photo: Richard Harris
It's Art Brussels this weekend which according to them "...has the reputation of being Europe's leading cutting-edge contemporary art fair. A must-see event for every art lover!"
Drome Magazine "The contemporary art magazine based on intergrity and visions" has a "project space" on the floor below us and for Art Brussels they are holding an exhibition of the work of Italian artist Emanuele Becheri. In this case the work is moldy magazines that he discovered in London while on a residency programme there. We dropped by for the opening cocktail on Tuesday. Tomorrow night is the Special Opening Night.
It's Art Brussels this weekend which according to them "...has the reputation of being Europe's leading cutting-edge contemporary art fair. A must-see event for every art lover!"
Drome Magazine "The contemporary art magazine based on intergrity and visions" has a "project space" on the floor below us and for Art Brussels they are holding an exhibition of the work of Italian artist Emanuele Becheri. In this case the work is moldy magazines that he discovered in London while on a residency programme there. We dropped by for the opening cocktail on Tuesday. Tomorrow night is the Special Opening Night.
photo: Richard Harris
The "fossilized" magazines framed and hung.
The "fossilized" magazines framed and hung.
photo: Richard Harris
It's as if the Judith Millers and the Dick Cheneys had never created that unholy alliance dedicated to selling the idea of WMD as reality so as to persuade a gullible public that war was necessary. Are people's memories really that short that they are all ready to believe all this nonsense about a Korean threat?
Tom Engelhardt:
"The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising. The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.
Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.
It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult. If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment...
...And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001. Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for. (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.)
So let’s consider those enemies briefly. Is there a major state, for instance, that falls into this category, like any of the great warring imperial European powers from the sixteenth century on, or Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, or the Soviet Union of the Cold War era? Of course not.
There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife. There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II. It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick. Iraq and Iran were then enemies. (Only in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.) And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them. Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler..."
I'm usually a big fan of Tom Engelhardt and he starts out well with this article but then he chickens out on the WTC attacks. Anyway, click here for the full article and all the links.
It's as if the Judith Millers and the Dick Cheneys had never created that unholy alliance dedicated to selling the idea of WMD as reality so as to persuade a gullible public that war was necessary. Are people's memories really that short that they are all ready to believe all this nonsense about a Korean threat?
Tom Engelhardt:
"The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising. The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.
Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.
It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult. If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment...
...And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001. Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for. (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.)
So let’s consider those enemies briefly. Is there a major state, for instance, that falls into this category, like any of the great warring imperial European powers from the sixteenth century on, or Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, or the Soviet Union of the Cold War era? Of course not.
There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife. There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II. It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick. Iraq and Iran were then enemies. (Only in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.) And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them. Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler..."
I'm usually a big fan of Tom Engelhardt and he starts out well with this article but then he chickens out on the WTC attacks. Anyway, click here for the full article and all the links.
photo: Richard Harris
This weekend was the Seventh Annual Hopla! Festival, the Brussels festival of the circus arts.
As usual it was lots of fun as the Saint Catherine neighborhood was taken over Saturday and Sunday by a mess of performances. But first, on Friday, there was a sort of graduation rite for some of the students at one of the Brussels circus schools (Brussels has become an international center for circus arts schooling, probably a result of the fact that Dragone of Cirque du Soleil fame is Belgian). One after the other they cross over the canal on a wire to the encouragements of their teacher.
This weekend was the Seventh Annual Hopla! Festival, the Brussels festival of the circus arts.
As usual it was lots of fun as the Saint Catherine neighborhood was taken over Saturday and Sunday by a mess of performances. But first, on Friday, there was a sort of graduation rite for some of the students at one of the Brussels circus schools (Brussels has become an international center for circus arts schooling, probably a result of the fact that Dragone of Cirque du Soleil fame is Belgian). One after the other they cross over the canal on a wire to the encouragements of their teacher.
photo: Richard Harris
The Manneken Pis is not in the Saint Catherine neighborhood but he did honor the Holpla! Festival by wearing his clown costume for 9am to 6pm on Saturday. That is quite the tribute since most often he wears a costume for three or four hours tops.
The Manneken Pis is not in the Saint Catherine neighborhood but he did honor the Holpla! Festival by wearing his clown costume for 9am to 6pm on Saturday. That is quite the tribute since most often he wears a costume for three or four hours tops.