Spell-Bound – Moon of Alabama

April 5, 2005

Spell-Bound

by anna missed,
pigment incised into douglas fir (detail),

full, (130 KByte)

"I’ve been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It’s like hospital food. It’s all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women’s rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once."

Riverbend, April 03, 2005: American Media…

Posted by b on April 5, 2005 at 15:58 UTC | Permalink

Comments

*** OFF-TOPIC ***
today i had a funny encounter here in vienna while hunting for a new flat for my GF. we were waiting in the inner yard of a rather crappy old house for the person who had posted the flat for rent to come and show us the flat when two furtive-looking guys popped in, looked around, registered us – displeased – and disappeared.
after 10 minutes the woman arrived, with the two guys in tow. first i thought they were queer because of their mutual rapport, but looking a bit sharper, i realized they were americans, both about 170cm high, early to mid twenties, both obviously very well trained and muscular. both of them looked angry in a way uncharacteristic of here, the stronger one just had a mean scowl, the other one seemed to be worried. both avoided eye contact, they didnt speak german very well.
my GF and the guys went to check out the flat, i stayed at the entrance talking and flirting with the woman who was showing us the flat, what pissed my GF big time. two times i tried to engage the guys in conversation but they just wouldnt talk to me. after a while i finally succeeded in engaging one of the guys in some talk. i asked him straight away if he was american (obvious from his looks). the poor guy almost freaked out and started dissembling over not being american but having “grown up in korea and other places near americans”.
well. both guys were obviously not only americans but soldiers on the run, people with the crazed looks i’ve only seen in people who have seen war. they should have shaved their crappy goatees and gotten themselves some local attire to not stick out like a sore thumb.
i mention this all because since 2002 there is a very obvious american presence here, far beyond the UN employees and the sons and daughters of diplomats and the occassional tourist. i see and hear americans every day in the public transportation, in restaurants, in the weirdest and out-of-the-way places here. there are LOTS of americans here. too much for a non-existent boomtown syndrome and behaving in too atypical ways to be either tourists, business people or spooks (those are all easy to spot), the more typical groups represented in american communities around the world.
i’ve long suspected there is some kind of exile movement, but had until today never managed to engage anybody in an exchange of words. today i met my first couple of scared-to-death deserters. if these guys only knew that probably most people have sympathy for them they’d be a bit less scared. i, for my part, wish them well.
has anybody else from europe (or anywhere outside the US and canada) made similar observations ? are there any deserters reading this ?

Posted by: name | Apr 5 2005 17:41 utc | 1

“crappy goatees”
LOL!!! There goes the neighborhood.

Posted by: beq | Apr 5 2005 18:11 utc | 2

Very nice (again) anna missed. This one is an artifact. Another statement of our times. The cropping is good but I like the effect of the full image as a tablet left by history.

Posted by: beq | Apr 5 2005 18:18 utc | 3

Furthermore, I don’t understand the worlds fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it’s endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)

I often think of Riverbend and what we have done (are doing) to her country. This is adding insult to injury, bigtime.

Posted by: beq | Apr 5 2005 18:48 utc | 4

thanx beq, yes, tree rings.
Found riverbend post a nice mirror. Once had an African friend, studying medicine here in the states and (with africas rich musical traditionsin mind) developed this weird affection for Muzak. I guess it’s similar to that story of Nanuk (of the north) when upon being transported to New York City, and his first exposure to “civilization”, showed little interest in the tall buildings, electric lighting, or the trolly cars, but was instead just transfixed by seemingly inconesequential odd things like brass doorknobs. Unbeknownst to the anthropoligists, it was these small metal objects that figured directly into his own cultural experience, and so this is what captured his imagination — all the wizardry of western technology ment nothing compared to a doorknob.
It’s this same stupid myopia that leads this latest propaganda effort in Iraq(& the ME). Throwing the whole rotten American mass media culture indescriminatly at the ME — because “WE” are so enamored with it — like everything else we do there, will backfire culturally, by providing all the evidence of hypocracy and decadence necessary to further the cause of resistance.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 5 2005 19:23 utc | 5

thank you anna missed. again your work resonates deeply with me. the spectral present. the sacred of everyday life

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Apr 5 2005 20:51 utc | 6

I am no art critic anna missed, but there is something haunting about it, as with the earlier “wood intaglio” you showed us. somehow the human hand and the wood have something in common — texture, curved-ness, vulnerability — and the intruding image of the death-chopper is by contrast inhuman, abiotic, alien, scary… making the living and recently living tissue (hand, tree, the artist’s own hand?) seem so frail, so much at risk. but I suppose we all read our own mood into art. anyway, I like it, but I wouldn’t want it in my living room — it would make me sad.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 6 2005 1:23 utc | 7

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