4,000 US Deaths in Iraq
March 24, 2008
Hi-Res | Latuff Iraq war archive
The death toll of U.S. soldiers in Iraq reached 4.000 on
Monday, days after the fifth anniversary of a war that
President George W. Bush says the United States is on track
to win.
Iraq 5 Years On
March 20, 2008
Carlos Latuff‘s latest on the Iraq war – 5 years on.
Zombie
March 15, 2008
The Cranberries anti-war song zombie is about a child meeting a violent death. The video depicts the British Army patrolling the streets of Belfast and in the closing sequences taking a life.
I met two Northern Irish guys not too long ago – one of which lost his 8 year old brother who was shot in the head by the British forces. They later joked telling me that when they were kids the British soldiers would have sweets and things for them and would encourage them to come over and chat. Now they realise that they were being used as human shields as the soldiers felt safer surrounded by children. I bet the military continue this practice in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another friend also joked that often he would have to dive for cover on the way home as British soldiers, when they couldn’t see who was in the distance, had a habit of ignoring binoculars and instead using their rifle scope to see who was coming. He laughed in a way that its funny now – like you might laugh at having broken you leg in some ridiculous situation. In reality it really wasn’t funny to have a soldier point a gun at you just because you happened to be walking home.
Interview
EM: In the “Zombie” video directed by Samuel Bayer you’re presented as some sort of deity figure.
DO: We wanted an abstract message as well as the real Belfast footage. The idea of the gold was my idea; I wanted to paint my body in gold and be all glamorous and perfect and just gold. And all the little kids on the bottom were painted in silver, but they’re screaming. Silver and gold symbolize the beauty that we see in the world or that we care to open our eyes to. Then the screaming and the cross and the real, black-and-white footage symbolize the pain that’s there and we close our eyes to: the children that suffer, and the parents and families that suffer.
Gotta Catch ‘em All
March 13, 2008
Gaza Calling
March 3, 2008
Carlos Latuff – Gaza
March 3, 2008
J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’
January 18, 2008
Michael Gorra on J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’
Halfway through J.M. Coetzee’s 11th novel there’s a chapter called “On music,” a series of elegantly phrased pensées that moves from bird songs to the heroic narrative of the 19th-century symphony before it ends by marking the difference between two masters of the German Baroque. For Bach, we read, it seems that “any musical germ …[contains] endless possibilities for development,” but with Telemann the work “sounds like the execution of a plan rather than the exploration of a potential.” “Diary of a Bad Year” is not precisely a self-reflexive novel, the kind of book in which the writer pulls himself out of his own hat; it’s nothing so simple. It does, however, provide an implicit set of instructions for reading, and none more pregnant than these words about music. No one will doubt either this book’s intelligence or its artfulness. A final judgment, however, will depend on which composer one thinks it most resembles.
Eat Your Heart Out, Homer
January 6, 2008
William Dalrymple reviews The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, 948 pp. The Modern Library).
Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction
In the summer of 2002, as Pentagon strategists were planning the invasion of Iraq, a short distance away, on the National Mall in Washington, the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery was showing one of the most interesting exhibitions of Islamic art seen in the United States for years. The show illustrated a story largely set in the Iraqi cities that would shortly become the targets of the Pentagon’s munitions.On display was a single work of art: a painted manuscript of the “Hamzanama,” a spectacular illustrated book commissioned by the sympathetic and notably tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605). To the delight of art historians, the Sackler brought together the long-dispersed pages of what is probably the most ambitious single artistic undertaking ever produced by the atelier of an Islamic court: no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations were commissioned. More than anything else, it was the project that created the Mughal painting style, and in the illustrations one can see two artistic worlds — that of Hindu India and of Persianate Islamic Central Asia — fusing to create something new and distinctively Mughal.
Saudi Arabia for Dummies (Really)
December 19, 2007
First class graphics, third rate history. (thanks Dave)
Henry Rollins Interviews Serj Tankian and Tom Morello
August 9, 2007
I was looking for a Nightwatchman (Tom Morellow’s solo project) song that plays during the credits for Michael Moore’s Sicko, and I came across this. Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down both rock!
Speaking of Sicko, I think it is Michael Moore’s best film yet. Not only that message is delivered with a punch, it is also a treat to watch. Highly recommended.
