Author: Josh Philip Ross

Dunno if you’ve followed the furor over a series of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad commissioned and published by Jyllands Posten, a Danish newspaper. PBS has lots of details on the whole thing.

There is no doubt the images were meant to be provocative. In Islam, images of the prophet are strictly forbidden. Nevertheless, I believe that the newspaper’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, was onto something when he told PBS that “The point was that we have some people who submit themselves to self-censorship, and they are doing so not out of respect, but out of fear.”

Here in America, I strongly believe that we should have the right to publish provocative and even obscene material. But few countries have such stringent protections of free speech as we do, and I do think that different countries need to come to terms with what they think is acceptable to say in their societies. For example, I’d fight to defend the rights of American Nazis to spout their idiocy, but I don’t particularly take issue with German laws against letting their own people espouse Nazism.

The case with Islam in Europe, however, is different. It was in November of 2004 that Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered after releasing a film that depicted violence against women in Muslim society and contained a scene in which a woman in seethrough clothes had Quranic verses and whip marks on her body. When Van Gogh died, he was working on a film about Pym Fortuyn, the anti-immigration Dutch politician who was assassinated in 2002. Often cast as a rightist in the Le Pen mode, Fortuyn was openly gay and feared that Muslim immigration threatened the libertarian and libertine values of his homeland.

It is against this background of threats to political and artistic expression that the cartoon stunt should be measured. The cartoons themselves are largely unfunny, but they did their job by provoking precisely the reaction that anti-Islamists would have expected and feared. They prove, if proof were needed, that a spirit of militant intolerance runs deep in the Muslim world.

I sincerely hope that there is a counterveiling spirit in the Muslim world as well — the spirit of plurality, welcome, brotherhood and equality that has made Islam attractive to people of so many different races and cultures, the spirit reflected in the ecumenism of the Mughal emperor Akbar, in the novels of Salman Rushdie and elsewhere. Right now that spirit, if it lives, is buried deep. But things change quickly in times of turmoil.

I’ve just discovered a marvelous resource for Columbia alums: the Columbia Libraries E-Resources site, through which you can search a wide range of books, scholarly and business journals, and newspapers, then view full texts. You’ll need a username and password, which you can hopefully figure out how to get from the Columbia Connection alumni pages.

Fuck that shit, man. I still love New York better. Every single time people from Frisco compare cities with New York, you fools bring up your stupid burritos! Well I got news for you: our burritos are catching up.

The man’s got a point. When I first moved from Marin County, California to New York City, in 1993, burritos were hard to come by, and too often they were made by Chinese people — who have every right to make and sell burritos, but whose efforts generally failed to comport with my San Francisco-based idea of what a burrito is all about. I still shudder at the memory of the burrito joint that had a carton of duck sauce and soy sauce packets on the table.

Back then, I had the unfortunate habit of telling everyone I met how much better the San Francisco Bay Area was than anywhere else, and if burritos were not Exhibit A in the case for NorCal — that would’ve been the weather — they were certainly one piece of evidence. Later, in 1997, when I had graduated from college and run off to India to avoid getting a life, I knew I had become a New Yorker because the food I craved was not burritos, but bagels.

In recent years, though, Mexicans have been quietly increasing their culinary presence in La Manzana Grande. When I moved to Queens in 1999, I was delighted to discover the highly authentic taco stands of Jackson Heights. And when we lived at Butler and Bond, in Brooklyn, we like to walk over to Cafe Mexicano, a tiny Mexican sandwich shop on Union Street just past Fourth Avenue toward Park Slope.

A 2003 Teacher’s College article discusses the demographic trend in detail. Between 1990 and 2000, Mexicans more than tripled their NYC numbers, from 61,772 in 1990 to 186,872 in 2000, according to official census data, and there are estimates that this undercounts Mexicans substantially, and that the real number may be as high as 300,000. They remain one of the poorest groups in the city, with a 1999 mean household income per capita of $10,231, against a citywide $22,402.

By contrast, the Asian American Federation of New York estimates that there are 90,896 Koreans in New York City, with the vast majority living in Queens. To me, at least, Koreans seem much more visible than the larger population of Mexicans, in part because they have become such a presence in delis and laundromats, where I interact with them regularly, and in part because I may not recognize Mexicans as Mexicans rather than Latinos of some other national origin.

But they are here, their numbers are growing, and New York’s burritos are getting better at last.

So I missed India’s Republic Day on January 26, but Slate celebrated with a nice series of photos of Bombay.

A lot of people are commenting on Bush’s statement last night in his State of the Union address that America is “addicted to oil,” but no one seems to have noticed the bizarre and glaring fact that this statement was made by a recovering addict.

As we all know, Bush used to be a hard drinker until he found Jesus and gave up the bottle. He’s not on the Alcoholics Anonymous path (which AA fundies believe is the only legitimate path to sustanable sobriety), but he is nonetheless someone for whom the concept and experience of addiction are very real.

I’m not sure that Bush or his speechwriters recognized this resonance, but it’s a strange one. It makes oil into something like tobacco or alcohol or heroin, something we need to give up completely in order to free ourselves from it. And it casts the federal government in the role that Jesus played in Bush’s own recovery.

I don’t know quite what to make of all this — considering that this was a Bush speech, most of it will probably be ignored as policy anyway, so maybe there’s no reason to make anything of it — but it’s weird nonetheless.

Topic: Korea

Nam June Paik, “TV Buddha” (1974)

Korea’s most famous artist, the video pioneer Nam June Paik (백남준), passed away on Sunday at the age of 73.

The Korea Times has an interesting obituary that takes on nativist Korean critics of Paik’s U.S. citizenship and Japanese wife and discusses the political impact on Koreans of his 1984 work “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” which linked Seoul with other world capitals by satellite at a time when South Korea was undergoing serious political strife and dictatorial repression.

A measure of Paik’s importance to Koreans is the installation of his 1998 work I Never Read Wittgenstein in the lobby of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations, where any guest who sits in the waiting area is likely to notice the flashes of pornographic content that appear from time to time in its swirling videos. The work is generally switched off when the Mission holds receptions, presumably to avoid offending guests, but it remains on most of the time, and it certainly startled me when I came here for my job interview.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the name Paik is pronounced bake.

On Saturday, Jenny and I drove up to the Bronx Zoo, my first visit since early childhood. The zoo in winter is a relatively quiet place, with many of the animals gone to warmer climes, but there was still plenty to see, and plenty of families out to see it on this balmy day of bright sun and temperatures in the fifties.

Entering at the Asia Gate, we were greeted by the unmistakable smell of animals, a fecund mix of hay and dung, which we soon discovered was wafting from the pen of a solitary dromedary, right across from where they do the camel rides in season. We moved quickly from Asia to the African “Somba Village” of faux mud huts with thatched roofs. Most of the African animals were on holiday, but there were a few interesting herd beasties. Then it was on to the bears, where a polar bear paced unhappily — polar bears in zoos always look unhappy — and the grizzly bears were up and about, which surprised us. According to Wikipedia, however, there is some debate about whether grizzlies actually hibernate, or merely enter a state of false hibernation. Either way, there hasn’t been much cold to hide from this winter, and I suppose there’s no reason for the food supply to disappear in winter, as it does in, say, the Rockies.

Eventually we made our way to the Monkey House, which Kurt Vonnegut must have had in mind when he wrote his famous story. It’s a neoclassical building complete with columns and Parthenon-style frieze, except that all the sculptures are of monkeys, which is very Planet of the Apes. Inside were exhibits of a variety of mostly South and Central American monkeys, including some tiny and fantastically coifed species, along with the more familiar, endlessly playful capuchins. Another simian highlight was the Congo Gorilla Forest, where we were able to watch several gorillas up close through the glass. They are magnificent animals, powerfully built and so nearly human that it’s eerie.

After visits to the Mouse House, which made Jenny shudder, and the World of Reptiles, where we saw giant pythons, deadly cobras, poisonous frogs and huge turtles, we finished off with a visit to Tiger Mountain, where we were able to catch a few glimpses of the elusive big cats, and then a quick pass through the Himalayan Highlands, which were less steep in the Bronx version than when we visited them in Nepal.

As we headed for the exits, Jenny pointed out the way that different cultural activities give you bits and pieces of the experience of travel: the zoo shows you the animals of other places, the museum shows you their art and artifacts, at concerts you hear their music. In many cases, the narrowing of focus gives a clearer view of things that can be difficult to see when you’re actually traveling. The tigers are a case in point: our guide in Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park, John, had spent years exploring the jungle but had never actually seen one of its tigers, whereas we had to wait maybe 15 minutes at the window of the exhibit to get a full-body view. But there is nevertheless something unique to the immersive, whole-body experience of travel — a sensation that, though often pleasurable, is not wholly different from nausea in the way that it seems to affect one’s whole being and to send every thought reeling.

On Sunday, we dived into New York’s best simulacrum of that experience, Manhattan’s Chinatown, for the New Year fireworks display. Packing into a dense crowd at Chatham Square, we waited through the interminable introductions of city council members, assemblymen, etc., as the crowd grew restless. All around, people were firing confetti guns into the air. As a light rain began, people’s patience wore thin, and the emcee wisely skipped past the last few speeches and the promised drum performance to get to the good stuff: fire. Long strands of firecrackers and a few flame-throwing spectaculars set off a giant racket that lasted probably ten minutes and is almost certain to have sent any evil spirits scurrying away (Xinhua has some great photos).

Our plan had been to find dimsum after the fireworks, but the crowds made that impossible, so we maneuvered to Baxter Street and decided to try Jaya Malaysian Restaurant. For all you hear about Asian fusion cuisine these days, few people realize that the Malaysians have been doing it for centuries. Certainly we didn’t know. We were pleasantly surprised by this savory blend of Chinese, Southeast Asian and Indian cuisines. We started with roti, which was almost like an Indian puri and came with a rich, mussalman curry-like dipping sauce with potato and chicken. For main courses, we had the sweet and delicious Char Sew Mee, or roast pork with noodles, and a dish of slow-cooked, curried beef that had a smoldering chili heat to it.

After our delicous meal, we headed for home along the streets coated in confetti pulped by the rain.

The Beeb reports that after a successful pilot program, the state of West Virginia is going to put Dance Dance Revolution in all its schools.

The state is currently in the top three for obesity and ranks fourth for diabetes, so anything that gets its kids moving is good news.

It’s no big surprise that Konami is kicking in some of the money. As far as I can tell, DDR has done spectacularly well by a kind of Green-Eggs-and-Ham evangelism, catching on because fanatics convince their sceptical friends to try it, and then the friends like it. With this program, which will give an Xbox and two dance pads to each school, kids will get to try the game out, but the limited number of consoles and pads will mean that the demand for DDR time will generally exceed the supply. Of course, kids can fix that problem by buying their own Xboxes and copies of Dance Dance Revolution.

One question, though: what happens when the pads wear out, as they seem to inevitably, especially with heavy use? Schools are famously low on disposable income, so shelling out $40 for new pads every few weeks is going to be a dicey proposition. Presumably this was worked out with the pilot program. If it wasn’t, then the whole thing might last no longer than the back button on a DDR pad. Which isn’t long.

Another way to celebrate the Chinese New Year this weekend: the 2006 CUCSSA Chinese New Year Party, starting at 6 p.m. this Sunday in Lerner Hall on the Columbia University campus, organized by the Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association.

I learned about the event from one of my colleagues here at the Korean Mission — an avid student of Chinese — who told me that the 2005 bash was fantastic. Festivities include a dinner, which she said was excellent, and performances that range from the traditional to the zany.

Word to the wise: buy tickets in advance if you plan to attend.

Gothamist reminds us that the Idiotarod shopping-cart race from Brooklyn to Manhattan will take place this Saturday, January 28, at 2 p.m.

Though I have never witnessed an Idiotarod, I do feel a certain connection to the event. That’s because of what happened at the Madagascar Institute on the afternoon of January 25, 2004.

We used to live just up the block from the Institute, which we knew was something arty but which had remained mostly a mystery to us. On the fateful afternoon, Jenny heard a huge bang while she was in the shower, and she came running out to make sure I was okay, thinking that maybe some of our furniture had come crashing down or something. For whatever reason, I hadn’t heard the noise.

Maybe an hour later, a friend of ours who was coming to visit phoned us from the corner. “I can’t get on your block,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There are cops everywhere, and they won’t let me on your block.”

I went outside to see what was going on, and there were indeed cops everywhere, along with news vans and a large RV that I later learned belonged to New York City’s anti-terrorism squad. The bang had been an explosion at the Madagascar Institute just up the block. We were later to learn that its founder, one Christopher Hackett, nearly had his face blown off, and suffered severe injuries, as he was putting the final touches on a confetti gun with which to launch that year’s Idiotarod.

Idiot indeed.

Hackett’s brush with death and the law didn’t stop him from pulling an even stupider stunt last summer: preparing a cellphone-triggered suitcase bomb for display in an art gallery (only Hackett would know the phone number).

Now, I know art is freedom and blah blah blah, but I gotta say to the people at SF Mad, who threw a benefit for Hackett: art is not permitted everywhere. Like, for example, I am glad that artful explosions are not permitted in my living room. It’s all well and good to defend Hackett against the evil government goons, except that he happened to be playing with explosives on the block where I lived. That’s so not cool.