According to WYNC:

NEW YORK, NY December 08, 2006 —Sometimes there’s a handy phrase to describe a cultural movement, like punk rock, or hip-hop, or grunge. Sometimes there isn’t, and you have to see a performance or hear an album to decide for yourself what’s going on. “Still Life with Commentator” is that kind of show. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter went out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week to take a listen.

You can catch a bit of the performance on Vijay Iyer’s website. The description of the show on that site:

A collaboration of composer-pianist Vijay Iyer, poet/librettist/performer Mike Ladd, and conceptual artist/theater director Ibrahim Quraishi, Still Life with Commentator is a lyrical, darkly comic transmedia performance/opera examining the role of the audience and the media in modern warfare. Also featuring experimental vocal artist Pamela Z, electronic percussionist/vocalist Guillermo E. Brown, cellist Okkyung Lee, guitarist Liberty Ellman, and actors Palina Jonsdottir and Masa Nakanishi.

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Pankaj Mishra’s excellent report from Shanghai:

There are still more poor people in India and China than in all of Africa. But the leaders of both countries, having promised to usher their huge populations into a Western-style consumer society, now make claims on the world’s resources as confidently as their American counterparts. Striking oil deals in Lagos, Tehran and Caracas, they scour the globe for iron ore, steel, copper and timber. China and India also increasingly rank among the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions.

In both countries, the newly enriched have similar aspirations. The wealthy farmer’s house I visited in a tea-growing village in Zhejiang province could easily have belonged to an Indian of comparable wealth, with its marble floor, 26-inch television, big poster of a white girl with an inexplicable tear in her eye, garishly upholstered sofa, bathroom with shower cubicle and open-hole toilet, and kitchen, with a brand new microwave and other underused mod cons.

To be an Indian in a Chinese city is to find familiar not only the vast crowds, the vivid street life, the open-fronted shops and food stalls, but also the malls with their luxury brand-names, the shiny new Mercedes and BMWs marooned in the intransigent traffic, the billboards for reality TV shows, the websites mixing sexual exhibitionism with jingoism.

It is hard not to wonder about the political outlook of the newly affluent Chinese.

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A cartoon by Mr. Fish. Hat-tip, Lisa Brawley.