Thanks: DCT, SFJ

“West Nile Style”
at D’Amelio Terras

M.V. Carbon with works and performances by Cat Chow, Tony Conrad, Chris Duffy, Nicholas Emmet, Brooke Hamre Gillespie, Jay King, Severiano Martinez, Zeljko McMullen and Doron Sadja with a special appearance by Johnny Misheff

Opening reception Wednesday July 9th from 6-8pm
Summer Hours Monday through Friday 10-6

D’Amelio Terras
525 W 22nd St
New York, NY 10011

D’Amelio Terras invites Brooklyn-based, artistic performance space Paris London / West Nile to inhabit the gallery and present a group exhibition of animated objects, sound, sculptures and performance. “West Nile” is a street-level warehouse founded in October 2006 by M.V. Carbon, Zeljko McMullen and Doron Sadja. In addition to free events open to the public, West Nile houses studios used for photography, painting, video and sound. With high, arched, corrugated metal ceilings, West Nile is hot for live recording and rehearsing. Their selective program brings together an array of internationally active performers working at the forefront of visual music.

The spirit of collaboration central to West Nile’s programming will be highlighted in the multifarious display of works at D’Amelio Terras. Workspace installations will theatrically reframe active atmospheres, punctuated with live performance. West Nile produces experimental ideas in a shared site where people meet, perform, work and influence one another. This re-presentation of West Nile artists and actions aims to address new models for exhibiting time-based media.

M.V. Carbon (Violet Raid) is a painter, composer, “soundscaper and scraper”. Her recent paintings explore concepts of territory, impact and atmosphere. She is interested in defragmentation that occurs within landscape, rhythm, physiology and narrative perception. She is a co-founder of Paris London West Nile.

Cat Chow is an artist, designer, educator and performer. Her labor-intensive work, minimal in form, suggests paradoxical tensions between seduction/repulsion, beauty/desire, control/restraint and fetishism/power.

Tony Conrad is a composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist and writer. While occasionally exhibiting and teaching, he continues to produce, perform and record at West Nile. He presents basic theoretical and practical aspects of the harmonic perception of sound.

Chris Duffy “had a hot sweaty love affair with glass blowing that lasted about four years, now they are just good friends.” His recent works incorporate electrified mixed media sculptures, drawings, machines and social chartings.

Nicholas Emmet states, “every piece of metal can be an antenna or a fork, and I want to find out which is more essential.” Through sculpture and performance, composting all the experiential remnants he can, Nicholas hopes to “nurture the neurons in our exquisitely damp and frenetic lives.”

Brooke Hamre Gillespie is an experimental artist and musical-innovator-inventor-performer-visionary. Brooke employs modern alchemy in creating new sounds through voice, various instruments and electronics that take on old forms.

Jay King is an artist, director, videographer and performer. He plays in the ensemble SYMBOL and Forrest Gillespie’s Dome Theater. He has presented solo and collaborative work at venues including Glasslands Gallery, The Juilliard School, Peabody Conservatory (Baltimore), “a goth speakeasy in Greenpoint”, the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid) and PS1.

Zeljko McMullen studied orchestral and electronic composition and sound art/installation and is currently pursuing an MFA in Music/Sound at Bard College. He creates immersive environments with walls of acoustic and electronic sound as imaginary architecture. He is an active experimenter with both binaural perceptive beating and spatial recordings. He co-founded both Shinkoyo art + music collective and Paris London West Nile.

Doron Sadja is a sound/visual artist who studied in London, Berlin, at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and is now pursuing an MFA at Bard College. Doron creates dark, psychological collages. Visually, he uses dense splashes of color, texture and action. Sonically, he employs electronic and acoustic feedback, mutated instruments, multiple speaker arrangements and extreme frequencies. Doron co-founded both Shinkoyo art + music collective and Paris London West Nile.

For more information about West Nile and for live performances at D’Amelio Terras visit http://www.shinkoyo.com

D’Amelio Terras
525 W 22nd St
New York, NY 10011
t 212 352 9460
gallery@damelioterras.com

Mea Culpa by Brian Eno & David Byrne. A film by Bruce Conner.

Mongoloid by Devo. A film by Bruce Conner.

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist renowned for working fluently across media, died at his home of natural causes on Monday. He was 74.

Mr. Conner was one of the last survivors of the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), Wallace Berman (1926-1976), and Wally Hedrick (1928-2003).

“We were all anonymous artists here in the ’50s,” Mr. Conner told The Chronicle in 2000, shortly before the opening of his retrospective “2000 BC The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” at the de Young Museum.

Despite an enviably long record of gallery and museum exhibitions, Mr. Conner met with little recognition outside the worlds of contemporary art and independent film. More.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/arthur/328/confessions-of-a-barista

re: June 26, 2007 – Arthur Emergency Appeal

We made it!

Thank you to everyone who contributed either monetarily or with positive thoughts.

We are eternally grateful.

Thanks to you, not only are we able to continue publishing the magazine, we are going to be able to grow into self-sustainability in the coming months without losing an ounce of autonomy. That is a HUGE accomplishment, and we could not have done it without you. Thank you.

New issue of Arthur is out in two weeks!

More news soon!

Kisses,

The Arthur Gang
Brooklyn * Atwater * Nevada City * wherever you are

Los Angeles Times – July 7, 2008

The Iraq war movie: Military hopes to shape genre

Burned by portrayals of Vietnam, the Pentagon focuses on a new era of filmmakers. ‘It’s important to tell the full story,’ says Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, who is deployed to Wilshire Boulevard.

By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

There’s a war going on, and Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale has a mission.

But it’s far removed from the captured Iraqi palace where he was once stationed. He fights his war now from an office on Wilshire Boulevard lined with movie posters chronicling conflicts real and imagined, from “Patton” to “War of the Worlds.”

Breasseale’s desk is piled high with scripts, each marked with his name and stamped “confidential.” It’s his job to help decide which movies should get Army help.

The mission is both harder and more important than it might appear.

After the Vietnam War, movies like “Apocalypse Now” and “Born on the Fourth of July” helped cement an image of psychologically damaged Vietnam veterans.

“In the ’80s and early ’90s, the Vietnam War vet was the ‘other,’ ” Breasseale said. “Hollywood had created the crazy Nam vet.”

For the Army, it was a bitter lesson.

With the country now enmeshed in another long, unpopular war, Breasseale is hoping to influence a new generation of filmmakers in order to avoid repeating the experience.

So far, Breasseale feels, most of the movies made about Iraq have really been about Vietnam.

“It is the self-licking ice cream cone of Hollywood: They make a war movie based on another war movie,” Breasseale said. “It’s important to tell the full story, not a story based on a weird Vietnam-era idea of what the military is like.”

The Army has been helping filmmakers ever since it furnished aircraft and pilots for 1927’s “Wings” — winner of the first best picture Academy Award.

With military assistance, moviemakers get access to bases, ships, planes, tanks and Humvees. Military leaders also offer script advice.

Most movies involving the military have been summer action films, like this year’s “Iron Man,” which was made with Air Force help.

But Army officials are eager to work with filmmakers making serious movies about Iraq — the kind of pictures that have the power to shape the public’s view of the war and its warriors.

“In the past, have there been instances of disagreements with scripts? Yes,” said Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III, chief of Army public affairs. “The message I would send is: Give us a try.”

The problem for military officials is that some in Hollywood see their script advice as a subtle form of censorship or an attempt to spin the war.

Paul Haggis, writer and director of the Iraq war movie “In the Valley of Elah,” said he concluded that the Army was not interested in telling honest stories about the war or soldiers.

“They are trying to put the best spin on what they are doing,” Haggis said. “Of course they want to publicize what is good. But it doesn’t mean that it is true.”

Few directors focused on Iraq or Afghanistan have approached the military for help. Haggis did.

Haggis said that after he submitted his script, the producers received 21 pages of objections to parts of the film. Haggis, who did not review the notes, said his producers told him they amounted to a refusal to participate.

“We needed their help,” Haggis said. “If they had reasonable input I would have taken it. But I am not there to do publicity for the Army. I am there to do a movie that I see as true.”

Military officers say flatly that they do not censor films.

“There is no way that we are going to go in and to steamroll anyone’s vision,” said Phil Strub, the top Pentagon liaison to the film industry. “They will just tell us to drop dead and go away.”

Officials will ask for changes, or decline to participate, if they believe military policies or practices are grossly misrepresented — especially if a movie purports to be based on real-life events, as Haggis’ film did.

Breasseale says movies about Iraq and Afghanistan have been one-dimensional.

“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for nuance,” he said. “What sells a script to a studio is an easy concept, like ‘This guy is crazy because he has been at war.’ ‘Easy, I love it,’ the executive says.”

Breasseale is particularly critical of Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” a film released last year and based on a real-life incident in which U.S. soldiers raped an Iraqi girl, then murdered her and her family. Breasseale, who was serving in Iraq at the time of the incident, says De Palma’s movie intimates that all soldiers serving in Iraq are criminals.

“It was so wildly offensive to me that he would group all soldiers together,” Breasseale said.

De Palma did not respond to several requests for an interview.

Many Hollywood filmmakers reject the criticism of Iraq war movies. Haggis said he worked hard to shade his portrayals of soldiers, even those who commit heinous crimes.

“I did want to have a balanced and nuanced film,” Haggis said. “If anything, I tried to be empathetic. I try not to make these kids into villains.”

Iraq war movies as a group have not done well at the box office. Film critics have speculated that moviegoers see enough of war on the news or don’t care to watch films about an ongoing conflict. The Army suggests another possibility: The public is rejecting films that feel didactic or inauthentic.

“The public does not deal too well with being preached at,” Breasseale said.

The military has assisted with one Iraq war film that officials hope will be unlike “Redacted” or “In the Valley of Elah.”

“The Lucky Ones,” due out in the fall, follows three combat-scarred soldiers as they travel from New York to Las Vegas. The Army says the film — which stars Tim Robbins, an outspoken war critic — offers a more refined portrayal of soldiers.

During production, Robbins had a long conversation with Breasseale about what life might be like for his character, Staff Sgt. Cheever — what would motivate an enlisted man through two combat tours in Iraq.

“It captures the nuance. It is not a broad brush stroke or just about PTSD” — post-traumatic stress disorder — Breasseale said. “They manage to tell a story that is familiar but different.”

Producer Rick Schwartz agrees his film is unlike other war movies. It takes place almost entirely in America, and although it deals with the aftereffects of war, the word “Iraq” is never mentioned.

Schwartz hopes audiences draw their own conclusions about whether “The Lucky Ones” is pro-war or antiwar, he said.

Though some Iraq war movies have been influenced by post-Vietnam films, he said, makers of “The Lucky Ones” avoided Vietnam references.

“You want to be able look back in 20 years from now and say, ‘That’s what was going on then,’ ” Schwartz said. “We don’t want to make a metaphor for any other war.”

The tension between Hollywood and the Army may never fully dissipate.

But Breasseale is confident that he and officers who follow him will persuade more filmmakers to view them as a resource, not a censor.

“I am the last of the eternal optimists. I believe there is always a way to make things happen,” Breasseale said. “My job is to help filmmakers tell an accurate story and help the American public understand their Army. End scene.”

julian.barnes@latimes.com

After six years in Los Angeles, Arthur editor/publisher Jay Babcock has relocated Arthur’s editorial headquarters to Brooklyn, effective immediately.

Please direct all correspondence to do with editorial (not advertising!) matters to:

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The New York Times – July 6, 2008

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tablet’s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me.”

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone’s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 on the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was “hayeh,” or “live.” Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohl’s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. “There is one problem,” he said. “In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.”

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books, “Gabriel’s Revelation” and Mr. Knohl’s analysis deserved serious attention. “Here we have a real stone with a real text,” he said. “This is truly significant.”

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and “Gabriel’s Revelation” shows it.

“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.”

From the Los Angeles Times – June 8, 2008

Traffic taking a toll on psychic health, experts say
By Christopher Goffard

As society hurtles forward in an age of instant messaging and one-click shopping, motorists paradoxically find themselves moored between bumpers for hours a day, with a psychic toll that experts are still trying to tally.

Dr. Laura Pinegar, a Long Beach psychologist who treats depression and panic disorders, hears a growing number of complaints about traffic anxiety in her practice.

“If you’re stuck in traffic, there’s a feeling of being out of control,” she said. “You can be at a dead standstill on the freeway, but amped up from the day, thinking, ‘I gotta get home. I gotta get the kids. What if I don’t get to day care before it closes?’ ”

In several studies on commuter stress, UC Irvine psychologists Raymond Novaco and Daniel Stokols made a surprising finding. Though they hypothesized that long commutes would be more stressful for hard-charging, Type A personalities than for mellow Type Bs, it turned out that the opposite was true. The reasons: The hard-chargers exercised more control over their lives. They had picked homes they liked and jobs that absorbed them. In traffic, they thought about work. The mellow drivers, on the other hand, thought about being trapped in traffic.

According to one study, women with long-distance commutes who drive alone are in the demographic group that suffers the greatest commuting stress. Pinegar said she has had some success in encouraging drivers to think of their commute as a buffer zone between work and home. “Especially mothers with large families,” she said. “They think, ‘This is my time to mellow out, maybe listen to the radio, get books on tape.’ ”

How gridlock makes us feel depends on what we tell ourselves about the experience, says Ronald Nathan, a psychologist in Albany, N.Y., who has treated both perpetrators and victims of road rage.

“Some people say, ‘Great, I can kick back and listen to some music,’ ” Nathan said, but others feel like life is passing them by. “We can start to over-generalize by saying, ‘My life is worthless. All I am is somebody who gets into a piece of metal and goes from one place to another.‘”

For Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, a lifetime’s academic pursuit began 25 years ago when his wife told him his driving scared her. She pointed out that he switched lanes before he looked, took curves too fast and raged against other drivers.

The rebuke stung his pride but got him thinking — and led to his pioneering role in the small academic field of the psychology of driving. He began by asking his students to carry voice recorders to monitor their responses on the road, and learned that they were no strangers to rage — particularly when cut off, tailgated or stuck behind slow cars in the fast lane. James said studies have found little correlation between motorists’ personalities inside and outside of the car. Road rage can overtake those who are models of agreeability at home or at the office.

“People tell me, ‘I’m amazed at myself. I’m not an aggressive person. I’m not this way. Why do I feel this way?’ ” James said. He has concluded that asphalt aggression is not an anger-management problem but one of socialization — people absorb their driving mores in the back seat at an early age, watching grown-ups curse, pound the steering wheel and cut each other off.

Even as kids learn self-control on the playground, he said, they are taught the opposite on the road. “What we need is traffic emotions education starting in kindergarten,” he said. “You can’t just act the way you want.”

christopher.goffard@latimes.com