If I just heard right, Matthew Barney will be interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC at 12pm.
[1pm update: hmm.]
The entire Cremaster Cycle is showing at Film Forum, starting Friday. Seeing it all will involve multiple tickets and rearranging your life.
Bloghdad.com/When_In_Rome
It depends on how you count. If you group desks+chairs together with vases+cuneiform+manuscripts, we are now seeing the second wave of looting in Iraq. Still to come: US-imposed mass privatization of the Iraqi infrastructure/patrimony opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment, but I digress. [And just sounded alarmingly like a lobster-puppet-wielding globalization protester for a minute, there. Just one of those fluctuations in The Matrix.]
Anyway, the second wave: journalists and soldiers, or Our Troops, as they’re known on TV.
For the benefit of those whose last shock-and-awe came from applying buy-and-hold to dot-com-stocks, this US soldier is holding up a $100K brick. image: Rick Loomis, latimes.com
[Rule #1 of Three Kings: There should only be three of you. Rule #2 of Three Kings: You can say “don’t tell anyone about Three Kings,” but, hell-o, every one of you and your bosses has seen it. WTF]
Bloghdad.com/Proclamations
“Our armies,” [British Lt General Stanley Maude] declared [on 9 March, 1916], “do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators.” Within three years, 10,000 had died in a national Iraqi uprising against the British rulers, who gassed and bombed the insurgents.
— Seumas Milne in the Guardian
Harper’s published The Proclamation of Baghdad (circa 1916) in the May 2003 issue, but, remarkably, I can’t find the complete text anywhere online. So I transcribed it and put it alongside GW Bush’s unsettlingly similar televised address to the Iraqi people from 10 April 2003. [Thanks, Roger & Harper’s for bibliographic information]
Read the Proclamations of Baghdad here.
And I hereby proclaim these proclamations to be the launch of greg.org Features.
Introducing greg.org Features
I swear, I wrote this on the train, before seeing Jason’s latest post. If only I’d waited till I got home, perhaps I’d just switch to Movable Type/TypePad and forget the whole thing:
Sometimes, my posts get a bit long. (Usually, I notice this when a reader–invariably not from The New Yorker–asks if I’m auditioning for The New Yorker.)
Sometimes, actual interviewing, research, reporting will yield far more information than will fit in a post.
Sometimes, there may actually be a lot to tell.
Sometimes, a topic or theme stretches across several posts, and it makes sense to group them together.
Sometimes, I’ll start with a simple link, and before you or I realize it, I’ve got an 800-word…something.
It used to bug me when such too-long posts would break up the flow of greg.org. Fortunately, this era of renaming your problems away offers the solution: now, on greg.org, a too-long post is not a bug, it’s a Feature.
Bloghdad.com/Shalom
Through “interviews with US intelligence officials and nuclear experts,” MSNBC has created an info-packed, interactive map of Israel’s WMD programs and locations, only according to Common Dreams, it’s not actually reachable through the MSNBC site. [via robotwisdom]
Movie and Art Roundup
I’m in the last minute throes of editing the AM screenplay before dropping it off for a serious reading. Here are some movie and artsite suggestions to occupy you. A little “Look over there!” handwaving, so you won’t notice a slight drop in posting in front of you.
Some fine art weblogs have come my way:
Bloghdad.com/Brewster_Kahle
Danny O’Brien quotes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle: “What happens to libraries? they burn,” a pretty nihilistic-sounding comment if it’s taken to be a comment on Iraqi libraries burning.
And Cory Doctorow points to a librarian’s-eye critique of blithe, “oh, just reprint it all” dismissals of burning by people who “should know better.”
But so far, all I can actually find about this “quote” from Brewster Kahle, is this ancient (1996!) Slate article on the looming, Borges-ian threat of a web archive, i.e., never being able to forget anything, ever. According to the oh-so-long-ago peace, love and cyber-utopian understanding paradise that was 1996, this kind of (admittedly traumatic) institutional slate-wiping is necessary “to rid yourself of the past so you can go forward.”
Perhaps the rhetoric’s just a bit, er, overheated. It was 1996, after all. But now that we’ve actually had a good, old-fashioned library-burnin’ or two, are we prepared to entertain the possibility that an ahistoricist, culture-be-damned imperialism may actually be boldly revolutionary and forward-thinking? Just playin’ Rumsfeld’s advocate here…
4/22 Update/Clarification/Retraction: If your main goal is just email *volume*, you probably can’t do better than to unintentionally sound like you’re slamming/questioning netgods Brewster Kahle and Danny O’Brien. If, however, you actually *care* what people think, and you also happen to be a longtime worshipper/groupie of said gods, you should quickly add context when it’s provided.
More later, (gotta drop the car off for service) but start by checking Danny’s original interview with Kahle, and the original quote, which is much better than the abbreviated version (and not just because it calls a spade a spade on the Bush library burning issue).
http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2002/12/05#1039148760
Bloghdad.com/British_Museum
Sue Ellicott writes in the Washington Post about how the British Museum (known, before last week, for having “the greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq”) mobilized during wartime. They quickly programmed lectures, gallery talks, and panels to meet the sudden surge in visitor interest in Assyrian and Mesopotamian art and culture.
And speaking of the British Museum: In the NYT, John Tierney looks at the Looting Formerly Known As Capitalism, Thank You, specifically, Lord Elgin’s “buying” the Parthenon frieze, which, inconveniently for present-day archeologist ideologues, saved it from destruction by the Turks. Or someone. I’m still waiting for Jeff Jarvis to slam France for not giving the Louvre back to Egypt. Or to the Pope.
Bloghdad.com/Gangsta_Life
The NYTimes‘ man in Baghdad, John F. Burns, talks to Newshour about the shakedowns and threats from his Iraqi Information Ministry handlers in the last days of the regime. Apparently, they were not all as funny as al-Sahhaf.
[4/19 update: In Sunday’s Times, Burns hits for the fence with a looong article on the thuggish nature of Saddam’s whole crew.
Bloghdad.com/Some_Looting
Arts Journal has an extensive round-up of coverage of the Iraqi National Museum and libraries looting/burning (Including LAT‘s Christopher Knight’s view of Bush admin. views of art/culture, which coincides with my own.It doesn’t include Pfaffenblog’s extensive discussion of possible pre-war collector lobbying at the Pentagon.) [via MAN]
Frankly, I’ve been surprised by the rather glib indignation of some peoples’ reactions to this issue (and I don’t mean Rumsfeld’s; his dismissiveness is entirelyto be expected.) If you’d suggested–two years, a year, even two months ago– that cuneiform diaries would become a poisonously partisan issue, you’d have been laughed out of whatever chatroom you’d wandered into. (If you’d said it in any more substantial forum, you’d’ve been hauled off in a padded wagon.)
But here we all are, screaming across the barricades, trying to spin a cultural tragedy (which has a primarily long-term impact on capital C Civilization, but almost no serious direct effect on any individual human alive) into instantaneous political pointscoring (which is designed to serve, above all, the ego and immediate wants of the person spinning). It’s like listening to ImClone derivatives daytraders arguing over the state of basic science research.
Bloghdad.com?/Reel_Bad_Arabs
This is probably a fence-sitter between greg.org and bloghdad.com: A Guardian interview with Jack Shaheen, who’s spent 20+ years studying Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs. His massive survey, Reel Bad Arabs, came out in the US in 2001, but is just reaching the UK. In his analysis of over 900 films, he finds negative stereotyping to a degree that’d now be unthinkable for other groups (unless, of course, they’re making mad bank off their own stereotypes, a la My Big Fat Greek Wedding).
And people criticized Lucas for his crafty Jewish traders? (Or was it his Inscrutable Asians? Or his…)
Ben-Hur‘s Arab Friend was played by Hugh Griffith, left, image: jitterbug.com
But seriously, setting aside David Russell’s Three Kings (which Shaheen adised on, btw), if the best you can hope for from Hollywood’s is the Ben-Hur treatment–where the Arab sheikh is a Brit (named Hugh Griffith) dipped in a tub of bronzer–you know there’s a problem. Of course, the Jews got stuck with Charlton Heston, so it’s lose-lose for everyone…
Locating Myself On The Ironing Spectrum
My second short film, Souvenir (January 2003), features a man who carefully irons his shirt before spending the day at a rural dry cleaners.
Here are two ironing-related websites:
Until my film actually screens somewhere, I’m not at all sure where it falls in relation to these points on the online ironing continuum.
On The Cultural Price Of Homeland Security
In an article in the Village Voice, Kate Mattingly gives new details of a disturbing casualty in the US government’s campaign for Homeland Security: the increasing difficulty and expense of securing visas for international artists and performers is keeping more of them out of the US and causing arts organizers to give up scheduling non-US programming.
Here’s the visa application process under the Dept. of Homeland Security:
New background checks >> bigger backlogs >> longer/impossible turnaround times >> fallback to once-optional, prohibitively expensive Premium Processing Fees >> non-profits sunk by $1,000/petition fees originally meant for the tech industry >> artists may not get approved anyway>> dance, music, art, film, theater organizations give up programming international talent.
An example cited in the article: Visa applications for an 11-engagement BAM Next Wave Festival cost $29,304, compared to $600 in peaceable 1988, with the possibility that some artists are still denied visas.
One of the first to pay the cultural price of harshened visa policies was last year’s New York Film Festival. As I posted then, Abbas Kiarostami was prevented from attending his film’s US premier, and the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki decided to boycott in solidarity. (“If the present government of the United States of America does not want an Iranian, they will hardly have any use for a Finn, either. We do not even have the oil.”)
When the photographer Thomas Struth spoke to a small group of collectors and curators in February, he wondered aloud about the possibility of the highly influential people who participate in the art world–collectors, trustees, sponsors, artists–working in concert to prevent the war in Iraq. Private opinion over the war was probably too divided for such an effort to be made, though.
But creating an effective and affordable way for internationally recognized artists and performers to visit the United States and contribute to our own cultural production seems like a cause worth working the phones for.
Useless Screenwriting Tip #1: Write When Ronin‘s On
According to the little-known Osmosis Theory of Writing, while trying to write a tight, sharp, crime thriller, you should watch a tight, sharp crime thriller, like, say, Ronin (directed by John Frankenheimer, screenplay by David Mamet on JD Zeik‘s story). It helps if it’s got insane chase scenes over roads you used to travel regularly (Paris, Nice, La Turbie). If you do this, the doors will fly open, and your screenwriting muse will spray you with inspiration, like so much shrapnel in a waterfront ambush.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Your screenwriting kit should include: Ronin (with the Frankenheimer’s commentary) and his 1962 classic, The Manchurian Candidate, on DVD, and Frankenheimer interviews at The Onion AV Club and Movie Express.
Bloghdad.com/Shagpad
The AP report on CNN details the contents of Saddam’s “shagadelic” safehouse.
On the day when I’m meeting a producer of Austin Powers for lunch, all my websites are converging.
In a nod to Thomas Struth, AP’s John Moore took this picture of US Army
Lt Eric Hooper checking out the art in Saddam’s shagpad. image: AP, via aftonblade.se
[Update: The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones looks at what can be learned from “the hysterical aesthetic, the hyperpornography of power and violence” of Saddam’s “art” collection.
The paintings were made in the mid-80’s by “Fantasy Artist Extraordinaire,” The NY-based Rowena, who sold one to a Japanese collector years ago for $20,000. She insisted to the NY Daily News that her newer work “is much better.” Here’s an online gallery. Oh, yeah, apples and oranges. Still, the Daily News wins with their headline, “Shag-dad art is mine!” (Thanks, BoingBoing!)]