Only two months earlier upon her return to Pakistan as the figurehead of the Pakistan People’s Party, terrorists bombed her homecoming procession and the armored truck she rode on. She survived, but 134 died and over 400 were wounded. Under the shadow of this massacre, she writes on borrowed time.

The first section of the book is in defense of the Koran. She argues that it is a book that embraces plurality and democracy and even equal rights for women. The second section is a history lesson, a country by country breakdown of Western intervention in the Middle East, parallax to the political record told in the West by our leaders. She also traces the historical roots of the Suuni and Shiite conflict. The third section is more theoretical. She argues that the "Clash of Civilizations" between West and Middle East is not inevitable.

The book is well-writen and clear in its arguments. Bhutto, a graduate of both Harvard and Oxford, a former debate champion and a lawyer(1),was an accomplished writer.  She would have been the tipping point in the United States war in Iraq which is now hamstrung by Pakistan.

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1. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/19/arts/bookmer.php

Tonight I went to a screening of Stephen Daldry’s "The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink’s international bestselling novel of the same name. David Hare wrote the screenplay.

Daldry says, "This is not a Holocaust movie, it is a movie about the second generation and how you come to terms with and how you can approach living in a society and loving in a society that has been involved in genocide…"(1)

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1.http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE4B755Q20081208

In the entry for December 18, WIkipedia notes:

• 218 BC - Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia - Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Roman Republic.

In one of my five years of studying Latin, I had to translate parts of Livy’s (59 BC to AD 17) The War with Hannibal.

Synopsis
In The War with Hannibal, Livy (59 BC AD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the immense armies of Hannibal, complete with elephants, crossing the Alps; the panic as they approached the gates of Rome; and the decimation of the Roman army at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Yet it is also the clash of personalities that fascinates Livy, from great debates in the Senate to the historic meeting between Scipio and Hannibal before the decisive battle.

It was during the Second Punic War that Hannibal, a Carthaginian commander and military genius, defeated the Romans by winning several early key battles. Despite heavy losses Hannibal led an army of roughly 80,000 men (disputed), complete with a herd of 37 war elephants, from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps (!) into Northern Italy. The feat was accomplished in under a month.

Excerpt:
Livy 21.32.6-37.6; translated by Iana Scott-Kilvert

Getting on the move at dawn, the army struggled slowly forward over snow-covered ground, the hopelessness of utter exhaustion in every face.

Seeing their despair, Hannibal rode ahead and at a point of vantage which afforded a prospect of a vast extent of country, he gave the order to halt, pointing to Italy far below, and the Po Valley beyond the foothills of the Alps. ‘My men,’ he said, ‘you are at this moment passing the protective barrier of Italy - nay more, you are walking over the very walls of Rome. Henceforward all will be easy going - no more hills to climb. After a fight or two you will have the capital of Italy, the citadel of Rome, in the hollow of your hands.’
…

The track was almost everywhere precipitous, narrow, and slippery; it was impossible for a man to keep his feet; the least stumble meant a fall, and a fall a slide, so that there was indescribable confusion, men and beasts stumbling and slipping on top of each other.
…

But even so he was no luckier; progress was impossible, for though there was good foothold in the quite shallow layer of soft fresh snow which had covered the old snow underneath, nevertheless as soon as it had been trampled and dispersed by the feet of all those men and animals, there was left to tread upon only the bare ice and liquid slush of melting snow underneath. The result was a horrible struggle, the ice affording no foothold in any case, and least of all on a steep slope; when a man tried by hands or knees to get on his feet again, even those useless supports slipped from under him and let him down; there were no stumps or roots anywhere to afford a purchase to either foot or hand; in short, there was nothing for it but to roll and slither on the smooth ice and melting snow.

 In art history and currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, we find:

J. M. W. Turner
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps  
Oil on Canvas, exhibited 1812

This picture exemplifies Turner’s achievement in the Sublime, combining personal experience with complex historical and literary associations. The picture originated in observations of a storm in Yorkshire, though it represents Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218BC. Turner does not show the General himself, but focuses instead on the distress of Hannibal’s army. He thus aims at a universal, pessimistic vision of mankind, a theme Turner elaborated in poetry written to accompany this work. Nonetheless, the picture invites a contemporary parallel, between Hannibal and Napoleon, who had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in 1797.

 (From the display caption August 2004)

Hopefully I’ll be able to see this exhibit before it closes and write a review.  Gordon Matta-Clark is one of my top five favorite artists. I’m a big fan of his films documenting his cut buildings, as well as, the cut building performances themselves. He first captured my heart fifteen years ago at Sci-Arc and during a city-wide retrospective with lectures and screenings at MOCA and UCLA.

The NY Times has background on Matta-Clark:

Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.

 

 

Enlarge This Image

Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artist’s Rights Society

 

An image from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” (1974). H
ouses that the artist carved with a power saw commented on the American city’s decay.

 

A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work — many projects were demolished weeks after completion — only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.

The show brings home just how cleverly he challenged the high priests of architecture who, in Matta-Clark’s mind, inhabited a world of lofty abstractions divorced from the physical reality of everyday life. That critique is newly resonant, when even the most radical architectural ideas are quickly gobbled up by the cultural mainstream and take on the slickness of advertising slogans.

This is from the MOCA press release:

Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is a full-scale retrospective of one of the key figures to emerge in the generation of artists that followed minimalism. During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death at the age of 35, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) has exerted a powerful fascination on artists and architects who know his work. The son of surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta, Matta-Clark produced a body of work that incorporated spatial, social, and psychological experiences. Best known for the variety of his often spectacular, planned architectural interventions, Matta-Clark’s works transformed everyday experiences into extraordinary visual encounters. Among the major works featured in the exhibition are sculptures made from his acclaimed architectural building cuts, as well as drawings, films, photographs, and notebooks. A wealth of documentary material related to his interactions with architecture and space, community events, and collective activity is also shown.

# # #

Installation views of Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest:

 

I.

In 2004, I lived with a crossword addict and caught the bug. I looked forward each Thursday for the (now gone) LA Weekly crossword. I rarely finished, but still found it relaxing to try. The person I lived with always finished.

Since then I’ve attempted to do the "easy" "coffee-break" crossword books compiled by Will Shortz. I take much much longer than the target 15 minutes. It’s a foolish goal, but I want to eventually breeze through these. They taunt the newcomer:

Often the subtle pleasures in life are the most rewarding. And as any solver can tell you, a brisk morning, a hot cup of coffee, and a New York Times crossword puzzle can be one of those quietly perfect moments.From the pages of The New York Times comes this brand-new collection of light and easy puzzles… These solver-friendly puzzles allow you to sit back, relax, and lose yourself in a puzzle, all in the span of a coffee break.

Two weeks ago, I receive a phone call to audition for Merv Griffin’s Crosswords.  I don’t know how they got my phone number, but I decide to give it a go. I arrive at Tribune Studios in Hollywood on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon and wait in line with ten people. The production assistants shoot polariods of each of us. I’m chatty, but can’t draw out the other would-be contestants.

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I don’t need them. I don’t need them. I don’t need them, but I want them badly.  Crayola has "multicultural" fleshtone sets of their crayons, markers, paints, and clays. The crayon colors are: black, sepia, peach, apricot, white, tan, mahogany, and burnt sienna. How inspired!

And how funny. The burnt ochre-ish crayon (second from the right in the photo above) must be for asian. Or perhaps "apricot," fourth from the right.

Apparently muticulturalism in art education is a topic long flogged by critics, graduate courses and publications. Like the proverbial dead horse, it’s here to stay.

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Yesterday, I was stopped at the intersection of La Cienega and Pico Blvd. when several fire trucks sped around me towards a 150-foot hydralic crane tipped on its side just half-a-block ahead. The 150-foot boom smashed into a building and maybe damaged a car. A pedestrian said yoga students from a neighboring business scrambled to get away and that kids were also in one of the buildings.

I snuck past the police line and climbed to the second story of an apartment around the back hoping for a nice photo. I didn’t stick around. This was my abortive attempt to pick up orange juice and flu medicine from the market before crashing to sleep myself.

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I came across this on Wikipedia:

As expected for a common occurrence, laughter is frequently depicted in books and cartoons.

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Last week I had time to read more from her body of work translated into English from the German and released in the late-80s and early-90s. This includes Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child; The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness; and Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries.

In all of her books, she speaks out against psychoanalytic theories as a form of intellectual self-deception that can only get in the way of recovery. She eventually breaks completely from psychotheraphy, unable to reconcile the role of therapist with this self-discovery. Actually, she is open to a new primal therapy proposed by J. Konrad Stettbacher which listens to the "language of symptoms."  The logic is irrefutable: when all the symptoms are gone, then you’ve addressed the root cause or "the truth" and are well.

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