VS. THE POMEGRANATE

Vs. the Pomegranate has moved to WordPress!

2011-07-31T01:05:00.006-04:00

I have moved Vs. the Pomegranate to WordPress. Please update your bookmarks and/or RSS feeds. This link will bring you to the new, improved blog:

www.josephshahadi.com/wordpress/

If you've followed my blog here at Blogger, thank you. I have truly appreciated your readership. I hope you continue to read Vs. the Pomegranate at WordPress.

Moving to WordPress

2011-07-30T16:08:00.003-04:00

Dear Readers,
I am in the process of migrating my long(er) form blogging to WordPress. It's complicated but I'm trying to archive the contents of this blog--including your intelligent comments--at my new spot. As soon as I'm up and running I will let you know and redirect you there. In the mean time please visit my Tumblog at www.vsthepomegranate.tumblr.com.

For what it's worth I like Tumblr a lot... but it's primarily a visual experience for me. I almost never want to read long blocks of text there so it has discouraged me form writing anything too in-depth, which the reason I began blogging in the first place. That, along with the ease of re-posting, encourages me to pass along already existing photos and smaller chunks of text or links at my Tumblog. I'll still be doing that but with everything that is happening in the world I want to do more.

The move to WordPress is meant to blow the dust off (Blogger looks really old-fashioned post-Tumblr, I think) and provide a space to explore the things that interest me in more detail.

More soon.

The Only Rapture I Am Caught Up In

2011-05-21T15:56:00.005-04:00

It is a beautiful spring day in New York. I'll work out and then bring my dog to the park so he can run around. Later on: dinner... and if I all goes well, dessert.

This, I think, is the difference between me and the end-times Christians: I love the world. It frustrates me and there are things I want to change, but at my core I love the world and I love my life. And I do not need for it to be swept away to feel close to God. I just have to walk around on a day like this and watch my dog gallop around the park, kissing everyone he sees.

Amen.

Kyriarchy is a Bitch, Part Two: This Time It's Personal

2011-05-20T14:21:00.012-04:00

Despite its vast, unbounded openness sometimes the internet is a small town. When I wrote about freelance "race and gender" writer JoNubian's bizarre, anti-Arab racist twitter-rant yesterday I didn't think she'd see it--or if she did, certainly not right away. But I was wrong. Out of nowhere she tweeted me this afternoon.

In case you didn't follow that, here is a brief play-by-play:

* Calling out anti-Arab racism is degrading... to the anti-Arab racist.
* Calling out anti-Arab racism is the same thing as street harassment... if the person doing the calling out is an Arab.
* Pointing out racial intolerance is racist.
* Jo thinks this would have been better handled between us, despite the fact that when I tried to do that she blocked me, making such a discussion impossible.

... At least she admitted that she'd made an "unfair generalization." So that's something, right?

Thoughts?

With Friends Like These (or, Kyriarchy is a Bitch)

2011-05-18T22:36:00.048-04:00

So this happened:

Um, what?

What the entire fuck? I log on to Twitter to see what's what and I'm confronted with this? From someone on my own timeline?

JoNubian is ready to drop some science on you Sand Monkey, so don't get it twisted! ... Sure, if you own a Bodega in Brooklyn you are probably South Asian but the fact that she can't tell the difference will not slow her down. (Just the opposite, apparently. Keep reading son)

Her "humanity." Hm. Right.

So, to clarify JoNubian is a graduate student at Texas Southern University who writes critically about human rights, race and gender on her own blog and at Race Talk. Seriously.

I can't remember why I started following her. We chatted every so often at first--mostly about a shared interest in Frantz Fanon-- and I promoted a few of her pieces on my blog. In return she put me in touch with the editor of Race Talk, although I was too busy to submit anything there. Up until this point Jo's tweets were pretentious in a faux-academic/ Afrocentric way-- a lot of florid Zora Neale Hurston, Fanon and Baldwin quotes-- and she describes herself in her profile as a "Dreamer. Lover. Provocateur." (I kid you not, see below) In other words, unoriginal but harmless: i.e. a grad student. So I was hoping I'd misunderstood. I questioned her about what she'd written to make sure I hadn't wandered into the middle of an inside joke or something.

Although I was hurt and put off I didn't automatically write her off as a racist. Twitter lends itself to a speak-before-you-think style of posting. I was hoping she'd see that she was acting out and modify her thought. If she'd responded with, "Know what? You are right, I wasn't thinking when I posted that. Peace." we would be good.

I figured her reaction would tell the tale and unfortunately I was right...

So... Jo was offended not because the attention was unasked for and unwanted, but because she thinks an Arab woman in the same circumstance wouldn't also be harassed? Which is why she is "especially" offended by Arab men who act inappropriately on the street? What? Even if she had some way to know what street harassment is or isn't suffered by Arab women (and let's be clear, she doesn't) what does that have to do with anything? I repeat: Jo specializes in writing about race and gender. At this point I thought, wow, that is ten different kinds of fucked up.

I also thought, "the hood"? Where are you tweeting from, 1995?

Jo, who has over two thousand followers on her feed, then turned to them for a bit of twitter-affirmation...

...And it worked! This thought-- not wrong in general but grotesquely inappropriate in this context-- was retweeted. But here's the thing, if the only way you can articulate your oppression is to oppress me, then we have a problem. Arab men are not "savages" we are just men. Some good, some not--just like everybody else.

I wasn't arguing that street harassment never happens, or that there isn't sometimes a racial component to it--or even that Jo herself hadn't been harassed. I was saying that stereotyping all of us for the actions of a few is complete bullshit. Especially slathered with a creamy frosting of orientalist stereotypes about violent, aggressive Arab men and passive, over-protected Arab women. Unlike Jo I keep my Twitter-feed small, mostly to avoid having to deal with crap like this.

Still, I thought--she got harassed on the street and she is upset. What she is saying is not okay but I don't want to downplay that.

To which she responded:

The reality is that Jo doesn't see anything "constantly" in New York, she lives in Houston. She is a tourist in my city and she is trying to school me on how it is in New York. In the, ah, "hood." Right. But even if street harassment by Arab men is a common experience for her making racial generalizations based on a small, unrepresentative group through her unacknowledged bias doesn't lead anywhere good. I am looking at you Dr. Kanazawa. At this point it seemed clear that her pride wouldn't let her admit she was wrong and in her defensiveness she was escalating her racism.

Given that she'd gone from pretending to know what is inside the heads of all "Arab Dudes" to pretending that she knows what's inside of mine I finally got angry and said so:

And to make sure it was clear I wasn't dismissing her justifiable anger at being harassed I wrote:

And then, one last ditch effort to make her understand her actions as racist by asking her to imagine herself n my place:

So she blocked me.

Right. Now let's review the World According To JoNubian, "a freelance writer whose writing focuses on human rights, especially issues of race and gender" :

* JoNubian is human but Arab men are savages.
* Arab women--those pampered creatures-- don't get harassed on the street, but if they did Arab men would behead the perpetrators.
* It isn't racist to say so because Jo has seen this "constantly" in New York (despite the fact that she does not live here).
*If you object to her racist anti-Arab generalizations, then you are lying.

I think expecting people of color in general and Black people in particular to be more racially enlightened because of their own struggles is a racist idea. It's a close cousin to the "Magical Negro" idea where it is the responsibility of Black people to uplift and educate everybody else, while simultaneously bearing up under the vicissitudes of racism with quiet, noble dignity. Yick.

But it is fair--and necessary-- to hold bloggers, journalists and academics who specialize in race to a higher standard, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. Race "experts", even if they are entirely self-appointed, perhaps especially if they are self-appointed, must be more self-reflective than the average person. Which doesn't mean always saying (or thinking) the most virtuous, racially enlightened thing under all circumstances--that is unrealistic. But rather that if we fuck up we own it and move forward, trying harder. So this post isn't really about poor, shallow JoNubian. I'm not mad at her: She is a tourist, not only in New York City but in a world of ideas she does not fully understand. Academia is busting at the seams with people like her. She'll either grow up and out of this or she won't. Either way , she isn't my problem. But she does provide a perfect case study of kyriarchy, which the way that marginalized people oppress one another.

Our particular subject positions can create blind spots that seem natural to us, but are created--and can therefore be dismantled if we try. And if you are going to promote yourself as race "expert" you have to try. Period. In my experience anti-Arab racism (and its close cousin Islamophobia) are pervasive on the self-described left, even among people who specialize in writing about racism. There really isn't anywhere to go to escape it, even your own Twitter feed.

That is the reality of orientalism and Islamophobia.

Before signing off Twitter I scrolled down Jo's timeline and came across this gem, posted just before the anti-Arab stuff above. I add it by way of a post script:

Hm. Yeah.

From Portraits to Pin-ups: Representations of Women in Art and Popular Culture

2011-05-13T14:39:00.003-04:00

Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969)

Academic Symposium: From Portraits to Pin-ups: Representations of Women in Art and Popular Culture

Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 11:30 a.m.–6 p.m.
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd Floor

In conjunction with the exhibition Lorna Simpson: Gathered, this symposium will explore the implications of female artists using images of women in their work, the relationship between popular culture and fine art, connections between women's history and contemporary art, perceptions of race and gender, and representations of beauty. Dr. Wendy Steiner will speak on concepts of beauty, a panel of graduate students will present current research, and a panel discussion with comedian Erica Watson, drag king Shelly Mars, and illustrator Molly Crabapple will follow.

SCHEDULE:

10:15 a.m. Dr. Steiner and panelists arrive (aside from Molly, Erica, and Shelly) for technical check
10:15-11a.m. technical checks, refreshments served
11:00am Auditorium opens
11:25am Introduction and Welcome
11:30am Keynote speaker Dr. Wendy Steiner "Beauty, Woman, Art"

12-2pm Paper session 1: Women and Image
Paula E. Hopkins, Georgetown University: "Subverting the Image: Representations of Black Women in Lorna Simpson's photography"
Shannon Vittoria, CUNY Graduate Center: "Women Artists at Work: Picturing Professionalization in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France"
Nicole Bebout, Hunter College: "How to Protect Your Virtue: Animal Transformations in the Work of Paula Rego"
Brooke Belisle, UC Berkeley: "Gathered: Portraits of Relational Identity"
Nicole Meyers, Hunter College: "Unpinning the Pinup: Axell’s Vicious Red Circle and the Coca-Cola Company”
Emilia Müller, New York University: "Fashion and Femininity in 1950s Sci-Fi Films"
Li Cornfeld, M.A., New York University: "Shooting Heroines: On Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses"

2-2:30pm: Lunch break. Light lunch will be served, cafe is also open.

2:30-4pm Paper session 2: Women and Embodiment
Kristen Lorello, Hunter College: "Kate Gilmore and goldiechiari: Re-envisioning the City in Rome and Beyond"
Joseph Shahadi, Ph.D, New York University: "Mona Hatoum: Foreign Body"
Aliza Shvarts, New York University: "Art, Hair, Beauty"
Thomas Naughton, Harvard University: "Performance Event or Pop Art Product: Lady Gaga's Instafilm Grimace and the new consumerist 'performance art'"
Al Janae Hamilton, New York University, "Radicalizing the Black Female Body: Fashioning Black Power from Olive Morris to Pam Grier"

3:30 p.m. Shelly Mars, Molly Crabapple and Erica Watson arrive

4:30-5:30pm Conversation with illustrator Molly Crabapple, drag king Shelly Mars, and comedian Erica Watson

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld Explains It All For You: Palestinians Aren't Human

2011-05-06T14:22:00.007-04:00

This handsome devil is Jeffery Wiesnfeld.

Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times

The story so far: Jeffery Wiesnfeld, a City University of New York trustee and semi-professional Zionist, got his knickers twisted over the inclusion of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner among a stack of proposed recipients of honorary degrees to be rubber stamped by its Board. After an impassioned, if factually dubious, recounting of Kushner's criticisms of Israel, (among other things Kushner is the Co-Editor of Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict) the Board caved like a... I'd like to think of a clever metaphor here but currently there is nothing that caves as fast or completely as the CUNY Board of Directors.

What ensued has been a fairly predictable push and pull: Kushner responded. Former honorees Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Cunningham have returned their honorary degrees to CUNY in solidarity with Kushner. And Wiesenfeld responded to Kushner's response. In the New York Times Jim Dwyer tried to get a defensive Wiesenfeld to clarify his position, which he did by asserting that the Palestinian people aren't human.

Dwyer writes,

I tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.
But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”
Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”
Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.

To paraphrase one of my favorite bloggers, Shark-Fu of Angry Black Bitch:

Pause.

Blink.

Right. So how do you engage with someone who believes (and reports that belief to the New York Times) that people like you aren't human? Short answer: you don't.

Like their Evangelical Christian brethren (who also do their level best to bend US civil discourse to suit their political concerns) it is pointless to engage rationally with Zionists. So rather than answer the various–-frankly ridiculously inaccurate and/or sensationally distorted–-racist and Islamophobic claims of various post Kushner-kerfuffle commenters (or of Wiesenfeld himself) I’d like to make three points:

1) The particular context of this debate aside, it should be clear that this incident sets a dangerous precedent at CUNY. Our universities are settings for the rehearsal of such arguments–to the great benefit of their students. The threat implicit in Wiesenfeld’s objection is premised on the potential economic consequences for CUNY based on public opinion, which is not fixed. If I were a Zionist I’d be very wary of opening this particular door. The times they are a-changin'.

2) The cultural behaviors, religious beliefs and legal policies of the various nations of the Arab world (and/ or Muslims in general) are utterly beside the point: the actions of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians are still wrong. They are not *less* wrong (or even somehow “right”) because some of the Palestinians do things that you (or Wiesenfeld, or even I) don’t like. Period. Ethnic cleansing doesn’t magically become justifiable when you use it against people with whom you disagree. In other words we don’t say “Well, slavery was okay because we don’t like the way the Africans treated women or gays.” We say, “Slavery is wrong.” Period.

3) This action–described by Wiesenfeld as “boycotting the boycotters”–has achieved nothing except to betray Zionist fear over the growing international influence of the cultural boycott of Israel. Bad move. I have never been more convinced that the Boycott is working than I am at this moment.

If they cannot see that this is not a Zionist “moral” victory but rather a sloppy, public misstep then they are kidding themselves.

Letters to Distant Cities; Multi-Media Performance

2011-03-17T13:21:00.007-04:00

Letters to Distant Cities

with

Shara Worden and My Brightest Diamond
Clare and the Reasons
Rob Moose (Sufjan Stevens, Antony & the Johnsons)
Poetry by Mustafa Ziyalan
Curated & produced by photo/videographer Murat Eyuboglu

MULTIMEDIA BOX SET WITH AUDIO, HIGH-QUALITY POSTCARDS

Monday, March 21, 7–9 PM

$10 at the door

The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
rsvp: rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

Music, poetry, and photography converge in Letters to Distant Cities. The album will be re-created in a multi-media release event featuring live performances by Worden, Moose, and Manchon, as well as readings of the poetry in the original Turkish by Ziyalan with English readings of the translations by Worden, and a video for two of the album's songs (The Sea and Invisible), produced by Eyuboglu and edited by David Sarno (videos available online only). To round out the evening, Worden and Manchon will perform a few extra tunes of their own, not included on the album.

About Letters to Distant Cities:

New Amsterdam Records welcomes singer-songwriters Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond) and Clare Muldaur Manchon (of Clare and the Reasons), along with indie-classical multi-instrumentalist/composer Rob Moose, as collaborators in the enchanted and melancholy Letters to Distant Cities, a multi-media project curated and produced by photographer and videographer Murat Eyuboglu, exploring urban solitude through the poetry of Turkish-American poet, Mustafa Ziyalan.

In addition to the CD, the album package includes a set of 24 pristine keepsake cards, comprising a photographic illustration for each of Zilayan's poems collected on the recording. The images were captured by project visionary Murat Eyuboglu with model Jamie Ansley. Designer Adam Frint brings musical, poetic, and photographic elements together, creating a physical connection to the album's sense of memorabilia.

www.newamsterdamrecords.com

About the Artists:

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Shara Worden spearheads the indie-folk band My Brightest Diamond. With a background in classical music, Worden studied opera at the University of North Texas and Manhattan School of Music, and studied composition with composer/performer Padma Newsome (Clogs, The National). My Brightest Diamond involves elements of rock and classical music, with the combined sound of instrumentalists Rob Moose, Earl Harvin, Chris Bruce, and Zac Rae. Their first record, Bring Me the Workhorse, was released on Asthmatic Kitty Records in 2006. Their sophomore album, A Thousand Shark's Teeth, was released in 2008.

Clare and the Reasons, fronted by collaborators Clare Muldaur Manchon and Olivier Manchon, is a Brooklyn-based indie-pop outfit started in 2005. Live, they have a steady list of contributors, with a host of acoustic instruments—cellos, violas, things to hit, kazoos, baby kotos, saws, recorders, and a bass drum that says "Kaboom" on it. Clare and the Reasons deliver an assortment of meticulously constructed and arranged songs. Walking the line between musical maturity and sophistication and primal, childlike musical instincts, Clare and the Reasons floats comfortably between both worlds.

A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music in violin performance, Rob Moose has established an exciting and eclectic presence as a performer, arranger and conductor in the rapidly changing atmosphere of contemporary music. Since joining Antony and the Johnsons in 2005, Moose has also toured with Sufjan Stevens, Beth Orton and Duncan Sheik, and recorded with Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, The National, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Rufus Wainwright, and Marianne Faithfull.

Mustafa Ziyalan's poetry, short fiction, essays and poetry translations have appeared in many literary periodicals, anthologies (most recently in New European Poets), and also in book form. Istanbul Noir, an anthology of short fiction he co-edited with Amy Spangler, was published by Akashic Books in 2008. His most recent volume of poetry, Land of Smiles/Gülümsemeler Ülkesi, a bilingual collection of poetry with original woodcuts by Vladimir Ginzburg, was published in 2009. Su Kedileri (Water Cats), a collection of short fiction, came out in 2005; Yakilacak Kentlerden (From Cities Slated to Burn), a collection of travel writing with original photography by Murat Eyüboğlu, in 2007; and, Manhattan'da Şiir Konuşmalari (Poetry Talks in Manhattan), a collection of writings on poets and poetry, in 2009.

Murat Eyuboglu started photography as an apprentice to Josephine Powell in Istanbul. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts, School of Photography (Istanbul), he transferred to Bennington College, Vermont, where he studied music, literature, and philosophy. He lived in Paris and returned to New York to pursue studies in music history. His dissertation was on the utopian aspects of Gustav Mahler's works. Since 2000, he has focused mainly on portraiture and has been working on various collaborative projects. In 2007, he also started working in video. He participated in the documentary Claude Lèvi-Strauss: Auprès de l'Amazonie as assistant director. His photographs have been published by the French edition of National Geographic, and his music videos have been released by Asthmatic Kitty Records and New Amsterdam Records. He lives in New York City.

Adam Frint is a Chicago-based graphic designer with a love for music and typography, an appreciation for illustration, and a passion for black and white fine art photography. A senior designer at AGI, a global leader in design, packaging, print and production for the entertainment industry, Adam has had the opportunity to work with many great clients ranging from the Sony Group and Walt Disney Studios to EMI Music, HBO, and Warner Home Video. He is a graduate of Northern Illinois University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication and a Minor in Photography, and a founding member of the online design community, c2ak.com. He has been affiliated with, and draws inspiration from, local designers and artists from Lumpen Magazine, Chicago Country Club, CPG (Chicago Screen Printer's Guild), ADLOVE, OhNo!Doom and Prairie Mod.

David Sarno is a freelance editor and has worked in television production for over ten years. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Cinema and Photography from Southern Illinois University, he moved to Chicago and began his editing career. The scope of his work covers a broad range, including broadcast television, music videos, and internet programs. Highlights include working at Kurtis Productions where he cut 4 episodes of American Greed, a documentary series airing on CNBC. Also while at Kurtis he cut two episodes of The Entrepreneurs for CNBC, a series profiling small businesses on the fast track to building national brands, and a one hour episode of American Originals, about the history of the Westminster Kennel Club. David has also worked at Thea Flaum Productions where he edited twenty-six episodes of From Junky to Funky, a home remodeling show on the DIY network, and Anderson Productions where he cut six episodes for the Emmy-nominated series, CPS Right Now!

William Pope L. Limited Edition at Art in General

2011-03-10T14:41:00.006-05:00

William Pope.L
a philosophical solution, 2011
Mixed media sculpture
13.5 x 4 x 4 inches
Courtesy the artist. Published by Art in General.
Edition Size: 20
$1,500

Join Art in General and William Pope.L on March 23rd for a special reception where the artist will launch his new edition, a philosophical solution. Pope.L joins a long list of artists who have generously supported Art in General's exhibitions and programs by producing a limited edition, including Allora & Calzadilla, Jim Lambie, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer, Spencer Tunick, and Pae White, among many others. Space for this event is extremely limited.

Please RSVP to Anna Starling at 212.219.0473 ext. 25 or anna@artingeneral.org if you are interested in attending.

a philosophical solution is a conceptual readymade, a wine bottle filled with a dark mysterious liquid in a branded wooden crate. Like a riddle, this piece contains hidden messages–a tiny tongue, a closed box, a sealed bottle, an opaque elixir. Together these elements expose our complicated relationship to language and those libations that let our own tongues run. In the artist's words, this edition is: "A beverage of dark mental liquid in the vein of such ideas as: 'the text wrote itself' or 'language has a mind of its own'; a thirst- quencher that silences the sipper while versing the sipped."

William Pope.L (born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is a prominent multidisciplinary artist known for his conceptual, often performance-based art practice, which actively confronts issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class. As the self-proclaimed “friendliest black artist in America,” Pope.L invites dialogue through provocative performances, installations, and art objects. His work has been exhibited and performed at The Whitney Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

For inquiries or to purchase this work, please contact Anna Starling at 212.219.0473, ext. 25 or anna@artingeneral.org.

About Art in General

Founded in 1981 in Lower Manhattan, Art in General is a nonprofit organization that assists artists with the production and presentation of new work. It changes in response to the needs of artists and engages the public with their work. Since it was established, the organization has emerged as one of New York City’s leading nonprofits devoted to supporting and stimulating the creation of contemporary art, providing an environment in which artists may exhibit unconventional work and exchange ideas with their peers.

Location: 79 Walker Street, NYC, at the southeast corner of Cortland Alley. One block south of Canal Street, between Lafayette and Broadway.

Subway directions: take the 6, A-C-E, N-Q-R, or J to Canal Street.

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-6 pm.

Admission: Always free.

Art in General's 6th Floor Gallery and restrooms are wheelchair accessible, and we can provide assistance to visitors with disabilities as requested.

The Scandals of Susan Sontag: One-Day Conference

2011-03-03T05:36:00.001-05:00

On Friday, March 4th, the Center for the Humanities at the The Graduate Center (CUNY) will host the conference The Scandals of Susan Sontag, in collaboration with Stony Brook University’s Humanities Institute. The event will take place in the Skylight Room, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York. The event will begin with registration at 10:00 a.m. and is free and open to the public.

Susan Sontag’s provocative career resulted in a body of artistic and intellectual work that is scorned as often as it is admired. This one-day conference brings together a renowned roster of scholars and critics to consider the impact of her work and life. The event is co-organized by Aiobheann Sweeney, Director of the Center for the Humanities, CUNY, and E. Ann Kaplan, Director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook. “The conference does not aim to glorify or make a saint out of Sontag,” explains Kaplan. “It rather aims to take a steady look at just some of the many contributions to thought Sontag offered across a range of topics.”

The event will feature the filmmaker Nancy Kates screening excerpts from her upcoming film, Regarding Susan Sontag. Other participants will include:Barbara Ching, Iowa State University ; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook University; E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University; Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University; Susie Linfield, New York University; Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY: José Muñoz, New York University; Deborah Nelson, The University of Chicago; Elaine Showalter, Princeton University; Catharine Stimpson, NYU and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Pennsylvania State University.

The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, was founded in 1993 as a forum for people who take ideas seriously inside and outside the academy. The Center puts CUNY students and faculty from various disciplines into dialogue with each other as well as with prominent journalists, artists, and civic leaders to promote the humanities and foster intellectual community across the city. The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook was established in 1987 to promote interdisciplinary research. Its varied programs have built, and continue to build, bridges between the human sciences and the medical, technical and natural sciences, and to reach out to the local community.

For more information please contact Aoibheann Sweeney, The Center for the Humanities, ASweeney@gc.cuny.edu or (212) 817-2006 or Olivia Mattis, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, olivia.mattis@stonybrook.edu or (631) 632-9957.

I Submitted My Dissertation to My Committee. (Or, Bring Out the Gimp).

2011-03-02T00:09:00.016-05:00

Former President Reagan's daughter Patti Davis answered "Fun!" when asked what it was like to write her first book. (It was a memoir about how hard it was to grow up the daughter of a rich, white movie star-turned-politician who didn't communicate his feelings.) Pete Dexter, the brilliant writer and columnist responded that writing a book is not "fun" and instead compared it to "getting caught in your zipper and not being able to get unstuck for three years."

I'll ask those of you without dangly bits of your own to forgive the metaphor because it is so perfect.

I submitted my dissertation to my committee yesterday. And I feel... I am not even sure how I feel. Or how to describe it. A peculiar combination of elation, relief, giddiness and... loss. Isn't that crazy? For the first time in--literally--years I don't have part of my brain working on writing this damn thing. It's not simmering away on the back burner while I pretend to be interested in the stuff normal people talk about. My burners are cold. That book--because that's what it really is, don't kid yourself: A Book--is out of my hands. My zipper is unstuck in a big way but a sick, masochistic little part of me (let's call it the Gimp) actually misses it. I have that seat belt- after- a- long- car- ride feeling on my brain.

It has been a long process. There were times over the past few years that I thought I would crack from the stress. I wrote about... difficult things. At times they made me soul-sick even though I knew they were important to write about: Guantanamo, self-immolation, suicide terror, torture, hunger strikes. There were times I thought, "What the hell am I doing?" "Why am I not writing about something simpler?" I had nightmares for years.

I read a lot for pleasure and I have knocked back 200 page books in a day many times, no problem. But I never thought about the labor involved in writing until I started this... the task of it. I wrote, and ate takeout Chinese food, and wrote, and watched weird daytime TV, and wrote.

I saw every single episode of Judging Amy twice because the reruns came on during my break time every afternoon and they cycled through them back to back for a solid year. (For the record Bruce and Amy never would have worked as a couple, they were too different. But Jared's death took me by surprise. Maxine was never right after that, even though they hooked her up with Cheech near the end.) I am pretty sure my neighbors thought I was a junkie because I didn't leave the house for days at a time. (I have heard folktales about people who exercise regularly during their writing phase. And they climb on their Unicorns and ride them to the gym. Me, not so much.)

And then I finished it!... Three years ago. My defense has been delayed for one reason or another but the upshot is: I have been in Limbo. Which is where all the unbaptized babies go instead of Heaven (You kind of have to be Catholic to get that but if you aren't: trust me, it's funny). So even though I was finished I wasn't finished-finished. It was the worst of both worlds, I did all of the work and got none of the credit. I wanted to be official already.

But now. Now it is re-formatted according to arcane rules designed to drive you insane, expensively reproduced and bound (thanks for nothing, Kinkos) and distributed to people whose job it is to judge the hell out of it.

And I feel.

Yeah, no. Still not sure.

Feminist Autobiographical Fictions: Performing the Self on Stage & On the Page

2011-02-12T11:41:00.006-05:00

A book talk with Barbara Browning, Linda Schlossberg, & Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana).

February 22, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, Room 612
between Waverly and Washington Places

This panel opens a feminist space — call it genre trouble — between self and “self” to explore the tension and productive possibilities between memory and imagination, autobiography and audience, printed text and embodied performance. Reading from and discussing their own creative fictions, our three speakers reflect on the political and artistic stakes of performing identities and re-staging histories, both intimate and public.

Featuring:

* Barbara Browning, Performance Studies, NYU
author of The Correspondence Artist

* Linda Schlossberg, Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University
author of Life in Miniature

* Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), writer and performance artist
author of I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the NYU Department of Performance Studies.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible. If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs@nyu.edu.

Mubarak is out, Egypt is Free

2011-02-11T20:18:00.005-05:00

Like many of you I have been riveted by the coverage of the revolution is Egypt. The last eighteen days have been exciting, sometimes frightening and ultimately joyful.

There is a lot to say and in the coming days it will be said (and hopefully some of it by me, here) but the most important thing to say right now is:

Today Egypt is free.

Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for the last three decades with the support of the United States, at the expense of the Egyptian people, has been forced out of office by his own people. For the last eighteen days Egyptians from all walks of life--men and women, Copts and Muslims, professionals and working people, flooded Cairo's Tahrir Square and demanded Mubarak's ouster. And when he-- predictably-- resisted they would not take no for an answer.

The Obama Administration-- predictably-- hedged it's bets until the last second with Biden delivering the veiled threats and Obama weighing in after the fact with an Inspiring Message of Support™.

The US media has-- predictably-- trotted out a seemingly endless supply of old white guy "experts" (former ambassadors, Middle East commentators, pundits etc.) on the Left and Right who have publicly speculated over the impact of the Egyptian Revolution on US and Israeli interests.

The US Christianists and Zionists (and Christian Zionists) are-- predictably-- shitting their pants at the prospect of millions of Arabs united for a common purpose.

But the facts cannot be denied: a leaderless revolution (the best example of --gasp-- anarchism at work in modern memory) that employed social media creatively has ended the reign of one of the worst autocrats of the last century. And today Egypt is free.

Free.

That is enough for now.

A Handy Guide To Understanding the US State Department's Position on Egypt

2011-01-30T16:35:00.007-05:00

Like everyone else I am still reeling from the unfolding events of the January 25th Revolution in Egypt. Some people have begun writing about it beautifully but I am not quite there yet. Soon I'll publish a link round up to the great reporting being done by bloggers and alternative media journalists on the ground in Cairo, but in the mean time here is handy guide to translating US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent statement about the US position on Egypt. It is pure genius.

More soon.

Fair for Knowledge: Hair (January 30 at the Brooklyn Flea)

2011-01-24T00:28:00.004-05:00

Fair for Knowledge: Hair

Featuring Laurel Braitman (historian of science), Barbara Cassin (philosopher and philologist), Cécile Guilbert (essayist), Justin E. H. Smith (philosopher), John Strausbaugh (author), and Sophie Wahnich (historian), seated at special tables designed by artist Gareth Long

An event organized by Cabinet and co-presented as part of Villa Gillet's "Walls and Bridges" series

Date: Sunday, 30 January 2011, 2–6 pm
Location: Brooklyn Flea, 1 Hanson Place (at Flatbush Avenue; map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary.

"Designed to encourage an informal, social, and open mode of learning, Cabinet's series of "fairs for knowledge" aims to create bridges between specialists and the general public by providing unusual venues for short one-on-one discussions between an expert and a member of the general public. In this first installment, six writers will be seated at special tables placed between the regular stalls of the Brooklyn Flea and be ready to engage the public in conversation on a topic that occupies our minds a great deal but is considered too lowly to be worthy of serious reflection—hair.

Come and brush up on “hair plucking” among anxious captive animals; Mary Magdalene’s hair as described in the Bible; fashion, hairdos, and underwear; hairlessness as a signifier of rationality in the history of philosophy; the exceptional hairstyles of rock stars; shaved women and the symbolic loss of power in the French revolution; and more!"

Right-Wing Terrorism: Murders Grow on the Far Right Four Decades After Martin Luther King Jr.

2011-01-17T10:19:00.009-05:00

Right-Wing Terrorism: Murders Grow on the Far Right Four Decades After Martin Luther King Jr.

The American landscape is pockmarked by the wreckage left behind by angry, white male extremists.

January 16, 2011 |

By Stephan Salisbury via AlterNet

The landscape of America is littered with bodies.

They’ve been gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon, and blown away at the Holocaust Museum, as well as in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida.

Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded.

Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.

In Pittsburgh, three police officers were shot and killed, while two were wounded in an April 2009 gun battle with Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist fearful that President Obama planned to curtail his gun rights. In Okaloosa County, Florida, two officers were slain in April 2009 in an altercation with Joshua Cartwright, whose abused wife told the police that her husband “believed that the U.S. Government was conspiring against him” and that he was “severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”

At the Pentagon, an anti-government conspiracy theorist, John Patrick Bedell, wounded two police officers in March of last year before being shot to death. At the Holocaust Museum in 2009, James W. Von Brunn, a white supremacist, gunned down a security guard before being wounded and subdued by two other security guards.

Government officials, of course, have also been targets of the gunmen, as demonstrated so vividly by the recent shootings in Tucson, where Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others were wounded, and one of Giffords’s staff members and a federal judge were among the six dead.

Churches Are No Sanctuary from Christian Extremists

Two of these shootings took place within the sanctuary of churches. In Wichita in 2009, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder. Tiller was serving as an usher during a Sunday morning service at Reformation Lutheran Church when he was shot. The attack in Knoxville, which left two dead and six injured in July 2008, occurred at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church while 25 children were performing Annie Jr. Killer Jim David Adkisson said he hated Democrats and deemed the church part of the “liberal movement.” Adkisson opened fire with a shotgun on an audience of about 200. In Brockton, Massachusetts, in January 2009, neo-Nazi Keith Luke sought to storm a synagogue, but never made it, authorities claim. According to a prosecutor, Luke wanted to “kill as many Jews, blacks, and Hispanics as humanly possible.” In his rampage, he reportedly murdered two Hispanics and raped and wounded a third before, near the synagogue, he was wrestled to the ground by ordinary citizens.

Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing -- initially attributed by numerous media experts to Arab terrorists but actually the work of right-wing militia-movement supporter Timothy McVeigh -- more than 25 law-enforcement officers have been killed by white supremacists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Extremist Wreckage Pockmarks the American Landscape

Beyond the shootings -- and those enumerated above are only a sample of such incidents since 2008 -- there is a landscape of rubble and carnage. In February 2010, Joseph Stack, infuriated by the IRS and U.S. tax policy, crashed his small plane into an Austin office building housing 200 IRS workers, killing himself and two others and injuring 13. Violence, he wrote in a “manifesto,” is “the only answer” to oppressive government policies.

Sometimes the wreckage left behind from such incidents is easily overlooked, a roadside crash on a springtime day. In Nashville last March, a motorist was so enraged by an Obama bumper sticker that he rammed his SUV into the offending car, pushing it off the road and onto the sidewalk, leaving a man and his 10-year-old daughter terrified inside.

Sometimes the incidents reveal deep emotional wounds. Just before Christmas in 2008, in Belfast, Maine, an abused wife shot and killed her husband, James Cummings, a wealthy California native and Nazi devotee. Loathing Barack Obama, he was planning to join the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement at the time he was shot. Police and federal agents subsequently found radioactive materials and instructions for the making of a “dirty bomb” in his house, according to an FBI document released by WikiLeaks.

An FBI official said the materials could all be purchased legally in the United States. The police offered assurances that the public was not at risk. Amber Cummings, the abused wife who believed her husband had sexual designs on their nine-year-old daughter, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the shooting, but the judge suspended the sentence.

Sometimes the carnage is vast and events are still playing out. A bomb lab discovered in an Escondido, California, house in November proved so immense that authorities feared removing the explosives. Instead, they closed nearby Interstate 15 and set the property ablaze, sending a towering black cone of smoke skyward and filling the air with the hiss of burning chemicals and the crack-crack of exploding ammunition.

Police are still investigating the supposed architect of this explosive realm, an unemployed Serbian immigrant. As with the apparent plans to build a dirty bomb in Maine, the authorities have not yet declared these efforts in California to be associated with terrorism or possible construction of weapons of mass destruction. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, which released the FBI field report on the Maine incident, has since been termed a terrorist organization by a number of federal lawmakers and officials for bringing classified documents to public attention.

White Men Are Never Labeled Terrorists

That leads to a common thread among these murderous incidents. None has been labeled the work of terrorists by authorities or the media. All involved white men, most of whom -- like Jared Loughner in Tucson -- have been deemed troubled or disturbed by authorities and various media outlets. Even Jim David Adkisson, the unemployed truck driver who attacked the Knoxville church because he believed it was “a cult” and a haven for Democrats and secular liberals, has not been characterized as a political terrorist. Adkisson was a fan of the writings and shows of right-wing media personalities Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity, according to authorities who searched his residence after the 2008 shootings. However, his primary motivation, according to those same authorities, was the imminent loss of food stamps and inability to find a job.

Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into the Austin IRS building in an eerie echo of the 9/11 attacks, is also not a terrorist -- just a plain old suicide. The Maine dirty-bomb maker, who amassed quantities of hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide, and magnesium ribbon, a terrorist? No, just a “disturbed individual.”

Arizona, of course, has seen a lot of extremist political activity in recent years. In fact, even as Jared Loughner was gunning down 20 people inside the Safeway on North Oracle Road on January 8th, the murder trial of Shawna Forde, head of the anti-immigrant Minutemen American Defense group, was getting underway in nearby Pima County Superior Court. Forde and two associates have been charged with the shooting death of a man, the wounding of his wife, and the killing of the couple’s nine-year-old daughter during a June 2009 robbery aimed at funding her extremist political activities.

These are America’s killing fields, coast to coast, yet the commentary and debate in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting revolves around political rhetoric in Washington. Both sides need to tone it down, we’re told. There have been endless discussions on television and radio, newspaper commentary and Internet postings all focused on the issue of overheated political talk -- as if Jared Loughner somehow leaped full-grown from the forehead of Glenn Beck.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck did not send Jared Loughner out to kill, even if their extreme lock-and-load rhetoric -- Beck, brandishing a baseball bat, has warned his viewers to watch out during the next “killing spree” -- has helped legitimate such talk. What they have certainly done is help create an inspirational environment where it is perfectly normal for Tea Party extremists to attend political rallies while packing pistols. Indeed, packing pistols is the point, isn’t it?

That said, conservative columnist David Brooks, in an astonishingly superficial argument, wrote in the New York Times that those who drag politics into public debate over the killing of political figures and government officials are leveling “vicious charges” and lack empathy for the mentally ill. Brooks gravely wagged his finger at those -- he singled out MSNBC commentator Keith Olberman, former Senator Gary Hart, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas -- who have argued that violent rhetoric from the Tea Party and Sarah Palin set the table for the Tucson shootings. (Of course Congresswoman Giffords herself chastised Palin for putting her district in the now-infamous gun-sight crosshairs. Does Brooks include her, too, in excoriating “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness”?)

How sugary is Brooks’ argument? Compare it to what he wrote following the shooting rampage that took place at Fort Hood in November 2009. In that murderous incident, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was ultimately charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30. Hasan, a Muslim psychiatrist, was clearly disturbed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (he was about to be deployed to the latter) and his deteriorating mental state had been a concern to officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

That was before Hasan snapped. Despite documented psychiatric worries, the issue of terrorism quickly dominated public discussion of Hasan’s act.

At the time, Brooks derided talk of Hasan’s mental state and characterized those who brought it up as casting “a shroud of political correctness” over the Hasan “narrative.”

“The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality,” Brooks intoned. “It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.”

So much for “vicious charges” and empathy. They are apparently reserved for young white males in Tucson; Muslims need not apply.

Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up in Arizona and Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania. The Homeland Security Department issued a lonely cautionary report in 2009 on the rising tide of right-wing extremism; it was loudly hooted down by right-wing radio celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and Internet pundits like Michelle Malkin. The killings and the attacks went on.

Now, we have arrived at another Martin Luther King Day, the birthday of a man gunned down by a right-wing extremist more than 40 years ago and, while we talk endlessly about rhetoric, we have done a remarkable job of ignoring the growing pile of bodies. The murderous right wing is still with us. The racists and the skinheads and the neo-Nazis are still here. Sales of Glock semi-automatic guns are skyrocketing in the wake of Tucson. The growing piles of bodies is real evidence of growing extremist activity. What could be plainer or starker?

Congressman Peter King, the New York Republican who now heads the House Homeland Security Committee, is planning to hold hearings on Muslim radicalization in America when the new Congress convenes. Muslims, he said in the wake of the Tucson killings, are recruited by "foreign" terrorists, while Loughner is just a "deranged" American, the latest in a long line of deranged Americans.

What place is this? Where are we now?

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.

[Note on sources: The FBI field report on dirty bomber James Cummings can be found in .pdf file format by clicking here. The Homeland Security Department report on rising right-wing extremism can be found in .pdf format by clicking here.]

Woven with Her Brush: Paintings by Zohra Ben Hamida

2011-01-14T15:31:00.004-05:00

Woven with Her Brush:
Paintings by Zohra Ben Hamida
At the Jerusalem Fund Gallery
21 January - 4 March 2011

Opening reception Friday, 21 January 2011, 6:00 -8:00 p.m.

Artist Zohra Ben Hamida says of herself, “I am an Arab and Berber by ancestry, Tunisian by birth, Mediterranean and African by a lucky chance, American by destiny, and who I am today by choice.”

In her paintings at The Jerusalem Fund Gallery, color is the theme. “ The blazing sun straddling the cool shades over the desert in Saudi Arabia, memories of the bright garments adorned with gold and silver fibulae my Berber grandmother always wore with such pride; colors encountered every day, the colors of the bougainvillea and jasmine, indiscriminately lending their beauty and fragrance to modest and luxurious houses alike; a bigger than life icon inhabiting a Roman church for hundreds of years, still calling attention to itself with its dazzling gold-leaf garment, bright colors, sprinkled everywhere you look, reminding us that beauty exists around and within us, reminding us that beauty will always prevail.”

Where
The Gallery
2425 Virginia Ave, NW

Washington, DC 20037
202.338.1958

Map
click here

When
Jan 21 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

I started a Tumblr Blog.

2011-01-13T14:45:00.007-05:00

Quote of the day.

(Word.)

I'll still be blogging here. My Tumblog (also called Vs. the Pomegranate) will be for shorter stuff--pictures, quotes, reblogging other Tumblog stuff I like, etc. I'll also be experimenting with cross-posting and linking to my older posts here. Broad strokes: This space will be more about words and my Tumblr will be more about pictures. This is all part of my multi-platform cross-promotional empire. Lock up your daughters America, those people are everywhere.

http://vsthepomegranate.tumblr.com/

Stop by and lemme know what you think.

Quote of the Day, "I Can't Wait To Blow Up..."

2011-01-07T06:22:00.000-05:00

Can't. Stop. Laughing.

... Blame Sabina for this, I stole it from her Facebook wall. Damn you Sabina! *shakes fist*

Radiohole presents: Whatever, Heaven Allows (WHA?!)

2011-01-05T15:52:00.006-05:00

Radiohole returns to Brooklyn to present:

Whatever, Heaven Allows (WHA?!)

at The Collapsable Hole
146 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-388-2251

January 8-10 (Sat-Mon) @ 8pm
January 12-15 (Wed-Sat) @ 8pm
January 17 (Mon) Benefit Show @ 7:30pm

Tickets: $20, $15 students/seniors
Reservations: radiohole@gmail.com or 718-388-2251

Whatever, Heaven Allows is by Radiohole with Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, Maggie Hoffman, Joseph Silovsky and Mark Jaynes
film & video by: Aaron Harrow & Radiohole

"Whatever, Heaven Allows is Radiohole's monster mash-up of Douglas Sirk's 1955 box office smash "All that Heaven Allows" (staring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman), and John Milton's hit 1667 poem "Paradise Lost" featuring history's most famous fallen hero, Satan.

GET AN AD IN THE SHOW
Purchase an AD or SHOUT-OUT that runs during Whatever, Heaven Allows

COME TO THE BENEFIT SHOW and/or PARTY MONDAY, JANUARY 17th
Hosted by: The Amazing RUSSELLO and special guests Richard Maxwell and the NYC Players Band with Scott Shepherd on Ukulele!

------------------------------------------------

Whatever, Heaven Allows (WHA!?) was commissioned by and performed at The Walker Art Center, The Andy Warhol Museum and PS122. It was also made possible with a matching grant from the National Performance Network's Creation Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affiars

Whatever, Heaven Allows is presented in association with Performance Space 122 as part of COIL - an annual winter festival of contemporary performance featuring hits from the past, present and future seasons of Performance Space 122. www.ps122.org.

Tarek Halaby performance, "An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition..."

2011-01-03T14:51:00.007-05:00

2010 New York Dance and Performance
“Bessie” Award Winning Artist Tarek Halaby

WHAT: An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Part One.

WHERE: at Henry St. Settlement (lower east side)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street) New York, NY 10002

WHEN: this Friday night Jan 7 at 7:30 and Saturday 1/8 at 1:30 pm. $15 Buy tickets here.

"'An Attempt...' is the result of a research process in which [Palestinian/American artist] Halaby looks into the varying and matching points between collective and personal stories, inside the choreographic creative processes. By presenting this piece as a "product" in process, to finish or resolve, Tarek relates the work to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  In this solo, Halaby questions and explores the ironies and paradoxes of art works with a deliberate political content.

This solo is presented as part of American Realness, a festival of new dance and contemporary performance made for the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) Conference; a platform for the experimental and subversive American artists who are pursuing new research and artistic production. The agenda of American Realness is to reshape the identity of contemporary American dance and performance, and an eye towards global diffusion."

"This failure full of personal vulnerability has seldom been this clever and funny" — De Morgen

State of the Blog: Happy New Year? A Toe Story.

2011-01-01T13:29:00.019-05:00

Yes We* Can!
(*we does not include Arabs, Muslims or Latin@s)

So thanks to about a million tweets and status updates I am now aware that it is 1/1/11, which is vaguely ominous and futuristic. Is this the year the intelligent machines take over? Will anyone notice when they do? Am I the only person in America who didn't get a Kindle for Christmas?

But despite the sci-fi subtext the year began gently-- at least for me. Dog slept late (the only trick I ever taught him he managed to learn) and peed right away in the snow. I ate a delicious breakfast to the sounds of the Honeymooners marathon and then, lost in thought about the upcoming year I smashed--and possibly broke, it isn't yet clear--my little toe. I jumped up and down like a Looney-Tunes character with a giant pulsing toe. A Looney-Tunes character that was yelling "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" (The dog, now sound asleep on my bed did not stir. Not exactly Lassie, him.) Then I sat down hard on a vintage chair, snapped one of the legs and wound up on the floor. As I sit here staring at my broken chair with a bag of organic frozen blueberries I bought five months ago as part of an antioxidant experiment slowly defrosting around my swollen toe I am struck by how quickly things can change.

I have a picture of myself from the exact moment Barack Obama won the 2008 election to become the 44th President of the United States. In it I am dumbstruck with happiness and relief. The long national nightmare of the Bush Administration was over because the American people have decided we have had enough, I thought. Obama's race was the lead story for most people, for obvious reasons. Although for me it was always secondary--since the few Arab-American politicians are extremely conservative (Darrel Issa, Jeanine Pirro) it never occurs to me to vote along ethnic lines. If an old money white guy had the right politics I wouldn't hesitate to support him over an Arab guy with the wrong ones, full stop. But the symbolic significance of Obama's ascension to the Presidency cannot be denied and I thought it represented not only a shift in the racial landscape of the US but a rejection of Bush-era conservatism.

Turns out, not so much. At least not for people like me.

It's hard to remember now given the rancorous obstruction and race-baiting of the past year and a half but there was a golden moment at the start of the Obama Presidency when his detractors weren't sure yet how to criticize him (and even many of his future enemies were still congratulating themselves for the social progress associated with his win). After dipping so low in the eyes of the world Obama's entry into our highest office seemed to signal a necessary sea- change and even conservatives seemed relieved to finally have something to celebrate.

Every American President enjoys a honeymoon period--Bush did--and how they choose to spend this political capital is instructive. Clinton, who also rode a wave of dissatisfaction with conservatism into office nearly derailed his young Presidency by trying to reform health care in 1993. (And in the process earned his wife, who'd lead the aborted effort, a reputation as an over reaching political opportunist that clings to her still). But unlike so many others I was unable to enjoy the Obama honeymoon because despite the fact that he cuts an inspiring figure I wanted to see what he was actually going to do. On the second or third day of his Presidency Obama affirmed his commitment to closing Guantanamo and I was relieved. I shouldn't have been. Not only did he not close the prison and interrogation camp at Guantanamo by his own deadline he has now--via US Press Secretary Robert Gibbs--announced that it won't close at all. At least, not anytime soon. Near the one year anniversary of the Administration's failed closure timetable--nestled conveniently in the midst of the holiday news-cycle--Gibbs said, "It's certainly not going to close in the next month [...] I think part of this depends on the Republicans' willingness to work with the administration on this.''

So this he is willing to blame the Republicans for?

Like the Obama Administration, Guantanamo is both a symbol and a functional system. It represents the corruption of US American justice and our willingness to torture and degrade our foreign "Others." (It bears remembering that the site was used to "detain" Haitians fleeing Aristide to prevent them from entering the United States as refugees under Clinton.) Functionally Guantanamo is a lawless space where the US does its dirty work and its closure would symbolize a turn of the page away from the worst excesses of the previous administration. But that did not happen so instead it signals that despite Obama's campaign promises to the contrary, the radical expansion of Executive powers engineered by Bush Administration are the new Normal for the United States. Despite a much-publicized troop withdrawal the US military presence in Iraq persists and the war in Afghanistan continues apace. So despite his campaign rhetoric Obama actually expanded US Military presence in the so-called "Muslim World." Of course he also never misses an opportunity to be made a fool of by Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, a country that would not exist without the billions of dollars we pump into it. And the so-called "peace-process" has never seemed more like a puppet show than it does under the rubric of his Presidency. It would not be much of a stretch to see Obama's repeated public humiliations at Netanyahu's hands as a rehearsal for his many embarrassing concessions to Republicans at home. And the overall message derived from these events is clear: President Obama does not care about Arabs and Muslims at home or abroad. Of course a similar list could be made by Latin@s with similarly disappointing results. The discourse linking "homeland security" with "illegal immigration" puts Arabs, Muslims and Latin@s in the same boat (pun intended) with this Administration. Even though Conservatives are the ones who have described us (All of us) as bacteria infecting the host body of the West the lack of challenge to that view put forth by the Obama Administration allows it to stand--and worse, to become an increasingly mainstream position. In sum, under President Obama Arabs, Muslims (and Latin@s) are no better off than we were under George W. Bush.

Under Bush I was angry. But under Obama I feel hopeless, the exact opposite of his promise. And as he gears up for re-election the apologists of the mainstream Left are already beginning to poo-poo the concerns of people like me and marginalize us as too radical. But is it too radical to ask that you be included among the list of concerns for your own President? To not have him sell you out to conservatives and foreign governments to earn points with the public by playing to their racism, ethnocentrism and Islamophobia?

Like my poor toe, I have been numb. But sooner or later you have to peel off the wet bag of soggy blueberries and assess the damage. Like my toe, I hope America is only bruised and not broken.

But it is too early to tell.

International Performing Arts Lab and Conference: Call for Artists

2010-12-30T21:38:00.004-05:00

May 17 - 24, 2011
Leitring bei Leibnitz, Austria

International Performing Arts Lab and Conference is inviting participants to take part in an intensive programme of practical training, lectures, discussions guided by the Russian theatre director and teacher Sergei Ostrenko, and a conference programme with leading experts and teachers from different countries.

Special discounted fees are available for artistic ensembles and their leaders as well as senior students groups and their teachers!

Participants are actors of physical, dramatic, dance, musical theatres, circus performers, directors, choreographers, visual artists, sound and light designers. Talents from different backgrounds, genre and style can draw from Ostrenko's system and develop their skills according to their field of expertise, enlarge personal horizons and create connections with colleagues from all over the world.

Programme:
The programme is focused on Ostrenko's method of actor’s training, relying on the Russian Theatre Tradition and the newest experiments in performing arts. Participants will practically explore physicality as the principal creative instrument, the key to form, style, atmosphere and emotional palette in contemporary performance, stepping beyond the limits of habitual text-based acting. Performer's physicality in the methods of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and M.Chekhov, Meyerhold's Biomechanics Etudes, Tai-chi for actors, Training by method of improvisation, scene composition from exercises to performance: these are some of the elements uniquely transformed and combined in Ostrenko's teaching system to suit performers, directors and teachers contemporary needs.

The Lab and Conference are a great opportunity to approach a unique methodological and practical material that will enrich your professional skills and will offer you the possibility to share an intense creative experience at a global level!

The event will take place in the "Green Heart" of Austria, Styria Region, at the historic 15th century castle. Nearest international airports - Graz and Vienna, Austria.
Accommodation and meals are organized.

Registration: candidates should send a letter of motivation stating the Lab dates and CV/résumé with photo to PhysikTheater@gmail.com

More details: http://www.iugte.com/projects/PhysicalTheatre.php
http://www.iugte.com/projects/program.php
http://picasaweb.google.com/globtheatre

A rapist who dodged jail, or a Palestinian man unjustly accused?: A Discussion, Part Two

2010-12-29T14:19:00.012-05:00

Sigh.

A little background in case you haven't been following along: My post about the case of Sabbar Kashur, the Palestinian Israeli man charged with "rape by deception" of an Israeli Jewish woman was inspired by a post on the blog/online magazine +972 (subtitled "Independent commentary from Israel and the Palestinian Territories") written by Lisa Goldman. As I wrote in Part One Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli based in Jaffa, responded to a cover story about the case by Lital Grossman that ran in the Tel Aviv weekly magazine Ha’Ir (The City), in which she questioned the role of anti-Arab racism in Kashur's sentencing. Goldman suggested that since the lesser change of "rape by deception" was a plea-bargain Kashur actually benefited from being Palestinian by using his ethnicity to avoid jail time. The subtext, that excessive Israeli compassion for Palestinians blinds them to their criminality, is a familiar--if mournful-- refrain among "Liberal Zionists", and it was the red flag that drew my attention in the first place.

Before writing about it here at the POMEGRANATE I responded to Goldman on the comment thread following her post at +972. When our interaction went past a few posts I tried to opt out--in my experience the internet often inspires an obsessive tit-for-tat that kills potentially productive discussions. So, rather than dominate her comment thread I wrote my own post and told Goldman she was welcome to continue our interaction here. Unsurprisingly she did not take me up on my offer but I want to reproduce our final exchange anyway as a folow up because it was fruitful in teasing out the multiple threads--gender, race, Orientalism/Islamophobia (which she dismissed as "hackneyed terms" Ha.), sexism , nationalism etc.--that are tangled together in this case. Anyone interested in reading our exchange in its original context should refer to the comment thread following Goldman's post.

ME: Lisa, I don’t want to bicker with you and clog up your comment thread. But: of course I am not suggesting that it is impossible for Kashur to be guilty because he is Palestinian– I am arguing only that the case for rape against him could not be proved. However, once B’s testimony was made widely available Grossman and you (and others around the net) decided that it was credible, despite her universally understood mental instability, which is a bit unnerving. You wrote , “B’s story sounds believable”… Why? And what makes you conclude that Kashur may be guilty of rape after all because he served time on a lesser charge? As I have said, that makes no sense to me. In fact, the only way I can think of to justify your conclusions in the above post is anti-Arab racism.

[...] If you feel I have misrepresented your argument please let me know and I’ll happily note that. In your last response you made a distinction between Grossman’s take on the case and your own that is not clear to me from the original post. I do not want to attribute opinions to you that are better described as Grossman’s, even if I ultimately disagree with the rest of what you have written. I appreciate that you have responded to me and I’ll publish any comment you make over at VS the POMEGRANATE. Does that seem fair?

LISA GOLDMAN: [Responding first to another commenter who'd critiqued my earlier post.] Maayan, you and Joseph are exactly the same types. If you had been born a Palestinian-American, you would have chosen his argument. Neither one of you is capable of seeing beyond your biases to examine a case based on facts. You are both blinded by your agendas and your prejudices.

LISA GOLDMAN: Joseph, if Sabur Kashur had been a Jewish Israeli man, the charges against him would have been dismissed.

However, the charges would have been dismissed not because he was innocent, but because he could not have been charged with rape by deception.

The defense attorney wanted to question the plaintiff about 14 previous incidents of rape and incest. Neither her attorney nor the judge thought she capable of maintaining her composure while she was questioned about previous rapes. At that point, seeing that he was about to lose his conviction, the prosecutor charged Kashur with rape by deception. And even here the ‘deception’ was not only the odious charge that Kashur presented himself as a Jew, but that he presented himself as a *bachelor* Jew, when he was in fact a *married* Palestinian.

My comparison between the judge’s wording of the plea bargain and EM Forster is not sarcastic, by the way; it is literal. The transcripts show that the judge would have convicted on the evidence, but could not legally override the defense’s request to question the plaintiff about her past. But his dissatisfaction with the plea bargain does not make his racist, colonialist wording acceptable.

The physical evidence against Kashur was solid. Police found the victim battered, bleeding and naked in a stairwell. She was taken to a hospital, examined and given a rape kit. Based on that evidence and her statement to the police, charges were brought against Kashur. Based on the transcripts of the trial, her testimony sounds very credible. If the defense attorney had not insisted on his right to question the plaintiff about her past, Kashur would most probably have been convicted on the original charges.

ME: Lisa, Thank for your last response to me (Sunday , December 26, 4:09)– In it, you were much more clear than in your original post, which conflated Grossman’s conclusions with your own. As promised I will integrate it into my own post.

However, based on your response it seems you missed an opportunity with your original post. The fact that the Defense has the right to question an accuser about her past in a rape trial is the point here, *not* the ethnicity of the alleged perpetrator. Under these terms an Israeli Jewish man would have gotten off completely so Kashur’s ethnicity actually worked against him here, which is the exact opposite of what Grossman (and you) suggest. But if you had focused on the fundamental sexism of Israeli rape law and its subsequent role in earning Kashur a reduced sentence you might have really had something here. I cannot help but wonder why you centered your post around Kashur then? Do you blame me for wondering about your motives when, given the opportunity to critique a sexist Israeli law you instead blamed the Palestinian guy? Especially given that Kashur’s conviction was predicated on his ethnicity, since a Jewish Israeli man committing the same crime would have gone free in the same circumstances?

I appreciate your devotion to “facts”, even if you framed your concern for the truth as a dig at me. If your original post about Kashur had been that straightforward and factual I wouldn’t have commented in the first place. But it wasn’t. And that you became so extraordinarily defensive when I pointed out the blind spots and inconsistencies in your post (some of which you still have not addressed) is telling. You have entreated me to “research” your past positions as a way to contextualize this post but if you had written it in such a way that was consistent with the kind of analysis you are clearly capable of, I wouldn’t have to.

Look, you live in a racist society. As an American, so do I. Any analysis of a case involving members of a privileged majority and an oppressed minority that does not engage with that simple fact is flawed at the root, even if it pretends toward “objectivity.” That has been my only point here.

Couple things tough:

1) I am not a “type” I am a man–singular. Don’t you think it is bad form to erase my humanity so summarily? Please note that at no point did I do this to you.
2) I am not Palestinian or Palestinian-American. Or Muslim, if you are wondering.
3) I do not have an “agenda” here beyond holding you accountable for being clear about what you are trying to say.
4) I don’t hate anybody. I’m just not an idiot–when liberals from racist societies (however unintentionally) reproduce racist ideologies in their work I notice. Sometimes if it is important enough I am compelled to comment. That’s all.

RIP Teena Marie

2010-12-28T02:27:00.007-05:00

Dead at 54. Just like my dad. Too young.

Rest in peace Vanilla Starchild. Your music was part of the soundtrack to my youth. Lovergirl was the first fast song at my senior dance. It is hard to imagine a world without you in it.

I was the one
who said tune in tomorrow
I love to the bone marrow, even when I am asleep and
who are you to say
what I did when you weren't around
just because I fell in love with you
Casanova Brown
standing room only, the concerts sold out
everyone's there for the party
the hush turns to a shout
everyone's got a piece
of the pie
of you and I
but nobody knows when the lights dim down
that the tears fall harder than the whole damn crowd

--Casanova Brown

A rapist who dodged jail, or a Palestinian man unjustly accused?: A Discussion

2010-12-26T06:18:00.009-05:00

Sabbar Kashur, on the cover of Ha’Ir (The City) magazine

On Christmas Eve in among the silly holiday tweets on my feed was an RT from Slate's @amandamarcotte that pointed to a blogpost from Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman about Sabbar Kashur, a Palestinian Muslim Israeli man accused of raping a Jewish Israeli woman. Marcotte urged those of us who were "hand-wringing" over the treatment of the Palestinian Kashur by the Israeli court to "go read this", implying that there was new evidence of Kashur's guilt. On December 3rd Ha’Ir (The City), a weekly magazine distributed only in Tel Aviv, published a cover story by Lital Grossman that openly questioned the allegations of anti-Arab racism in light of the details of Kashur's sentence, which was revealed to have been a plea bargain. Grossman's article inspired Goldman's blogpost (and Marcotte's tweet) and all three summarily dismiss the effects of anti-Arab racism on Kashur's case on feminist grounds.

After two years under house arrest Kashur was finally charged earlier this year with "rape by deception", based on the accusation that he had mis-represented himself to his accuser--called "B" by the court to protect her identity--as a single Jewish Israeli rather than the married Palestinian Israeli Muslim he is. The court's decision was openly questioned and sparked debate about the secondary role of Palestinians with Israeli society and their subsequent vulnerability to the law. In response to these criticisms the judge revealed that Kashur's sentence of rape by deception was a plea bargain. The lesser charge, which led to an 18 month sentence for Kashur, was proposed by the prosecution because the more serious rape charge could not be proved. In her unsealed testimony B affirmed,

“He took off my pants and underwear [...] and all of this was done with force, I didn’t agree to anything… I was left in just my shirt. Then he took off his clothes… then he put saliva on his penis and then, it was like full penetration, like, it wasn’t with consent as he claims. He laid me on the floor… and asked to kiss my chest too and then like when I asked him to stop and tried to push him away, he started pressuring me with his arms forcefully on me… when I tried to push him with my hand in his stomach, this happened in a more advanced stage, when he was already inside of me, then he said that if I stay silent and I don’t resist, then it would like end faster and it wouldn’t be, like, he wouldn’t use force. I still resisted him and it was forced.”

The blogger Goldman concludes that B’s story "sounds believable"... although she does not explain why she thinks so. She writes, "Based on her testimony it appears that she was not a racist but rather a terribly vulnerable, emotionally damaged woman who was desperate for affection." So for Goldman B's emotional vulnerability precludes the possibility of her racism, a false binary that disregards the fact that, however desperate her circumstances, B is a member of a privileged ethnic group within Israel and Kashur isn't.

According to Goldman,

“B,” was an emotionally traumatized woman in her 20s who had been raped by her father from the age of six. On the day she met Kashur, she was living in a women’s shelter. Before that, she had worked briefly as a prostitute and spent some time living on the streets. Kashur lured her into the building on Hillel Street with the claim that he worked there and wanted to show her his office; he then assaulted her and raped her, leaving her naked and bleeding – which is how the police discovered her. B. was later hospitalized in a psychiatric institution, where the police questioned her about the rape, which led them to Kashur. During the trial, after it became apparent that B’s past, combined with her emotional state, made her a vulnerable witness, the prosecution came up with a plea bargain of rape by deception.

Goldman sums up her evaluation of Kashur's case, writing, "Kashur was not unjustly punished because he was an Arab, but the opposite: [...] he managed to avoid the punishment he deserved because his ethnicity made it possible to plead guilty to the lesser charge of rape by deception, thus avoiding jail time." This gymnastic logic employs lack of evidence for the greater charge, which would normally be construed as lack of guilt (if not proof of innocence) as the opposite. In other words, for Goldman the fact that the prosecution could not make a case against Kashur for rape is "proof" of his guilt.

Goldman writes,

The judges’ wording of the verdict seemed to be inspired by E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, or an Oriental version of To Kill a Mockingbird, with Kashur as Tom Robinson, the black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” wrote the judges. Judge Tsvi Segal added, “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls .”

The angle of Goldman's post (and Grossman’s story), that being Palestinian is in any way advantageous in Israel is utterly fantastic… But the notion that minority populations derive benefit from their abject status is a pretty standard charge. She makes light of the obvious comparisons to Forster and Lee’s stories even as she recounts the Israeli court’s description of Kashur as a “sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminal” who preys on “innocent (Jewish, female) victims”, which is pretty much the basic narrative of all the “Darkie Wants Our Women” stories ever written. Further, his accuser's lack of mental coherence, which substantiates her accusations for Grossman, Goldman and Marcotte could also easily disqualify them... And no, it is not "victim blaming" to point that out, especially since all parties involved agree that B is mentally unblanced. Neither is it "rape apology", given the long history of male racial and ethnic "others" getting tortured, killed and/or imprisoned based on the say-so of white women in racist societies. Or white men acting of their behalf, regardless of their wishes. The story of Emmet Till, a black fourteen year old boy who was literally beaten to a pulp because he was alleged to have flirted with a white girl in 1955 Mississippi is emblematic of the special vulnerability of men of color to charges of sexual violence.

Emmett Till, before and after reportedly flirting with a white woman

I would never suggest something as stupid and vile as the idea that men of color are never guilty of sexual violence or that racism (Orientalism, Islamophobia, etc.) is ever an excuse for rape. But racism inevitably shapes the dynamic when the alleged victims are members of a privileged majority, the accused attackers are minorities, and the society in which the charge is made is based on a fundamentally racist distinction between them. A blanket dismissal of such entrenched hierarchies grants free access to a wealth of racist repertoires about "dark"men under the cover of liberal discourses like feminism. If we can agree that allegations of rape should be taken seriously, can we not also agree that institutionalized racism should not be waved away because it complicates the frame in which they are made? This dynamic is especially stark in a country like Israel, whose ethno-nationalist illusions are formalized as law, but it is no less a factor in the United States, with its melting-pot pretensions. It seems clear though, based on Gloria Steinem's remarks during the last election that there is a line of feminist thinking--often espoused by white, middle class, westerners-- which argues the reverse: that gender trumps all other considerations, a proscription that has potentially deadly consequences for men of color.

Goldman writes,

There are few unassailable facts or bottom lines here. A woman who may or may not have been raped is in a psychiatric hospital, traumatized and unable to communicate coherently. Perhaps a rapist who should have have been jailed is now a free man, wandering around Jerusalem shopping malls with his kids while the woman he raped is institutionalized, physically and emotionally traumatized. Or perhaps an innocent man was forced to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, in order to avoid being sentenced to jail by judges who were biased against Arabs. None of these issues were raised in the original reporting of the affair. None of the reporters covering the story when it first broke, in July, mentioned having applied to the courts to obtain the unsealed testimony. The polarized, angry atmosphere in contemporary Israel seems to make rational, detached analysis nearly impossible. This is a very troubling state of affairs. It is also quite dangerous.

There is no way for anyone to know for certain what went on between B and Kashur, which is why in democracies we depend on the law to guide us to resolution. If proved guilty of B’s rape there is no question that Kashur should be punished, but he wasn’t and he was punished anyway. Goldman's post (and Grossman’s story), which suggest that Kashur’s Palestinian identity earned him a legal advantage purposefully obscures two key points: 1) The court made his ethnicity an issue and the justification for his charge and 2) His ethnicity is only important in the first place because Palestinian Israelis are not equal citizens with their Jewish neighbors. No matter how “macho” Israeli society is--another argument made by Goldman to explain Kashur's reduced sentence-- the notion that Jewish Israeli men feel solidarity or even empathy (!) with a Palestinian man accused of raping a Jewish Israeli woman is too ridiculous to contemplate. Israeli Apartheid precludes the possibility of such collusion.

Goldman is correct when she writes that the particular arrangement of Israeli society make "rational, detached analysis nearly impossible" but she seems to exempt herself from this dynamic. However in raising concerns about Kashur's case without acknowledging the role of institutionalized racism in Israel she perpetuates its most pernicious memes about Arab criminality (which occurs only in a vacuum and never as a response to living within a racist system). Only someone who benefits from it could conclude that a Palestinian accused of a crime that could not be proved has somehow beaten the system by serving eighteen months in an Israeli jail. Goldman is also correct when she describes the situation around Kashur's case as "dangerous."

What is less clear in her analysis is, dangerous for whom?

UPDATE:

Lisa Goldman responded to my critique of her post about Kashur on her blog +972. Because this post is already long I have reproduced the key section of our exchange in Part Two.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T19:13:00.006-05:00

Rocket wishes you a sleepy Christmas and a relaxing New Year.

Spike Lee Signs His New Book: Do The Right Thing

2010-12-13T20:33:00.004-05:00

Spike Lee: Do The Right Thing

By Spike Lee and Jason Matloff

Book Signing

Thursday, December 16, 7–8:30PM

The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
rsvp: spikelee@powerHouseArena.com

Spike Lee is stopping by The powerHouse Arena to sign copies of Spike Lee: Do The Right Thing, a new book that celebrates the 20th anniversary of the film's seminal debut.

About the book:

Spike Lee: Do The Right Thing is an unprecedented, insider's look at the film, with behind-the-scenes visuals and interviews celebrating the impact of Do The Right Thing on American culture.

Do The Right Thing remains one of the most controversial films of its era. Employing director Spike Lee's hometown of Brooklyn as the essential setting, this explosive film masterfully explores race and class relationships.

Both a critical and popular success, Do The Right Thing became a landmark film that brought serious issues in the African American community to light and established Lee as a major director in American cinema. Lee also wrote the screenplay, produced, and even starred in this deeply personal film, which was applauded for its commanding visuals provided by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, intense performances by an all-star cast, and an assertive soundtrack featuring Public Enemy's Fight the Power.

The film is even credited with bringing President Barack Obama and the First Lady together on their first date!

About the author:

Spike Lee and his film company, 40 Acres and a Mule, continue to shine the light on controversial subjects through award-winning feature films and documentaries. Lee is also the artistic director of the graduate film program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

2010-12-07T01:28:00.001-05:00

Date: Friday, December 10, 2010, 8 pm
Location: The New School Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 2nd Floor, 55 W 13th St, New York

FREE. No RSVP necessary.

A co-presentation with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis & the New School

Cabinet, The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, and the New School present a screening of There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed and Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering, parts 3 and 4 of The Century of the Self, the extraordinary BBC documentary on the intertwined histories of Sigmund Freud, modern consumerism, and representative democracy. At its heart is the idea that public relations and politicians have used Freud's theories to engineer a society of consent.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction by George Prochnik, Cabinet contributor and author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology (2006) and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2010). It will be followed by an open discussion with psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann, who is a participant in the documentary.

Parts one and two of the documentary (Happiness Machine and The Engineering of Consent,) were screened on November 12, with a short introduction by Jane Kupersmidt, faculty at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and member of the Freudian Society. A transcript of the introduction is available here. The first two parts of the The Century of the Self can be seen online here.

Rumble Ghost: A dance performamce based on Poltergeist

2010-12-06T06:00:00.000-05:00

P S 122 presents the WORLD PREMIERE of JACK FERVER’s

RUMBLE GHOST

Wednesday December 8th - Sunday December 12th

8pm with a late show at 10 pm on Saturday December 11th

Tickets $20, $15 (students/seniors), $11 (with the PS122 Passport - limited availability!)

Tickets can be purchased here
or calling 212-352-3101
PS 122 is located at 150 1rst Ave @ E. 9th Street

Rumble Ghost is a psychological dance-play that channels the classic 80s horror film Poltergeist.

"Horror movies will never be as terrifying and shocking as the human psyche. They act as metaphors – scary stories that offer a release or escape from the more devastating twists and turns of an unquiet mind. Without ghosts to explain haunted houses, we are left with the pain sites of crumbling careers, failing marriages, abused children. In Rumble Ghost, as the flimsy membrane between an American horror movie classic and the fragility of the human condition deteriorates, the darkest place in the world is shown to be right up there: in your mind.

Performed in Jack Ferver’s “hyper-reality” style, seven performers reinterpret the 1982 classic horror film Poltergeist, exploring pop-psychological landscapes with movement, original music, and a highly calibrated script. The Poltergeist theme corrodes and gives way to a group therapy session, created from Ferver’s personal experience with “Inner Child Work”, in a therapy technique aptly called: Psychodrama. As the performers are overtaken by their own child selves, a disturbing spectacle confronts the audience and a fearless exploration of the company’s own personae ensues."

Written and Choreographed by Jack Ferver.

Performed by Benjamin Asriel, Reid Bartelme, Christian Coulson, Carlye Eckert, Jack Ferver, Michelle Mola, Breanna O’Mara

Dramaturgy by Joshua Lubin-Levy
Assistant Dramaturgy by Samara Davis
Original Score by Calder Singer
Costumes by Reid Bartelme

Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens

2010-12-05T01:03:00.007-05:00

Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens
By Liz Goldwyn

WHAT: Paperback Launch Party, Reading, and Signing
WHEN: Wednesday, December 8, 7–9PM
WHERE: The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) DUMBO, Brooklyn

For more information, please call 718.666.3049
rsvp: rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

Training her journalist's eye on the glitter and glamour of American burlesque's greatest generation, Liz Goldwyn takes readers on an enthralling tour of the original queens of the striptease. Goldwyn's incisive exposé is a retrospective of the sights and spectacles of burlesque's golden age—and an intimate look at the women whose sexuality, ambition, and verve brought the cabaret stage to life. Join us for an exclusive reading and paperback launch party for what V Magazine calls "the most comprehensive study on the era of burlesque."

About the book:

Liz Goldwyn's lifelong fascination with the inimitable glamour of classic burlesque inspired her to spend the past eight years corresponding with, visiting, interviewing, receiving striptease lessons from, and forming close relationships with the last generation of the great American burlesque queens. Goldwyn invites us to step back into an era when the hourglass figure was in vogue and striptease was a true art form.

Pretty Things introduces readers to legendary burlesque icons including:

Betty "Ball of Fire" Rowland, who was known for her flaming red hair and bump-and-grind routines. (It turns out she once sued the author's grandfather, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., for using her stage name and costume in his Hollywood picture, Ball of Fire.)
Sherry Britton, who, with her long black hair and curvy, trim physique, was among the most stunning of the burlesque stars before Mayor LaGuardia outlawed burlesque in New York.
Zorita, whose sexually explicit "Consummation of the Wedding of the Snake" dance (performed with a live snake) and other daring performances earned her legendary status.

With Pretty Things, Goldwyn draws back the curtain to reveal the personal journeys of yesteryear's icons of female sexuality and power, restoring their legacy to an age that has all but forgotten them—despite today's resurgence of burlesque. Drawing from hundreds of archival photographs, costume sketches, newspaper clippings, and mementos that Goldwyn has collected along the way, Pretty Things is at once a feast for the eyes, a history of the art of burlesque, and a lovingly documented story of stardom and self-discovery.

About the Author:

Liz Goldwyn has worked in fashion, art, and photography since the age of sixteen. She has produced major fashion shows and art installations, helped establish the fashion department at Sotheby's New York, and was a global consultant for Shiseido America. She writes feature articles for national magazines, and designs her own collection of jewelry. Her documentary film on burlesque queens, Pretty Things, premiered in July 2005 on HBO. Goldwyn lives in Los Angeles.

DESARROLLAR: A Gallery Exhibition and Solo Performance

2010-12-04T03:46:00.006-05:00

[This fascinating exhibition/performance comes via my friend Makram--the fellow in the bit above-- who curated the HOME-LAND show I just did at his space 49B]

DESARROLLAR

by Laura Schwamb and Makram Hamdan

A gallery exhibition and solo performance at Center for Performance Research

A collaboration of visual art and dance, the evening begins with a gallery exhibition of works by Laura Schwamb. Her videos, animated neon, and black and white images set the atmosphere for the performance. Her concept of having a human bridle fabricated was beautifully realized and made possible by Johnny Farah. The exhibition is followed by a solo performance in the main theater by Makram Hamdan. Using the show's theme, conceived by Laura Schwamb, Makram Hamdan engages to push the limits of poetic control, visceral constraint, and physical endurance in a challenging semi-autobiographical performance based on memory.

CPR - Center for Performance Research December 9, 10, and 11. 2010.

Gallery exhibition opens at 7:00pm - Performance begins at 8pm - SHARP

Tickets: $15 - advance purchase recommended - http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/139506

Directions: 361 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn (b/w Jackson St. & Withers St.). L Train to Graham Avenue (3rd Stop in Brooklyn) / Exit right out of turnstile / Left on Graham / Left on Jackson / Right on Manhattan. www.cprnyc.org

General Inquiries (non-press): info@cprnyc.org 718-349-1210 

Makram Hamdan (Choreographer and performer) Originally from Lebanon, Makram Hamdan’s emigration to Portland, OR as a teen, initiated his dance training. Subsequently, he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts. Another emigration to France launched his professional dance career, notably with Jean-Claude Gallotta, CCN de Grenoble. While in France, he also began working with Robert Wilson as a performer, then, as choreographer and assistant director both in Europe and at Wilson's Watermill Center in Long Island, NY. With a strong desire to design gardens, he established Makram Hamdan Designs, and began creating grand-scale gardens for private clients. Currently living in Brooklyn's vibrant arts neighborhood of Bushwick, Hamdan founded 49B Studios, an artists' residence loft and exhibition space and recently curated his first exhibition titled HOME-LAND for BETA Spaces 2010 and co-presented with ArteEast. www.makramhamdan.com 49B Studios

Laura Schwamb (Visual Artist) Lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, where she works in different media centered around the day-to-day psychological moments of the experience of being alive, balancing between the physical and the spiritual and the transitions of being and becoming. www.lauraschwamb.blogspot.com

Johnny Farah (Leather Goods Designer) Johnny Farah's early influences came from Copenhagen. Living there in the 70’s, he developed a particular interest in the simplicity and practicality of the Scandinavian architecture and furniture design, more specifically in the way different materials like concrete, iron, wood or leather were put to their full formal and functional potential. Following Johnny’s life-changing encounter with architects Arne Jacobson and Hans Wegner, he decided to concentrate on his leather designs, which, up until then, were only a means to support his studies. Johnny Farah has since become a global brand. www.johnnyfarah.com

Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz, Censored at the Smithsonian

2010-12-03T06:47:00.010-05:00

Fire in My Belly, David Wojnarowicz (1987)

Music by Diamanda Galas

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a painter, writer, filmmaker and performance artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at 37. In 1990 he won an important lawsuit against conservative Christian Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, who'd appropriated some of his work for one its tracts. The judgment read, in part,

[David Wojnarowicz] earns his living by selling his art works, many of which are assertedly directed at bringing attention to the devastation wrought upon the homosexual community by the AIDS epidemic. Plaintiff attempts through his work to expose what he views as the failure of the United States government and public to confront the AIDS epidemic in any meaningful way. To this end, plaintiff's art at times incorporates sexually explicit images for the avowed purpose of shaping community attitudes towards sexuality. As a result, his works have been the subject of controversy and public debate concerning government funding of non-traditional art.

[...] On or about April 12, 1990, the AFA and Wildmon published and distributed throughout the United States, including the Southern District of New York, the AFA pamphlet (the "pamphlet") in an effort to stop public funding by the NEA of art works such as plaintiff's. The pamphlet was mailed to 523 members of Congress, 3,230 Christian leaders, 947 Christian radio stations and 1,578 newspapers, at least twenty-eight of which were located in this district. Without plaintiff's authorization, Wildmon photographically copied fourteen fragments of plaintiff's works which he believed most offensive to the public and reproduced these fragments in the AFA pamphlet. These fourteen images, with three exceptions, explicitly depict sexual acts. The other three images portray Christ with a hypodermic needle inserted in his arm, and two ambiguous scenes which plaintiff represents as respectively depicting an African purification ritual and two men dancing together.

Wildmon wrote the text of the pamphlet, which is entitled "Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay For These `Works of Art.'" It states in the introductory sentence that "the photographs appearing on this sheet were part of the David Wajnarowicz [sic] 'Tongues of Flame' exhibit catalog." The envelope in which the AFA pamphlet was mailed states that the "[p]hotos enclosed in this envelope were taken from the catalog of the `Tongues of Flame' exhibit" and is marked "Caution — Contains Extremely Offensive Material."

Wojnarowicz only received a dollar when he won the suit, but he succeeded in preventing Wildmon from distributing altered images of his artwork for his hate campaign--and won a rare victory in the early years of the culture wars.

Untitled (1990), David Wojnarowicz
(in collaboration with Phil Zwickler and Rosa von Praunheim)
still from the film "Silence = Death"

Eighteen years after his death Wojnarowicz's art is still disturbing Christian conservatives, who are still arguing that taxpayer money should not support it, only this time he isn't winning... His video Fire in My Belly (1987) appeared in the National Portrait Gallery show Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture until it was removed on November 30th. It had been on display since the show opened a month earlier but objections to an image of ants crawling on a plastic crucifix in it's first few seconds led by Catholic League President William Donohue, who called the video "vile... hate speech," impelled the Smithsonian to remove it from display. The office of Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the presumptive incoming speaker of the House also issued a statement that read, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy. While the amount of money involved may be small, it's symbolic of the arrogance Washington routinely applies to thousands of spending decisions involving Americans' hard-earned money." (As part of the Smithsonian the National Gallery receives public funds.) These are shockingly similar to the attacks Wojnarowicz withstood when he was alive and using his art to shock an apathetic public into acknowledging the human cost of the AIDS crisis that ultimately ended his life. The fact that they are still being made is not that shocking considering the enormous percentage of loud, stupid D-bags swarming all over public life in this country like ants on a dropped popsicle. What is shocking is that they still work.

The fact that this happened the day before World AIDS Day is a sickening reminder of how little ground has been gained. The video, which attempts to represent the physical and emotional pain caused by AIDS, is primitive by today's standards. But the punk, DIY quality of it is a visceral reminder that it is a time capsule from 1987, when brilliant artists like David Wojnarowicz were getting sick and dying so, so young. Watch Fire in My Belly above and give it a minute. If you suspend your 21st century cynicism and let the historical context reach you, you may have a brief echo of what it was like to work in the arts then and watch helplessly as people you cared about died all around you for no reason, while the President blithely ignored the crisis.

UPDATE:

Diamanda Galás Responds to the Smithsonian’s Removal of David Wojnarowicz’s Work:

Diamanda Galás, the composer and performer of the This is the Law of the Plague (1986), which is the soundtrack to part of Wojnarowicz's Fire in My Belly responded to its removal from the Hide/Seek exhibition by the Smithsonian. She writes,

The cross is a symbol of the CRUCIFIXION, among the cruelest tortures in the world. This is the sentence of slow and horrific death in which the spinal column breaks and the organs rupture. This is the torture for the worst of outlaws – the man who protested that the sick and the poor were not allowed into the church for the crime of being perceived as UNCLEAN, rather than "pristine," and moneyed for his advocacy that the church BE a sanctuary to the sick, rather than a citadel for the rich family man, who comes to exchange invitations for tea and other such serious matters with OTHER rich family men.
David Wojnarowicz was a great artist who died a terrible death in 1992. It was one of the worst times in this country for people with AIDS. My brother, Philip-Dimitri Galas, died six years before him in 1986 of the same disease in San Diego. THERE WAS NO HOPE WHATSEOVER THEN FOR THIS DISEASE.

So what is so shocking about the truth now in 2010? Does it remind the clergy and the lawmakers of what the cross stands for: PUNISHMENT AND SAVAGE CRUELTY, and make ugly with the NICE and FRIENDLY WARM xmas spirit?

WHO in countries other than our own are dying horrific death of AIDS this Christmas? Christmas comes but once a year.

AND YOUR LIFE? It comes to you but once.

Diamanda Galás
NYC, Dec 2 2010

Eric Lott : A l'assaut du ciel! : Deturning the Twin Towers : August 1974

2010-12-01T06:54:00.001-05:00

Eric Lott : A l'assaut du ciel! : Deturning the Twin Towers : August 1974

Wednesday, December 8 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612

In August 1974, French street performer Philippe Petit made an illegal high-wire walk between the tops of the World Trade Center's newly completed Twin Towers. Petit's response to the Haussmanization of lower Manhattan is a classic Situationist "detournement": not explicitly political, it intervenes in the urban psychogeography of everyday life to reinvent not just the space between the towers but also spatial relations on the ground.

Eric Lott teaches American Studies at the University of Virginia. He has written and lectured widely on the politics of U.S. cultural history. He is currently finishing a study of race and culture in the twentieth century entitled "Tangled Up in Blue: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism."

http://www.facebook.com/Performance.studies.nyu?v=app_2344061033&ref=ts#!/event.php?eid=144029322313586&index=1

Seven Really Good New(ish) Music Videos (Proving That I Am Not An Oldhead)

2010-11-27T09:07:00.011-05:00

I had one of those unbearable, Oldhead conversations a few days ago with the comic genius Anthony DeVito about how, you know, everything used to be better. Before. In this case however, I wasn't wrong because we were talking about music videos, which kind of suck now. We grew up in the Golden Age of Music Video, when a new release would get talked about at school the next day. And rightly so. Visual cliché's aside, they were really exciting. Even artists whose music I wasn't into became compelling for a few minutes at a time based on the originality of their videos (Madonna was the Mayor of that Town). But the 90s pretty much ruined music video. The music changed and didn't really lend itself to images. Unsurprisingly, Jeremy aside, watching Eddie Vedder contort his mouth around an invisible corn-dog as he sang didn't inspire anyone to make the Grunge-thriller, which was probably just as well. Trip-hop, breakbeat, and electronica didn't either. And when Hip Hop turned "Gangster" it rejected all the joy, fun and politics that might have led to great videos. Hype Williams made a handful of good ones and a whole lot of crap ones using the same few tricks: blown out whites, fish eye lenses, shiny, shiny everything...

Anyway, I asked the question: Now that really high quality digital video is within reach for most artists why aren't videos getting better, not worse? If you listed the best music videos ever made you could easily do the top fifty before you got to 1990. Top hundred before '95. As an experiment I decided to--off the top of my head-- come up with seven memorable current (more or less) music videos to stem the tide of nostalgia that was pulling me under. Lists are the purview of the beautiful Beth Mann (see her "10 Reasons Why Everything Was Better 'Back in the Day'", for a timely example) but perhaps she will let me have this one since the results were kind of interesting when I put them all together. This is what I came up with:

"Leave all your love and your longing behind/
You can't carry it with you if you want to survive"

I'm probably going to start hating Florence and the Machine's great, strange Dog Days Are Over any day now given its ubiquity in various you-go-girl marketing campaigns (Gossip Girl? Check. Gray's Anatomy? Check. Tampax, you're up!). But even Julia Roberts doing her White-Lady-Shops-The-World-For-Enlightenment schtick in commercials for Eat Pray Love's DVD release to this song can't undo the greatness of its video. This is actually the second clip created for the song (following a DIY effort you can still find on YouTube that Florence created using Christmas lights and starring her dad poking around in a forest.) This one was directed by Georgie Greville and Geremy Jasper and features a pleasingly disparate mash-up of cultural styles-- 60s girl-group back up singers painted a science fiction-y blue, "tribal" dancers, a native-painted gospel choir... this is the sort of thing that is never less than offensive done badly. But here it completely works for me by underscoring the weird structure of the song itself, which veers from folky harp-plinking to blue-eyed soul to power-pop and back again. Florence is the real thing, I think. If she stays weird she could be the new Annie Lennox.

"It's casual/ Not heartbreaking"

Brooklyn's Here We Go Magic are a fuzzy, lo-fi "psychedelic electro-folk" band formed by Luke Temple and Casual is a track on their sophomore album, Pigeons. Building on the simple lyric, "It's casual/ Not heartbreaking" the video, directed by directing team Peking (aka Nat Livingston Johnson and Gregory Mitnick), is set in an obscure hospital/clinic. Various bloody vignettes illustrate the ordinariness of death, dying and, in a surreal turn, birth. I won't blow the big reveal at the climax but for me the most heartrending image is Temple, writhing in pain on a hospital bed when his face is suddenly suffused by white light... which the camera reveals is only streaming from a newly opened window. Oof. Oh, and NSFW.

"It's only just a crush, it'll go away/It's just like all the others it'll go away/Or maybe this is danger and you just don't know"

The songs on LA-based duo She Wants Revenge's self-titled debut sound like lost 80s New Wave classics, in a good way. Tear You Apart is emblematic of their new-new wave sound with a dark, Bauhus-y synth crackling in the background and an urgent, angsty Ian Curtis-like vocal up front. The actor Joaquin Phoenix directed the video, which owes as much to paranoid 50s sci-fi as 80s teen romances--it's like "Pretty in(vasion) of the Body Snatchers". A couple of years old now, pre-Phoenix's scripted career meltdown, this video pushes the narrative as far as possible, providing subtitles for the short "film" he created to accompany the song.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

" Yeah I don't want to live for tomorrow/ I push my life today"

I loves me some M.I.A. Born Free is built around a 33 year old sample (ouch) from Ghost Rider by Suicide and the song is propelled forward by its churning panicky energy. The video was directed by Romain-Gavras (son of filmmaker Costa-Gavras) and it caused a huge controversy for overtly referencing indigenous rights struggles from around the world including Palestine (ruh-roh) and Northern Ireland. Crystallizing an M.I.A. backlash in the press that culminated in a New York Times hatchet-job, the clip depicts US government troops terrorizing an unnamed city, rounding up a group of redheaded young men and well--you should watch it for yourself. But be warned if you haven't seen it: it is upsetting. Brilliant but shocking. Also kinda NSFW.

"I’m livin’ in the 21st century/Doin’ something mean to it/
Do it better than anybody you ever seen do it"

What more can you say about Kanye West at this point? He may not be the genius he seems to think he is-- but he still pretty damn good. Kind of a whiner with a nasal voice to match, no one would accuse him of being a great vocalist. And Kanye's smartest lyrics are often drowned out by the overwrought ones (see: Diamonds from Sierra Leone). But his strength has always been his vision, which can sell an oddly personal idea with an unlikely hook, like this one. Power is also built around a sample (hmm) from King Crimson's 1969 21st Century Schizoid Man... which might be the most self-aware reference Kanye has made so far. The video, which Kanye tweeted was like a "moving painting," was directed by the artist Marco Brambilla and features model Irina Shayk. It is peopled with characters from the Major and Minor Arcana of the Etteilla Occult Tarot deck, all interacting in a shiny, slow-motion, prog-rock album cover dystopia.

I actually like the way Kanye (or his tour director) translated the images when he performed this song on SNL as much (if not more) but I decided to keep consistent and list the video itself.

"I'm the spark, make the world explode/
I'm a man-eating machine, I'll make the world explode"

Grace Jones doesn't get a fair shake. Sure, her early disco stuff is largely awful/forgettable. But Jones' New Wave turn produced some of the most memorable sounds and images of that genre. Which I guess is the problem: the images were so arresting that they gave people permission to dismiss the music. But her sound, equal parts French cabaret, Jamaican Dub and icy new wave synth was completely unique. And her covers of Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing, The Normal's Warm Leatherette and Joy Division's She's Lost Control exceed the originals, I think. Jones was ahead of her time--a video star before video, whose look was an integral supplement to her music, which is the regular order of things now whether you are Jack White or Rihanna. Corporate Cannibal was the lead single on 2008's Hurricane, Grace Jones' first new studio album in nineteen years. Unfortunately, the album wasn't released in North America and the single was pretty much ignored by the radio-- but the video, directed by Nick Hooker, was a huge hit online. And it is easy to see why. It's pretty amazing, simultaneously tweaking Jones' image and making it new for this moment. Bottom line: she is so iconic at this point that her entire image can be rendered in an inky digital blur and she is still unmistakable. How many other artists could make that claim?

"What's in the silver locket?/ What's in the silver frame?/
What's that fool around your neck?/ Albatross, albatross, albatross"

Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band are from Seattle. They have that crunchy, hippy spookiness I love in bands like Black Mountain and White Magic. I love this song, Albatross, Albatross-- and the video, set in the Pacific Northwest and directed by Matt Daniels, is simple but disturbing. I included it because even though it is a bit more homemade than the others on the list it is darkly suggestive without being pyrotechnic or imposing a clear narrative.

... So there you go. Now get offa my porch!

THE AIDS JAAGO PROJECT: In Observation of World AIDS DAy

2010-11-26T06:31:00.001-05:00

THE AIDS JAAGO PROJECT (The AIDS Awake Project): In Observation of World AIDS Day

Tuesday, November 30, 7:00 pm, Wang Center Theater

Four of India’s finest directors aim to dismantle myths and misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, which if ignored will soon reach epidemic proportions in India, in the AIDS Jaago Project. Putting their individualistic stamp on these films and using top Indian movie stars they created four beautifully shot, richly textured stories about the human dimension of the disease in order to change minds and save lives.

Free admission.

The Directors and Films:

Migration by Mira Nair
Blood Brothers by Vishal Bhardwaj
Positive by Farhan Akhtar
The Beginning by Santosh Sivan

Flier: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/wang/AIDS%20jaago.pdf
Watch Trailer: http://www.aidsjaago.com/trailer.htm
For more information: http://www.aidsjaago.com/

On the Importance of Being an Arab

2010-11-24T10:20:00.012-05:00

On the Importance of Being an Arab

Friday, November 26th
Saturday, November 27th at Theatre Monty in Antwerp.

Friday, December 3rd at Les Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels.

This performance is based on events in the life of director/performer Ahmed El Attar. In sequences based on his personal archives – love letters, school and university grades, programs of the performances he has attended, work documents and letters etc. – a character is drawn who shares his views on his own perceptions of himself and on how the outside world perceives him.

On the Importance of Being an Arab further develops the performance style that characterizes Attar's recent Temple Independent Company productions – a combination of theatre, music and visual arts. A single intense rhythmic soundtrack accompanies the performance from beginning to end. The music composed for this production by Hassan Khan, with its emphasis on the use of electronics, driving and insistent loops and riffs, and emotional synth workouts is based on contemporary Cairene Shaabi forms. Video clips, also by Khan, are projected behind the performer, making this a multimedia performance in what the company describes as “new and relevant Egyptian theatre that is sensitive to the contemporary context in both form and content”.

On the Importance of Being an Arab was created in 2009 and was presented in Sharjah (UAE), Düsseldorf (Germany), Ivry (France), Groneijen, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Amsterdam (Holland) in the fall 2009, in Cairo in July 2010 and at the Piccolo theatre in Milano in September 2010.

Ahmed El Attar is an independent theatre director, translator and playwright who lives in Cairo and works in the Middle East and Europe. He is the founder and artistic director of the Temple Independent Theatre Company in Egypt and the founder and managing director of the Studio Emad Eddin Foundation. The studio is a unique space in Egypt and the Arab world, providing rehearsal space and training to performing artists in Cairo, and residencies to visiting trainers and artists. El Attar has a BA in Theatre from the American University in Cairo and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is currently a Chevening scholar on the Clore Leadership Programme (UK). El Attar has been chosen by the Arabic edition of Newsweek as one of 42 personalities who influence change in the Arab world. Recent productions include F**K Darwin, How I’ve Learned to Love Socialism (2007), Othello Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare (2006) and Mother I want to be a Millionaire (2004). His pieces, which address socially relevant themes, have been performed to public and critical acclaim throughout the Arab world and the West.

The performance is 40 minutes long and is subtitled in English.

Suspicious Packages: Liberals, Libertarians and the TSA -or- "Don't Touch My Junk"

2010-11-20T16:20:00.025-05:00

Friday Charles Krauthammer wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Don't Touch My Junk."

Um, okay.

Krauthammer was responding to the recent uproar over the new, aggressive Transportation Security Administration procedures, which include a full-body scan that renders an image of the traveler's naked body or, alternately, a thorough full-body pat down. Very thorough. As in a stranger's hands on your genitals-and-not-in-a-good-way thorough. Perhaps predictably people have begun to freak out over this. Including John Tyner, a San Diego man who refused the scan or the pat down announcing that he would call the police if they "touched [his] junk." All of which he captured on his iphone and posted to You Tube. Krauthammer writes,

...everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives - when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone... But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

This is a dozen kinds of racist and wrong, but entirely within Krauthammer's character and the spirit of his appalling discourse. So, in a sad way, unsurprising. Nevertheless, The American Prospect's Adam Serwer responded to Krauthammer in his own Washington Post op ed titled "Touch His Junk" writing,

Racial profiling is no more statistically accurate than those random searches conservatives always complain about. Thousands of Muslims travel on airplanes every day, and an infinitesimal number actually turn out to be dangerous. But the argument here is pretty clear -- the problem isn't that the violation of privacy isn't worth an unknown gain in security. It's that the TSA should be frisking "Nigerian nutjobs" instead of grandma. Conservatives like Krauthammer aren't angry that the TSA is infringing on individual liberty, just that it's infringing on their individual liberty.

Of course Serwer is right, but something about his response bothered me and I couldn't quite articulate it until I read Avon Snarksdale's supplement to his argument, titled "This Type of Ish Happens Every Day", at Post Bourgie (and subsequently quoted at length by Serwer at The American Prospect). Snarksdale writes,

It should be pointed out that for plenty of people of color in the nation’s inner cities, these kind of uncomfortable, vaguely legal searches — with the stated intent of finding people carrying guns and drugs — are essentially de rigueur... In one four-block section of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the NYPD made 52,000 stops over a four-year period, which averaged out to about one stop for every resident in the area each year. And it’s no more efficient than the profiling Adam decries: for all that scrutiny and all those stops over four years, the police in Brownsville recovered just 25 guns, and less than 1 percent of all those people who were stopped — and questioned and patted down and humiliated as they went about their lives — were ever arrested. (All of the personal info taken during the stops, however, was entered into a citywide database.)

I cosign the spirit of Snarksdale's critique and I completely agree with his analysis of street stops. But his essay (and Serwer’s before it) stops well short of addressing a) the unprecedented legal shift away from civil rights initiated by the Bush Administration and perpetuated under Obama and b) that Arabs and Muslims–regardless of their race–are the disproportionate target of this new legislation. In other words, it is now perfectly legal in the United States for me to be removed from my apartment for writing this blog post and imprisoned indefinitely with no legal right to counsel. And further, for me to be tortured physically, psychologically and sexually at the discretion of my captors, who would suffer no consequences for those acts even if they came to light. That is NOT an “every day” scenario. That is a new, radical abrogation of civil rights and Arabs and Muslims are its unambiguous focus.

Charles Krauthammer is arguing against the TSA’s invasive security theatre in favor of profiling Arabs and Muslims, an increasingly mainstream position. That the main refutation of this argument at Post Bourgie and at The American Prospect is “but it doesn’t work” does not fill me with confidence. So… what if it worked? Would it be okay then? Every couple of years or so when some conservative nutbag advocates fencing off ghettos or forcing women who receive welfare benefits to submit to state-enforced birth control we don’t click our tongues and say “but it wouldn’t work.” We say, “Fuck you for suggesting that we legally dismantle civil rights for your racist political agenda.” So would it kill these guys to take such an unambiguous, ethical stand against targeting Arabs and Muslims? The fact that in the space of two short posts we got from Charles Krauthammer calling for the profiling of Arabs and Muslims in a mainstream newspaper to a complete reframing of his arguments in terms of a Black-White racial dynamic profoundly disturbs me. How is it that Serwer and Snarksdale--putative Liberals-- managed to do what Krauthammer couldn't and made Arabs and Muslims disappear completely?

Snarksdale is quite right that the law is selectively applied to Black people–and that this is exponentially worse for poor Black people. And he is completely right that institutional racism goes down to the bone in US society. And a critique of the responses of old white guys like the pilot who was so shaken by his groping pat down that he refused to fly afterward using a racial lens is valuable and completely valid… But the selective application of civil rights (as in “random” police stops in Brownsville) is *not* the same as legally removing them entirely.

Which is a thing that has happened. Bush did that and Obama has done nothing to undo it.

So let’s be clear. Enduring a humiliating pat down is not the same thing as getting sodomized by a fluorescent light tube (which is another thing that has happened to Arabs and Muslims imprisoned in the “war on terror”). Do violations like that also happen to Black men in police custody? We know that they do. But we also know that when they happen they are completely illegal. Not so for Arabs and Muslims at Bagram, Gitmo, or any of the numerous Black Sites around the globe. When US soldiers screamed at the Arabs and Muslims who were collected almost entirely at random for imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo Bay “You are property of the US Military!” as they sodomized them, it was completely legal. That is a paradigm shift. Period.

Now is it a slippery slope from one to the other? You bet. But that isn’t really what Snarksdale is arguing (If he were believe me, I’d be thrilled) Instead he is saying it “happens every day” to Black folks and so, in some sense, it is not a big deal that it is happening to folks like me. This is a grotesque sentiment that I have unfortunately heard over and over from Black Liberals. (Who have also made the same point about Latinos in the ongoing immigration debate, to similar effect.) But here’s the thing guys: Our experiences are different, mine are not a weak metaphor for yours.

Don't get me wrong, I love Post Bourgie. That I felt free to post a frank response to Snarksdale's essay is a testament to my respect for the intelligence of that community. So if I sound angry it’s only because I AM angry. Posts like Snarksdale's that argue But This Has Always Happened To Black People Anyway are fundamentally dishonest if they do not acknowledge the material circumstances of life for Arabs and Muslims under the USA Patriot Act. There is a fantastic, intersectional analysis of US racism and orientalism/Islamophobia waiting to be written. But that analysis cannot be made if we begin from assumptions like those upon which his essay is based.

Between you, me and the CIA operatives monitoring my internet activity, a better analogy than institutional racism to the USA Patriot Act and its ultimate effects would be Germany’s Enabling Act of 1933, which legally expanded the reach and powers of the government to selectively apply constitutional rights and protections… And we all (I hope) know how that ended up. Still, if Liberal bloggers wrote about Arabs and Muslims by relating our situation to what Black folks endure under institutionalized racism I think that would be great. But if they only want to use us to make a point about their experiences– delegitimizing ours in the process–then I wish they'd do us a favor and please don’t.

Dealing with the Krauthammers of the world, who are not in short supply, is exhausting enough. But, as an Arab, the lack of will to speak out for me among the US Left is at least as frightening as the open hatred among the Right. As far as flying is concerned I have already made the decision to go for the pat down over the scan. They want to feel for a suspicious package? Okay then. We'll see who blinks first.

49B Studios Presents HOME-LAND: An Exhibition of Middle Eastern Artists

2010-11-10T06:40:00.009-05:00

Dear Friends,

Please join me at 49B Studios for the exhibition HOME-LAND, during Arts In Bushwick's one-day event: BETA Spaces, co-presented with ArteEast.

HOME-LAND opens November 14th 2010 from 12pm to 7pm with Installations, Photography, paintings, performances and screenings. My installation, Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People (2010) (*see below) is part of this exhibition of Middle Eastern artists, curated by Makram Hamdan. All the works in this show were created in response to representations of the idea "homeland."

Participating Artists:
Barrak Alzaid
Omar Amiralay
Faysal Bibi
Rafael Fuchs
Amnon Gutman
Makram Hamdan
Zied Hamdan
Maria Kassab
Leeor Kaufman
Rami Kodeih,
Maryam Najd
Rima Najd
Azadeh Saljooghi
Joseph Shahadi

Directions:
Take the L train to Morgan Ave.
Exit at rear of train at Harrison Pl/ Bogart St.
Turn right out of station, walk one block to # 49 just past Brooklyn Naturals Deli.

RSVP at 49bstudios@gmail.com

* The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor
For The Good Of The People (2010)
Installation detail, Mixed media: Lamb hearts, testes,
straight pins, sewing and upholstery needles

Sunday Music: Ode To Billy Joe (R.I.P. Tyler Clementi)

2010-11-07T05:36:00.006-05:00

I'm still thinking about Tyler Clementi.

About two months ago now, overwhelmed by the experience of having his privacy invaded by his roommate, who'd live streamed footage of him having sex with another boy, Clementi-- by all accounts a sensitive, thoughtful kid and talented musician-- threw himself off of the George Washington Bridge. The circumstances around Clementi's tragic death have sparked a much-needed conversation about homophobic bullying, especially since it comes on the heels of the recent suicides of so many other gay teens. I'm glad those conversations are happening-- but I want to focus on another, broader aspect of this tragedy.

The thing that struck me, and haunts me still about Clementi's death is the casual cruelty of his roommate Dhaurun Ravi. On September 19th Ravi tweeted “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” Three days later Clementi, unable to process this violation, took his own life.

And I keep asking myself: What made Ravi think it was okay to do something like this?

What essential messages about boundaries did he not receive? How can he have reached young manhood with so little basic, human compassion?

The default explanation for his actions is homophobia, and that may be true... But I don't think it's only that. Why should we assume that Ravi wouldn't have played the same cruel prank on a straight roommate? (Although it's clear that if he had it wouldn't have had the same tragic result.) For me, the fact that Ravi felt empowered to blindly abuse Clementi with no thought of the consequences is a chilling statement about a culture that celebrates cruelty as entertainment. This question brings me squarely into Old Fart territory, but I don't care: In a cultural landscape where people attack one another physically and emotionally for sport, there are no consequences for stupid, dangerous behavior and routine cruelty is openly rewarded how can we expect kids like Dhaurun Ravi to get the message that what he did to Tyler Clementi isn't okay? The most frightening thing to me is the thought that Dhaurun Ravi isn't a monster, but just a kid acting on the premises he has learned up until now.

The tragedy is that Tyler Clementi had to die for him to understand that other people bleed when you cut them.

UPDATE:
The wonderful Jo Nubian has addressed another element of this issue--the bullying that is often incited by kids who don't perform "normative" gender roles-- in a terrific post on Race-Talk called, Tolerance, Acceptance and Princesses. Jo writes, as the mom to a little girl who sleeps in her tiara, about Dyson Kiloadavis, the "Princess Boy" who likes dressing in pretty girl's clothes. The video that accompanies her essay is perhaps the anti-Jerry Springer: a healthy, well adjusted family thoughtfully discussing their relationship to a member who is acting differently from them in terms of gender expression. I dare you not to choke up when Dyson's older brother says, of his desire to dress as a princess for Halloween, "Just let him be happy." Amen.

Why You Should Care About Christine O'Donnell's One-Night-Stand (And Why Caring Does NOT Make You A Misogynist)

2010-11-04T23:24:00.027-04:00

Christine O'Donnell, contemplating the state of her Ladybug

Last Thursday Gawker posted a story titled "I Had a One-Night-Stand With Christine O'Donnell" written by an anonymous Philadelphia man who recounted a 3 year-old fumbling encounter with recent Tea Party candidate for Delaware Senate--and staunch abstinence advocate--Christine O'Donnell. According to "Anonymous" (who has since been identified as Dustin Dominiak) O'Donnell showed up at his door three Halloweens ago with a friend in tow asking to borrow his bathroom to change into her costume. Dominiak barely knew O'Donnell (he was renting an apartment from her aunt) but went along as she, now dressed as a ladybug, persuaded him to accompany her to a bar on Philadelphia's South Street.

Both drank heavily and later that evening/early that morning found themselves naked in his bed, fooling around. According to Dominiak, O'Donnell seemed sexually unskilled, announced her intention to remain a virgin and sported an all-natural pubic bush, all turn-offs for him. Dominiak, who had to get up early for work cut his losses, rolled over and went to sleep. Despite the awkwardness of their encounter O'Donnell contacted Dominiak and suggested that they get together again. He writes, "I didn't see any reason to try and see her again. But two or three days later, she emailed me to ask me if I wanted to hang out again. I made an excuse. But she didn't take a hint and emailed or called a few more times over the next couple of weeks before I was forced to make it clear to her that I wasn't interested."

So, to review:

Two adults have a consensual sexual encounter that leaves one of them unsatisfied and with no desire to see the other again. Happens every day. If you adjusted for the details what sexually active adult with a history of more than one partner hasn't been on one side of this equation or the other? Or, if we are really being honest... both? Speaking of details, most people are focusing on O'Donnell's alleged all-natural pubic hair situation, but for my dollars the image of Dominiak rousting her in the morning so he can get to work, is the gold here. And not only because it involves a still-drunk, panty-free Christine O'Donnell but because the embarrassing banality of this scenario makes it so ordinary. And if this were a story about any two people trying to connect and failing that would be the end of it.

... But the dump-ee in question here is Christine O'Donnell, a politician whose positions (sorry) are largely derived from an extreme interpretation of Christian doctrine that precludes pre-marital sex, a proscription she famously extended to include even masturbation. Under most circumstances I am completely disinterested in the sex lives of famous people (or, anybody really who I am not having sex with) but Christine O'Donnell long ago blurred the lines between her public and private life by continuously using herself as an example in her activism. O'Donnell, a Catholic convert to evangelical Christianity, has said that looking at pornography is tantamount to adultery, that homosexuality is an identity disorder and has argued for the adoption of a "higher standard than abstinence" as an expression of personal righteousness. As a politician O'Donnell's take on sex and sexuality informs her public stance on multiple issues: she is pro-abstinence education, virulently anti-gay, and opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. So when a person with such a rigid public stance on sexuality is revealed betraying her stated values in private, it is news. There have been many recent revelations of such hypocrisy from conservative politicians in recent years and this is merely the latest example, right?

Apparently not. The negative response to the Gawker article has been overwhelming, even among people who are deeply opposed to O'Donnell's political agenda. The National Organization of Women (NOW) rushed to defend O'Donnell Thursday when spokesman Terry O’Neill issued a statement describing the Gawker article as a "sexist, misogynist attack." O'Neill clarified, "NOW/PAC has proudly endorsed women's rights champion Chris Coons, O'Donnell's opponent in the Delaware Senate race, and finds O'Donnell's political positions dangerous for women. That does not mean it's acceptable to use slut-shaming against her, or any woman." In the New York Times, David Carr characterized the Gawker article as a "drive-by" that feeds O'Donnell into "the digital wood chipper" in an essay pointedly titled "By Any Means Necessary." The reaction online has been even more knee-jerk as Slate's Jack Shafer describes Gawker's O'Donnell post as a "tawdry... sleazy...nonstory" and Jessica Coen at Gawker's sister-site Jezebel dismisses the entire thing to an anti-female witch hunt. She writes,

If the politician in question were a man, this wouldn't be a story — an anonymous woman probably wouldn't even think to contact a gossip site with her story about how she once played spin-the-bottle with Mr. Candidate. Because who hasn't made out with someone? (With apologies to you, over there, looking sheepish in the corner.) Anyhow, big whoop. Wait — let me revise that a bit: perhaps a lady from Mr. Candidate's innocent past would step forward with such a small faux-scandalous tale, and we'd briefly pay attention to it — but only if Mr. Candidate were viewed as patently ridiculous as is O'Donnell. Really, the dude has got to be captivatingly idiotic in order for this kind of story to be of even the most remote interest. And that brings us back to the Would Never Happen column, because even the most absurd male candidates aren't considered half as loony as their female equivalents are.

Um, what? So, a scandal like this would never happen to a man... Except that it would, but only if he were as nuts as O'Donnell, and that wouldn't happen because men are never considered as nuts as women. And then everyone would forget about it right away anyway so it would be like it never happened. Besides, a woman would never publicly reveal embarrassing details of a sexual encounter with a famous man... because that is a thing that never, ever happens, right? Yeah, I am going to have to call bullshit on the pearl-clutch.

I am also going to save this paragraph forever so that when people ask me what I mean by "straw man argument" I can have one at my fingertips. But aside from being based on--literally--nothing, Cohen's argument relies on a purposeful revision of very recent political history: sadly, there is no shortage of male conservatives who are every inch as batshit crazy as O'Donnell. Am I expected to believe that if, say, Glenn Beck were caught in a similar situation it wouldn't become a giant story? (I know Beck isn't technically a politician, but with the rise of Tea Party politics the line between "pundit" and "politician" has been completely blurred, a la Sarah Palin.) At any rate, we don't need to speculate. There are many, many examples of male public figures--conservative and otherwise-- whose private lives did not match their stated public values and were embarrassed by the revelation of their various indiscretions. Like, oh... Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggert, Mark Sandford, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Jim Bakker, Randal David Ankeny, Bob Barr, Parker Bena, Ken Calvert, Mark Foley, Phillip Giordano, Matthew Glavin, Bob Packwood, Ed Schrock, Jim West, Michael Duvall, Mark Souder, Glenn Richardson, Daniel Stout, Roy Ashburn, Jim McGreevey, Gary Condit, David Vitter, George Rekers, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, Paul Stanley, Bob Bauman, David Dreier, Jim Kolbe, Jim McCrery, Coy C. Privette, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Don Sherwood, Tim Mahoney, Vito Fosella, John Ensign, Richard Curtis... By any realistic standard then Christine O'Donnell is not being singled out and treated differently because she is a woman. Rather, she is being treated in exactly the same way as any man in her position would, and the same as many already have, which is pretty much the functional opposite of sexism.

And the charges of misogyny (!) leveled at Dominiak for blowing the whistle on O'Donnell by talking about their night together are completely ludicrous. Exactly how is he expressing any hatred for women? By being honest about not being sexually attracted Christine O'Donnell because of her pubic hair? You may find that a shallow reason to become turned off to someone sexually... but that isn't really yours to judge, now is it? A broad coalition of commenters at Jezebel don't get a vote in who Dustin Dominiak does or doesn't have sex with and why. Here's the thing: Adults get to have sex with whoever they want, as long as their partners are willing and of age, even if their choice of partners and rationale for being sexual with them is very different from yours. So if there's slut-shaming going on here it is being aimed at Dominiak, whose sexual behavior is being judged by other people's standards and found wanting. In reality, his behavior toward O'Donnell was pretty honest and straightforward. He hardly cast himself as a sexual James Bond in their story. They both come off like awkward , sexually unsophisticated young people... except that Dominiak was 25 and O'Donnell was almost 40 at the time of their encounter. What emerges from this story is the image of a woman sexually immature for her years, whose repressed attitudes led her to make reckless personal choices : a similar narrative to a dozen other conservatives who have publicly railed against sex in its various forms only to collapse under the weight of taboo temptations in private.

The most bothersome element of this entire affair is the patronizing assumption that Christine O'Donnell somehow requires protecting. She is a grown woman who entered into a consensual sexual encounter that ended badly. It's only newsworthy because of the extremity of her anti-sex positions. And downplaying the explicit danger posed by those positions in favor of a vision of Christine O'Donnell as some sort of victim is utter bullshit. Her famous pronouncement decrying masturbation is a punchline in 2010... but when it was made in the early 90s it was a direct refutation of Joycelyn Elders' assertion that masturbation might be encouraged as part of safer sex education, a position that cost her the job of Surgeon General of the United States. In those deadly, pre-drug cocktail days safer sex education was a life or death proposition for an entire generation and Christine O'Donnell actively worked against it, telling young people , "Condoms will not protect you from AIDS." So lets not get it twisted, Christine O'Donnell's extreme anti-sex positions are NOT a joke. Or worse, the harmless, kooky ramblings of a misguided girl who needs "our" protection. They are the hateful pronouncements of a death-merchant, whose Christo-Nationalist world-view makes her very fucking dangerous indeed.

... And let's be real, would it even be a question if O'Donnell weren't a middle-class white lady, whose apparent distress activated the white-lady-as-perpetual-victim bat-signal?

Fuck her (or don't).

And if you think it is your job to protect her from the legitimate revelation of her hypocrisy, then fuck you too.

Book Reading and Discussion: Moustafa Bayoumi, Max Blumenthal, Arun Gupta, Rashid Khalidi, on the Impact of the Gaza freedom Flotilla

2010-09-26T06:00:00.000-04:00

Panel Discussion with Max Blumenthal, Moustafa Bayoumi, Arun Gupta, Adam Horowitz, Rashid Khalidi, Alia Malek and Phil Weiss on the Impact of Gaza Freedom Flotila Attack.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010
7:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts

Free and Open to the Public

This event is sponsored by OR Books and Haymarket Books and is a launch of the Haymarket Books (http://www.haymarketbooks.org/) edition.

Midnight on the Mavi Marmara
The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Moustafa Bayoumi, Editor

* * * * *

Eastern Mediterranean, Monday, May 31st, 2010, 4.30am: Israeli commandos, boarding from sea and air, attack the six boats of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it sails through international waters bringing humanitarian relief to the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza. Within minutes, nine peace activists are dead, shot by the Israelis. Scores of others are injured. The 700 people on board the ships are arrested before being transported to detention centers in Israel and then deported.

Within hours, outrage at Israel’s action echoes around the world. Spontaneous demonstrations in Europe, the United States, Turkey, and Gaza itself denounce the attack. Turkey’s prime minister describes it as a “bloody massacre” and “state terrorism.” Lebanon’s prime minister calls it “a dangerous and crazy step that will exacerbate tensions in the region.”

In these pages, a range of activists, journalists, and analysts piece together the events that occurred that May night, unpicking their meanings for Israel’s illegal, three-year-long blockade of Gaza and the decades-long Israel/Palestine conflict more generally. Mixing together first-hand testimony, documentary record, and illustration, with hard-headed analysis and historical overview, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara reveals why the attack on Gaza Freedom Flotilla may just turn out to be Israel’s Selma, Alabama: the beginning of the end for an apartheid Palestine.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ali Abunimah, Eyad Al Sarraj, Lamis Andoni, Omar Barghouti, George Bisharat, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Marsha B. Cohen, Juan Cole, Murat Dagli, Jamal Elshayyal, Sümeyye Ertekin, Norman Finkelstein, Neve Gordon, Glenn Greenwald, Arun Gupta, Amira Hass, Nadia Hijab, Adam Horowitz, Rashid Khalidi, Stephen Kinzer, Iara Lee, Henning Mankell, Paul Larudee, Gideon Levy, Alia Malek, Lubna Masarwa, Mike Marqusee, Yousef Munayyer, Ken O’Keefe, Daniel Luban, Kevin Ovenden, Ilan Pappé, Doron Rosenblum, Sara Roy, Ben Saul, Adam Shapiro, Raja Shehadeh, Henry Siegman, Ahdaf Soueif, Raji Sourani, Richard Tillinghast, Alice Walker, Stephen M. Walt, Philip Weiss, and Haneen Zoabi.

Alwan for the Arts

16 Beaver Street (between Broad and Broadway), 4th floor,
New York, NY 10004
(646) 732-3261

CFP: The International Journal for Arab Studies

2010-09-25T06:26:00.003-04:00

Next issue submission: Oct 31

The International Journal for Arab Studies is an electronic journal introduced by the Society of Arab & Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UK). We strive to publish foutstanding and unique research produced by young academics from around the world. Our eJournal will publish original, previously unpublished, work in both Arabic and English.

Through our website www.ijasjournal.com, and partner links www.sais-exeter.org.uk and www.globalinkinternational.com, we hope to expand our readership and access to the thousands of researchers with interest in the Arab World.

Our journal will be published twice a year. Our second issue, due out in January 2011, will establish both a broad audience and broad spectrum of contributors. We believe our eJournal will allow academics across disciplines the opportunity to discuss with our audience history and current affairs of Arab societies and the vital internal and external security issues of concerns. IJAS also welcomes Book Reviews.

Our deadline for submissions for this second issue will be 31 October 2010.

Contact: ijas.editor@gmail.com; submissions.ijas@gmail.com
URL: www.ijasjournal.com

The International Journal for Arab Studies is a refereed journal and aims to promote genuine research in the field of Arab studies. The multi-disciplinary nature of this journal includes the following fields: politics and International Relations, sociology, history, linguistics, literature and anthropology. The journal also is interested in theories relevant to these disciplines. Thus, the journal presents itself to a wide readership interested in Arab studies. This is only an electronic journal, yet we seek to produce hard copies once resources are available by 2011.

Our publication will cover articles, reviews of books and short articles on recent issues relevant to the theme of each issue. The working languages will be English and Arabic. Yet, articles will only be published in English during the first year of the establishment. The e-journal will be published three times a year; April, August and December where it will include seven articles and four book reviews. Review of publications in Arabic and English are also welcome.

The International Journal for Arab Studies seeks to make a strong link between scholarly work published in Arabic and English; hence the latter seems to be dominant over the former. Therefore, we welcome contributors from any backgrounds.

Other special events and issues will be announced on the e-journal website. The website itself will be a forum for academic discussions related to theme of the e-journal. The editorial board includes several scholars representing different universities in Europe, the US and the Middle East.

Editor in Chief
Dr. Khalid Almezaini
Fernando Carvajal (University of Exeter)
You will find our guidelines for articles and book reviews on our websitewww.ijasjournal.com.

Electronic submission is the only format accepted by IJAS. Please submit your manuscript to submissionsDOTijas@gmail.com

High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music Sept 23-26

2010-09-19T04:40:00.003-04:00

High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music

Sound Installations:
September 21st - 26th, 2010
@ Gallery Four 4th Floor / 405 W Franklin St., Baltimore

Main Concerts:
September 23rd - 26th, 2010
@ The Theatre Project 45 W Preston St., Baltimore

What is High Zero?

High Zero is the premier festival of Improvised, Experimental music on the East Coast, being fully devoted to new collaborations between the most inspired improvisers from around the world.

Lasting two weeks in total, the festival brings together 28 core musicians each year, but also involves a much larger subculture of musicians in Baltimore and on the East Coast. Unlike many related festivals, High Zero is not narrow in terms of sensibility or subculture, but rather widely inclusive of all the different types of experimental music-making in the moment. The fact that half of the festival's core participants are from Baltimore speaks to the depth of Baltimore's experimental music subculture, which in recent years has grown to be one of the richest cities in the country for experimental art.

The festival has a unique structure. HIGH ZERO is focused solely on new collaborations in freely improvised experimental music. Internationally famous musicians play side by side with younger "unknowns," united by their commitment to the musical imagination. Each year, Baltimore becomes a fertile meeting-ground for a large group of inspired players, drawn from a fascinating international subculture.

The festival exposes large audiences to this radical music in its pure form. Large-scale public concerts, recording sessions, workshops, and guerilla street performances are all part of the heady mix. The players are carefully selected by the festival's organizers for their intense, unique music, whether it is based around dramatic intensity, humor, specially designed instruments, original approach, raw sound, or nearly superhuman instrumental technique. The resulting collaborations challenge the limits of music and delight by their audacity, expressiveness, immediacy, and innovation. It isn't about stars or established projects; it is about the most uncompromising and stimulating new improvised music we can bring together.

To say the High Zero Festival is an unusual event is an understatement. Not only does the festival intend to provide the audience with extremely varied, inspired and ingenious experiences, it is also a major challenge for the improvisers, who are put in contexts where their stock personal musical languages may not work, pushing them into terra incognita.

This year's festival again promises to be the best yet, with more performers and more music. We hope to see you at High Zero 2010, and hope that you will spread the word to anyone you think might be interested!

Directions to main High Zero concerts at:

Theatre Project
45 W Preston St.
Baltimore 21201

Performing Idea, Performance Matters

2010-09-18T06:56:00.000-04:00

Adrian Heathfield, Co-Director of Performing Idea

Performing Idea public programme

2nd-9th October 2010
Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Studios, London

Performing Idea is a programme of events at Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Studios that investigate the shifting relations between performance practice and discourse, event and writing.

The public programme comprises a set of workshops led by three internationally acclaimed artists; a five day symposium with leading writers, thinkers and artists; a sound and video archive of seminal performance lectures; and a series of new performance lectures and redos by UK and international artists.

With contributions from: Janine Antoni, Ron Athey, Anne Bean, Wafaa Bilal, Maaike Bleeker, Silvia Bottiroli, Jonathan Burrows, Gavin Butt, Cabula 6, Augusto Corrieri, Robin Deacon, Rose English, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish, Adrian Heathfield, Hannah Hurtzig, Shannon Jackson, Janez Janša, Joe Kelleher, Tellervo Kalleinen, Lois Keidan, Ong Keng Sen, Bojana Kunst, Boyan Manchev, Fred Moten, Rabih Mroué, Giulia Palladini, Owen Parry, Peggy Phelan, Heike Roms, Lara Shalson, and Julie Tolentino.

To make a booking for the Performing Idea public programme click on How to book.

About Performing Idea

At a time when performance and live art have increased visibility in the worlds of art, theatre, dance and the academy, Performing Idea asks how such experimental performance forms signal changes in understandings of both art and the world beyond. The event pursues the multiple ways in which contemporary artists and thinkers have come to refashion not only understandings of art, but also the ways in which we produce and value the world of ‘ideas’.

Performing Idea seeks to explore the consequences for traditional understandings of knowledge when contemporary art actions, immaterial performances and social exchanges are routinely presented as valuable ways of knowing. What challenges do such practices present for the keepers, institutions and edifices of knowledge: the intellectuals and art arbiters, the academic institutions, and archives and libraries? Might the current forms of critical practice – of ‘creative research’ and ‘discursive events’ – represent new models of knowledge exchange and thoughtful relation, and suggest something more provisional and trans-active in the ways in which we might hold something dear?

Performing Idea is the first year of Performance Matters, a three-year creative research project rethinking why performance matters through the matter of performance. At a time when performance and live art have increased visibility in the worlds of art, theatre, dance and the academy, Performing Idea asks how such experimental performance forms signal changes in understandings of both art and the world beyond through a set of critical and creative exchanges and research processes.

For full details of the Performing Idea public programme and
information about the Performance Matters project, please visit:
http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/activities.html

Bookings:
- The Performing Idea Symposium (5th to 9th October, 3pm to 7.30pm)
and evening programme of performance lectures and redos (4th to 9th October,
8.30pm) take place at Toynbee Studios and bookings must be made through Artsadmin
here.

Spaces are limited - early booking is advised.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow to Give Away New Album Digitally

2010-09-17T05:11:00.001-04:00

Via Pitchfork:

MP3: A Sunny Day in Glasgow: "Drink drank drunk"

When they were working on their 2009 album Ashes Grammar, Philadelphia dream-poppers A Sunny Day in Glasgow wrote a ton of songs, not all of which made it onto the final album. Some of those songs made their way onto Nitetime Rainbows, the EP that the band released earlier this year. And still more make up Autumn, Again, a brand new album that the band will release in October. Up above, you can download the woozy album track "Drink drank drunk".

On October 19, the band will give away the album on their website as a free download. They'll also press up 500 vinyl copies of the album, which they'll sell on their website and through Carrot Top Distribution.

A press release pounds points out that this isn't a sign of any new directions that the band might take. Rather, it's another souvenir from a particularly fertile period. Below, we've got the Autumn, Again tracklist.

Autumn, Again:

01 Autumn, again
02 Fall in love
03 Petition to refrain from repetition
04 Sigh, inhibitionist (Come all day with me)
05 Moments on the lawn
06 Drink drank drunk
07 Violet Mary haunts me OR Loss of forgetfulness on Renfrew Street
08 How does somebody say when they like you?
09 Calling it love isn't love (Don't fall in love)
10 This assclown eats ambien OR Nobody likes you (No Art)
11 100/0 (Snowdays forever)

Hey Kids, Progressive Clichés!

2010-09-14T20:31:00.011-04:00

Okay, here goes.

This summer I had an exchange with another blogger who'd tweeted something along the lines of "enough already, we all agree, America is NOT post-racial... can we move on now?" I love a cranky, self-aware tweet and I told him so. (For me this is the genius of Twitter: for every meaningless kernel of trivia that floats along the data-stream there is a shiny pearl, excellent for its brevity. The 140 character limit makes good writers better by forcing them to be brief and it keeps bad writers from going on for too long. In my book this is a win-win.) His point was that the "we are not post-racial" drumbeat had become meaningless through constant use and was perhaps taking the place of more substantive discussions about race. I'd thought the same thing but hadn't known how to articulate it... Not so much a meme as a punchline, it stops conversations rather than opening them. In other words, "America is not post-racial" is a progressive cliché .

This brief conversation really made me think and I realized that there are a lot of tropes like this clogging up the discourse, making us ("us" = folks who write critically about various systems of oppression like racism, orientalism, sexism, etc. etc.) lazy. I considered writing a series of essays on these progressive clichés, but I hesitated. The self-imposed pressure to "keep it in the family " and not give the Right, who have become simultaneously more vicious and media-savvy in the last decade, more ammunition is strong. And kyriarchy--the ways in which we oppress each other--worries me. I don't want to inadvertently contribute to the systems of oppression I am trying to critique vertically or horizontally. And of course, while "America is Not Post-Racial" is a cliché, it is also true.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that such statements aren't true, but with how they are used. Like comedians who pander to the audience to get them on his side, the ultimate effect of this language is reactionary. There is no there there. But... does it make sense to criticize people for saying something that is true, especially when they/we are under constant attack from the Right? Don't people have the right to just vent--even if the ultimate effect is reactionary? It seems to make more sense to just leave it alone, grit my teeth and complain to my friends who will understand where I'm coming from.

And yet... I can't seem to let go of this idea.

I returned to Twitter and asked my feed: What do yo think? And the response was overwhelmingly positive. (What's more, suggestions for other progressive clichés started pouring in. Like "Check Your Privilege", "The 'Insert-Bad-Thing-Here' Industrial Complex", "How To Be A True Ally" etc. etc. ... special thanks to @monshiprose). Self-selecting Twitter hive-mind notwithstanding, it seems I am not the only one frustrated with these intellectual non-starters. Huh. Okay then.

So I have decided to forge ahead.

I suppose it comes down to this: I don't believe that the best way to deal with overwhelming opposition from the Right is to prevent ourselves from holding each other accountable to do better. But I do believe that if we have any chance at all to contribute (for lack of a better term) progressive ideals to a larger social conversation we can't let the Right turn us into a self-silencing monolith in the name of solidarity. Agreeing in principle doesn't mean we can't disagree--productively--about the whys and wherefores. And/or even about the hows. Right? There must be a way to critique the usefulness of certain arguments without attacking the people who articulate them, as a way of lifting the level of the discourse for all of us. Right?

So. All of that is the long way around to say that I am announcing a series of posts on "progressive clichés." I don't expect everyone to support the idea or agree with the way I present it, but I think one of the strengths of this format is its immediacy. So if you question what I propose with these posts then speak up. I'll happily hear you out. And if you have clichés of your own to propose, let me know.

More soon.

Book Reading: "Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East Since 1967"

2010-09-12T06:01:00.002-04:00

Samira Aghacy

Alwan for the Arts

16 Beaver Street (between Broad and Broadway), 4th floor,
New York, NY 10004
(646) 732-3261

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
7:00pm

Free and Open to the Public

While Western scholars and media notoriously scrutinize the role of women and feminine identity in Arab literature and culture, Samira Aghacy's new book is groundbreaking in exploring masculinity and male identity in Arab literature over the past four decades.

This book offers an exploration of masculinity in the literature of the Arab East (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq) in the context of a specific set of anxieties about gender roles and sexuality in Arab societies. While gender studies in the area have focused primarily on the situation of women, the treatment of Arab men as gendered subjects has fallen behind. Samira Aghacy’s rich analysis presents gender relations not within a fixed biological mold, but rather as a complex phenomenon fraught with ambivalence and operating within particular historical and geopolitical settings.

Through a series of close readings of twenty contemporary Arabic novels, Aghacy presents a mosaic of masculinities that challenges the generally held view of an essentialized archetypal Arab man and mirrors a contested vision of manliness where men figure in diverse sociocultural environments. This groundbreaking work reveals the volatile nature of masculinity and its inextricability from femininity.

Samira Aghacy had her M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Exeter, England. She joined L.A.U. as Associate Professor in 1987. She was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1993. She chaired the Humanities Division between 1991 and 2003. In October 2003, she was appointed Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Aghacy has also taught at the University of Jordan, the Lebanese University and A.U.B. She has published a Bibliography and a book of poems as well as various articles in International literary journals and has participated in numerous international conferences.

This Day, Again.

2010-09-11T12:00:00.021-04:00

On the morning of 9/11/2001 I was headed in to work in midtown Manhattan. I was late. My train was constantly getting re-routed as they built a new line, which always made me late. Also, I hated my job. So when the first plane hit I was on the subway, reading the novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I'd never read it in school and I was bored stiff with my life so I wanted a fictional world completely different than my own to escape to. Just as I was reading about Becky Sharp tossing Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of Modern Life out of her coach the first plane crashed into Tower One: These two unrelated images became tangled up in my head. I never did finish the book. Every time I looked at it in the weeks after it made me queasy so I returned it to the library unread.

I exited the subway and walked toward my office while all around me business guys were looking at their phones, which had suddenly stopped working. They were like puppets with cut strings, blinking at their phones and looking quizzically at one another. I walked through a cloud of them who had begun to ask each other what was happening. A man rushing in the opposite direction muttered something about the towers in explanation and kept going. No one understood because none of us had heard yet. Fire trucks full of firemen who would be among the dead before the morning was over went screaming past me.

I got to work and a guy from another department was at my desk, covering the main phones. I said, "Geez... what, is the world ending?" and he looked at me. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center," he said. We all still thought it was an accident. "Was anyone hurt?" still seemed like a reasonable question.

But when the second plane hit we knew.

I was working at a private foundation and we all crowded into the conference room to listen to a fancy Bose radio the VP brought from his office and set in the center of the table. (The sound quality on those things is really amazing...These are the things you remember, like the weird details in a dream) We were listening to a reporter who was live on the scene, trying to make sense of the confusion in a shaky but determined voice. We were completely silent.

And then the reporter screamed as Tower One collapsed on itself.

There was a meeting of the Board of Directors scheduled for that day and most of the board was in the wind, caught in the chaos of re-routed traffic. The staff scrambled as we tried to reach everyone and the Executive Director, a medical doctor, announced quietly that she had to head toward the World Trade Center (it wasn't called Ground Zero yet) to offer her help.

I got frantic emails from my ex and my brother demanding to know that I was alive. I responded but soon the server was overwhelmed and useless. The phone lines were jammed so I couldn't call my family long distance. Instead I called my friend Spiff in Harlem and asked him to try and reach them for me. When he talked to my aunt he told her his name was Steve.

Tower Two fell.

As we were standing there trying to understand what was happening our computers began bleeping with calendar overdue reminder messages... we were supposed to be at the restaurant Windows on the World at the top of Tower One for an office celebration. It was rescheduled at the last minute to accommodate the Board Meeting. The change was so recent it was still on the calendar. The HR director just pointed at the screen and we knew: It was blind luck that we weren't all dead.

When the first plane hit the people who worked in the restaurant were killed instantly. Yet the professional 9/11 mourners never talk about those people. They only ever mention the police and firemen who died--"our heroes," they always say. So I would like to ask, what about the busboys? The servers? What about the guys who worked in the kitchen? For that matter, what about the secretaries throughout the building? The janitors? What about me and the other grunts from my office who would have been there early to set up, just in time to be incinerated by the first plane?

Their work was invisible while they were alive and once the narrative became politicized they were forgotten. And if I had been in Windows on the World I would be dead and, aside from the people who love me, I would be forgotten too. There isn't much political capital to be gained in remembering the people who hated their jobs. The ones who fetched coffee and cleaned up. The entire point of their (our) lives is that they (we) weren't heroes. We were all just going to work that day.

There's a lot more to tell and the rest comes in flashes:

Fleeing Manhattan across the 59th St. Bridge a woman from my office slipped her hand into mine and awestruck we watched the massive plume of smoke, heavy with incinerated building materials and bodily remains, just hanging there obscenely in space.

The crazy blueness of the sky (the weather was so beautiful that day...).

Thousands of New Yorkers trudging along, stunned and quiet as planes zig-zagged overhead.

Women carrying high heels crowded into sporting goods stores to buy sneakers. A business guy in a suit whizzed by on a newly purchased bike.

The people with little cups of water at the other end of the bridge and every so often for the dozens of blocks I walked until I found a working subway.

Standing in the laundromat the following night and meeting eyes with a woman from my neighborhood who just shook her head.

The moment when local, New York news morphed into national news.

The moment when the solemn tenderness that suffused the city became became edged with race-hatred.

Shaving off my beard and lying to the VP with the fancy radio when he asked if it was because I was scared.

The Cuban guy in my office who got jumped because they thought he was an Arab.

The veiled women in my neighborhood who disappeared inside for months.

Hearing people discuss killing people like me and my family openly on the street, in restaurants, hallways, the subway.

Wondering aloud, "if they come for me, will anybody speak up?"

So:

When media personalities like Sarah Palin, who is hosting a big 9/11 mourn-off with Glenn Beck in Alaska, use our grief for political ends it turns my head inside out. Not that the Democrats are any better. But unlike 99% of the people on TV talking about 9/11 today I lived through it. And here's the thing the professional scab-pickers do not seem to understand: No one who was really there wants to see it over and over on TV with scary music playing behind it. If I really wanted to see it again I could just close my eyes, it is right there. So, Republicans, Democrats and independents of all stripes, think twice before you rub yourself in the ashes of the dead. Were you here? Forget seeing it on TV... did you smell it? No? Then shut the fuck up immediately. Go about your business, it didn't happen to you. 9/11 is not yours.

It happened to New York City.

It happened to me.

And this year, I am taking it back.

Call for submissions: Between the Seas staged readings

2010-09-10T06:47:00.001-04:00

Between the Seas is an initiative that aims to bring together performing artists of the Mediterranean and Mediterranean diaspora, explore Mediterranean cultural identity, its historical connections, commonalities and differences and share with New York audiences the
vibrancy of contemporary Mediterranean cultural production.

In anticipation of Between The Seas festival in 2011, we are hosting an evening of staged readings that will give the opportunity to NY based artists to connect, share their work and interests and exchange projects and ideas. The event will take place on Monday October 18th,
6-10 pm at Solas [232 East 9th St.]

We are inviting proposals from directors, writers and theater companies for staged readings of : new plays by contemporary Mediterranean playwrights [preferably that have not been staged in NY before]; new plays by US-based playwrights that engage in various ways with Mediterranean culture and identity; short stories by Mediterranean writers that artists are interested in adapting for the stage.

We welcome short or full-length plays, as well as scripts still in progress. Please note: it is the responsibility of the artist to put together a team for the reading- we will not be involved in casting and directing the works.

Please submit: resume, a brief cover letter and a 10-page sample of the script. Deadline: September 20th. Email your materials to lesmanouchestheatre@gmail.com

Between the Seas is curated by Aktina Stathaki and produced by Les Manouches, a theater
company focusing on the creation of original works, intercultural collaborations and on bridging research with performance practice on topics of identity and culture.

Aktina Stathaki, Ph. D.
Theatre Artist, Curator and Researcher
Artistic Director Les Manouches Theatre
www.aktinastathaki.com

The Victoria & Albert Museum Seeks Arabic Speaking Curator to Administer Jameel Prize

2010-09-09T07:43:00.001-04:00

Afruz Amighi, winner of the Jameel Prize 2009.
Courtesy of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, photo V&A images

The Victoria & Albert museum (London, UK) has an outstanding collection of Islamic art from the Middle East, and the main display for these holdings is the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which opened in July 2006. The new gallery was named in honour of Abdul Latif Jameel and his wife Nafisa, and our link with the Jameel family and the philanthropic organisations they support has continued. Our joint aim is to give new prominence to the Middle Eastern collection and to emphasise its value for the contemporary world.

As a result, the Asian Department at the V&A is now responsible for the Jameel Prize, an award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition, which was first presented in July 2009. The accompanying exhibition, which showed work by the nine finalists, was displayed at the Museum between July and September 2009 and is now on tour in the Middle East, sponsored by Abdul Latif Jameel Community Services Programs. In the meantime, the nomination process for the second Prize is beginning. The exhibition of work by the short-listed artists will open at the V&A in July 2011, and the Prize will be presented in the Autumn.

The Jameel Prize, an exhibition of contemporary artists and designers inspired by Islamic traditions of craft and design will now tour to five venues in the Middle East, including the National Museum, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (23 - 31 January 2010) and the Beit ed-Dine Palace, Lebanon (Summer 2010), plus venues in Damascus, Casablanca and Istanbul. It will be the first ever exhibition the V&A has sent on tour to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Morocco. The Jameel Prize is sponsored by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, who conceived the idea after providing the financial support for the renovation of the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which opened in July 2006. The tour will be supported by Abdul Latif Jameel Community Service Programmes (ALJCSP) throughout. We now wish to appoint an Arabic-speaking curator with an interest in contemporary art and design. The post-holder’s primary tasks will be to act as administrator for the Jameel Prize, to project-manage the associated exhibition, and to take responsibility for the production of materials in English and Arabic on the Prize and on other aspects of the Museum’s work, for our website and for publication.

Contact: To apply online, please go to our website. If you have any queries regarding the recruitment process, you can email us at hr@vam.ac.uk or telephone us on (+44) 020 7942 2937

Website: www.vam.ac.uk/jobs

Primary Category: Art and Art History

Secondary Categories: Asian History / Studies

Posting Date: 09/06/2010

Closing Date: 09/26/2010

Dear "Burn a Koran Day" Pastor Terry Jones: A Personal Message from A Syrian Catholic Priest

2010-09-07T14:38:00.011-04:00

The "Pastor" Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center

The "Pastor" of Florida's Dove World Outreach Center Terry Jones has announced that he will go ahead with his plan to host "International Burn a Koran Day" on 9/11 this year, despite a warning from General Petraeus that this action will endanger US troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and criticism from the White House. Jones, who has also written a book titled Islam is of the Devil (which has a Facebook page and Twitter account) insisted he would not be deterred. In remarks published by Florida radio station WOKV on Tuesday morning, Jones said, "We think the message is that important. We can not back down just because of fear, because if we back down, it won't make Islam any more moderate."

Right. Because Terry Jones is clearly an authority on moderation, what with the Koran-burning and all.

It's easy to point fingers at nutballs like Jones (or Fred Phelps, the "Pastor" of the Westboro Baptist Church, who is famous for his--paging Fr. Freud-- obsession with homosexuality) but it is a mistake to dismiss such expressions of hate as fringe sentiments because they come from wackadoodles like these. The potent mix of Christianity (or a version of it in any case), American nationalism and conservatism that characterized the Bush presidency did not disappear with Obama's assumption of the office. On the contrary, this toxic mash of ideas has supplanted the arguments about the role of government that used to characterize the Republican party... And the Democrats aren't exactly breaking their necks to distinguish themselves from these ideological stink bombs either.

I'd argue that Islamophobia (and homophobia for that matter) are absolutely mainstream sentiments. As we have seen in the rancorous public debate around construction of the Park 51 Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan, while the racist nuts yell the loudest the echo of their message can be heard through the statements of putatively "liberal" politicians like Howard Dean. Times like these reveal the character of a people. That is what makes Obama's weak-kneed response to the Park 51 Islamic Center opposition so disappointing (if not entirely surprising) and Mayor Bloomberg's stunning moral leadership in support of the center so inspiring.

Of course, "moral leadership" brings us full circle to religion itself. Just when I lose patience with religious leaders of all stripes someone surprises me... in a good way.

The letter below, by a Syrian Catholic priest named Father Elias Zahlawi was written to Terry Jones in response to his insistence that burning Korans is a proper use of his position as a Christian leader. I love that Father Zahlawi responded to Jones as a fellow leader of a Christian faith community who is also an Arab. Arab Christians--like me--are virtually invisible in the discourses around the Middle East, despite the fact that we are the only indigenous Christians on the planet. Both Arab and Christian, we are in a unique position to weigh in on tensions between US Christians and Arab Muslims, so often racialized as White vs. Brown. It is also true that many Arab Christians in the West use their faith affiliation to construct assimilated, "White" identities and are very invested in articulating the differences between Arab Muslims and Christians. My own family is often like this. But without smoothing over such differences it is also possible to celebrate the possibilities suggested by an action like the release of this letter by an Arab Catholic priest.

In his letter Father Zahlawi articulated many of my own questions when"Christians" like Jones and Phelps preach hate. He writes, "Tell me, is there in the character of Jesus, in his words or in his actions anything that would remotely justify even a hint of promoting disdain and hatred among people?"

Perfect.

(Via The Ugly Truth)
"Respected Pastor Terry Jones,

I have read your worldwide call for the burning of the Quran on this coming 11th of September. Your message stated that you are a pastor of one of the churches in Florida in the United States of America.

As an Arab Catholic priest from Damascus (Syria), I wondered what would be your objective, as an American pastor, for such a call?

I wondered, and I ask you: What are your responsibilities as a pastor?

Are you really a Christian pastor serving God in a church in America?

Or are you merely a layperson from America who is pretending to be in the service of Christ?

Did you give in to your nationalism (Americanism) rather than giving in to your Christianity?

What is your aim with that call?

(Do you wish) to further fuel hatred among people? Is that consistent with (the teachings of) Jesus, whom you represent in your eyes and the eyes of many others?

Tell me, is there in the character of Jesus, in his words or in his actions anything that would remotely justify even a hint of promoting disdain and hatred among people?

Have you forgotten that Jesus was completely for love, forgiveness and peace? Have you forgotten what he taught us when he told his disciples and the people after them to tell God the heavenly Father of all to “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who wrong us”? You overlooked or forgot that when Jesus was hanging on the cross and being subjected to insults and vile words, he raised his voice, saying, “O Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Who, then, do you represent or who are you trying to guide with this call of yours?

Isn’t it enough what has been happening since September 11, 2001: the killing, destruction, displacement and starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, from Palestine – the land of Jesus – by your leaders in particular, headed by George Bush, who was claiming direct communication with God?

Wouldn’t you agree with me that with your call (to burn the Quran), you have demonstrated that you are really unfamiliar with Jesus and that you desperately need to re-discover him again to be a true Christian pastor who calls, like Jesus, for the comprehensive love and full respect for every human being and a commitment to the full and wonderful teachings that call upon all believers, without exception, to always stand beside the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged?

My brother Pastor Terry Jones. Can you tell me, honestly, if Jesus came today, whose side would he take?

Is it the side of the powerful and arrogant oppressors who dominate the world and endlessly plunder its resources, violate its laws and international treaties, and kill people in their countries and destroy houses on top of their owners and turn them into refugees across the earth? Or is it the side of those who are oppressed, the disadvantaged, hungry, and homeless?

Did you forget what Jesus himself would say on the Day of Judgment to each person in front of him: “All that you did to one of my brothers, you actually did to me”?

I wonder if you have overlooked or forgotten that Jesus did not point in that speech on the Day of Judgment to the religion of any of those mistreated persons. He only referred to everyone as belonging to the human race and to his standing with the deprived, the weak, and the oppressed in this world.

So how could you as an American Christian pastor stand with the oppressors from your country whose injustice has spread around the world?

Aren’t you afraid of when you appear before Jesus on Judgment Day and you are burdened with a heavy conscience, like your leaders who are blinded by the gods of power, money, control and greed?

My brother Pastor Terry. Do you think I am being unfair if I conclude that your hatred toward Islam is what drove you to such a reprehensible call for the burning of Islam’s holy book, the Quran?

But let me ask you, as a Syrian Roman Catholic priest: What do you know about Islam? It appears to me from your call to burn the Quran that you are ignorant of Christ and Christianity, and that makes me believe that you are also ignorant of Islam and Muslims.

Believe me, it is not my intention to indict you and it is not my intention to engage with you in a religious debate about Christianity or Islam. However, after I prayed for a long time, let me suggest for both of us to make a joint effort on this coming September 11.

You might ask me what effort can we do jointly when you are in Florida and I’m in Damascus?

Here is my suggestion.

I invite you to visit Syria, where you will be my guest and the guest of many of my Muslim and Christian friends. Syria is a country populated mostly by Muslims and in which Christians are indigenous to the land and have lived side-by-side with Muslims for centuries and centuries.

Come and don’t worry about anything.

Come and you will find out about Islam and Muslims what will comfort you, please you, surprise you, and even lead you, from where you are today in Florida, to invite all people to live in respect, love and cooperation among all people.

This is what people need rather than the un-Christian call to fuel the sentiment of hatred and division.

Come to Syria and you will be amazed by the good nature of people and their faith, their relations, friendly cooperation and openness toward all strangers.

Come to Damascus to witness and live an experience that is not in your mind nor the mind or expectation of all the churches of the West or their bishops, pastors, and clergymen.

Come to see and hear two choruses, Christian and Muslim, singing together during Christian and Islamic holidays to praise Allah, the One God, who created us all, and to whom we all return.

My brother Pastor Terry.

I call you my brother and I am serious about calling you brother and about my invitation to you. I await a word (of reply) from you. Trust me that you will find a brother in Damascus, actually many brothers.

Please contact me and don’t delay. I am waiting for you in Damascus.

I ask God to make our anticipated meeting the beginning of a long and interesting path that we undertake together with other brothers in Damascus and around the world.

How desperate is the need of our world for bright roads.

Come, the road to Damascus is waiting for you.

Father Elias Zahlawi"

Call For Submissions: New York Arab & South Asian Short Video Slam

2010-09-05T06:42:00.001-04:00

Thursday, September 30, 2010

11:30 pm at Alwan for the Arts

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

For the first annual New York Arab & South Asian Short Video Slam (NYA & SA SVS)

Deadline: September 30, 2010

Seeking new short videos (produced 2006 or later) by South Asian and Arab directors OR videos about those regions and their diasporas by filmmakers of all backgrounds.

Videos of all genres are welcome, including conceptual and political video art. Please limit these video to 20 mins or less Total Running Time.

The 2010 NYA&SA Short Video Slam will present the best in recent short videos that increase awareness of the creative vitality and sociopolitical realities of North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, South Asia, and their diasporas. The NYA&SA Short Video Slam will take place in late October 2010 at the Alwan for the Arts Space at 16 Beaver Street in Lower Manhattan.

Alwan for the Arts & 3rd i NY have been co-presenting monthly film screenings and a combined film festival for over 3 years. These started at the now defunct Two Boots Pioneer Theater, where due to low costs and a basement venue for pizza and beer receptions after the screening, we were able to create a lively space for filmmakers and film enthusiasts to interact. While we have continued our monthly series and for two years our festival at the Tribeca Cinemas, the space does not accommodate these informal post-screening discussions and is more conducive to showing feature films from abroad than local independent and experimental work. We'd like to once again play a greater role as a showcase for aesthetically, politically, theoretically and/or technically innovative work as well serve as a meeting place filmmakers and film aficionados.

As a participating filmmaker you will benefit from the deep level of engagement provided by the audience members that Alwan & 3rd i NY has cultivated over the last few years of intense programming, who are more knowledgeable than general audiences about the history, languages, and cultures of the North African, Middle Eastern, and South and Central Asian regions. They enjoy healthy debate and cross-cultural learning. They are diverse in their ages, incomes, and professional backgrounds. They often come to many screenings or cultural events per year, and appreciate the opportunity to engage with artists, writers, thinkers, and cultural producers. Alwan's loft space's open layout makes it easy to quickly convert it from screening to social gathering, and it is close to numerous trains.

To submit please include:

1) DVD or VHS (NTSC or PAL) preview copy
2) Synopsis, running time, year, country and year of production
3) Director bio, cast/crew list
4) Screening history, Awards
5) All possible screening formats available
6) Contact email, phone #, website if available
7) If above info provided on CD, please also include film stills at 300 dpi as tiff or jpeg as part of the EPK

MAIL TO:

Video Slam Submissions
ATTN: Melissa Forstrom
Alwan for the Arts
16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
New York NY 10004

Tel.: 646.732.3261

Materials will be returned if prepaid from USA, self addressed envelope is
provided. If selected, you will be notified by October 30, 2010.

For questions or to submit electronically email: info@alwanforthearts.org

Hamas, the I.R.A. and US by Ali Abunimah

2010-09-04T06:53:00.002-04:00

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams with Barack Obama

August 28, 2010

Hamas, the I.R.A. and Us

By ALI ABUNIMAH

Chicago

"GEORGE J. MITCHELL, the United States Middle East envoy, tried to counter low expectations for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by harking back to his experience as a mediator in Northern Ireland.

At an Aug. 20 news conference with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, announcing the talks that will begin this week, Mr. Mitchell reminded journalists that during difficult negotiations in Northern Ireland, “We had about 700 days of failure and one day of success” — the day in 1998 that the Belfast Agreement instituting power-sharing between pro-British unionists and Irish nationalists was signed.

Mr. Mitchell’s comparison is misleading at best. Success in the Irish talks was the result not just of determination and time, but also a very different United States approach to diplomacy.

The conflict in Northern Ireland had been intractable for decades. Unionists backed by the British government saw any political compromise with Irish nationalists as a danger, one that would lead to a united Ireland in which a Catholic majority would dominate minority Protestant unionists. The British government also refused to deal with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, despite its significant electoral mandate, because of its close ties to the Irish Republican Army, which had carried out violent acts in the United Kingdom.

A parallel can be seen with the American refusal to speak to the Palestinian party Hamas, which decisively won elections in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006. Asked what role Hamas would have in the renewed talks, Mr. Mitchell answered with one word: “None.” No serious analyst believes that peace can be made between Palestinians and Israelis without Hamas on board, any more than could have been the case in Northern Ireland without Sinn Fein and the I.R.A.

The United States insists that Hamas meet strict preconditions before it can take part in negotiations: recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by agreements previously signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which Hamas is not a member. These demands are unworkable. Why should Hamas or any Palestinian accept Israel’s political demands, like recognition, when Israel refuses to recognize basic Palestinian demands like the right of return for refugees?

As for violence, Hamas has inflicted a fraction of the harm on Israeli civilians that Israel inflicts on Palestinian civilians. If violence disqualifies Hamas, surely much greater violence should disqualify the Israelis?

It was only by breaking with one-sided demands that Mr. Mitchell was able to help bring peace to Northern Ireland. In 1994, for instance, Mr. Mitchell, then a Democratic senator from Maine, urged President Bill Clinton — against strenuous British objections — to grant a United States visa to Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader. Mr. Mitchell later wrote that he believed the visa would enable Mr. Adams “to persuade the I.R.A. to declare a cease-fire, and permit Sinn Fein to enter into inclusive political negotiations.” As mediator, Mr. Mitchell insisted that a cease-fire apply to all parties equally, not just to the I.R.A.

Both the Irish and Middle Eastern conflicts figure prominently in American domestic politics — yet both have played out in very different ways. The United States allowed the Irish-American lobby to help steer policy toward the weaker side: the Irish government in Dublin and Sinn Fein and other nationalist parties in the north. At times, the United States put intense pressure on the British government, leveling the field so that negotiations could result in an agreement with broad support. By contrast, the American government let the Israel lobby shift the balance of United States support toward the stronger of the two parties: Israel.

This disparity has not gone unnoticed by those with firsthand knowledge of the Irish talks. In a 2009 letter to The Times of London, several British and Irish negotiators, including John Hume, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the Belfast Agreement, criticized the one-sided demands imposed solely on Hamas. “Engaging Hamas,” the negotiators wrote, “does not amount to condoning terrorism or attacks on civilians. In fact, it is a precondition for security and for brokering a workable agreement.”

The resumption of peace talks without any Israeli commitment to freeze settlements is another significant victory for the Israel lobby and the Israeli government. It allows Israel to pose as a willing peacemaker while carrying on with business as usual.

As for Mr. Mitchell, since he was appointed Middle East envoy, he has so far enjoyed almost 600 days of failure. As long as the United States maintains the same hopeless approach, he can expect many more."

Ali Abunimah is the author of “One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse."

(A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 29, 2010, on page WK10 of the New York edition of the New York Times.)

Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy

2010-09-03T06:15:00.000-04:00

"The American River Ganges," Thomas Nast's 1875 cartoon
showing Catholic priests as crocodiles attacking the United States
to devour the nation's school children

Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy

John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby

"As historians of American Catholicism, and Catholics, we are concerned to see the revival of a strain of nativism in the current controversy over the establishment of an Islamic center some blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent “religious other.” Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.

Most worrisome, Catholics seemed insufficiently grateful for their ability to build churches and worship in a democracy, rights sometimes denied to Protestants and Jews in Catholic countries, notably Italy. In the 1840s and 1850s these anxieties about Catholicism in American society turned violent, including mob attacks on priests and churches as well as the formation of a major political party, the American Party, dedicated to combating Catholic influence. This led to novel claims that the US constitution demanded an absolute separation of church and state—claims that stem not from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington but from nineteenth-century politicians, ministers, and editors worried that adherents of a hierarchical Catholicism might destroy the hard-won achievements of American democracy. In 1875, a decade after accepting General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Ulysses S. Grant publicly warned that Catholicism might prove as divisive in American society as the Confederacy.

Like many American Muslims today, many American Catholics squirmed when their foreign-born religious leaders offered belligerent or tone-deaf pronouncements on the modern world. New York’s own Bishop John Hughes thundered in 1850 that the Church’s mission was to convert “the officers of the navy and the Marines, commander of the Army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the president and all.” The Syllabus of Errors, promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1864 denied that the Church had any duty to reconcile itself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”

But a Catholic president was elected in 1960, and today Catholics hold more seats in Congress than any other religious body. The Vice-President and Speaker of the House are Catholics, as are six of the nine Supreme Court justices.

It took Catholics more than a full century to attain their current level of acceptance and influence, and they made their share of mistakes along the way, occasionally by trying too hard to prove their patriotic bona fides. (Exhibit A: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name is now, paradoxically, a synonym for “un-American activities.”) But they earned their place, over the course of many decades, by serving (and dying for) their country, and building their own churches, schools and health care systems alongside public counterparts, which they also frequented and supported with their taxes.

Meanwhile, American Catholics helped transform parts of their own church that seemed at odds with the American freedoms they had come to cherish. An American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was decisive in shaping Dignitatis Humanae (1965)—the Declaration on Religious Liberty, in which the Second Vatican Council endorsed religious freedom for all people. In this sense, the American acceptance and encouragement of Catholic parishes and schools once seen as threatening, reshaped an international religious institution. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington once commented on how ironic it was that the papacy had become the greatest global champion of religious freedom in the final quarter of the twentieth century.

Historical comparisons are bound to be inexact; but American Muslims, like American Catholics, are now building their own religious and cultural institutions, and they are seeking guidance from a wide variety of religious sources—some few from jihadists, most from accommodationists.

Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the center of the New York controversy, is an accommodationist. He claims, correctly, that the vast majority of the nation’s Muslims abhor al-Qaeda. Moreover, Rauf seeks to demonstrate that Muslims are no less Americans than are their Christian and Jewish counterparts. They, too, pray for (and were among) the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorists and beg God’s forgiveness for atrocities committed in his name.

Is it imprudent for Rauf and his supporters to locate the proposed Islamic center so close to the site of terrible violence against Americans committed in the name of Islam? In fact the fault lies less with Rauf than with a debased effort to whip up partisan fervor around the issue. Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting. The genius of the American experiment in religious liberty is precisely this long-term confidence that equal rights for all religious groups builds the loyalty every democratic society needs. Certainly American Catholics learned that lesson long ago."

R. Scott Appleby is the John M. Regan, Jr. Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame. John T. McGreevy is the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame.

"The Ground Zero Synagogue"—Lebanon Becoming More American than America

2010-09-02T01:21:00.001-04:00

Beirut's Magen Abraham Synagogue

The Ground Zero Synagogue—Lebanon Becoming More American than America

By Gus Bridi (originally published on his blog Zero Party Politics)

"There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York
so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.
The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave
aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and
submission is over.”
— Newt Gingrich

Has Lebanon officially become more tolerant and progressive than the United States?

Let's talk about Lebanon’s Ground Zero and you can decide for yourself.

One must first understand what “Ground Zero” means to most Lebanese.

In a country with about the same land mass as Los Angeles County which has been at war off and on for nearly four decades, “Ground Zero” for the Lebanese is arguably their entire country—and at the center of their Ground Zero is downtown Beirut, captured and occupied by the Israeli Defense Force in 1982 and which was almost entirely reduced to rubble from Muslim West Beirut to Christian East Beirut, and all points in between.

Once upon a time not too long ago, there was scarcely a building left standing or unscarred by shrapnel in all of Beirut. I know, because I was in Beirut in 1991, and witnessed first hand a city once described as "the Paris of the Middle East" reduced to ruins, pot marked with unexploded munitions and a haphazard "network" of open sewers.

Miraculously, Beirut was rebuilt and reclaimed its prominence. It once again became the jewel of the Arab world, remarkably able to bridge the ancient mystique of the east with the modern allure of the west.

Upon the first completion of its "rebuilding" process however--after 15 years and tens of billions of dollars spent on reconstructing Lebanon and its Ground Zero from rubble to splendor, Israel did what Israel does...

In July and August of 2006, Israel again followed through on its promise to “bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age,” and in so doing displaced 1,000,000 Lebanese civilians (nearly a quarter of the country’s population), completely destroyed the country’s infrastructure (again), its only airport, at least 64 bridges, leveled entire buildings and neighborhoods to rubble (again), including the country's largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centers, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, several mosques, and a handful of hospitals (in a country which only had a handful of hospitals to begin with).

Over 1,200 hundred Lebanese civilians were killed and over 5,000 wounded.

Israel routinely talks about “proportionality” when comparing their “terrorism deaths” to American 9/11 deaths. In order to shock the sensibilities of a gullible American public, they portray a figure “in American terms,” by multiplying their dead by a number which reflects their population in comparison to the American population.

Well, what’s good for the Israeli goose is good for the Lebanese gander. I will play their game: 1,200 dead Lebanese civilians are the “proportional equivalent” to 90,000 American dead when accounting for the two countries’ population differences. Therefore, according to Israeli goose math, that’s the equivalent of roughly thirty 9/11’s Israel exacted on Lebanon in July and August 2006 over the course of 34 days—nearly one 9/11 a day for an entire month without relent.

Incidentally, July and August of 2006 only tell a small part of the story when it comes to Israeli aggression against Lebanon. There have been decades of invasion, devastation, and occupation which predated 2006. Several thousands of Lebanese have been killed at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force. Tens of billions of dollars of damage have been levied on the Lebanese infrastructure and private and public property courtesy of the IDF over the course of decades.

“Ground Zero” for Lebanon is an ever expanding, never ending, open wound that never heals.

So what now Newt?

Should you expect the Lebanese to allow a synagogue to be built on their Ground Zero, in the aftermath of a 9/11 that occurred 5 years after ours and which, “proportionately” speaking, was 30 times the size of ours?

Well guess what you hateful, misguided, twit?

THEY DID.

In the process of re-building Beirut yet again, in 2008, renovations began and have now been completed on the Maghden Abraham Synagogue located in the middle of newly renovated downtown Beirut in an area known as the “Solidere" which has become the focal point and showcase of Lebanon’s rebirth.

This isn’t some hole in the wall, nondescript, “excuse me” synagogue hidden out of view so as to not “offend” Lebanese non-Jews—this is an elaborate, ornate, beautifully designed, cathedral-style house of worship built for a Lebanese Jewish population that totals less than 500 in a country of more than 4,000,000 (in stark contrast to the eight million American Muslims living in the United States).

And wait until you hear Hezbollah’s response to the building of this Ground Zero Synagogue.

(To those expecting a Newt Gingrich equivalent response, prepare to be woefully disappointed).

Courtesy of Hassan Nasrallah himself: "We respect Judaism, just as we respect Christianity. Our only problem is with Israel."

Did you hear that Newt (and the rest of you idiots)?

An Arab democracy, with a Muslim Prime Minister and a Christian President, allowed the building of a synagogue, squarely in the center of their “Ground Zero” in the heart and pride of downtown Beirut which used to be a dumping ground for Israeli military ordinances.

An Arab democracy allowed this, without so much as a protest being made by its citizens, or allegations by politicians that this was sacrilege, or hateful commentary by the media that the Jewish faith was barbaric, or any of the other stupidity I have seen and heard plastered all over American television, talk radio, and internet-blogs regarding a certain “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Islamic faith.

Regardless of whether you perceive Israel to be justified in perpetrating the devastation it did on Lebanon is irrelevant. The purpose of this article is not to debate that. What cannot be debated, is that Israel (a Jewish State, flying a Jewish flag) unleashed hell on Lebanon for 34 straight days in July and August of 2006 (and for decades prior in its wars against Lebanon). Regardless of whether or not you feel Israel had a right to do that, you cannot deny that Lebanese civilians harbored, and continue to harbor, a very real resentment against the government of Israel—this Jewish state—for those actions and the devestation those actions caused.

Yet these very Lebanese, who are so quickly labeled as “blood thirsty terrorists” by Newt Gingrich and his army of xenophobic morons, were able to draw a distinction between the Jews “flying those planes” in July and August of 2006 working at the behest of the Israeli government, and the Jews whom are citizens of Lebanon who had no connection with those attacks.

Lebanon rebuilt that Ground Zero Synagogue for its Jews.

Not for Israel. Not for the world’s Jewry. Not as a monument to mark a “Jewish victory” over Lebanon.

Lebanon rebuilt that Ground Zero Synagogue because its Jews lived in that neighborhood and they had every right to build a house of worship in a place they called home.

For crying out loud, Hassan Nassrallah and Hezbollah can even draw the distinction between a Lebanese Jew and an Israeli soldier who happens to be a Jew. So how is it that Americans can’t distinguish between American Muslims who were victims of 9/11 and Saudi Muslims who were the perpetrators of 9/11?

Thank you Mr. Gingrich for allowing Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah to outclass you and the Republican Party (and you Democrats aren't too far behind--yes Harry Reid, I'm talking to you). When the former Republican Speaker of the House and the current Democratic Senate Majority Leader start sounding less tolerant and less reasonable than a "terrorist," we need to start sounding the alarm bells.

What a sad state of affairs for America.

Juan James: "Burka Board" + "Prayer Board"

2010-09-01T06:03:00.008-04:00

Prayer Board + Burka Board by Juan James
(Sebastian Errazuriz and J. Carlton Dewoody) (2010)

These skateboards were designed by Chilean-born New York-based artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz in collaboration with NYC artist and musician J. Carlton Dewoody, an artistic union they have dubbed "Juan James." The provocative designs, which feature a stylized prayer mat and covered woman's face respectively, were created for a fundraiser for Skateistan, an Afghan NGO that founded the first co-ed skateboarding school in the world in Afghanistan. The exhibition and fundraising event, held on August 20th at Red Bull Space in Soho NY, included more than 50 different customized boards. While the exhibition is passed the boards themselves are available for auction on eBay and 100% of the final bids will go directly towards Skateistan’s efforts to provide skateboarding and educational opportunities to the boys and girls of Afghanistan.

Over 70 artists and designers contributed skate decks for the auction. I didn't attend the exhibition but none of the designs pictured on eBay feature overtly Islamic themes. Nevertheless, the "Juan James" designs were the ones that represented the entire exhibition online at various design blogs (like DesignBoom and Lost In A Supermarket for e.g.) There's a lot going on here that is worth talking about (and I've written about Skateistan before) but I'd like to focus on these particular designs:

I can't help but think of a female Muslim colleague who has called for an official moratorium on the use of heavily kohl-eyed women peering out from behind veils as a signifier. (Try and get through a week without seeing a version of this image somewhere, I dare you) Of course she is right, although the graphic appeal of the eye-veil combo is undeniable from a design perspective. While you can get versions of the same thing within Arabo-Islamic cultures--in some Palestinian revolutionary art, for example--it is safe to say that Burka Board is squarely within the tradition of Western/Non-Muslim depictions of Islamic women.

...But maybe arguments about the veil, which are exhausting in and of themselves, aren't really a productive way to think about this image. Since this is at once an art and design object it's appropriate to think about it not only aesthetically, but in terms of its use. Inescapably this object is defined by its relationship to a potential user, who is being invited to stand on the face of the woman pictured on its surface. Once you proceed from that realization what she is wearing and why become secondary. If we assume that the graphic represents an Afghan woman--famous in the West as victims of the misogynistic excesses of the Taliban--then the resonance of this distasteful dynamic only deepens. There is no guarantee that this deck will ever be used to skate because sometimes such "designer decks" are displayed as art objects instead. But even still, the conceptual difficulty remains: the relationship suggested by this design is "woman under your feet."

For me, if I consider the Prayer Board separately it becomes more interesting and less culturally tone-deaf. As a New Yorker I see Muslims praying throughout the day-- sometimes in dedicated prayer rooms, sometimes in hallways, sometimes tucked away in corners-- so I already have an understanding of prayer rugs as mobile. Using this motif on a skateboard doesn't seem to degrade the sacred intent of the original objects it references. (Does it? I'm curious to hear from Muslim readers on the subject). It is playful, yes--but not derogatory.

The history of Islamic art, which developed largely without representing human forms, is full of stylized decoration like those on this board. So, whether it was intentional or not, Prayer Board references the artistic tradition of the community it was designed to support through its sale. And unlike its companion Burka Board, it is free of nasty colonial associations--at least to my non-Muslim eye.

I have no specific objection to non-Muslim artists using Islamic aesthetics in their work--there are lots of examples of cultural borrowing that yields artistically interesting results. But it does make me wonder: why reference Islam at all when skateboarding is the focus of the school and the exhibition?

ATTENTION PLAYWRIGHTS: Co-Op Theatre East is taking Play Submissions

2010-08-30T10:33:00.005-04:00

Playwrights Rob Florence and David Meth at January 2009's
COTE Tales Reading Series post-show discussion

ATTENTION NYC PLAYWRIGHTS: Co-Op Theatre East is now accepting one-act plays for its play reading series COTE Tales at Kaffe 1668 in Tribeca. Plays should be no longer than 20 pages, and speak to one of this season's themes:

1. Haunted Histories (10/24/10)
2. Ethical Conflicts (12/11/10)
3. Love across Borders (2/19/11)
4. Evolutions (4/13/11)

Plays should also fit COTE's mission statement: "Co-Op Theatre East believes in the power of art to foster a dialogue for social change. We provide an entertaining performance forum in which to ask evocative, challenging questions of artists and audiences on our way to creating collaborative answers."

The DEADLINE for "Haunted Histories" is September 3rd; plays for future readings will be accepted on a rolling basis. All readings will be held at Kaffe 1668, 275 Greenwich St., nr. Murray St. All chosen playwrights must be able to attend. Each submission must also include a synopsis, resume and the theme or which you're submitting in the subject line. Plays without a synopsis will not be read. Please e-mail all submissions to Casey Cleverly at COTEsubmissions@gmail.com.

COTE's General Writing Submission Policy:

Co-Op Theatre East has an open submission policy and welcomes all playwrights to submit work. We accept all types of submissions including solo pieces, one-act plays, musicals and full length plays. All plays must coincide with Co-Op Theatre East's mission statement (see www.cooptheatreeast.org ) and include the following:

1) Synopsis
2) Ten Page Dialogue Sample
3) Playwrights Resume

COTE reads every submission and after reading the synopsis/sample may ask to see the entire script. Submissions may be e-mailed to Casey Cleverly at COTEsubmissions@gmail.com.

Where The White Women At?

2010-08-28T13:36:00.006-04:00

Oriental Stories, Spring 1931
(courtesy of Ted Swedenburg)

Dear Tea-Partiers,

While you are busy having your "Restoring Honor" Rally with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on the anniversary of the March on Washington I am going to jump on my magic carpet and have sex with your daughters.

All of them.

Hey Bristol! I'll catch up with you post-Dancing With the Stars, okay habibi? (I hear Bristol Palin is single again but I am going to wait until she dances off some of that baby weight.)

Sincerely,

Yusef al-Chesthair of Big-Cockistan

The Levantine Review Seeks Writers

2010-08-27T06:34:00.000-04:00

The Levantine Review, founded in 2005, is an online monthly magazine dedicated to coverage of the arts and culture of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as its communities in diaspora. With up to 25,000 readers per month worldwide, and up to 10,000 local to Southern California, The Levantine Review is looking for talented new writers to contribute profiles, features, reviews and op-eds. Profiles consist of interviewing and portraying select authors, actors, filmmakers, composers et al—movers and shakers in the arts who happen to be connected to the MENA. Profiles will range 750-1200 words, features 750-1500 words, reviews of books, films and events 500-1200 words, and op-eds will range 500-1000 words.

Query first: editor@levantinecenter.org. Visit http://www.levantinecenter.org/levantine-review.

Levantine Review
Levantine Cultural Center
5998 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90035-2657
310.657.5511 vox
310.657.5522 fax
Email: editor@levantinecenter.org
Visit the website at http://www.levantinecenter.org/levantine-review

Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum August 4-September 26th

2010-08-26T06:12:00.000-04:00

New Museum (5th Floor)

August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

BGP: Black Girl Project Premire Screening

2010-08-25T07:53:00.005-04:00

My friend the awesome Bianca Laureano wrote to tell me about an upcoming screening of an important new documentary Black Girl Project this Friday August 27. She writes,

"My homegirl, activist, filmmaker, mami, radical teacher, and media maker Aiesha Turman will have her premiere screening of one of her first films through her production company SUPER HUSSY MEDIA for her organization called THE BLACK GIRL PROJECT.

The Black Girl Project (BGP) is now a non-profit organization of which I sit on the board. We have amazing events and activities planned to create our communities (world and universe) into engaging, supportive, and loving spaces for young black girls (and yes that includes Latinas as well as other/all ethnicities!). There will be a cocktail reception, film screening, and panel discussion with Aiesha and 4 participants in her film.

The film screening on Friday is at the Spike Lee Screening Room located at Long Island University 1 University Place Brooklyn, NY btw Flatbush and DeKalb (yes that is in Brooklyn). Tickets are on sale and are $20 (these are donations to the BGP) and will be on sale until Friday at NOON online http://bgpbk.eventbrite.com/ and are $25 at the door. You will get a dope film to see, drinks, dessert, and to see your girl in some 3 inch heels (honestly that alone is worth the $20, those of you who have seen me in my 3 inch heels know this is the TRUTH).

If you cannot attend but would like to support please consider making a donation. http://blackgirlproject.org/get-involved/

TONIGHT: NYC Book Launch "Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 "

2010-08-24T06:27:00.004-04:00

Why Be Something That You're Not chronicles the first wave of Detroit Hardcore from its origins in the late 70s to its demise in the mid-80s. Through a combination of oral history and extensive imagery, the book proves that even though Southern California might have created the look and style of hardcore punk, it was the Detroit scene--along with a handful of other scenes across the country [cough *Philly* cough] that cultivated the music's grassroots aesthetic before most cultural hotspots around the globe even knew what the music was about.

The book includes interviews with members of THE FIX, VIOLENT APATHY, NEGATIVE APPROACH, NECROS, PAGANS, BORED YOUTH and L-SEVEN along with people who had a hand in the early hardcore scene like Ian MacKaye (MINOR THREAT), Tesco Vee, and Dave Stimson (Touch & Go Fanzine).

TONIGHT: The Sternberg Project

2010-08-23T00:23:00.004-04:00

The Sternberg Project

August 23, 2010, 8pm

Sternberg Park

The Sternberg Project, a site-specific dance film by Zena Bibler of the Dance Film Lab, is a crowd-sourced, multi-media, videodance time capsule of July in Sternberg Park and its surrounding area composed of short videos made on anything from HD camcorders to cell phone cameras.

The final Moviehouse screening of the summer is a screening of The Sternberg Project as well as original work by Itziar Barrios called (Ballad of) Knowville and a live performance.

Shot in abandoned industrial locations in New York City, (Ballad of) Knowville attempts to explain our present world through the murder ballad aesthetic. This aesthetic is a sub-genre of the traditional ballad form (often an American version of an older European ballad), that relays details and often consequences of crimes of passion but with the elements of supernatural retribution removed. In this video piece, the murder ballad is an entry point into a world that conjures tension, intrigue, and mystery and where death is decorative, lyrical, and aestheticized. (Ballad of) Knowville teeters on the edge of a dream-state, repeatedly falling into dance-induced lyricism only to abruptly regain the stark reality of self-awareness.

Details:
Monday, August 23rd, 8pm
Sternberg Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Lorimer + Boerum Streets)
Event is FREE! (So bring your friends)

Zena Bibler is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and experimental filmmaker. Her latest projects include The Union Square Experiments, an expanding set of site-specific, geo-tagged, Google-Mapped, public dance performances with Katie Schetlick and Ashley Hannan and Little Dances Everywhere, a series of short, site-specific dance films that function like postcards from particular moments and situations.

Conceived and directed by Zena Bibler in collaboration with Katie Schetlick, Ashley Hannan, Faye Min Lim, Ashley Murray, Jacob Liberman, Malinda Crump, Rishauna Zumberg, Ariel Lembeck, Elaine Carberry, Zavé Martohardjono, Ullani Atkins, Sofia Feria, Jennifer Ruiz, Nico Demus, Peter Roushakes, Trevion Tillman, DJ Tillman, Zanaya Tillman, Davonaisha Tillman, Mia-Lee Betances, Kassandra Matos, Jacqueline Betances, Rian Rooney, Michelle Castañeda, Chris Tabron, Chris Henderson, Clay Franklin, Alice Cox, Gabriel Roldos, and Hannah Krafcik.

For more information visit http://www.brilliantp.com/moviehouse/

Multi-media Installation, Painting, and New Album IX Are Featured in Luis Jacob's First U.S. Solo Exhibition at Art in General

2010-08-21T21:08:00.006-04:00

Luis Jacob, Without Persons (2006) by David Frankovich

Luis Jacob: Without Persons

Art in General is pleased to present Without Persons, an exhibition of new and recent works by Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, curated by Andria Hickey. The exhibition includes video, painting, and a new work from the artist’s Album series that will be on view from September 16 – November 13, 2010. Receiving increasingly wider recognition, Jacob’s work was first exhibited at Art in General as part of the group exhibition Explosion LTTR: Practice More Failure, in 2004. More recently, Jacob’s work has been included in Documenta 12 and has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunstverein, Hamburg; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Over the past decade, Jacob’s diverse practice has addressed issues of social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Working in video, installation, sculpture and photography, as well as actions in the public sphere, Jacob’s work is often derived from research on a wide variety of subjects. In bringing together unlikely referents, Jacob invites a collision of meaning systems that destabilize our conventions of viewing and open up possibilities for participation and the creation of knowledge.

In the artist’s words, “what is essential for our experience of art—what is foundational—is the experience of non-intelligibility, a kind of dislocation. Aesthetic experience for us today is first of all an encounter with otherness, with strangeness: but an otherness that, crucially, is there demanding appropriation, intelligibility. What is so constructive about aesthetic experience is that it requires a creative act on the part of the viewer, an act of synthesis that is original through and through.”

The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Luis Jacob: Without Persons features a series of works that explore absence and authenticity in terms of pictorial representation, the legacy of modern art, and the self and others. These works call on the viewer to consider what may lie beneath the surface of the “empty picture,” and what new forms of real and unconscious knowledge may lay dormant in such minimal propositions.

The central installation, “Without Persons,” for which the exhibition is titled, is an immersive multimedia work that features two computer-generated voices, one male and one female, that talk about “being-in-the-city” and “being-with-others.” The adjacent images project an amorphous, plasma-like liquid, with abstract but seemingly bodily movement, as if animated by the artificial voices. As the liquid finds new forms in formlessness, the voices invite the viewer to consider the discord of the alien world without persons, and the coming to consciousness of an infant who knows no persons.

Jacob’s engagement with abstraction is also reflected in the exhibition through a series of paintings the artist made in response to an early suite of Mark Rothko paintings. Considering notions of authenticity and appropriation, Jacob reconstituted the original works using a staining technique on raw canvas for one series, and a vivid tie-dye technique, with two “eye holes” in the accompanying series of paintings.

Likewise, Jacob’s Album IX, newly created for this exhibition, intuitively reconstructs an uncanny narrative of recent art history. Album IX consists of dozens of images culled from a variety of books, magazines, and other publications. These images are montaged together in plastic-laminate panels, and hung sequentially in the gallery in the form of an “image bank”. Through processes of visual association, the images of Album IX compose a poetic narrative around various themes: reductivism in painting and the modernist tradition of creative rupture; base materialism and the aesthetic sublime; embodiment and the monochrome. Using imagery excised from published sources, Album IX becomes an invitation to construct associative narratives about artistic experience by means of the visual material that surrounds us in the expanded cultural environment. In the fall of 2010, Album IX will be published as an artist book by A Prior (Ghent, Belgium).

About the Artist

Luis Jacob’s work has been presented in numerous international group exhibitions including Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Animism, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp; Kunsthalle Bern (2010); Dance with Camera, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2009-2010); If We Can’t Get It Together, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2008); The Order of Things, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (2008); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007). His solo exhibitions include the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg of Mönchengladbach (2009), the Hamburg Kunstverein (2008); Platform Seoul, PKM Gallery, Seoul (2008); the Musée d’art de Joliette, Quebec (2008); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia (2007), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2005). In June 2010, Jacob presented the first of a three-part touring mid-career survey exhibition, Luis Jacob Tableaux: Pictures at an Exhibition, at the Darling Foundry in Montréal; the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto and to Vancouver. Jacob lives and works in Toronto.

Art in General
79 Walker Street
New York NY 10013
212 219 0473 tel
212 219 0511 fax
info@artingeneral.org

Classy.

2010-07-01T23:36:00.005-04:00

Mel Gibson, to the mother of his (latest) child, "You're an embarrassment to me... You look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault."

There has been a lot written about Gibson already but for me it comes down to this: You are either the sort of man who says something like this, or you aren't. Mel Gibson is.

Laura Jane Musser Fund grant for Intercultural Harmony

2010-06-20T06:32:00.001-04:00

Laura Jane Musser, 1916-1989

Intercultural Harmony

Application packages must be postmarked on or before October 13, 2010.

Funding decisions will be announced by February 2011.

Download RFP

The LAURA JANE MUSSER FUND would like to promote mutual understanding and cooperation between groups and citizens of different cultural backgrounds within defined geographical areas through collaborative, cross-cultural projects. Projects must be intercultural, rather than focused on just one culture.

PRIORITY IS PLACED ON PROJECTS THAT:

Include members of various cultural communities working together on projects with common goals
Build positive relationships across cultural lines
Engender intercultural harmony, tolerance, understanding, and respect
Enhance intercultural communication, rather than cultural isolation, while at the same time celebrating and honoring the unique qualities of each culture

PROJECTS MUST DEMONSTRATE:

Need in the community for the intercultural project
Grassroots endorsement by participants across cultural lines, as well as their active participation in planning and implementation of the project
The ability of the organization to address the challenges of working across the cultural barriers identified by the project
Work towards a tangible benefit in the larger community

LIMITS OF GEOGRAPHY: Only programs in Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Wyoming may apply.

PROJECTS ELIGIBLE FOR SUPPORT: Intercultural Harmony projects can be carried out in a number of areas, including (but not limited to):

The arts
Community service
Youth activities

OUTCOMES SHOULD INCLUDE:

Increased comfort in interaction between the groups and individual citizens addressed by the project
Harmonious shared use of public space and community facilities
Continued cooperation by the participants or communities addressed by the project

WHAT THE PROGRAM WILL COVER:

New programs or projects within their first three years
Either the planning or implementation phase of a project

WHAT WILL NOT BE FUNDED:

Capital Expenses
General Operating Expenses
Ongoing Program Support

WHO CAN APPLY:

Nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations
Organizations that are forming if they have a documented fiscal agent relationship
Organizations located within one of the eligible states listed above

The Power of DIY: Do It Yourself Alternative Exhibitions & Performances

2010-06-17T14:30:00.000-04:00

Yanira Castro, Dark Horse/Black Forrest (2008)

The Power of DIY: Do It Yourself

Alternative Exhibitions & Performances

Thursday, June 24, 6:30-8pm - FREE Taller Boricua
Multicultural Space, 1st Floor
at the Julia De Burgos Latino Cultural Center
1680 Lexington Avenue, between 105 & 106 Streets MAP
Please RSVP

Join this panel of visual and performing artists who are creating unique projects for super alternative spaces: from homes to the Internet to hotel bathrooms. By using untraditional venues, artists can do a lot with fewer resources and take more control of their artistic destinies. The resulting art is often accelerated by this DIY philosophy. It’s propelled forward by the artists’ commitment to their aesthetic, and supported by their professional savvy.

Panelists: Yanira Castro, Kibibi Dillion, Jorge Rojas, and Cassie Thornton
Panel Facilitator: Charles Rice-Gonzales of BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance)
The panel will be in English, but the audience may ask questions in Spanish.

Co-presented by The Field & Taller Boricua, with support from Senator José Serrano, as part of The Field’s program Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists.

Taller Boricua/The Puerto Rican Workshop is a 40-year old artist-run nonprofit art gallery and multidisciplinary cultural space in El Barrio. Its mission is to be a proactive institution for the community in East Harlem by offering programs that stimulate its social, cultural, and economic development through promotion of the arts.

PANEL BIOGRAPHIES:

Director/choreographer Yanira Castro collaborates with performers and designers on individual projects under the name a canary torsi. They work in a multiplicity of spaces: from warehouses and tiny restrooms to the stage, embedding dances within installations that directly address the audience’s experience of the live event. Castro’s work has been presented by DTW, PS122, and The Chocolate Factory, among others, and has toured internationally. She has received several fellowships and awards for her work including: The Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, ArtistNe(s)t and Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Her newest work, Wilderness, will premiere at The Invisible Dog, presented by DTW, Oct 27-Nov 7.

Through her producing artistry Kibibi T. Dillon is on a steadfast mission to re-build, uplift, and support her community. In 2006 The Neo Harlem Renaissance Party became the back drop and the beginning of theater company Launch World Wide and over the following 12 months produced four phenomenal shows with four of New York’s Most Talented Artist. Frayed by Cornelius Smith (All My Children), Birth of Power U by Queen GodIs, The Super Star Artist Show by Sherry Boone and Kick N 2 The Beat by Lee Anet Noble. Kibibi Dillon is also a Director, actor and comedian who performs who works all over NYC. LaunchWorldWide.com

Charles Rice-González is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance which he founded in 1998 with Bessie Award-winning dancer/choreographer Arthur Aviles. BAAD! is a workshop and performance space in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx that showcases challenging and cutting-edge works by women, people of color and the LGBT community. He received a BA in Communications from Adelphi University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and his debut novel, Chulito will be published by Alyson Books in the fall.

Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on the creation and processes involved in artistic production. Rojas has exhibited across Mexico, the United States and India including Queens Museum of Art (New York), New World Museum (Houston), Ex Convento del Carmen (Guadalajara), White Box (New York), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles) and West Chicago City Museum (West Chicago). His work is included in numerous private and public collections including The Mexican Museum (San Francisco) and Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach). Rojas currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in Morelos, Mexico. JorgeRojasArt.com

Cassie Thornton is an artist educator living in Brooklyn, NY. Her projects are systems for investigation and interaction with psycho-governmental and corporate footprints on people. She has founded a School of the Future, a Teaching Artist Union, a Consulting Company in a Forest, and a Barter System Beauty Salon. A recent project imbues our definition of debt with beauty and value: WealthOfDebt.com. Cassie will be studying Social Practice at California College of the Arts this fall.

Progressive Clichés

2010-06-15T10:55:00.000-04:00

Okay, here goes.

This summer I had an exchange with another blogger who'd tweeted something along the lines of "enough already, we all agree, America is NOT post-racial... can we move on now?" I love a cranky, self-aware tweet and I told him so. (For me this is the genius of Twitter: for every meaningless kernel of trivia that floats along the data-stream there is a shiny pearl, excellent for its brevity. The 140 character limit makes good writers better by forcing them to be brief and it keeps bad writers from going on for too long. In my book this is a win-win.) His point was that the "we are not post-racial" drumbeat had become meaningless through constant use and was perhaps taking the place of more substantive discussions about race. I'd thought the same thing but hadn't known how to articulate the thought... It is less a meme than a punchline. It stops conversations rather than opening them. In other words, "America is not post-racial" is a progressive cliché .

This brief conversation really made me think and I realized that there are a lot of tropes like this clogging up the discourse, making us ("us" = folks who write critically about various systems of oppression like racism, orientalism, sexism, etc. etc.) lazy. I considered writing a series of essays on these progressive cliches, but I hesitated. The self-imposed pressure to "keep it in the family " and not give the Right, who have become simultaneously more vicious and media-savvy in the last decade, more ammunition is strong. And kyriarchy--the ways in which we oppress each other--worries me. I don't want to inadvertently contribute to the systems of oppression I am trying to critique vertically or horizontally. And of course, while "America is Not Post-Racial" is a cliché, it is also true. So, does it make sense to criticize people for saying something that is true, especially when they/we are under constant attack from the Right? It seems to make more sense to just leave it alone, grit my teeth and complain to my friends who will understand where I'm coming from.

And yet... I can't seem to let go of this idea.

I returned to Twitter and asked my feed: What do yo think? And the response was overwhelmingly positive. What's more, suggestions for other progressive clichés started pouring in... ("Privilege Gotcha", "Whatever-Industrial Complex", "How To Be A true Ally" etc. etc. ... special thanks to @monshiprose). Self-selecting Twitter hive-mind notwithstanding, it seems I am not the only one frustrated with these intellectual non-starters. Huh. Okay then.

I suppose it comes down to this: I don't believe that the right way to deal with overwhelming opposition from the Right is to prevent ourselves from holding each other accountable to do better. But I do believe that if we have any chance at all to contribute (for lack of a better term) progressive ideals to a larger social conversation we can't let the contempt of the Right turn us into a self-silencing monolith in response.

Agreeing in principle doesn't mean we can't disagree--productively--about the whys and wherefores. And/or even about the hows. Right? There must be a way to critique the usefulness of certain arguments without attacking the people who articulate them, as a way of lifting the level of the discourse for all of us. Right?

So. All of that is the long way around to say that I am inaugurating a series of posts on "progressive clichés." I don't expect everyone to support the idea or agree with the way I present it, but I think one of the strengths of this format is its immediacy. So if you question what I propose with these posts then speak up. I'll happily hear you out. And if you have cliches of your own to propose, let me know.

Onward...