The Storyteller at ICI

by Sarah Stephenson on February 8, 2010

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Two further artists investigate the combination of the mundane and the communal during a time of war. In Lamia Joreige’s piece Objects of War from 2006, interviewees discuss an object which represented their personal experience of the Lebanese War, in many cases something as simple as a radio or a key. Brought together, these items detail the shared experiences of many through the everyday. Daily life is also the focal point of Steve Mumford’s twelve watercolor sketches; in one, Mumford captures “Iraqi contractors waiting to be paid on a Friday morning FOB Thunder, March 2004″ while another depicts street trading as usual.

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Leonard Cohen at Isle of Wight

by Blythe Sheldon on February 5, 2010
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Cohen’s 4 am introduction creates a suspension of disbelief for both his concert and Lerner’s production; a performer so in command of his charms that, looking back, his mastery of the crowd seems almost preordained. Cohen is unobtrusive, yet firm. He does not hustle for attention. Even as a songwriter, he circles around the same melancholic themes. The flower children lit their matches and stared. “I would love to see those matches flare. I know that you know why you’re lighting them,” he continued, and broke into “Bird On A Wire.”

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Interview with Julia Weist

by Idiom on February 3, 2010
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And yet, once the book was published there were these gems related to its distribution that I had to give voice to, such as when I was outed on a chicklit book forum pretending to be a fan of the book and concealing my role as author. The forum administrator who suspended me was named FunkyTown, and the exchange became one of the vignettes performed in relation to the work. Another centered around an Amazon user named “soulnourisher” who identified Sexy Librarian as number 3 on his list “Ultimate Guide to Literary Soul Nourishment for Librarians” (other compendiums included “Ultimate Guide to New Modern Day Female Clerical Sleuths,” and “Ultimate Guide to Faith Based Scrapbooking”).

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Art and Culture in Haiti after the Quake

by Hong-An Truong on February 2, 2010
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To be sure, cultural objects, and the discourse surrounding them, have consistently served as pawns in our civilization’s long, ugly history of war and violence. Consider the collections of artifacts and antiquities housed in major historical museums across the Western world. These collections can be seen as a record of imperialist desire and the power to steal – often in the name of science and preservation. A weapon of nation-building, art objects are inextricably bound up with a kind of global ordering. They allow nations to claim history and shape it, to locate themselves via friend and foe alike.

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On the passing of J.D. Salinger

by Idiom on February 1, 2010
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I read Catcher In the Rye around the time when postwar coming-of-age novels were required elementary school reading (possibly 6th grade?) and I remember being struck by Caulfield’s off-kilter slang and vaguely psychopathic tendencies—as well as being shocked by the fact he could simply run away without fear of parental reproach. But even as I admired the novel, it never really resonated, and until college I dismissed many of its advocates as teenage fanboys happy to find a justification for hating their daddies in one of literature’s most overexposed rebels.

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