This is the visually impressive clip from the 1981 Warren Beatty film about John Reed The Reds starring Diane Keaton. Note how hammer and sickle morphs into the Muslim crescent. And the jihad inducing Zinoviev is a sort of Jewish caricature. The culturally inaccurate mosque background, Spanish Moorish carvings instead of the Persian mosaics of the Soviet Asia and even the miscast Corinthian column behind on of the translators. Those machine gun horse carriages magically rolling out of the train cars are more appropriate for the streets of Paris than for the Konarmia cavalry aka Budennovtzy. (annoying sound crack at 1:45 mark) ►►►read more
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war
What used to be the great cafeteria and now the great Greek Hall at the Met on Sunday.
On a Tel Aviv bench, photo by Max Reider
A clip of Slavoj Zizek talking about the classic musical The Sound of Music. I need to see the film again but let me think about this for a moment. The film was a Broadway remake, I wonder if there was an evolution of the imagery. A classic carnival persona is Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural mirror image. Here Zizek claims that the mirror image itself is just a metaphor, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Because in reality Nazis were impersonating the Jews all along. Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete. Check it out: ►►►read more
I weep easily, but this film in Hebrew is just hard to describe. Half a century in half an hour. Lodz, Frankfurt, Auschwitz, Arkhangelsk, Samarkand, Tel Aviv, Rego Park, Paris, Sinai. This film is a heartbreaking masterpiece.
The fatal story of a family discovered with detective precision based on the photos found in a garbage container in Tel Aviv. The film is strikingly minimalist, yet hauntingly beautiful. The dramatic suspense of the biblical fate punctuating one family, one of many. The unsettling proximity of the tragic century (the video is slow to load but well worth it, pay no attention to the commercials): Ynet – תעלומה במכולה הירוקה
An interview with Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee. This is the battlefield where the future wars will be won and lost. Wired – Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated.
Defensetech reports about the new US Army combat pants. The pants have stretchy, elastic fabric above the knees and in the back (where plumbers have the crack problem), knee pads are built into the pants, improved fire resistant fabric. Army plans to issue 7, 000 pairs to the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles” heading to Afghanistan. But you don’t need to wait for the testing, you can get your own pair, in four complimentary colors, for you weekend projects from Crye Precision (“knee pads sold separately”). I imagine they change the color pattern for the actual Army order.
Speaking of Afghanistan, there is moving New Year’s Eve report and haunting photos from Arghandab, Afghanistan by Michael Yon – Into Thine Hand I Commit My Spirit.
Marc Chagall, Apocalypse in Lilac: Capriccio, 1945
NYT – Small Museum Captures a Rare Chagall. Chagall made the sketch while in New York in 1945. The paper writes that this is a “gouache” although it looks like a watercolor. The drawing will be displayed for the first time in Ben Uri Gallery AKA The London Jewish Museum of Art. The name of the painting is a translation from Chagall’s own Russian inscription (wonder what it is in the original).
There is a ubiquitous for Chagall shtetl on the right, a cow, a fiddler, his trademark flying, till death do us part, lovers plus a Sefer Torah. And the falling clock. The crucifixion itself is equally offensive to both religions, but who is counting. The naked Jesus Chris is wearing a Tallis and Tefillin, might be annoying for the remaining Jews. The Christians on the other hand are used to the iconic naked depictions of the Christ but certainly not with the obviously female lower body (probably bleeding). As the Trinity is Kabbalistically recast into “The Father, The Son and The Holy Mother”.
Peter the Hermit shows the crusaders the way to Jerusalem. French illumination
So what was happening in the world almost exactly 1,000 years ago? As a rule one will find an intersection of pivotal conflicts at the center of a superpower of the time. In those days it was the Byzantium during the rule of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1056-1118). Alexios certainly a contender for political genius award. I call it Judo politics because Alexios managed a declining empire and he could only win the chess matches with his enemies or friends by using their own power against them, he was breathtakingly scheming. The half hour podcast by Lars Brownworth is simply superb. He describers Alexios struggles with the Normans, the Turks and the First Crusade (via 12byzantinerulers.com).
Following “the best documentary ever made” The Century of the Self, in 2007 Adam Curtis produced the three part BBC series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. The weakness and the strength of Adam Curtis is that he uses the broadest of the strokes. But he is the master of zeroing in on personalities pivotal for the history of ideas. In the third part of The Trap – We Will Force You To Be Free (Google Video) Adam Curtis describes the central ideological confrontation of the post WWII 20th century. On one side was Sir Isaiah Berlin who believed that the terror and the slaughter inevitable in revolutions should be avoided at all costs. Isaiah Berlin argued that a society without coercion, even if it negates progress and promotes inequality (welcome to America), is better than any progressive violent revolutions. On the other side was the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition Jean-Paul Sartre who preached terror as just and required for progress. The idea was the underpinning of the African revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Yassir Arafat, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and many “national liberation movements”. ( BTW, the description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as existentialist is a severe misreading (The Rebbe and French Existentialism by Ephraim Rosenstein). Just the opposite is true (see my post The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson). This is the classic case of confusion between the rhetoric and reality. The Rebbe for sure sided with his relative Isaiah Berlin, but his revolutionary rhetoric was just that. In fact the Rebbe never failed not take sides in any argument, let alone believed in the active and violent overthrows).
At the end of then film there is Tony Blair and the American neo-cons who imagine a revolution without a revolution, without the terror, etc., the position that proved to be unrealistic, especially in Iraq.
P.S. Today Slavoj Zizek is the most visible proponent of the violent revolutionary ethos (video Žižek on Robespierre and la Terreur).
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) “was born in the Bronx, New York, to Joseph White (who came from an Orthodox Jewish family) and Minnie Bourke, the daughter of an Irish ship’s carpenter and an English cook; she was a Protestant. She grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey (in a neighborhood now part of Middlesex), but graduated from Plainfield High School. Her father was a naturalist, engineer and inventor. His work improved the four-color printing process that is used for books and magazines.”
View of the bed where Joseph Stalin was born.
Guardian – Police believe gang behind theft of Nazi slogan:
“A state of emergency was announced in Poland today involving tightened border controls and random police checks as a nationwide hunt was launched for the infamous bronze sign to the former German Nazi death camp Auschwitz after it was stolen.”
photo via flickr/glennaa
Some blogger posted notes from the MIT lecture by Kevin Woods, describing his post Saddam analysis and interviews in Iraq. Inside Story: Saddam’s Strategic Thinking. Nepotism, Cowardice and Stupidity:
“Saddam lived in fear of a coup mounted by the Republican Guard. His solution was to create the Special Republican Guard, whose main remit was to protect him against coups particularly from the Republican Guard. You would think that the head of this outfit would be a fearsome figure who would terrify any budding coup plotters. Woods asked other leading figures if this was indeed the case and the answer was a resounding NO! Why? Saddam was well aware of the “who monitors the monitor problem” – what is the head of the Special Guard mounted a coup himself? Saddam’s solution was not original: appoint a relative. Make sure the appointee is a coward so he would not dream of mounting a coup. Just in case he is tougher than you might think, choose someone stupid so he cannot mount a successful coup and is too stupid to recognize someone else’s good ideas for a coup.”
