption involving illegal internal surveillance of its officers. When the scandal breaks, a police press conference publicly denying responsibility is called, blaming the head of The Laughing Man task force. But before reporters can press the personal ties to the nanomachine company responsible for the surveillance equipment at the heart of the scandal, The Laughing Man hijacks a police official's cyberbrain, denouncing the police response as a farce, and threatening the Superintendent-General's life.

The following night, an attempt is made on the life of the Superintendent-General when a security chief is brain-hacked, followed by a close series of apparent accomplices attempting to finish what the hacked goon could not. While a virus is blamed for the initial attempt, it is soon apparent that all of the succeeding individuals operated entirely on their own volition, with no link to one another or the previous crimes. While the public is quick to be swept up in the fervor when a fall guy is named posthumously as The Laughing Man, Section 9 unravels a sizable conspiracy that the government was doctoring evidence and using The Laughing Man as a means to control public opinion while they work with private corporations to profit off of human misery.

The Laughing Man is seen as both a vigilante hero and a public menace throughout nearly every echelon of society who look from the outside-in. His iconic logo is utilized in art, and on merchandise. His name is evoked in the fiery rhetoric of those wielding public platforms and open forums. While the perpetrator of the more televised actions which fast-tracked the whole Laughing Man frenzy is revealed to be a man named Aoi, whether this persona was born from a real activist attempting to change society, or was always a farce created to manipulate the masses, in the world of Stand Alone Complex, it's rather a moot point. His place in the culture, and as a means for motivation to pursue similar courses of action, is set deep within Japan's social landscape. This makes the public reactions to his supposed rhetoric and acts of terrorism even more dangerous, because there is nothing to precipitate what people will do, when they will do it, and for what purpose. This uncertainty provides a perfect opportunity for powers in a position to manipulate the image of The Laughing Man. The rest of us will believe what we will, and will act accordingly. As a result, hysteria spreads, the truth is buried, and the world keeps on turning.

Now, the metatextual origin of The Laughing Man initially came from the short story of the same name, written by American author J. D. Salinger. And even if you haven't read the story, or any of Salinger's works, on top of multiple references to his writing through casual conversations, the character Aoi is highly influenced by Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. Now, I am certainly not a fan of Salinger, and I have mentioned this a few times in other videos, and there are a lot of reasons why I keep anything he wrote at arm's length. But the surprising thing with Holden's motivations and qualms with the world around him, a facet of his character that has caused immense irritation, is that when Aoi takes hold of the same principles, there are two key differenceshe is proactive, and he manages to mature.

Holden is a passive character, and a perpetually immature one. He is a teenager, cursing the adult world for its harshness, monotony, and greed, which influences his views on what is important in life. But Aoi tries his damnedest to do the right thing in the wake of such inhumanity; he wants to change the world for the better. He wants to embrace the idea that innocence and solidarity are innate concepts within human society, which need to be fostered and protected. As he aged, with his moniker hijacked by those seeking to exploit others, and those he sought to bring down still operating behind the scenes, he sees the work of Section 9 as a fastlane to finally accomplish what he set out to do all those years ago. And get used to a lot of literary references, because the whole cast of Stand Alone Complex is extremely well read (as if they all were going for a graduate degree in literature).

Every installment in the Ghost in the Shell franchise is buried under an avalanche of overarching themes and visual motifs, wearing many of its influences right on its sleeve. While mostly this comes around as more debates over life when artificial intelligence is nearly identical to organic intelligence, the focus on a Stand Alone Complex and its implications for a society is thoroughly unique. And even though SAC just passed its 19th birthday, its relevance is more prevalent now than ever before. We exist in a world of hyper-charged ideological battlefields and cultural friction, with hysteria continuing to pressure public policy and mob mentality. We live in an age where stand alone complexes such as Anonymous are bound to increase exponentially, regardless of who may be seen at the helm. When we eventually reach our next singularity point, these complexes will only compound the considerable change our worldwide civilization will undergo and settle into in the coming generations. Nothing truly occurs within a vacuum, and all actions have consequences.

While Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is laden down with weighty themes and conflicts, seasoned heavily over a multi-faceted thriller, does the series hold up as an anime, and as a consistently coherent story? Well, starting from a technical perspective, you won't hear me debating whether or not early 2000s 3DCG is always effective. Sure, it isn't Hand Shakers (2017) bad, and this was when 3D was really being ramped up throughout worldwide animation production for the first time. But in the first season, its limits ultimately inhibit immersion far more than it augments the series; and though the second season does improve significantly, the 2D and 3D content maintains a disjointed relationship. This is made even more prominent in scenes where settings are largely rendered in CG, because it takes away one of the key aspects which make the Japan in Ghost in the Shell feel so amazingtactility.

To make my point, let's go back to Oshii's 1995 feature film. As we follow the Major throughout Niihama, we are given a parade of locations which always play with two essential elements of this universeadvancement and decay. We see the mechanized limbs and bodies of cyberized humans meshing against a backdrop of a decrepit and overcrowded city. It is an amalgamation of cultures and historical eras conflicting with technological singularity, and the result is a sizable divide between haves and have-nots, which extends to the very buildings and streets we inhabit.

The lush color scheme of the original film gives an ethereal vibrancy to its world and characters, yet we also feel the weight. We get to see the rings of the tree, so to speak. In the colorized pages of the manga, you can also see its use of a fairly vivid and striking color palette. Both of these approaches were replaced in SAC with earthy colors, which can sometimes blend into a mess of murky hues. Gone are the overused waterways, the ever-constant infrastructure improvements, the ever-present blend of the chic and the decrepit. When we do get similar aesthetic combinations to these in SAC, we're usually venturing into more unsavory parts of town. As a result, this dichotomy becomes less reflective of the society as a whole, and more specifically tied to Japan's criminal elements and underclass, inadvertently reducing its overall effectiveness. Yes, adaptations are free to make of what they will with the material, especially when you have to make a lot of decisions as to where the limited resources are best directed, but when such an intrinsic element of the world is neglected, we lose a potent aspect which makes Ghost in the Shell so unique.

But opposite this, Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG is a massive improvement, both in artistic direction, and in production design. It manages to recapture those original atmospheres while still keeping a lot of visual motifs established in the beginning, which I thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. Because buttressing your existing strengths, and changing those artistic decisions which fell flat, without sacrificing the integrity of your story or your visual identity to which your fans are already attracted, is extremely hard to do. Though it seems that Kamiyama may have forgotten to import his last save over to Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045.

Having said that, Stand Alone Complex understands Shirow's sense of humor considerably better than Oshii. The manga's dark, yet playful sense of humor is one of the key features which were somewhat dismissed in the feature films, being the more serious take on the subject, to be sure. But Stand Alone Complex is constantly riffing, and most of the scenes featuring the Tachikomas find ways to throw in a fair few jokes even when the scene is deathly serious. And when we look at the Tachikomas in the manga, the snappy dialogue and pacing is almost an exact match. So while there were a few creative paths taken that I certainly have issues with, there also is enough beholden to what came before it, that Stand Alone Complex still manages to feel right despite the liberties taken.

Kamiyama manages to make expert use of his assets, making budget and production limitations almost negligible, and allowing the series to save the majority of its complex work for moments of higher octane action. There is little that I would describe as fluff or fat, with each sequence meticulously crafted around a succession of angles which always add further emphasis to each pivotal scene's tone and importance.

Similar anime series which share the same economical direction include Noboru Ishiguro's 1988 adaptation of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Hideaki Anno's 1995 series Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Naohito Takahashi's 1997 anime adaptation of Berserk. Not much may be happening during these moments, but the lack of motion rarely makes me feel bored or impatient, because of what else is occurring and how it is delivered and paced. But on the flip side of that, these moments are often veritable shiploads of exposition, and if you aren't a fan of anime where they sit around and talk all day, this one probably won't be for you. Massive info dumps occur every couple of episodes, and there is little left to the imagination by the end of the series.

This conflicts with the natural ambiguity and uncertainty which hallmark the original work and the films, especially when The Major incorporates the Puppet Master into her cyberbrain, erasing the original Major (as the rest of Section 9 knew her) from existence. Now, as SAC is set on a different timeline, this never occurs, but it doesn't doesn't fill that void with an equitable conflict. That isn't to say you won't have a significant emotional response to the dour events which plague the Major and her colleagues, but the focus is considerably more drawn to the overarching story rather than personal introspection. Having said that, Stand Alone Complex benefits from its expanded runtime and scope, allowing episodes to focus on individual members of Section 9 in order to provide their stories to the audience, and to better understand their motivations, rather than keeping a microscope mostly fixed on Major Kusanagi. This creates a bit of a disparity between the tone of the manga and Oshii animated films, and that of Stand Alone Complex, the former two being considerably more ambiguous and emotional, where SAC is more cerebral and action-oriented. One isn't better than the other, as it comes down to a matter of preference. But I never had a reaction to Stand Alone Complex like I had with the manga or with the original films.

So, when I started making video essays for Anime News Network last year, my very first topic was on Serial Experiments Lain, in which I said the following: That isn't to say Lain's story is the pinnacle of cyberpunk, because Ghost in the Shell will always hold that spot in my world. While this was directed mostly at the manga and Oshii films, this declaration absolutely includes Stand Alone Complex. Its healthy balance of action, masterful direction, compelling intrigue, and the possibilities of technology. It makes for a prophetic thriller which may hit a little too close to home for some of you, and while the production elements can be hit-and-miss more times than some would allow, these same aspects can occasionally be outright brilliant.

While there's so much more I wanted to talk about, and stressed about it long enough that I had to delay putting this essay out for another month, I will end with saying that the second season surrounding the Individual Eleven, subtitled 2nd GIG, is far better at interweaving storylines and themes than the first, as well as providing minor characters with a lot more characterization and opportunities to influence the larger world. On the flip side, the first season is much more exploratory with its titular concept of a Stand Alone Complex, making for a more engaging thriller. Either way you cannot go wrong with the whole 52-episode series, because it continues to hold up extremely well, both as a stand alone project and as part of the greater Ghost in the Shell multimedia franchise. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex remains one of those anime series that may not appeal to everyone, but everyone should give it at least one go. You get something new out of the series (and out of yourself) through each rewatch of the show, examining your own understanding and observations of how our world operates around us.

Thank you to everyone who've made it all the way to the end of this video essay. I know it couldn't have been easyyou're awesome. If you enjoyed (or have taken issue) with my interpretation and examination of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, leave a comment down below to let me know what you think. If you have an idea for an anime which you'd like me to cover, also let me know in the comments. If you haven't done so, subscribe to the Anime News Network. We release new content every week, so be sure to ring the bell. Be sure to mosey on over to my personal channel Criticlysm for similar content, and follow my utter misunderstanding of social media over on Twitter. I deeply appreciate your continued support and feedback. Until next time.

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Does it Hold Up? Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Anime News Network

For the Dubai Watch Weeks fifth edition since 2015, organisers have gone bigger and better. Around 50 exhibitors of all sizes are enjoying higher-quality, more comfortable surroundings, more breakout sessions and interactions with collectors and clients, sold-out watchmaking workshops, and journalists from every continent. The event is taking place from 24 to 28 November in the heart of Dubais financial district, the DIFC Gate Village, with its bustling art galleries and trendy restaurants. Although the event is entirely the initiative of the Seddiqi family, their name is nowhere to be seen. In their opening address, Hind and Mohammed Seddiqi explained their motivation: Were not here to sell, were here to educate and to promote watchmaking. Our goal is to create an unparalleled educational, experiential and networking event. But they also added: Go and have fun!

Dubai Watch Week shares its exhibition spaces between marquees, along with reception areas and a range of other activities, at the heart of the Gate Village in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) WorldTempus/Brice Lechevalier

Although the participating brands and their teams are there to present their products, no sales are allowed at the booths. Most exhibitors are using the platform to launch new products (local limited series or global releases), explain their particular features to potential future clients, and talk about their strategy. A measure of the importance of Dubai Watch Week is that most of the brand CEOs are in attendance, including the heads of Czapek, Trilobe, Audemars Piguet, Breitling, Chopard, Hublot and Rolex. Rolex CEO Jean-Frdric Dufour took the opportunity to greet the other executives at their own booths, noting, Its a very important event for the watchmaking community, because were opening our hearts here. From talking to the executives and artisans of the other exhibiting brands, its clear that everyone is delighted to meet an audience of genuine enthusiasts that really gives us great pleasure. Being able to talk one-on-one to a client who understands the technical know-how and expertise that go into making a watch, particularly a complicated watch, is very rewarding. The organisation is exemplary, and I would advise all Swiss watchmakers to come. Visitor numbers have been particularly high, especially in the evenings, when the wealthy residents of Dubai and watch collectors from the region, which is home to a number of collectors clubs, came to soak up the atmosphere. Networking is in full swing. Nigerian distributor Deremi Ajidahun (Zakaa) was full of praise for the dynamism of the event and the commitment of the organisers. Only Watch founder Luc Pettavino spoke at a collectors panel; and the CEO of Reuge, Amr Alotaishan, despite not having a booth, is more than just a regular visitor. He said: Although were not exhibiting this year were working with the Seddiqis, so its important for us to attend their event and observe whats going on in the watchmaking world, because Reuge is naturally part of their universe. GPHG director Carine Maillard and the chair of the GPHG Foundation, Raymond Lortan, answered journalists questions about the prize-winners exhibition:"We have been partners since the very beginning, and even before that. So DWW means a lot to the GPHG and even more this year since our Jury has decided to award its Special Jury Prize to this event, which is gaining momentum. We are delighted about that."

Audemars Piguet chose Dubai Watch Week to inaugurate its Beyond the Limits exhibition Audemars Piguet

Having travelled to Dubai with Rolex senior executives, CEO Jean-Frdric Dufour is seen here in the company of Dubai Watch Week organisers, Hind and Hamied Seddiqi WorldTempus/Brice Lechevalier

Browsing the booths revealed two trends among brands: those that are presenting limited series in partnership with Seddiqi or aimed at the local market, such as for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates, and those that take advantage of Dubai Watch Week as they would any other major international watch-themed event to introduce their new products. Certain of these releases are joint endeavours. Bvlgari and MB&F, for example, took the wraps off the Legacy Machine Flying T Allegra; the two partners had been working together on this new watch for the past four years. The launch was celebrated two nights running with a cocktail reception at the Cipriani pop-up, at the foot of the famous U-shaped tower. Despite the fact that virtually all the watches in the two 20-piece limited series have been pre-sold, MB&F founder Max Busser and Bvlgari creative director Fabrizio Buonamassa were generous with their interviews and presentations. This is the first collaboration between a very large, very strong brand and a small independent name like MB&F. We hit it off straight away. Fabrizio changed everything about our watch except the movement! In a different vein, Armin Strom took the wraps off the Zeitgeist, a single-piece edition to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Resonance line. Co-founder Claude Geisler had this to say: We really appreciate once again having the opportunity to talk with the international press, but also with the other brands, thanks to the amicable and relaxed atmosphere that prevails here.

Fabrizio Buonamassa (Bulgari creative Director) and Maximilien Bsser (MB&F Founder and Creative Director) presenting their joint creation WorldTempus/Brice Lechevalier

MB&F x Bulgari LM FlyingT Allegra WorldTempus/Brice Lechevalier

Theres never any downtime at Dubai Watch Week. Brands are constantly on the go, and none more than the established independent niche brands. Edouard Meylan, CEO of H. Moser & Cie., is grateful towards Dubai Watch Week for having done so much to educate the end customer, ever since our first participation in 2015. Back then we were selling two watches a year in the region. No-one had heard of us. Now visitors are asking about availability for this or that product and buying in very significant numbers. Over at Urwerk, co-founder Felix Baumgartner notes that the market is surging. We could sell our entire production two or three times over! The positive aspect is that the most serious customers dont discuss prices so they can be sure to secure their watch, which suits retailers. For the founder of Akrivia, Rexhep Rexhepi, the market has grown. Were seeing customers coming out of nowhere who, all of a sudden, are taking an interest in our watches. And not just the super rich. Those with a normal level of wealth are forgoing a bigger car so they can buy themselves a watch. They appreciate the intrinsic value of a watch and what it stands for. The generosity of the Seddiqi family is also seen in the fact that brands they dont (yet?) carry are welcome to take part. Reservoir is one. Its CEO, Franois Moreau, says right from day one, we were highly satisfied with our participation. Weve met with local collectors as well as distributors from other countries in the region and journalists. The event is also extremely well organised. Its very Swiss in its approach. Even the big brands on a roll, like Hublot whose booth features a comfortable lounge area, consider Dubai Watch Week to be a must-attend, as CEO Ricardo Guadalupe confirms: Dubai Watch Week is hugely important for us. Not only is this a key market for Hublot our boutique in the Dubai Mall is also our number-one store in the world we particularly appreciate that we can meet with end customers during this pandemic, and have face-to-face talks with our local retailer, Seddiqi.

De Bethune came to Dubai Watch Week with its new DB25 QP with green dial that replaces all earlier references of the perpetual calendar WorldTempus/Brice Lechevalier

*Seddiqi & Sons is the largest retailer in the United Arab Emirates and the creator, in 2015, of Dubai Watch Week which since 2017 has been held every two years.

Read more from the original source:

Dubai Watch Week 2021 - Of Watches and Men (and Women!) - Dubai Watch Week - WorldTempus

On Wednesday, Hulu dropped the first three episodes of its most star-studded scripted series to date, David E. Kelleys adaptation of Liane Moriartys bestselling novel Nine Perfect Strangers. Directed by Jonathan Levine and co-produced by Nicole Kidman, the limited series takes place in an exclusive wellness retreat where the titular guests attempt to undergo some spiritual and physical transformation, guided by a sketchy Russian guru named Masha, played by Kidman in yet another distracting wig.

As Kevin Fallon opined in his review, the series is a tonal mishmash. Despite some performances that would otherwise attract immediate awards buzz if placed in a better show, notably from Melissa McCarthy and Michael Shannon, none of them really coalesce to create a dynamic ensemble. Nor do any of these broadly written characters or the evidently fraudulent institution warrant that much intrigue. On a marketing level, the series also faces the burden of competing with the hype of HBOs just-concluded smash hit The White Lotus, which also portrays rich people swapping their privileged at-home lives for another privileged experience in an exotic location, and Kelleys previous Moriarty adaptation Big Little Lies, where his pen is far more robust.

Whether or not Nine Perfect Strangers attracts the fanfare its clamoring for with its cast of A-listers, its presence in the zeitgeist, and wonky, cult-ish portrayal of the wellness industry, along with other new media, feels indicative of a growing exhaustion and cynicism surrounding the state of self-care and wellness, particularly the ways its manifested in American life just over the past few years, from social media to QAnon conspiracies to corporate advertising and, of course, the current pandemic.

Wellnessencompassing holistic practices and dubious remediesis hardly a new phenomenon in the United States, although it feels like its become ubiquitous over the past decade. Since colonialism, the Western world has been importing and appropriating Eastern methods of medicine and spiritual practices that are now associated with catchall terms like New Age, alternative medicine, and even Goop. Self-care as a rationalization for incorporating wellness and self-improvement into our lives also has a deeper history than the average Instagram user inundated with #selfcare sponcon would be led to believe, promoted by ancient philosophers and repopularized in political environments like the womens liberation movement of the 70s and, specifically, queer Black feminist spaces. (This is why writer and activist Audre Lordes definition of the term is often referenced on the feminist sections of the internet.)

Now more than ever, these practices and their philosophies have been detached from their histories, stripped of their nuances and monetized by corporations and upper-class white peoplebut most visibly in pop culture, upper-class white women. In a piece for The New Yorker, Jordan Kisner writes about the #selfcare-as-politics movement of 2016 that was ironically powered by straight, affluent white women in response to Donald Trumps presidential campaign and subsequent election, a moment that awakened much of that demographic politically. Likewise, the rich white woman who collects crystals, receives sound baths and is obsessed with tarot cards and, most significantly, considers herself an expert in these customs has captured our collective attention and skepticism, from Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop empire, Kourtney Kardashians try at her own Goop, shows like the aforementioned Nine Perfect Strangers and Foxs Fantasy Island (although the rich woman is Latina).

Now more than ever, these practices and their philosophies have been detached from their histories, stripped of their nuances and monetized by corporations and upper-class white peoplebut most visibly in pop culture, upper-class white women.

Lorde has taken on this archetype in her new music, particularly the music video to her latest single Mood Ring, which dropped on Wednesday ahead of the release of new album Solar Power. It captures Lorde, ironicallybut maybe not so ironicallydonning a blonde wig like Kidmans Masha, and a group of women in jade green performing sun salutations, turning through old, spiritual texts, and playing with crystals while the 24-year-old croons about tryna to get well on the inside. This lifestyle has been so readily adopted by her ilk, particularly people in the entertainment industry, that one might miss the satirical tone in these lyrics. In her newsletter, the musician explained that the song is satire and that the narrator is fictional, although she admits that she occasionally succumbs to magical thinking when she need[s] to believe in something to feel good and clear.

While Lorde lacks a strong rebuttal to the Gwyneth Paltrow figuremaybe because its too close to home the singers analysis of wellness culture and its misappropriations feels sharper when aimed toward men. On the Solar Power song Dominoes, she lambasts the specific type of man who takes on gardening, weed, and yoga to rebrand from his toxicity and misogyny. It must feel good to be Mr. Start Again, she sings caustically. The song cleverly illustrates how goodness is often ascribed to men who associate themselves with activities that are deemed feminine within our culture. But it also gets at the way self-improvement can easily be utilized as a Band-Aid or a facade in place of doing the actual work.

As culture becomes more and more desperate for healing, whether from political divisions, as our president constantly suggests, or literal life-threatening diseases like COVID-19, the space between community and cult, non-traditional medicine and pseudoscience, self-care and individualism seems to be capturing our artistic imaginations at an extremely vital time. How can the roots of wellness be reclaimed and reasserted when its become a $4.4 trillion money grab and employed for the most dangerous political agendas? Lordes Solar Power and Nine Perfect Strangers may not be perfect articulations of these quandaries, but they show how much there is to mine in that danger zone.

More here:

Lorde and Nicole Kidman Take on the Cult-ish Wellness Industry - The Daily Beast

The political career of Kalyan Singh, the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who died on Saturday aged 89, reflects the ebb and flow of the BJPs electoral fortunes since its formation in 1980. His spectacular rise in the 1990s and marginalisation in the 2000s coincided with the BJPs own transformation from a cadre-based party that talked of Gandhian socialism to a mass outfit that championed Hindu nationalism during a period of political upheaval in northern India.

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Singh was well poised to ride the crest of the two ideas that had captured the zeitgeist of the decade Mandal and Mandir and occupy office in Lucknow as the BJPs first CM of UP. Along with Uma Bharti, he was the prominent face of the BJPs own Mandalisation process, through which the party had tried to shed its image of being a caste Hindu outfit and embrace a pan-Hindu identity with a support base that included large numbers of backward castes. Born in a Lodh-Rajput family, Singhs rise to office was viewed as representative of the empowerment of OBCs within the rubric of Hindutva politics, which also neutralised the political edge that Lohiaite groups had gained on the ground, post Mandal. As CM, he presided over the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a moment that shamed constitutional democracy, but also irreversibly changed the contours of the countrys politics. It also cost Singh his office. When the tide that rose with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement fell and equations within the BJP changed, Singh found himself dispensable to the party though he had become CM a second time in 1997. Singh quit the BJP in 1999 (and in 2004) to float his own outfit only to realise that he could at best be a caste leader and dent the BJPs electoral fortunes, but would need the support of his chief political adversary in the 90s, Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, to win even his own Lok Sabha seat.

Singh returned to the BJP after more than a decade at the political fringes, but like Bharti, was a much diminished leader with little or no influence within the party on his return. It only seemed to confirm that leaders like Singh and Bharti commanded influence as products of a moment and movement, which overtook them, left them behind. Their relegation also suggested that OBC empowerment in the BJP could only exist as a current within the main course of Hindutva politics. However, the churn that Singh was a part of, and contributed to, has not ceased. It continues to shape the electoral and ideological contours of Indias politics.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 24, 2021 under the title Mandal in Kamandal.

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Mandal in Kamandal - The Indian Express

The political career of Kalyan Singh, the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who died on Saturday aged 89, reflects the ebb and flow of the BJPs electoral fortunes since its formation in 1980. His spectacular rise in the 1990s and marginalisation in the 2000s coincided with the BJPs own transformation from a cadre-based party that talked of Gandhian socialism to a mass outfit that championed Hindu nationalism during a period of political upheaval in northern India.

Singh was well poised to ride the crest of the two ideas that had captured the zeitgeist of the decade Mandal and Mandir and occupy office in Lucknow as the BJPs first CM of UP. Along with Uma Bharti, he was the prominent face of the BJPs own Mandalisation process, through which the party had tried to shed its image of being a caste Hindu outfit and embrace a pan-Hindu identity with a support base that included large numbers of backward castes. Born in a Lodh-Rajput family, Singhs rise to office was viewed as representative of the empowerment of OBCs within the rubric of Hindutva politics, which also neutralised the political edge that Lohiaite groups had gained on the ground, post Mandal. As CM, he presided over the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a moment that shamed constitutional democracy, but also irreversibly changed the contours of the countrys politics. It also cost Singh his office. When the tide that rose with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement fell and equations within the BJP changed, Singh found himself dispensable to the party though he had become CM a second time in 1997. Singh quit the BJP in 1999 (and in 2004) to float his own outfit only to realise that he could at best be a caste leader and dent the BJPs electoral fortunes, but would need the support of his chief political adversary in the 90s, Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, to win even his own Lok Sabha seat.

Singh returned to the BJP after more than a decade at the political fringes, but like Bharti, was a much diminished leader with little or no influence within the party on his return. It only seemed to confirm that leaders like Singh and Bharti commanded influence as products of a moment and movement, which overtook them, left them behind. Their relegation also suggested that OBC empowerment in the BJP could only exist as a current within the main course of Hindutva politics. However, the churn that Singh was a part of, and contributed to, has not ceased. It continues to shape the electoral and ideological contours of Indias politics.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 24, 2021 under the title Mandal in Kamandal.

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Kalyan Singh was a product of, and contributed to, change in the BJPs politics, with all its tumult and contradictions - The Indian Express

Casein Tempera No. 1 by Raymond Jonson, 1939. Casein on canvas, 22 by 35 inches. Albuquerque Museum, gift of Rose Silva and Evelyn Gutierrez, PC1999.85.1.

By James D Balestrieri

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Expression conceals as it reveals. To say art secretes meaning is to say the word secrete in its binary, antipodal meanings: secrete as discharge, release; and secrete as conceal, veil. Vibrations hide inside the geometry of the works by members of the Transcendental Painting Group, inside the Raymond Jonsons, Lawren Harrises, Emil Bisttrams, Agnes Peltons and all the rest, inside their concentric ellipses and polygons and fields of color. You want to unlock and hear those vibrations but their music is as elusive perhaps deliberately as the music made by ripples on a placid pond. Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, the new exhibition at Albuquerque Museum, offers a comprehensive look at these understudied artists and their art.

Raymond Jonsons 1939 painting, Casein Tempera No. 1, is an excellent example and a good place to start this discussion. The shaded circle, just left of center, is a circle, a sphere, a hole, an eye, a porthole, a portal. It can be negative, like a hole, or positive, like a sphere. This object sits in concentric circles overlaid by a series of eccentric rotations. You can imagine the whole as a cosmic machine, the clockwork of a solar system. Your eye moves around it, over it, through it. Individually, the tones I am speaking of both color and sound are different, often very different, from one another; in combination, they harmonize. Overall, the effect is a kind of wandering restfulness.

Its amazing how often you find that a short-lived movement in art has a longer shelf life than anyone in the movement could ever have imagined. The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) formed in 1938 and disbanded just three years later in 1941, in large measure because of the exigencies of World War II.

Installation image, Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group at Albuquerque Museum. Photo Nora Vanesky.

In the unending, alternately hot and cold, but ultimately phony war between realism and abstraction, the Depression fostered strong interest in representational art and the Social Realism characteristic of the WPA artists. In his essay for the catalog, The Transcendental Painting Group and Significant Abstraction, Scott A. Shields writes, As the TPG manifesto made clear, the group did not share the prevailing concern with political, economic or other social problems. Jonson, for one, sought consciously to work against the grain: I am not interested in telling the farmer and politician about our country but rather in telling all about the wonders of a richer and deeper land the world of peace love and human relations projected through pure form.' In other words, the concern of the TPG was for the spiritual health and well-being of all the people on the planet as opposed to the material needs of the impoverished and the failures of established political and economic systems to grapple with inequities. Like the realism of the period, the TPG saw an absence, and a need, but chose abstraction, not in the Modernist search for pure form art for arts sake but in search of artistic forms that would elicit responses, responses that, in turn, would contribute to human harmony.

Thinking about the Taos Society of Artists and Los Cinco Pintores in Santa Fe, about J.H. Sharp and Ernest Blumenschein, Fremont Ellis, Georgia OKeeffe, and dozens of other painters, the TPG brand of abstraction must have had a hard time in New Mexico. Like most artists, the TPG painters generally started out in the realm of realism. The Canadian painter Lawren Harris, for example, made his name painting landscapes that recall Rockwell Kents work mountains, skies, ice, water in simplified realistic forms, yet his desire to venture beyond that, to transcend it, if you will, is evident in his 1939 canvas, Painting No. 4.

There are asymmetrical mountain forms one gray, one turquoise that spill off the left and right edges of the painting, but the white diamond dominates the space and contains the lavender, blue and purple diamonds that vibrate and overlap inside it. It is as if mountains might emerge from these Platonic Forms of mountains, as if a single sun might form from the two at center and left and the parts of a sun that are gathering themselves at right. Together, the three are like shields with insignia, guardians of the natural world and natural law. Harris is after the mountain before the mountain, the symmetries that emerge into reality and are worn and transformed by time. Theres more. All of this is superimposed, as it were, on something we cant see apart from monochromatic arcs at the bottom of the canvas. Forms beneath Forms beneath Forms; like the parable of the turtles, it is Forms all the way down, though the more we look at them, the more we see that they are not archetypes, that their symbolism is Harris, expressed for us, if we want it.

Oversoul by Emil Bisttram, circa 1941. Oil on Masonite, 35 by 26 inches. Private collection.

Wassily Kandinsky is the driving force, the soul, if you will, of the TPG. His search for a conscious spiritual art one not dependent on surrealisms dreams, instinct and intuitions guides Jonson, Bisttram and the rest of the TPG. Kandinsky said, We have before us the age of conscious creation with which the spiritual in painting will be allied organically; with the gradual forming structure of the new spiritual realm, as this spirit is the soul of this epoch of great spirituality. In 1910, when he wrote On the Spiritual in Art, quoted above, the world, to Kandinsky, might have looked to be on the verge of transformation. By August 1914, it was, though the transformation was not at all what Kandinsky predicted. Had he written his book in 1915, that last quote might have been very different.

Conscious spirituality rejects surrealism but also repudiates the Emersonian idea of Transcendentalism, with its return to and reliance on natural forms as a path to spirituality. For the TPG, an awakened rationality and a fearlessness is the source of creation there is no turning back to nature or to earlier forms of art.

The TPGs true champion and philosopher, Dane Rudhyar, in his unpublished book-length study, The Transcendental Movement in Painting (excerpts of which are published in the catalog for the first time) makes the case for the TPG knowing that the world is on the brink of the centurys second world war. Rudhyar wrote: Let us be more brutally frank: the issue today for America is between Transcendentalism and some form of Fascism; between a Walt Whitman and a Mussolini; between a life of creative freedom in the realm of ideas and universal symbols, and a life of subservience to some collective pattern of thought and behavior imposed upon masses too frantic with insecurity and too emotional to resist the hysteria aroused by radio voices, by the modern black magic of dictatorships and organized greed.

Composition #57/Pattern 29 by Robert Gribbroek, 1938. Oil on canvas, 36 by 27 inches. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Harriet and Maurice Gregg Collection of American Abstract Art 2019.42.

For Rudhyar, the TPG was necessary, an antidote for the above, summed up in this way: The purpose of the Transcendental Movement which can become the keynote of our century is to arouse men and women out of their bondage to sense-patterns and dead intellectual attitudes; to stir in each and all the creative spark, the Living God, whose essence is fire, audacity, heroic activity, search for ever wider meanings; whose rhythm is one of cyclic metamorphoses leading ever-onward along the spiral of ever-progressing, ever more transcendent living.

The radiance that the TPG strove for didnt stop World War II. Radiance twisted into radiation that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proving that we could make the fabric of nature do our destructive bidding. War is the opposite of art.

Still, look again at the works on these pages. TPG paintings often look as though they correlate to some phenomenon as though they might be scientific diagrams or visualizations of experiments with light or sound, or that they represent the infinite or the infinitesimal or that they sprang from science and then metamorphosed into something more, something neurological and metaphysical. Agnes Peltons 1930 painting, The Voice, for example, is an attempt to visualize song, speech, utterance. Under her brush, the voice becomes something vegetative, something growing and reaching up, something alive. Similarly, Emil Bisttrams Creative Forces is like the spectrum of a comet seen through a prismatic instrument.

Creative Forces by Emil Bisttram, 1936. Oil on canvas, 36 by 27 inches. Private collection, Courtesy Aaron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe.

If theres a time and place for everything, 2021 might be the year for the Transcendental Painting Group. Artworks that convey spirituality unmoored from organized religion while blending mysticism and meditation, that seem to possess a personal, sacred geometry, while sharing in the Midcentury Modern appeal of Bauhaus and Art Deco, the atomic age and the jet age with all the connotations of a better tomorrow that may or may not come to pass might just be what the universe ordered.

In the phony war between realism and abstraction, realism often takes hold of the artistic zeitgeist at times when we need to be reminded of our common humanity; abstraction, on the other hand, often rises to the surface when it seems as though our inner lives need shoring up. Shields notes, In the United States, work by the TPG bore some relationship to the Synchromism of Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, these artists, like Kandinsky, finding commonalities between abstract painting and music The reductive, streamlined Precisionism of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth also held aesthetic motivation for some in the TPG, Jonson most notably, as did the paintings of Joseph Stella and the design forms of the machine age. Reconciling machines and our species that makes those machines, marrying senses to sciences and making art of these syntheses is one of the philosophical projects of Twentieth Century art, a project very much on the minds of artists today.

Abstraction and realism. Its all isms, choices, human expressions that reveal as they conceal. The phony war between realism and abstraction is a war that was never a war. There are wars enough without it.

The exhibition is on view at the Albuquerque Museum through September 26. The show travels to the Philbrook Museum of Art from October 17, 2021 to February 20, 2022 and then to Artis-Naples, the Baker Museum, from March 26 to July 24, 2022. The show will then travel to the Crocker Art Museum from August 28 to November 20, 2022 and it will conclude at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with a run from December 18, 2022 to April 16, 2023.

Albuquerque Museum is at 2000 Mountain Road NW. For more information, visit http://www.albuquerquemuseum.org or call 505-243-7255.

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Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group At Albuquerque Museum - Antiques and the Arts Online

After decades of constant turmoil, the latest chapter in the conflict of Afghanistan took place as the Taliban overran the countrys capital in the wake of the withdrawal of US forces and the implosion of the Western-backed Afghan government. This outcome is being characterised as dramatic because of the inevitable comparison to the fall of Saigon and also because of the widespread resonance of the images that vividly illustrate the various facets of this calamity. The baffling scenes that show the hasty evacuation of American personnel and the capture of the presidential palace have caught the attention of observers from all over the world.

Moreover, the significance of this event is highlighted by the fact that, after almost two decades, the invasion and occupation of the Central Asian country did not go as expected. The limits of American military power even with the assistance of NATO forces and the involvement of other allies were demonstrated in a stark way. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to interpret this as a return to the status quo that prevailed before Operation Enduring Freedom was launched. In fact, the Taliban is arguably more powerful than ever before. Right now, they control even more territory than before the Pentagons direct military intervention first started.

However, a closer and dispassionate analysis reveals that this turn of events is hardly surprising. After all, progress was elusive, governance was feeble at best, the promise of prosperity never materialised, and the costs of the war effort got to be far in excess of the marginal benefits being obtained, most of which concerned the dismantlement of al-Qaedas top leadership. Furthermore, there were longstanding and serious doubts about the effectiveness of the massive investments being made to develop governmental institutional capabilities in the fields of security and law enforcement.

On the other hand, the imperative to abandon Afghanistan had become self-evident in Washington itself. The proverbial writing on the wall had been there for a while. In fact, deliberations started during the Obama administration and the US government under President Trump even engaged the Taliban in talks to pave the way for a pullout. Regardless of contrasts in terms of both domestic politics and foreign policy, the Biden team was nominally committed to the execution of an orderly withdrawal. Yet, what was unforeseen was the speed with which the whole situation unraveled as the power void left by the US and its local allies was rapidly filled by the Taliban. No matter how this reality is sugarcoated by official spokesmen, it was a shocking failure in terms of foreign policy, strategic intelligence, and planning.

In this context, a great deal of attention is being paid to the damage done to the prestige of the United States as a superpower, the humanitarian impact of the crisis, the multiple political costs that would have to be paid in Washington, and the nature of the regime that will be established by the Taliban. Besides, another major issue that will certainly ignite geopolitical shockwaves on a global scale is the diminished credibility of American support, commitment, and security guarantees. However, this disaster can offer instructive lessons for policymakers, analysts, and scholars, which are valid for understanding matters that will condition international security environments for years and maybe even decades to come.

War is a phenomenon of permanent change

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States represents 33% of global military expenditures, far above any other country, including other great powers like China (13%) and Russia (3.1%). Qualitatively, the power projection capabilities of Washington include impressive platforms like aircraft carriers, submarines, state-of-the-art stealth fighters, nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Moreover, the American arsenal also contains special operations squads, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and highly sophisticated systems of intelligence and surveillance. In contrast, the Taliban is an irregular and loose alliance of militias equipped mostly with primitive firearms. Nevertheless, that massive disparity did not prevent the Pentagon from experiencing a severe setback in Afghanistan.

In order to understand such paradox, it is necessary to highlight that war is commonly regarded in Western countries as a military activity in which performance is mostly conditioned by logistical, operational, and technical matters. Those variables are of course relevant but said technocratic vision of military conflict is flawed because it overlooks that war is above all else a quintessentially political reality in which violence is instrumental in a deadly struggle between clashing interests, as the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz famously explained. Furthermore, it also has a psychological dimension that cannot be manipulated with hardware or weaponry alone. Neglecting such axioms is not just an intellectual shortcoming. Actually, an inaccurate assessment of what war is all about can lead to disastrous decisions.

Moreover, even though the underlying logic of war remains constant, its grammar evolves and becomes increasingly complex. As the Chinese General Sun Bin presumably related to the legendary Sun Tzu argued hundreds of years ago, war can be regarded as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon whose permutations are endless. In the particular case of Afghanistan, a modern national fighting force along with NATO troops and the Afghan government were involved in an intermittent confrontation with tribal warlords affiliated with the ideology of hardline militant Islamism.

In other words, it was an asymmetric conflict. This war is an illustrative example of what American professor Sean McFate refers to as durable chaos, i.e. a protracted conflict fought between the armed forces of a national state and a nonstate actor in unconventional battlefields in which rules of engagement are unclear. Moreover, an aspect that provides an additional layer of complexity is that the motivations of both sides could not have been more different. For the Americans this was an optional conflict fought very far away from their own homeland and one in which no vital interest was at stake. In contrast, for the Taliban it was an existential confrontation and a holy war against both infidels and apostates.

Under such conditions, there is no precise definition of victory. The rebels win as long as they do not lose and the invaders lose as long as they do not crush the insurgents. In this regard, the coalition headed by Washington rapidly overthrew the Taliban regime, but it never managed to pacify the whole country. In addition, the reach of the new Afghan government seldom went beyond the perimeter of Kabul, leaving the hinterland mostly wild, lawless, and dangerous. Eventually, through a relentless campaign of guerrilla warfare, spectacular acts of psychological warfare, salami tactics, the appropriation of modern weaponry handed over by deserters from the US-trained security forces, and a final Blitzkrieg offensive, the Taliban achieved their intended outcome: the eviction of the foreign invaders and the demise of the client regime they had established.

Another factor that must be taken into account in order to understand why this turn of the tide was seen by so many as surprising is that, in the context of asymmetric wars, appearances can often be deceiving, especially if ones analytical framework relies on narrow unidimensional prisms. Specifically, the idea that technological superiority by itself is enough to ensure a favorable result in war is not supported by empirical evidence. Hence, understanding the comprehensive and malleable nature of war in todays world requires a broad multidimensional perspective.

Nevertheless, despite the deeply humiliating overtones associated with the loss of a crucial anchor of geopolitical influence in Central Asia, this can be an opportunity for learning in Washington itself. As a result of that military, strategic, political and diplomatic catastrophe, the worlds leading sea power will have to rethink, reassess, and reformulate its grand strategy, the actual reach and limitations of its national power, and the criteria that will determine its involvement in operational theaters in which direct intervention can create more problems than it solves. Thus, this occasion is appropriate for the Americans to analyze the far-reaching implications of fighting land wars in Asia against subnational nonstate actors the 21st century. As classical realist thinkers such as Thucydides and Machiavelli have argued, the sense of humbleness imposed by restraint is a timeless virtue of paramount importance for statecraft.

The influence of geography cannot be overstated

Sometimes, obvious realities are so blatantly evident that they are actually overlooked. As the German philosopher Carl Schmitt noted, man is an earthling. As such, the political behaviors of human groups are heavily influenced by the spatial and material contextual circumstances in which they live, grow, thrive, decline, and fight against each other. In fact, the idea that geography is a powerful driver of political actions and interactions especially because of its relatively unchanged permanence in time is the core fundamental assumption held by all works of geopolitical literature.

Accordingly, an in-depth scrutiny of Afghanistans geographical conditions is essential to explain the countrys past and present. Afghanistan is a landlocked state located in the so-called rimland, a region whose control is constantly being contested between continental (aka the heartland) and maritime powers from what it is referred to as the outer crescent. However, it can also operate as a pivotal land bridge that connects vibrant, wealthy and powerful nations from the Eurasian landmass with one another. In fact, Afghanistans territory was crucial for the trade networks that were established under the umbrella of the legendary Silk Road. This reality explains why such a location at the crossroads of empires has attracted the interest of mighty conquerors such as Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Nevertheless, that reality does not clarify why Afghanistan has acted as a graveyard of empires, i.e. a black hole that drains the strength, manpower, resources and even the vitality of foreign invaders. Afghanistans rugged and arid geography entails meaningful military, political and economic challenges. Consequently, it is a place that is hard to control, rule, manage, and develop. Moreover, the ubiquitous presence of mountain ridges is an element that gives birth to clannish societies that are deeply distrustful of outsiders, particularly if those outsiders come from either valleys or ports. Such societies are protective of their own beliefs, ways of life, traditions, laws and independence. Likewise, in those environments, fierce warriors that are feared by their enemies are much more common than accommodating merchants and individuals who are eager to embrace ideologies with ecumenical pretensions.

Afghanistan is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of this reality. However, it is critical to underscore that, throughout history, the highlands have been the natural habitat, protective shelter, and perfect hideout of guerrilla forces, insurgents, separatists, rebels, religious extremists and even drug lords. In fact, many contemporary flashpoints are located in mountainous environments, including the Caucasus, Tibet, Scotland, Kurdistan and even the remote Colombian and Mexican villages in which the presence of the state is not even symbolic.

Hence, geography is an impersonal force that has played a major role in the history of Afghanistan. Yet, it can also determine its future, as the countrys geography offers many obstacles but it also provides assets that can be harnessed in a strategic way. For instance, it contains vast untapped deposits of natural gas, metallic minerals including rare earths and gemstones. Moreover, it is well positioned to participate in the ambitious multilateral projects of regional interconnectedness headed by China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Yet, only the power of human agency will define if, how, and under what terms Afghanistan is willing to play its cards as a potential geoeconomic corridor. At least for the time being, it seems the Taliban are prepared to adopt a pragmatic approach for statesmanship in the latest iteration of the Great Game played on the Eurasian geostrategic chessboard, but only time will tell.

Militant Islamism is here to stay

Anthropologically speaking, since the dawn of human civilization, religion has been closely connected to the worldly domain of politics. Historically, the expansion of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, the Levant, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Persia, Southeast Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Eastern periphery of Europe was a result of military conquest. Centuries later, Christianity played a crucial role in the global expansion of European empires. Tellingly, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once described the Vatican as the ghost of the defunct Roman Empire.

Nonetheless, after the Enlightenment, it was believed that the influence of religion would eventually vanish thanks to the continuous progress of reason and science. However, even though secularism has triumphed in much of the West, religion as an element that shapes collective identities, establishes social rules, and provides a sense of meaningfulness in an uncertain world is still a powerful political force elsewhere. As such, it can be pragmatically mobilized for the pursuit of power.

Specifically in the Muslim world, the disappointing political, military, and economic failure of Arab nationalism a secular ideology championed by the likes Gamal Abdel Nasser and the various branches of the Baath Party fueled the gradual rise of militant political Islamism. Another precedent that needs to be taken into account is the overthrowing of the Shah of Iran (a right-wing secular modernizer aligned with Western powers) as the result of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Furthermore, in the particular case of Afghanistan, the CIA and local intelligence agencies like the Pakistani ISI clandestinely encouraged the struggle of the Mujahideen against the invading troops of the Soviet Union and the atheist local client regime backed by Moscow.

Likewise, the flames of militant Islamism have been fanned by major events like American military intervention, the deposal of secular governments in the Middle East, the intermittent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the so-called Arab spring, the birth of ISIS and the sectarian carnage unleashed by Sunni and Shiite forces in places like Syria, Iraq and Yemen. In addition, radical Islamism has played a major role in multiple Eurasian spots whose control has or is being contested, including Chechnya, Transcaucasia, the Balkans, Kashmir and Xinjiang. Likewise, Turkey has abandoned almost a century of secularism in order to openly embrace political Islamism both at home and abroad. Finally, deadly acts of jihadist terror have taken place in Europe and even in the American hemisphere.

This is the political zeitgeist in which the growing power of the Taliban must be understood. The Western campaign to hunt down Al-Qaeda was to a certain extent partially successful, but radical militant Islamism is very much alive and thriving. Moreover, the prestige that comes with the achievement of defeating two superpowers that wanted to impose secular regimes in Afghanistan in a couple of generations will likely enhance their strength and their reputation as holy warriors. The impressive victory of the Taliban will be seen as a source of inspiration for jihadists all over the world.

Therefore, their triumphal return is being monitored with concern and caution in Moscow, Beijing, Delhi and Teheran, all of which are troubled by the prospect of Sunni extremism. Needless to say, such a turn of events entails potentially problematic ramifications in a region in which turmoil and tension can rapidly spiral out of control and engulf those in close proximity. Hence, those great powers have a strong incentive to reach some sort of mutually acceptable accommodation with the Taliban. The last thing they want is to intervene in Afghanistan, but they have to make sure, through either carrots or sticks, that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan does not become an exporter of jihadist geopolitical disruption.

Nevertheless, the political revival of religion goes well beyond the confines of the Muslim world. In fact, this lesson can be extrapolated further in order to examine relevant phenomena in non-Islamic societies in which religion is playing a prominent role in politics, foreign policy, and statecraft. In fact, this contemporary trend is reflected in the proliferation of religious Zionism (even though the movement was originally secular), the closeness between the ruling Siloviki clan and the Orthodox church in Russia, the influence of Catholicism in Poland, and the mass political mobilization of Evangelical Christians in places like Brazil and the United States.

Dreams of utopian nation-building can engender very real nightmares

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the early post-Cold War era was a period of intellectual triumphalism in the West. Back then, it was commonly believed that the global expansion of liberal democracy, free markets, human rights, and institutionalized co-operation was inevitable. In this regard, the quixotic neoconservative crusade launched by President George W. Bush was based on the premise paradoxically inspired by the Trotskyist concept of permanent revolution that Western models could be exported through hard power to places like the Greater Middle East. The radical transformation of societies was seen as desirable, but it could not happen without military might.

Afghanistan became the most notorious experiment undertaken to validate such ideas. Thus, once the Taliban was removed, an ambitious program of institutional reform was undertaken in order to remake Afghanistan. In other words, Washington was following the footsteps of the Soviet Union. In fact, both superpowers were guilty of hubris, in the sense that they were attempting to impose forms of government that had no roots whatsoever in the idiosyncratic national character and historical background of a country like Afghanistan, a place in which political dynamics are driven by collective tribal affiliations rather than by class struggle or individual self-interest. Thus, neoconservatism was mugged by reality in Afghanistan just like communism was in the late Cold War.

As the insightful Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony observed, the use of military force or diplomatic pressure by a great power to rebuild a society in its own image and likeness is seldom met with welcoming enthusiasm and support. Instead, as history shows, the instrumental use of coercion in order to implement political reengineering usually elicits a strong nationalist backlash. After all, the collective struggle to determine a peoples own fate regardless of whether the decisions made as a result of that process please foreigners or not is a structural feature of an international system in which there is a plurality of heterogeneous polities. Thus, the idea of enforcing the universal homogeneity of political regimes is unnatural and out of touch with reality. In the case of Afghanistan, the Americans were seen by large segments of society as arrogant imperialist invaders, and their local allies were regarded as outright treacherous collaborators willing to sell out their country in exchange for personal benefit.

Furthermore, the artificial regime propped up by Washington can hardly be described as a textbook example of Jeffersonian democracy. It was an uneasy amalgam of sheer opportunism, professional careerism, rampant corruption, and misplaced optimism. Of course, realpolitik played a major role, since the US had little choice but to make deals with unsavory stakeholders such as local warlords, all sorts of outlaws, ambitious politicians with little genuine popular support, and Soviet-era strongmen. Likewise, occupation forces largely turned a blind eye to problematic phenomena like a skyrocketing cultivation of opium poppies. Unsurprisingly, such a political creation never reached the levels of legitimacy that could provide reasonable stability. Arguably, considering all of the above, it was simply a matter of time before the regime collapsed like a house of cards.

Concluding thoughts

Undeniably, the military, political and ideological triumph of the Taliban over the West in general and the U.S. in particular represents a tectonic shift in contemporary international relations. It can even be argued that, as the epilogue of the twenty years crisis that began with 9/11, it abruptly disproves the premature prophecies that were made in the early 90s about the imminence of the end of history. However, despite its ominous connotations, it can also teach sobering lessons that are valuable for strategic intelligence, foreign policy, and statecraft. The greatest tragedy in this case would be to disregard or, even worse, to stubbornly contradict those lessons. After all, wisdom in statesmanship calls for realism, a keen understanding of human nature, a thorough knowledge of impersonal forces, and an unshakable fixation on attainable concrete results rather than on zealotry over abstract principles. This is what the art of the possible is all about.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com

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What Afghanistan Teaches about the Art of the Possible - Geopoliticalmonitor.com

Photo by Lindsey B. King2020: The Year That Changed Everything

Coloradans took to the streets this year to fight against police brutality and structural racism. But 2020 didnt make it easy, as advocacy organizations were forced to adjust how they planned protests.

There were plenty of tears in the crowd. They were streaming down Black womens faces until the liquid pain trickled behind their brightly colored face masks. Gathered near the Colorado State Capitol, women took turns telling stories of dead family members, exhaustion, and fearfear for their children, their brothers, their friends, and their partners. In 2020, there were more reasons than ever for the March for Black Women Denver to come together to rally for racial equity. Unfortunately, there were also many reasons not to.

Protesting and organized marching arent new to the Mile High CityDenver hosted one of the countrys largest womens marches in 2017 but the murder of George Floyd, an out-of-control pandemic, and a contentious election cycle have encouraged Coloradans to voice their concerns with more urgency and frequency this year. In years past, however, the March for Black Women Denver would have sounded, looked, and felt very different. Along with all the other changes 2020 has brought with it, this year has also necessarily altered the way protest planners have had to organize their events.

That is, of course, if they even felt comfortable staging in-person events. The Womxns March Denver canceled its October rally and pivoted from rallying in the streets to encouraging a parade to the polls in November. It also set up moderated panels and other smaller eventsmost held in virtual settings.

For some organizations, however, the risks of gathering were far outweighed by the need to capitalize on the national zeitgeist surrounding racial equity. The March for Black Women Denver and Black Lives Matter 5280 had to modify their programming and enforce strict social distancing protocols. Temperatures were taken, masks were required, and hugging was discouragednot only because those measures are widely known to help stop the spread of the virus, but also because COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black and brown people in Colorado and across the country. Although it pained organizers to scuttle their usual lineup of deejayed dance parties, free food, and a long list of speakers, they dutifully replaced events that engendered too much close togetherness with programming that allowed for social distancing, like quiet reflections, long marches through Denvers streets, and impromptu speeches from members of the community. In the past we have been able to really have community and be in close proximity with each other, says Tiya Trent, one of the organizers of the March for Black Women Denver. Laughing, dancing, huggingwe really didnt get to do a lot of that this year. We wanted to make sure that the people who chose to show up were safe.

COVID-19 wasnt the only safety issue event planners had to think about, though. Considering protesters physical safetyfrom law enforcement, counter-protesters, and random dissentershas always been a priority. That concern was heightened this year. Theres always been a risk in Black women gathering, says Shontel Lewis, another organizer for the March for Black Women, who explains how Black women have long been susceptible to violence, whether through their relationships or at the hands of police. But this is 2020. With all the agitators and antagonists against the movement, we felt that it was best to take a few more safety precautions. The Black women who chose to speak were physically surrounded by Black men and white allies. There was an effort to protect and shield, something Black women have had to live without for a long time, Lewis says.

Black Lives Matter 5280 orchestrated four marches in 2020. But local organizers didnt stop there: They also continued to focus on traditional tacticslike fundraising and community educationthat have always been part of Black Lives Matter 5280s mission. We have been modeling after our ancestors before us and the types of direct actions that they engaged in, whether thats formal protest, or other forms of direct action, like different forms of collective action in fundraising efforts, says Apryl Alexander, a professor at the University of Denver and BLM 5280 Community organizer. I think there are some things that changed with 2020 and a lot of things that didnt change.

What has changed, according to multiple organizers, is the response theyve received to their work. Black Lives Matter 5280 has been able to work with far more people this year than ever before; its marches were heavily attended; and their fundraisers elicited more donations than in previous years. What the tragic events of 2020 havent changed, planners say, is the fight for Black rights. Alexander explains that 2020 has only changed the reactions Americans are having to the movement. And there are upsides and downsides to that: White allies are paying more attention, but white supremacists are becoming more emboldened.

Organizers say theyll deal with the need for increased safety measures and take the good response with the bad so long as the increased interest in social justice doesnt fade away when 2020 comes to an end. My biggest fear is that people forget, because thats happened in movements before, Alexander says. I fear that people wont continue to engage in the action thats needed to abolish systemic and institutional racism.

More here:

How 2020 Changed the Way That Protests Are Organized - 5280 | The Denver Magazine

Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive)

With the arrival of Ma Raineys Black Bottom on Netflix, playwright August Wilsons celebration of Black lives once again takes center stage. The film, produced by Denzel Washington and starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman and Colman Domingo, chronicles the day in the life of the legendary blues singer and her backing band as they record music one afternoon in the 1920s. It also marks the second time one of Wilsons award-winning plays has been adapted for the screen. The first, of course, being Fences, which Washington produced, directed and starred in.The two-time Oscar winnerhas also made it his mission to make movie versions of Wilsons 10 plays, known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Also referred to as the Century Cycle, nine of the 10plays depict different generations of African Americans living in Pittsburghs Hill District, with the other, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, being set in Chicago and focused on the singer. Overall, Wilsons aim was to bring Black experiences -- not just a singular one -- in America to the stage, with all 10 eventually performed on Broadway.

He wrote vital plays, director Ruben Santiago-Hudson told ET of Wilsons work. Plays that had pulses. They reflected each generation and each time specifically in importance and nature of issues of that era. But things change only so much, the disguise just becomes different. August has a lot of revolution in his plays; its not just survival, theres a lot of revolution.

The last one to make it to Broadway was Wilsons first play, Jitney, which was directed by Santiago-Hudson and starred Andre Holland among an ensemble of Black actors. It opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York City in 2017, just as Fences was earning accolades, including four Academy Award nominations -- with one being a posthumous nod for Wilson in Best Adapted Screenplay -- and eventually one win, for Best Supporting Actress for Davis performance opposite Washington.

[Audiences] are being exposed to greatness, Davis told ET, when asked about the significance of Wilsons two works being produced for stage and screen at the same time. I think the worst thing is to be that great and to live in any sort of obscurity, because I know I've reaped the benefits of the words and that writing and those characters and those narratives and how much it enriched my life. That's the beauty of it. People are being exposed to the effects of that writing.

She added, Hes no longer unknown. Hes going to be right at the tip of everybody's tongue. It's not going to be August Wilson who?

It's significant because people recognize this extraordinary quality, and it allows the integrity of August Wilson's star to shine so bright right now, Santiago-Hudson also said of the zeitgeist moment, sharing Davis sentiment.

Several years later, Wilson is back in the spotlight as both Ma Raineys Black Bottom and Giving Voice, a documentary produced by Davis and Washington about an annual monologue competition inspired by his work, find their way onto Netflix. The projects also come amid a cultural reckoning in America, as the Black Lives Matter movement not only challenged the systemic and institutionalized racism in all facets of the country but encouraged the importance of Black stories in entertainment.

If director George C. Wolfe had it his way, Ma Raineys Black Bottom would have been released during the height of the movement over the summer. But Washington and others discouraged him from that knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the film is out there, available for audiences to see again and again, unlike the play, which people often only get to see that one time.

People all over the world are going to see it, he tells ET now. I think that feels really kind of thrilling to me simply because all of a sudden, even people who know nothing about him or who have heard of him but havent seen the play will now have his language and his understanding of the world and his characters in their lives.

And what sets Ma Raineys Black Bottom apart from Wilsons other plays, and perhaps what makes it even more resonate as more stories about LGBTQ people of colorare being told, is that it focuses largely on a queer woman. I think thats something that needs to be even celebrated more so, Domingo says, adding that Wilsons plays tend to be very male-centric and normally dont include any gay characters.

But when it comes to Ma, the actor adds, shes a force to be reckoned with, who was an openly gay blues singer who was fighting so many fights in one day. Just to get through the day, she was a woman, she was a Black woman, she was a queer, Black woman in a male-dominated industry.

That diversity within the Black experience is even reflected in Giving Voice, and the new generation of performers who are interpreting and performing Wilsons words in the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition. Every year, thousands of students from across America vie for a chance to perform on Broadway.

And despite Wilsons work being written decades ago, for many of the young competitors, it still relatable to what many are going through today. If this play was written a while ago and this is still happening, we need to do something about it, says Gerardo Navarro, one of the teenage performers in the documentary.

No matter what, with both projects available on the streaming platform, People will now know the majesty of August Wilsons work, Wolfe says.

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Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive) - WUSA9.com

The News Tribune asked local brewers and bakers and others in the biz to talk about their best bites from the past year. Here is what they said.

Lobster roll at Scenic 61 (Christa Lawler / clawler@duluthnews.com)

"My best food was the lobster roll from the airstream trailer at The Scenic Cafe. My best drink was cedar and cider from Vikre and Duluth Cider."

DAVE HOOPS is the veteran brewer behind Hoops Brewing and whose Hoops on Hops column runs in the News Tribune. The New Scenic opened an airstream trailer, Scenic 61, and has been serving customers in the parking lot and at a few pop-up locations.

Laura Kirwin liked New Scenic Cafe's meal kits. (Photo courtesy of Kirwin)

As someone who works in the restaurant business, it was so refreshing to have a nice meal cooked for me from New Scenic Cafe. My husband and I were sick of cooking at home so for our 13-year wedding anniversary, we got a meal kit from New Scenic Cafe. Missing travel and reminiscing about our worldly travels, we ordered the cassoulet (a hearty bean dish with housemade sausages and duck confit) paired with a cherry frangipan tart. I can't tell you how much it lifted our spirits and (temporarily) made us forget about the stressful times we are living in. I'll never forget it.

LAURA KIRWIN goes by the name Bayou Baker when she adds the dessert red velvet cupcakes, pralines, coconut snowballs to the Cajun dinners from Gumbo Boi. New Scenic Cafe, in addition to opening the Scenic 61 food truck, has added meal kits in its Mise en Place Marketplace.

The Buffalo Chikn Tacos at Mama Roots Vegan Food Truck (2020 file / News tribune)

Mama Roots is a huge standout this year. The vegan food truck sold out during their debut, and the peoples taste buds dont lie.

During my visit, the Buffalo Chikn Tacos and Moroccan Carrot Slaw were to die for with organic soy curls that really tasted like chicken! Also, greens, tomato, green onion, buffalo sauce and bus-made ranch (made of aquafaba, lemon, fresh dill and parsley, among other delicious things).

The slaw was sweet, bright, orange in taste and color and well-covered in their ACV-maple syrup-lime aioli. Their food is 100% plant-based, impressive on the taste buds, easy on the wallet and on Mama Earth what more could you ask?

MELINDA LAVINE is a features reporter at the News Tribune and frequently contributor to the Things We Like column. Mama Roots opened as the weather warmed in 2020.

A menu card showing the Real Tacos served by Oasis Del Norte in Duluth. (Clint Austin/caustin@duluthnews.com)

I've loved the innovation of 2020 and the way food became a source of entertainment: The buzz around Doc Witherspoon's Soul Food Kitchen, the radically honest social media presence of Tony O'Neil from JamRock Cultural Restaurant, Gumbo Boi's muffuletta sandwich, served out of a borrowed kitchen, with the coziest homemade bread, Scenic 61 offering New Scenic levels of food with the decidedly concession stand of regular old bag of chips or a bottle of wine. When I interviewed Eduardo Sandoval Luna about taking Oasis Del Norte to a pop-up spot at the mall, he recommended his super torta. I keep going back for it, this handful of taco flavors like beans and cheese and avocado; we add carnitas, but there are other meat options, on a soft tela roll. Every once in a while you come across a glop of mayo and audibly groan with pure food joy. Do not skip the tres leches cake, which is a moist crumble of dessert, and tack on horchata.

CHRISTA LAWLER is a News Tribune features reporter. Oasis Del Norte spent the summer popping up in areas often untouched by food trucks, including an insurance company's parking lot in West Duluth.

Vikre Distillery is offering cocktail kits. (file / News Tribune)

I think the one thing that I enjoyed and was impressed with the most was Vikre and their quick offering of cocktail kits. Each one was hand mixed, creatively packaged and (duh) delicious. It really helped take the edge off those early months of the lock downs and helped keep me feeling classy. And let's not forget to mention the sanitizer program, I didn't drink it, but Vikre deserves a lot of praise for things they did this year. Also, I really enjoy Bent Paddle's Snow Maker brew.

ROBERT LEE went from cooking hobbyist to a full-fledged pop-up shop with Gumbo Boi, which serves cajun dishes on weekends out of the kitchen at Zeitgeist. Vikre Distillery began making hand sanitizer early on in the pandemic, but also has kits filled with ingredients for the home bartender.

The enchiladas at Bucktales are worth the drive, according to Taco Stand writer Jon Nowacki. (Jon Nowacki / jnowacki@duluthnews.com)

Growing up in a small town, I was used to taking road trips as the nearest town was eight miles away, and the nearest restaurant chain, 30 miles away. I did even more driving than normal this spring, with everything shut down, sightseeing out of boredom. I liked hitting Wisconsin Point until they posted a sign saying it was only open to people who lived in Douglas County (not sure how a guy walking outside by himself checking out a lighthouse contributes to the spread of coronavirus, but I digress).So I went the other direction and ended up south of town at a place called Pickled Petes, shortly after Wisconsin opened back up. I was hungry, and the bartender recommended a place just down the road that served great Mexican cuisine.A Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere? I had to investigate.Turns out, Bucktales Cantina and Grill was just as advertised.Ive been to Bucktales about a dozen times since, and Ive never been disappointed. Owner and chef Dee Morales never mails it in its always good. He clearly takes pride in his work, whether its traditional Mexican dishes like enchiladas and chimichangas or gyros and Philly sandwiches, and theres always a good Mexican beverage to pair with it.I was there just the other day and while it was listed as an appetizer, the chorizo tacos were a meal in and of themselves, and man, they were good.In this year of COVID-19, and with Minnesota back on lockdown, this holiday season Bucktales has been the gift that keeps on giving. Its definitely worth the drive.

JON NOWACKI is the News Tribune sports reporter who writes the Taco Stand food column. Bucktales is a Mexican restaurant in a bar on South State Rd. in Superior.

The Boat Club's Lake Superior Breakfast comes with whitefish, eggs, arugula, mushrooms and pickled red onion. (Melinda Lavine / mlavine@duluthnews.com)

I was a big fan of The Boat Club. From set up to service to plated meals loved everything about them and went to my own JamRock page to rave about them publicly.

TONY ONEIL took JamRock Cultural Restaurant from a mobile grill to a brick-and-mortar spot at Average Joes and now has plans to move to the former Paks Green Corner, 1901 Tower Ave. The Boat Club, located in the lower level of the Fitgers Complex, specializes in seafood and views.

The Toasty's Burger in Paradise features cream cheese spread, Colby jack cheese, pineapple, cilantro, organic BBQ sauce, lime zest, jalapeos and bacon. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

We're so blessed with so many amazing local options. But, if I've gotta choose just one I'm going with the Burger in Paradise from Toasty's. It's mortal magic in a bun. Two cheeses, jalapeos, bacon, bbq sauce, lime, two perfectly juicy patties *chef's kiss* superb. I once let someone try a bite of my burger (pre-covid) and cried because they took a bigger bite than I was expecting. Also, I haven't confirmed this, but their fries taste like they blanche them. The BIP and fry combo could get me through, like, five more 2020s. Although Universe if you're reading this pleeeaaassee understand that it's just hyperbole. Less pandemics, more burgers in paradise.

RACHELLE RAHN of Duluth Kombucha recently reopened in a new space, 12 S. 15th Ave. E. Toastys, located in downtown Duluth, is a sandwich shop that offers variations on the classic grilled cheese sandwich in addition to burgers.

There are two things I have eaten the most in 2020.

One would be a cheese burger from Lake Ave. This is definitely my favorite restaurant in Duluth. They always have a creative, well thought out delicious menu but I always come back to this perfect patty. I have to get my burger fix from them a few times a month. Hands down best in the D!

Two would be fettuccine alfredo from Gannuccis Italian Market! Bill puts a lot of love into all his dishes but that one in particular is, in my opinion, the best in town. The noodles are handmade, perfectly cooked, and the sauce is creamy perfection.

JONATHAN REZNICK owns The Rambler food truck and MidCoast Catering and was part of the movement to deliver food to frontline workers during the pandemic. Lake Ave. is based in the Dewitt-Seitz Building and Gannuccis Italian Market is a West Duluth mainstay.

Love Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. (2016 file / News Tribune)

We honestly eat our food all the time, but we also love love love to visit Love Creamery. The completely made-from-scratch taste is never missed and included in every flavor. My wife especially loves the gluten/dairy free options like Smores. My favorite flavor is the Honey Chamomile because it reminds me of home, a flavor I had growing up as a kid.

EDUARDO SANDOVAL LUNA opened a pop-up Oasis Del Norte at the Miller Hill Mall with plans to stay through March. Love Creamery, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, seemed to have a steady stream of masked and distanced customers throughout the pandemic.

Lulu's Pizza Banh Mi-Za features pork or mock duck, a pickle medley, cilantro, banh mi sauce, roasted garlic, olive oil and shredded mozzarella cheese. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

The affogato at Love Creamery. This isn't news, but does it need to be? It's sooooo good. I like to get mine with the salted caramel ice cream and top it with whipped cream because it reminds me of the ones we had on our honeymoon in Italy!

The banh mi pizza at Lulu's pizza. Lulu's opened right before the pandemic began, which seems like unlucky timing, but maybe it wasn't since their pizza is pretty much the perfect take out food. We have been picking up pizza for dinner almost every Friday since the pandemic began, and the banh mi is my steady favorite.

EMILY VIKRE of Vikre Distillery published Camp Cocktails this past year and the distillery also made a quick move to create hand sanitizer when there was a sanitizer drought and also has created cocktail kits. Love Creamery is a craft ice cream shop that quickly adapted to the pandemic. Lulus Pizza has clever pizza options and is at 420 W. Superior St.

It's been a super odd year for eating out, but there were still some good experiences. I have so many favorite spots like Lake Ave Cafe, Phoholic, OMC / Duluth Grill. It's really hard to pick something. I really miss the Scenic Cafe. The Earthwood Inn in Two Harbors sometimes has fresh herring and fresh lake trout fish cakes. It's bar food connected to a little motel, but if they have fresh fish they do a really great job served with hush puppies and fries. Yikes, it's a greasy dinner, but a little juxtapose to fine dining and super foodie fun that I'm usually after. For a favorite drink option, the new Jade Fountain has some really top-notch cocktails with really interesting ingredients and house made ginger beer and other concoctions.

JASON WUSSOW made a quick shift to add a drive-thru window at Wussows Concert Cafe in West Duluth, in addition to hosting parking lot concerts this past summer. Jade Lounge is a tiki bar located across the street from Wussows and The Earthwood Inn will often update its Facebook page with its fresh fish options.

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Duluth's best bites of 2020 ranged from fresh herring to ice cream - Duluth News Tribune

The Wall Group has produced a digital magazine, out today.

The global agency, which represents the industrys leading fashion and beauty creators, tapped into its in-house talent for the free publication, called Inside/Outside. The project is a reflection of the climate this year with the coronavirus pandemic, featuring home diaries from the likes of stylist Yashua Simmons and makeup artist Bo Champagne, recipes from creator Margaret Zhang and FaceTime shoots with IMG Models.

Stylist Chloe Hartstein used the opportunity to spotlight Black Lives Matter activists Qween Jean and Vidal Guzman.

When The Wall Group first approached me about contributing to their new magazine, it was very clear to me that I wanted to share this platform with people who have inspired me and challenged my thinking in the past few months, and who dont necessarily get a huge platform to amplify their voices, Hartstein said. As hard as 2020 has been, I feel so thankful for the incredible humans Ive met through the [Black Lives Matter] movement, whove shared their stories, and made all of us better people through the process. It felt right to share my new family with my Wall Group family.

Inside/Outside, available at insideoutside.thewallgroup.com, was done remotely by The Wall Groups digital team, led by creative director Erin Dennison. The work was a collaborative effort with nothing commissioned, said the agency. They expect to produce more issues.

As we reflected on the extraordinary events of 2020 and their profound impact on our lives, we felt compelled to capture and memorialize the diverse perspectives and experiences that have shaped our understanding of this watershed moment, founder and chief executive officer Brooke Wall told WWD in a statement.

Wall created the agency in 2000. In 2015, it was acquired by Endeavor, formerly WME-IMG.

I am proud of our artists and our team, who have come together to create a body of work that beautifully encapsulates the myriad emotions of this year, showcasing not only their creativity but their support of one another through this challenging time, she continued. Our hope is that Inside/Outside will not only capture the 2020 zeitgeist, but remind our fashion community that we can and will get through this together.

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The Wall Group Launches Digital Magazine, Showcasing BLM and Creatives at Home - WWD

In her recent paintings exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, on view through 23 December 2020, the artist has continued to develop what she refers to as insistent gestures and neologisms. They are marks that have progressed over time, becoming larger in size, decisive in stroke, and referential to forms before them. This newly invented language emerges from her desire to further develop the space she creates, where she reimagines the potential of the liminal expanse born in the in-between or transitional place.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Always circling back to biblical references, Mehretu's exhibition is enveloped in its drama. Like the clouds over The Raft of the Medusa (18181819) by Thodore Gricault, the exhibition recalls the Book of Revelation and the narrative of the Seven Seals of God that eventually lead to the beginning of the apocalypse.

It is in that moment before the apocalypse, and in that impossible frame of theological time, that Mehretu finds the space for another possibility. In these paintings Mehretu works dynamically, starting her process with a news image, which she first digitally alters and blurs. She distils the essence of that image, its spirit and substance, and builds layers of a gradient and saturated palette consumed by blacks and resonating colours, airbrushed and sanded impressions of varying opacity and pointed deconstruction.

Julie Mehretu, Maahes (Mihos) torch (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

The series of seven paintings, 'about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1)' (20182020) depict this hovering between realms. There is a sense of anticipation among streamers of saturated colour, movement, and form, their gestures evoking a post-event in an uncanny space. They are suspended among particles of airbrush, indicating that the dust hasn't settled yet.

Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation.

In the series of aquatint photogravures, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (2020), Mehretu references both Joan Didion's collection of essays and W.B Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming'. Her paintings in this series begin with blurred images of worldwide protests and movements transformed into abstractions of light, shadow, and colour on the large surfaces inhabited by her gestural marks.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The vertigo-induced image both manifests and destabilises the catastrophic logic of those contemporary moments that are alluded to in the works' titles. This is a unique quality in the paintings, which maintain their indeterminacy as delineated in the spaces of near illumination and penumbras manifested by the hovering patterns, computer glitches, painterly streaks, and forms and glimmers of light that push through the shadows. Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation. The paintings consequently evoke the possibilities to be discovered within the blur, altering the images into disembodied experience.

'There's an access to this other condition that is insistent,' she explains to me in our conversation. Black lines and shapes hover over masses of shadow and light in another series of seven paintings also in the exhibition. In Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020), the title suggests a realm between contemporary Brazilian political corruption and a dedication to novelist Brenda Lozano whose love story ruminates on marking and erasure.

Julie Mehretu, Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Here, Mehretu looks to her surroundings. Synthesising her immediate environment and the social and political zeitgeist raging in the United States and the world, she reciprocates with abstraction that resists a single idea, and instead, draws a perspective where a once fortified patriarchal world shows its cracks.

Mehretu's paintings are immersive in this way. Works like Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019) allow us to step into these histories of brutal colonialism, orthodox doctrines, and natural exploitation, their demise revealed in a collective punishment of flames devouring parched forests, and revolts and protests fuelled by racial oppression and killings.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The paintings on view demonstrate Mehretu's tremendous creative output during this year of global pandemic. She began some of the painting at the early stages of the pandemic reality in New York, and continued throughout the curfews and lockdowns.

Within this space of anticipation, she constructed a visual language in abstraction, which leaves an afterimage imprinted in the mind's eye, like the fleeting flash-blindness of dark spots that appear after a bright flash of light. This corporeal and time-based experience of Mehretu's paintings feels like an emergence in that instance of anticipation as your vision begins to return, and the swirly lines and dots dissolve. It is the calm before the storm, as the image comes back into focus.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Second Seal (R 6:3) (2020). Photogravure, aquatint. 170 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMOpacity and abstraction are at the core of my practice and have been since graduate school. One should never feel the need to translate, or explain who and how one is for anyone else. This has never been asked of white male artists in terms of their identity. Black artists are too often expected to explain who they are in their work, which is based on racist ideas of authenticity.

Radical liberatory practices come from breaking away from the constraints of those ideas of authenticity, language, identity, culture, or any form of determinism. So much of the Black Radical tradition has been based in abstraction, precisely for this reason.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

In my work, the language of abstraction has evolved. Painting evolves slowly. But through years of working and mark-making, how I think about space, surface, the marks, and what can happen in a painting has transformed.

I think it really started with the 'Mogamma' paintings (2012)the scale of them and what takes place in terms of how one optically experiences the paintings. They take timea different kind of space opens up in them. It is a visceral experience, not just of space, but maybe also in relation to the memory of space and how one experiences that, while the marks become something else in their interaction with the architecture.

When I started to understand this whole time-based physical experience in the paintings, the architectural drawing became redundant to me. It was not necessary as a signifier anymore. At that point, I became interested in the blur.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The blur grew out of projecting a photograph that had an architectural image in it. I was projecting a photograph of a bombed-out street that was out of focus on the projector, and it felt more haunting than tracing the ruins.

Everything that the blurred photo contained felt more palpable. One could not only feel the history of it, but the possible future of that ruin as wellall from this weird blurred photograph. It became more potent, in a way, so I took that as a starting point. I experimented in Photoshop using spray paint and airbrush, trying to create this ephemeral, blurry, hazy spacethe blur became the uncertainty of the image.

We live in a super mediated environment, especially considering social media, and every person's reality is differently informed by that. It's like a house of mirrors where we can't locate ourselves, and I don't think anyone really understands our sense of space, time, place, or history within it.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

Paul Pfeiffer and Lawrence Chua and I have a collaborative, collective project called Denniston Hill, which has been an artist residency but is also a collaborative creative space to mine and invent forms of liberatory practices and pedagogies.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

For the past few years and the foreseeable future, the theme of our interrogation and projects revolve around the idea of exodus and aesthetics of uncertainty. Not the promised land, but rather of the post-emancipatory moment of those 40 years at a complete and utter loss in the desert: the cognitive confusion of that moment and that uncertaintythe haze and blur of the murmurings.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

That is the conceptual space that I have also been exploring in my paintings. These blurred photos are of a moment that we collectively experience. You don't need to know which California fire Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018) isit could be Beirut, Brazil, or Myanmar.

My interest is more in the visceral, collective source of that experience. For me, it becomes this activated, fertile space I can work in and respond to. I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities. It's not about delineating or defining some concrete political perspective, or some directive on how to understand things, or even a historical narrative. It's about the collision of all those thingsthe uncertainty and murmurings of all that.

For a lot of people, this way of working can be problematic, especially so for Black artists or artists of colour, who are expected to explain who they are and to tell the world their perspectives. It goes back to the idea of the right to abstractionthe right to opacity.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes. In the Book of Revelations, it's the moment after the four horsemen of the apocalypse are released; after the seventh seal is opened and 'there would be silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour.' It is the moment that's considered the threshold, the calm before the storm, or the space before the apocalypse; before the second coming.

During this whole pandemic, it felt like time was suspended. Many failures of our social systems have been exposed by the pandemic. But, at the same time, especially the first few months, it was this massive pause.

I was working upstate on these paintings, reading Moby-Dick and listening to it when I had insomnia. This story is about foreboding and mayhem, as well as the calm before the storm. We have been completely captured in this suspended, vertiginous, foreboding moment, with our own Captain Ahab catapulting us further into clear disaster. The show also opened the day before the election, so that was another threshold in my conscious.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMYes, I was more interested in that blur and that hazeto find the emergent light and forms within, as well as the absence and emergence of figures and what happens to them within these haunted spaces of imprisonment.

There is a charged DNA in the blur, for me; it affects my interaction with the painting, and it enables me to play with the spectre inside the image.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMFred Moten discusses the continual release of the fugitive and the possibility that emerges therehow Black joy can be advanced through negotiating against the constant effort to negate and extinguish that.

There are incredible inventions across American culture that are rooted in the effort to find possibility and joy, in the context of Black creativity and experimentation, despite all efforts against this and through pain.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Third Seal (R 6:5) (2020). Photogravure and aquatint. 169.9 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

So even though many of the previous 20th-century concepts of futurity feel shattered and impossible as tropes, there's still a determined persistence on something else that is possible. That is core to my investigation in painting. There is intentionality and intensity in this pleasure and excitementthe fervent effort to make and createand I think part of that comes from this place.

I'm reading this book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, where she follows the ecology, economy, and history of the matsutake mushrooma rare delicacy in Japan. Basically, it's this mushroom that thrives in damaged landscapes. She argues that by tracking the mushroom, the people who have travelled the world to pick itmostly refugees from Southeast Asiapresent a case for creative, imaginative ways to reinvent ourselves in the midst of precarity.

Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (20192020). Julie Mehretu. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist.

To me that is super profound when considering the creative work and creative thinking required of this time. It is our role to mine those possibilities, and to figure out how to continue to exist, insist, and to persist. It's not pessimistic.

I think that the elements of wanting to create, think through mediated images and painting, participate in the history of painting, learn how to make another picture and what that time-based experience is like, and to insist on a visceral, transformative experience that can happen in front of a work, can allow one to participate in those imaginative possibilities.

Julie Mehretu, Orient (after D. Cherry, post Irma and summer) (20172020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 274.3 x 304.8 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes, I was writing a piece on John Coltrane recently, and I was thinking about how, 50 years ago, coming out of Jim Crow and the denial of any type of humanity, there was still a revered creative force. His work, I think, was to mine and invent another space where he could be free, through concepts of universality and various forms of religion and spirituality.

So how do you do that when you don't have a language for that? You can't use the language of the oppressor in the same way. But it's not just the language of the oppressorit's the way you understand the world.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

I think that's where the neologism comes inwhere we invent new words. In music, there's the invention of sound and the constant effort to mine structure and sound. There's the effort in trying to create some kind of texture, space, and experience that goes beyond what can be defined or described or articulated with the language of pain, because experience is visceral and known.

I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities.

I'm not trying to speak opaquely, it's just all of this stuff is complicated, contradictory, undefined, and intangible. Is intuition a sense that is mined from the ontological congregation of resistance, an ontological congregation of ancestry; of a collective? How does one have understanding or access to different points of history, of time and of space in their knowing?

Marilynne Robinson said these beautiful words about writing fiction: 'It sounds as if it's some jag of mysticism or something but in fact it's true and I think it's important to me for people to realize that there are much larger, more complex, more consequential entities than most culture allows them to believe . . . when I'm writing fiction the hope is that I will have found my way to something that speaks for itself that is not interpreted but is adequate to interpretation when it comes.'

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 1 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMAbsolutely, especially in the architectural drawingsthe marks were always trying to be like clogs in the machine. They were trying to devour that system, if you willwork against it, devour it, participate in it, but ultimately, there's this kind of emergent entropy.

I think you see that energy in the paintings in the gallery. There's a kind of fury coming out of what the marks and blurs participate in creating, but there's also this dynamic happening with all of the other elements in colour. I feel like they participate in the construction of a systemic thing, but they also fall apart in that.

Julie Mehretu, Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

It reminds me of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who wrote, 'I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs . . . only an appreciation of the current precarity as an earth-wide condition allows us to notice thisthe situation of our world.'

I think all of that is a part of the disruption and the kind of breaking of a particular linear narrative. One of the paintings is titled Loop, after Brenda Lozano's book, where the protagonist goes through these cycles that weave from ancient mythology to today, through these repetitive, sometimes creepy patterns. That's the kind of magnitude of time that we connect with that's also broken and disrupted, so I think there's a participation in that, not only in a disruptive way, but also in a generative way.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 3 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMOf course, part of the intention with the work is to participate in this grand history of painting, which has been dominated by the white male painters for the most part. And institutionally and structurally, whether it's colonialism or patriarchy, or heteronormativity, it all contributes to the history of abstraction.

Julie Mehretu, Being Higher I (2013). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 213.36 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

What I'm trying to do with the making of these pictures is to try to resist, invent, and push against all of that. So, part of it is the scale of the work, and part of it is the desire to work in this language that has been denied to many people, though numerous artists have been working this way for decades. How does one articulate fragmentary breakdown, of a decentred way of looking? A multi-perspectival way of approaching paintings and an openness to their reading? It is all a part of the refusal of autocratic and patriarchal systems.

I think about those things because they are core to not just the way that I make, but also the way that I amthe way I live and participate in the world. This also goes back to what you asked earlier about opacity alongside negation in abstraction.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMI think part of the effort in trying to find a space for oneself is to constantly be inventing, finding, and mining your own spaceinsisting that you have that rightas we have to do as marginalised people.

The constant effort of trying to find a space for oneself is to work against and participate in that language: to use that language, to participate in that language, to shift it and morph it, and to create something else out of that, but also to insist on a state of possibility. I keep using that word 'possibility,' without it being too directed.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 4 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMIt is the most potent thing I feel I can do. Morton Subotnick said, in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber, 'The meaning of life, for me, and it never changed, is you find out who you are. Your duty is to find out who you are, what you are, and do the very best you can with that, and share what you do with other people. That's what I've done my whole life.'

Read more from the original source:

Julie Mehretu on the Right to Abstraction - Ocula Magazine