In Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall (his stellar weblog: Talking Points Memo) has a sobering look at the neocon view of Baghdad-as-beta for “rolling the table,” i.e., regime changing the entire Middle East. Slate‘s Kaus realizes that this explains Rumsfeld’s hubris and micromanaging (cf. Sy Hersh) a small military footprint–so Baghdad’s fall puts Teheran, Damascus, and Riyadh (!?!) on notice.
One conclusion of Marshall’s article: this neocon war strategy is self-fulfilling prophecy; the more they pursue it, the more “painfully necessary” constant war becomes. “The White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.”
Which puts me in a coining mood (Hey, why should Jarvis have all the fun?). The war to begin all wars.
My Juror Waiting Room Survival Kit…
…is mostly books, and gym stuff, since there are two gyms near the courthouse. I searched several used bookstores* for a paperback copy of Infinite Jest, which I could rip into more portable chunks. But I learned an obvious lesson: if you go to a used bookstore with a specific book in mind, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here’s what I discovered instead:
- In the Blink of An Eye, A Perspective on Film Editing, by Walter Murch
- The Orwell Reader, 1956 ed. (without the inaccurate cover the Amazon reviewers complain about.)
- Among the Believers, An Islamic Journey, V.S. Naipaul — travel through the ancient (i.e., late ’70’s) Islamic world.
- The Believer, Among the things Dave Eggers has been up to. We’ll see.
- The real find: Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted, 1st ed., 1948, by Gordon Kahn, a contemporary, insider account of the 1947 HUAC hearings.
(Blacklist trivia: The blacklist era didn’t end until the director Otto Preminger openly hired Dalton Trumbo, one of the original Hollywood Ten, to write the script for Exodus, a 1960 movie about the founding of Israel. Preminger’s sleek, modernist house was across the street from mine. I’m looking at its English/Portuguese replacement right now.)
* Shopping credits: East Village Books, 101 St Mark’s Pl (1st & A); Bookleaves, 304 W 4th St.
On The Best Way To See The daVinci Show
Go right now, before it closes. You’ve got three minutes. Just after 8:00, there wasn’t any line at all. Galleries were crowded at first. Seeing the drawings required surrendering your personal space in this strange, silent, dance, like having to get out of a hundred elevators. But the throngs fell away, and when we left at 9:30, artist friends were sauntering back for a leisurely second lap.
Bloghdad.com/Post-War/Rebuilding
Jeff “Buzz” Jarvis suggests I give bloghdad.com to the (eventually) liberated Salam Pax, who he notes is “the true Baghdad Blogger.”
I like it.
To make it happen, I’ll link up with an NGO and petition the ITU liaison at the UN’s Interim Iraqi Administration Authority and… oh, what the hell, just get me Richard Perle on the horn.
Bloghdad.com/Blame_Canada
When Bush’s Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, blamed Canada for not supporting the Administration’s war policy, it set of waves of self-criticism and anguish across the whole country (granted, they probably do that a lot up there…). Aaron has a day-by-day, um, breakdown of the whole crisis on 601am.
In today’s Halifax Herald, the Nova Scotian writer Silver Donald Cameron sets the record straight. After turning the Administration’s French taunts of “Remember WWI? WWII?” back on the US–which entered the wars three and two years after Canada–Cameron adds “Remember September 11th,” that day when Canada took 40,000 stranded US airline passengers into their homes on a moment’s notice. [via IP]
Bloghdad.com/Sabbath
Gary Wills’ NY Times Magazine article, “With God on His Side,” a long look at presidents’ pressing God into the service of politics. Keywords: “Missed you at bible study,” (an unsubtle slam in the Bush White House) and “muscular Christianity.”
Wills closes with an excerpt of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer,” written to protest the US invasion of the Philippines.
Bloghdad.com/About
So rather than reinvent the war-related weblog wheel, develop an RSS/XML aggregator that categorizes all the war-blog posts by politico-ideological slant, or simply redirect it to Slate, I’ve decided that Bloghdad.com will be an unpredictable feature where I point to some war-related post or another that lays siege to my attention.
And the Bloghdad.com first strike: Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine, Saturday Edition.
Why? Jarvis leads off with “Also click here to go to my war news weblog,” yet he still posts eighteen war-related stories in one day. Disagree with him if you want (and I do, a lot), but get used to it; it’s urban blogfare.
On Sokurov On His Film On Art
In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones talks with Aleksandr Sokurov about his latest film, Russian Ark, and he retraces the path of the single 96-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage with the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. I’ve written about this before, but what comes through here is a double view of serious passion for art.
The Hermitage dominates the lives of those who work there: It “has its own school where children can learn archaeology and art history from the age of five, preselected for curatorial lives like gymnasts or violinists.” Piotrovsky appears as himself in the film, talking with his deceased father, who was also director.
And for Sokurov, encountering art, not just seeing or presenting it, was a central goal of the film. “Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections – as they do – obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible.” One encounter Sokurov provides is Rembrandt: “When you meet the real painting, you meet a real creature. Rembrandt left part of his physical being in his painting – every time you come up to a painting, you feel part of this energy, this sense of something being alive.”
Sokurov dismisses modern works—the museum’s famous Matisses don’t make the film’s, um, final cut–saying “the main criterion in art is time. It seems to me that those artists who are considered modern classics are to be tested by time yet.” And the director chides film for utterly lacking historical awareness (“due to the lack of cinema museums,” he claims) even as Jones points out the contrast of the unedited Russian Ark and its Russian Avant Garde antecedents–like Eisenstein, who also filmed in the Hermitage–whose “great modernist aesthetic” of editing became the foundation of our entire visual language.
So, Sokurov, what’s a better way to spend four hours today, watching my Criterion Collection Andrei Rublev DVD (aka, the cinema museum?) or standing in line at the Met for the last day of daVinci? “Museums make culture stable,” Sokurov notes, and they perform an invaluable conservative function, that is, conserving the “real creatures” of our collective past. As Sokurov would no doubt agree, in contemporary art, the artist leaves no part of his physical being in his work: he leaves his thoughts, his mind, his idea. And when I encounter a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string, fabricated with parts off the hardware store shelf, I still have a sense of something being alive.
On Memorials Near The Pentagon
Earlier this month, the Air Force unveiled James Ingo Freed’s design for the Air Force Memorial, which will be located on a ridge overlooking the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s own recently announced September 11th Memorial. The design is inspired by fighter jet contrails, which I can’t complain about, since my disappointment with the 9/11 memorial competition drove me to a similar–but more jarring, and far less elegant–concept for the Pentagon Memorial.
What I objected to was the many designs’ near-total emphasis on the individuals who died, to the exclusion of the greater import of the event. What turned out to be the winning design, in fact, was the apotheosis of this trend; it features 184 “memorial units,” aka benches, with individually lighted reflecting pools. I blame a bathetic misreading and misapplication of Maya Lin’s minimalist memorial language. But I’ve written a lot of this before.
What’s new, though, is Bradford McKee’s piece in Slate, where he points out an other, more fundamental flaw in the Memorial plan: no one will be able to actually visit. The Pentagon’s chosen site is essentially inaccessible, for both logistical and security reasons. Oh, and it’s right next to a noisy highway.
To imagine the resulting memorial’s best case scenario, just look at the completely unvisited Navy and Marine Memorial, which is located on the Potomac in the Ladybird Johnson Memorial Park, part of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove, aka the landscaping along the highway.
On Providing Aid and Comfort to the Enemy
No, not Iraq, I mean one of the other hundred+ countries who aren’t “with us,” that “second largest landmass in North America,” the nation high-sticking our northern border, Canada.
I’ve fled to Canada for 1) research/groundwork for the Animated Musical, part of which is set in Montreal, 2) skiing in Mont Tremblant, a hothoused attempt to create a Quebecian Aspen or Park City, which ends up looking like Universal Studios CityWalk, 3) to get away from the incessant, empty haze of American media on the war, and 4) to hang out with my wife, who’s attending an astrophysics conference at said resort.
Here’s a status update: 1) rather than repeatedly dig their car out every morning, driveway owners in Montreal put up these temporary plastic tent garages, which look like crappy greenhouses. Also, they bilingualize everything, even things that shouldn’t be translated, like steak au poivre and croissant. That’s all I can reveal at this point. 2) It’s raining at Tremblant, so skiing is losing out to weblogging in a room full of telnetting physicists. 3) Canadian media, or the CBC, at least, is comparing the breach with the US over Iraq to the whole softwood export turmoil. Yep, coming to Canada’s certainly put the war in perspective for me. 4) well, one outta four ain’t bad.
(VIA CEL) if u think u cn
skip church & beat the line 4 the davinci sho, 4get it. Godll cu & put 5k old ppl (who only sleep 4hrs/nt) in line ahed of u
On The Subway: History Of The Peloponnesian War
Since I read a WWII novel in the buildup to GWII (If you can boil Gravity’s Rainbow down to a WWII novel), I thought I’d better go back to the Mother of All War Stories, another book you pretend to have finished in college, Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War.
Considered the first clear attempt at fact- not myth-based history, HOTPW puts paid to the idea that there’s anything new in the art or business of war. I’m only about a quarter of the way in, still in the escalation to war between Sparta and Athens, the alliance and superpower, respectively, of their day, and page after page have played out in the news.
Some things change forever, but some things are painfully the same, no matter what you hear.
On TV: IFP Independent Spirit Awards
Eh. Who needs to watch the Oscars, with their self-serious, press conference-addicted producer, Gil Cates, and their Chicago faits accomplis. The IFP Spirit Awards are like a hundred times better. It’s on Bravo right now (and it repeats, uncensored, on IFC, again and again). Some highlights:
If Stylists Ruled The World
As in matters of war, the British press is out-reporting the US on the impending Oscar crisis. See, for example, this Observer article, “Glitz out as stars ponder Oscar protest.”
“A determination to ‘down-gown’, that is, to exchange frivolous glitz with muted glamour, has been announced as the tactic of choice by celebrities keen to demonstrate their sensitivity and political awareness but unwilling to boycott the ceremony altogether.” [italics added for shock and awe, -g]
“Ben Affleck is among those who has apparently not yet made up his mind [about wearing an anti-war totem of some kind] . Instead he has announced that the final decision will rest with his stylist.”
Just as peace descended on the ghetto, albeit briefly, when breakdancing supplanted gang warfare, maybe what our war-torn world needs most right now is a serious political and military down-gowning. I never thought I’d say this, but: Phillip Bloch, put down that breast petal; it’s time for you to save the world.
On Opera Adapted From Novel
I became familiar with Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, through its horrible film adaptation, a numbingly unsubtle reproductive fascist farce. I guess in 1990, the only totalitarianism that director Volker Schlondorff could get people to accept is the East German kind.
Anyway, on the occasion of its premiere at the English National Opera, Atwood writes in the Guardian about allowing the Danish composer Poul Ruders to make an opera of it in the first place. One challenge turned out to be the lack of contractual precedent for adapting an opera from a living writer’s work.
Then there was the Danish and/or lawyerly cast of mind, an introspective one given to second thoughts, as in Hamlet. (“Whether ’tis prudenter in the contract to offer/ The perks and carrots of outrageous royalties/ Or to strike pen throughout a sea of clauses/ And screw the writer blind?”) But with the help of various agents we managed to cobble something together. I forget who got the T-shirt rights, but it wasn’t me.
That was 2000, and Atwood’s world–a fundamentalist takeover of the US government, a rollback of civil liberties, secret police with the all-seeing eye for a logo controlling the population through credit card surveillance–seemed like a liberal campfire story, best told with a flashlight under your chin. The Danes loved it, though. So did Time, which compared it to the Taliban. You may have to travel to the UK for this one; I don’t imagine it opening in the US for 2 or 6 years.
One upside: at least now we know it doesn’t look like East Germany.