Ramadan karim to all my Muslim readers, and best wishes for a happy and healthy month. Despite the fact that my observance of some Muslim rituals has faltered in recent years, I still keep up with the fast. I find abstinence from food and drink to be the easy part, in fact. The hard part, I think, is staying away from all the other stuff.
Happy Rosh Hashanah to my Jewish readers. Put some North African flavor in your celebrations by reading this interview of Sherwin Nuland, where he talks about his new biography of Maimonides; and by listening to this cool podcast where Jewlia Eisenberg talks about Algerian divas like Reinette L’Oranaise and Alice Fitoussi.
The Levantine Cultural Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that brings together people of American, Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean heritage to explore the arts, has a history of putting together amazing events. This year alone, they’ve staged a major rai concert, showings of films like Lila Says, poetry readings by Nathalie Handal and Sholeh Wolpe, plays like Nine Parts of Desire, and much else.
But the center has run into some financial trouble. The staff is made up exclusively of volunteers, but they still need to be able to cover rent and program costs. If you are able to contribute, consider making a donation.
The L.A. Times has a profile of UCLA professor Jonathan Friedlander, who is using his collection of ‘orientalist paraphernalia’ for an exhibit at the Powell Library. The items were collected over the years, bought at antique shops or even at the local Sav-On.
Several hundred items will be on view until Dec. 16. The complete collection, by contrast, comprises more than 1,500 pieces: 1930s comics and pulp fiction such as “Spicy Adventures” and “Desert Madness”; ads for Ben Hur Flour; bottles of Pyramid Beer; video games such as “The Prince of Persia”; sheet music for songs including “The Sheik of Araby” and “Persian Moon.” Exotic topless women undulate on the covers of Arabic music CDs. Fierce warriors scowl from the covers of DVDs. (Most of the collection is available for view on a database at the exhibition, which includes listening stations and film clips.)
Despite his attraction to these artifacts, Friedlander maintains there’s something pernicious at work in them. The images, which seem increasingly cartoonish the more you look, portray the Middle East as an irrational, oversexed, violent land given to despotism and mysticism. The women tend to move in harems and wear very little; the men seem not to go very far without their scimitars.
“It becomes ahistorical anything goes,” Friedlander says of the mishmash of myth, reality and disparate historical periods portrayed. “And you erase people’s cultures this way: It all becomes ‘the East,’ ‘the Orient.’ “
What’s even more twisted is how Camel cigarettes are exported and sold to the Arab world. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that one can sell the Orientalist mystique even to the Arabs. How’s that for a research topic?
Mariam Said, Edward Said’s widow, takes issue with Maureen Clare Murphy’s report about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s performance in Ramallah last Friday.
Murphy criticized the poor organization of the event, the fact that it was invitation-only, and even the cooperative aspect between Israelis and Palestinians. Mariam Said, for her part, emphasized the history of the project, the desire to bring together musicians of different nationalities together, and the amount of good will that it took to found the orchestra and keep it performing.
In other news, the orchestra’s conductor, Daniel Barenboim, is being called an “anti-Semite” because he refused an interview to an Israeli Army radio.
An exhibit of Botero’s paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist’s works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.
These aren’t the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.
But this perception of Botero’s work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velazquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.
Read more here.