Aula Point of View

3quarksdaily debut

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:26:32 +0200

I’ve started a daily filter blog of my own called “3quarksdaily”. It is similar to what the Aula Point of View used to be a year or so ago. If you go there, you will see some familiar names, like Husain Naqvi, Marko Ahtisaari, and Asad Raza. I hope you’ll check us out often. Thanks.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:54:22 +0200

It is hard to know how to respond to John Ashcroft’s frequent terror alerts. I myself have taken to reading poetry. See what you think of this poem written in 1904 by Constantine P. Cavafy: Waiting for the Barbarians.

24h dot-com

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 18:43:32 +0200

Since 7 last night Central European time, artist-wiz Eric Wahlforss & co. have been building a dot-com from scrath as a “performance art/business project” at the Wizards of Oz conference in Berlin. The service is Dozomo, a web search engine aggregator. You can buy 1% of the stock for €10 using PayPal, and exactly 24hours from start time the company will be sold on eBay. As I write this there’s only 35 minutes left so potential VCs better hurry :)

Drunk Indian Elephants

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 21:19:30 +0200

Breaking news: Drunk Indian Elephants on Rampage.

Top ten party schools listed

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 20:01:31 +0200

Breaking news: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the annual Princeton Review Top Ten Party School List is in! Apply now.

Iraqi cocks

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 23:24:59 +0200

Iraqi cocks . Nuff’ said.

Zagat's movie guide

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 06:01:14 +0200

We here at Aula are opiniated. We more or less maintain that our word is gospel, a function, perhaps, of our collective temperament, of certain supreme self-confindence, faith in our intelligence. Some may argue that out epistemology is a variety of cultural fascism (if not mild delusion). But we have no way of enforcing adherence. Niether, for instance, does NYT film critic A.O. Scott, somebody we often disagree with (but reluctantly respect). And therein lies the rub. Who, dear readers, fans, sycophants, would you consider when you watch a movie? Aunt Aula, A.O. Scott or Zagat’s? The folks at Zagat’s have recently introduced a movie guide that ranks “’Finding Nemo’…nothing less than the 19th-finest film of all time, not quite of the quality of ’The Third Man’ but just a wee bit better than ’Dr. Strangelove.’” Understandably, A.O. Scott is not excited by this development: “And who am I to argue? Or, rather, who am I supposed to argue with? If this book enshrines a grand tautology — that the movies a lot of people like tend to be really popular, and vice versa — it also rests on an unacknowledged paradox. Consider the operative words of the title, ’survey’ and ’guide.’ These terms are closely allied in map-making, perhaps, but not necessarily in criticism, if we can apply that name to the consumer-friendly pop sociology on which the Zagat empire is built.” We steadfastly believe that everybody is wrong (scroll to March 28th.) In fact, we’re mulling putting together a movie guide ourselves.

Bloom County is back

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 00:26:13 +0200

Breaking news: Bloom County, the Ulysses of newspaper comic strips, is back! (Courtesy of one Asad N.)

More on Russian sex relations

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 10:46:40 +0200

More on Russian sex relations (and something on our favorite American sex symbol.) (Courtesy of one Asad N.)

Fridayspecial

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 07:50:46 +0200

F R I D A Y S P E C I A L (on Saturday): The prudish Russian are considering a ban on kissing in public. After all, kissing can be bad for you. The intrepid Norwegians, however, don’t care. Do you, boys and girls?

En Niño is back!

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 10:07:23 +0200

Breaking news: El Niño is Back! (More here and here.)

In reading headlines

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 07:12:46 +0200

In reading headlines, ladies and gentlemen, you have to be astute, you have to scrutinize, read between the lines. For the intelligent observer of the great global global dialectic, this is de rigeur, an imperative, a responsibility. Paul Krugman, for instance, is an independent voice. Whether or not you agree with him, he doesn’t tow the line. Similarly, the New York Press is also an independent source. This week, Matt Taibi challenges the complicity of the media in its reportage of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russain oil tycoon. “New York Times and…the Boston Globe along with the vast majority of Western media outlets around the world, have cast this smarmy fight over assets long ago stolen from the Russian people as a battle between the evil forces of nationalization and the good, industrious representatives (Khodorkovsky) of the people-friendly market economy.” But Khodorkovsky is a bad, bad man. “Even in the group of fantastic individuals who participated in [the] mass robbery [of privatization], he stands out. He is the Bad Bad Leroy Brown of Russia. You know that opening scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta says, ’All my life, I wanted to be a gangster?’ Just imagine the fleshy, bespectacled Khodorkovsky slamming that trunk shut. In a nation of mobsters, he is king, a stone-cold ruthless genius. It would take a hundred thousand pages to detail all of his schemes, but they make the work of Professor Moriarty seem like a game of Chinese checkers.” Yowzah.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 09:14:47 +0200

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, tonight we had the misfortune of sitting through the worse movie Hollywood has produced in an epoch: Kill Bill. We here at Aula entreat, exhort you not to see it. More disappointing than the movie is the canon of American film criticism as so few dismissed the movie for what it was: an exercise in profound idiocy. Tartintino, ladies and gentlemen, arguably one of the most important directors of the nineties, has failed us. We, then, hearby dismiss the most of the canon of American film criticism, in particular, Kaltenbach of the Baltimore Sun, Morris of the Boston Globe, Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times (whom we have dismissed before), Corliss of Time, Howe and Hunter of the Washington Post and Travers of Rolling Stone (not to mention a cacaophony of minor voices). Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we’re naming names. Hail, Edelstein of Slate, Zacharek of Salon.com, Hoberman of Village Voice, Denby of The New Yorker and Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal; hail, the critic who kept his head despite being cut by Kill Bill’s blinding blade. Denby, for instance writes, “Kill Bill is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap…Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing—not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing.” (We have quickly culled some reviews from the net that echo are sentiments since the constraints of Aula do not allow us to articulate the vitriol that wells within.) Most disappointing was the great A.O. Scott’s in his complicity: “How much you like ’’Kill Bill,’’ a two-part revenge epic, the first volume of which opens nationwide today, will probably depend on the extent to which you share those obsessions, on how much of a taste you have for the synthetic fusion cuisine that the director has cooked up.” Put differently, if you have the appetitie for shit, you’ll eat it. We don’t. Kill Bill is bullshit.

F R I D A

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 09:01:29 +0200

F R I D A Y S P E C I A L: Buzz Words for Booze Heads (from one of our favorite publications).

Mark Frohardt’s and Jonathan Temins’s

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 15:15:33 +0200

Mark Frohardt’s and Jonathan Temins’s analysis focuses on the role of media in vulnerable societies.

Media can be manipulated in an effort to move a society toward conflict or toward non-democratic rule. Perhaps media have generally been overlooked in analyses of conflict because, on their own, they are rarely a direct cause of conflict. Nonetheless, as part of a larger matrix of factors, media can be extremely powerful tools used to promote violence, as witnessed in Rwanda, the former Republic of Yugoslavia, the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and elsewhere. As Jamie Metzl observes, “mass media reach not only people’s homes,but also their minds, shaping their thoughts and sometimes their behavior” (“Information Intervention,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 1997, p. 15). Use and Abuse of Media in Vulnerable Societies