Small Arms Fire

There are suggestions that our Olympic team has more guts than our politicians. McClatchy notes:

First came the decision by U.S. team captains to pick runner Lopez Lomong, who was a Sudanese war refugee, to lead the U.S. delegation into the Aug. 8 opening ceremony as the team’s flag bearer.

Many interpreted Lomong’s selection as a dig at the Chinese government’s support of Sudan, which has armed militias that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the country’s Darfur region.

On Friday night, the U.S. team entered the political fray again by choosing archer Khatuna Lorig, who was born in what is now the country of Georgia, to be the U.S. flag bearer in Sunday’s closing ceremony.

Lilliputin. Eamonn Fitzgerald has this:

Had to laugh upon reading at the weekend that Mikheil Saakashvili is credited with inventing the nickname “Lilliputin” for the Russian Prime Minister. It’s “an allusion to Mr Putin’s diminutive stature, in contrast to his own towering presence.”

Botox and Xerox. Robert Fulford reviews The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press) by Raymond Tallis.

Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, “Her face was a study.” In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.

Botox relaxes facial muscles and makes possible a smoothness where creases might otherwise appear, revealing the face’s age. In return, Botox exacts a harsh payment. The user becomes relatively dull-looking, more like a copy than an original. Will we eventually speak of pre-Botox faces as artifacts in a once-loved but now abandoned style, like the Victorian novel?

Death of Critics. Norman Lebrecht says newspapers are cutting back on their coverage of classical music. Critics may be an endangered species. Newspapers are undergoing a paradigm shift, and it’s not surprising that the arts are getting short shrift, but Lebrecht places the blame primarily on the orchestras.

As editor, try explaining to your chief executive why you are holding a full staff job to report on an art that never makes news, an art that plays the same old music, year after year, with the same parade of expressionless faces on the platform. An art whose audience is greying and unattractive to advertisers. An art whose music director is an absentee European and whose few glamour soloists will only agree to talk about their new record or hair makeover.