Today's Stories

March 27-29, 2009

Michael Hudson
How the Scam Works

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

Andy Worthington
A Letter to Obama From a Guantánamo Uighur

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Hog Wallow

Souad N. Al-Azzawi
Iraq: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves

Dave Lindorff
A Financial History Lesson

Ian Masters
The Zombie Presidency

Jami Tarn
Smearing Tristan Anderson

Diane Farsetta
The Nuclear Industry Targets Wisconsin

David Ker Thomson Against Democracy

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu and the Future of the Peace Process

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Shiites' One-Word Demand

Wajahat Ali
Writer as Fighter: the Genius of Ishmael Reed

Nick Egnatz
Whatever Happened to the Fierce Urgency of Now?

Gregory A. Burris
The Insolents Abroad: a Defense of Iceland

Missy Beattie
This Land

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar
A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

Weekend Edition
March 27-29, 2009

The Musical Patriot

How They Built Bach's Face (Is the Bard Next?)

By DAVID YEARSLEY

After a bold ascendancy, the recently dusted-off portrait purported to be of a ruddy-cheeked, lace-collared, and slightly wall-eyed Shakespeare now watches without a blink as its claims to authenticity came under increasing attack this past week on many fronts.

Chief among the gathering throng of doubters were Shakespeare biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones and Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century paintings at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The ruckus proves two things:  how strangely important the face of an artist is to our understanding of his or her work, and how the desire to know that face is fired to still greater heat when the uncertainty about its true features increases. Even if one could accept the so-called Cobbe portrait’s provenance, there would still be the unsettling prerogatives of artistic license to contend with. Indeed, it is over the face of the artist that art and science have often waged war.

The rise of forensic reconstruction in the 19th-century promised the way around the problem. It is an obsession remains with us as forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, working for the Bach Haus in Bach’s hometown of Eisenach, Germany, demonstrated with her tough-guy reconstruction of the composer’s face, unveiled little over a year ago.

After making a laser scan of the skull, Wilkinson “scientifically” built up the tissue to give us the real—and real scary—Bach. According to this method of reconstruction, the key to finding the real face is first to find the skull.
      
Here’s how they found Bach’s.

Bach's bones would have remained in the ground around St. John’s church outside the Leipzig city walls, where they were put on July 31, 1750, had his beliefs about the dead body retained their currency. Spurred by an emerging sense of national pride, the nineteenth century saw the remains of great German historical figures, among them Kant, Schiller, and Beethoven, exhumed, examined and analyzed, and then placed in new, more prominent sites that allowed for easier access and worshipful pilgrimage, often in the shadow of a newly designed monument. No resting place is final.

By the nineteenth century Bach's burial place was without a marker; prevailing scholarly opinion in the 1890s held that there had never been one. This made the task of finding his remains difficult. But Gustav Wustmann, director of the Leipzig city archives, discovered in St. John's account books that Bach had been buried in an oak casket, one of only twelve oak caskets out of the 1400 Leipzigers who had died in 1750; this narrowed down the hunt for his remains considerably.

During the rebuilding of  St. John’s Church in 1894 the chairman of Vestry, a pastor by the name of Tranzschel, ordered excavations in the graveyard, directing some of the workers to dig down to about eight feet in the area where oral tradition held Bach's grave to have been. On October 19 Tranzschel summoned Leipzig forensic expert and craniologist Wilhelm His to the excavation site.  Dr. His described the scene as an enormous hole filled with "heaps of bones, some in many layers lying on top of each other, some mixed in with the remains of coffins, others already smashed by the hacking of the diggers." All the coffins seemed to be of pine, however, and optimism flagged.

Then, at eleven in the morning on the 22nd of October the crew finally came upon an oak casket, but it had collapsed around the skeleton, bits of wood mashed around the bones. The experts began sifting through the remains, and quickly established that they belonged to a young woman of diminutive stature. Before disappointment could set in, another oak casket was found, the opening of which had to wait until after the workers had had their lunch.  In inclement weather perfect for the Gothic scene, a dark-clad pastor, an anatomist with his trusty anatomic assistant stood over a jumbled pit of bone, mud, and wood in which men dug with picks and shovels as the second casket was pulled from the ground. Dr. His and his assistant Dornfeld removed the skull from the casket and slowly, too, the bones. They could quickly see that skeleton belonged to an elderly man.

The skull was "sturdy and of strong features"—a protruding jaw, relatively low-set eye sockets, sharply angled base of the nose. The skull, Dr. His claimed, "presented an uncommonly powerful  Expression." But what of a third oak casket also unearthed in the morning of the 22nd, the skull inside smashed beyond recognition and therefore unsuitable for scientific study? In his account for the Saxon Academy, Dr. His does not entertain the possibility that it could have been these that were Bach's bones. Soon afterward the commission charged with finding Bach's body, a group that included His, Tranzschel, Wustmann, and the sculptor Karl Seffner (called into make a bust of Bach based on the skull) reported to the Leipzig City Council in a signed statement, that the authenticity of Bach's bones had been established "to the highest degree of probability.”
      
Dr. His now set to work on the bones, free, as he put it, of "all biases" and "false concerns for piety" in the discovery and examination of "scientifically significant relics." Heeding the anatomist's contempt for religious squeamishness, and answering instead to the higher calling of science, Dr. His carefully dissected Bach's skull. Now the brain could be cast in plaster and its features analyzed. Bach's temple bones, thought to be responsible for acoustical cognition, were seen to be particularly well developed. This area of the skull was carefully cross-sectioned with a small jig-saw so as to minimize the loss of irreplaceable bone mass. After painstakingly measuring the openings in the temple bone, Dr. His sent his data to the leading expert on the osteology of the temple and ear, his colleague Herr Prof. Dr. Politzer in Vienna. Politzer was impressed by "Bach's" temple, in particular by the impressive size of the fenestra rotunda—the opening between the middle ear and the cochlea. Other peculiarities of construction led Politzer to pronounce its features to be "very rare" indeed, offering striking confirmation, it seemed, that they the temple had once belonged to Bach.  Further comparative research, suggested His, should be done on the temple bones of other (dead) composers, though His lamented the deplorable fact that on the exhumation of Beethoven's remains for his removal to Vienna's central cemetery, his temple bones had been sawed out of the skull and then preserved in alcohol.  Unfortunately, they had subsequently disappeared, apparently sold off to an English doctor—a great loss for science and culture.
      
Just as important as the analysis of the formation of Bach's brain was the project to establish the literal expression of his genius as well as his character: to reconstruct Bach's face. For this the thickness of the flesh in all the regions of the face had to be established scientifically—just as the Scottish forensic anthropologists would do a century later.  Over the winter of 1894-5, Dr. His began his own tissue researches with a grim eagerness, probing the faces of thirty-seven corpses with a sewing needle and measuring the depth of the flesh, from the surface of the skin to the bone. All but four of the corpses were male: nine bodies "consumed by disease" came from the penitentiary, the remaining twenty-eight were "corpses of healthy suicides."  The inmates were for the most part emaciated; the suicides by contrast were generally "well-nourished" and "robust” as Dr. His wrote in his scientific paper for the Academy.
      
With the data meaningfully compiled. Dr. His perceived clear trends establishing the median thickness of the tissue. Dr. His now believed that a bust of Bach based on objective scientific data could now be created, a likeness which would surpass the accuracy of any of the historical portraits. 
      
The relevant averages of tissue thickness were given to the sculptor Seffner, who would follow the measurements precisely in his three-dimensional reconstruction of Bach's head.  The discoverers of Bach's bones were awe-struck by the result.

Dr. His, his colleagues, and the city fathers others believed that a previously undreamt of, historically elusive, exact reproduction of Bach's face had been achieved. It is this face that sits a top the statue of Bach rising next to his old church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Few of the millions who come to pay it homage know that this is a statue within many skeletons in the closet.
      
In nearby Halle, birthplace of Handel, Hermann Welcker, a retired professor of physiology and one of the founder’s of forensic science, had followed the work on the famous musical bones with great interest.  Beginning in the 1860s Welcker had been called in to verify historical portraits of Raphael, Dante, Schiller, and Kant by comparing these images against scientific measurements he had made on their exhumed skulls.  Like Dr. His, Welcker had used cadavers for his research. 
      
But in November of 1895, little more than a year after Bach’s casket had been pulled from the mud, a scientific breakthrough was made that promised much for the field of facial reconstruction: Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray.  Within a few months of that discovery, Welcker eagerly had himself strapped in front of an X-ray gun and subjected his head to thirty 30-second doses of the particles; in between each dose he waited, motionless, for the apparatus to cool down. After this grueling hour, the 74-year-old scientist now had an image of his own skull, which not only verified his forensic methods but allowed him to endorse the His/Seffner reconstruction of Bach’s face, save for a small caveat having to do with the bridge of the nose. Thus one of the first human applications of the X-ray was valiantly made in the service of reconstructing Bach’s face. Welcker was dead within the year.     
      
Wilhelm His, was now the foremost expert on Bach's countenance, the man with the unparalleled knowledge of the specifics of his bone structure and the scientifically calibrated flesh thickness.  Various collectors sent portraits of Bach to Dr. His for his inspection hoping that he would authenticate them. In His's assessment of one portrait he received from a certain Herr Boormann, phrenology, physigonomy, and aesthetics flow together in frothy confluence: "the bloated distended, insipid and smug face of Boormann's picture with its flat eyes is …not that of a man of Bach's immense power and depth"—a less than flattering assessment of an heirloom that had apparently been in the Boorman family's possession for nearly a hundred years. Such a pronouncement could cost Alec Cobbe, owner of the would-be Shakespeare portrait, millions in today’s art market. 
      
The old, perhaps apocryphal, story about Shakespeare skull is that it was stolen by a “Resurrection Man” from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford in the 1790s, in spite of the grave’s inscription: “Good Friend for Jesus Sake Forbear, To Digg the Dust Encloased Heare;  Bleste Be the Man that Spares These Stones, And Curst Be the Man that Moves My Bones.”  Just at the time that Bach’s posthumous devotees were digging  and dissecting and x-raying, an intense debate was similarly animated about exhuming Shakespeare. One of the main arguments in favor of it was the value the skull for verifying the authenticity of historic portraits of the Bard.
      
As yet  the Stratford grave has not been penetrated anew, so we don’t know if indeed the skull is gone, or if  the skull it encloses belonged to someone else, as the exhumation of Petrarch’s grave recently showed: the skull found there turned out to be that of a woman. My advice to Cobbe is this: endow a chair in forensic anthropology at the University of Dublin, nearby the country house where the portrait had so long resided. Get the right person appointed to the position, and then steal into that Stratford grave with a 3-D laser scanner. Concoct the requisite data and fashion definitive face. And then watch as the eyes of the Cobbe Shakespeare portrait begin to twinkle with delight as science imagines once again that it is has gotten the upper hand on art.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu  

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