The Secret Museum

artists in iraq

Artists have been central to recording and interpreting the wars of their times. While the results often fail to be strictly factual--Washington's crossing of the Delaware didn't quite come off the way Leutze painted it--such work can still reveal, centuries later, the feelings of the time: fears or aspirations, despair or hope. In Iraq, artists are breaking free of years of totalitarian censorship and stagnation to record and interpret what's happening around them. They're creating Renaissance-style sculptures of the figures from the Abu Ghraib pictures, paintings of tanks burning and bombs dropping, and a flowering of satirical dramas in which star-crossed lovers meet in the shadows of American tanks.

This creative freedom would have been impossible under Saddam Hussein. I guess that's one of those ironies of war.

(via Modern Art Notes)

'...weeping for her century...'

...is how William Gibson describes his character, Cayce, near the end of Pattern Recognition. "...whether the one past or the one present, she doesn't know."

Read Kevin Sites' blog today, about the news footage he shot in Falluja, the killing in the Mosque.

How to reconcile that with the quiet park across the street, the glowing yellow leaves on the trees, or even something as small and warm as my cat sleeping, curled up, across the room?

But if the off button is stuck in the on position...

...we can always marry a willing Canadian.

Today We Push the Off Button

Orr stooped to unlace his shoes. He didn't want to get the Alien's bedspread dirty with his shoes, that would be scarcely a fair return for kindness. Stooping made him dizzy. "I am tired," he said. "I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button."

"You have lived well," the Alien said.

U.K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven