It's hard to beat Reuters for level-headed and ever polite video coverage of the occasional beating.
Typepad today seems to want to revise the Reuters video code and then hang, so I may only invite you to use the URL noted in this brief post's reference section.
1. Chapman, Paul. "Farmers suffer Zimbabwe violence". Reuters, July 1, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
The world knows Zimbabwe is burning.
It knows its refugees dare crocodiles to survive its hardships by seeking work elsewhere.
It knows its money, hyperinflated into near useless ink and paper, represents not more than a dictator, his cronies, and their thugs.
And it knows, this most important of all, that protests and sanctions send a message to aged, deafened, and hardened ears.
As most do who have nothing to offer their countrymen apart from thievery, fingers point always to the most convenient and toothless scapegoat: in Zimbabwe, that would be white farmers.
Reuters reports three white farmers "abducted, assaulted, and thrown off a moving vehicle" in a district 62 miles west of Harare. [1]
In Zimbabwe, there is no justice, for not only does the state care not for its white farmers, it presents itself as blind and immune to the desparation and hunger of the tens upon tens of thousands of its citizens fleeing its burnt fields for greener ones better managed elsewhere.
Backwardness prevails where despots rule.
Despots prevail where courage fails.
In Zimbabwe, no white farmer, MDC opposition leader or follower, or job seeker, the kind who braves crocodiles on the long walk to work, has ever lacked for courage.
From some African countries, one may expect agreable noise and purposeful inaction. [2]
From continental Europe, Great Britain, and the United States one may similarly expect agreable noise and, so it would seem to this point, token actions (in the form of gummy sanctions).
From South Africa, which bears its share of Zimbabwean refugees, comes this caution: "South African President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday rejected an EU position that it will only accept a Zimbabwean government led by opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai" [3]. In the article cited, President Mbeki is quoted as having said earlier today (Wednesday), ""So we are fully supportive of the cooperation and dialogue among political parties to find a solution to the challenges they face."
Having for some time witnessed through the news the marvel of Zimbabwean political cooperation, one may only wonder what a truly earnest disinterest in accommodation on the part of the Mugabe government might look like.
I'll grant you this: knowing where misery lives may not mean fully knowing how it works, and that, I think, the message where not even the most aggrieved and refugee-hosting neighbor cares to look too closely, honestly, or coureagously over the fence--or if having looked, talk about it.
Let Zimbabwe be Zimbabwe!
Whatever that may be, credit President Robert Mugabe, for no one else would wish to be responsible.
1. Banya, Nelson. "White farmers attacked and wounded in Zimbabwe." Reuters, July 1, 2008.
3. IC Publications, 24-Hour News. "SAfrica's Mbeki rejects EU demand on Zimbabwe govt."
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
To date, my intended prints have been sepia toned, but I have twice worked with "day-into-night" techniques, and with this one, the full-sized, fully printable Nikon D2x RAW file. While there is a stubbled field to the viewer's right and adjacent to the lane named to pass beside "The Cornfield", this is the corn field planted behind Miller's Farm and facing in the distance a contemporary "East Woods".
In his book, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day, author William A. Frassanito painstakingly locates the position from which Alexander Gardner, the Brady Studio employe (along with peer and assistant James F. Gibson), made stereographs starting two days after the battle. In numerous examples, the "lay of the land"--its essential shape and features--has not changed, but natural and human alterations are rife. Whatever the battle may have done to the East Woods, it's a sure bet farming, road building, and time have done much more. In point of fact, the natural--grass and dirt--service lane beside the cornfield pictured featured small bumps of macadam beneath where I walked, perhaps one of many small signals of National Park Service intent to accommodate the land's farmers, in this instance, by producing additional buffer, while returning the historic property to its mid-19th Century state..
1. Frassanito, William A. Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1978.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
One of the more charming items in my garden, brought indoors, placed on a mat, and lit by a single speedflash, a crisp bit of devilish joy for shooting--and back to the garden with it later today!
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
MacEoin, Denis. "Hudna." Issues of Concern for Justice & Society (ICJS), June 23, 2008.
Denis MacEoin's historical and linguistic analysis touching on where infidels and Jews may stand as regards contemporary Islamic thought as expressed through language rings true to this ear.
In correpondence with a friend, I wrote:
In addition to calling the whole kit and caboodle of Islamic strife the “Islamic Small Wars”, I’ve also referred to the whole as a “detective’s war” as it seems a war custom-made for the men, families, and tribes that manage actions through tangles of manipulated personal obligations shielded in privacy separate from specific institutional imprimatur.
A secret involves information of known value to someone else—“tell no one”—but there’s much information of value not kept secret per se but rather maintained as private and seldom transmitted in any fashion.
While Hamid Karzai's government mobilizes to chase its "banditos" equivalents off its land and across the Pakistani border, it's soon and sure to be noticed that the Talibani numbers that may stand, fight, and die in a conventional scenario may not approach the numbers involved in this past week's prison breaks and subsequent "takeovers" of towns in Arghandab District in the south of the country.
As less involved citizens decamp, that old "hold and fold" may come into play, and the militant Taliban recede purposefully back into the populations from whence they came, protected not by their firearms, which may be abandoned or stashed, but rather the friendly arms of quiet kith and ken.
While even with overwhelming firepower on its side, battle may prove hard on young and untested Afghanistan government troops, the cultural battle overall and that part of the front characterized by detective work may prove the most merciless facet of all, for Afghanistan, and probably no less so the region, private relationships--the esteem, love, obligations, and promises of family and tribe and relationships that develop to resemble either--trump all official mouthwork.
Everyone understands a secret--i.e., information of value willfully kept from the party to whom it is most relevant; the notion of troves of information purloined within the privacy of one's own head, of family, and affiliates may be a close but quite different thing.
Let's deal with something banal.
If Joe Engineer, corporate "project manager" by day, plays in a "down and dirty" blues band at nights and on weekends, whose business is that? Provided J. Engineer avoids scheduling conflicts, who's to know of the avocation, and how wide or how high may that information pass? Whatever your answers, take it up a notch: J. E. does a little "smoke and blow" with the band: who's to know? What if JE brokers a bit of the same for this buddies?
The private way that becomes the secret way becomes both for the state and its enemies in Afghanistan: nepotism; officials on the take for all manner of services; a poppy industry much appreciated by Iran's addicts, one may be sure, and doubtless defended by skeins of invested--"in cahoots" we used to say--relationships, some looking the other way, some profiting from it, many not looking at all: who's to know?
Such things are private.
1. Sameem, Ismael. "Afghan start anti-Taliban offensive in south." Reuters, June 18, 2008.
2. Legg, Sonia. "Afghan battle with Taliban looms." Video. Reuters, June 18, 2008.
4. Jones, Ann. Kabul in Winter. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Hold and Company, 2006.
5. Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Courtesy of Tammy Swofford, who maintains an always entertaining and perceptive blog, I have gotten notice of Andrew G. Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, a scholarly compendium of translations and much needed exegesis.
I'm not the scholar to review Bostom's work, but my blog category "LitStream" serves to pass along awareness of works, any medium, I feel may well have telling contemporary significance.
In addition, as regards this particular note, I strongly, albeit intuitively, believe that Islam's misery--its warfare with all and most of all itself--lays rooted in language poetics.
Representing FrontPage.com [1], Jamie Glazov asks, "Tell us about the origins of Islamic Antisemitism"--Andrew Bostom answers:
Islamic Antisemitism has a heritage independent of Europe, arose as an entirely indigenous phenomenon that dates from the advent of Islam, and originates in Islam’s virulently Antisemitic foundational texts—the Koran, most importantly, and the gloss on its myriad Antisemitic verses by the greatest classical (and modern) Muslim exegetes of the Koran, the hadith (which include in addition to corporeal Antisemitic motifs, critical Antisemitic motifs in Islamic eschatology), and the further elaboration, or embodiment of many of these themes in the sira, the early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad, particularly the works of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Saad. [2]
One need not wonder why good professors beg young poets and scholars to write responsibly and truthfully, for here the effects of rhetoric--for example, this well disseminated statement from the Koran (5:82), “Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews and the idolaters . . . ."--provide ample powder for baseless warfare across millenia.
Citing a 17th Century tract, Bostom relates, "In the midst of an anti-Hindu tract Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, Sirhindi observes, 'Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.'”
How deeply has that remark been cherished, how widely spread, how passed through the mouth to sons who themselves become angry and calloused fathers, convinced of a generational cheat founded in a similarly transmitted transgenerational claim to great privilege?
# # #
2. Bostom, Andrew G. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Reviews. June 13, 2008 (andrewbostom.org).
3. Swofford, Tammy. http://www.tammyswofford.blogspot.com/.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
I have not yet added "The Cornfield" to my main web's Flash gallery but will do so soon.
In addition to producing a small series of prints fit to the timbre of the history, there has been some challenge in devising a limited edition production plan for the work. One need hardly tell another photographer that pigment inks are expensive and A3+ (13 x 19 inch) art paper, for this project Hahnemuhle Fine Rag Pearl, no less, is dear, indeed. One may go only so far without individual or subscription sales, so here launches that and with a breakdown of intended distribution: Antietam--Limited Edition Print Pricing.
In archival ink-jet printing, as opposed to, say, silkscreen printing, the notion of "limited edition" is highly artificial: inks can be refreshed, and, for all intents, the printer's not going to wear out for some thousands of print jobs. Moreover, there are so many ways to produce and view the same artifact, including here on the Internet, that they threaten the very notion of "limited" anything or "constrained value".
However, in that I have not stepped off with lithography--and won't do it--I am finding production nonetheless limited in fact, albeit not by the technology used: it turns out capital and time come both in short supply.
So far, I have printed just half (10) of the intended run for "The Road to Roulette Farm", which I am numbering, titling, and signing as any artist would for silk screen prints.
The tone's a little less warm in print--each print is proofed beneath a 5000K 13W fluorescent bulb--but the sense of retreat in time to 1862, severe sharps (you can count blades of grass in these prints), and appropriate mood, so I believe, persist.
Each image has come out a unique artifact--there is no question about that.
I work some with each appearing here or in the slideshow noted until the second proof print (No.'s 1 and 2), at which point my job is simply to ask a sophisticated printer to do the same thing over and over again.
If you visit the distribution page, you'll note that there are only five prints available at the price set--if they sell, up that goes; if they don't, well, oh my gosh, I guess I'll have to hold all in reserve or do something else with whatever has been printed. In that I'm holding back four prints (No.'s 1-4), assigning two of each run for public display (bought or sponsored) and retaining another four for entire hand-crafted folios, I suppose I'm looking for just 10 individual print or subscription buyers (subscription price negotiated) nationwide--and so far just half of those at the initial posted rate of $450 per print, not including applicable taxes or shipping).
Above: the Roulette Farm House.
I haven't fixed the extent of the project catalog yet but soon will. I've been thinking of a minimum dozen but no more than two dozen total--then the cut is in keeping with both the restoration of the visual and historical-emotional landscape.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
http://www.communicating-arts.com/index2.htm
My project, "Antietam", started at the National Cemetary and with this view of the "Private Soldier" statue, beneath which form on the pedestal has been inscribed the phrase, "Not for themselves, but for their country."
One knows this is common stuff for school children and tourists.
There is always the drive through Maryland's congenial countryside, the walk in the fresh air, the brief encounter with the Gettysburg Address (displayed on a large plaque on a nearby building), but it takes more time than that for the meaning of those rows of uneven tombstone teeth to sink in.
As a photographer local to the battlefield (and not far from several others), I have better ability than most to return again and again to its ground, and that early in the morning to near dark, from winter through the fall.
I've joked with myself, "Everyone shoots September 17, 1862. I am working on the year prior, and getting the digital files to look like it too."
In his work, This Hallowed Ground, historian Bruce Catton foretells the end of the struggle near its start with three critical variables set into place: the development of the Soo Locks enabling massive growth of America's steel industry; the cordon made of the border states and Mississippi River at the outset of hostilities; and, most telling, the sense of country unified and set on its egalitarian principles held in the hearts of those who would fight, and that seems a common sentiment held across boundaries even though loyalties and politics were articulated otherwise.
The Civil War is the one that ended with Confederate officers entitled to their sidearms and soldiers provided with horses and mules, what would have been the spoils of the northern armies, paroled out of uniform to return to their farms and work.
Strangely, and with not much made of it, so it seems, the first charge seems to have been led by rebels out of Baltimore under the command of Captain J. B. Brockenbrough (Baltimore Battery, Jackson's Division, CSA). [1]
If decorative art is about making pleasant and hosting company, retro-historical fine art may be about reflection and wonder, and nothing more compelling about that than the ghosts of this old and resonant conflict most hard to fathom.
1. National Park Service. "Baltimore Battery, Maryland, Confederate."
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
For a bird that's had its sticks tossed out twice, she's proving more stubborn than me.
I'm not feeding her.
The cat may have to stay indoors when he visits.
