American News Project: Iraq soldier testifies

Very disturbing testimony by a soldier formerly stationed in Iraq. Difficult to watch, but important to do so.

Rock some sense into the Republicans

"The Republican National Convention is coming to the Twin Cities in September, and wouldn't it be a shame if there was no one to play deafening power chords just up the street?" So reads text at the website of ProVention, online homebase for a concert planned in Lowertown St. Paul on Sept. 3 and 4 to coincide with the GOP convention. But the point isn't an antagonistic, Noriega-psyops kind of thing, but to welcome Republican guests with "music, beauty and rational engagement" (here's the group's platform).

The lineup -- which may change, "probably in the direction of more and more ginormously powerful" -- has elephantine star power: Tapes 'n' Tapes, Haley Bonar, Nellie McKay, The Honeydogs, Charlie Parr, The Alarmists and others.

Stake a claim on democracy. In yer yard.

A cacophony of voices and a one-(wo)man-one-vote policy on which messages get amplified: Sounds like the Republican National Convention, right? Not really.

As a stark counterpoint to the "scripted democracy" of this fall's GOP nominating convention, a project by mnartists.org, the Walker Art Center and the UnConvention is inviting people of all political stripes and artistic abilities to create yard signs to coincide with the RNC -- and, fittingly, the 50 designs getting the most online votes will be produced and distributed around the Twin Cities and near the convention site.

Visitors to the My Yard, Our Message site can submit designs by June 30; then open voting will be held from July 1-27.

Don't want to leave the fate of your design in the hands of we, the people? For $20 bucks, the project will produce and deliver a one-off of your design.

Featured: "Ugly Partisanship" by Emmet Byrne; "Convention" by Andy Pressman; "Groove" by Emmet Byrne; "Now or Never" by David Barawski

[Fake] global self-portait

A guy sends a suitcase around the world and, thanks to the GPS device he embedded in it, creates a self-portrait -- the biggest drawing in the world. (Thanks, Ben.)

Update: Wired calls bullshit, and the art fesses up that it's a fake.

Democracy: "I'm mellllting!" [RNC DIY! launches]

Over at Minnesota Monitor, we just launched RNC DIY!, an ongoing series looking at creative responses to the Republican National Convention (if you've got a suggestion, let me know). Here's our first installment:


Even John McCain has acknowledged things are worse in America today than they were eight years ago, and according to artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, democracy agrees. The duo who brought us "Contract with America" underpants (signed by Newt Gingrich!) will present their work "The State of Things" in the Twin Cities during the Republican National Convention. A 900-pound, 15-foot ice sculpture of the word "democracy," the work will melt away over the course of a day. As it does, Ligorano/Reese will stream video, audio and photography related to current sociopolitical realities.

According to The UnConvention, a collaborative project by arts groups like Intermedia and the Walker Art Center, the piece is "a testimonial to the impact eight years of extreme judicial, legislative, and executive actions have had on American democratic institutions -- from the landmark Supreme Court decision 'Bush v. Gore' in 2000 to presidential signing statements to illegal FISA surveillance." The work will also be "performed" at the DNC in Denver.

Earlier: Democracy in oil!

Photo du jour: Wall of Fire

Jason Lazarus' photo Wall of Fire, Labor Day 2006 (Cleveland, OH), available as a print at Humble Arts Foundation.

Photos from TV

Mike Sacks' photos from TV offer a hilariously absurd look at media culture. Look at the whole set and see how screenshots taken out of context give a telling glimpse of the entire context of television itself.

Stop-action smokes

Here's a clever stop-action animation made only using cigarettes to make the point that smoking kills more people than war. The Brazilian campaign by F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi also features an artist on the street making visages of Hitler and Bin Laden with the tagline "Cigarro Mata Mais."

Eye Contact: Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib and the Interrotron

Watching Errol Morris' new documentary, "Standard Operating Procedure," I was reminded of a Jean Baudrillard quote I'd jotted in a notebook years ago: "Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void."

The film, like all of Morris' recent works, was made using his patented interviewing tool, The Interrotron, a device that puts a video image of Morris where the camera lens should be. It makes interviewees more comfortable and gives movie-theater audiences direct eye contact with them. Given what some of the Abu Ghraib guards have seen with those eyes -- often as perpetrators of horrible acts -- this contact can be unnerving, and I found an odd disconnect: the intimacy of eye contact is in such stark contrast to the distance I felt seeing those bizarre photographs. Here's what Morris had to say when I asked him about the use of the device in the specific case of Abu Ghraib.

Listen to the full Morris interview here.

Pictured: Spec. Sabrina Harman, featured in Standard Operating Procedure

Interview: Errol Morris on "Standard Operating Procedure"

"Here's one irony," Errol Morris told me in a recent interview. "You take a picture and you see the culprit in the picture, but you don't see the culprits who have not been photographed."

That pretty much sums up the thesis of his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, which opens at The Lagoon in Minneapolis this Friday. An unflinching reconsideration of the iconic photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison, the film talks mainly to low-level military personnel and contractors (only one higher-up, Col. Janis Karpinski, would talk) but still manages to look beyond the frame of the photos we've all seen a million times to find some of the context for these unfathomable acts. My interview, conducted for Minnesota Monitor, covers what we don't see in those shots: the "obscene" violations of the Geneva Conventions, the vast tent cities and cellblock networks of the prison, and the countless people -- MPs, intelligence officers, commanders and civilian contractors -- who were there when these supposed "bad apples" were at Abu Ghraib.

"Photographs can make us feel like we've seen everything when in fact we've hardly seen anything at all," Morris said. And in yesterday's post at his New York Times blog, he addresses one such case, that of Spec. Sabrina Harman, whose smile in her snapshots with a battered Iraqi corpse is not what it seems. He told me:

"There's one photo that endlessly fascinates me. It's Sabrina Harman with her thumb up smiling over the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner. I looked at the photo and thought, initially, what a monster. I now know she had nothing whatsoever to do with this man's death and she was secretly taking photographs to prove that a murder had occurred and the U.S. military was attempting to cover it up. In fact the picture means something much closer to the opposite of what we think it means."

Listen to the interview at Archive.org.

More: Listen to an interview outtake, where Morris discusses his interviewing tool, The Interrotron, and the power of eye contact in Standard Operating procedure.

"To hell with Shakespeare!": Rightwing radio host decries Hmong rapper's work with schools

Listening to Minnesota conservative radio host Jason Lewis, you'd get the impression that a week of hip hop in a public school will shatter the very foundations of Western civilization. During his May 2 show, the KTLK talker went off about plans by Woodbury's Lake Junior High to bring in Hmong hip hop artist Tou Saiko Lee for a series of classes teaching sixth graders about Hmong culture, collaborative poem-writing and emceeing. The week would conclude with an all-school assembly featuring a performance of student work.

"My god! What is going on," Lewis moaned. "To hell with Shakespeare, to hell with Tennyson, to hell with science and math; we're going to teach our sixth graders how to be hip hop emcees!?" Hip hop is "garbage," he added, and as evidence, he quoted that font of high culture, the former Mr. Christie Brinkley: "Even Billy Joel says rap is crap."

Lewis' opinions have raised ire among local hip hop and spoken-word artists, many who have for years used spoken word as a teaching tool in educational and artistic settings. Writing at CultureBully, spoken-word artist Kyle "El Guante" Myhre says, "Mr. Lewis is fighting a straw man; no one is ever going to suggest that we replace math and science (or Ethan Frome, for that matter) with hip hop... To somehow suggest that Shakespeare is taking a backseat to 2pac in our public schools is, even for conservative talk radio, laughably ridiculous, unfounded fear-mongering."

He talked about Lewis' rant with Tou, who says his aim is to teach kids about self-expression, understanding where they come from and ways to tell the stories of their lives here. "I don't teach students to become hip hop emcees; I just expose them to hip hop music as a medium to speak through," he said. Further, he sees it as a way of turning kids on to the kind of literature Lewis is shouting about.

"I feel that hip hop emcees are modern day poets, and that studying them can open doors to having more interest in learning about the classics such as Shakespeare, Robert Frost and so on," Tou said. "It did for me."

Tou's interest in hip hop is also about preserving his own culture. As a recent New York Times video on Tou explains, Hmong people in Laos, including Tou's grandfather, fought against the Communist Pathet Lao, with CIA backing, in the Vietnam era, and are persecuted for that help. The US government helped resettle many Hmong refugees here, including around 60,000 in Minnesota. Tou says he fears that Hmong Americans are losing touch with these roots and the continuing violence against the Hmong in Laos. Some of his work directly relates to the troubles there, but another project tries to use hip hop to link a younger generation to older cultural traditions. He's collaborated with his grandmother on a fusion of spoken word and the ancient form of poem-chanting (Kwv txhiaj) she's mastered.

"How," he asks, "can we find ways that reconnect back to our culture?"

For Lewis, there's only one culture that matters -- his own.

"You know, it might be a good idea to teach Western culture before we start going into all of the other cultures," he said. "Might be a good idea for our friends in the Hmong community, and the Somali community, and any other community, to learn our culture. Let's have an assembly and a weeklong fine arts program teaching them Shakespeare."

More: Read the Twin Cities Daily Planet's profile on Tou Saiko Lee, or listen to Lewis' May 2 program.

Talk about commitment

Egad: A sports photographer covering a track meet in Utah got hit in the leg by a javelin... and kept shooting.

[via]

Rightwing bloggers decry Obama's meeting with imam Bush kissed

When George W. Bush met Imam Hassan Qazwini in 2003, he gave the leader of America's largest mosque a hug and a kiss on the cheek. When Pope Benedict visited the U.S. last month, Qazwini was called forward to speak individually with the pontiff. But when Barack Obama met with Qazwini, it's time to sound the alarm -- at least according to rightwing bloggers.

Minnesota's Power Line claims Obama's meeting was shrouded in secrecy and passes along word that Qazwini is "Hezbollah's most important imam and agent in America." Power Line's source is rightwing blogger Debbie Schlussel, who says the meeting "says a lot about the company Obama keeps . . . and why he shouldn't be President." Trouble is Schussel offers only one outside link to substantiate her claims, which given her track record might give one pause: she speculated that the Virginia Tech shootings were done by a "Paki" Muslim and were part of "a coordinated terrorist attack," and she's said that the liberal watchdog group Media Matters is funded by Nazis.

That one source link goes to a matter-of-fact news report on Obama's visit by the Detroit Free Press. While Power Line's Scott Johnson acknowledged Bush met with Qazwini several times during the 2000 campaign (he doesn't mention the 2003 encounter pictured above or Qazwini's attendance at a 2001 interfaith event at the White House), Schlussel doesn't. In the post Power Line links to she quotes extensively from the Detroit paper, but omits the key last sentence: "Qazwini has also met several times with President Bush and other elected officials."

Photo du jour: Hillary

[via]

TC Art: Great write-up on this weekend's Heliotrope festival

As I've mentioned before that the fifth edition of Heliotrope is this weekend. The annual underground music festival got a good write-up in City Pages today, covering what I think are the best aspects of the festival: shared profits among band members; its make-up of musical "experimenters, agitators, and aesthetes"; a low-key atmosphere; and a truly DIY spirit.
Rich Barlow, co-founder of Flaneur Productions and co-curator of the festival, says, "I'd get really tired of everyone I knew saying there was nothing going on. My feeling is that you can either complain about stuff or you can change it. I don't particularly like complaining."

The story also mentions the "bittersweet return" of this year's headliner, Japan's Suishou No Fune. It will be a bittersweet return for Suishou, who became friends with the band Salamander and played a few shows with them last summer; in November, drummer/visual artist Matt Zaun passed away at age 34. Part of the Ritz's lobby will be dedicated to a small exhibition of Zaun's graphic art.

Pictured: This year's poster by Burlesque's Steven Boettcher

Rauschenberg is dead.

The Times reports.

How the world sees us: "D'oh, pardner!"

Steve at MinMon posts this ad from the Mexican newspaper Milenio. Translation: "A world so complex needs a good explanation."

TC Art: The Gaards at the Phipps

Painter Frank Gaard and his wife, painter/mixed media artist Pamela Gaard, have a joint show on view at The Phipps Center for the Arts, just across the border in Hudson, WI, through June 1. We checked out the artist-curated show during the opening two weeks ago and met up with Frank and Pam; Frank had a copy of Charley 05, the newest publication on the "stray dogs" of contemporary art edited by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. A beautiful -- and thick -- catalogue (designed by Conny Purtill, formerly of the Walker), it features an eight-page spread on Frank's work (you'll also remember Frank's contribution to the Walker's billboard project in '04 and this piece, which was published alongside an Adbusters essay I wrote in '05). Notably absent from the show: Frank's trademark x-rated comics. Probably good, considering the family-friendly atmosphere of the Phipps. See more photos here.

Bill O'Riled.

As old footage of Bill O'Reilly going ballistic on the set of Inside Edition burns up the Internet, RevoLucian makes an NSFW remix sure to make Dick Cheney proud.

In case you need more proof Bill O'Reilly's a jerk

NSFW (cursin')