Truth Force

Here's a piece Harold Jaffe posted on the Facebook Occupy San Diego discussion page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/161765230583534/):

--We see a broken human emerge from the canyon and avert our eyes.

--We read of homeless vets and pregnant women breaking into boarded-up buildings to escape the cold; we avert our eyes.

--The buildings have been boarded up for years; squatting in them is against the law.

--Law is not justice.

--We read of a polar bear and her cub trekking 900 miles south from the north Pole to find food, dying on the trek.

--See what's been done to our living world.

--We avert our eyes.

--We see brown-skinned women and children being slaughtered in bloody, fruitless wars across the globe, and we avert our eyes.
--We see people, young people, rebel in cities across the globe. The rebellions are labeled riots; the rebels are labeled criminals.

--We know otherwise.

--Still we avert our eyes.


--We see aircraft funded by caucasian corporate despots relentlessly bomb the country of a brown-skinned desert despot.

--Their mission, they claim, is liberation.

--We know otherwise, even as we avert out eyes.

--We see cynical, opportunistic industrialists and politicians line their pockets while lying to their constituents, and we avert our eyes.

--We see long lines of laid-off working people waiting to claim their unemployment checks which will run out before they find another job.

--We avert our eyes.

--We are not permitted to see the tens of thousand of people imprisoned unjustly in privatized prisons where inmates are denied parole and forced to do surplus labor so that prison owners and investors can extort their surplus profit.


Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.

See.
Share the pain.
Have courage.
Bear witness.

One writer fights the Indian Wars in her own little way

This weekend the New York Times (enjoy it while you still can) printed an article about the effect of the Twilight books/films on the Quileute people. By using them in her books, Stephenie Meyer inadvertently renewed the 200-year-and-counting war which has been waged against all Native American cultures. Does anyone from Team Jacob support the Quileute with their merchandise purchases? Does Stephenie with her book sales?

"To millions of 'Twilight' fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, 'Twilight' is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside — while they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series' vast commercial empire.

Just last month, MSN.com issued an apology to the Quileute for intruding on its territory while videotaping a 'Twilight' virtual tour in September. MSN.com sought permission from the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Forks, Wash., but didn’t pay the same courtesy to the Quileute."

Go to Hell - with Dante

Want to create a course that might have students - especially male students - reading Dante's Inferno? Link it to a video game.

In the video game Dante is no longer a reedy, introspective poet but a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find that his beloved Beatrice has been brutally murdered. Her innocent soul has been taken captive by Lucifer, and Dante must chase the archfiend into hell, fending off wave after wave of advancing demons with a mighty scythe.

. . .

"A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start."

Checkpoint 303 Beats Drum for Resistance

Checkpoint 303 composes activist breakbeats and middle-eastern electronica to promote peace, human rights and justice in the middle-east.

Their music is available for free download at http://www.checkpoint303.com or Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/checkpoint303.

Here's a piece the band recently wrote for Common Ground News Service (CGNews) available at: www.commongroundnews.org

Tear down the wall and dance!
06 March 2008

EAST JERUSALEM and LYON, FRANCE — We had nearly finished getting our gear off the stage when someone from the audience came up to congratulate us on our show. After telling us how much he enjoyed the music and video projection, he added, with a slightly troubled look on his face: “…but I have a problem. Isn’t it somehow wrong to dance to music that deals with the Palestinian cause?” He explained that while he found himself dancing to some of the more up-beat songs, he could not help asking himself whether it was okay to dance to the message our music embodies.

We were pleased to hear about his ‘dilemma’. This is precisely what our band, Checkpoint 303, is all about. Instead of telling the audience what to think about the issue of Palestine, which would be a ridiculously naïve attitude, we try to trigger a reflective process in our listeners.

This same question is put to us every now and again. Obviously there’s no universal answer. Every individual has to discover what they consider to be right, that’s the point; it’s ultimately all about the process of figuring it out. But for those who feel guilty grooving to the sound of a serious humanitarian issue, we have one consolation: silly I-love-you-baby lyrics need not be the unique criterion for danceable music.

This said, Checkpoint 303 is not a dance music band. The songs we consider successful are ones that involve the listener in the artistic process, songs in which the listener participates in creating the statement, as opposed to passively consuming a message. This can only be achieved by avoiding music with a ready-to-go, prêt-à-porter, take-away message.


How can this be achieved from a practical point of view? By contrast to other forms of musical activism, we do not rely on lyrics to convey our message. Checkpoint 303’s music is primarily based on field we record throughout the Middle East, and Palestine in particular—covering a large spectrum of predominantly urban sounds: people talking in the old city of Jerusalem, a traffic jam in Ramallah, excerpts of a local Bethlehem radio station, the sound of an identity control at an Israeli checkpoint, the chanting of a demonstration in the west bank, etc. We then transform the audio material into loops, onto which we add electronic beats, riffs and melodies played on oud (oriental lute), keyboard or guitar.


When our ‘sound catchers’, SC Yosh or Cheikh Julio, are on the street with their recording gear, they are not looking for a specific sound to convey a pre-defined impression or statement. The essence of our music is to capture, fragment, and reconstruct the soundtrack of daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories. Yet we don’t restrict our music to only portraying the suffering and hardship of life under occupation. The media is doing a fantastically wrong and biased job of exclusively depicting the negative aspects of life in this tormented region of the world. By contrast, our music includes rhythms of “normal” life, the supposedly insignificant things that never make headlines, but help make possible the very idea of “hope” in Palestine.


Many Palestinian families heroically try, against all odds, to get along with their lives, educate their children, and dream of a better future—one worth living for. There are positive stories to report from Palestine. Our attempt to make music based on objective field recordings in the Middle East is in itself a challenging intellectual exercise. But, at the end of the day, that is precisely what yields the necessary degree of realism and humanity that is the backbone of our music.
Our aim, then, is to blend the aesthetics of electronic music composition with the social, economical, and humanitarian dimensions of reality in Palestine in a way that actively involves the listener in shaping the message. But does this make our work political? Although it may be perceived as such, our creative intentions are not political per se. They are driven by fundamental humanitarian values. It seems to us that the universality of human rights should in theory be both the common ground and the starting point to achieve peace. Additionally, when it comes to the question of whether our art is politically correct or not, the answer is simple: we do not care as long as it is humanly correct. We are artists, not politicians; this allows us the luxury of being able to tell the truth from a humanitarian point of view with no fear of electoral consequences!

Electronic music and audiovisual experimentation are the tools Checkpoint 303 uses to react to both the virtual and physical walls the occupation has created. These walls are also being hacked by the flourishing Palestinian hip-hop and trip-hop scene (e.g. DAM, Ramallah Underground, G-Town, Arapeyat, etc.) but also international artists such as the British graffiti artist Banksy or the American indie songwriter and political activist David Rovics to name but a few.

###

This article is part of a special series on Art and Conflict, which surveys the work of art in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and examines the political dimensions of art in general.

Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Checkpoint 303 collaborates with film-makers, musicians, and visual artists from around the globe. Its free tunes from occupied territories are an act of resistance and a celebration of hope.

Checkpoint 303 was invited by Massive Attack to be a support band for three shows in the UK in 2007 and in France in 2008. We are also very much into performing in alternative venues and spaces where the aesthetics and meaning of sound/noise and its link to social activism can be reconsidered and explored...

Over the last two years, the band has performed electronic and live sets in several countries (USA, Australia, Canada, France, Palestine, Tunisia, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Japan, etc.) spreading the word for peace and human rights through a blend of twisted electronica, downtempo, break-beats, oriental riffs and field recordings...

The Korean Reunification

On Monday, I saw a documentary as part of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, called Tiger Spirit.
Korean Canadian filmmaker Min Sook Lee intended her project to focus on the elusive and possibly extinct Korean Tiger, which is an important symbol for the Korean fighting spirit.
During filming however Lee's attention turns to the 56-year-old wall separating the two Koreas and millions of family members.
The heavily guarded DMZ was created in 1953, following the 3-year Korean war that ended in stalemate and armistice between the communist-backed North and U.S.-backed South.
At the time, Koreans assumed reunification would shortly follow.
Separation then was 'merely' geographical. It has over the years become a wide cultural expanse. South Korea has opened to capitalism while North Korea of course has grown more isolated.
During the film, we meet former North Koreans who defected south and find themselves strangers adrift in a foreign country. They must attend indoctrination classes to repatriate. They rely on each other. They start families. Get jobs. But when they close their eyes, they still dream of the Korea they know in the North. They can never return.
However, the film culminates with a 3-day reunification event between family members separated during the war. Those who fled to the South are now well into their 70s, 80s and 90s. They are picked by a lottery to attend. Many who have applied discover that their siblings and cousins have died off in the five decades.
The reunions are tightly controlled and observed. Lee doesn't tell us exactly who is observing. We know the North Koreans are under watch, but we must also assume the South Korean government has its own interests in the event. Participants are allowed only two hours of privacy in a hotel room during one of the days.
Those who are selected see old men and women looking back at them. They try to communicate through the barriers of time and dementia. As the last meeting ends, the North Koreans board buses to return them to Pyongyang. Their old family members waving them off can be heard crying and breaking down as they see their siblings probably for the last time.
It's a heartbreaking tale created by one of the most enduring walls of the last half century.
-Ned

Walt Whitman, Ad Man or Mad Man?

Here's an ad agency using Walt Whitman to sell jeans:



Can a poem sell? Of course. Should a poem be used to sell? Well, Walt's dead, so he has no say.

Teachers could see the ad campaign as a teaching tool, to sell students on poetry.

meta-roles

We're workshopping a story today about a helicopter pilot in Allied occupied West Germany. It's filled with detailed descriptions of post-Nazi Germany, but also a twist which promises to get mixed reviews. The third person character, McKay, is also writing the story, which is being reviewed by his wife Suzan.

She is making various suggestions to McKay about revising the story. This is a meta approach attempting to make the reader an self-conscious party. The couple also discuss later details in the story, which foreshadows those events.

At the chapter's conclusion, Suzan asks McKay what she looks like as a character.

"Are we sitting down at a table? Are we drinking wine? Is it red or white? Do I look lovely tonight? Are you serious about sailing our boat to Hawaii?"

"Sitting down, red wine, very lovely, quite serious."

"Oh," she said. "Will you pour me another glass please?"

Interesting technique. But does it fly?

Can University Presses survive this recession?

My local newspaper of choice recently printed an AP article about the possible demise of Louisiana State University Press. Seems in an era where universities are being squeezed of funding by their states, one likely victim will be the University Press.

Chancellor Michael Martin doesn't question the prestige the Louisiana State University Press brings to his school, with Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction and poetry, tomes on Southern history and culture and other noted works to its credit.

What it doesn't bring in is revenue, and, like cash-strapped colleges across the country, LSU is getting tired of propping up its press.

The school has said the 74-year-old original publisher of "A Confederacy of Dunces" doesn't generate enough money to independently function.

Fiction International understands the problem, which is why we began a drive to increase revenue. We applied a few basic accounting techniques to get expenses in line, then started (and continue) looking for subscribers. We created an online presence (including this blog) and went looking for past, present, and future contributors and avid readers.

The result is a journal that is - for now - making enough money to cover our publishing costs. A journal that is - for now - safe from the university's budget ax.

Who will be hurt most by this latest cost-cutting move by universities are the contributors, most of whom teach and need the publishing credit to retain their jobs. There are few markets for short fiction and poetry, and most are affiliated with a University, so losing fiction and poetry journals will be a severe blow.

If a university wants to save their publications, they need to find within their department an administrator who knows both literature and business. Imagine the revenue LSU Press would have if it had - for example - the publishing revenue from A Confederacy of Dunces when it was hot, instead of well after its money-generating days were over. (LSU Press quietly resumed publication of the Larg-Print version, while Penguin Classics publishes the version assigned by literature classes.)

So could LSU Press or any other university press make enough changes in their way of thinking about literature and the marketplace to increase their revenue enough to survive the recession? Yes they can.

Sartre's Wall

In 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short story titled, "The Wall." It takes place in Franco's Spain, and concerns a group of men about to be executed as anarchists - against a prison wall.

"Something is going to happen to us than I can't understand."

There was a strange smell about Tom. It seemed to me I was more sensitive than usual to odors. I grinned. "You'll understand in a while."

"It isn't clear," he said obstinately. "I want to be brave but first I have to know. . . .Listen, they're going to take us into the courtyard. Good. They're going to stand up in front of us. How many?"

"l don't know. Five or eight. Not more."

"All right. There'll be eight. Someone'll holler 'aim!' and I'll see eight rifles looking at me. I'll think how I'd like to get inside the wall, I'll push against it with my back. . . . with every ounce of strength I have, but the wall will stay, like in a nightmare. I can imagine all that. If you only knew how well I can imagine it."

"All right, all right!" I said. "I can imagine it too."

Warr Games

A Docufiction by Harold Jaffe.

Night after night throughout the wrecked city contingents of US troops in cartoon video uniforms hunt for hidden roadside bombs.
        On a recent night, a unit from Company B of the Fifth Engineering Battalion, out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., met in a darkened tent to prep for their road-clearing mission in a 27-foot armored vehicle called Cowpoke.
        At the end of their meeting, Staff Sgt. Jessie McGah, 31, of Greenville Arkansas, led his team in prayer.

Out on what passes for a road, crawling along at five miles per hour, the unit peer through blast-resistant glass windows, using giant floodlights and a remotely operated steel arm to help detect any telltale disturbance in the pavement or median that would reveal a buried bomb.
        To accomplish their mission, the engineers, or sappers, try to get into the enemy’s mind.
        "When we're out," Sgt McGah said, "we're thinkin’ like how the bad guys think, even like how we'd blow ourselfs up to keal Americans.”

Wolfing trash food, the bright American male 17-year-old sits cross-legged on the floor, pavement, tarmac, astroturf playing warr games.
        Video velocity, hand-eye coordination, game-theory-fantasy-slaughtering- cartoon-state-of-the-art weaponry.
        Speed speed.
        In warr games the fierce-eyed baddies wear long beards and turbans.
        Make agitated gestures and scream Jihad! Jihad! when they’re not sticking their collective butts in the air praying to Allah.

Meanwhile the bright 17-year-old’s older brother, dad and uncle are murdering the fierce-eyed baddies in their long beards and turbans.
        In what used to be called “real time.”
        Murdering the long beards’ wives and children.
        Infinite children, since the phrase “birth control” has never been translated into Arabic.
        There is no corresponding phrase in Farsi.
        In Urdu.
        No corresponding phrase in the million and one regional dialects of tribal Africa.

Hyper-brained 17-year-olds play warr games in their techno-caves
while their older brothers, sisters, National Guard dads, uncles are killed and maimed by roadside bombs.
        Poisoned by xenophobia.
        Sickened unto death by depleted uranium.
        Zombied home with PTSD.
        Resume a life of legislated dysfunction with sharply reduced benefits.
        Migrating patriotism.

40 years ago, before Starbucks, the internet, and boutiqued angst, 20-something males refused to kill while contesting the real-time war, and (no matter what the Discovery Channel tells us now) raised consciousness, as the phrase went, helped end the holocaust.
        End the war that in hindsight nobody wanted, not even one of its chief architects, Defense Secretary McNamara, previously a car salesman, president of Ford Motor Company, who long after the war received a seven-figure advance for dictating his old man’s recantation to a ghost writer.
        In Retrospect, 1995, Random House.
        Then gave contradictory lectures based on the book he didn’t actually write for big $$ where he bristled when the audience interrogated him.

“Mr. Secretary, you say you objected early in the campaign to the bombing, napalming, wanton murder of innocents, carpet bombing of neighboring Cambodia which was not even a player in the war.
        “Mr. Sec, if you had these objections early on, like you say, why didn’t you make a case for stopping the war to the president, to the congress, to the American people?”

Mac’s peeved response: “I was a member of the team.
        “I was not in position to instruct my President.”
        From the audience: “What about after you left Defense and headed the World Bank? It was ‘68; the war was still raging.”
        Mac’s response: “As president of the World Bank I had pressing responsibilities, no time for distractions.”
        “Mr. Sec, are you calling the genocidal Vietnam War a distraction?”

Do 17-year-old males playing video warr games in their techno-caves constitute a distraction?
        Are “real time” wars a distraction from accountable reality?
        What counts more than Reality (TV) in your palm in a strip mall in anywhere, America?
        More than the NFL, America’s game, with a GDP higher than Sub-Saharan Africa?
        More than XXXtreme Games?
        With God, family, hedge funds, and Xtreme patriotism, McNamara, an advocate of game theory and the technological “revolution,” has never (he says proudly) found time for play.

**

        Intelligence officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have been studying postmodern theory.

        You’re lying.

        They recognize that the principles of waging warr must change in the new millennium.
        For Israel to contain its enemies on every side without taking big losses, the intelligence officers have studied Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bourdieu . . .

        Whole lot of Frogs.
        The French and Israelis don’t even like each other.

        They’ve read PoMo architects and scrutinized their erections.

        Okay.

        Origins are out.
        Except for the origin of the disputed territories, which belong to the Jews, indisputably.
        Perpendicular is out, swarm is in.
        If insurgent street fighters have mined an alleyway and are wedged into sniper positions in the buildings lining the alley on either side, the Israelis don’t enter the alley from the front and proceed forward.
        Instead, small contingents of Israeli commandos break through the walls of apartments in the buildings lining the alley.

        What do they do with the families living in those apartments?

        Lock them in a room, bolt the door.
        The commandos unwall the walls, collapse the space, swarm into the alley from either side.
        In medias res.
        Like ants, like killer bees.
        They blast the insurgents.
        Or they disrupt them, startle them out of their holes.

        I didn’t think freedom fighters startle that easy.

        Not easy.
        Reading postmodern culture theory isn’t easy.
        Applying postmodern culture theory to warr ain’t easy.

        What happens if the freedom fighters are not in the alleys?

        Then Israeli intelligence hacks into their technology.
        PoMo warr is fundamentally a discourse between enemies.

        They discourse in different languages.

        Incidental.
        If the enemy’s lines of discourse are impeded they can’t communicate.
        An isolated, incommunicable enemy cannot warr effectively.

        You’re saying that the IDF, with their ruthless reputation world-wide, wage warr on their computers?

        PoMo battle-space is various.
        Situational.
        A network of interfacing but also unlooped spaces, offline and on.
        Battle-space is inseparable from living space.
        The souks, sewers, streets, mosques, kasbahs are where the enemy live, shit, pray, terrorize.

        How does the IDF distinguish combatants from innocents?

        Vermin is vermin.
        Nobody is innocent.

        Nobody on the insurgents’ side.

        It’s all in the mind.
        Which is the technology.
        Space is relational, subject to interpretation.
        So is innocence.
        We have the technology.

        True.

        The principle is if you can’t kill or brutalize the enemy, impede him.
        While the enemy moves haltingly, the IDF glides effortlessly.
        Online, off.
        Smooth, liquid, permeable movement vs striated, opaque, impeded movement is how the texts put it.

        The PoMo culture theory texts?

        Previously, the IDF, like other well-equipped, rigidly organized armies, warred strictly off-line via a traditional, Euclidian -- so to speak -- perspective.
        Now that centralized perspective has been put under erasure.
        Torqued, ruptured, shattered.

        If the freedom fighters are not murdered they will regroup.
        Resume fighting.

        Less effectively.
        Confidence shattered.
        An enemy does not have to be annihilated to lose a battle.
        Lose the warr.
        When the battle resumes the IDF “reads” and analyzes the dynamic; it kills with hardware, disorganizes with stratagems, reorganizes with software.
        One can win a post-millennial battle purely by reorganization.

        Were -- are -- any of those postmodern theorists soldiers, fighters?

        Postmodern theorists are pussies.
        Especially if they’re French.
        They’ll murder their wives.
        Or themselves.
        They do what they do.
        So long as they leave their texts behind.

        What happens to the unwalled walls?
        The inhabitants bolted into their rooms?
        What happens to the buildings the IDF breaks through in order to swarm like killer bees, reorganize space?

        The buildings remain unwalled.
        The inhabitants are not a factor.
        It could be they don’t even notice the unwalled walls.
        That is one of the advantages of warring with an impoverished enemy.

        You talk of the new post-millennial battle plan.
        Startle, swarm, disrupt, rupture.
        Battling situationally, with knowledge gained by studying the postmodern culture theorists?
        But isn’t this the way the most impoverished guerrillas on every bedeviled continent have been warring all along?
        Without having to read those French pussy theorists?

        Maybe.
        But without our technology.


[Part 2 is drawn from Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls,” Radical Philosophy #136, March/April 2006.]

War is Over

The Doors/Unknown Soldier

Writers Living in Economic War Zones

Harold Bloom just published an article about how the lessons learned from an economic meltdown informed his writing. The writer? Ralph Waldo Emerson.

While Emerson is a great source for "self-reliance" and "transcendence" in a country gone mad from greed and power, other writers -- like Walt Whitman (who can teach us about transcending war) and Henry David Thoreau (who can teach us about transcending both greed and war) are Emerson's equals -- not his pupils, as Bloom suggests. (Bloom does love a hierarchy!)

               

Hope

Image by Shepard Fairey.

Here is a link (posted without comment) to a Wired feature on street artist Shepard Fairey, who has been hired by the Obama campaign to create images for their theme "hope."

SARTRE ON LIVING IN NAZI OCCUPIED FRANCE

WE HAVE NEVER BEEN SO FREE AS UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION.  We had lost every right, and above all the right of speech:  we were insulted every day and we had to remain silent;  we were deported as laborers, as jews, as political prisoners;  everywhere, on the walls, in the newspapers, and on the screen, we saw the foul and listless face which our oppressors wanted to give us.  Because of all of this we were free.  Since the Nazi venom penetrated our very thoughts, every true thought was a victory.  Since an all powerful police tried to force us to be silent, each word became as precious as a declaration of principle.  Since we were hounded, every one of our movements had the importance of commitment.  The often atrocious circumstances of our struggle had at last put us in a position to live our life without pretences--to live in this torn, unbearable condition which we call the human condition.  Exile, captivity, and above all death, which is ably disguised in periods of happiness, became the perpetual object of our concern; we discovered that they were not inevitable accidents or even constant but external threats:  they had become our lot, our destiny, the source of our reality as men.  Each second we fully realized the meaning of that trite little phrase "All men are mortal."

--Jean Paul-Sartre.  From his essay, "The Republic of Silence."

Always war

As a preliminary contribution:

"There is a War" by Leonard Cohen

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn't.

Why don't you come on back to the war, that's right, get in it,
why don't you come on back to the war, it's just beginning.

Well I live here with a woman and a child,
the situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says "I guess you call this love";
I call it service.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous.

You cannot stand what I've become,
you much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be embarrassed,
why don't you come on back to the war, you can still get married.

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
a war between the black and white,
a war between the odd and the even.

Why don't you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get even,
why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?

What type of "Artist in Wartime" are you?

Traditional Battlefield-Style Warfare?


War Re-enactment?


War metaphors?


Cold War?


Guerilla War?


War of Words?

War of Wills?


War as "hot, man-on-man action"?


Submissions are now being accepted for Fiction International's "The Artist in Wartime" issue.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

General, your tank
is a powerful vehicle
it smashes down forests
& crushes a hundred men.
but it has one defect:
it needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful
it flies faster than a storm
& carries more than an elephant.
but it has one defect:
it needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly & he can kill.
but he has one defect:
He can think.

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was a Marxist dramatist, stage director and poet.

Post via erasmuspc

I have been here

The following photographs are the work of Iranian artist Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, from his series, I have been here.

Art of the First World War

Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Soldat (Self-Portrait as a Soldier), 1914, ink and watercolour on paper, on both sides, 68 x 53.5 cm, Municipal Gallery, Stuttgart.

The aim of this exhibition is not to review the facts of the war, but to show how they were portrayed by artists on either side of the front line, and indicating the difficulties involved. Amongst the millions of conscripts there were painters of every nationality and every school of painting. Those who were born around the year 1880 belonged to the generation that was called up immediately on the outbreak of war. The war held no secrets for men such as these – they were the ones who did the fighting. Boccioni, Macke, Marc, La Fresnaye and Gaudier-Brzeska died during, or as a consequence of, the war. Only the citizens of neutral countries (for example the Spanish nationals Picasso and Gris) were not called up. Many enlisted out of patriotism or because they could not bear to be away from the action. Until now, with very few exceptions, artists and writers had witnessed wars without actually becoming involved. In 1914, for the first time, they all had to take part: Germans, Britons, Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen. Léger became a stretcher-bearer, Kokoschka a cavalryman, Beckmann a medic, Derain an artilleryman, Camoin a camoufleur, Dix a machine-gunner. Many of them drew and painted what they saw and lived through. From the sketchbooks of pencil drawings done at the front to the canvases painted on returning home, theirs is an intense and accurate testimony.

And yet, many of these works have been little researched, if not altogether forgotten. Because they recalled painful memories they were not much looked at once the war was over. Even the men who painted them - with the crucial exception of Otto Dix - had grown away from their work, and made no attempt to exhibit them. For example, Beckmann and Léger were no sooner demobbed than they set to work painting very different subjects, such as contemporary life and the city. Others went even further in making a fresh start. Among those who were called up were Braque and Derain, who left Avignon station together on August 2nd 1914 to join their regiments, accompanied by Picasso. Braque took part in the fighting during that autumn and winter. He was seriously wounded on May 11th 1915, was trepanned and, after a long convalescence, returned to his workshop a year later. He left not a single drawing or canvas alluding to what he had been through and no representation of the war is present in his work. Derain was attached to an artillery unit and served in the Champagne region, at Verdun, on the Somme, and on the Chemin des Dames until 1917. He was not demobilised until after the armistice. Of this five year period there remains no trace, apart from the title of one painting, the Cabaret on the Front seen by André Breton in Derain's studio in 1921, but which disappeared and was probably destroyed. Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kokoschka also refrained from painting what they had seen and experienced...

Nevertheless, new art works did appear, and in larger numbers than might be expected. They expressed violence, fear, exaltation, suffering, pity and disgust. They appealed to the persistence of the human conscience at a time when it was being enslaved and ignored by war. Some of the older ones, those most set in their old ways, tried to do this with the tools of pictorial realism handed down from the previous century. They observed biplanes, artillery guns and soldiers in close detail, and equally methodically reproduced what they saw. Illusion and illustration were their main resources. However, their themes, being all about movement, speed and the instant, were bound to suffer from being fixed as if suspended in a still picture. These works still have their documentary value however, which today is heightened by their picturesqueness from another age.

Younger painters trained during the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, attempted combinations which nowadays we find surprising, such as bright, sharp colours and macabre subjects, or cut-out shapes and white light. Whether they were painting the ruins of a bombed-out church, a mountain artillery post or two bodies lying forgotten in a trench, Vallotton in Argonne, Horovitz in the Alps and Orpen on the Somme introduced purple shadows, sinuous lines and Japanese-inspired flat tints - as if it were still possible, a quarter of a century on, faithfully to apply the lessons of Gauguin and the Nabis...

The artists belonging to the European avant-garde movements - the German Expressionists, French Cubists, Italian Futurists and British Vorticists - rejected once and for all the rules which had previously governed the painting of battle scenes. They worked to overcome the difficulties involved in devising new themes and methods suited to the monstrous new reality. Those methods were largely those of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Abstract Art. In May 1915, Léger was in Argonne from where he wrote to a friend: "All the same, it is a funny kind of war (...) This war is the perfect orchestration of every means of killing, both old and new. It is intelligent to its fingertips, which actually makes it damned annoying as there are no more surprises. We are controlled on either side by very talented people. It's as linear and as arid as a geometry problem. Such a large number of shells in such a short time over such a surface area, so many men per metre and in order at the specified time, it is all triggered off mechanically. It is pure abstraction, much purer even than Cubist Painting "itself". I can't deny my allegiance to this method (...)" (6). In devastated Verdun, he discovered "completely unexpected subjects to gladden (his) Cubist soul" (7). Drawings and watercolours are the satisfactory result of these new contacts. Léger portrays dehumanised automata serving the machines that crushed them. He brings out the collapsed shapes of his ruins and the broken lines of a shot-down plane.

Dix, Nevinson, Severini, Wyndham Lewis, Nash and Grosz also came to understand that modern warfare needed to be painted in a modern way. The time for heroic realism and patriotic allegory was up. To interpret the explosions of shells, the all-powerful artillery and total war demanded transcripts and not imitations. In order to convey a feeling of its inhuman violence, rather than represent the particular details of the battle, lines had to be broken, and colours had to burst out.

From the website The Art of the First World War