Reason Magazine - Staff

Artifact: Warhol Goes to China

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:16:00 EST

This looks a lot like a Godfrey Kneller portrait of William III painted in the 17th century, but it’s actually a copy of Kneller painted the other day in a sweatshop in Dafen, China. The painter, who received less than $1 for the portrait, is one of thousands of artists who have converged on Dafen’s many art factories, where they each paint up to 30 replicas during a 16-hour day. Dafen’s output is sold in places such as Wal-Mart, which recently commissioned 50,000 copies made in China. London’s Fulham Palace mounted a show of such canvases this year to call attention to “a shocking form of sweatshop labour.”

If only Andy Warhol could have attended. In the 1960s, Warhol called his Manhattan atelier The Factory, declared that he wanted to become an art “machine,” and made a theme of the mass reproduction of familiar images, from soup cans to the Mona Lisa.

Warhol, of course, was an ironist trying to subvert the status of art. There’s nothing subversive about Dafen’s factories, or its machine-like copyists. Yet China has outdone Warhol, dispensing with art’s status entirely.

By the way, Dafen’s copyists do the Mona Lisa, too, and some of them now copy contemporary Western painters. Maybe we’ll soon have Chinese versions of Warhol’s Mona Lisa silkscreens, thus dispensing with irony altogether.

The Politics of Pants

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:00:00 EST

Lion of the Desert, Fanatics In the Street

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

In an interview broadcast last Friday, Moustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born film director and producer, noted that he was "deeply proud of my American citizenship." Akkad was appearing on Mosaic, a program directed at the Arab Diaspora, and he was addressing—in Arabic—an audience of fellow Middle Eastern expatriates. Among America's special attributes, the filmmaker explained, was that its immigrant people had largely avoided the most extreme forms of nationalism that—and here he adopted a certain Levantine discretion—"we have seen lead to such excesses elsewhere."

Among the nationalisms that Akkad considered prone to excess was Arab nationalism, especially in its conspiracist form. In the aftermath of September 11, Akkad appeared on another program aimed at an Arab audience: a public-affairs show called Between the Lines hosted by a woman journalist with decidedly Arab nationalist sympathies. Her interview with Akkad may well have been one of the most difficult she ever did: Akkad was scornfully dismissive of the nationalist rhetoric in which she couched her questions, focusing on such matters as the persistent Middle East rumors of Jewish foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks as marks of a dysfunctional political culture.

By the time last week's Mosaic interview aired, however, Akkad was dead, a victim of the Nov. 9 suicide-bomb blasts in Amman, Jordan where he and his daughter Rima were attending the ill-fated Palestinian wedding at the Radisson.

The jihadis led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who have been attempting to re-establish the Caliphate on the corpses of Iraqi children lined up to receive candy, Iraqi mourners gathered at funerals, Iraqi women crowding Baghdad's outdoor produce markets, Iraqi worshippers assembled in mosques and churches, along with a great many other such victims, had added Jordanian wedding guests to their continuing slaughter of the innocent, the unarmed, and the unsuspecting.

Yet by killing Akkad, Zarqawi's jihadis managed to pull off a bloody act of particular stupidity, even for them. Although he is best known to U.S. audiences as the producer of the eight-film Halloween horror franchise, Moustapha Akkad had spent much of his long career in Hollywood—he came to LA from Allepo in the 1950s to study film—attempting to use the movie capital's power to reshape negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. As the liberal journalist Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed wrote on Monday in the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, "The irony is that Akkad, the very man who delivered a wonderful image of Islam, was killed by Al-Qaeda, the very organization that has defamed Islam and Muslims." There's actually a larger irony at work as well: Al Qaeda was not the first group of Islamists with whom Akkad found himself in conflict. The motif of a uniquely pro-Islam American moviemaker beset by Islamist foes marks his unusual careeer.

Al Rasheed's embrace of Akkad's career as a director was not merely a post-mortem courtesy; Akkad was celebrated for his efforts in his lifetime, too. For example, Jack G. Shaheen, the mass-communications scholar who has devoted himself to studying popular anti-Arab stereotypes, also praised Akkad's films about Islam and Arabs. In his 2001 book Reel Bad Arabs, a huge compendium of anti-Arab movie slurs going back nearly to Thomas Edison, Shaheen singles out for praise Akkad's two major works as a director: The Message (1976), and Lion of the Desert (1981).

For Shaheen, Lion of the Desert, a tale of Libyan resistance to Italian imperialism in the early 20th century, was one of the best films about Arabs ever made. Not only did it offer a sympathetic view of Islam as a humane faith, it also "illustrate[d] what viewers almost never see—brave young bedouins. . . ." Shaheen is especially pleased with a scene in which the film's star, Anthony Quinn, is teaching young village boys the meaning of the Koran. "Why," Quinn asks them, "do you think we begin every chapter of the Koran with 'God the merciful'?" Indeed, the producers of the TV show Mosaic liked the same scene enough to insert it during last week's interview. Akkad was especially proud of Lion of the Desert; the old one-sheet poster is seen framed on the office wall behind him throughout his final broadcast interview. He regarded the film as his homage—perhaps his reply—to David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.

However, the film was also a financial failure of historic proportions, costing some $36 million to produce, and recouping perhaps $1 million. Akkad blamed its failure on politics: Much of the production money came from Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, who was in particularly bad odor in those years, and the film quickly gained a ruinous reputation as Qaddafi propaganda, presumably stifling audience interest. In fact, a three-hour epic dealing with people and events almost totally unknown in the West was always going to have a difficult time finding its audience here.

On the other hand, Western audiences had become only too familiar with Akkad's previous directorial effort, The Message, about the origins of Islam. When that film opened in Washington, D.C. in 1976, a small group of Black American converts to Islam known as Hanafi Muslims (who lived in a small house adjacent to a huge uptown synagogue) reacted by storming several locations in the capital, including the national headquarters of B'nai Brith, and holding a large number of people hostage. Among their demands was that the film, which they had not seen but nevertheless regarded as blasphemous, be withdrawn. Several ambassadors from Muslim-majority countries converged on the hostage scenes to defuse the situation, and the theater chain that had booked the film cancelled the run.

Akkad was understandably dismayed. "I made the film to bring the story of Islam, the story of 700 million people, to the West," he later complained. The film troubled some other religious critics aside from the Hanafis, who assumed that the Prophet Mohammed would be portrayed in the film by an actor in the same the way that Jesus is portrayed in Christian Biblical epics. Such full pictorial representations are strictly proscribed by Islam. But not only is Mohammed never seen, Akkad claimed that his script had been approved by the clerics of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni religious institution, as well as by prominent Shiite clerics whom he approached prior to production. Saudi clerics were reluctant to sign off on such a project, probably because they regard movies as themselves in violation of the rules against pictorialization.

There was enough controversy about the film in its original location—Morocco—to persuade Akkad to move the production to Libya. That was no small matter, because Akkad was shooting two versions of the ambitious picture at the same time, one in English with Anthony Quinn, and another in Arabic with an entirely different cast. (The one cast member who appeared in both versions was the Arab-American character actor Michael Ansara, then known to American audiences for his portrayal of an American Indian on the popular TV Western Broken Arrow.) The Message apparently did reasonably well in many markets, though its disastrous Washington opening ruined its box-office chances in the U.S.

For all the attention he gave such subjects, Akkad himself lived a secular life in LA. A brief memoir from Andrew Breitbart, an LA schoolmate of Akkad's children, recalls growing up with the Akkad children. "In all the years I knew Malek, Rima and their older brother Tarik," he writes, "I never really thought about their family's obvious ethnic or religious background. I just remember Malek loved Led Zeppelin. Tarik worked the counter at Maria's Italian Kitchen while I delivered pizza. And Rima was cooler than most of the girls her age and had a most brilliant smile. . . At the time, and in retrospect, the Akkads were to Islam what many more of us at Brentwood School were to Judaism, highly secular, typical Americans."

Moustapha Akkad worked to make Breitbart's view a more common one, by seeking to "normalize" Arabs and Islam through popular movies. "Movies for me are not about art," he told Mosaic. "They are about entertainment." He sought to find the thrilling and the compelling and the humanizing in Arab history, an approach to the Arab past that is common enough on Arab TV. Indeed, he spent ten years trying to finance the project that he seemed to believe would cap his career, a big-scale retelling of the story of Saladin that would have starred Sean Connery. The only money that was being offered, however, was for yet more Halloween sequels.

"I cannot understand the continuing success of Halloween," he sighed to Mosaic. "Do you realize they want to make Halloween 9?"

Akkad did find compelling material about Islam and the Arabs. But along the way, he also encountered a string of critical clerics, hostage takers, and outraged fanatics, until at length he stepped into a hotel ballroom in Jordan where the angry clerics and the censors had been replaced by "martyrs" poised for a massacre.

Charles Paul Freund is a former senior editor of reason magazine.

Flood Insurance

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Massive tsunamis will wipe out the United States in 2007, according to Ziad Silwadi. The Palestinian Koranic scholar has become convinced that passages in the Koran dealing with the divine punishment of terrible sin are actually about the U.S. Silwadi recently published these findings because, as he puts it, "what is about to happen is extremely shocking and frightening." The Jerusalem Post reports that Silwadi's study "has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide."

Just as proud and arrogant Pharaoh was drowned by heavenly decree, Silwadi argues, so will proud and arrogant America be submerged for its sins, including genocide, slavery, and the use of atomic weapons. "International law penalizes such crimes," the Post quotes Silwadi as saying. "If no one on earth is capable of punishing [the U.S.], Allah was and remains able to do so. All these actions have been documented by Allah in a big archive called the Koran." To arrive at the exact year of this approaching catastrophe, Silwadi did what most end-of-the-world millennialists do: performed a series of arcane calculations involving verse counting.

The scholar seems to have mixed feelings about the matter. On one hand, he believes "the world would be better off with a U.S. that is not a superpower and that does not take advantage of weak nations." On the other hand, he expects the world economy to sink along with the United States. "The world will certainly lose a lot if and when this disaster occurs," he says, "because of the great services that American society has rendered to the economy, industry and science."�

"A love letter to the whole world from Hamas"

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:23:53 EDT

Sixty thousand flag-waving onlookers packed into a Nablus stadium the other day, but they weren't there to see a soccer game. The flags they were waving were Hamas banners, and a local sheikh used the sound system to berate the U.S. and Israel, but the spectators hadn't gathered for a political rally, either.

They were all wedding guests. Hamas (yes, that Hamas) had decided to sponsor a mass wedding ceremony involving 226 couples. Why? According to the BBC, "Organizers said the ceremony was an attempt to show a different side to Hamas, which has carried out numerous suicide bombings in Israel." Perhaps if Hamas wanted to show a different side of itself, it might have chosen a side that didn't make everyone else think of Rev. Moon's Unification Church, but that's their business.

The mass wedding was also intended as "a show of strength for the organization, which is contesting Palestinian parliamentary elections," according to the Beeb. A local Hamas leader told the AP that the mass ceremony "says that Hamas is a part of every aspect of Palestinian society. This is a message to the world -- we are not terrorists."

The couples seemed pleased. All 226 grooms wore green Hamas scarves, and stood on a stage separate from that of their brides. The brides were veiled, of course, and wore green Hamas scarves with their dark abayat. Hamas apparently doesn't like the white wedding gowns otherwise familiar throughout the region.

One of the brides told AP that, "This is a love letter to the whole world from Hamas."

Bombs and Banality

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 13:10:53 EDT

WaPo's Jim Hoagland writes today that the surveillance images of London's would-be July 21 bombers "show the face of evil as all too human and surprisingly mediocre -- a face not of mysterious supernatural forces that we cannot comprehend or combat, but one of petty criminality and hatred that we can easily recognize."

Hoagland argues that these portraits are a natural counterpoint to the dramatic images of terrorist destruction, whether of 9/11 or Sharm el-Sheikh, which can distort the nature of the terrorist operative in terms of the scope of his deeds. But, writes Hoagland drawing on Hannah Arendt, "To glimpse Yasin Hassan Omar and others as the shiftless punks they seem to have been for most of their lives -- to put a name and a face on evil rather than resign ourselves to endless speculation about the motives and long-lost origins of these criminals' grievances -- should help shrink the sense of menace we feel around us."

Theo van Gogh's mother made a related observation following last week's sentencing of her son's Islamist murderer. "What is so regrettable after this trial is that Theo has been murdered by such a loser," Anneke van Gogh told a Dutch newspaper. [Van Gogh link via Samizdata.]

Nailed to the Mosque Door

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:42:14 EDT

The Iraqi writer Majed Al-Gharbawi is calling for sweeping reform in Islamic culture and religious discourse. Writing for the liberal Arabic-language Website, Elaph.com (translation via MEMRI), Al-Gharbawi argued in the wake of the London bombings that while the psychological, political, and economic reasons for terrorism are important, "they are secondary reasons."

"The driving reason is religious ideology," according to Al-Gharbawi. "In the name of religion, wars have broken out; blood has been let; murder has been legitimized; rights have been revoked; regimes have been taken over; those with different opinions have been accused of unbelief; and Muslims with different opinions have even been accused of heresy . . . Religion was and remains a cover for justifying acts of terror and for arbitrary policies . . . ."

A distorted religious discourse "has reshaped the logic of the [Islamist] movements, based on mockery of life and love of death, hatred for the other and self-glorification, neglect of this world and [preparation] for the hereafter . . . ." That discourse "has not educated the people of the Islamist movements to adopt leniency, mercy, and tolerance for the other -- but rather has educated [them] to hatred of the other and plans to murder and uproot the other . . . This culture is completely unconnected to the human values to which the Koran calls . . . . "

Al-Gharbawi is one of numerous Muslim writers demanding a religious response to Islam's global crisis. Many of these writers are calling for religious fatwas against terrorist deeds, but Al-Gharbawi thinks that's not enough. He wants a re-interpretation of Shari'a, a new understanding of the life of the Prophet, and even writes that "there is a need to discuss intensively the issue of abolishing chapters in the Koran."

A revised Koran may be unlikely, but changing perceptions of the Koran are a known historical phenomenon. The Mu'tazilites, for example, who controlled orthodoxy in early Baghdad, held that the Koran was a created book. There are numerous examples of changing Koranic understanding in Islamic history.

That process continues. As the NYT reported last December, many Muslims today are "dismayed by the ever more bloody image of Islam around the world. They are determined to find a way to wrestle the faith back from extremists. Basically the liberals seek to dilute what they criticize as the clerical monopoly on disseminating interpretations of the sacred texts." The long-term Muslim revolt against Islamism that Al-Gharbawi and others are demanding has been trying to start itself.

Four Faces

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:13:19 EDT

London's police "believe they have caught four men suspected of trying to explode bombs on London's transport system last week." Assuming they have the right guys (and their associates), that's great work; the London (and Italian) police involved in the hunt deserve praise. (The circumstances surrounding the shooting death of an innocent Brazilian man by London police are still to be clarified.)

Here's a question: The suspects are still to be charged and tried, but have these quick arrests helped normalize London-style surveillance among likely target groups elsewhere? In the last few days, I've had a number of conversations with Washingtonians who previously had been skeptical of such surveillance (it didn't stop the bombers), but who seemed to be revising their privacy/safety calculations (it enabled the quick identification and arrest of the suspects and helped lead police to alleged associates as well).

Just for context, London's police force had to go through a period of normalization, too. When a police force as such was first established in the early 19th century, nearly all of London rejected the very concept as an intolerable intrusion. Policemen then enjoyed less status than did grave robbers, and were jeered in the streets. A common epithet thrown at them, by the way, was "Spy!"

On Beyond Kelo

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:09:04 EDT

Saturday's NYT offers a round-up of post-Kelo activity, including some jurisdictions that are moving quickly to condemn homes and businesses in order to replace them with shopping centers, condos, etc.

In Texas, for example, the city of Arlington has sought to condemn homes for a new Cowboys stadium, and in the wake of Kelo officials "filed condemnation lawsuits against some holdout property owners this month. Officials in Sunset Hills, Mo., outside St. Louis, voted to condemn a cluster of homes to make way for a shopping center, despite the pleas of some elderly homeowners who said they had nowhere else to go and no desire to move. Officials in Oakland, Calif., evicted a tire shop and an auto repair shop to make room for a development that is part of Mayor Jerry Brown's plan to bring 10,000 residents to the central part of the city."

The major case featured by the Times involves Santa Cruz, CA, where "city officials started legal action this month to seize a parcel of family-owned land that holds a restaurant with a high Zagat rating, two other businesses and a conspicuous hole in the ground and force a sale to a developer who plans to build 54 condominiums."

The owner of the so-called "hole in the ground" had "proposed hard-to-build, idealistic plans, involving alternative energy sources and unusual designs, that have never gotten off the ground"; his family says he's being penalized for trying to build something special on his property. The city says that its condemnation "is moving forward" because "The Supreme Court gave us reassurance of our ability to proceed."

Matt linked to this Kelo roundup on Friday.

What the Pope Told James Brown

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:43:44 EDT

"I took a trip to Rome during one of my down periods a few years ago, and had the good fortune to be greeted by the pope," says James Brown in his latest memoir (according to this Martha Bayles review). "The pontiff shook my hand three times, and I told him I had been thinking about leaving the music business, and to my surprise, he advised against it. I asked him why.

"He said, 'Because, sir, you can get things done.'"

So what do you suppose John Paul II meant by that? Did he have a list of worthy things that he hoped that James Brown would accomplish? Or was the pope trying but failing to get down, intending to say, "Because, James Brown, you can really take care of business!" Or is that "get things done" stuff what passes for papal small talk? Maybe you once chatted with the pope; did he tell you the same thing?

Maybe JP2 hoped that James Brown would reveal the truth about crunk. Brown speculates in his memoir that rap lyrics heavy with sex are some sort of FCC conspiracy to make Black people look bad, and that some songs may even have their origin in "some faction of the FCC."

"Their backpedaling is so furious you can smell the skid marks."

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:34:08 EDT

Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian-born liberal journalist who writes for Asharq al-Awsat, has been a steadfast critic of George Bush, the Iraq war, and Israel. On Sunday, however, she wrote an impassioned essay in The Washington Post condemning not only terrorist bombers, but the tepid reactions of many Muslim leaders in the wake of the July 7 London attacks.

Eltahawy blasted "those dog-eared statements that our clerics and religious leaders read out telling us that Islam means peace -- it actually means submission -- and asking us to please forget everything they had ever said before July 6, because as of July 7 they truly believe violence is bad. Their backpedaling is so furious you can smell the skid marks."

Citing Mohammed Musawi, the head of the World Islamic League in London, Eltahawy wrote that, "In a classic example of laying blame everywhere but at our own door, Musawi actually criticized the Western media (for supposedly confusing frustrated young Muslims) rather than those scholars who had blessed suicide bombings as long as they targeted Israelis." Such bombings "are killing Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and yet our imams and scholars cannot condemn them."

"I'm done with the 'George Bush made me do it' excuse," concluded Eltahawy. "We must accept responsibility for this mess if we are ever to find a way out."

Carry On Suing

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:49:09 EDT

Here's the British version of a familiar story. The music industry in the U.K. claims that sales have fallen by some 25 percent since 1999, and has been blaming its losses on illegal Internet file trading. The British Phonographic Industry, a trade group, has been suing people caught trading files illegally.

But today's Guardian reports that "Computer-literate music fans who illegally share tracks over the internet also spend four and a half times as much on digital music as those who do not, according to research published today." That is, "downloading tracks illegally has also led [music fans] to become more enthusiastic buyers of singles and albums online."

The head of the outfit that did the survey concludes that "music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers." However, a spokesperson for the music industry said that the findings confirm the wisdom of taking file traders to court, and said that they'll keep right on suing.

This Side of Jehenem

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:20:03 EDT

The Washington Post recently ran this front-page follow-up to the intentional massacre of 26 Baghdad children in mid-July. This appalling event was only the most recent such targeting of children by a malevolent jihadi; these murderers presumably believe that by killing themselves and those children standing too near an American, they gain martyrdom and the reward of paradise.

Yet in Arabic, the name of Hell itself is associated with the murder of children. Hell's most common name among Arabs is Jehenem, derived from the Valley of Gehena outside the walls of Jerusalem. In antiquity, this valley was an infamous place of ritual child sacrifice, and the horrors evoked by its name were long ago transferred to the concept of damnation.

In a sense it's quite appropriate that the name for Hell used by so many Muslims has such a root. One of the benefits of Islam's original spread was an end to the once-common pagan practice of infanticide, usually of girl infants, and most commonly by exposure. Jihadis today apparently see such things -- children and murder, Heaven and Hell -- differently.

Explosions in Egypt

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:26:45 EDT

The BBC is reporting that "A large explosion has struck the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, witnesses have reported."

BBC TV news has sketchy updates suggesting that there may have been multiple explosions in the old center of the resort city, and that some unconfirmed local reports attribute the explosions to car bombs. There may also have been bombs set in a nearby strip of luxury hotels outside the city. The death toll was put at 20 by an Egyptian stringer reporting by phone. [Update: French TV reports at 8 EDT set the death toll higher. A staffer for Radio France Internationale in Cairo attributed the explosions to suicide car bombs.]

Thirty-four people died in bombings in the area last year.

White Magic

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:06:40 EDT

This being Harry Potter Eve and all, I'm wondering if T.H. White (1906-1964) has gotten the credit (or if you see it that way, the blame) that he deserves for at least foreshadowing the remarkable Potter phenomenon.

White is the author of the 1938 Arthurian fantasy, The Sword in the Stone, as well as a raft of sequels to it. Because White's old novel is full of good-natured wizardry and adventure -- it tells the story of Arthur's boyhood, when he is tutored by an eccentric Merlyn who is living backwards in time -- it turns up on lists of books that you'll like if you like Harry. But there's more to the story than that.

Both Harry's character and the idea of a school for wizards were foreshadowed by White. If this appreciation is correct, for example, Harry's character is in the debt of White's young "Wart," as the boy Arthur is called. A wizards' academy turns up as the narrative backdrop to a duel of spells between the good Merlyn and the not-so-good Mistress Mim, both of them academy graduates. Foreshadowing the primary setting, the general ambiance, and the main character of the most successful commercial series of all time seems worth recognizing.

Many of White's readers probably know him from The Once and Future King (1958), which combined his various Arthur novels into a single work. The older books were rewritten and edited for the amalgamated version, and some of the similarities to Potter are thus obscured. Arthur is an adult in most of the combined work, for example, and Mistress Mim never appears at all. Nevertheless, The Once and Future King has left a spectacular mark of its own.

Camelot, the popular 1961 Broadway musical, was drawn from White's combined novel. In the days following the murder of JFK, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with New York Times journalist Theodore H. White (a very different T.H. White) with the specific intention of mythmaking to honor her husband's memory. She was wildly successful. Inspired by the musical, she and journalist White shaped a portrait of the Kennedy White House as a latter-day Camelot (the connection had never been made in JFK's lifetime), an association that has survived for over 40 years.

For all the apparent lightheartedness of his best-known work, however, White was a profoundly unhappy man. Some of his close readers see his Arthur fantasies as bittersweet laments of national mythology and memory. The odd thing is, that's just how the stories ultimately were used. Only, thanks to Broadway and Dealey Plaza, the mythology and the memories belong to a different nation.

Movie Mystery, cont.

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:13:52 EDT

Hollywood finally had a decent weekend [reg. req.]: Thanks to Fantastic Four, receipts were higher this summer than for the same 2004 weekend for the first time in 19 weeks. But nobody's celebrating; the difference was tiny, and the money issue is masking a big attendance shortfall. Admissions are down 10.4 percent compared to last year, and even movies with good reviews (Murderball, Dark Water) aren't drawing.

The mystery Hollywood is pondering is whether these numbers reflect a succession of mostly uninteresting movies, which is fixable, or whether they reflect a shift in leisure-time use driven by new technology. Compounding the mystery is the case of the Shrek 2 DVD [more reg.]. Shrek 2 is reportedly the most profitable animated film ever made, and its producer, DreamWorks, expected DVD sales to match that achievement. While the DVD sold well, it didn't sell nearly as well as DreamWorks expected, one of a number of factors that have depressed the company's stock.

"The [DVD] market is fast approaching maturity," a trade publisher tells the LAT. "People who've bought DVD players have got a pretty big library and maybe they're being more selective."

Maybe they are. Or maybe they're distracted by video-game sex.

Thanks to ArtsJournal. For registration problems, try this.

Bouyeri: "I would do exactly the same."

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:33:45 EDT

Mohammed Bouyeri, the 27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national on trial for the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, confessed in court Tuesday that he had acted out of religious motives, and that if given the opportunity, he would kill again.

"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," Bouyeri told the court. "I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same."

Van Gogh's mother was in court, and Bouyeri addressed her. "I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain, I cannot -- I don't know what it is like to lose a child," he said. He added that, "I cannot feel for you . . . because I believe you are an infidel."

Bouyeri shot Van Gogh 15 times, stabbed him, slit his throat, and affixed a note to his corpse threatening others. The prosecutor called for a life sentence, and asked the court to strip Bouyeri of the right to vote or run for office, "to literally place him outside of our democracy," according to wire-service reports.

British Bombers

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:45:54 EDT

The BBC is reporting that at least three of the suspected terrorist bombers in last week's London attacks "are believed to be British men of Pakistani origin who lived in West Yorkshire." However, police believe that the attackers probably had outside help. The suspected murderers, who were in their late teens and early twenties, are now believed to have died in the explosions, according to British press accounts.

"It appears our youth have been involved in last week's horrific bombings against innocent people," Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain said in a statement. Sir Iqbal received the reports of British Muslim involvement in the bombings with "anguish, shock and horror," the BBC reported. Police have arrested a relative of one of the suspected terrorists.

Londonistan

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 10:26:47 EDT

The Washington Post this morning offers a lengthy piece about the "sprawling shape and deep history of al Qaeda and related extremist groups in London." Writes the Post, the British capital long ago "became 'the Star Wars bar scene' for Islamic radicals, as former White House counterterrorism official Steven Simon called it, attracting a polyglot group of intellectuals, preachers, financiers, arms traders, technology specialists, forgers, travel organizers and foot soldiers."

"Today," according to the piece, "al Qaeda and its offshoots retain broader connections to London than to any other city in Europe . . ."

The NYT fronts its own version of the London story, writing that in recent years, "Britain had become a breeding ground for hate," and its capital "a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base . . ."

The New Stateman's Jamie Campbell wrote last August about Why terrorists love Britain.

"We are all Londoners today."

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 13:00:14 EDT

Britain's Guardian is collecting what it calls "Messages of Resolve" from its online readers. There are comments from all over, though the page seems to be dominated by messages from the U.S. and Spain.

The newspaper is also providing frequently updated blog coverage of the bombing aftermath here: "Explosions plunge London into chaos."

[Blog link via The Command Post.]

"That isn't an ideology . . . "

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:30:56 EDT

London Mayor Ken Livingstone, speaking in Singapore where he had been working in support of London's successful Olympics bid, said of the attacks in his city that, "This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners.

"That isn't an ideology," he said, "it isn't even a perverted faith, it's mass murder."

"Black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindus and Jews, young and old," the bombings were an "indiscriminate attempt to slaughter irrespective of any considerations for age, class, [or] religion . . . "

Livingstone sees the "objective" of the attacks as "to divide London."

Ihab el-Sherif is Dead

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:03:58 EDT

Reuters is reporting that Egypt's top envoy to Iraq, Ihab el-Sherif, has been murdered by his al Qaeda kidnappers.

The group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has posted a statement that reads, "We al Qaeda in Iraq announce that the judgment of God has been implemented against the ambassador of the infidels, the ambassador of Egypt. Oh enemy of God, Ihab el-Sherif, this is your punishment in this life."

The statement adds that, "The ambassador of the infidels gave information that showed the infidelity of his regime and his allegiance to the Jews and Christians." This may be a reference to el-Sherif's former role as deputy to the Egyptian ambassador to Israel. Video of a blindfolded el-Sherif was posted along with the statement.

"He who warns is excused."

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 09:57:12 EDT

The BBC reports that it "has located an Islamist website that has published a 200-word statement issued by an organisation saying it carried out the London bombings." Obviously, nobody currently knows the validity of the claim. The BBC notes that "The website has previously carried statements purporting to be from al-Qaeda."

The statement by the otherwise unknown Secret Organization Group of al-Qaeda says, "Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters."

The statement also claims that "We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused."

Wary Washington

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 09:19:15 EDT

Officers with machine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs are patrolling the capital's subway system in the wake of the London bombings. News accounts are quoting a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security as saying that it "does not have any intelligence indicating this type of attack is planned in the United States." AP now reports that 40 are known dead in London.

UPDATE: Homeland Secuity has "asked authorities in major cities to increase their vigilance over major transportation systems."

Waad: #1 with a Bullet

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:24:32 EDT

The most popular music video in the Arab world, according to the Beirut-based countdown show Top Ten, is currently "Aala Meen" ("Whose Fault?"), performed by an elegantly beautiful woman named Waad. That brings the Arab music-video revolution to Saudi Arabia: Waad is a Saudi, and until now her country has yielded very few women pop singers, and certainly nobody like her. Even the Arab world's music fans are interested in her phenomenon, in part because Waad's career is a spectacle that includes the potential of danger. Indeed, there have already been an alleged kidnapping and an attempt on her life by an outraged brother.

By the often-racy standards of music videos by singers from Lebanon (and to a lesser degree from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco), Waad's video is pretty tame. By Saudi pop standards, however, it's a breakthrough. Like other Gulf women singers, Waad remains covered below the neck. (She does wear a pantsuit, however, which is frowned on by some moral conservatives; one Egyptian cleric recently issued a fatwa against ironing women's pants because it would be abetting a woman in wrongdoing.) But while other Gulf women singers generally remain immobile while performing so as not to appear provocative, Waad moves around freely, swaying to her music. By contrast, a Waad video last year was notably austere: Sitting on a stool in an otherwise empty set, her only physical movement was to accompany her lyrics by "signing" them for the deaf.

Swaying and pants may not seem like much, but then one of her brothers has allegedly tried to kill her simply because she sings in public, a story that is an important aspect of Waad's public persona. For example, here is a page where Arab music fans discuss Waad's music, her Saudi-ness, her appearances on Arab reality TV shows, her dark complexion, and, inevitably, the attempt on her life. According to the version on the forum, Waad's brother, Muhammad Bakar Yunus Al-Fallatta, tried to kill her during a concert.

A different version appears in this April 2004 account in the Saudi paper, Arab News. According to the brother's own father-in-law, Al-Fallatta and another brother disguised themselves as women and followed Waad into a Cairo TV studio. Al-Fallatta fired a gun in his sister's direction, then escaped. The same source adds that later, Waad, who lives in Lebanon, "was drugged and kidnapped and smuggled back into Saudi Arabia"; Al-Fallatta was reportedly "under investigation for the kidnapping" of his sister. (These allegations are "back story"; the account is really about Al-Fallatta beating his own wife nearly to death because she answered their ringing home phone.)

In fact, Waad's video seems to make use of the air of impending danger around her. The clip's opening titles identify her character in the video as on the run and in hiding, though the nature of that danger is left to the viewers' understanding. In short, Waad appears to be exploiting the very challenges to her unusual role of Saudi diva to enhance her career. The bigger her career, of course, the more she may contribute to the pressure for social change within Saudi Arabia.