In the 2019 documentary ‘Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land,’ directed by Gilad Baram we get to see a photographer with the perfectionism of a master and the patience of a saint. Koudelka has lived a life of discomfort and often danger for his art.
The project is so daft it is touching: an attempt at nothing less than a comprehensive visual catalog of the entire material culture and socio-familial life of the Vietnamese as they were then, an attempt initiated by a young man in the colonizing machinery meant to drag the Vietnamese into a Western conception of modernity.
There is much of interest in the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough.
Harvard, which has America’s largest university endowment, of at least $53 billion, might be seen as best-suited to defend its autonomy from federal demands, but then that is one of the very reasons it is a primary target.
No one was protesting in downtown Champaign, with its popular restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. No MAGA believer showed up with an assault rifle, as someone did in Indiana, or with a Nazi flag, as a man did in St. Louis’s Metro East.
The U.S. administration, destabilizing and unjustifiable in nearly all its actions, said Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “at its depth comes down to hero worship”—of Putin, Musk, Trump—but in the end we are sacrificing ourselves, “our children, our grandchildren, the possibility of life on earth….”
I had known her parents, and now all four of our parents were in their graves, and we were parents of grown children. We lived in the same metropolitan area. Why would it not be pleasant to sit together and imagine the futures that remained in each of our separate lives?
The goal is to make you feel slightly more virtuous, briefly. But why stop there? People are crazy, and times are strange.
Facebook’s algorithms, which drive what any of us see individually, are a mystery to most of us. At best they make us passive consumers; at worst, easy pupils to brain-train for nefarious ends.
Oksana Maksymchuk explained that she started writing ‘Still City’ in Ukraine, “maybe half a year before the actual invasion in the summer of 2021…and the Russian troops were amassing on the border, and we were assured that there would be nothing happening, but it seemed very threatening. I thought, ‘I’m going to write it as a kind of narrative about a non-event,’ something that I was sure would not take place.”
Crises come in specific forms, which might determine needs for an apocalypse house. Will you need a well or stream, and seclusion? Or a bus to a workplace and mutual aid groups? How comfortable do you hope to be? What will you do for leisure?
Zombie strips, they are called, drawn long after the original artist has died, and going through the motions for syndication. Bill Watterson, adored for his art and admired for his integrity against corporate newspapers and marketing, criticized this phenomenon. It is said Charles Schultz left instructions not to allow it to happen to his strip.