John Menick

From Yahoo News. One is art, the other, not. Maybe.

I’m not exactly sure why Peacemaker was on NPR this morning, since they covered the gamemaker almost exactly one year ago. Like political art that doesn’t take into account its role as a market luxury item, one has to wonder if politics should really be understood as a video game…

The Colossus of Baghdad.

From Errol Morris’ First Person.

From Creative Time:

Michael Rakowitz will re-open Davisons & Co., based on the importexport business his family operated in Baghdad. Located in a storefront on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, the project will provide free shipping for the Iraqi diaspora community, as well as other families who have military personnel stationed in Iraq, thereby creating a space where human concerns on both sides of the conflict can meet.

Davisons & Co. was originally opened in New York by Rakowitz’s grandfather when the family was exiled from Iraq in 1946, leaving behind a legacy that spanned centuries. In this incarnation of the business, Rakowitz will also attempt the importation of Iraqi dates and other products, offering them at prices that are clearly the result of prohibitive import charges and restrictions that remain years after the Gulf War embargo was lifted in 2003. This situation has kept Iraqi products from legally entering the United States, with severe repercussions for the previously thriving, world-renowned date industry in Iraq that produced over 600 different varieties.

Michael is also blogging the project.

Two quick updates on Lebanon and the arts:

MakeFilmsNotWar, launched this year at the Venice Film Festival, is co-sponsoring the 7th Beirut International Film Festival. And for this month’s issue, the editors of Artforum “turned to five individuals involved in [Modern Art Oxford’s “Out of Beirut” exhibition]—Lamia Joreige, Bernard Khoury, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, and Christine Tohme—and asked them to reflect on the Lebanese crisis and its implications for their practices and for the culture at large.” Some of the results are online.

In the fall of 2002, Emily Jacir asked me to help her organize a video festival in Palestine. As I remember, Emily had sent out an email to a group of artist friends requesting they send videos to show in a class she was teaching at Birzeit University that winter. Evidently, she meant the request to be private, but that wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the email, and many of the people began forwarding it on. The emails spread quickly, and weeks later she was inundated with videos.

I watched and helped select many of the videos with Emily, at first just because I was around, and then as a co-organizer. A video festival grew out of those initial subissions. Actually, Emily did most of the hard work in Palestine, and I mostly managed the New York end. The response to the project was quite good, and despite the fact that there was almost no press on the fest outside of Palestine, I get occasional emails about the project. There have been several film and video festivals since, but none focusing on videos art or experimental cinema.

The old domain for the festival’s Web site expired (impossible to renew since it was gobbled up by some porn company) and the only records of the festival left were the local PHP files I had backed up in an ancient computer in my apartment. At Emily’s request I dug them out and will keep them archived here until we find a better place for them.

Blogger and architect Raed Jarrar was flying to California through JFK wearing an Artists Against the War t-shirt that said “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English. JetBlue’ response?

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said “people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English “we will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him “why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt”.

More from Raed Jarrar and Democracy Now.

A second video (.mov) from Beirut Letters.

Via Electronic Lebanon.