Oppenheim Arts & Letters

. . . Until You Grade 3,000 Papers

Source: Youtube poster "germanyacko". "The Simpsons - Comments about PhDs and Grad Students. [HQ]." Posted December 26, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0

A painful little chuckle, that one, but looking back on more than a thousand reviews at Zoetrope.com and more than 700 posts here, each one a small adventure in online expression and journalism, I feel even today the enrichment of the graduate school experience worth the lifestyle costs.

We know because we see, and if we should come to see a great deal, it is because at some point in our lives we had time to look, and that appreciatively, with discipline and patience, and in depth.

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Why Indulge in Art Criticism

At the Mayhem today (www.modelmayhem.com), a participant wrote about why he doesn't care to care to respond to requests to criticize the photographs of other artists. 

I took an opposite tack:

Why I participate in various critique venues:

1. I might learning something in the process of trying to write a considerate, earnest, incisive response to someone else's work;

2. I may harbor some useful observations about method, process, or place in the literature about which the artist may yet be unaware or unfocused;

3. I like the sound of my voice in typing;

4. Good artists listen to criticism critically and may enjoy how informed conversation complements their own peculiar art-making experience.

Step A: Always the development of a technical vocabulary--some thing or many things one may do with a set of tools;

Step B: Always the development of literary or conversational (through the art) sensibility.

With age, in some regions quasi-official imprimatur or an influential myth, the personal "editor"--the old fashioned substantive thing--may become an important figure in the artist's head, and at that point, paid or not, the work involved in thoughtfully engaging with someone else's effort in both its technical and literary facets becomes both ambitious and responsible.

A good critic, imho, should not be far in kind from a curator, editor, publisher, stage manager, or producer in terms of a kind of guardianship of the art (through "gatekeeping") and improvement of its essential discriminating qualities for marketing and showcasing.  Pop culture gives us a cartoon version of the critic as an immensely egotistical and impotent personality--e.g., the theater know-it-all who can't write a play--but between artists and "master teachers" and creative representatives, the figure may be quite different, a Perkins, for example, to Hemingway, Wolf, or Faulkner.

I should have put a smiley icon after the cynical and self-denigrating  "I like the sound of my voice in typing" but may admit that the experience of writing for an immediate audience or single recipient online has been much a part of the charm of participating in life in this way.

The zenith, so far, of my career as a volunteer critic may this line from the Photo Wing at http://www.zoetrope.com:

1

J. S. Oppenheim

4.337

1044

The score of "4.337" represents the aggregate recipient rating for my remarks on a scale from one to five; the figure "1044" tells how many times I've gotten it together to give another photographer one to a few paragraphs of thoughtful and apparently helpful criticism.

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A Warm OA&L Logo

Ah, the magic of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4--and may I say if I can do it for me, I can do it for you too, one letter and illustration "layer" at a time.

Conceptually, I like this one as much or more than the Communicating Arts symbol, which also relied on bold lettering and color for its impact. There's a reminder on the side of this page, but for fun, here's the companion:

With the signs and symbols department taken care of, I'd say it's time to shop some general art, editorial, and photography talent across the web.

Anyone who would like to say "Hi" on LinkedIn.com, do.

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Israel in Haiti - Fast High-Tech Field Hospital Mobilization

Source: Youtube poster "Mykidstallerthanme". "Haiti Day 6 - No one but the Israeli's have come to help any of our patients that are dying." January 18, 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX-UmrFAWNw&feature=player_embedded

There was a time the world would look once and look away, the disasters of earthquakes, volcanos, tsunami, hurricane, typhoon, and plague remote to any locale other than the one affected being comparatively isolated and inaccessible.  Flash forward a short one hundred years or so, and it becomes clear that my neighbor's misery may not only be mine, but that I have more neighbors everywhere.

Who is not a part of the communicating, accessible-by-air, and near thoroughly globalized earth community?

While Israel has a crack jump-n-go capability and generosity to match, one may wonder what the disaster-response bureaucrats have been doing in Washington, D.C. since 9/11 and how pondorous their machinery and schemes may be.

I know: armchair criticism is easy.  The truth is given the scale of Haiti's distress, one, even a few, super-duper field hospitals does not the larger suffering ameliorate.  Clearly, high populations, limited resources, and adverse underlying ecological or environmental conditions will sooner or later overwhelm all plans.

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Apartment Mizrah

I have had my little Friday-at-Sunset chat with the All (and shouldn't be writing), but found it odd that I have always stood at my table facing, virtually, the front of my building, and spoken toward the left side corner of the entrance to my apartment.

This evening, the compass has told me the axis to the corner lays directly east of where I customarily stand.

I never knew.

I always knew.

Mizrah.

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From Mixed Multitudes, Just Yesterday

Last night I went to my first taqwacore concert. Taqwacore is Muslim punk rock, and what that means to you is basically that I was in a room packed full of angry young Muslims, and I was, well, the only person looking like this. Which could have been a recipe for disaster at best case and ethnic cleansing at worst, if things had gone that way. Lo and behold, though, it was a crazy, jubilant, good-natured and even sort of flamboyant affair.

Roth, Matthue.  "The Kominas Live: The Only Jew in the Room."  Mixed Multitudes, January 7, 2009: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/blog/ideas-beliefs/the-kominas-live-the-only-jew-in-the-room/

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Out of Multitudes

To be a Jew, then, is to be born of those two escapes:  into the desert and into the Book.  Exile and text created us far more than genealogical descent from Abraham or the high priests, and throughout our history we have always turned back to these two concepts for strength, inspiration, and rebirth.  There is no convincing archaeological evidence for the flight from Egypt.  Evidence that the Hebrews were even enslaved in Egypt is scarce.  But the Exodus story doesn't need to be true to serve its purpose.  Whether divinely inspired or written by a series of editors over hundreds of years, the Torah narrative has its normative function, summed up succinctly by my bar mitzvah portion: you owe a debt to the God who sent you wandering, who made you into a people, who promises you won't wander forever. [1]

Charles London points out early in Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community that not only Jews left Egypt with Moses: "A mixed multitude also went up with them" (Exodus 12:38).  London puts the population in exile, at more than a million souls, all transformed, Jews and the mixed multitudes that joined them, into one nation with the receiving of the Torah.

Cited Reference

1. London, Charles.  Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community.  New York: Harper Collins, 2009, p. 8.

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A Comment on Islam in America and Choosing Sides

The question from the audience as repeated by James Taranto:

"What can the West do to prevent the preaching of hatred in Madrassah and Islamic schools."

Following Wafa Sultant's answer, Daniel Pipes:

"it's a scandal the way the western authorities in general and the American in particular are blind to what I call 'lawful Islamism'.  They're very focused on terror and criminality and violence, but so long as an Imam and anyone else is not engaged in funding terror, apologizing for terror, engaging in terror, that's okay.  In other words, it's a very law enforcement approach.  So long as you don't have a criminal record, or are in some way associated with criminality, that's okay.  That is the threat, I believe.  That is a deep threat to our society because we are blind to it, and it is the schoolbooks, it is the sermons, it is the television, it is the Internet sites, it is the nonviolent promotion, the political, the educational, media, law court aspect of this that our governments are blind to, and we see appointments of Islamists--people who don't have criminal records--to, say, the Department of Homeland Security--we see example after example of infiltration of law enforcement and security forces throughout the west . . . what I say is whether entering the country, or joining a police force, or anything else, we have to look, and the most difficult thing I have to say, and the thing I least like saying, and that people least like hearing  is there has to be special scrutiny of Muslims because there is this temptation to radical Islam, and not necessarily violent . . . there is this temptation you see over and over and over again, the latest example is Nidal Hasan in Fort Hood.  He went violent.  Others don't go violent, but the temptation is there.  Someone like Nidal Hasan needs special scrutiny.  I hate saying it.  You hate hearing it.  But I think it's absolutely necessary.

* * *

Fora.TV.  "Moderate Islam: Western Ally or Western Myth?"  Debate featuring Daniel Pipes and Wafa Sultan, hosted by The Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto at The Middle East Forum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 1, 2009, time mark approximately 36:30, Chapter 14, of the presentation: http://fora.tv/2009/12/01/Moderate_Islam_Western_Ally_or_Western_Myth

The discussion in its entirety makes an hour well spent, but I excised the above for its focus on the preventive. 

In cases we know of, including the rampage by Nadal Hasan, persons of interest--Carlos Bledsoe of the shooting at a Little Rock army recruitment center comes also to mind--have been tracked, but not detained, watched but questioned and possibly derailed from plans held close to their vests and yet known by two sets of associates: active provocateurs providing moral if not logistical support; passive enablers, including officers and others which whom the same may have had contact and turned up a card or two.

Whatever the clues and the level of what might be called the "coalescence of probability", the state's power to briefly detain persons of interest at critical junctions needs to be established.  Our abilities to detect behaviors and signals characteristic of impending attacks will most certainly improve, but we are not so sure today in whose garage or bedroom closet the plans and weapons of a dispersed warfare reside. 

In fact, we may not want to know for fear of breaching the defenses of autonomy, privacy, and respect that are the hallmarks of a peaceful open society, and yet in this new year we would do well to consider methods of intervention--i.e., a means of getting between a weaponized human and his or her targets--least likely to harm the liberal and democratic fabric whose weave has provided unprecedented freedom and security for hundreds of millions of souls and continues through peaceful exchange with quite a few of the more stable of traditional autocratic systems to encourage greater freedom along with economic development and wholesale improvements in agriculture, education, health, and trade.

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Author Recommended: Laqueur

Alpha:

"I belong to the last generation of Jews with conscious memories of growing up in Weimar Germany and under the Nazis." [1a]

Omega:

"I tried to forget quickly all I learned about the theory of autobiography--which was not too difficult.  But one quotation stuck in my mind.  It is from the preface of the autobiography of a German writer named Karl Immermann entitled Memorabilia (1840), and it says, "My life does not seem to me of sufficient importance to bring it on the market in all its details.  I shall deal only with my encounters with history."  This translation is unfortunately much too vague; Immermann used an untranslatable turn of phrase, "wo die Geschichte ihren Durchzug durch mich hielt," which, literally translated, means "where history marched through me."

History, fortunately, never "marched through me," but it affected my life more profoundly than Immermann and his generation . . . .  [1b]

The tickets to the front row seats to history do not get hotter than those held by Walter Laqueur.

My first encounter with the work of this possibly now irrascible old fellow--in his 30's in the 1950's, he has got to be in his 90's today, and by his own account does not suffer fools lightly--came through his book Guerrilla: A historical and critical study at a time when my interest in terrorism had crystalized into a leftward sympathy for the economically exploited.  Never interested in the real deal, I had wondered what to do about the excessive corporate autonomy that ended in disasters like Bhopal, which Wikipedia now labels the "Bhopal Disaster" [2] and the massive business "downsizing", "rightsizing", "reorganization", and "reengineering" of the early 1990's. 

I wrote a bad screenplay.

Capitalism continued coughing up periodical and near criminal--and criminal--economic disasters. 

Precisely how Laqueur's Guerrilla claimed its stake in my library (next to Demaris' Brothers in Blood [3]), I don't know, but it's held its place on my shelves for at least 20 years, and its presence provided a small but much appreciated signpost as my attitudes and interests swung with post-9/11 American culture toward renewed interest in conflict and terrorism; also, while personal experience brought me back to the existential, perhaps even mysterious business of being Jewish.

Speaking here as an avid reader, Walter Laqueur invariably provides from first sentence to last both "ease and tease" in conveying the essentials of what he has to say.  From the preface to Guerrilla:

This book deals with guerrilla warfare; it does not aim at presenting a universal theory, for such a theory would be either exceedingly vague or exceedingly wrong.  The author of an excellent book on the Cuban revolution noted some years ago that in view of its unique character the events in Cuba were a subject for the historian rather than the sociologist.  The same is true of most guerrilla wars: a tank is always a tank, but guerrilla wars differ greatly from one another." [4, vii].

And into a rich telling of the ways one goes.

For this Jewish wastral in his mid-fifties and reconnecting with, in essence, the ancestral, Walter Laqueur provides a tour through a part of the Jewish experience most congruent with Jewish modernity, which is to say his Jewish identity propelled a journey from the Weimar Republic in the 1930's to Palestine through the birthing of Israel and beyond, and on to London and Washington in ways inseparable from it, yet without making too much of a deal of it--or much of a deal of it at all.

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, Laqueur's memoir, covers a most tumultous period in history, from the poisonous anchoring of World War II to, with some ellision, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, although the main part might be said to cover the author's youth to maturity.  With such a long life, there's room for a second remembrance, and such would be welcomed here. 

Cited Reference

1. Laqueur, Walter.  Thursday's Child Has Far to Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992. A) p. xii, B) p. 401-402.

2. Wikipedia.  "Bhopal Disaster": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

3. Demaris, Ovid.  Brothers in Blood: The International Terrorist Network.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.

4. Laqueur, Walter.  Guerrilla: A historical and critical study.  Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1976.

Other Reference

Laqueur, Walter: http://www.laqueur.net/

Laqueur, Walter.  Dying for Jeruslaem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City.  Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2006.

Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wikipedia.  "Walter Laqueur": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Laqueur

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Slid Comment: On Art and Language

Among evergreen topics in art communities online is that of defining and valuing fine art.  In response to a discussion in the photography forum at "the Mayhem" as I like to call it (http://www.modelmayhem.com), I added my two cents:

Transition the question to culture and language in their totality--all modes of expression and manner of artifact--and ask what in that vast output possesses aesthetic, cultural, historical, intellecutal, political, psychological, or technological singularity.

An alteration in medium has demonstrative singularity, what some might call a "proof of principle", and at times there may be more interest in the paint, the paper, the sound system or recording system, the presentation system, etc. than in the "essential content" and portent of the work.

Most of the time, however, we look, listen, taste, sometimes smell, rarely touch (although there's unexplored territory) for The New. Or the refreshed. Or the anachronistic. Ultimately, what we appraise as art has to do with both the collective and individual mastery of a corner of language. The antique road show has a far-reaching writ as do curators, editors, and scholars worldwide, and for the same reason: apprehension of the significance of the artifact or body of work before them.

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