Shots in the Dark

In Australia, cage divers greet a visitor.

Sticking your arm out of the cage probably not the best way to deal with this, by the way.

I returned from Cuba late last night with some strong opinions and some serious exhaustion. Will be blogging intermittently today!

Thanks for all the kind words below, by the way. Much, much appreciated.

I’ll be in Cuba doing some reporting for the next couple of days. Not sure if it’s possible to blog from there, but if it is, I will.

And thanks to all of you for your kind words below.

I interviewed the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who spoke about his rival, the non-Nobel Prize-winning economist (among numerous other topics).

Here’s a part Harvardians may find especially interesting (questions in bold):

In criticizing the economic policies of Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers back in the 1990s, you were fighting “the committee to save the world,” as Time famously described them. Is this round two?

You could say that he was afraid that his ideas would not win out in an open marketplace of debate. Maybe he was aware of the intellectual incoherence of his views and the extent to which they were really special interest pleadings of the financial markets.

Stiglitz is a fascinating guy, and if you’re interested in his views on politics and the economy, read the full interview.

Apologies for being a haphazard poster the past couple of days. I’ve had a lot going on. At Worth, also known as “the real job,” we’re closing our April/May issue. (It’s going to be great!)

And on the home front…yours truly got engaged last night.

I enjoyed writing that sentence so much that I’ve been staring at it for about five minutes.

My fiancee isn’t a blogger like me, so I won’t go into a lot of details, but her name is Sarah and she’s a dream come true for me. I’m a lucky man.

She’s even supportive of me sharing our engagement with the world on my blog.

I will tell you one funny coincidence: I popped the question in a suite at the Algonquin—we had our first date there—and after some champagne and a lot of phone calls, we went downstairs to hear Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano in the Oak Room.

And who was there waiting to enjoy the music—which was wonderful—but Cornel West?

Who was, as always, charming and gracious and very kindly sent us two glasses of champagne. Quite sweet of him.

Anyway…before I get too maudlin, I’ll sign off. But when you have news this good, you want to share it. Thanks for listening.

The Harvard honoree is in hot water for possessing and e-mailing a naked picture of his former manager, Lisa Ellis, and neither she nor Jean’s wife sound very happy about it.

Ellis, who recently resigned her job with Jean, told the Daily News that the photo was an artsy shot that someone leaked.

A friend described Ellis, who has a boyfriend, as “mortified.”

“She resigned because she just was not happy with the way Wyclef was conducting himself. He wasn’t listening to her advice,” the friend said.

Ellis told the NY Post, “I quit being Wyclef’s manager just because I don’t like the way he does business.”

Jean’s rep, Ken Sunshine, told the Post, “Wyclef is spending all his time trying to rebuild Haiti and will have no comment on any of these false rumors.”

He gave the same quote to the Daily News but omitted the word “false.”

…for scamming free Yankees World Series tickets.

The New York governor has that going-to-resign smell all over him.

Listen to their new album, Plastic Beach, in its entirety here.

Fun.

Here’s New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl talking about the Whitney Biennial, which I saw on Saturday. It’s a curious take: He calls it underwhelming but concludes by saying that you’ll be glad to have seen it. I’d err a touch more on the side of underwhelming.

(Full disclosure: Your dog knows more about modern art than I do.)

There were two exhibits in particular that struck me as powerful, but in the context of the Whitney, borderline offensive. One was the work of photographer Stephanie Sinclair, who documented Afghan women who’d set themselves on fire to protest abuse from their husbands and/or families. It’s heartbreaking.

But even more so is the work of photographer Nina Berman, whose pictures you may have seen reported on in the New York Times. In “Marine Wedding,” Berman chronicles the story of an American soldier whose face was blown off by an IED in Iraq (I think). You can see some of the photos here—they’re not for the faint of heart; the visage of this man challenges our conception of humanity. Berman’s story is of the man’s return to civilian life and subsequent marriage to his high school sweetheart. It’s powerful and tragic and inspiring and devastating all at once. I found it overwhelming.

But is it art? That question bothered me when considering both Sinclair’s and Berman’s work. Somehow even to discuss such photojournalism in artistic terms seemed trivializing, offensive. Berman’s work was shown on the walls of a room which also contained a couch made of papier mache on top of which sat two urns—some random piece of artwork whose meaning was utterly lost on me. At one point a guide leading a group of visitors entered the room and began talking about the couch, and I just thought, really, who gives a fuck about the couch? Was it supposed to make some glib statement about domesticity amidst the horror of war? I don’t know. Even the idea appalled me. And the idea that the curators might have been going for just that shock value appalled me further. Real-life horror overwhelmed art, relegated it to a trivial place, made the curators seem like gerbils scurrying on a wheel that never moved.

Put those photos in a museum of photography, or in the Newseum in Washington. Put them in a cemetery or a church. Put them in Arlington. Put them in the Smithsonian. Create from them a memorial. Tell people what war is really like, what it does to us, what it steals from us.

Just don’t put them in a museum of modern art on the Upper East Side of New York City.

He’s releasing an album of covers of other people’s songs—done entirely with stringed instruments. (No guitars, no drums.)

Weird.

You can listen to it here. Check out his version of Bowie’s Heroes. It’s unorthodox, and very cool.