« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »

September 26, 2007

The Ghost in Their Machine

The posthumous show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu -- now at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I'd be surprised if it's on the list at all. And I don't think McWhinnie's appreciation will change that. As the former Newsweek art critic (and painter) Peter Plagens said to me about a Nelson Algren video I praised yesterday, "The trouble with being dead is you can't fight back against tributes people pay to you."

The show itself is eye-popping, however, and so is the gorgeously printed catalogue. Maybe that will bring on the collectors. I hope so. Of course, I'm partial to Mary and Claude. I knew them in San Francisco, back in the late '60s, when we created a little magazine together. They were doing collages then, too, though they weren't nearly as polished as these -- not even close. It seems to me that by 2001, the year almost all the collages in this show were executed, they had fully absorbed the influence of Norman O. Mustill (who also collaborated on the magazine).

Mustill is not mentioned in McWhinnie's appreciation or in the catalogue or anywhere in the show itself. But I believe it was Mustill's work in the first place that turned Mary and Claude onto the method and style of the collages here. (They were so taken by his work that they commissioned an entire book of his collages. It was called "Flypaper," and they published it in 1967 under their Beach Books imprint.) So this show may be regarded as an unspoken homage to Mustill. He's the ghost in their machine.

This is not to say the furious accomplishment of the "2001" collages is not their own. Mary, who died in 2006, had already been a painter many years before meeting Mustill, and it's evident. Her collages, along with a handful of paintings also on exhibit (like the one above), are more freewheeling, less "designed" than Claude's. Claude, who died in 2002, was first and foremost a writer. A prolific one. He was large in everything he did. And this show, though it only scratches the surface of his output, indicates how prolific a collagist he became as well. And how proficient.

Speaking of prolific, proficient and accomplished . . . Ted Morgan, author of more than a dozen books -- including biographies of Churchill, FDR, Somerset Maugham and, not least, William S. Burroughs -- was at the show's Sept. 14 opening. (So were rockers Grant Hart and Thurston Moore, and poet-photographer Gerard Malanga.)

When he met Pelieu in 1970, in London, Morgan recalled, they used to swap stories about the French Army. Morgan had served as an intelligence officer in Algiers. (See his latest book, the memoir "My Battle of Algiers," a swift, informative and, despite the subject, entertaining read.) "Pelieu was an army deserter," he said. "Claude was full of funny stories. We laughed like crazy. "

At the time, Morgan was staying in Brion Gysin's Duke Street apartment on a visit from Tangiers, where he'd been living since 1968 and where he'd first met Gysin and Burroughs through Paul Bowles. I asked him about Gysin, a special interest of mine.

"You know how Brion always hated government or any governing authority," Morgan said. "Well one day, probably through one of his friends, he was offered an apartment-cum-painter's-studio in Paris owned by the Ministry of Education. More or less against his principles, he agreed to take it. The hitch was that the education ministry was entitled to purchase whatever work he turned out while he lived there. So, whenever the ministry felt like it" -- Morgan didn't say exactly how often, but it sounded like a regular affair -- "Brion had to receive a ministry delegation who came to inspect his work." Morgan laughed at the irony. "And they never offered to buy a thing."

Had he written the Burroughs biography "Literary Outlaw" as a change of pace from Churchill and FDR? "That's it exactly," he said. Burroughs, it turned out, was proud to be in their company. "He even boasted about it," Morgan noted. Guilt by association, I guess.

As good a story teller in person as he is on the page, Morgan recounted how he searched through crates of the Burroughs archive before anyone else -- it was purchased in 2006 by the New York Public Library's Berg Collection -- and how he found a letter from his first wife warning Burroughs it would be a mistake to let Morgan write his biography. He laughed at the memory.

You'd think that at 75 -- with all sorts of accolades to his credit, including a Pulitzer Prize for reporting -- he'd be interested in taking it easy. Forget it. Morgan, who is tall, tan, modest and attractive, and who looks younger than his years, says he's working feverishly on a new book, "Dien Bien Phu: A Tragedy in Four Acts."

"It sounds like you're taking a run at Graham Greene," I told him. He laughed. "I've been to so many places," he said, "I could write a hundred books like that." Unlike his Algiers memoir, however, this one is not personal history. "I'm not that old," he said.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Posted by jherman at 8:29 PM

September 25, 2007

Hustlers' Paradise

Dunno know why it took me so long to catch up with "Nelson Algren's Last Night!" Made by Warren Leming and Carmine Cervi, it's a beautiful video that runs for just over 5 minutes but with a long-lasting eloquence that matches its subject's words.

Such as these:

I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.

Now we all know.

... The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

-- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
(from the introduction to the 1961 edition dedicated to Joan Baez)

Meanwhile, per World Can't Wait:

Today a belligerent President Bush comes to the United Nations to impress upon the world that the U.S. is in the Middle East to stay, that the war on terror will be endless, and to threaten a murderous war on Iran.

"That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn or be forced to accept." If you don't show your resistance, it doesn't count.

As the man said, Now we all know.

Posted by jherman at 10:46 AM

September 7, 2007

Have You Heard This One Before?

Laugh track included: Via moveon.org

Posted by jherman at 3:00 PM

Just So You Know, in Case You Didn't

Paul Krugman's column this morning warns us not to put any credence in the claim Gen. Petraeus will make in his upcoming report to Congress "that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq." Excellent point. The column makes lots of excellent points -- like this one:

Oh, and by the way. Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there's nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon's metric.

You could argue with the headline "Time to Take a Stand." That time was long ago. So for the record, a few past reminders from this small corner of the world about genocide and ethnic cleansing in Iraq:

Hed: The Sunni Genocide, December 8, 2005.
Lede:

Now that Harold Pinter has given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he has also provided us with cover to post what may be the most incredible item -- truly the hardest to believe -- we've ever put up. It's not only about genocide, which we've written about before, it's about "the coming genocide of the Sunnis in Iraq," to quote a friend of ours, which will be committed by American proxies for a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder.

Hed: 'Ganda Machine Gears Up, on December 15, 2005.
Lede:

We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can't control what will happen.

Hed: Hidden in Plain Sight, on December 20, 2005.
Lede:

We've been banging on about the American strategy to democratize Salvadorize Iraq, as though the coming Sunni genocide is a revelation because a "U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder" has proxies doing the dirty work. But all of this has been hidden in plain sight for so long -- in the mainstream media and elsewhere -- that we're shocked by our own naiveté.

Hed: Bold, Red-faced Contradictions, on February 21, 2006.
Lede:

Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that?

Hed: Loud Whispers, on December 17, 2006.
Lede:

Finally, an acknowledgment of Sunni genocide as the BananaRepublic's sub rosa policy in Iraq: "The Whispers and the Why Nots."

Postscript: Sept. 11 -- You can't say the mainstream media is not telling us. Even though it uses the antiseptic term "internal displacement," a New York Times news analysis about yesterday's dog-and-pony show notes that massive ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has soared during the surge:

[M]any Iraqis have told reporters they still do not feel secure, despite General Petraeus's charts showing drops in violence. Internal displacement has doubled since the "surge" began, reaching 1.1 million people nationwide, according to the International Office of Migration and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. [Emphasis added.]

Shiite militias have continued their steady march to force Sunni Arabs from an ever-expanding area of Baghdad and surrounding villages. That has been compounded by mass roundups of Sunni Arabs suspected of being insurgents, who are held for months in dangerously crowded detention centers without trial or charges. Shiite judges concede that 40 percent to 50 percent of those detainees are innocent.

Of course, the analysis by reporters Alissa J. Rubin and Damien Cave, who are in Baghdad, is almost unfindable on the front of the NYT Web site and pretty much buried in the print edition. It's on the bottom of page A16 (though, to be fair, the editors cite it above the fold as part of a front-page package).

Now read "The erasing of Iraq," in The Guardian of London. It's excerpted from Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine," and it's mind-boggling. But I thoroughly disagree with her conclusion that "'[t]his was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world." Or that "cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated."

(Postscript crossposted at HuffPo)

Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM

September 6, 2007

'Our Palace Press'

Jay Rosen lays it out. Read this.

Posted by jherman at 12:02 PM

Orwellian Zombies All

The jingoism implicit in daily life taints everything we say, let alone what we do. To use my friend Bill Osborne's term, we are all "Orwellian zombies." This includes even the most sincere opponents of the President With His Head Up His Ass and his regime of BananaRepublic war criminals.

Consider Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent. His loathing of war in general and the Iraq war in particular expressed by two of his books -- "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," a cri de coeur, and the deadpan "What Every Person Should Know About War" -- would seem to place him above reproach.

Yet he, too, can't be excluded from the ranks of Orwellian zombies. His latest column, "The Next Quagmire," illustrates the point.

When Hedges writes that "we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect," he is correct of course. Same here:

We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn't worked well in Iraq. It hasn't worked well in Afghanistan. And it won't work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.

But Hedges "goes on to create the same alarmist bullshit as bad as the policy folks he criticizes," Osborne contends, as indicated by a key paragraph. His comments on Hedges's points are bracketed in italics:

The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for a series of airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. The air attacks are designed to cripple the Iranians' military capability in three days. ... It is not hard to imagine what will happen. Iranian Shabab-3 and Shabab-4 missiles, which cannot reach the United States, will be launched at Israel, as well as American military bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad. [The missiles could be taken out within 24 hours -- and hardly get a shot off.] Expect massive American casualties, especially in Iraq, where Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies will be able to call in precise coordinates. [They would not have a window of opportunity for massive casualties. I would say 20 Americans dead.] The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, will be shut down. [For about 5 days at most.] Chinese-supplied C-801 and C-802 anti-shipping missiles, mines and coastal artillery will target U.S. shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers. [Utterly vulnerable to A-10 jets so no big threat. Boats laying mines would also be instantly wiped out by A-10s and F-16s.] Oil prices will skyrocket to well over $4 a gallon. [Or at least the plutocracy hopes.] The dollar will tumble against the euro. [Ditto.] Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, interpreting the war as an attack on all Shiites, will fire rockets into northern Israel. [With the same minimal effectiveness as during the last idiotic invasion of Lebanon.] Israel, already struck by missiles from Tehran, will begin retaliatory raids on Lebanon and Iran. [The pretense for hegemonistic invasions would be welcomed.] Pakistan, with a huge Shiite minority, will reach greater levels of instability. The unrest could result in the overthrow of the weakened American ally President Pervez Musharraf and usher into power Islamic radicals. [Yeah, like our actions in Iraq and Iran. It is secular, leftist nationalists we actually fear. In the end, theocracy and plutocracy make great bed partners. See Saudi Arabia. And if business arrangements can't be made, theocracies are easily isolated.] Pakistan could become the first radical Islamic state to possess a nuclear weapon. [Oh dear, I see the smoking gun mushroom cloud already.] The neat little war with Iran, which few Democrats oppose, has the potential to ignite a regional inferno." [Uh, don't let the cat out of the bag about our one-party government.]

Osborne adds: "Yeah, yeah, more mushroom clouds as smoking guns, aluminum tubes, Nigerian yellow cake, attacks on Holy Israel, etc. The Iranians don't have the terrible abilities he describes. Frighten us Hedges, so we will think war with Iran should be brutal and quick. When will someone finally admit that if the Islamic world goes out of control they won't attack Israel with any significant effectiveness, but that they will start slaughtering each other (just as in Iraq and Palestine)? Which is just what the U.S. is counting on.

"Same old story with Serbia, by the way. As the last East Block holdout, it rejected neo-liberal globalism and had to be destroyed. And of course, every fucking honky swallowed the demonizing propaganda hook, line and sinker. Keep up the great work, Hedges. Propaganda disguised as criticism.

"The alarmist Hedges report is a good example of the thinking that gets the sissies (to use Gore Vidal's terms for Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk) shooting at everything. There is nothing more dangerous than a paranoid, belligerent coward with a big military apparatus. They're out to get us; pulverize them!!!!

"And how about the photo (above) that illustrates Hedges's column? It makes his argument hilarious: Iranian female militia members. The column might be called "Big Guns Under Burkas." Notice in the photo how only the front row of women have guns. I can well understand why the patriarchal theocracy in Iran wouldn't want to have too many women running around with AK-47s. There would be some big changes made there really quickly! With just a few touches the column would be great for The Onion."

Posted by jherman at 10:03 AM

September 3, 2007

Still Cookin'

Poetry as Insurgent Art:

I am signaling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door...

What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? ...

The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Posted by jherman at 8:52 PM