Monthly Archives: October 2005

The Power of Nightmares, review of BBC documentary series, 2005

31 Monday Oct 2005

Posted by in essay, reviews, short film

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

The Power of Nightmares, a BBC documentary in three one- hour parts by Adam Curtis, is available free online and free from intellectual property burdens. It is in the Creative Commons so you can just download it from

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Watch it and rebroadcast it anywhere you can. The series takes as its subject a comparison of two ideological groups that have tried to shape the entire world for the past fifty years using money, power, influence, religion, violence and finally fear.

This doc also seeks to define and address a change in policy makers: from positivists who seek to represent humanity toward a better life into negativists who perpetuate stereotypes of fear to remain in power. But fundamentally the series is a comparison of two radical groups who now hold the world in their grip:

The Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists and
The US American Neoconservatives

The series begins with an examination of the intellectual pursuits of Egyptian philosopher and Islamic Fundamentalist scholar Syed Qtub and Neo-conservative Scholar and University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss in 1949 and details how their pursuits led to what would become the ideology behind these two currents of hyper-conservative thought that have been extremely active: struggling against their own societies, subsequently working together to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and ending up in direct conflict in a Winner-Take-All-Fight-to-the-Death, which is taking place even now in the guise of the War on Terror [which ought rightfully be called the War of Terror].

But more, this series properly addresses the tactic of fear used by both groups, and especially that used by the neocons, to propagandize humanity into electing politicians willing to use the fear model for their own selfish interests – Tony Blair is really exposed as an opportunist by this series.

I deeply wish more people could see this doc so we could begin a discussion to reframe the global power conversation that is being dictated to us by military and militant authorities.

Curtis’ series does not address the possibility of Neocon or US American complicity in the attack on 9/11 nor does it properly address the Clinton era in context:

He says 9/11 was executed by extreme readers of Islamic Fundamentalism and leaves it at that [he says the actual events were executed by a plan drawn by KSM (that’s Khalid Sheik Mohammad in CIA-speak)] and that Clinton was a fundamentally good agent who was buried by a neocon cabal which trained its powers of attack at him [painting Clinton as a victim].

In these readings, I have differences with Curtis, but he doesn’t take a stance on these matters that threatens the possibilities lined out by many other researchers and documentarians with more access and focus on them. He simply leaves them as generally accepted media ideas for the sake of a wider, more historiographic perspective that is really very brilliant.

He proposes very effectively that the neocons have used the exact same exaggerative tactics to take down first the Soviet Union, then Bill Clinton and now, finally, Muslim Fundamentalism under the vague rubric of Terrorism.

The series goes further and proposes that “there is no al Qaeda.” And fully debunks the Bush administrations claims of successful anti-terror work in the USA post-9/11.

This is a GREAT historical view of conflicts authored by and between the Neocons and the Islamist Extremists … really important work.

Please find some one with high speed connection universities would be perfect places to achieve this – and broadcast them widely.

Film clubs, organizations, peace groups, non-profits, NGOs, students or professors or faculty or staff with access to computer labs with high-speed connections: please download this important three part series from the BBC and have public viewings and showings.

I urge this because I think it would make a great beginning to reframing the 21st century conversation.

M.T. Karthik
31 October 2005

dereliction

24 Monday Oct 2005

Posted by in artists books, collage, Los Angeles, NYC, poetry, politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

dereliction [2005]
13.5 x 21 in

an original poem by M.T. Karthik on seafarer’s maps salvaged by G. Borsa from a derelict tugboat on the Newtown Creek that separates the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, NY; with gouache, acrylic, ink, and collage of printed paper, printed plastic and color prints from digital media by M.T. Karthik; bound by C.K. Wilde

Initially authored during the Republican National Convention as it was taking place in New York City, “dereliction” [2004] begins with a slap across the face of the Prince of Wales in 2001.  A reprint of the BBC World Service Internet screenshot features 19-year-old Alina striking Charles with a rose in Riga, Latvia, and is collaged into a map of the seagoing entrance to the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic.  Accompanying text reports that Alina was protesting the then recently begun bombing of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom. This is the only spread in the book which maps an actual place.

An invocation:
“O, Chorus of unknown seas, drowning the known to smithereens”
leads the viewer from the map and image of an actual place into a fantasy cartography.

As an organizing principle each folio is designed such that no spread has paper from the same original map in its recto and verso facia.  To achieve this, the maps were spread out, cut into quarters and recomposed, designed primarily with an aesthetic created from the juxtaposition of land masses and water. The land and water were then treated with media to create text that serves to obfuscate specificity further, but also to unify bodies of water and masses of land.

Each spread (including the title page and frontispiece) is composed from deconstructed maps positioned to create shorelines and seaways with no basis in earthly reality. The result is a deconstruction of the original maps that creates an atlas of a world familiar yet not accurately descriptive of any known place. The title page is companioned with a frontispiece detailing the title, as the first sets of waves of text appear in the sea: “the ship of state is derelict”.

Figures rigid in concept, but loose and flexible in media, create a striking paradox, as patterns of zeroes and ones are painted in gouache across the land masses – a reminder of digital output and a haunting count.
Swiftly, the context leaps back in time to the era of the Atomic Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a play on words is employed in the repeating waves of text in the sea: Truman as the “worst president,” the decision to use the bomb as the “worst precedent”. [Curatorial note: there are momentary and unique changes in the underlying text in each spread. In this case, buried in the text are two additions:  “the buck stops here” and “worst Missouri Mob” … meant to implicate unseen hands behind the Truman presidency.]

A spread follows featuring the English transliteration of the name of Hiroshima copied 1,000 times and of Nagasaki 750 times and leads to the A-bomb spread: the spread with the most text in the book, in all five layers, including the Sanskrit transliteration of Chapter 11, Verse 32, from the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by Oppenheimer upon seeing the cloud from the first successful test of his atomic bomb.

From the A-Bomb spread, “dereliction” [2005] continues to accuse the founders of the U.S. of genocide and the current leaders of the United States of militarization for centuries. A parallel is made between the figure cited by Bartholomew de las Casas as killed by Columbus’ ventures and a figure representing those killed by the USA abroad in covert and overt operations between 1945 and 2001 and digital photos of pre-columbian sculptures from Oaxaca, Mexico float in the seas.

The centerfold of “dereliction” [2005] employs a quote from James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to make a point about the rush to war in Iraq. In the novel, Joyce describes his class being asked by his teacher, to copy the phrase “zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift,” repeatedly. At the place marked in the maps as “Middleground” this quote is written over and over as instructed, and creates the central thesis of the text: that the USA is adrift, waging bungled wars led by men who don’t know even simple philosophical truths.

The text then moves to an admonition of those adrift without such knowledge:

“Oh, woe betide ye, adrift at sea, without even a cosmology”

and concludes by offering a cosmology in the form of a Haiku [5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables]:

a cosmology :
sun father mother ocean
the moon is a god

Arcadia in Tokyo, 2005

01 Saturday Oct 2005

Posted by in journalism, reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Plays are events rather than texts.

They’re written to happen, not to be read.

Tom Stoppard, 1979, NYT

The latest incarnation of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia – a wickedly clever postmodern play about meaning, mathematics, sex, literature and academia – will open in Tokyo on October 14, with a cast of actors from across the English-speaking world.

Irish Director Conor Hanratty’s education in classical Greek has included Bachelors and Masters degrees in theater and trips to Greece to observe the ancient dramas live. He is in Japan on academic exchange from Dublin to study iconoclastic Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa (about whom he is writing a book) and, in his spare time, has connected with Tokyo International Players (TIP) to direct the dense and witty Stoppard two-act, which, as he puts it, poses far more questions than it answers while still managing to leave the audience wondrously sated. “The questions Arcadia raises really don’t go away,” Hanratty says, “asking, why we’re here and ‘why do things survive’ and ‘why do things get lost’ and ‘do we find them again’?

“There’s a wonderful moment in the play when the tutor turns to his pupil and says, “It’s okay, you know, we lose things and we carry things with us but it doesn’t matter because the important thing is the march that we’re on, and there’s nothing outside that, so even if we drop something, someone else will pick it up later.’ And they talk about all of the lost plays of the Athenians in Greece – which is, of course, close to my heart. Just very recently they found a big lump of a new Sophocles play that we didn’t have before, so it’s quite timely that they talk about these things that will reappear eventually … they do.”

The play takes place in one room in different times set apart by two centuries, and pits academics in sexual dalliances against a discussion of events muddled by history. American assistant director Robb Dahlke says, “I especially find intriguing Stoppard’s theme of not knowing exactly what has happened in the past – the mistakes that can be made by circumstantial evidence; how something can be read one way leading in the wrong direction from what actually happened.”

TIP is the oldest English language theater company in Japan, having a history of a remarkable 109 years and employing an entirely volunteer cast and crew made up of English-speaking actors and hands that happen to be in Tokyo. “That’s the difficulty,” remarks Briton Alice Hackett, who plays Hannah in the production, “you never can be sure you’re going to be able to cast a play with exactly the right pool of people. You have to count on what’s available. But that’s also very challenging for the actors who are available … you might find yourself playing slightly older than you normally would or in an accent you might not normally be acting in. It’s a great opportunity to try out new things.”

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Directed by Conor Hanratty, October 14-16, will be performed at the Tokyo American Club, for more information: http://www.tokyoplayers.org

(originally published in Japanzine here)