Jay Voss's blog

Xi, It's Good to Have You Back.

Xi Jinping

(Image credit: The New York Times)

With last week’s tempestuous events in the middle east, the subsequent chaos on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, and news of a professional peeping Tom in the south of France, much was lost on the American public concerning the strange and unexplained absence of Xi Jinping, the man in line to be the next president of China. Mr. Xi disappeared completely from public view on September 1st, leaving only wanting pundits to explain what they thought might be reality. Think about it. Imagine if we lived in an ascendant country and our leader-in-waiting suddenly vanished from the public eye for longer than two weeks. Furthermore, imagine if we lived under a government that lacked any sense of transparency, and under which a freethinking blog post such as this one might warrant imprisonment, all the while the ruling elite might not proffer any explanation concerning our presumptive leader’s whereabouts. We’d be anxious, and the Chinese were last week. Anyways, the reason I bring this event up isn’t to inform the average American about global events (that’s their own responsibility and their newspaper’s job), but rather, I think the whole circus surrounding Xi’s absence provides a unique insight into the ways that China’s ruling elite attempt to visualize their control.

Stretching things a bit?

Apple media event, Sept 12

Preparations being made for today's media event.

(Image credit: Luis Gutierrez)

Apple’s set to release some new products later today, and I thought it’d be fun to round up the most credible rumors and then we can all check back later and evaluate the quality of my intel. As a recent Secretary of State complained, “But they don’t tell us when; they don’t tell us where; they don’t tell us who; and they don’t tell us how.” I predict that later today Apple will give us a new iteration of the iPhone, stretched to new dimensions, and an additional iPad model, shrunk but with its big brother’s current dimensions. These things sound cool. Honestly, my only hope is that they don’t call the new iPhone the “iPhone 5,” as that would present a dilemma for those of us keeping track. Let’s pretend that the first iPhone was iPhone 1, then the iPhone 3G would confusingly have been the iPhone 2, which means the iPhone 3GS was the iPhone 3, and the iPhone 4 was (thankfully) the iPhone 4, all of which means that last year’s iPhone 4S was the iPhone 5. We already have an iPhone 5. Is it premature to worry that later today Apple might be giving us something that we already have?

艾未未

Ai Weiwei after initial arrest

(Image credit: hyperallergic.com)

I’ve been a fan of Ai Weiwei’s work ever since the Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate (October 2010). In that work, Ai commissioned 1,600 Chinese artisans from the town of Jingdezhen (a town that’s been producing pottery for nearly 2 millennia) to hand-paint 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, and the pieces were then scattered evenly on the floor of the museum’s great hall. Visitors were initially allowed onto the seeds, making the spot a lovely place to pass an afternoon. What drew me to the exhibit and its creator were not the political implications of the installation (which I’d come to respect later) or the smart way in which Ai decided to fill the Tate’s space, but rather the fact that 8 million extra seeds had been created to account for visitors taking a handful on their way out. It’s probably fair to say that most artists invited to fill the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall are rather finicky about their work, but here was someone honest enough to account for the fact that visitors might be tempted to take a piece home with them.

Logos Isn't Working

Romney - Obama Isn't Working

Image Credit: storyful.com

So last week I suggested that my post on tennis, David Foster Wallace, and postmodernism might be my last for the 2011–2012 academic year. I lied. Here’s another 500–1,000 words for your delectation. While thinking over what to write about last week, I decided to take coffee at Starbucks and read the paper. This was the day that Paul Krugman wrote his column “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012), and I’ve been thinking about what’s said there ever since. The Op-Ed is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and it is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which, if true, must surely be further compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. There’s probably some truth to this. How could there not be given technology’s onslaught of information?

Tennis After Postmodernism

Federer Greatness

Image Credit: New York Times

This might be my last viz. post for the year, and so I thought I’d take a moment and say something that I’ve been dying to say for about 18 months or so: David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times Magazine, August 2006) is an allegory for what Wallace thinks fiction can (and should) be after postmodernism. Please forgive me if any of this seems obvious. In early July of 2006 Wallace headed over to south-west London to take in Wimbledon for the Times. Ostensibly, the magazine piece that resulted was a long definition of Rodger Federer’s talents as a tennis player. Wallace’s argument turned out to be that “if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon…then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’” Religious sentiments are present throughout the article, and Wallace works hard to articulate the ways in which perfect beauty can be found at the highest level of sport. It all has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” Wallace suggests. To parse this out, Wallace explains the evolution of professional tennis tactics since the days of Jimmy Connors.

Play Ball

David Foster Wallace

Image Credit: Steve Rhodes

I’ve always loved the moment in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” when he praises Las Vegas for being the least pretentious city in America. What an astute thing to say. Who among us could have looked at, for example, the Bellagio’s famous fountain, Paris Las Vegas or the Venetian and describe them as not pretentious? (The Wynn complex wasn’t built yet, but everything interior designer Roger Thomas has done there since confirms Wallace’s point.) The irony Wallace is highlighting, of course, is the fact that these institutions pretend to be nothing other than what they are: spaces smartly designed for people to come into and enjoy wasting their money. They don’t pretend to be otherwise. No Vegas weekender sees the Paris’ Eiffel Tower and looks for the Louvre, because that structure isn’t there to trick people into thinking they’re across the ocean: it’s there to encourage people to luxuriate in their extravagance. Wallace makes this point, I suspect, because deep down he was worried that a certain degree of pretentiousness in modern American culture is fostering a strong undercurrent of cynicism. With all the naïveté of Wallace’s ideal citizen, I’m hoping the Miami Marlin’s new stadium, aptly named Marlins Park, isn’t a great example of what Wallace was worried about.

The first page of the New Testament in the King James Bible

KJB New Testament Title Page

Two weeks ago I posted on the title page of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible. This week, I thought it’d be fun to consider the first page of the New Testament in that same edition. [Click here for a large-sized image of the page.] This first page of the New Testament contains as much imagery as the edition’s actual title page, which is surprising given that it comes nearly 4/5’s of the way through the book. And though I am no expert in seventeenth-century bibliography, it does seem a little bit odd that such a detailed woodcut would come in the middle of a book, but perhaps this was commonplace for bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In any event, there’s a lot going on in this image, and I thought you might find it enjoyable to take a moment this week and consider the page.

Some thoughts on the title page of the King James Bible

KJB title page

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As I was perusing the new Harry Ransom Center exhibit, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, I couldn’t help but linger over the first edition’s title page. The image is gorgeous and what one would expect from King James I’s own printer, Robert Baker. It features Moses and Aaron flanking the title, with the four Evangelists around the corners. Above them, the remaining Apostles are depicted, each holding the various symbols that are associated with their individual iconographies. Of these figures, the one that caught my eye was St. Andrew. Prominently on top of the title page, St. Andrew’s saltire is much larger than any of the other objects that the various figures are holding. To a certain extent, its largeness is obvious and expected given that it’s a slightly rotated crucifix. But one can’t but help also thinking about why St. Andrew might have been given special primacy here. After all, this was a Bible commissioned by King James.

E.O. Goldbeck and the '22 Yankees

1922 Yankees crop

Image Credit: E.O. Goldbeck

Over the next couple of weeks viz. will be putting up a series of posts celebrating the etched glass façade of the Harry Ransom Center, and I thought I’d get things rolling with a discussion of a baseball picture I’ve always noticed on the southeast corner of the building. The hand-written caption on the bottom of the photograph’s etching reads “The New York Yankees as seen in San Antonio, Texas – March 31st, 1922.” San Antonio’s never had a Major League Baseball team, so it’s always struck me as a little bit odd that the Yanks might venture that far south. That said, Babe Ruth stands in the center of the picture, and on first glance it seems entirely probable that the team is on some sort of exhibition tour. Anyways, I thought I’d take a moment and research the photograph before speculating on the reasons for its placement on the outside of the Ransom Center.

Oddities Caught in Street View

Burning House

Image Credit: Google

I had ten minutes to kill yesterday afternoon, and I spent them clicking around on The Guardian’s website. And while I was thinking about posting on something else today, this weird collection of images came across my screen and I thought it’d be fun to put them up. They’re a collection of images amassed by Jon Rafman of people and animals doing funny and/or stupid things when the Google Maps Street View van drove by. Some of them are really quite entertaining, and I encourage you to take a look if you haven’t seen them already. Most of the images have correct corresponding addresses and can be found in Google Earth Street View, which confirms for the weary that these things actually happened. Some of the addresses are ambiguous (e.g., “Victoria Highway, Gregory, Australia”) and it’s hard to find their corresponding images on Google Maps, which is a shame. Sometimes you wish you could move up and down a given location and discern how a given scene developed. In addition to the selections that can be found on The Guardian’s website, even more can be found on Rafman’s website here.

Recent comments