Archive for September, 2008

Ezgi Kınalı is a girl i know from facebook. She doesn’t have a lot of work yet, being 20, but I think she has some considerable talent and I hope she will go on working…

Tonight I saw the movie ‘Transsiberian’ , directed by Brad Anderson. Transsiberian is his second film and for a second film ‘Transiberian’ is pretty amazing, even though we already knew Anderson was talented from his first film ‘The Machinist’ which I thought was one of the best films of 2005.

Transsiberian has two of my favourite actors in it: Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley. Frankly, I blindly go to any movie that has Ben Kingsley in it. I have never seen him do bad films. He’s one of the most important actors on the screen nowadays and any film he finds good enough to play in I will find good enough to watch.

Transsiberian had me at the edge of my seat for 2 hours. The films script is good, the story is excellent, the actors are top class. Two minor points I didn’t like: a too exaggerated torture scene that seems to have been put in by the demand of producers (‘must have some gore boys’) and I thought the end of the film was somewhat weak. But other than that, far better than ‘Batman’ so if you have to choose try this one, it won’t disappoint. Brad Anderson is one of the most promising directors of his generation.

Dear members of the Bush administration,

Yesterday I read an article about the possibility that terrorists could use games like ‘World of Warcraft’ to communicate with each other and spread hidden messages about plans and attacks. This theory was vented by one Dr. Dwight Toavs of the ‘Defense University’ on a conference in Washington Tuesday. I was in shock after I read the article. It suddenly dawned upon me that Dr. Dwight Toavs was not only absolutely right: but that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that, far-fetched as his theory seems, he has overlooked the most obvious communication avenue for terrorists: poetry.

As you might know a ‘poem’ is a piece of coded text in which the writers uses so-called ‘metaphors’ to hide the real message of the poem. That already makes it a very useful medium for terrorists, as they, using poetry, can conceal their true message by pretending the text is about something else. A terrorist might write a line like ‘Oh wavering flowers of the city, where it that the bees could honk and loom’ and what he would be really saying to his fellow jihadists is ‘Guys, go take a cap and bomb those buildings flat’.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabic poetry has seen a suspicious rise in recent years. But please, let’s not forget that these terrorists could use any sort of poetry to communicate their message: what about avant-garde, Flarf, language poetry? They are all suspect. Dr. Dwight Toavs is right and wrong: writing poetry is dirt cheap while playing WOW costs 14 bucks a month, let’s not forget that’s a months salary in Afghanistan! So we can safely conclude that poetry is the tool par excellence for terrorists to communicate their hidden messages.

And it doesn’t stop with contemporary poetry, oh no. Who says these terrorists aren’t secretly reading Shakespeare to each other in those caves in Tora Bora? What did the Lithuanian poet Henrikas Nagys really mean when he wrote ‘I was awakened by the whistling sound of pigeons wings and the flood of sunshine rising in my eyes’? Is there really any end to the vile possibilities of misuse one can imagine such tools to have? Clearly, any society that is serious about combatting terrorism must do something about poetry.

What can we do? It’s clear that we have to scan the entire literary opus of humanity for hidden terrorist messages. But only experts can do that: a regular CIA trainee will have no idea what these poems mean. Therefore I must propose that the US government employs all currently known poets, domestic or foreign, to scan contemporary and past poetry for messages that seem, well, suspect. It’s a gigantic operation but it’s for the sake of World Security. While Dr. Dwight Toavs from the ‘Defense University’ has a minor point I would want to suggest he stops wasting tax payers money playing World of Warcraft and instead focus on the real dangers, the world of poetry.

Laura Lipton is an American born artist who lives in London now. She gave me permission to post some images from her ‘haunted dollhouse’ work which you can see below. Laura Lipton is an exceptionally skilled drawing artist who creates works with almost impossible detail levels. Besides that, her work is also conceptually interesting and very atmospheric. She has a show opening on 11 October in Santa Monica, Florida, called ‘Day of the Dead’. Lots of her work is inspired by tales and (mexican) folk traditions.

“The Haunted Doll’s House”,charcoal & pencil on paper, 55″ x 80″ (with doors open)

Have you been making out ok?

Listening to the voice of Al Green
is like stepping out of a long, white limousine
straight on top of the clouds. The moon slides
by to shine new boots. Your white suit
crinkles like dust under the hooves
of the pooling sun. The warm
leather of a smile creaks
on the ceiling, Jesus is waiting,
the angels dealing.

When you step through the diamond door,
he looks up from the mirror,
with a banknote in his hand and says
‘are you the one I’ve been looking for?’

His voice, a silk broom of rays,
swindles the cracks of the world.

Sweet Jesus, just a white snort away
from eternities dollaring pearls.

M.H.Benders, 18-09-2008

An interesting installation by the Israel-born artist Guy Ben-Ner, who currently lives in New York. We see him pose on a paradisical island in his kitchen home and as some sort of Abraham in a self-constructed symbolic tree, an installation called ‘tree house kit’:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the tree was build entirely from IKEA parts! It’s hard to say why this work touches me – maybe it has something to do with the iconic idea of the father in the tree, christmas, or maybe with the weird symbolism of the whole piece.

You can see the whole installation here