Ethan Zuckerman writes about Ghana and Bernard Woma.#

There are many African artists who have found a way to make a good living sharing their culture with the world. Given the success countries like Senegal, Mali and Ghana have had marketing aspects of their arts and music, it's clear that culture is a resource as important as cocoa, gold or timber. But what became clear to me on this trip is what a complex and successful balancing act Bernard's life as businessman and musician is.

In the US, we generally think of artists as removed from the world of business by a layer of managers and agents. And while some artists take visible political stances, we tend to think of them more as promoters and spokespeople, less as activists and organizers. The Ghanaian reality is a bit more complicated. Bernard is celebrity, businessperson and community activist wrapped in a single insanely busy package. (Indeed, we were lucky to catch him - in five years, he's off to the US to start a semester simultaneously teaching ethnomusicology, earning his BA in music and touring.)

RPGamer posts a preview of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.#

FF:CC follows the adventures of the Crystal Caravan, a group of kids on a quest to collect Mirula droplets from mana trees. This magical dew is necessary to maintain the sparkle of the crystals, which mankind needs to keep the poisonous Miasma air at bay. This simple narrative is designed to fit any number of players regardless of what point in the game they join in. Indeed, the entire setup of the game aims to facilitate the multi-player process. Players can join or leave a game without any difficulty - they can even bring their own memory card to avoid re-creating their character. This whole "come and go" philosophy is reminiscent of multi-player gameplay in online games or at the arcade. Unfortunately, the developers and publishers did not take advantage of this opportunity by enabling online play, moreover, the previewer suspects that he wouldn't be the only person to bring quarters and a memory card to a Crystal Chronicles arcade console... but he digresses.

Makiko writes about Lost In Translation.#

Were Japanese people portrayed in a negative way? I don't think so. I recognized so many of those people in some ways. The Ugly-Americanishness of both Charlotte and Bob was not glossed over - well, Bob was more Ugly than Charlotte was, though he was not nearly as bad as many real-life Americans I've seen outside of the confines of the U.S. If Americans see the way Bob makes fun of the Japanese peoples' accents and cringe, that's good! Maybe they will remember to be polite to their hosts when they travel abroad.

Dan Hon writes a brilliant piece about the Return of the King. (No spoilers in my excerpt.)#

The beacon scene rocked. I hope in the extended edition it's at least five minutes longer.

I'm much less bothered now that Sauron looked more like a flaming eye in this installment and not, as in the first film, flaming labia.

Never mind Sam living a lie, I was a little disturbed by the fact that he seems to have married a mute.

Rosie does talk actually, in the 1st and the 3rd she mumbles things to bar patrons.

J. Shell writes about furniture.#

This weekend, I obtained some new furniture. Nothing fancy - in fact, quite simple, but elegant. Just some new shelving, small tables, and this console table in the entry way where my iBook gets to hang out now as I write this. For some reason, I've always wanted a writing table in here. Maybe because it's free of the distractions of the big windows in the main area.

As a result of all this, I've reorganized my apartment. Everything is shifted around now. The place feels more homely, in place of the more stark minimalism of before, while retaining a lot of open space (and still fairly minimalist). The couch is now placed so that I can see the heart of the city from it. Actually, when all the blinds are open, I now face all the windows when sitting. It's a nice improvement.

The quest for a perfect room layout will forever elude me.

The Binary Circumstance links to a review article of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand.#

I suspect that this book had its genesis in two distinct impulses: admiration for the writings of Ayn Rand, on the one hand, and impatience with the contemporary art world, on the other.

The impatience is eminently justified. As one looks around at much of what is adulated as art today, one shuttles between weariness, incredulity, and revulsion. Of course, there is plenty of good art being produced today. But the headlines are mostly reserved for work that is unutterably banal, downright pathological, or, just occasionally, both. Everyone will have his own rogues gallery and catalogue of horrors. Karen Finley, for example, earned her place in the annals of fatuousness by convincing the National Endowment for the Arts to shovel some money her way for an act that consisted of her prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, while skirling about the evils of patriarchy. Or consider Matthew Barney, a hot young artist whose oeuvre consists of things like Field Dressing (Orifill), a video that depicts the artist "naked climbing up a pole and cables and applying dollops of Vaseline to his orifices." That description comes from Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times who recently declared Barney "the most important American artist of his generation."

Jacques Barzun comments on the book:

"At last I have found enough uninterrupted time to read What Art Is from end to end, and I report my enthusiastic appreciation and enjoyment. You have done a splendid piece of work--research, reflection, and writing are worthy of all praise. . . . Your scholarly treatment of modern art, your Appendices, your Notes are full of facts, comparisons and judgments that come to grips suggestively with the elusive double topic, Art and the arts. . . . My hearty congratulations on an admirable book."

Richard links to slideshow of photographs depicting the decline of fashion photography.#

Richard Tallent on art preservation.#

Thought: if every pot, every vase, every painting, every carved stone, every ruin of every ancient civilization survived until today, how much would we cherish the ones we have now? Why do we bestow such honor upon them? In most cases, it is not because of their intrinsic artistic value: they were common and ordinary in their own time. We do not value them for their durable construction: their survival is more often a case of chance than designed longevity, and greater works have certainly perished under different conditions. No, they are honored because they among the few tenuous links we have to their creators.

To bestow such honor on common items of our own generation is ludicrous. Time and fate must test them first. If a common spray-painted frog on a wall survives another century through naught but happenstance, then we might give it some place of honor as a link to our past, a relic that survived its season by nothing worthy within itself. But to debate and protest its destruction in the normal course of events is as silly as going to the dump and digging through the trash for a photograph in yesterday's paper.