Reason Magazine - Contributors

Artifact: Warhol Goes to China

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:16:00 EST

This looks a lot like a Godfrey Kneller portrait of William III painted in the 17th century, but it’s actually a copy of Kneller painted the other day in a sweatshop in Dafen, China. The painter, who received less than $1 for the portrait, is one of thousands of artists who have converged on Dafen’s many art factories, where they each paint up to 30 replicas during a 16-hour day. Dafen’s output is sold in places such as Wal-Mart, which recently commissioned 50,000 copies made in China. London’s Fulham Palace mounted a show of such canvases this year to call attention to “a shocking form of sweatshop labour.”

If only Andy Warhol could have attended. In the 1960s, Warhol called his Manhattan atelier The Factory, declared that he wanted to become an art “machine,” and made a theme of the mass reproduction of familiar images, from soup cans to the Mona Lisa.

Warhol, of course, was an ironist trying to subvert the status of art. There’s nothing subversive about Dafen’s factories, or its machine-like copyists. Yet China has outdone Warhol, dispensing with art’s status entirely.

By the way, Dafen’s copyists do the Mona Lisa, too, and some of them now copy contemporary Western painters. Maybe we’ll soon have Chinese versions of Warhol’s Mona Lisa silkscreens, thus dispensing with irony altogether.

The Politics of Pants

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:00:00 EST

Lion of the Desert, Fanatics In the Street

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

In an interview broadcast last Friday, Moustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born film director and producer, noted that he was "deeply proud of my American citizenship." Akkad was appearing on Mosaic, a program directed at the Arab Diaspora, and he was addressing—in Arabic—an audience of fellow Middle Eastern expatriates. Among America's special attributes, the filmmaker explained, was that its immigrant people had largely avoided the most extreme forms of nationalism that—and here he adopted a certain Levantine discretion—"we have seen lead to such excesses elsewhere."

Among the nationalisms that Akkad considered prone to excess was Arab nationalism, especially in its conspiracist form. In the aftermath of September 11, Akkad appeared on another program aimed at an Arab audience: a public-affairs show called Between the Lines hosted by a woman journalist with decidedly Arab nationalist sympathies. Her interview with Akkad may well have been one of the most difficult she ever did: Akkad was scornfully dismissive of the nationalist rhetoric in which she couched her questions, focusing on such matters as the persistent Middle East rumors of Jewish foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks as marks of a dysfunctional political culture.

By the time last week's Mosaic interview aired, however, Akkad was dead, a victim of the Nov. 9 suicide-bomb blasts in Amman, Jordan where he and his daughter Rima were attending the ill-fated Palestinian wedding at the Radisson.

The jihadis led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who have been attempting to re-establish the Caliphate on the corpses of Iraqi children lined up to receive candy, Iraqi mourners gathered at funerals, Iraqi women crowding Baghdad's outdoor produce markets, Iraqi worshippers assembled in mosques and churches, along with a great many other such victims, had added Jordanian wedding guests to their continuing slaughter of the innocent, the unarmed, and the unsuspecting.

Yet by killing Akkad, Zarqawi's jihadis managed to pull off a bloody act of particular stupidity, even for them. Although he is best known to U.S. audiences as the producer of the eight-film Halloween horror franchise, Moustapha Akkad had spent much of his long career in Hollywood—he came to LA from Allepo in the 1950s to study film—attempting to use the movie capital's power to reshape negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. As the liberal journalist Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed wrote on Monday in the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, "The irony is that Akkad, the very man who delivered a wonderful image of Islam, was killed by Al-Qaeda, the very organization that has defamed Islam and Muslims." There's actually a larger irony at work as well: Al Qaeda was not the first group of Islamists with whom Akkad found himself in conflict. The motif of a uniquely pro-Islam American moviemaker beset by Islamist foes marks his unusual careeer.

Al Rasheed's embrace of Akkad's career as a director was not merely a post-mortem courtesy; Akkad was celebrated for his efforts in his lifetime, too. For example, Jack G. Shaheen, the mass-communications scholar who has devoted himself to studying popular anti-Arab stereotypes, also praised Akkad's films about Islam and Arabs. In his 2001 book Reel Bad Arabs, a huge compendium of anti-Arab movie slurs going back nearly to Thomas Edison, Shaheen singles out for praise Akkad's two major works as a director: The Message (1976), and Lion of the Desert (1981).

For Shaheen, Lion of the Desert, a tale of Libyan resistance to Italian imperialism in the early 20th century, was one of the best films about Arabs ever made. Not only did it offer a sympathetic view of Islam as a humane faith, it also "illustrate[d] what viewers almost never see—brave young bedouins. . . ." Shaheen is especially pleased with a scene in which the film's star, Anthony Quinn, is teaching young village boys the meaning of the Koran. "Why," Quinn asks them, "do you think we begin every chapter of the Koran with 'God the merciful'?" Indeed, the producers of the TV show Mosaic liked the same scene enough to insert it during last week's interview. Akkad was especially proud of Lion of the Desert; the old one-sheet poster is seen framed on the office wall behind him throughout his final broadcast interview. He regarded the film as his homage—perhaps his reply—to David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.

However, the film was also a financial failure of historic proportions, costing some $36 million to produce, and recouping perhaps $1 million. Akkad blamed its failure on politics: Much of the production money came from Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, who was in particularly bad odor in those years, and the film quickly gained a ruinous reputation as Qaddafi propaganda, presumably stifling audience interest. In fact, a three-hour epic dealing with people and events almost totally unknown in the West was always going to have a difficult time finding its audience here.

On the other hand, Western audiences had become only too familiar with Akkad's previous directorial effort, The Message, about the origins of Islam. When that film opened in Washington, D.C. in 1976, a small group of Black American converts to Islam known as Hanafi Muslims (who lived in a small house adjacent to a huge uptown synagogue) reacted by storming several locations in the capital, including the national headquarters of B'nai Brith, and holding a large number of people hostage. Among their demands was that the film, which they had not seen but nevertheless regarded as blasphemous, be withdrawn. Several ambassadors from Muslim-majority countries converged on the hostage scenes to defuse the situation, and the theater chain that had booked the film cancelled the run.

Akkad was understandably dismayed. "I made the film to bring the story of Islam, the story of 700 million people, to the West," he later complained. The film troubled some other religious critics aside from the Hanafis, who assumed that the Prophet Mohammed would be portrayed in the film by an actor in the same the way that Jesus is portrayed in Christian Biblical epics. Such full pictorial representations are strictly proscribed by Islam. But not only is Mohammed never seen, Akkad claimed that his script had been approved by the clerics of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni religious institution, as well as by prominent Shiite clerics whom he approached prior to production. Saudi clerics were reluctant to sign off on such a project, probably because they regard movies as themselves in violation of the rules against pictorialization.

There was enough controversy about the film in its original location—Morocco—to persuade Akkad to move the production to Libya. That was no small matter, because Akkad was shooting two versions of the ambitious picture at the same time, one in English with Anthony Quinn, and another in Arabic with an entirely different cast. (The one cast member who appeared in both versions was the Arab-American character actor Michael Ansara, then known to American audiences for his portrayal of an American Indian on the popular TV Western Broken Arrow.) The Message apparently did reasonably well in many markets, though its disastrous Washington opening ruined its box-office chances in the U.S.

For all the attention he gave such subjects, Akkad himself lived a secular life in LA. A brief memoir from Andrew Breitbart, an LA schoolmate of Akkad's children, recalls growing up with the Akkad children. "In all the years I knew Malek, Rima and their older brother Tarik," he writes, "I never really thought about their family's obvious ethnic or religious background. I just remember Malek loved Led Zeppelin. Tarik worked the counter at Maria's Italian Kitchen while I delivered pizza. And Rima was cooler than most of the girls her age and had a most brilliant smile. . . At the time, and in retrospect, the Akkads were to Islam what many more of us at Brentwood School were to Judaism, highly secular, typical Americans."

Moustapha Akkad worked to make Breitbart's view a more common one, by seeking to "normalize" Arabs and Islam through popular movies. "Movies for me are not about art," he told Mosaic. "They are about entertainment." He sought to find the thrilling and the compelling and the humanizing in Arab history, an approach to the Arab past that is common enough on Arab TV. Indeed, he spent ten years trying to finance the project that he seemed to believe would cap his career, a big-scale retelling of the story of Saladin that would have starred Sean Connery. The only money that was being offered, however, was for yet more Halloween sequels.

"I cannot understand the continuing success of Halloween," he sighed to Mosaic. "Do you realize they want to make Halloween 9?"

Akkad did find compelling material about Islam and the Arabs. But along the way, he also encountered a string of critical clerics, hostage takers, and outraged fanatics, until at length he stepped into a hotel ballroom in Jordan where the angry clerics and the censors had been replaced by "martyrs" poised for a massacre.

Charles Paul Freund is a former senior editor of reason magazine.

Flood Insurance

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Massive tsunamis will wipe out the United States in 2007, according to Ziad Silwadi. The Palestinian Koranic scholar has become convinced that passages in the Koran dealing with the divine punishment of terrible sin are actually about the U.S. Silwadi recently published these findings because, as he puts it, "what is about to happen is extremely shocking and frightening." The Jerusalem Post reports that Silwadi's study "has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide."

Just as proud and arrogant Pharaoh was drowned by heavenly decree, Silwadi argues, so will proud and arrogant America be submerged for its sins, including genocide, slavery, and the use of atomic weapons. "International law penalizes such crimes," the Post quotes Silwadi as saying. "If no one on earth is capable of punishing [the U.S.], Allah was and remains able to do so. All these actions have been documented by Allah in a big archive called the Koran." To arrive at the exact year of this approaching catastrophe, Silwadi did what most end-of-the-world millennialists do: performed a series of arcane calculations involving verse counting.

The scholar seems to have mixed feelings about the matter. On one hand, he believes "the world would be better off with a U.S. that is not a superpower and that does not take advantage of weak nations." On the other hand, he expects the world economy to sink along with the United States. "The world will certainly lose a lot if and when this disaster occurs," he says, "because of the great services that American society has rendered to the economy, industry and science."�

Beyond Arabism

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Artifact: The Changing Face of Old St. Nick

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

This statue of Santa--in the style made familiar by Coca-Cola ads, and postured like a Salvation Army bell ringer--stands year-round in the main square of Demre, a town in Turkey. According to The Washington Post, it recently replaced a bronze statue of the original, fourth-century St. Nicholas, who worked his miracles in that ancient city and has lent his name to the modern commercial avatar.

Santa's arrival is a relief to many of the town's Muslims, despite his Salvation Army pose: They prefer the plaster commercial image to the bronze Christian saint. Many of Demre's tourists, however, are Orthodox Russians who revere Nicholas and often prayed before the old statue; they want it back. German Protestants, for their part, tend to applaud Santa for his American-style exuberance.

Back in the U.S., Santa is regularly criticized for leeching Christmas of spirituality. Some critics even charge that he is descended not from Nicholas but from the saint's folkloric and rather satanic red-clad servant: the Krampus. Perhaps the last word in this unexpected mix of Islam, Orthodoxy, commercialism, and devilry should go to one of Demre's town fathers. "Noel Baba [Father Christmas] is our citizen," one bureaucrat assured the Post. "We respect him. We embrace him."

Inciting Censorship

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has added a measure to the proposed Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill that would create a new offense: "incitement of religious hatred." This follows two notable events last year: a play called Bezhti that upset many Sikhs (the playwright went into hiding) and the BBC broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which prompted some Christians to burn their TV licenses. (British televisions are licensed by the state, which uses the proceeds from the fees to fund the BBC.)

English PEN, the writers' group, protested the proposed law and requested a meeting with the home secretary. Salman Rushdie complained too. In a letter to The Guardian, the author of The Satanic Verses noted that "the continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain."

Home Office Minister Fiona Mactaggart responded with a letter of her own: "For many years the law has established that free speech rights do not licence people to stir up hatred of others on the basis of their race. Now we are seeking to offer the same protection to people targeted because of their faith." Such sentiments prompted the author Timothy Garton Ash to suggest, in The Guardian, that "historians may look back on the last three decades of the 20th century as a high point of freedom of expression, never to be achieved again. There may be a net gain in other public goods--such as civic peace--but there'll be a net loss of liberty."�

Madrassas Molesters

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST

A minister in Pakistan's religious affairs department says there were 500 complaints last year of child sex abuse by clerics in madrassas, Muslim religious schools. Irfan Khawaja, writing for the Web site of the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, wonders why Western journalists have taken so little interest in a story that could be "to Pakistan (and by extension to the Muslim world) what the analogous story was to the Catholic Church a few years ago--or for that matter what Abu Ghraib has been for the U.S. occupation of Iraq."

"Both of the latter scandals have permanently scarred the institutions responsible for producing them," notes Khawaja. "The consequences of inflicting the same sorts of damage on the Pakistani madrasacracy are incalculable--incalculably good, that is."

Khawaja believes such allegations, if proved true, would offer some perspective on familiar claims of Western moral decadence and "the superior moral virtue of the Islamic East." Although such arguments are generally associated with Islamists, even Western moralists have been known to accept them. Robert Bork, for example, recently told The Washington Times that conservative Muslims "have good reasons to be very worried" about the spread of American pop culture, due to its baleful moral influence.

Khawaja, however, believes that it is the culture common to Islamic nations that is morally dysfunctional. He notes incidents of gang rape in Punjab, "mass rape in Darfur, female genital mutilation across parts of Muslim Africa, and honor killings of girls," concluding that "it would appear to be time for our holier-than-thou sermonizers to introspect a bit and focus on some of their own sexual hang-ups."

Let Freedom Sing

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST

In Iran women are not allowed to sing solo when men are present. But according to the Middle East news site Al Bawaba, "aggravated young Iranians (and there are many...) are tuning nowadays in to a mysterious voice that, according to them, symbolizes the notion of 'freedom.'"

That would be the enigmatic techno-pop diva known as DJ Maryam, whose traditional vocal trembles have been digitally intensified and who has inspired a widespread cult that mixes celebrity and martyrdom. Maryam's myth is that she has been imprisoned after being caught singing at a party. In some versions, the mullahcracy has cut out Maryam's tongue; in others, authorities have pulled out her teeth. Sometimes she has a wealthy father, but no amount of money can free her.

Not so, says DJ Maryam, who was interviewed on BBC Persian radio in October. According to reporter Shahla Azizi, "She told BBC that she is in fact an 18-year-old 'moloodi' (religious/mystic music) singer who only performs for women. She complained that her music had been recorded and disseminated without her permission, and that rumors of her arrest were unfounded....She likes [techno-pop] because it has movement in it, and that is what is needed for progress." Her real name, she told the BBC, "is Mahshar, daughter of the sun and the earth and sister of water and air."

Maryam's/Mahshar's fans interpreted the interview their own way, according to Azizi, concluding that she was forced to say what she did. One added, "She is one of us--just listen to her.

Labyrinths of Identity

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Artifact: Idol Hour

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Here is a pair of idols apparently acting out a forgotten pagan tale of Central Asia. Part of a collection housed in the Kabul Museum, the wooden statues were badly damaged in 2001 on the orders of the Taliban regime. At the same time that the giant Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed, the contents of the museum were reduced to rubble. A weeklong orgy of destruction in the museum involved thousands of ancient artifacts. Some of these objects had long been in private collections but were returned to Afghanistan in the 1970s.

Ironically, the presence of the idols in Kabul was once perceived as serving Islam politically. The life-sized figures had a role in the traditional religion of eastern Afghanistan; following the forced conversion of that area in the 19th century, they were brought to Kabul as trophies of war and symbols of Islam's triumph. Taliban clerics, of course, saw them as an offense to Islam.

The West's view of the region's artifacts has changed as well. The Greco-Buddhist mix that marks Gandharan art used to interest only specialists; now it's hot. The Bamiyan Buddhas used to be dismissed as grotesque; now they're sorely missed.

These once-obscure idols were restored by the Austrian government. They went back on display in December.

Cyberfatwa

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Blogging promises its more ambitious practitioners a chance to influence multitudes. For some there may even be a measure of renown. But as they begin to reach audiences comparable to those of traditional journalists, bloggers are also finding that they face some of traditional journalists' problems.

Repressive governments figured out fairly quickly that weblogs could be as threatening as the conventional press. In recent months, in addition to arresting several reporters, Iran's fundamentalist regime has blocked access to hundreds of dissident blogs and other political sites.

Now come threats of murder from equally repressive freelancers. An Iranian-Canadian blogger named Hossein Derakhshan wrote in November that the blog Islamic Army "has threaten [sic] a big list of Iranian blogger [sic] for their 'insults' to Allah, Prophet Mohammad and other Shia Imams." Derakhshan, who maintains blogs in English and Farsi, noted that Islamic Army has "picked particular posts from my Persian blog, in which they think I've insulted the God, and other sacred concepts of Islam and therefore, quoting from a Quranic verse, I deserve to be killed."

There are many names on the threat list, but Derakhshan is at the top. Although he writes from the seeming safety of Canada, incidents such as the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by an Islamist extremist suggest his concern is warranted.

Still, Derakhshan isn't sure if the threat is serious. He even asked his readers, "What do you think?" Most of them suggested he go to the Mounties.�

Artifact: No Through Street

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Here is the new pedestrian plaza in front of the White House. The space used to be a typically busy downtown street, but after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing it was "temporarily" closed to traffic. 9/11 sealed its fate as a city street.

First Lady Laura Bush formally "reopened" this stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in November, but its permanent transformation into a plaza is really another stage in the closing of what was once the world's most open capital. Many D.C. streets are being narrowed or obliterated, and the city's once-grand open spaces are increasingly interrupted by concrete barriers, chain-link fences, bollards, and armed guards. The Washington Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, has argued that the experience of Washington now evokes fear, and that "the openness that must be the hallmark of a working democracy" is being lost.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the same concerns about the capital in the wake of September 11. Speaking at a symposium on security in November 2001, the former senator noted that "architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were." Surely, he added, "ours must be openness and fearlessness in the face of those who hide in the darkness. A precaution, yes, sequester, no."�

Artifact: Shock Me, Amadeus

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Years ago, this nearly toothless skull was removed from public display after complaints that it not only screamed but also emitted music. A nice story, given that the skull is reputedly Mozart's. Now the mysteries of the skull--devoid of life since 1791 and housed in Salzburg's Mozarteum since 1901--may be nearing a solution.

Archaeologists believe they have recovered the bones of Mozart's niece from the family vault and will perform DNA tests. If the controversial skull turns out to be genuine, it may provide information about Mozart's often difficult life and perhaps even his notorious death. As viewers of the 1984 film Amadeus will recall, the composer has long been rumored to have been murdered.

Not everyone is pleased. Britain's Guardian reports that officials in Salzburg, the Austrian city that "attracts thousands of tourists every year on the strength of its Mozart connection," have complained about researchers disturbing and removing the family's remains. Salzburg may not welcome bad news about its bizarre but valuable holding.

Bones like these once constituted the most macabre of markets. The skulls of such composers as Hadyn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt were all valuable collectibles at one time. None of those, however, was ever heard to scream.?

Allah My Children

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Every Ramadan, Arabic-language TV is dominated by loudly hyped, month-long soap operas. Last Ramadan, however, one of the more heavily advertised series, the Qatari-produced Road to Kabul, disappeared from the schedules of every TV service that had purchased the right to show it. The apparent reason: A Web site that often features messages from Islamist extremists carried a threat against everyone involved with the show.

"We swear to the great God that if we see in the series anything other than the honorable reality of the Taliban...we will assault all those who participated in this sullied malice," said the posting. "We direct our strong warning to all who participated in producing this series, whether an actor, producer or cameraman."

The series deals with an Afghan woman exile living in England who falls in love with an Arab. She eventually returns to Afghanistan, only to confront the harsh rule of the Taliban. There had been some anticipation that the series might spark a broad conversation about the role of women and the interpretation of Koranic law.

The show was scheduled to be shown by Jordanian TV, which canceled it at the request of the Qatari producers. Two other TV services, Moroccan TV and the Gulf-based MBC, showed the first eight episodes but were forced to stop the series when the Qataris refused to supply them with the rest of the episodes.

The Qataris denied that the threats were a factor in their decision, citing technical problems. But technical problems are an unlikely reason to pull any of these Ramadan series, which are often riddled with production deficiencies. For example, the opening episode of an Egyptian series about an Alexandrian wheeler-dealer went on the air with an incomplete sound mix, so that the dialog in important expository scenes was completely inaudible under a blaring track of incidental music.

Indeed, despite the attention the Ramadan soaps enjoy, they are often still being written, shot, and edited during Ramadan itself. That can result in a precipitous decline in the quality of the later episodes. In the case of one of last year's more popular series--dealing with Hezbollah's war against Israel--the producers miscalculated the pace of their narrative. The result was that the series ended with the story still unresolved, to the deep consternation of the audience that had been following it faithfully each night for a month.�

Free the Nile

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Lebanon's Daily Star reported last summer that Egyptian parliamentarians have formed a new liberal political party. Hizb al-Ghad, or the Party of Tomorrow, says it stands for "a free-market economy, respect for the rule of law, good governance, women's empowerment, freedom of expression, and an open relationship with the West."

The new party's secretary general is Mona Makram-Ebeid, a Harvard-educated Coptic Christian. Makram-Ebeid told The Daily Star she has high hopes for the future of the party and for liberalism in Egypt. "The prevailing feeling in the country is that change is inevitable," she said. "It is out of frustration that a powerful wave of nostalgia in Egypt has emerged for the liberal period of the country's politics."

That period lasted from 1920 until the catastrophic rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his poisonous variety of Pan-Arabism in 1952. The new party is specifically evoking the politics of the time. "The achievements and aspirations of Egypt's liberal period have inspired many Egyptians," Makram-Ebeid said. Hizb al-Ghad "does not believe that change should be gradual, as announced by the government. The party rejects the claim that democracy would only empower Islamist extremists. On the contrary, deferring change is extremely dangerous."

Egypt has been under "emergency" rule for nearly 25 years, and under current law, the country's political parties must be licensed by the state. The new party was turned down three times by officials, and Makram-Ebeid said her organization would push for� reform of the political laws. In late October, however, Egypt officially recognized Hizb al-Ghad. �

Artifact: Dirty Pictures

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

See those happy, eye-catching ducks on the wall? Are they art? Or is this, as authorities in the British city of Leeds have complained, mere public vandalism?

Before deciding, you should know two things. First, the ducks haven't been painted on--the image was created by carefully removing grime. The ducks' outlines are the clean spots.

Second, they're paid advertising.

The images are created with water and a shoe brush.? This process is the specialty of the British street artist Paul Curtis, who calls himself Moose. Moose says his company, Symbollix ("refacers of the 21st century"), is "a completely ecologically driven guerilla-style operation." It uses walls, tunnels, and sidewalks to bring temporary ads "literally up to the doorstep of the target audience."

Moose has done refacing campaigns for such clients as Microsoft and Britain's Channel 4; the ducks were created for a shoe store. There's a certain poetic justice in his work, Moose believes, because "the corporations who help make the dirt are getting me to clean their names in it."

Moose cleans more onto walls than ads. He says he's gone "wherever the graffiti has taken me," including the occasional message to his girlfriend. The graffiti will soon bring him to the United States, where he plans to set up a similar operation.?

Queen of Persia

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

The first rock group to have its music officially authorized for sale by Iran's ruling mullahs is, of all acts, Queen. The band, popular in the 1970s and early '80s, was fronted by the late Freddie Mercury, a gay icon who died of AIDS in 1991. Mercury was of Iranian descent--his real name was Faroukh Bulsara--and was reported to be a practicing Zoroastrian.

Homosexuality is illegal under Iran's theocratic government, and unlike Christianity and Judaism, Zoroastrianism is not a "protected" religion under Koranic law. The regime has done what it can to Islamize the band's image. The official compilation of the group's hits that was made available on cassette this summer includes a leaflet explaining the supposed meaning of the lyrics. "Bohemian Rhapsody," for example, is described as the tale of a man who has accidentally committed murder and sold his soul to Satan. Before his execution, according to the leaflet, he calls to God in Arabic ("Bismillah!"), thus regaining his soul. Also on the cassette are such songs as "The Miracle" and "I Want to Break Free." No love songs were included.

Western music has long been available on Iran's black market. Persepolis, Marjane's Satrapi's 2003 comic-book memoir of growing up in Tehran, features a sequence set along the capital's Ghandi Avenue, where pop-culture vendors are offering tapes of Abba, "Estevie Vonder," "Jikael Mackson," and others, along with such products as lipstick, chocolate, and pantyhose. Though illegal, black-market cassettes are plentiful enough to have become the foundation of a lively Persian rock scene. Iranian bands (including many inside that country) can be heard playing various syncretic styles at tehranavenue.com.

Severed Heads

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

No Through Street

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

Want to take a stroll in front of the White House? Pennsylvania Avenue has been "reopened," so feel free. But better hurry: It's about to be shut down again.

Tuesday, Laura Bush formally opened the stretch of the Avenue that runs in front of the White House, declaring that it was "marvelous" that pedestrians could once again use the famous and now redesigned block. My old friend Ben Forgey, the Washington Post's architecture and design critic, didn't see it that way. He thought that the plaza, with its guardhouses unfinished and still lacking 100 planned elm trees, "looked distinctly unmarvelous." In fact, the area struck him as "enormously barren and somehow sad."

Actually, you can say that about much of the central capital, which is being reshaped by security concerns. Some streets have been narrowed, others closed, and a few obliterated. The experience of approaching the city's famous monumental destinations no longer consists of wandering the intentionally grand (perhaps too grand) spaces intended by Pierre L'Enfant and the designers who came later; it is now an adventure in confronting chain-link fences, cement obstacles, bollards, and wary armed guards. Places like the U.S. Capitol are preparing "visitors' centers" that are underground, so as better to control crowds; visitors in the past would gather in the Capitol's Rotunda.

For that matter, getting into many government buildings is an ordeal not unlike boarding a plane. Indeed, getting into Washington itself, if you fly into Reagan National, can be a peculiar ordeal of its own, especially if you're flying across an international border. Passengers to Reagan must gather in distant terminals far from any other human activity, and are subjected to repeated personal searches and wandings.

Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, thinks that the experience of Washington now evokes fear. Writing just before the election, Hiatt was concerned that "the openness that must be the hallmark of a working democracy" was being lost. He was pleased by the reopening of Pennsylvania Avenue, but knew that "for every torturous step forward, somewhere else another street is closed, another block seized, another hundred feet of hideous fencing unspooled. And once a street is closed, it does not reopen; no one dares confront the security bureaucracy, knowing that if a bomb does go off, any memo favoring access will be waved as an indictment."

As for the Avenue, it's taken nearly a decade to dress up this stretch of town. Pennsylvania between 15th and 17th Streets, once a typically busy downtown street, was closed to vehicular traffic in 1995, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing (as was a pair of intersecting side streets). Its problem was that it was rather too democratic a thoroughfare; Thomas Jefferson himself declared that the street should be cut through what was originally intended as a grand presidential park. (Cutting the street through the grounds created Lafayette Square.) Eventually, the street ran right by the president's front door and past the Treasury Department to the east and the over-ornate Old Executive Office Building on the west. Indeed, it ran right under the windows of Blair House across the street, where visiting heads of state often stay. Local D.C. officials had hoped that the federal agencies that had closed the street would one day relent, but they were kidding themselves. After September 11, everyone knew that the Avenue would probably never reopen again. (On the other hand, things could be even worse: The stretch of E Street that used to run past the South front of the White House doesn't even exist anymore.)

For most of this period, pedestrians could still walk around in the area, but there was no pleasure in it. Lafayette Square was still welcoming, but the Avenue itself was empty of everything but barriers and guards. Still asphalted and painted for the traffic that no longer passed, the area had the inescapable feel of abandonment.

Now, the street is no longer dominated by its security measures, and presumably future visitors who won't know it any other way could find the area appealing, especially when they finally plant the trees. The plaza may yet become lively in its own way. In the meantime, the "openness" Fred Hiatt wrote about will have become a matter of memory.

Recently, a former aide to the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan reminded Post readers of something Moynihan had said in the days after Sept. 11. The former New York senator and academic had been involved with Washington planning and revitalization for many years, and in the wake of the attacks he took part in a symposium on "Freedom Without Fortresses: Shaping the New Secure Environment."

"[A]rchitecture," he said, "is inescapably a political art and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were... Surely ours must be openness and fearlessness in the face of those who hide in the darkness. A precaution, yes, sequester, no."

Anyway, take that walk on Pennsylvania Ave. soon, because an inauguration is coming, and this one promises to feature the most stringent inaugural security measures ever taken in the city. They'll be closing the Avenue to prepare for it.

Artifact: Stretching Condoms

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

Nice hat, no? It has a sort of post-Carmen Miranda quality, in that its orchid-like appearance is garish enough to make you look without being so garish as to make you laugh. Its petals even have a certain gleam, as if this "orchid" had been picked in the midst of a tropical rainfall. That luster is actually the effect of the latex condoms that constitute nearly the whole of this fashion item.

Yes, condoms. And not just any condoms, but condoms that have been distributed free throughout India for population control and AIDS prevention. Millions of these free rubbers, reports London's Telegraph, "are being used for other purposes such as waterproofing roofs, reinforcing roads and even polishing saris." India's military uses them to protect tank barrels against dust. (The hat was made in Thailand, where many of the condoms have ended up.)

Health authorities understandably complain that the condoms are not "properly utilized." Yet such unauthorized use is a familiar economic phenomenon that's at the heart of innovation. People create products for one use; consumers often find alternatives. Such innovations often increase the value of a product (especially if it's "free"), so there should be little wonder that many condoms are diverted to spontaneous markets of their own. Except for the hat: That's a surprise.

The Big O

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

THE STORY OF O, a once-notorious French novel about a woman, an obsession, and a lot of whips and chains, turns 50 this year. To mark the occasion, France has included the work on an official list of national triumphs.

"Official" recognition of a work of outright erotica as a "national triumph" may seem perverse, but The Story of O has earned its celebration. The novel, attributed to one "Pauline Reage," finally paid off centuries of French-language erotic tedium with an acknowledged classic.

No nation has enjoyed a greater reputation for producing and tolerating such works -- from the 17th century "whore dialogues" that swept Europe to the original Paris edition of Joyce's Ulysses -- than France. Philosophe Denis Diderot penned an 18th-century novel featuring talking vaginas, while poet Guillaume Apollinaire spiced up one of his short works with incest and urine fetishism. And then there's Marquis de Sade.

Most such works were written rapidly, anonymously, and for the money, and they show it. O, however, is a different matter. Author "Reage" lent her masochist heroine both eloquence and insight; the character communicates not only her humiliations but also the pleasure she takes in submitting to them. In short, the work transcends the fetish at its center. A common reaction to the novel is to express warm admiration despite a stated disinterest in sadism or bondage.

"Pauline Reage" was identified 10 years ago as Dominique Aury, a woman of distinction in French letters. She wrote the book in her 40s to prove to a doubtful lover (Jean Paulhan of the French Academy) that a woman could write effective pornography. Paulhan was impressed, arranged its publication, and even wrote a notoriously opaque introduction. French authorities cracked down on O when it appeared, and the book was long sold surreptitiously.

Talk Like an Egyptian

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

In August The Washington Post ran a front-page story about the rising popularity of anti-American themes in Egyptian pop culture, offering as its lead example the latest work by Egypt's best-known filmmaker, Youssef Chahine. Entitled Alexandria...New York, the movie is "a cinematic divorce paper," according to the Post. "Chahine said he had long admired the United States and its biggest city," wrote reporter Daniel Williams, "but now he has made a film brimming with resentment."

Is that so? Spare me Chahine's supposedly lost admiration. The last time I saw Chahine take up the subject of the U.S. he once "admired" so much, he portrayed the country as an old whore pandering to Jews.

That's the concluding scene of his 1978 "masterpiece," Alexandia...Why? That film, which attempts a series of parallel plots, offers the story of a young Egyptian actor in the 1940s who wants to come to the U.S. At the movie's end, he's on a ship approaching New York. But when Chahine shows us a close-up of the Statue of Liberty (the shot involves an actress in costume), she turns out to be an overage, overweight, overpainted harlot, and she's welcoming not the Egyptian student but an arriving group of European Hasidic Jews, complete with long side curls.

The whorish Ms. Liberty laughs lasciviously, exposing her mouthful of bad teeth, while a Jewish chant is playing on the soundtrack. That's what Chahine thought of the U.S. some 25 years ago.

Yet in its effort to demonstrate that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has turned the whole Arab world, including such one-time "admirers," against the U.S., the Post allowed Chahine to strike a self-serving pose of regretful lost love.

Here's a sample passage: "'I don't know if this is a final divorce,' Chahine, 78, said as he smoked cigarettes against the wishes of attentive aides. 'I think about the friends I have had in America every day. It was in New York where I saw the greatest plays. I saw Sinatra at the Paramount.'" Please.

Most of the rest of the Post's story was about singer Shaaban Abdel Rehim and his anti-American songs. Abdel Rehim, a former wedding singer who has cornered the subgenre of paranoid hate pop, is pretty useful to these hand-wringing "they-hate-us" press accounts. In March 2003, for example, Post reporter Anthony Shadid filed a story from Jordan that was also about inflamed Arab anti-Americanism, and his story was mostly about Abdel Rehim.

The singer is best known for his 2001 toe tapper "I Hate Israel!" (which was followed up by something called "I Will Quit Smoking!"). What do Arabs think of him? He's so admired in the region that, the last time I looked, he couldn't find an actress to co-star in a proposed movie. Last year a long string of actresses protected their own careers by publicly refusing to work with him. Indeed, if the Mideast's celebrity press is to be believed, one Egyptian woman singer actually sued a pair of journalists who called her the "female Rehim." Many Arabs may well embrace the anti-American themes in Rehim's music, but much of his own celebrity springs from the outsized persona he projects: that of an aggressive slob.

Yeah, there's anti-Americanism in Egyptian pop culture. Stop the presses! Yet last Ramadan, Aunt Noor, a serial drama that starred actress Nabila Obeid, drew a huge audience with a quite friendly view of the U.S. Why doesn't somebody at the Post call her? The noted playwright Ali Salem remains an important figure despite his anti-Arabist views. Why not call him? The popular Moroccan singer Samira Sayeed has called for an end to mindless anti-American lyrics. Where's her voice?

For that matter, a call to Damascus will get you the Syrian actor and writer Yasser Al-Azmeh, who has actually made anti-American posturing among Arabs the subject of his stinging satire. Al-Azmeh could no doubt have fun at the expense of a self-flagellating -- and posturing -- U.S. press, too.

Sex, Politics, Religion, and Egypt

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Look, it's genuinely heartening that the Middle East's liberals are organizing themselves, demonstrating against their suffocating regimes, issuing manifestos, and otherwise working for reform. The same is true for those exasperated Arab liberals who have been writing angry articles and essays in the region's press and online denouncing the desiccated pathologies of Arabism. These are courageous people who deserve admiration and support. There is clearly a long-term effort under way to loosen the Arabist stranglehold that has been paralyzing the region's political discourse since at least the days of Gamal Abdul Nasser.

But if you want to know how complicated it can be to address the region's social and political issues while navigating its sensitive cultural context, you have to put down the op-ed page and make a quick trip with me to the movies. This summer, an exceedingly controversial Egyptian film entitled B'heb al Sima (I Love Movies) finally opened in Cairo. That film attempted to mix sex, politics, and religion, with the result that its completion has been delayed for years due to a combination of budget and censorship problems. Now that it's out, the controversies swirling around it have only become ever more complex.

According to the region's entertainment press, B'heb al Sima is set in 1960s Cairo, and deals with a family whose patriarch is a religious fanatic. He refuses to let his artist wife show her work or to allow his son see any movies; indeed, the father fasts for religious reasons some 200 days a year. He even regards it as sinful to have sex on any of these fast days. One result is of his fanaticism is that his unhappy wife has become involved in an adulterous affair. We're already in dangerous territory, but things get much more complicated. There are kissing scenes, bubble-bath scenes, and even a scene featuring a fight during a religious ceremony, any of which would normally have been enough to make a contemporary Egyptian film controversial.

But never mind those. In one scene, the unhappy wife mounts her fasting husband, hoping—in vain—to arouse him. In the meantime, the family's radio is blaring away in the background. What's on? It's not Umm Kulthum singing one of her sad, 45-minute epics. It's no less than President Nasser, delivering a famous speech in which he takes responsibility for Egypt's ignominious defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, and offers to resign. I will leave you to contemplate this remarkable contrapuntal presentation of various Egyptian frustrations.

No wonder, you may be thinking, that such a film is controversial; it's a wonder that it was released at all. Actually, no. The real problem faced by the film is that the family portrayed in it is Coptic Christian, which has deeply offended a significant portion of Egypt's Coptic community. (Copts are perhaps 10 percent of Egypt's population.) A group of 40 litigants, many of them clergy, charges the film with defaming all Copts, and demands that 15 scenes be cut. The only court to rule on the film thus far has decided it had no jurisdiction, enabling a belated release. Unhappy Copts say they are pursuing the matter in other courts, charging that the film insults them and citing a notoriously ambiguous Egyptian law that forbids "injury to the unity of the nation." Meanwhile, the film has been screened publicly.

Why tell such a story about Copts in the first place? Well, both the director, Osama Fawzi, and the film's screenwriter grew up in the Coptic community they are portraying, so there are personal reasons to set their story there; the film may well draw on their childhood experiences. There may also be political reasons to tell such a story. As one Christian moviegoer told Reuters, "If the movie was about Muslims it would have been banned immediately." That may be true; Fawzi thus had an opportunity to address such difficult issues as Egyptian religious fanaticism, sexual mores, and controversial politics, and to get away with the whole package by setting it outside Islamic Egypt. Plus, he's a Copt himself, so it's okay, right?

Wrong. Fawzi, you see, isn't a Copt anymore. He married a Muslim woman, and necessarily converted to Islam. That too has become a charge against him. According to his accusers, he's supposedly a Muslim fanatic who hates his former community, and has used this film to denigrate it. While I have no idea what Fawzi thinks of Copts at large, that charge seems empty. Not only does the screenwriter remain a Copt, but the film has attracted Coptic defenders who see the real controversy as involving freedom of expression.

In other words, there are simultaneous debates about this single film. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has observed, "Now there is a double-barreled argument: among the Copts over the degree to which the community has or will be hurt; and between the Copt opponents and the Egyptian culture ministry, which approved the screening of the film."

Nor does the matter end even there. The Copts' allegations against the film matter, because in the past the U.S. has criticized the treatment of religious minorities in Egypt. In fact, as Haaretz notes, a considerable sum of U.S. aid money to Egypt can potentially be tied up on such grounds. U.S. delegations visit countries that receive American aid, and report to Congress on just such issues. In the past, the delegation that has visited Egypt has included Jewish members, which has suggested to some Egyptians that its U.S. aid money is tied up in a Zionist plot. Anyway, there's apparently been some concern that the Egyptian government could yet prohibit the film in order to avoid a negative report to Congress. No one that I know of has yet suggested that the film is really a part of a Zionist plot to embarrass and impoverish the Egyptian state, but given the debate so far, the lack of such a charge is almost disappointing.

B'heb al Sima itself features a happy ending. The ascetic patriarch has a reverse conversion, puts his fanaticism aside, and even makes love to his wife. By the end of the film, the family actually goes to the movies. Let's hope that whatever film they see had a less complicated history than does the one that tells their own story.

Artifact: Food Fight

cpf@reason.com (Charles Paul Freund) — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Here's W ketchup, perfect for pouring over freedom fries. "You don't support Democrats," says the tag line, "why should your ketchup?" The brand was born, recalls the manufacturer's chairman, when a group of friends found that reaching for Heinz condiments was spoiling their barbecues. The company insists that W stands for Washington.

Political foods used to be a novelty in the U.S. There was a 1964 campaign soft drink named Goldwater, for example, and its Democratic answer, Johnson Juice. The 1970s saw the short-lived Billy Beer, named for Jimmy Carter's hapless brother (who actually drank Pabst). In recent years, though, political branding has become a niche of sorts. The Iraq invasion saw a wave of anti-Saddam hot sauce brands. Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream outfit, is one of numerous companies to associate their products with liberal causes. In response, some conservatives are now producing Star Spangled Ice Cream, available in such flavors as Nutty Environmentalist and I Hate the French Vanilla.

In fact, W ketchup itself has inspired an alternative. A product called Bush Country Ketchup accuses the W brand of centrist politics, and of merely "masquerad[ing] as a conservative condiment." Bush Country markets itself with the tagline, "Making sure Kerry won't ketchup to W."