Yes, that’s a headline from The Onion.
A portrait of the arts in a war zone
One aspect of the war in Iraq that has been hard to grasp, for Americans trying to follow events from across an ocean, is how the war has affected the day-to-day culture of the place. We do hear occasionally that Iraqis have stopped frequenting markets due to the violence, or have returned to the markets due to a lull in violence, or that restaurants and barbershops in certain areas have closed, or perhaps reopened, but the vast majority of the coverage — understandably — is focused on hard news like the jockeying among political blocs and the ongoing violence.
Thursday’s LA Times has a nicely done story providing a glimpse into the Baghdad art scene, and how it has fared in the past four years. Most of what we learn is as unencouraging as most other news out of Iraq:
Like other segments of Iraqi society, the art community is withering under a daily assault of car bombs, kidnappings, gunfights and mortar blasts. Dictatorship has given way to the suffocating strictures of religious extremists, who frown on most forms of artistic expression, consider sculpture idolatrous and a painting of a nude an insult to Islam.
Many of Iraq’s artists have joined the flight that has decimated the country’s intellectual reserves. For those who remain, it is a constant struggle to keep producing work that few will ever see and most cannot afford.
The article focuses on Nebil Anwar, who had high hopes for an artistic career after the fall of Saddam, but found himself painting portraits of foreigners to make a living, copying the paintings from photographs because it was too risky to meet face to face. The money was good, but he lived in constant fear that he would be discovered, and finally he decided to move to Jordan, where he now lives. He is pessimistic about the future of art in Iraq:
“Art will die in Iraq,” he predicted gloomily. “Art comes from the artists, and if the artists go, then art will go with them.”
While most of Baghdad’s once-plentiful galleries have had to close, and many artists feel compelled to work in secret, there is a brighter note at the very end of the article. A new gallery opened last year, and it is busy with art shows, poetry readings, and lectures:
For Nasar, the gallery embodies his belief in the power of art to open the eyes of those who follow blindly; it restores sanity amid the bloodshed and creates new heroes for a generation growing up under the sway of gunmen.
“Art is part of life here in Iraq,” he said. “Without it, people would become like monsters.”
The BBC posted a little slideshow on their website in 2005, showing the art that was appearing on the large concrete blast walls that had been erected around Baghdad to protect embassies and other buildings. In an act of defiance against the violence and strife, the artists had covered the drab and imposing concrete with striking murals of pastoral scenes, peace doves, mosques and churches coexisting, and quiet cityscapes.
It would be foolish, of course, to see the persistence of art as a sign that things are better than they seem in Iraq — despite Anwar’s dire prediction, art probably never dies entirely — but nevertheless it’s heartening to get this reminder that art does persist, against reason and against despair.
(”The Vulture” by Esam Pasha, from “Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix” at the Pomegranate Gallery in New York City, 2006)
More at:
Post-Saddam Art, Newsweek online, January 20, 2006
The Art of Kareem Risan and the Uranium Civilization, Electronic Iraq, July 23, 2007
Concrete: Canvas of Resistance, Subtopia, May 1, 2007
Was that Oakland’s new cathedral in a presidential debate?
There’s no cable service at Dogtown Commons, but we gather that Oakland blogger Zennie62 had a question in the CNN/Youtube debate, and filmed himself in front of the new (or soon-to-be-new) cathedral next to Lake Merritt.
Zennie Abraham seems to be a prolific political Youtuber. Two of his proposed debate questions were mentioned in a New York Times story on Monday previewing the upcoming debate. Unfortunately, Kit Seelye, who wrote the article, mangled things a bit, feeding various stereotypes in the process. Probably just sloppiness under a deadline on Seelye’s part, but sloppiness is still damaging when distrust of the media is so widespread. Every time a reporter gets something wrong, no matter how minor, the perceived credibility of the press is diminished a little more. So it’s important to get it right.
Interbreeding among the cultural elite
Or, why the New York Times is still indispensible:
Meghan Elizabeth O’Rourke and James Michael Surowiecki were married last evening in Fairfield, Conn., at the home of Eleanor and Andrew Beer, friends of the bride’s parents.
…Ms. O’Rourke, 31, is keeping her name. She is the literary editor of the online magazine Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris Review. She is the author of “Halflife,” a collection of poems that was published this year by W. W. Norton & Company.
…Mr. Surowiecki, 40, is a staff member at The New Yorker, where he writes The Financial Page, a business column. He is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” (Doubleday, 2004) and the editor of “Best Business Crime Writing of the Year” (Anchor, 2002).
Full announcement can be found here. (Connecticut gazetteer may come in handy.)
In related news from a couple of weeks ago:
IT was no billet-doux. Certainly, there was nothing in the e-mail message Andrew Solomon sent John Habich six years ago, as they were arranging their first meeting, to suggest that they would one day publicly wed at an English country house.
“I understand you might write something about my book,” Mr. Solomon — the author of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” (Scribner 2001), examining depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms — recalled writing to Mr. Habich, then on the staff of The Minneapolis StarTribune. “Do let me know if you have any questions of a nature such that the author might be of assistance.”
Solomon (himself an erstwhile New Yorker writer) and Habich wed at Althorp, Princess Diana’s family estate, with Uma Thurman there to lend the shabby venue some needed glamour.
“When you walk into my house, you walk into my brain”
That’s probably true for all of us, but extreme cases can really clarify matters. First there was Phineas Gage, now there is Tommy McHugh:
Newspaper advertising finally takes off (but not necessarily in a good sense)
There’s been a lot of chatter in newspaper circles about the recent introduction of advertising on the front pages of some papers. But front page ads aren’t the only innovation in newspaper advertising lately. Here is a photo of pages A22 and A23 in Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle:
Perhaps we should call this a “pop up” ad in print form (or maybe “liftoff” ad would be more apt). One attribute it shares with online pop up ads is that it seems designed to be annoying, getting the reader’s attention by interrupting the smooth flow of a story. Here’s a closer look at page A23, where you can see more clearly that the ad cuts across a single article, breaking each of the five columns into two pieces with jagged edges:
This kind of visual interruption of an article is routine in magazines these days, and also in the feature sections of newspapers, but the news sections are typically kept more graphically straightforward (anyone who has tried to read the A section while walking a dog or standing in a crowded subway car can understand why). Even in places where graphical interruptions do occur, in those cases the text is usually broken up by some kind of illustration that accompanies the article, not by an advertisement.
This ad is for Virgin America airlines, which just launched its service from the San Francisco airport the day the advertisement appeared, so one can assume they were trying to do something bold and attention-grabbing. Apparently the ad served its purpose, because it got at least one person’s attention.
The economics of scavenging
Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Lou Brown is benefiting big-time from the lockout of East Bay garbage workers.
Brown, who is 63 and homeless, recycles aluminum cans, plastic and glass to help make ends meet, and the piles of garbage on Oakland streets are proving to be a bonanza.
“You got more now. It makes me feel good because the trash is full,” Brown said Friday near 46th Avenue and International Boulevard in East Oakland as he pushed a shopping cart loaded with bottles, aluminum cans and other junk that he turns in for cash at recycling centers.
And further down in the same article:
The trash strewn about because of the lockout “makes me look bad,” said Boyer, who says he became homeless after spending 15 years in prison for selling drugs. He repeatedly asked a reporter and photographer shadowing him Friday for some money or to buy him a taco.
Although Brown says he’s been taking in $80 a day since the lockout began, an increase of $10, Boyer says he’s been getting the usual amount of recycling.
Still, “I’m reaping the benefits,” Boyer said. Nowadays, the things he needs are right up near the top of the overflowing bins instead of wedged deep in the bottom as they usually are.
“It’s easier to get,” Boyer said. Which is good, he said, because “this is nasty stuff.”
I’m always fascinated by these examples of unexpected ripple effects, such as the recent study claiming that the drop in violence in the 90’s was caused by the earlier regulations banning lead paint (or was caused by legalizing abortion, as argued in Freakonomics). In these cases, we’re talking about positive side effects, but unfortunately there are plenty of other cases where unintended consequences can be awful.
And 70 bucks a day, even before the increase in revenue due to the lockout? Even if Brown works a 10-hour day, that’s well above the current federal minimum wage. I knew people must support themselves by collecting recyclables since I see them working hard at it, but I wouldn’t have guessed it would bring in more than $40 per day. (The $70-per-day estimate seems to find some corroboration when the reporter witnesses Mr. Brown earn $23 for two hours worth of collected recyclables.)
“That whole cult of convenience strikes me as a bit of brainwashing.”
This is how you sell products: “This will save you time.” Time for what? Well, so you can watch ads for more products.
More from Michael Pollan in this interview from May 2006
The Word
The word from Springfield, Mass. is that “ginormous” has cleared the bar:
Merriam-Webster updates its best-selling Collegiate® Dictionary every year with a number of new words, senses, and variants. This year, the word “ginormous” was one of approximately 100 neologisms to make the cut, while many others will stay “closely watched” by our editors for possible inclusion in future revisions. (This, of course, begs the question: so just exactly how does a word get into the Merriam-Webster dictionary?)
And good for Merriam-Webster. The M-W Collegiate is a quintessentially American dictionary (Oxford, schmoxford), and we sure like things big — big cars, big houses, big televisions, Big Macs. “Gigantic” and “enormous” just weren’t cutting it anymore. Hell, even our sunflowers make Japanese sedans look like toys:
