In defense of spontaneous contestation and/or beauty
‘Cutting Ties with Sotheby’s’ outside of the Museum of Modern Art.
Photo by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.
This was originally posted at The New Inquiry.
‘The Streets Are Dead Capital’
Recently I went to a talk by Ricardo Dominguez, an artist and hacktivist I had the occasion to interview a year ago. To say that Ricardo gave a ‘talk’ is putting it mildly. What you get with him (a trained actor) is more a passionate and self-conscious oratory performance than a scripted dry-run; as if to underscore this point, tucked underneath his lecturer’s day clothes was a Superman t-shirt, giving the unsettling illusion that at any moment the bespectacled stand-in for Clark Kent was going to transform into a caped crusader.
His starting point: design is a marker and site for neoliberal markets. One might choose to read ‘design’ broadly as self-enclosed, highly produced spaces, ergo your basic mall, museum, amusement park, or sports arena.
If design is a repository for obscured market power, Ricardo reasoned, then those lacking power could intervene with ‘microgestures’ that allow power to stage itself. In 1985 he performed such a microgesture at a site he viewed as part of an ‘exit culture’ of Disneyfied commodity exchange. He bought various packaged commodities—toys and electronics and so forth—but instead of going home he opened them at the exit door of a mall and began displaying and playing with them. Soon a crowd would gather, which inevitably set off mall security and then the police.
The kind of person who acquires packaged goods but doesn’t go home is typically a war vet, drug dealer, or homeless person, all of whom invite police attention because they are perceived to be trespassers. Bodies that deny the process of flow—by now it is as common to hear move along, there’s nothing to see here in colloquial form as it is to read it in a volume of French theory—are considered a blockage. Ricardo’s body became an instant site of blockage as a community of people formed around him at precisely the designated exit point at a shopping mall. He describes this—completely seriously, I might add—as an act of sabotage, accounting for the origin of the word ‘saboteur’ as women factory workers who wore wooden sabots at the mill so they could stick them in the machines (Fr. saboter, ‘kick with sabots, willfully destroy’).
Image source: Historical Boys’ Clothing.
During the Industrial Revolution, machines replaced workers at an alarming rate throughout Europe, and the once stable economy of guild and craft shop members who had performed manual labor for generations found their very welfare threatened. To protest machine replacement of workers, the workers would toss their shoes into the machine works to make them stop—sabotage.
Since his work in the 1980s with the Critical Art Ensemble and the Electronic Disturbance Theater Ricardo and his cohort have explained streets as dead capital. The streets’ primary design is to aid the flow of people and traffic, and even minor blockages such as the mall exit experiment are bound to perk up the antenna of even the laziest squad patrol. If flesh-and-blood bodies are being subjected to unprecedented curbs on freedom of movement and assembly, then a virtual alliance with data-bodies retains the possibility to return some power back to the disenfranchised: ‘[W]e put forth our idea that all digital actions must be part of parallel street action. That via transparency and simulations data bodies and real bodies could act in unison.’
This seems inarguable, especially given how (1) activists have at least since the 2004 DNC and RNC conventions coordinated their real-bodies via TXTMobbing, a technology developed for communicating and reporting in real-time in 160 characters, a direct predecessor to Twitter, Inc., and continue to do so on an exponential level, (2) popular awareness about virtual networks of hackers, hacker cultures, and the liquid potential of the web (e.g. Anonymous, LulzSec, Wikileaks) seems more diffuse than ever, and (3) allegiance and retaliation for the wrongs done to real-body activists by police, the FBI, the Justice Department, among others, have often been exacted by data-body activists—in fact, sometimes those wrongs are so egregious and the inculcated parties so powerless that appealing to collectives like Anonymous has became a foreseeable form of real-body/data-body solidarity.
‘An Emergency May Happen’
Action at the Museum of Modern Art, 30 March 2012.
Photo by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.
Last month I went to see 9 Scripts from a Nation at War at the Museum of Modern Art. I arranged a press pass in advance of my visit. But admission to the museum is free on Target Free Friday Nights. No one cared about the press pass, and I headed to the installation gallery.
One of the screens showed a reenactment of a testimony by a female American soldier in Iraq. I took the kind of careful notes that come with the realization of how glazed, distracted, and unreliable your mind becomes in the crowded and hot crush of museum-goers.
I like some of the Iraqi people.
You don’t know who is against you, who is for you.
I felt I was maintaining the country, not defending the country. What are we truly defending.
When you have your uniform on you get a totally different feeling. It’s like a switch.
I was startled out of the note-taking by a clamor. I ignored it, but it grew persistent. It was the kind of sound you imagine hearing if two very wealthy people started fighting over the last Knoll Tulip Chair in the museum gift shop. The clamor swelled to a roar.
I rushed outside toward the glass balcony, where tens or maybe hundreds (it would certainly become hundreds) of people were starting to hover. Mic-check! There’s no adequate way to describe what it feels like to walk into a political action at an art museum you had nothing to do with. That’s exactly how someone responded when I blared the horn on Twitter: the actions are becoming so prevalent that people are literally walking into them.
The wave of mic-checks alerting watchers to MoMA’s ties to Sotheby’s—the main target of the action—continued for some time without a police intervention. Presumably private security was calling them, since that’s what private security does when a group of people shout in unison in an encased space.
I fumbled with my phone camera and started recording [Video I. Video II.] capturing one of the first waves of mic-checks just before a hefty security guard stood in my way and pushed me off the balcony rails. I shouted at him to stop and demanded his name. He elbowed more people out of the way and poked a IO PARLO ITALIANO badge into my face. (I wrote a written complaint to MoMA about the physical nature of the incident but they have not written me back.)
Much more surprising than getting pushed around by museum security was the realization that an institution devoted to procuring objects for people to look at was actively blocking their view of a live event, happening in front of our very living eyeballs. By the time a second, third, and fourth wave of mic-checks started, the upper-level balconies of the museum were completely cleared of people. I started recording again. This is when a MoMA floor manager appeared. When I asked why he and the security guards were shooing us away and preventing us from watching he said very austerely, ‘An emergency may happen.’
On the ground level of the museum the mood was buoyant. Art handlers from Local 814, transit workers from Local 100, communication workers, carpenters, and NYU students mingled, giving the illusion of a temporary freehold of the space. The museum’s Free Fridays, a student explained, provided them with a ‘ready audience’ for the actions, bringing to mind the curious and surefire swarm toward Ricardo’s exit displays in the ’80s.
‘Union-busting’ does more to onomatopoeically evoke a police gang bursting through a union hall than to offer a realistic description of how contemporary unions actually get dismantled. It’s more a war of attrition than a stealth bomb attack. Like other prominent union battles (such as public school educators in the United Federation of Teachers, or New York state workers under Governor Cuomo) Sotheby’s union-busting tactic includes instituting a two-tiered system (or as someone described to me more evocatively, a ‘two-headed beast’). New hires were due to make about half the salary of veteran workers. When the Teamsters resisted, Sotheby’s locked them out for eight months.
From Sotheby’s: Bad for Art:
In 2010, Sotheby’s sales increased by 74 percent to $4.8 billion. And recently, Sotheby’s reported its most profitable quarter in the company’s 267-year history. Despite record profits and growth, Sotheby’s refuses to negotiate a fair contract with its art handlers. Instead of recognizing and rewarding the contribution these workers have made to the company’s success, Sotheby’s has locked out its professional art handlers, kicking them into the street with no paycheck, while outsourcing their jobs to temporary workers. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s rewarded its CEO by nearly doubling his annual salary to almost $6 million.
That the workers’ fighting Sotheby’s, who personally faced the expiration of their healthcare coverage, displayed this kind of sincere worry about the art works at the expense of their own livelihoods makes the art conglomerate appear especially insidious:
Is Sotheby’s putting irreplaceable and fragile pieces of art at risk? Auctioneers may sell the art, but art handlers are responsible for the transportation, preparation and display of each piece. Some of the locked out art handlers have more than 40 years of experience protecting art that sells for as much as $100 million. Replacing these individuals with temporary workers is enough to make anyone scream.
Neo-Situationists?
Situationism, as outlined in Guy Débord’s La société du spectacle (1967), Raoul Veniguem’s Traité du savoir vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations (1967), the May 1968 brochure ‘De la misère en milieu étudiant, considerée sous aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pours remédier,’ and in the 12 journal issues of the Internationale Situacionniste (1958-69), settles on a short but indispensable principle: a fight against the spectacle, the culture of the spectacle, generalized spectacularization, or against non-participation and non-intervention against passivity and social alienation.†
The rousing Situationist call to dérive or drift and to disorient oneself in familiarly designed surroundings did not obligatorily carry political overtures, but doubtless the principle they had in mind was to be used in an ongoing life project rather than a one-time edict. Either the political disruption and social transformation they imagined worked so organically that one could simply drift in and out of them or the reception to Situationist ideas has interpreted them that way.
We might want to spend a night in a house that’s in the process of being torn down or hitchhike without a destination through Paris during a transportation strike—just to add more confusion—or break into graveyards and catacombs, wandering aimlessly through the bones.‡
Whichever interpretation seems more persuasive, and however arbitrarily authoritarian the state-police-corporate response, the idea that art and hyper-designed space and personal orientation and virtual ontologies are deeply interconnected produces an impressive array of possibilities.
On 16 April 2012 University of Vermont students mic-checked UVM Board of Trustees member and Sotheby’s Arthouse CEO Bill Ruprecht.
Bill Ruprecht
Is paying himself
6 million dollars
And recording record profit at Sotheby’s
All while locking out his art handlers
In order to force cuts in wages and healthcare
Bill Ruprecht’s actions are in contradiction
To the values of UVM
Before you go into debt
At one of the most expensive
State universities in the country
Demand that Bill Ruprecht
Settle up with his workers
Or step down from the Board of Trustees
The activist group Liberate Tate drenched themselves in an oil-like substance and lay on the floor of the museum’s classical sculpture gallery in protest of Tate’s ongoing partnership with BP. Taking place on 20 April 2012 to mark the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, the protest lasted 87 minutes—one for every day oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.
And in a moment of passing beauty that had nothing to do locking out workers or partnering with ecological destroyers (and just when you thought flash mobs had lost their power to surprise or enchant) the Copenhagen philharmonic orchestra Sjællands Symfoniorkester played Griegs Peer Gynt for unsuspecting subway passengers.
All of this happened in April of this year alone.
The odds that collectively enjoined spontaneous contestation and/or beauty will not be met with real and chilling force are almost nil (look at the blow dealt to Occupy actions, terrorism charges for anti-NATO activists in Chicago, or the crazed anti-assembly law passed in Québec) but there is another equally important certainty. Real-bodies have still not lost their ability to turn dead capital into vitalized living.
__
†From Paola Berenstein Jacques, Estética da ginga: a arquitetura das favelas através da obra de Hélio Oiticica, Editora Casa de Palavra, 2001, Rio, 156.
‡From Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘The Situationists: Out in the Streets’ in Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press: New York, 2011. 37.
Five questions with Eileen Myles
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet and essayist (and mighty fine blogger) Eileen Myles, who reminds you to imagine yourself loved when being judged.
‘Examination of a Witch’ by Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853.
Source: University of Virginia archives.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
In everyday life how do you temper duty with desire, the menial with the resplendent?
I don’t temper much. I am overly dutiful, quite often but then I become deeply paralyzed, tired, overwhelmed and resentful. I don’t want to live. I then go reverse things, take care of myself and wind up on a higher more bodily plane where most things seem quite laughable and I’m able to make better choices and included in this realm is pleasure but I often have a hard time getting there. I have to work hard to stop working.
Do you agree with Walter Pater that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the conditions of music’?
No. That seems rather one note. He’s being prescriptive. I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.
Winter or summer: which season invites the better rituals?
Summer.
What ‘bad’ genres did you grow up reading—science fiction, fairy tales, romance, etc.—or read as an adult?
I resist the question entirely. I don’t think quotes ['...'] dispense with the idea of putting writing into good and bad genres. Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today. Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I’m not a writer to be protected at all. I love science fiction, have all my life and it’s where I met Kafka. Angela Carter is swimming around in there too. Science fiction propelled me into poetry and writing in general and if I think of the children’s books I was exposed to I can’t see the difference between sci fi, poetry, Kafka or Angela Carter. Yet they all know each other very well. That’s all I’m saying. Are there good and bad writers? I’m not sure about that either.
If you were ever prosecuted in a trial by jury, what expression would you most wish to see on their faces?
Delight. I’d like to know that my oppressors were out of their minds.
Previously: Five Questions with Jaswinder Bolina
Avoid all demonstrations as a precaution
Most major U.S. colleges and universities issue emergency guidelines to their traveling students. Often these are based on travel alerts from the U.S. State Department. In some cases, entire travel assistance programs for special ‘SOS’ medical or evacuation services are based around such precautions.
The University of California (full disclosure: I am an alum) has an odd sense of timing, geography, or dark humor. In lieu of alerts warning students from recently bombed or attacked sites in Baghdad and Kandahar or ongoing protests in Kuala Lumpur, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) just issued students a detailed alert about upcoming U.S.-based May Day general strike actions via its preferred travel management program, Connexxus. Their list of sites to avoid includes a schedule of U.S.-wide actions in major cities, appearing to be copied directly from the New York-based May Day 2012 site. Stay away from May Day protests in the United States, it warned, and the itinerant disruptions in transport, business, and ‘scuffles with police.’
It is unclear where the most wretched irony lies. Is it in a public university—one whose reputation partly rests on the national impact of historic free speech, anti-war, and labor movements—issuing red-flag directives to its students about pre-planned demonstrations? Or in issuing such red flags about ‘scuffles with police’ with the total annihilation of self-awareness required to forget that the scraps of that reputation lie in tatters because of campus responses such as these:
University of California-Berkeley, 9 November 2011.
University of California-Davis, 18 November 2011.
Below is the UCOP email in full.
Date: Fri, Apr 27, 2012
Subject: UCOP Travel News Alert – Protests Across U.S. Tuesday, May 1st.
From: Connexxus Travel ProgramThe following Travel Alert from University of Ca., Office of the President was sent to all campuses to alert anyone traveling to the following U.S. cities on Tuesday, May 1st. Advice: Confirm business appointments for May 1st. Allow additional time for ground transportation near protest sites. Avoid all demonstrations as a precaution.
Activist groups, including Occupy Wall Street, to protest May 1 across the US. Traffic disruptions, scuffles with police possible. Avoid all protests.
This alert affects United States
This alert began 23 Apr 2012 16:10 GMT and is scheduled to expire 02 May 2012 11:59 GMT.
Event: Protests, general strike
Date: May 1
Location: Major US Cities
Impact: Transport, business disruptions; possible scuffles with policeSummary
Various activist groups will stage protests, rallies, and marches across the US on May 1. The Occupy Wall Street movement has called for a general strike, asking participants to abstain from work and economic activity on the same date.
Cities with a large immigrant population and strong labor groups traditionally stage rallies on May 1, and Occupy groups are likely to bolster support for scheduled demonstrations.
Major demonstrations are scheduled for the following cities (listed actions are tentative):
Oakland, Calif.: March from the Fruitvale BART station to downtown beginning at 1500; actions and marches in the downtown area
Los Angeles, Calif.: “4 Winds” marches via cars and bikes with ”flashpoints” along routes, to converge at Main and 6th streets at 1430; actions in the financial district at 1500
New York City, N.Y.: 0800-1400 “Pop-up Occupation” at Bryant Park (W 42nd St. and 6th Ave.); march to Union Square at 1400, rally at 1600, march from Union Square to Wall Street at 1730, march to unknown ”staging area” at 1900; various other actions in Madison Square Park and likely other areas throughout the city Chicago, Ill.: March from Union Park (1501 W. Randolph St.) to Federal Plaza (230 S. Deerborn St.) at 1200, rally at 1500 Washington,
DC: Festival at Malcolm X Park (16th and Euclid streets) at 1530, march from the park to unknown location at approximately 1800
Portland, Ore.: Rally at South Park (SW Park and Salmon streets) at 1530, march at 1630
San Francisco, Calif.: Occupation of Golden Gate Bridge at 0630
Boston, Mass.: Rally at 1200 at Boston City Hall Plaza/Government Center, located at Cambridge and Court streets
Seattle, Wash.: Rally at Westlake Park (Pine St. and 4th St.) 0900-2200; march at 1700 from Judkins Park (611 20th Ave.) to unconfirmed destination
Philadelphia, Penn.: Rally at Elmwood Park, located at 71st Street and Buist Avenue in southwest Philadelphia, from 1400-1900
Expect localized traffic disruptions. Depending on the level of participation, business disruptions are possible. Expect a heightened security presence near protest sites.
Background and Analysis
Previous demonstrations from Occupy groups have turned violent, particularly in Oakland, Calif., and New York, NY. When Occupy groups from neighboring cities join together in solidarity of a certain action, such as a general strike, disruptions are likely.
In late 2011, protesters from Oakland prompted authorities to temporarily close the Port of Oakland, which disrupted business operations, shipments, and local traffic. May Day has traditionally been an international labor holiday, inviting strikes and protests from various labor groups. However, it is unlikely that a general strike will gain massive union support due to union laws prohibiting such participation. Off-duty union members may participate in marches and protests, but it is unlikely a large number of union workers will abstain from work May 1, unless they are already involved in a specific union action pertaining to their employers.
Advice
Confirm business appointments for May 1. Allow additional time for ground transportation near protest sites. Avoid all demonstrations as a precaution.
(Image source, top: Davis Enterprise.)
Five questions with Jaswinder Bolina
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet and essayist Jaswinder Bolina. I encountered his work after an essay in Poetry called ‘Writing Like a White Guy,’ which begins, ‘My father says I should use a pseudonym. “They won’t publish you if they see your name.”‘
‘The Map No. 3′ by Ala Dehghan, Tehran, 2009.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
As a devotee of words have you come upon any you can’t bear to write?
I think there are a lot of words I don’t want to write, but I feel I make discoveries when my poems take on those words or phrases directly. A few years ago, I wrote a poem about somebody yelling ‘sand nigger’ at me from a passing car. Obviously, that’s not a phrase I want to repeat, but then I did—about fifteen times in that poem. Forcing myself to confront the language offered me a means of taking on that experience in what I hope is a provocative way. I think I discovered my own perspective on the incident while writing that poem. There are other words and phrases that are far less charged or offensive that I do this with too. Words like ‘twitter’ or ‘spam’ that become part of some meme irk me maybe just because I hear them too often. Actually, the word ‘meme’ is currently on the list of words that irk me for this exact reason. Others like ‘irregardless’ bug me because, well, just say ‘regardless.’ Whatever the words are, I find myself trying to work them into poems precisely because I dislike them. This forces me to attempt to take the irksome and commonplace and hopefully find a new perspective on it.
Do you wear shades in the sun or do your eyes face the day nudely?
I love your phrasing, ‘do your eyes face the day nudely?’ A few months ago, I would’ve said, they always face the day thusly, but after years of walking around with a sun-blinded scowl on my face and being asked, ‘Are you upset about something?’ by friends who’d run into me on the street, I’ve taken to sunglasses. For the record, I’m not now, nor have I ever been, upset. I’m just a little light sensitive and probably trying to remember what I’ve forgotten to do that day.
What did your childhood concept of a god or supreme being consist of?
I don’t know that I ever really believed in much of that. I remember being taught to pray and to be wary of some omniscient arbiter in the sky, but nobody convincingly gave me the impression any of that stuff was real. There’s a poem by Amiri Baraka written back when he was still LeRoi Jones called ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.’ I think it’s the title poem of his first collection, and it’s one of my favorites. By the end of it, we have the speaker tiptoeing into his young daughter’s room because he hears her talking to someone. He finds her there praying, but as she’s doing this, she’s peeking, as he says, ‘into her own clasped hands.’ I think I was that kind of kid. The story religion told me didn’t seem any more or less real than any of the works of fiction I read or movies I watched, and it still doesn’t. At this point, I’ve decided that if there is a higher power, it’s mostly beyond my understanding. After all, a single skin cell or neuron has no way of knowing that it’s attached to the bigger, more sophisticated thing called ‘me.’ I realize a single cell doesn’t constitute the same thing as consciousness, but I mean it as an analogy: I’m part of this bigger, more sophisticated thing we call the universe—ninety-six percent of which we can’t even see—but I have little way of knowing what that universe is up to. I’m happy writing poems about what it’s like to live in that condition. I’ll leave it to the physicists and cosmologists to figure the rest of it out.
In what language would you most like your work to be translated, or transcreated, and why?
Arabic always looks like rippled water to me, Hebrew like a city skyline turned sideways, Punjabi and Hindi like vines dangled from a lattice, Chinese and Japanese dialects like feathers and bones. What I mean by this is that I’d love to see my poems translated into any language written in an alphabet different from the one we use in English and the Romance languages. Because I don’t know those alphabets, the poems would turn into something akin to paintings. I also wouldn’t have to worry anymore about tweaking or revising them any—something I do a bit obsessively—because I simply wouldn’t be able to at that point.
What do you do at your loneliest hour?
I think I do the instinctive thing: I find a friend. Whenever I get to feeling lonely, which fortunately doesn’t happen to me all that often, I just call someone or send a text or an email. Sometimes, if none of that works, I’ll walk to a caféor a bar and just work on a poem till somebody kicks me out at closing time. All of these are attempts to communicate with someone, and I think I turn to them because loneliness isn’t a product of being isolated. It’s the feeling that nobody understands your perspective or your emotional condition at a given moment. This can happen in the middle of a crowded subway car or at a party with throngs of friends around. I worry some people feel this way for much of their lives. Lucky for me, I have a small battalion of friends and family who do understand much of my perspective, and it’s easy enough to get a hold of them. Failing that, I always have the reader: this imaginary listener out there to whom I can describe whatever thing it is nobody else seems to understand. The reader always understands because the reader doesn’t exist and is also always sitting right in front of me.
Some southern maladies
‘La playa de los muertos’ by Adolfo Couve.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
By an observation, we found ourselves in the latitude of 30 degrees and 2 minutes south. Twelve of our crew were dead by immoderate labor and ill food; the rest were in a very weak condition.
From Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, 1900.
I want you to savor that fear. The South evolved in fear. Fear of the Indian. Fear of the slave. Fear of the damn Union. The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear.
From Cape Fear by Martin Scorcese, 1991.
She had gone off to join in the great battles that would end the worst of discrimination against black people in the South, and had become known for her bravery and her organisational skills. Threatened with the end of her visitor’s visa, she had married an American, ringing up Johnny to say it was only for form’s sake, he must understand it was her revolutionary duty. She would be back when the battle had been won. Meanwhile, rumours flowing from across the Atlantic said that this marriage for form’s sake was going along well, better than her sojourn with Johnny, which had been a bit of a disaster. She was much younger than Johnny, at first had been in awe of him, but had soon learned to see with her own eyes. She had had plenty of time for reflection, because she had found herself alone while he went to meetings and off on delegations to comradely countries.
From The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing, 2001.
Images fall slow and silent like snow…. Serenity… All defenses fall… everything is free to enter or to go out…. Fear is simply impossible…. A beautiful blue substance flows into me…. I see an archaic grinning face like South Pacific mask…. The face is blue purple splotched with gold….
From Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, 1959.
“Among other absurdities, I have considered studying the comparative influence of central heating on hemorrhoids in northern and southern countries. What do you think of it? The role of hygiene? Of diet? That kind of thing is fashionable nowadays. Such a study, properly handled and ingeniously dragged out, is sure to be favorably received by the Academy, since the majority of its members are old men to whom these problems of heating and hemorrhoids can hardly be indifferent. Look what they’ve done for cancer, which concerns them so closely… Don’t you think the Academy might vote me one of its hygiene awards? Why not? Ten thousand francs? Not bad… Enough for a trip to Venice… Yes, my young friend, I was in Venice once as a young man… Oh yes! You can starve there just as well as anywhere else… But you breathe a sumptuous aroma of death that’s not easy to forget…”
From Journey to the End of the Nightby Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Trans. Ralph Manheim), 1934.
Seating myself across from her I drew my chair close and took hold of her hands. They were dry, small and quite hard. From all her tile-cutting she had developed sinewy arms, strong fingers. “Let’s run off. Let’s drive south and never come back, never see the simulacra again or Sam Barrows or Ontario, Oregon.”
From Can We Build You by Philip K. Dick, 1972.
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.
From Orlando by Virginia Woolf, 1928.
Drones are paranoid androids
I wrote a fairly long post at The New Inquiry on drone subjectivity and robotic engineering. Because of the quantity of margin notes, I apologetically direct your attention there rather than attempt a cross-post. Nearly 3,000 words later I still find myself dissatisfied, searching, and trying to work out what I think of all this—elucidations welcome.
Five Questions with Anna Moschovakis
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, translator, and editor (at Ugly Duckling Presse and elsewhere) Anna Moschovakis. My first entry into her work was this poem, situated as a conversation between Annabot and the Human Machine.
From Saeed Ensafi‘s War and Peace collection, Tehran, 2011.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Coffee and chocolate or tea and toast?
I love all my stimulants equally. (And if you don’t think toast a stimulant, you don’t understand jam.)
Which dream or cinematic imagery do you find more emotive, an apocalyptic desert landscape of ruin or the scene of a biblical flood?
I was born in an apocalyptic desert landscape of ruin that I also deeply love.
If you could download one skill into your brain without any effort, which would it be?
Time-management, because then I could learn the others.
Harold Norse’s poem ‘i heard evtushenko’ protests against American writers:
I think of Antonin Artaud—
he made the French language spurt blood
raking arteries & veins
swept them clean of world shit
What North American poet makes the English language spurt blood?
For me, right now: Dodie Bellamy. But I may have peculiar notions of blood, spurting, and poetry.
Is the reported pain caused by paper cuts exaggerated?
I thought I was the only one who knew how painful they are!
Previously: Five Questions with Michael Kelleher
Friendly squirrels
The source for these images (and dozens of others like it, not shown) is a chain email forward from my father titled ‘Friendly Squirrels’ [Recipient List Suppressed]. He has given me explicit permission to share them. I couldn’t keep a thick batch of rodent file images like this all to myself, so here they are, for the world to view.
Jul, one year later
Juliano Mer-Khamis
(29 May 1958 – 4 April 2011)
Image: Untitled woodcut by Abdel Nasser Amer, Gaza, 2002. Two-thousand two was also the year the Freedom Theatre (founded by Arna Mer-Khamis, and at that time called the Stone Theatre) was razed to the ground when the Israeli Army sent bulldozers into Jenin Refugee Camp. (This post first appeared at The New Inquiry.)
Juliano Mer-Khamis was killed one year ago today when a masked gunman shot him five times—some accounts say seven—as he sat in his red Citroën. He died in view of his one-year old son and babysitter (his wife, pregnant with twins, was out of range). At this writing his killer has not been apprehended, and likely never will be. Even if it were so, the mighty sting of losing Jul has not worn off.
I interviewed Juliano about his directing, acting, and political organizing when he toured with his film Arna’s Children (full text of the interview here.). I had bought a cheap tape recorder from a nearby pharmacy with two triple A batteries and some fresh tapes. (After transcribing the interview the tape recorder promptly and mysteriously broke, literally falling to pieces.)
Our interview took place at Boston’s South Station on 4 April 2006, five years to the day of Juliano’s death. This is the kind of unsettling coincidence that still gives me goosebumps because of its intensity. Intensity, I wager, is how anyone who ever met or knew Jul would describe him.
Meanwhile, the young Palestinian who collaborated with him are continuing their efforts at the Freedom Theatre.
We came very close to collapsing amid all the confusion and fear but we have managed to ride through the storm.
Requiescat in pace.
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Today the Palestinian rap and hip-hop group DAM posted ‘Juliano’s Way,’ a musical track in remembrance of Juliano featuring his students. It is a moving tribute, and frankly, it proves difficult viewing as his coffin is carried atop waves of friends, comrades, and collaborators, a Palestinian flag flying high and undaunted above it.
From this day on we aren’t just revolutionaries, we are artists.
From empty signifiers to a hoodie is like a sign
I posted some notes on the dialectic of watchmen and people out of place here.
Five questions with Michael Kelleher
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet and editor Michael Kelleher. He also writes at Pearlblossom Highway, one of the most stirring and consistent blogs about writing and poetry around (and where he literally unpacks his library letter by letter in the ‘Aimless Reading’ project, a single-stop destination to discovering new/old work). I was first introduced to his work through this piece, which I considered one of the 20 best things I read in 2011.
Image: Sikoryak, ‘Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.’ Source: Raw, Vol. 2 (2), 1990.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
In ‘publish or perish,’ which word would you choose to replace the word ‘publish’?
This has almost no application outside university tenure decisions. That said, I think that reducing a qualifying process to a single activity, one that is sometimes in tension with what I see as the other main purpose of being a professor, that is, to teach, is unfortunate. There’s room for great research and great teaching at a university, sometimes even in the same person, but I think it’s unfair to place so much emphasis on the former and so relatively little on the latter. There are plenty of researchers who can’t teach, but they still get tenure. Why shouldn’t a great teacher (or translator or editor or literary culture worker, for that matter) who’s not a researcher receive the same consideration? How about, ‘Devote yourself to your students or perish’?
What is the worst job you ever had?
I once spent two weeks at a New York publisher’s office transcribing a ghost writer’s recorded interviews with comedienne Jenny McCarthy. He was writing her ‘autobiography.’ He kept repeating the phrase, ‘This is a classic Hollywood-rags-to-riches story,’ followed each time by something to the effect of, ‘You’re not like other celebrities. You’re very down to earth. Real. You don’t need to be flattered all the time.’ About the tenth time he repeated this piece of flattery, I had to walk away. I got my revenge by leaving all of the, ‘ums,’ ‘uhs,’ ‘likes,’ and ‘you knows’ in the transcript. There wasn’t much else, I am sad to report.
Does time heal all wounds?
One of the poems in my book Human Scale contains a section that reads:
Time heals
No wounds
Least of allMy own, which
I have sat here
Licking, yearAfter year, until
All I could taste
Was your name
So I guess the answer is no.
Is there any such thing as good advice?
As Charles Olson said, ‘There it is, brothers, sitting there, for use.’ Any advice can be good advice if put to use effectively. Poorly used, that same counsel can look pretty bad. We can’t really judge until after it has been acted upon. If it works, it’s good advice. If not, not.
‘Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love.’ Do you think Yeats was right?
Being of Irish descent, I can appreciate the fatalism in Yeats’ formulation. However, I think I prefer the statement a few lines down in the poem: ‘A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds.’
Previously: Five Questions with Ammiel Alcalay
The headless gentleman
Image: Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads), Georges Méliès, 1898.
Screen grab by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.
There is a story about an English colonial administrator, who, during the first world war and for some time after it, lived in a backward community. He regularly received newspapers and periodicals from home, thus knew of films, and had seen pictures of the stars and had read film reviews and film stories; but he had never seen a motion picture. As soon as he reached a place where there was a cinema, he went to see a film. A number of children around him seemed to enjoy it very much, but he was completely baffled by what he saw and was quite exhausted when at last the film came to an end.
‘Well, how did you like it?’ asked a friend.
‘It was very interesting,’ he said, ‘but what was it all about?’
He had not understood what was going on, because he did not understand the form-language in which the story of the film was told, a form-language every town-dweller already knew at that time.
—Bela Balázs, ‘The Colonial Englishman,’ Theory of Film, 1952, 34.
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Back in Fall 2011 Mimi Thi Nguyen and I put out a call for papers for a Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) panel called ‘Something Missing: Transnational Discourses and Practices of War, Embodiment, and Vision.’ We want to consider someone missing something,
—in which the face, a limb, or a particular sense (sight, for instance) functions analogically to impede another’s cognition or premonition of interiority or humanity. Henri-Jacques Stiker observes that at the scene of modern war, personhood is violently made partial in body and also mind: ‘Mutilation applied to all alteration of integrity, of integralness. It amounted to a degradation, but one by removal—or deterioration—which has the effect of suppression. The maimed person is someone missing something precise, an organ or function.’ We extend this concept to the age of hypervisibility and screen culture. This ‘missing’ or unseen part that blocks recognition—because it is covered, obscured, or otherwise absented—becomes a microsite for surveillance, incarceration, rehabilitation, even imagined or actual death. We especially seek papers that explore the consequences of sovereign powers and governmentality ‘restoring’ a sense, function, body, or organ that aligns the target once again with a regime or liberal government.
The SCMS convenes during 21-25 March in Boston (schedule). The ‘Something Missing’ panel takes place on Thursday, 22 March, 3:00 – 4.45 pm (Session H) in Room H25 of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Our presenters (we are sad that Mimi is unable to be present) include: University of Massachusetts-Boston Professor Emeritus Linda Dittmar on phantom memory in Waltz with Bashir; UnionDocs programmer and Columbia film studies master’s graduate Neta Alexander on war, cinema, and ‘olfactory unconsciousness’; University of California-Berkeley doctoral candidate Simona Schneider on early cinematic representations of Muslim prayer and the ‘guillotine effect’; and yours truly on concealed faces and the battleground of fashion.
Since the SCMS is a ticketed (and costly) event and we want this work to reach an engaged public, this space may get updated with a summary or gateway to the talks. The Twitter hashtag is #scms12.
Five questions with Ammiel Alcalay
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets begins with the multi-hyphenated poet, translator, scholar, editor, and essayist Ammiel Alcalay. His incredible translation of Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Nine Alexandrias first introduced me to his work.
Image: ‘Jet Fuel Formula,’ the first Rocky and Bullwinkle story arc. ABC broadcast, 1959-60. (Source: Wiki Commons screen grab.)
This post first appeared at The New Inquiry.
What kind of cartoons did you watch in childhood?
Keep in mind, born in 1956—’childhood’ (watching age?) maybe from around 1960 (not sure if we even had a TV then, remember early ballgames (think I saw Stan Musial & he retired in 1963 so i somehow remember TV coming in around then, previously my brother & i had snuck in to watch TV, at a place during the summer adjacent to where we were staying in Gloucester, & saw a very dramatic show with Rip Torn playing a guy in a phone booth who had been stabbed, seemed to be raining). So, cartoons: classics—Disney, Hanna-Barbera, Chuck Jones: Road Runner, Popeye, Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales. I remain deeply involved in cartoons, all the old classics, & new ones too: Hunger Force, Squidbillies, Boondocks.
How did your view of growing up in your 20s, 30s, and 40s change as you grew up?
This is a very confusing question! I think I understand – I probably didn’t think too much about it until my later 40s, to early now mid 50s: quite intensely in the past few years as I have revisited time & time again, trying to get a grip on my own history & its relationship to events, things I gravitated towards, ways of making sense of the present. I became aware of it very clearly through teaching, seeing myself in relation to students who remained more or less the same age as I, for some reason, kept getting older. So I would try & explain, for example, before the war in Iraq, what it meant to wear an army jacket in 1968 or 1969.
What is your least favorite Americanism or American culturism?
The Ivy League?
Is there a dead poet you’re supposed to like, but don’t?
I like all dead poets. Well, maybe not all, but I find it actually hard to think of one. I mean, I’m not supposed to like T.S. Eliot, but how can you not, in the end? There are probably a bunch of poets I’m supposed to like but they’re dead, so why name them?
To paraphrase Hugo of St. Victor, is there any soil to which you feel native, or is the entire world a foreign land?
Many soils & mainly sands I feel native to, have come around to accepting myself as a New Englander living in Brooklyn who feels less and less at home where he/I live.
Where the fire’s still burning
Image: Intellectuals murdered in the Sivas massacre (source: Sivas’ı Unutma!).
This post first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Dostun bahçesine bir hoyrat girmiş
Korudur hey benli dilber korudur
Gülünü dererken dalını kırmış
Kurudur hey benli dilber kurudur
To the garden of my love there came an evil louder
The shrubs now lie there, my beautiful one, shrubs lie
While gathering the roses, he broke their stems to moulder
They are all dry, my fair one, they are all dry.
—Pir Sultan Abdal, ‘To the Garden of My Love There Came an Evil Louder’
Since the worst prison fire in a century in which up to 375 Honduran inmates suffocated and burned alive in their cells, some have brought news of another fire-induced slaying to my attention. Its consequences are reverberating in Turkish civic life this week. On 13 March 2012, an Ankara court is expected to close the case of the 1993 Sivas mass burning, in which plaintiffs say some suspects are still at large, due to a statute of limitations.
Sivas is known as the home of minority Alevis, a religious group known for its syncretic or ‘heterodox’ Islamic practice. The Sivas Massacre, as it is known, saw the killing of 35 writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, tourists, and hotel staff (plus two suspected arsonists) by a group of ‘Islamist’ Sunni vigilantes—known for viewing the Alevis with disdain—who set fire to the Madımak Hotel. Celebrants (most of them Alevis) had gathered for the Alevite Festival on 2 July 1993 in honor of the sixteenth century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal. The victims were killed when the hotel in Sivas was torched by a large, angry group heard screaming ‘down with secularism,’ among other chants. They also shouted the name of writer Aziz Nesin, who was believed to have been targeted for facilitating the Turkish translation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Witness testimony and videotape evidence showed that police ‘merely gazed at the scene with empty looks‘ as the building was set on fire (in the aftermath of the Comayagua prison fire, a narrative of neglect and tacit police encouragement has also been confirmed). Cemal Şahin, the uncle of victims Nurcan and Özlem Şahin, said an incredible sense of helplessness overtook those who watched the events on live television with little hope besides the intervention of state forces, to no avail. According to Şehriban Metin, who lost her 20-year old sister Handan Metin’i in the fire, relatives and attorneys for the deceased were continually mistreated—sworn at, pushed and shoved—by the police. No member of the police force or the military was held responsible for not interfering.
Thirty-three people were tried and convicted of ‘attempting to destroy constitutional order’ and given death penalties, which were converted to life sentences when Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002. Fifteen years later an Ankara prosecutor demanded that the case be dropped, since it had been filed on the charge of attempting to destroy constitutional order, which carries a 15-year statute of limitation. Although 79 people have been sentenced to to prison terms so far, six suspects in the case are believed to be still missing. Critics of the Turkish government say it has failed to bring any figures of law enforcement to justice and that it has shielded missing perpetrators from facing the full brunt of the law in the past 18 years.
Photo: Victorious Akyüz/AA (source: Radikal).
The Collective Memory Platform on the expiration date in the Sivas case:
Plaintiff lawyer Şenal Sarıhan had previously told Bianet that the defendants were litigated under Article 146/3 of the Turkish Criminal Law (Subversion). Even though they might benefit from the statute of limitation according to domestic law, international law had to be considered since the offences lay within the scope of ‘crimes against humanity.’
Sarıhan reminded the court that the six defendants alleged to be fugitives had gotten married in the meantime, had children and registered them at school. She added that it was incomprehensible that these people had not been arrested until today.
‘If the case ends on March 13, we will appeal to a higher court, and if we cannot get a result again, this case will go to the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] in the end,’ Sarıhan told the Daily News.
For its part, the Erdoğan government unanimously blocked the draft bill on 6 March 2012, which would have brought the issue before the Turkish Parliament. The bill was introduced by the CHP or Republican People’s Party, the main Turkish opposition group, and was intended to abolish the same statute of limitations that will prevent defendants in the case from being tried. During the last two years of the trial, the related bill (to recognize the massacre as a crime against humanity) was blocked 17 times, in addition to the last time when it was blocked, in its ‘draft’ state.
Plaintiffs want the case to be treated as a breach of human rights under international law, blaming the Turkish politico-juridical process for leaving them bereft of meaningful closure. Their alienation from the system—despite sentences already handed down to those found guilty—would not be without merit. The Turkish Human Rights Foundation has reported on numerous ‘unsolved’ extra-judicial killings, often at the hands of the police and gendarmerie. Amnesty International blogger Howard Eissenstat says the ‘ghosts of Sivas‘ is an echo of past crimes, in the context of Turkey’s Article 301 statute which criminalizes ‘denigrating Turkishness.’ And let us say nothing of systemic racism and intolerance toward Kurds, Armenians, and Shiite Muslims.
_______
In the middle of preparing this post I was interrupted by news of a deadly mosque arson in Belgium, where a man was seen throwing Molotov cocktails—Molotov cocktails—at a Shiite mosque, killing its 47-year old imam. The mosque is said to be entirely burned down.
The newspaper Le Soir reported that a man entered the Shiite mosque in Anderlecht, a suburb of Brussels, shortly before 7pm local time armed with an axe, Molotov cocktails and a can of gasoline. The newspaper reported that the man broke windows, then threw the incendiary devices inside.
It is said that the imam died trying to put out the fire.
Where is the line between us?
Questions New York Moscow New York by Davis, Komar, and Melamid, 1977. Images from the Ronald Feldman Gallery.
This post was first published at The New Inquiry.
Lenin said there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. He could have said there are years where everything happens, and 1977 was a year like that. It was defining for both the United States and Soviet Russia: the former USSR was relatively prosperous, and adopted what would become its last major law of the land, the Brezhnev Constitution. In the U.S. the first Apple Computer went on sale and Jimmy Carter was elected President. Elvis died.
Over the course of the year before their 1977 exhibit, American artist Douglas Davis and the Russian duo Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar¹ collaborated on a set of photographic montages. They photographed themselves simultaneously on four dates marking significant events in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union: 1 January, 1 May, 4 July, and 7 November. Standing in front of a white wall, a thick black line formed a perforation between them, a stand-in for a political separation that by that year had become naturalized. The white-on-black posters in their hands (the American artist’s in Russian, the Russian artists’ in English) asked a few supremely human questions.
The impact of this work comes not only from its stark aesthetic simplicity (down to the choice of ‘colorless’ black & white) but the literalization of a political impasse whose effects seeped into the way ordinary people across geopolitical divides see each other: what’s the boundary that separates us? How did it get there? Where will it take us?
I find myself remembering 1976-1977 over the course of 2011-2012² because of this set of photographs produced the effect of a détente. It would be difficult to separate the aesthetic merit of the work from its social or political impact; from a personal standpoint I couldn’t say which exactly has caused the images to stay with me as long as they have, but that is the entire point: the perpetual hand-wringing over whether Art is inherently political or Politics is fundamentally sensible fades into the chiaroscuro effect of the prints. The answer to both quandaries, the sequence repeats, is yes.
I note this with some regret since A Separation utterly stands on its own merit as Art, without the burdensome layer of farangi or foreign misconceptions about Iran filed under Politics.
On Sunday, 26 February 2012, Asghar Farhadi’s name was called at the podium to the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He approached the stage as A Separation‘s lead actors Payman Moadi, Leila Hatami, and Sarina Farhadi (his tearful daughter) watched from the audience.
At this time, many Iranians all over the the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award, or a film, or a filmmaker. But because at a time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their county, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.
I noted two reactions to Farhadi’s speech on Twitter:
Heartbreaking that an Iranian filmmaker essentially just had to beg the US not to bomb his country.
This Oscar for best foreign movie cud be a red line³
Farhadi’s speech has been quoted in the press (rightly so) as an anti-war message but I’m surprised (and shouldn’t be) how no one has mentioned the direct way he spoke to his homeland. Among the very first words in his speech was a direct address in Persian: Salam be mardom-e khoob-e sarzameen-am (Greetings to my good fellow countrymen). I don’t know too many Iranians (in or out of Iran) who maintained a dry eye that night and part of the reason was the humble and self-effacing way Farhadi included them in his salutation. The film’s sheer Iranianness (even Tehranness) and its content—primarily the red line of class divisions—could have lent an air of the excruciating us-and-ours games some Iranian intellectuals in the ‘Western’ public sphere play.
Instead Farhadi stood right at the edge of that thick black division—if ever you wondered about American political animosity toward Iran, who the U.S. has still not been able to cower into full submission, just watch the lingering camera focus on bellicose Steven Spielberg, a longer intercut than any other B-roll during Iran’s first Oscar win—acknowledged its existence, and posed an understated but perennially salient question: where is it leading us?
I note parenthetically that I feel too close to A Separation (whose Persian title is Jodaee-ye Nader az Simin, which literally translates to Nader’s Separation from Simin) to offer a close viewing experience. Even though I watched the film a year ago (and described it as a masterpiece to anyone who cared to listen, and let me say it here: the film is masterful and quietly blew away everything else released last year) I think that it should be experienced rather than read about second-hand. (I felt similarly about Farhadi’s previous film, About Elly: still too close for distance.) It was released in Tehran in March 2011. I happened to be present when the first posters of the film were going up, like this one in front of the Film Museum of Iran:
Photo by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.
None of the three theaters where I initially watched A Separation were filled to capacity, but that has already changed. Its popularity has been quicker to form than other films exported to festivals; Kiarostami’s position as an auteur is unquestioned but even today one would be hard-pressed to call his films ‘popular’ among Iranians. Sure, there are entangled sectarian lines to cross with a film not made by a government-sanctioned filmmaker associated with the secular left—right-wing provocateurs interrupted the second screening I attended in Tehran, using the thin guise of ‘renovations’ to interrupt the film without remorse—but the film’s real achievement inside Iran is the impetus it gives for a badly needed national discussion around class, especially the North/South economic divide and the devastating impact of accompanying social mores, encoded acts which play themselves out with such gut-wrenching subtly in Farhadi’s screenplay.
Leila Hatami said A Separation is a very good film and a very honest film. Is that going to be OK, or at least good enough, for now? Can the American war machine ever grasp its enemies as fully developed humans? Since we are used to managing already lowered expectations good and honest will just have to do.
But Farhadi is conscious that creating a masterpiece is never enough leverage to stand on: you have to allow two counter-posing canvases separated by a semi-imaginary line to face each other side-by-side on the same screen, and ask some difficult questions.
___
¹ They showcased drawings made by Thai elephants they ‘taught’ to paint at a museum I worked at in college, and seemed, well, nice enough.
² Arguably the heaviest period of Iran-bashing, targeted assassinations, and war threats since the Bush years.
³ Has Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s first Oscar win for Pakistan paused the expanding American proxy drone war there?
Semeiotic Dubai: Peirce and pop architecture
Imagine from Dubai Hotels, a dubiously useful super-hotel photo source.
I posted this piece on Dubai’s iconic Burj Al Arab hotel and the American logician C. S. Peirce over at The New Inquiry. (There are margin notes, which is why I’m linking and not cross-posting. Efficiency over superior inline options.)
The fire next time
My post for The New Inquiry on the prison fire in Comayagua, the massacre at Carandiru, and the political prisoner Khader Adnan can be seen here.
(Image: Cover of the vintage paperbackAgainst the Grain by J. K. Huysmans, 1922.)
Simulacra descending a staircase
This post was first published at The New Inquiry.
In these dark and brooding times it is Kafkaesque tragicomedy that strikes the right note of collective mirth. The Iranian government recently staged an anniversary celebration of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s momentous return from exile in France. The cardboard reenactment of his arrival has been the subject of effusive internet mockery since photos from the state-affiliated Mehr News Agency (taken by photographer Ruhollah Yazdani) proved it was not, alas, an insurgent Photoshop hack operation but an official ceremony.
On February 1, 1979 Khomeini, who would become the steward of the revolution, descended the stairs of a chartered Air France Boeing 747 as three million Iranians turned out on the streets of Tehran to salute him.* To understand the mass fervor of the moment that prognosticated Khomeini’s role in the nation (and region’s) fate it might be useful to remember that between January 27-28 at least 28 people were killed protesting the Shah’s closure of the airport to prevent Khomeini from returning. But it was too late for the Pahlavi dynasty—the damage to their rule was irreparable.
Now, 33 years after those prophetic moments, the richly deserved ridicule that Cardboard Khomeini has received is an indicator of the profound upheavals, divisions, and contradictions that have characterized modern Iranian history.
Once you regain yourself after laughing at the photos of the 2012 ceremony there’s something deeply serious and ironic to consider: as a consequence of the revolution Khomeini himself would turn into a figure of majesty, even divinity. He who denounced immodestly dressed women as ‘coquettes’ (the Shah referred to them as ‘dolls’) has been dwarfed into a string puppet. There’s a measure of pathos that elaborate stately images strike. These make a sad pauper out of the regime.
Every time a historical event of seismic importance is glorified in Iran, it fails spectacularly. The Shah’s infamous Perspolis moment, when the royal family’s extraordinarily lavish, multi-million dollar ceremony marking 2,500 years of the Persian Empire outraged Iranians and turned them irrevocably against the monarchy.
The Shah’s idolatrous visions were shattered by one of the most important revolutions of the twentieth century. The current show of idolatry is merely shattered by laughter, and the distant banging of US-Israel war drums (or unmanned drones, unprecedented sanctions, and scientist assassinations, as the case may be).
I find myself more interested in what is really real in these photos than what constitutes simulacra of the real. The Cardboard, escorted by guards solemnly holding each two-dimensional side of him, descends the official Islamic Republic of Iran airplane. The bristly green garlands of the plane, the sharp red edges of the staircase, and the curvacious aviator hats of the officers are all three-dimensional surfaces that put the spotlight even more harshly on the cardboard’s flatness. That flatness adds to the image’s hilarity, with a tinge of pity for the performed gullibility of those displaying it: don’t they see how idiotic this looks.
Rows of officers extend roses—real roses—a recurring decorative image whenever Khomeini or a revolutionary martyr is shown. (Here is a photo I took off the television on the advent of the 2011 Iranian new year, as Khamenei morosely announced the Year of Economic Jihad with Khomeini’s simulacra, and a vase of roses, by his side.)
Cardboard Khomeini is descended to the tune of a musical procession of trumpets. (Khomeini did after all eventually legalize music).
The officers salute the cutout. A lone guard looks back at the camera. Yo, is this for real real?
The most remarkable photo is a peculiar sort of simulacrum, one that would have fogged up Walter Benjamin’s glasses: it is a cutout of Khomeini and his escorts, frozen in time, descending the staircase.
Things only get more delicate from there. The New York Times‘ Lede blog writes: ‘Shortly after the airport arrival, another cardboard cutout made an appearance in southern Tehran at Refah School, which served as Ayatollah Khomeini’s base of operations. There, it was joined by officials, including the education minister, who sat in a large circle with the silent version of the revered leader and awkwardly drank tea.’
Jasmin Ramsey notes how the king-wears-no-clothes absurdity of the cardboard printout stands in contrast to the photographs of Khomeini’s picture being held up by thousands of adoring crowds at Tehran University in 1979. The contrast between that photo and the empty space of the tarmac in the 2012 images is stunning.
True to form there is already a Cardboard Khomeini meme, culturally referenced in detail. The most meta shot is Khomeini gazing at Charles Foster Kane, who points to his own publicity photo.
Cardboard Khomeini holds a personal, if inopportune, significance in the form of a childhood memory. My uncle belonged to one of Khomeini’s banned political parties. A few years into the revolution he was prohibited from ever entering the country again. Yet he wanted to marry a woman from Iran, and because the wedding demanded the presence of extended families, it was decided the event would be officiated without him. To those involved, an absentee ceremony seemed as natural a cause (under the strained circumstances) as any.
On the night of the wedding, folded neatly into a cream-white decorative chair next to the bride, lay an upright and framed photo of my youthful, smiling uncle. He peered over the entire nuptials, from the choice of dress to the flower arrangement. He may have teasingly but gently been offered a forkful of cake or sweetened tea at some point in the evening. Desperate hours can motivate the suspension of belief, however absurd it might appear.
* Iran Between Two Revolutions, Ervand Abrahamian, 526
New directions
A nearly 100-year old Empire Passport from Iran. In addition to identifying eye color (black), it also noted the nature of the document holder’s beard (shaved).
ATTENTION SHOPPERS.
As there are currently 400 posts on this blog I’m using post no. 401 to tell you that South/South has found two new homes. Beginning this month I will be writing for Al Akhbar English and The New Inquiry as a contributing blogger. (You can visit the TNI blog page and see Imp Kerr’s wonderful logo design here.) All posts will either be linked to or cross-posted right here on the mothership. Thank you to Malcolm Harris at The New Inquiry and Mansour Aziz at Al Akhbar (and all the fine, hardworking editors and managers that make these collaborations possible and worthwhile) for inviting me onboard. Blogging across three platforms is a prospect that excites and frankly overwhelms me a little, at this very moment, but I will do it as long as it’s sustainable. (Ask me in six months. I kid. But no, really.)
Blogging is not the only or even main kind of writing I do—I’m slogging away at a dissertation, drying the ink on some book chapters and longer articles, writing a handful of poems a month, and sinking my teeth into my knuckles over a film project that’s on hold until these works are completed—but it has found a place among my favorite forms because of the slightly frenetic, slightly laboratory-like conditions it affords.
For those who are newer here, this blog was begun in 2009 in Brazil and will turn three years old this year. I had little ambitions for it when I began—wasn’t blogging something you did in 2005 anyway? Two months after I started, the Iranian election and its aftermath transfixed global attention and mine. Unable to expedite my expired passport to Tehran I watched, listened (via daily telephone calls), and wrote. A few days later the L.A. Times called South/South a ‘popular blog’ at a time when it had just tens or maybe a few hundred readers. Three years later I don’t know (nor care to find out, honestly) what makes a blog quantifiably ‘popular’ or even likeable. I like to write about things that obsess, stir, challenge, frighten, or excite me. In the great trembling of this vast, enigmatic, and so-called globalized life of public ideas I hope that what I throw into the ether (in the place of silence) will be worth it.
Call and response
In November 2011 Triple Canopy asked me to contribute words and image to their compilation of ‘materials for a future we can’t anticipate but that the various Occupys are trying to model in miniature.’
Today they have issued that compilation as Call and Response, an OWS survey of ‘sounds, sights, and stanzas from then and now.’
I submitted Pedro Valtierra’s 1998 photograph of a woman and a soldier in Chiapas alongside brief commentary. That piece, among many others, can be viewed here.
