By Igal Bursztyn, December 13th, 2011 
This is the second part of a two-part post on new developments in Israeli and Palestinian film. Part 1 provided the historical and aesthetic background. Today, the new developments are considered. -Jeff
One of the first attempts to undermine and transcend Israeli cinema’s tendentious rhetorics and contents was Avanti Popolo (Rafi Bukai, 1986). It takes place in Sinai during the 1967 Six Days War. Two Egyptian soldiers (acted by Palestinian actors Salim Daw and Suhel Haddad) lost in the desert without water, discover two bottles of whiskey in a UN abandoned jeep, which they drink to survive. Khaled is an aspiring actor in Cairo fringe theater. He would love to act Hamlet but instead has been given the part of Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” As the two wander, thirsty and drunk in the desert, they run into an Israeli patrol. Their captors refuse to share a can of water with them. Khaled stuns them as he desperately quotes Shakespeare tinged with an Arab accent “I am a Jew! Has a Jew not eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food…”
An article by the Palestinian poet and critic Anton Shammas has brought to my attention that
“the two allegedly Egyptian soldiers lost in the desert talk behave like typical Palestinians. They represent the Palestinian to the Israeli cognition through the back door, through a brilliant, humane, humoristic and most of all clever cinematic distraction. Bukai, maybe intuitively, felt that the only way in which the Palestinian could touch Israeli conscience and raise his interest would be through a softened, retouched image of the ‘Egyptian’, who has existed significantly in this awareness since the days of the Bible.” (Shammas Anton, ‘He Confused the Parts’ in Bukai Rafi, Avanti Popolo, Kinneret Publishing House, 1990. Hebrew)
What strikes me about Avanti Popolo, is its yearning for a disinterested and universal “promesse du Bonheur” according to Stendhal’s famous definition of beauty, for Shakespeare, capable of transcending Israeli/Arab differences and conflicts. Avanti Popolo was followed . . .
Read more: Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere: Fantasies of Art & Beauty in Israeli and Palestinian Films, Part 2
By Igal Bursztyn, December 12th, 2011 
This is the first of a two-part post on developments in Israeli and Palestinian films: Today a reflection on the historical and aesthetic background, tomorrow on new developments. -Jeff
“The promise of happiness” bequeathed by art and beauty (Stendhal) does not seem to have much political or social relevance in the grim perspective of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict today. For most Palestinians, happiness probably depends on getting rid of the Israeli occupation, if not of the Israelis themselves, For most Israelis, happiness may consist of being relieved of Arab threats, if not of the Arabs. Artifacts of both cultures, especially their respective cinemas, tended to reflect this irrelevance till the late 20th Century.
Recent developments in Israeli and Palestinian film share a new, unexpected theme: an outspoken yearning for high-art and beauty. In Atash (Thirst) by Tawfiq Abu Wa’el, an Arab village girl, oppressed and almost raped by her father, obsessively reads classical poetry. In Rafi Bukai’s Avanti Popolo, an Egyptian soldier captured by Israelis in the 6 Day War Sinai quotes Shylock’s monologue to save his life. In Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention, a beautifully stylized fashion-model causes a military checkpoint watch-tower to collapse. In Yoav Shamir’s documentary, Checkpoint, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians in a routine search are accompanied by a beautiful Italian opera tune coming from a radio-transistor. These (and many more) works juxtapose art and beauty with bleak, everyday reality, creating an unanticipated, almost utopian vision in which art and beauty transcend reality, thus becoming critical (and self-critical) comments on their respective Israeli and Palestinian societies. They “help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible” (Jacques Rancière).
*****
In 1899, Shaul Tshernichovski published “Facing the Statue of Apollo,” one of the most influential poems in modern Hebrew literature:
Youth-God, sublime and free, the acme of beauty…
I came to you – do you recognize me?
I am a Jew, your eternal adversary…
I bow to life and courage and beauty…
The outspoken idolatry of the poem . . .
Read more: Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere: Fantasies of Art & Beauty in Israeli and Palestinian Films, Part 1
By Vince Carducci, December 5th, 2011 ![Book cover of Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law [Paperback] © 2011 Duke University Press Books](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Cutting-Across-Media-96x150.jpg)
In his recent book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, British-born writer Simon Reynolds laments what he believes is the lack of creative originality in contemporary popular music. He compares what he perceives as the debilitated state of today’s sounds to the toxic instruments of financial piracy that nearly collapsed the global economy: “music,” he writes, “has been depleted by derivativeness and indebtedness.”
And yet one might note the irony that Reynolds himself initially emerged as a champion of English punk, a musical form that leapfrogged back over the stylistic excesses of glam, disco, and arena rock to mine the lode of romantic primitivism that fueled skiffle and the thrashier proponents of beat, in particular groups like Them, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds. What’s more, the subsequent style Reynolds lionized, rave, is even more obviously built upon a preexisting foundation, pilfering tracks from a variety of sources, which are sampled, looped, and mashed-up into collages of sound.
That this is pretty much the way that popular music, and indeed much of art, both high and low, has long been made is obvious to Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, who have put together the collection of essays, Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law (Duke University, 2011). As befits its subject, the book brings together a broad range of contributors, from highfalutin academics to cutting-edge (no pun intended) street-level remixers, who reflect on a plethora of creative practices in all manner of media and genres.
An idea underlying the book is that the process of exchanging, altering, and assimilating information is and always has been central to humankind’s conscious being in the world. Natural scientist Richard Dawkins terms the basic unit of information exchange the meme, which is to culture what the gene is . . .
Read more: Cutting Up: Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
By Anna Paretskaya, November 28th, 2011 
The long-anticipated opening of the renovated Bolshoi Theater in Moscow last month was another sign that the country has transitioned from post-socialism to post-post-socialism. As one scholar observed, the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s (not unlike its Soviet predecessor, I should add) was founded on a metaphor of “historical rupture and social rebirth,” of rejection of the past and construction of the new social, political, and economic realities. However, in the new millennium, which more or less coincided with political ascent of Vladimir Putin, a new metaphor, that of “civilizational continuity,” has emerged and the current Russian “vision of political history and social identity [is] based in continuities, at various historical depths, linking [its] present with the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras.” Such reconceptualizaiton of the distant and more recent pasts is “coupled with the reappearance of particularist ideologies that set Russia in explicit opposition to Western states, social norms, and geopolitical interests,” which no doubt is a reaction to the post-Soviet import of Western “experts” and their economic wisdom and political counsel backed by NATO troops encroaching on the Russian space.
At the theater’s opening ceremony, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev pronounced the theater to be “one of our grandest national brands” (bolshoi translates as big or great). The six-year-long and nearly 700-million-dollar renovation resulted in extensive upgrades to stage technology (it now has 3D and multimedia capability) and at the same time in the return to the 19th-century look of the theater’s décor. Frescoes, tapestries, chandeliers, mosaic floors were restored, while the Soviet hammer and sickle throughout the theater were replaced with a double-headed eagle, the symbol of both the tsarist and contemporary Russia.
The restoration and the opening performance attest more to Russia’s recent movement toward reconciliation with its various pasts. Guests at the invitation-only gala consisted of Russian beau monde: haute couture designers and television personalities, artists and designers, bankers and industrialists. But it seemed that whoever was issuing invitations wanted or, likely, was instructed to put together a guest list showing that whatever momentary political disagreements Russians might have, they can be . . .
Read more: Big Is Beautiful Again in Russia: The Return of the Bolshoi Theater
By Lisa Aslanian, November 2nd, 2011 
 This is the second of a two-part series on Eminem by Lisa Aslanian. For the first part, see White Rage: Eminem, the Bad Boy from Detroit. -Jeff
Eminem’s Relapse does not deliver a clean rise from the ashes, a smooth transition from high to sober — far from it. The album, which Eminem released after he came out of rehab for the second time, resolutely off drugs, challenges our assumptions about therapy, creativity and what exactly it means to be cured.
Eminem’s sobriety does not blunt the dark and dank isolation that characterizes the artist and his work (there is very little collaboration on the album), it sharpens it. The music and Eminem himself seem looser. The rhymes are still agile and dense, but the subject matter — child molestation, serial murder and exhausting digressions on being high — is even more profane and harder to take.
Critics tore the album apart. Many accused Eminem of trading in shock value and playing for laughs. A few called the work forgettable, the latest in nasty, a summer blockbuster. A critic for the LA Times expressed dismay that the rapper’s critique of therapy was not explicit enough (I have no idea what it means to accuse an artist of not delivering an obvious enough critique) but all critics conceded that Eminem remains an unparalleled linguistic contortionist, bending and twisting words (see reviews here, here, here, and here). He used his skill to chronicle addiction and beating addiction, including all of the filthy phantasms that haunt him along the way.
Relapse showcases his talent and his feel for unbridled truth, and — here is where you should pay attention — the album is linked to his past (immaturity, self-absorption and fear of failure) and gestures, briefly, toward his future, or a sense that maybe Eminem is, even outside of stardom, worthwhile.
As critics and listeners, we ought to say first what the album is, before we can consider what it is not. To get at (and get) the work, three . . .
Read more: White Rage and the Riffing Cure: An Analysis of Eminem’s Relapse
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, October 26th, 2011 
With mixed feelings I rushed to PS1, to see its September 11 show. The promise was indeed intriguing and somehow relieving: in a lavish shower of commemorative events, PS1 curator Peter Eleey wrote in his statement on the show that “the exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” The public commemorations seemed to be unthinking. Perhaps art would present a rich alternative.
Yet, I went to the show with some trepidation. I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with contemporary art curatorial projects: less for professional reasons, while working with an artist often invited to group shows, more personal reasons, as a viewer. Following Sontag, I might decry interpretation. Yet, I must add an important qualification. Art critics are not the problem. Curators are.
I find contemporary art all too often trapped in labeling, paradigm-itizing and contextualizing; as if the death of universal values art had been addressing for centuries became conclusive with the need of pinning down the reading of art and awarding more or less random collections of artworks under common thematic, paradigmatic labels.
It does not mean that I don’t appreciate interesting juxtapositions of artworks, revealing their unexpected meanings, which have been proposed by some curators of group shows. The issue starts when these juxtapositions are radicalized, with artworks only used as a mere illustration of a curator’s statement. The art curator becoming the artist, placed somewhere between film director and writer, seems to me to be a corrupted idea. I’m sure many curators would disagree with me, and I would like to underline that it doesn’t apply to the profession in general. Rather, I address the scary . . .
Read more: “Nine-elevenism” and My Discontents
By Daniel Goode, October 11th, 2011 
When artistic “texts” are confused with context, it is reductive and infuriating, as Goode reflected upon in his post on the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler. But text with no context is without life and unsatisfying. Imagination enlivens, as revealed in these reflections on a book about Jazz. -Jeff
The omniscient narrator goes inside saxophonist Lester Young, and Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, and other great jazz musicians, and tells us their experiences as if they were having them right then. And not only their musical experiences. That’s what happens when you open Geoff Dyer’s 1996 But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. The back cover says it’s to be filed on the “MUSIC” shelf. What can you call it: anti-musicology? Fictional musicology? Keith Jarrett says it’s the only book about jazz that he recommends to friends. And it draws you in like any wonderful fiction—while you ponder: “did this really happen? did he/she really say or feel this?” I call this the “Lawrence of Arabia syndrome” because I first started asking myself that stupid but unavoidable question after seeing David Lean’s exciting, grandiose film about explorer/writer, T.E. Lawrence. Especially after he was tortured.
So Dyer stands musicology on its head as was said of Marx about Hegel, and Einstein about Newton. But let’s call his strategy an “informed poetics.” Fine to name it, but to my mind he takes a heroic risk to put his subjective narration up with all the well-known ones already out there. He succeeds, I think because he deals with a probabilistic world of weather, landscape, roads, cities, drugs and their effects—these universals in any historical picture of jazz, and then we hope and trust in him to add the specifics of these real people, and their relations to the events, in an informed and astute way. Whomever thinks he hasn’t done so, speak up, but with the evidence, please!
I see the same impetus as Dyer’s in Ken Russell’s series of films about famous composers, Liszt, . . .
Read more: Heretical Musicology
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 10th, 2011 
I am on the road from Gdansk. It’s been an intense few days. Last Tuesday, I joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration for a bit. By Wednesday, I was in the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity confronted the Party State in 1980, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I was interviewed for the Solidarity Video Archive, giving my account of the work I did with Solidarity and my understanding of the great labor movement. Immediately after which, I was taken to Gdansk University, where I gave my talk, this year’s Solidarity Lecture, “Reinventing Democratic Culture.” It opened the All About Freedom Festival. Over the weekend, I visited my family in Paris, and now I am flying over the Atlantic on my delayed flight to Newark, hoping I will get back to New York in time to teach my 4:00 class, The Politics of Everyday Life. It has been a packed week.
Unpacking my thoughts is a challenge. A new social movement is developing in the U.S., with potentially great impact. In Poland, a new generation is confronting the Solidarity legacy, trying to appreciate the accomplishments, while also needing to address new problems. Yesterday’s elections in France and especially in Poland were important. Yet, just as important for what was not on the ballot as for what was. Everywhere, there seems to be a political – society agitation and disconnect, with the politics of small things potentially contributing to a necessary reinvention of democratic culture.
I have many thoughts and will need more time to put them into a clear perspective. Here, just a start. I have a sense that things are connected: not falling apart, rather, coming together.
In the U.S., the central ideal of equality has been compromised in the last thirty years. From being a country with more equal distribution . . .
Read more: Things Come Together: Occupy Wall Street, Solidarity, Elections and Khodorkovsky
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, October 5th, 2011 
Sex:
Formally, it’s a pleasant poster. Whites and sandy beiges to recall Karen Blixen stories – the sun, the beach, the endless Africa, the innocent exotic; a successful attempt to cater to our idea of the far away, in a classy, elegant way. Even the slow walk, in which the men are captured as if coming back from work, helps to maintain a relaxed ambiance.
The content, on the contrary, seems to be a masterpiece of offense.
It starts with the exact same troubling “sandy beiges”: colonial cliché of a white man wearing his elegant outfit next to indigenous “exotic-folk” batik skirts and beads (if the men are indeed coming back from a work site, should one ask about division of labor? Better not).
And it goes further, to the main message of the poster, being a quotation of the man on the first plane (the two men turn their heads to him, listening eagerly): “Approach women like you do wild animals, with caution and a soothing voice.”
I can’t stop thinking about Bakhtin and his approach towards “the chain of speech communion” (although I’m not sure if I would like to be chained to the speech visualized on the poster in any way). Aside from his famous “the speaker is not Adam,” indicating that no speech is “innocent” and free of its precedent, he was also pointing out – a father of advertising? – that the speech is created in anticipation of encountering its response (which in his metaphor of chain of communication adds subsequent links to the preceding ones).
So there is no need to discuss a scandal of the actual statement – rather, one should think about the expectations of the response.
Was the indigenous man chosen to make this statement, as he could serve as an authority, given his familiarity to wild animals? Or was he chosen to be easily dismissed, in the presence of civilized white man, who knows (does he?) it is not . . .
Read more: Sex, Race, and Advertising
By Lisa Aslanian, September 27th, 2011 
Eminem’s rise from the rubble is well known. A shy white boy from East Detroit, Eminem was trailer park trash raised by a single mother who was often too high to mother. He regularly changed schools, repeated the ninth grade three times and was constantly bullied. By retreating inward — he read the dictionary and riffed rhymes at the floor — Marshal Mathers (M&M) found his way around ridicule and attack.
Like most rappers, words were Eminem’s weapon and escape. Unlike most rappers, however, Eminem is white. He stands out like a sore thumb. The lyrics that express his deep sense of isolation and vulnerability otherwise absent from rap are twice born — first, he uses rap to talk about growing up “white trash, broke and always poor” and second, he is a white dude in a nearly all black art form, and he believes he is isolated, rejected and often singled out because of the color of his skin.
Eminem does boast but what he brags about having, and having in spades, is unbeatable talent. His linguistic prowess is undeniable, but what separates him is not really his skill — I am not here to say who the best rapper is, though most claim the title — it is what he uses his skill to express: anxiety, timidity, envy and rage. When Eminem digresses on the many shades of depression, he extends rap’s emotional range beyond its hyper-macho comfort zone.
On the debut album 8 Mile, in “Lose Yourself,” Eminem says he cannot:
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten to me, to the point I’m like a snail I’ve got
To formulate a plot, or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherfuckin’option, failure’s not
Mom I love you, but this trailer’s got to go
I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot
So here I go it’s my shot, feet fail me not
This may be the only opportunity that I got
The . . .
Read more: White Rage: Eminem, the Bad Boy from Detroit
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