Daily Dreamtime

Bacon’s ‘Dyer’ Expected

2008-05-16T19:28:20Z

Bacon’s ‘Dyer’ Expected

To Attract Big Numbers

When an artist’s works begin fetching astronomical prices, other works by him or her will almost inevitably, and immediately, come to auction. Francis Bacon fits that bill; in the last year nine of his paintings have each fetched more than $25 million, and a 1976 triptych sold for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction.

So it is not surprising that at Sotheby’s next big contemporary-art auction, in London on July 1, one of the star paintings will be “Study for Head of George Dyer,” a 1967 portrait Bacon painted of his companion, who committed suicide in 1971.

Although 129 photographs of Dyer were discovered in Bacon’s studio after his death in 1992, this portrait is one of only two he painted in a 14-by-12-inch format. Bacon’s inspiration was a photograph of Dyer taken by John Deakin.

While Sotheby’s is not saying who is selling the painting, experts familiar with Bacon’s work say it belongs to Ian and Mercedes Stoutzker, who bought it from the Marlborough Gallery only two months after it was painted. Sotheby’s estimates a price of about $15.5 million.

“It is one of the most literal translations Bacon did after a photograph,” said Oliver Barker, of Sotheby’s contemporary-art department in London.

Since Polaroid announced in February that it would stop manufacturing instant film and that supplies

2008-05-16T19:23:38Z

Since Polaroid announced in February that it would stop manufacturing instant film and that supplies would run out next year, artists like Chuck Close and Lucas Samaras have been passing through stages of grief. Nothing, they say, can replace the Polaroid — awkward, dated, a little sleazy, but miraculous nonetheless

Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Untitled (Patti Smith),” a 1973 Polaroid.

Spontaneity Was the Medium and the Message

By KAREN ROSENBERG

The beloved instant photograph could not have hoped for a better sendoff than the Whitney’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. During his 20s, between 1970 and 1975, Mapplethorpe made more than 1,500 photographs with Polaroid cameras. This may surprise viewers who are more familiar with his posed and polished studio photography of the ’80s.

“Polaroids: Mapplethorpe” offers some

100 examples drawn largely from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, including portraits, still lifes, erotica and works that fall into more than one of these categories. All the themes of Mapplethorpe’s mature work — the body as a site of pain and pleasure, the ideals of classical beauty, the celebration of alternative lifestyles — are here, but rendered in a more spontaneous medium.

As Mapplethorpe once said, “If I were to make something that took two weeks to do, I’d lose my enthusiasm. It would become an act of labor, and the love would be gone.”

Sylvia Wolf, the show’s curator in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, writes in the catalog that Mapplethorpe “learned how to see photographically with the Polaroid camera.” The growth was personal as well as artistic. Mapplethorpe’s earliest Polaroids date from 1970, around the time he was beginning to explore his sexual identity.

His early self-portraits are frankly autoerotic, taking full advantage of the Polaroid’s seamy associations (from the days before cellphone cameras). Instead of leafing through pornographic magazines to find a desired pose, as he had for earlier collage-based works, Mapplethorpe could simply create it himself.

This being the Whitney, the exhibition does not include some of the more provocative images that appear in the catalog. It’s too bad, because it interrupts sequences of shots and plays down the Polaroid’s seductive function.

A card from Mapplethorpe’s 1973 opening at the uptown Light Gallery made the connection explicit. Invitees opened cream-colored Tiffany envelopes to find a protective sleeve for Polaroid film, printed with the words “DON’T TOUCH HERE.” Inside was a self-portrait made by positioning a Polaroid camera at crotch level across from a mirror. A strategically placed paper dot added a touch of false modesty.

The Polaroid technology was inherently collaborative, in that models could see and respond to the results of the photo session. This is particularly apparent in shots of Mapplethorpe’s friend and roommate Patti Smith. The ever-aloof Ms. Smith crosses her arms, hugs her knees and thrusts her hands into her pockets, but there is a sense that she might crack a smile.

The romantic and creative relationship between Mapplethorpe and the collector Sam Wagstaff, which began in 1972, inspired some of the most intimate photographs in this exhibition. A series of three subtly erotic Polaroids, mounted on paper and separated with thin bands of colored pencil, shows Wagstaff rinsing his hair and shaving his chiseled jawline in the bath.

Mapplethorpe often created special mountings for his Polaroids, though only a few examples are at the Whitney. One such 1973 work combines four images of the Warhol superstar Candy Darling, each surrounded by pastel-painted plastic. Another, also from 1973, features a grid of six Polaroids in which racy portraits of Mapplethorpe and David Croland, his friend and one of his early lovers, alternate with photographs of a public sculpture.

In works made the following year, Mapplethorpe continued to depict the nude body — athletic but not necessarily male — as classical statuary. Several Polaroids show dancers and performers posing next to columns and on pedestals. In one photograph of a male dancer from 1974, taken opposite a mirror, Mapplethorpe can be seen crouching with his camera in the lower right corner.

In other photographs Mapplethorpe and his models wear masks, harnesses and other sexual accessories, but even these pictures have a cold, flesh-as-marble sensibility. More shocking, in a way, is a photograph of two men (“Charles and Jim”) kissing in a bathhouselike setting. In the catalog Ms. Wolf compares this image to Warhol’s taboo-defying film “Kiss.”

By the mid-’70s, Mapplethorpe had gained access to the upper echelons of creative society and was able to make a living by taking portraits. His Polaroids from this time form an impressive social archive: Ozzie Clark, Clarissa Dalrymple, Henry Geldzahler. In these pictures Mapplethorpe seems to have used the Polaroid as if it were a more conventional camera. Only the shots of Marianne Faithfull, cradling a cup of tea, and Helen Marden, veiled by a leafy branch, possess the immediacy of Mapplethorpe’s earlier portraits of Ms. Smith.

In 1975 Wagstaff gave Mapplethorpe a Hasselblad 2 1/4-inch camera. It was the end of Mapplethorpe’s affair with the Polaroid. By then he had outgrown it.

The photographs of the early ’70s show us that Mapplethorpe did not emerge fully formed as a photographer of “the perfect moment.” How might his art have developed without the Polaroid? We can only guess, but it is difficult to picture young artists approaching their camera phones and Webcams with anything like his sense of wonder.

“Polaroids: Mapplethorpe” is on view through Sept. 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, (800) 944-8639, whitney.org.

HIV-Positive Man Sentenced to 35 Years for Spitting at Officers

2008-05-16T18:33:54Z

HIV-Positive Man Sentenced to 35 Years for Spitting at Officers

In Dallas, Texas, an HIV-positive homeless man has been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for spitting in the mouth and eye of a Dallas police officer. The man, Willie Campbell, was found guilty of harassing a public servant with a deadly weapon—his saliva. None of the three officers contracted HIV. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there are no known cases of contact with saliva, tears or sweat transmitting HIV. Campbell will not be eligible for parole until serving at least seventeen years behind bars.

Chiding Obama, Bush Likens Iran Talks to Hitler Appeasement

Meanwhile in Israel, a visiting President Bush continued to take part in Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations. Speaking before the Israeli parliament, Bush took a swipe at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama,comparing his call to negotiate with Iran to the appeasement of Hitler before the Second World War.

President Bush: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, ’Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

In a statement, Obama’s campaign denounced Bush’s remarks, calling them an “unprecedented political attack on foreign soil.”

Palestinians Denounce Bush Visit to Israel

Palestinians, meanwhile, continue to protest Bush’s visit. Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri condemned Bush’s support for Israeli settlement expansion and rejection of a ceasefire in Gaza.

Sami Abu Zuhri: “We believe that Bush’s visit to the region and his speech represented a slap on the face of all those who bet on the project of compromise. The American administration is a partner in the aggression against
our people by supporting the Israeli side.”

Palestinians are marking the sixtieth anniversary of what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes during the war around Israel’s creation in 1948.

Residents: US Attack Kills 18 in Pakistan

In Pakistan, local residents say eighteen people have been killed in a US attack in the Bajaur region. The dead included several civilians and foreign militants. Taliban spokesperson Maulvi Omar said he’s certain the strike came from a US drone.

Maulvi Omar: “We are absolutely certain that these aircraft were US drones, the ones that NATO forces use in Afghanistan. It is a shame that our boundaries are being crossed and foreign aircraft violate our airspace. But
God willing, we will avenge this brutality very soon.”

The attack would be at least the fourth by a US drone in Pakistan this year. The Pakistani government is currently negotiating with militant groups on a peace agreement. The Bush administration has opposed the talks.

Israeli Writer-Activist Tikva Honig-Parnass, Who Fought for Israel’s Founding in 1948, on 60 Years o

2008-05-16T18:31:05Z

Israeli Writer-Activist Tikva Honig-Parnass, Who Fought for Israel’s Founding in 1948, on 60 Years of Palestinian Dispossession and Occupation

We continue our coverage of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. We begin with Tikva Honig-Parnass, an Israeli who fought with Jewish paramilitary units and the Israeli army, participating in the military operations that expelled over 750,000 Palestinians. Today, she’s an anti-Zionist leftist writer and activist who has been involved with anti-occupation, women’s, and Mizrahi movements in Israel since the 1960s

Tikva Honig-Parnass, Anti-Zionist leftist writer and activist, has been involved with anti-occupation, women’s, and Mizrahi movements in Israel since the 1960s. She was the editor of News From Within, the publication of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, for close to a decade. More recently she founded and edited the periodical Between the Lines with Palestinian activist Toufic Haddad. In 1948, she fought with Jewish paramilitary units and the Israeli army, participating in the military operations that expelled over 750,000 Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with our coverage of the sixtieth anniversary

of the founding of the state of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba. First, we look at the events of 1948 from the perspective of an Israeli who fought with Jewish paramilitary units and the Israeli army, participating in the military operations that involved the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians.

Raised in an ultra-Zionist family, Tikva Honig-Parnass was barely twenty years old in 1948. She was a member of the Haganah paramilitary and the Palmach. Today, Tikva Honig-Parnass is an anti-Zionist leftist writer and activist. She has been involved with anti-occupation, women’s, and Mizrahi movements in Israel since the 1960s. She was editor of News From Within, the publication of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, for close to a decade. More recently, she founded and edited the periodical Between the Lines with Palestinian activist Toufic Haddad.

Last year, Honig-Parnass and Haddad came out with a book called Between the Lines: Readings in Israel, the Palestinians, and the US War on Terror, currently working on a book on the Jewish democratic state in the left-liberal Zionism.

Tikva Honig-Parnass joins us now. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: OK, good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us.

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you go back to 1948? Explain—

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: Yes, of course I can. But I would like you to allow me to tell in short an event that happened in my grandson’s school just a week ago which emphasizes that the Nakba of ’48 is not only ongoing forces, but that Israel is—the Jewish state of Israel is the vehicle of implementation, advancement and expansion of the project. I’ll tell the story just very shortly. This was the memorial day for the soldiers who were killed in all Israeli wars. It was opened with a child reading from the Bible, saying that Abraham—that God said to Abraham, “Look from the place you are there, to the north and south and east and west, because all the land you see, I will give to you and your offsprings, and till it.” It’s my free translation. But it’s typical, and it’s indicative of the kind of values children are getting—are educating for ’til this present. And to see this in the context of memorial day is a message given to the children that you must fight, you must make war, because the land is exclusively ours.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your experience in 1948? Could you go back in time, Tikva, and talk about how it is you joined the Haganah and the Palmach? And explain what they are, for viewers and listeners who are not familiar.

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: Yes. But before saying how I enlisted Haganah and the Palmach in—and what happened in ’48, the listeners have to understand that we were the generation that were programmed to commit the mass expulsion. It was inserted to us with the—as you say, with the milk of our mothers. In school, the Bible, in a secular school, was taught five days a week as if it is an historical document. And we were already ready when ’48 war broke out. We were already indifferent to the Palestinians—not even hating, just indifferent. They became for us a kind of an environmental nuisance. It is the kind of objectification which prepared us not to care about the expulsion, which we saw in front of our eyes.

AMY GOODMAN: Where did you see it? Where were you?

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: I was in Jerus-–I started university one month before the decision of the UN, and I joined the Palmach. And all the area of Beit Jibrin, Beit Jamal and Zakariyah, which are now refugees in Dheisheh and in Beit Jibrin and in camps around Bethlehem, these are camps of refugees who were expelled while the Palmach, in which I was a soldier, occupied and expelled.

There is a letter which was published already in many—but it’s showing—it’s a letter to my parents from October 30, ’48, saying—I’m writing the letter on a office stationery of the director of [inaudible], a oil company station, which fled a few days before we came—before I came there. I don’t even relate to the fact that I’m writing on someone’s stationery.

And the story on the [inaudible], which really raises my hair ’til this very moment is, I’m telling about two American volunteers who came—you know, there were many American volunteers who came after World War II, and they joined our unit, and I’m saying that these two Americans, they were liberals. We were Zionist left. And that’s the decisive difference between us and these two Americans. They were shouting at evening—in the evening that they met women and children starving to bread—this is a translation from Hebrew—on the way back to their villages. And they started saying that if this new state can’t take care of its residents, there is no justification for it to be established.

And what my reaction is that I tell to my parents—and I said, “Dear mother and father, I am very often sick and tired of these American philanthropes.” I don’t say “humans” or “with human values”; I say “philanthropes.” And then I go on, of course, with my daily information home, as if nothing happened. So what I can say is that it’s the climax of dehumanization, not only of the Palestinians, but of us who committed the job with a [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: Tikva Honig-Parnass, for those who say the Palestinians left of their own accord, what is your response?

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: I didn’t get you. The line—

AMY GOODMAN: For those who say the Palestinians left of their own accord in 19-–

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: No, no. What do you mean, “of their own accord”? No, of course not. It was actually—already we know now. Already, the—not only the new historians, but even Benny Morris, who justifies the ethnic cleansing, already we know that it was a pre-planned [inaudible], which was to evacuate the land—the land, so that it will be with a Jewish majority, because according to the UN decision, there was half and half Jews and Palestinians.

So, you know, the ridiculous thing is that after all we know, only two weeks ago, a very fine person, like Uri Avnery, who really fights against occupation, or ’67 occupation, repeats the Zionist narrative that the plan wasn’t aimed at cleansing the land, but because of military considerations. So after all this information, which is flowing from the most serious, not only Palestinians, which Israelis don’t respect—after all this, you’ll ask everyone here in Palestine, in Israel, and they will tell you that they went—that they left because the leaders of the Arab states, they encouraged them to leave. But it’s no point anymore even going after it, after all these dozens of books which reveal the truth about the Nakba.

AMY GOODMAN: Tikva Honig-Parnass, we have to break, but we’re going to come back. She fought for the creation of Israel in 1948 with the Palmach and Haganah, the paramilitary units that helped to establish the state of Israel. When we come back, we’ll also be joined by other guests, including Israeli historian Benny Morris. Stay with us.

Anna U Davis

2008-05-16T17:33:39Z

Anna U Davis

Monday, 05 May 2008
Robotic-like faces intermingle with picture perfect hair from glossy magazines. Not your everyday juxtaposition of subject matter or materials, but Anna U Davis is attempting to tell a larger story with her unlikely imagery. Her recent solo show at Washington DC’s Hillyer Art Space opened this Saturday, but spend some time with more of her work at www.frocasians.com.

Norah Jones

2008-05-16T15:46:00Z

Norah Jones

http://www.norahjones.com/

LUCIUS DURHAM BATTLE (1918-2008)

2008-05-16T13:53:32Z

LUCIUS DURHAM BATTLE (1918-2008)

Chairman, National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Advisory Board

In Memoriam and Appreciation

It is with a heavy heart that I report sad news. Longtime Chairman of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations' National Advisory Board, the inimitable Ambassador Lucius Durham Battle, died Tuesday, May 13, 2008. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for quite some time. On June 1, he would have turned 90.

What I have to say here is based entirely on conversations I have been privileged to have with Ambassador Battle over the past 35 years. It will undoubtedly be different, in some ways less detailed, and in places possibly not as accurate as what others may have to say. It is a memory and appreciation of the life of Lucius Durham Battle. Although no one is bereft of blemish, what I have to say is as accurate as I can make it and also as impressionistic a portrait as I could hope to paint of an extraordinary person. I apologize in advance if these remarks are less enlightening or insightful than what one may hear in forthcoming eulogies or read in the days to come in The Washington Post or the New York Times.

Lucius Durham Battle was born in Dawson, Georgia on June 1, 1918. After pre-collegiate schooling in Bradenton, Florida, he attended the University of Florida, from which he received both his undergraduate degree and a degree in law. After serving in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War Two, he applied to and was accepted into the U.S. Foreign Service. Like any entry level officer, his early responsibilities were not exactly of a routine nature. Neither were they of a kind that determined the world's daily orbit. Among his earliest assignments was service on the staff of Secretary of State George C. Marshall up to and through the time when the Marshall Plan, drafted and declared in June 1947, and for which Marshal was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, proceeded to help rebuild West European economies that had been devastated in World War Two. He then joined the staff of Marshall's successor, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for whom he served as the Department's Executive Secretary throughout Secretary Acheson's tenure, which included the onset and most of the duration of the Korean War. Subsequently, during the first Eisenhower administration, Battle was assigned to the post of First Secretary at the American Embassy in Denmark from 1953-1955. From there he was seconded from 1955-1956 to NATO in Paris, where he served as secretary to NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay. Battle resigned from the Foreign Service in 1956 and aided in the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia as Vice-President of Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., from 1956 to 1961, when he returned to the Department of State under President Kennedy.

President Kennedy nominated Ambassador Battle as Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Culture, a position for which he was a "natural." In that role, he and his wife, Betty Davis Battle, a graduate of Stanford University with a Masters Degree in International Relations, and who predeceased him earlier in this decade, cut a wide swath through the cultural corridors of the nation's capital and abroad. Among his most remarkable and enduring achievements in that post was his pivotal role in leading the campaign to save the ancient Egyptian monuments at Abu Simbel that would otherwise have been flooded forever by the rising waters of the Nile.

President Kennedy, Ambassador Battle, and others were involved in the idea of establishing a future national center for the performing arts, one that, although no one then could have foreseen, would later bear the name of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. An additional component of Ambassador Battle's posting as Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Culture became his and his wife Betty's role in the Art-in-U.S. Embassies Program. The program succeeded in using private sector sources to fund an ambitious and extensive campaign to place the paintings and other art work produced by some of America's most gifted citizens on the walls of the foyers and drawing rooms of American embassies throughout the world.

Ambassador Battle's work in helping to save the Egyptian monuments at Abu Simbel made for a natural bridge to his appointment by President Lyndon Baines Johnson as American Ambassador to Egypt. During his tenure as Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in Cairo, Ambassador Battle was the principal United States point of contact with Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser and Vice-President Anwar Sadat, who was simultaneously also President of Egypt's National Assembly. Diplomatic relations between the American and Egyptian governments during that period were polite but often strained. The relationship between the two countries often became tense as the Egyptian government sought to navigate a non-aligned course through the treacherous shoals of Cold War competition, pursue pan-Arab ambitions, and assert leadership in the continuing regional conflict with Israel. The caliber and results of the overall geopolitical dynamics between the two countries were often mixed. Even so, prior to President Kennedy's assassination, the relationship bore the extraordinary imprint of an unusually personal and heartfelt exchange of letters between President Kennedy and President Nasser. Since then, nothing remotely comparable is known to have occurred between an American president and any Arab head of state.

One of the seeds planted on Ambassador Battle's watch during his time as America's chief representative in Egypt evolved to become an extended visit by Anwar Sadat to the United States in February 1966. At the time, Sadat was the highest ranking Egyptian official ever to have visited America. No previous Egyptian monarch, prime minister, or president had ever bothered to come. Those associated with the occasion, including escort (later Ambassador and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State) Michael Sterner, also a longtime member of the National Council on U.S. Arab-Relations' National Advisory Board, would long afterwards refer to that experience as one that had a profound, far-reaching, and enduring positive impact on Sadat.

From what Luke and Ambassador Sterner shared with me over the years, all involved with Sadat's visit were awed by what happened to him as a result of his visits to the U.S. Congress. According to Sterner, who was the principal escort, Sadat was fascinated by the position and role of the Congressional committees, hearings, and the budget process. Battle, Sterner, and others recall that it was then that Sadat's admiration for the United States acquired some of its deepest and most profound and lasting roots, ones that would later nurture, among other things, the 1979 Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel at Camp David that remain in effect to this day.

Sadat's 1966 visit extended to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The overall impact left him deeply grounded in the importance of local politics and increasingly attracted to democratic principles, processes, and ideals. That Lucius Durham Battle played a key visionary and strategic role in these developments may have been lost upon some but not many others, including me, as I was a living and studying in Egypt when Kennedy's and Nasser letters were exchanged and was aware of Sadat's visit when it occurred.

The period (1962-1967) during part of which Ambassador Battle served as America's senior representative in Egypt was also one, however, when Egypt was weighted with an enormous burden of national economic and human costs. A significant component of these costs were incurred by Nasser's decision to send and sustain an armed expeditionary force to Yemen that, as Nasser himself later admitted, evolved to become Egypt's Arabian "Vietnam." As the fighting in Yemen continued without what seemed at the time any end in sight, the Yemen adventure severely drained Egyptian forces and resources. It also contributed directly to the relative ease with which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was able to rout the Egyptian army stationed in the Sinai in June 1967 when Israel invaded and occupied Egypt.

Not many Americans are aware of what Ambassador Battle did when the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war occurred. After Israel defeated Egypt, the Israeli government very quickly sent an official delegation to the Department of State on the weekend to inform the Department that, as the IDF had seized Egypt's oil and gas fields in the Sinai, Israel considered these resources as part of "the spoils of war" and would henceforth proceed to produce and benefit from the fields in the course of their having become "Israeli property." The Department of State duty officer who received the delegation appropriately informed its members that, as it was a weekend, they would have to wait until Ambassador Battle and the Department's then Legal Counsel, Leonard Meaker, returned to the Department, when they would be apprised of the matter. When they returned, Battle and Meaker examined the merits of the issue and concurred that under no circumstances would the United States acknowledge that Israel had any legal right whatsoever to Egypt's energy resources. Together, notwithstanding the pressure exerted upon them by the government of Israel and the American Israeli lobby, Battle and Meaker placed the United States on record as legally being in the strongest possible opposition to the Israeli claims.

Ambassador's Battle's time in Egypt and afterwards was also a period when the United States was extensively engaged in administering a program that provided American agricultural exports to Egypt. It was administered under what was known at the time as the "Food for Peace Program" or Public Law 480 (PL 480). For long afterwards, the program entailed that Egypt pay in Egyptian currency for its food-related imports from the United States. With there being little American official or private sector demand or other need for Egypt's currency in those days, as trade between the two countries was minimal, the currency amounts accumulated were placed in a special account for possible undetermined future use. Before the end of his tenure in Cairo, Ambassador Battle managed to gain approval for the United States to allocate a substantial amount of these funds for the local capital building program of the American University in Cairo (AUC).

This precedent, however bland and innocuous it may have seemed to some at the time, was prescient. It would lead to numerous additional American appropriations in support of AUC's educational mission from these and other funds. The results would ultimately help to place on a firmer financial footing what, then as now, is America's largest university outside the United States. Those long ago strategic steps in which Ambassador Battle took the lead and helped shepherd to successful conclusion a robust center of American-style university education in the heart of the Arab world have had an unending series of positive ripple effects on the overall Arab - U.S. relationship down to the present. For example, what he did -- there was no precedent at the time -- helped ease and provide added momentum to the process by which AUC became home to the extraordinarily popular and successful Center for Arabic Studies Abroad that, to this day, is remarkable for enrolling the largest number of young Americans studying Arabic anywhere in the world.

Ambassador Battle's educational legacy in furthering the U.S.-Egyptian relationship through the work of the American University in Cairo also did much to heighten AUC's legitimacy in the eyes of Arab donors. A case in point is HRH Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Sa'ud, who in recent years has contributed to the endowment of AUC's Center for American Studies. Battle's impact also helped strengthen AUC's overall foundation, enabling it to add new academic programs. Among the more prominent of such programs are those that presently focus upon women's studies, humanitarian assistance and human rights, and broadcast journalism studies. By extension, Ambassador Battle's role facilitated the multifaceted and multi-year efforts that have led to the scheduled opening of AUC's brand new campus later this year.

The AUC centers and programs of educational excellence which Ambassador Battle helped foster and sustain are recognized far and wide. They are acknowledged for what they are: pioneering hallmarks of American international university outreach and efforts to promote and expand the merits of citizen diplomacy in a country that, on the regional and global stage, is hardly of marginal significance - Egypt is home to one out of four of all the world's Arabs. It was therefore no coincidence that Ambassador Battle subsequently served on AUC's Board of Trustees. Neither was it an accident that he was awarded the Order of the Nile, Egypt's highest award for excellence at a ceremony that my wife and I were honored and privileged to attend and witness.

At the conclusion of Lucius Battle's tenure as American ambassador to Egypt, something different, and in its own way greater, lay in store for him. He was appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson to the highest post in the U.S. government dealing with America's relations with the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world: namely, Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asia Affairs. In assuming the post, Ambassador Battle became one of only two Americans ever to have twice held the post of Assistant Secretary of State.

With the onset of the Nixon Administration in 1968, Ambassador Battle resigned from the Foreign Service and returned to the private sector, where he served as a Senior Vice President with COMSAT. In 1973 he accepted the post of Middle East Institute President. This is where and when he and I first met and became fast friends. Then and ever since we were two dyed-in-the-wool southern boys that had journeyed, as it were, north towards home - a point on the compass that, with a chuckle, we acknowledged readily in each others' presence whenever we reflected on how far we had strayed from our ancestral origins.

At the time we met, I was simultaneously working as Assistant Editor of the Institute's Middle East Journal, teaching courses on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf countries at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and serving as chairman of the Department of State's Near East and North Africa Program, which trained American diplomatic, defense, and other U.S. personnel assigned to the region. It was in the context of those activities, in each of which Ambassador Battle was either already or would soon become involved, that he and I began an association that grew ever-closer from one year to the next and that lasted from then until today.

One of the more hilarious and unforgettable episodes in our friendship is known but to a very few. The episode occurred shortly after the October 1973 War and the aftershock of the ensuing skyrocketing of oil prices and the subsequent economic boom times in the Arabian Peninsula countries and elsewhere in the region. Some of the Middle East Institute's then supporters suggested strongly to its leadership that "Ambassador Battle and Dr. Anthony" collaborate in writing a book for Americans on "How to Do Business in the Middle East." The idea had appeal. No such book then existed. Enticed by the thought, and in an effort to give it a try, the two of us retired to Luke and Betty's beloved Sunnyfields. This was their extraordinary home outside Charlottesville, Virginia, situated barely minutes away from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. It was perched atop the exact same hill and located but seconds across the road from their longtime friends, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Woodward.

For nearly ten days, working apart from each other in different areas of the house, Ambassador Battle and I cranked out draft after draft of what had the makings of either a book or, more exactly, a southern street dog's breakfast -- meaning, a little of this, a little of that, and a little of this until it all added up to a meal -- if only in length. Fortunately, that was as far as the project went. Of the many things Luke and I would connive and contrive to do together over the next three and a half decades of brotherhood and friendship as comrades-in-arms, that particular effort stood out from all the rest as an utter failure on both our parts. Even so, it was ultimately a happy failure, given that neither of us knew anything about what we had been tasked with writing. Long afterwards, whenever we periodically reflected that we had once had the naiveté, if not also the insanity, to think we could maybe write such a book, the memory of the effort itself always reduced us to laughter. For decades, we would not infrequently refer to that episode in our lives as the "greatest book never written."

Few Americans in their post-diplomatic career can claim to have accomplished as many exceptional and varied feats as Luke Battle did from the late 1970s onwards until his passing. Among his more remarkable achievements other than the ones already noted are the following: he served twice as president of the Middle East Institute, leaving it at the end with an endowment base, originally underwritten largely by three generous women benefactors, each of whom was an extraordinary person in her own right, who thought the world of him, that helped to ensure the Institute's existence for many years to come; he was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Middle East Peace; Chairman of the board of the American Near East Refugee Aid, Inc.; Chairman of the SAIS Advisory Council; Founding Chairman of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute; Member of the Board of Advisers of Harvard's Middle East Center; Founding Chairman of the National Commission to Commemorate the Fourteenth Centennial of Islam; Founding Chairman of the American Institute for Islamic Studies; Recipient of the Diplomatic and Consular Officers Retired, Inc. Award for Outstanding Public Service and Achievement; and, as mentioned, following Senators J. William Fulbright and Charles Percy, he served with distinction, from 1995 to 2008, as National Chairman of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Advisory Board.

For many years before and after assuming this last position, unbeknownst to many, Ambassador Battle managed to find the time to meet and brief every student and academic delegation that the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations' Kerr High School Scholars and Malone University Faculty Fellows in Arab and Islamic Studies sent to the Arab world. He also served (with me) as co-escort for the first of the many delegations comprised of what in time would become 220 Members of Congress and Congressional staff participants in the National Council's study visits to the Arab world. In addition, he was: a fellow member of National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations' delegations that met in Europe and the United States with European Union countries' members of parliaments that sought, on the whole unsuccessfully, to stiffen the spine of America's national lawmakers on foreign policy issues of importance to U.S.-Arab relations; co-teacher of a course on the Middle East that I taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School; co-lecturer in seminars we addressed at U.S. military bases and other armed forces establishments in the United States; a fellow Member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and co-participant in the strategic dynamics and decision-making of how best to organize the National Council's Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conferences, now in their seventeenth year.

Over the course of his extraordinary range of public service commitments and contributions after retiring from the world of diplomacy, Ambassador Battle was also frequently sounded out by the president then in office as to whether he might agree to return to government service. Not only were some of the offers tempting, but they were ones for which the range and nature of his talents, accomplishments, and experiences, as his many admirers agreed and argued, were sorely needed. On at least three separate occasions of which I am aware, he was asked by senior U.S. government officials representing the president whether he would accept, if nominated, the post of American Ambassador to Great Britain, Greece, and Iran. His reaction to each of these invitations was vintage humility. He believed that the better part of wisdom would be for him not to accept. He and Betty made these decisions jointly and, by all accounts, with no later regrets of consequence.

Among other attributes for which Ambassador Battle will long be remembered by his family and many loved ones, he was also renowned for his knack of discovering young American talent early in their careers and granting them extraordinary leeway to develop their leadership and related talents. Widely cited research suggests that many mentors over time tend to grow jealous and resentful of those they helped nurture, especially when attention ends up being sometimes focused more on the mentee than the mentor. However, it is a matter of no small moment to note that Luke Battle was perennially the exact opposite.

I am but one among many, including Foreign Service officers I have met who once served under him, who can attest to how he challenged to the maximum young people in whom he saw promise and potential, especially those who were just starting their careers. He backed to the fullest such American leaders of tomorrow through thick and thin. He was unstinting in his support of their career advancement. And in the end he was almost as pleased and proud as those he encouraged were when, contrary to what some of them thought might be possible, they ended up succeeding beyond his and their wildest dreams.

Not the least of the memories I will cherish of the many quality hours of my life spent with Lucius Durham Battle is the same one that is cherished by my wife. Next month it will be twenty-five years ago since Luke and Betty hosted a reception at their home for my family and friends the night before my wife and I were married. As if that was not enough of a fitting tribute for a friend, the next day he was also the person who walked down the aisle with my bride-to-be, Cynthia, on his arm. Knowing that her father had predeceased her, Luke had earlier agreed to be her father's stand-in. He agreed to be the one who, in front of everyone, with his booming voice, would say "I do!" even before I did -- in response to the minister's query, "Who presenteth this couple to be married?"

Another memory, one that my twin sons and I will never forget, is when they were barely four years old. Luke and I took them to a local playground and placed them in swings that we pushed to the boys' delight. At the end of that afternoon together, when the boys and I piled into the car and began to pull away from the curb, one of my sons, Jamie, leaned out the window and for as far as he could hold Luke in the line of his sight, kept waving and calling at the top of his lungs, "Goodbye Battle; Goodbye Battle."

It is no coincidence that my son Jamie's son, my grandson, is named Lucius.

There is one other thing about Luke and my times together that I am compelled to relate. It has to do with what the two of us tended to marvel at more than once whenever we saw it in each other. It was when we pondered the course of our country's history nationally and internationally, and sometimes when we watched together a stirring movie that blended various themes of love of country with uplifting ideals and principles. On such occasions, we could become unabashed weepers. Neither of us could explain it. We openly admitted to each other that there was great pain in our hearts whenever we pondered the maladies and injustices that our country's leaders, over time, unwittingly or otherwise, had caused to be inflicted upon people who, at the end of the day, were totally innocent and undeserving of what befell them at our hands and behest. More than once, in the stark reality of realizing the nature and substance of things over which we had no control, but wished we did, we would get angry, say it is not right, and, despite the fact that we were grown men and from a societal perspective not supposed to do such things, more than tears welled in our eyes -- we cried.

Twenty years or so ago, when Luke was relinquishing the Chairmanship of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, a number of his friends decided to host a farewell party for him at SAIS. (SAIS, by the way, has several scholarships for deserving students that bear the name of Lucius Durham Battle, made possible by individuals who want to see his example emulated and, if at all possible, perpetuated). Although I was unable to attend because I was out of the country, the organizers, knowing of Luke's and my relationship, asked that I submit remarks that my wife might read aloud at the event. The thrust of those remarks, a copy of which I no longer have, was but an echo of a then soaring, popular, and beautifully uplifting song. It had to do with the love of the singer's object of affection and which he described lyrically and metaphorically as the wind beneath his wings.

For untold numbers of Americans of all ages and walks of life, Lucius Durham Battle was forever, for me and for many, a constant source of wind beneath the wings - that and more. His presence will be sorely missed by all those who were as privileged and honored as I was to know him long and well. Not least among these are those who knew him best and for the greatest period, who loved him, and whom he and Betty loved the most -- his daughters Lynne D. Battle (Bill Roesing) of Bethesda, MD, and Laura D. Battle (Chris Kendall) of Rhinebeck, NY, his sons John D. Battle (Janice) of Concord, MA and Thomas D. Battle (Margaret Waters) of Belomt, MA, and their eight children - Luke and Betty's grandchildren.

"Goodbye Battle; Goodbye Battle."

Lucius Durham Battle: May He Rest in Peace.

ο John Duke Anthony

Memorial Services will be held at Christ Church Episcopal, Georgetown, 31^st and O Street, Washington, D.C. on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 10 a.m. Memorial Contributions may be made to the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Interment private.

Vanunu - great political battle in Norway - a lawyers appeal

2008-05-16T12:32:01Z

Vanunu - great political battle in Norway - a lawyers appeal
fyi
William R. Polk
669 Chemin de la Sine
F-06140 Vence France
fax: +33-493 24 08 77

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Fredrik S. Heffermehl"
Date: May 15, 2008 5:36:40 PM GMT+02:00
To: Mailing List IALANA and progressive European lawyers
Subject: Vanunu - great political battle in Norway - a lawyers appeal -

Oslo, May 15, 2008

Dear colleague,

In the last 6 weeks there has been a tremendous interest in Norway for the
liberation of Mordechai Vanunu, Israel´s nuclear hostage. The media have
given extensive and sympathetic coverage, and the cabinet obviously is
under strong pressure to stop ignoring the many calls for action in the matter.

The launch of the Lawyers´ appeal yesterday was a media success. An
editorial in a main Oslo paper today, said that the pressure on the cabinet
is building and called the lawyer´s appeal a very heavyweight contribution.
Earlier appeals for a strong Norwegian intervention to protect Vanunu´s security
and human rights have been made by the 2005 congress of all Trade Unions,
a month ago by the Council of Norwegian Bishops. Generally there is both a
strong feeling of sorrow and indignation in Norway about the plight of Vanunu.

A translation into English of the lawyers´ appeal is attached. In Norwegian
you will find it on the web with the lists of signatories, at this address:
http://www.peaceispossible.info/vanunuopprop.html

You may not be able to decipher all the titles in Norwegian. A delicate point is
that the petition has been signed by 2 Judges of the Supreme Court. Further,
the signatories include around 20-25 "professors dr. of law" and a very solid
list of over 60 lawyers involved in foreigners law, immigration, asylum and
refugee law, human rights and international law. This just is not something to
be ignored - the petition makes it clear that legal formalities and the arguments
used by several Norwegian governments as a fig leaf to excuse inaction, are
clearly untenable law. The point is that the fact that MV is in his "home country"
iss no bar to granting him asylum and a Norwegian passport and protection.

In the final paragraph, the petition lays out a three-point action plan on how to
come to the rescue of Mordechai - if the political will is there. It further makes
the point that under international law any country is entitled to grant asylum
and issue a passport for a foreigner in need of protection on humanitarian
grounds, even those under foreign jurisdiction. I hope this could be used by
colleagues and peace movements in many countries to approach their gvmts.

The support for Mordechai in the Norwegian media and the general public is
enormous - I should wish you could have read the main editorial in Dagsavisen
today http://www.dagsavisen.no/meninger/article349088.ece . We hope
to create the political will also in the cabinet (The interesting position is that
there is an internal split in the three-partite cabinet between the two junior
partners and the main party (Labor) and also within the ranks of Labor itself).

Our foreign minister (Labor) still sticks to a standard statement "Israel is
a rule of law democracy and Norway will not wish to interfere in the
operation of Israeli justice". I have again and again said that he is giving
an answer to a question that has not been asked, what we are demanding
is that Norway intervenes forcefully in an individual case where it is clear
for everyone to see that Israel is violating the principles of law and
democracy. We hope the cabinet of Norway will in discrete forms convince
colleagues in Israel that the 60 years anniversary is a good occasion for
Israel to appear as a state under the rule of law by releasing Mordechai.

Fredrik S. Heffermehl

As Palestinians Mark 60th Anniversary of Their Dispossession, a Conversation with Palestinian Writer

2008-05-16T12:29:14Z

As Palestinians Mark 60th Anniversary of Their Dispossession, a Conversation with Palestinian Writer and Doctor Ghada Karmi

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, that resulted in the expulsion and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from their cities and villages. Ghada Karmi is a well-known Palestinian writer and medical doctor from Jerusalem who lives in Britain. She has written several books about Palestinian history and her own experience as a refugee, including In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.

Ghada Karmi, Palestinian writer and doctor, one of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee in 1948. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several books about Palestinian history and her own experience, including In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine

AMY GOODMAN: Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, that resulted in the expulsion and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from cities and villages.

Tomorrow, a discussion with Israeli historian Benny Morris. Today, I talk to Palestinian writer and doctor Ghada Karmi, one of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee in 1948. Ghada Karmi is a well known Palestinian writer and medical doctor from Jerusalem who lives in Britain now. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several books about Palestinian history and her own experience, including In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.

I began by asking Ghada Karmi what happened to her family in 1948.

GHADA KARMI: I was in a house in West Jerusalem. I had been born in that part of Jerusalem. And I was a child. I was eight, and I didn’t understand actually what was happening. Nobody talked to us really or told us what was really happening. But what I do remember is that everybody was very scared. And I wrote about this in my memoir, In Search of Fatima.

It was a very bad period in my life,

because as a child, the things that mattered to me were what was familiar: my home, my dog. I had a lovely—well, a dog, which I loved dearly. We all loved him. He was called Rexy. And the thing that is very vivid in my mind is a scene of the morning that we left the house. It was in April 1948. And I knew that we had to leave the dog behind. And for me, that was the most painful thing I could imagine. I knew I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t make him understand that we wouldn’t be away for long, because my mother said, “We’re not going to be away for long. Don’t worry. It’s only because it’s very, very bad now, and we’re going to be back, not to worry.” And they believed that, of course.

But the situation around us was so dangerous. You could hardly go out of the front door, because there were Jewish militias, armed men who roamed the streets, who were in empty buildings, who took shots at people. And it was absolutely terrifying. So my parents thought, “Right, we’ll evacuate. We have a young family. We can’t leave them in this danger. It’ll be a couple of weeks, the whole thing will settle down.”

But for me, as a child, two weeks is an eternity. And as I embraced the dog, I hugged him, and I said to him, “Don’t worry. It’s OK. We will be back. We will. It won’t be long.” But I had a feeling somehow, a terrible feeling, that there was something wrong, and we—maybe we wouldn’t be back. And so it turned out to be.

We left in a taxi, very hurriedly, because the neighborhood was so dangerous. No taxi would come near it, but somehow we got a taxi. It was pretty old. It was very decrepit. And we got into it, and it drove us as fast as possible down to the old city, where there was a big bus depot where you could take transport out of Palestine. So we had a car from there, and we drove over to Damascus to my grandparents’ house, with the feeling—my mother constantly saying, “Look, don’t worry. We’re going to be back in a couple of weeks.” And that’s what we thought. But my memories were—some kind of dread. I don’t know what it was, some kind of child’s intuition—who knows?—that it was—we wouldn’t be—there was something wrong that was very, very serious. And we went to my grand-–

AMY GOODMAN: And who is “we”?

GHADA KARMI: There was my mother, my father; there were three children. I was the youngest.

But the worst part, of course, was that Fatima—was a woman who used to come and clean the house. She was a village woman. She used to look after my—she looked after me. She looked after our house. She used to help my mother cook. And I loved her dearly. She really was my mother, actually. I loved her. And leaving that morning, I left the dog, I left Fatima, in that order, and it was the most terrible thing. I can’t even think about it, it was so painful. And then we went, and we never returned. Israel never allowed us to go back.

Many years later, in the 1970s, just for the heck of it, I wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy in London, where of course we were living. I said I lived in Jerusalem, my house was there, I would like to go back to live there. And he wrote back—they wrote back, and they said, “No, that is not possible for you. You can come in as a—on a tourist visa as a visitor.” And that was it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever?

GHADA KARMI: Yeah, I did. I wanted to find the house. I looked for it desperately in the early 1990s, couldn’t find it, because I didn’t remember. My brother and my sister, who did remember, weren’t with me.

But then I tried again, and I did find it. And we went in. There was a Canadian Jewish family living in it, Orthodox, and they didn’t speak Hebrew. I didn’t speak Hebrew either, but I had an Israeli friend in case I couldn’t make myself understood. So, however, we needn’t have bothered, because they spoke English. And they went—they were very uncomfortable. They didn’t want me to look around. I said, “Can I look around? This was my home.” And they said, “It’s nothing to do with us. It’s nothing to do with us.” In fact, they were tenants. And I went around, but they hurried me out. I didn’t have much time to look around, to relive the memories, to get the feelings, the feelings back, because as a child, you know, it’s the feeling that comes back. You don’t really remember where that chair was, where that wall was, where that—you know. I had to leave, and it was terribly—as you can imagine, it was extremely upsetting.

But then a very strange thing happened. I returned to Palestine in 2005, where I worked in Ramallah for the Palestinian Authority. I wanted to live in Palestine for a while, and I had a visa, and I went in there to do work. I was working for the United Nations. And one day, I got a message from a man called Steven Erlanger, whom I had never met. I didn’t really know who he was, but of course I realized he was the bureau chief for the New York Times, saying “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house.” And it was amazing. He said, “From the description in your book, it must be the same place.” Anyway, we arranged to meet. I went over to Jerusalem, and I met him. And indeed, it was my house.

And what had happened was somebody at some point had built a story above the old house, which was of course a one-story place, a villa, typical of that kind of architecture. But somebody had built a floor above it, and that belonged to the New York Times. And the incumbent at the time was Steven Erlanger, who had been moved by the memoir and said, “This is your house?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And he took me—I remember he took me—he had made friends with the people downstairs, who were not the Canadian Jewish family. They were somebody else. They were really quite nice people, Jewish, and—Israelis, in fact. And they—he told them, “Look, this lady used to live here.” And they said, “Please, come in.” And I had all the time in the world. I went around. I felt terribly sad. He took loads of photographs of me.

And actually, we talked, he and I. I said, “Look. Look at what’s happened. You’ve seen this—you’ve seen me. You know what happened here. How do you feel about Israel now?” And I couldn’t get him to say that what happened in 1948 was an iniquity and an injustice. He didn’t say anything like that. He remained diplomatic, I suppose you would say, noncommittal, very pleasant to me, but it was a very strange episode.

AMY GOODMAN: The narrative in this country of that period when you left was that the Arab governments called on the Palestinians to leave, not that you were forced out by the Israeli government or, before that it wasn’t Israel, by Jewish settlers.

GHADA KARMI: I can’t believe that anybody still believes this narrative. Is that so? I grew up with this nonsense, and I always used to wonder how sane human beings could actually believe that people would get up, leave their belongings, leave their home, their land, their livelihood and just walk away because somebody told them to. Now, of course, later—first of all, this was completely untrue. There was no such instruction. It was not—on the contrary, the leaders told the Palestinians to stay put, not to leave, but then they said, look, get the women and children out, evacuate them temporarily, but the men were not allowed to leave.

And, in fact, when we left in that April of 1948, they stopped our taxi. They stopped it. These were militia, Arab militias. And they said, “Where are you going?” And he said, “Look, this is my wife. These are children. I am returning,” which was perfectly true. He said, “I’m returning the next—tomorrow morning. I just have to take them to my in-laws’ house just for safety, and I will be back.” And they took his name and so on.

So, of course, this was all nonsense. But the thing, you know, that used to get me is that you’d say to friends of Israel and devoted friends of Israel—you’d say to them, “OK, supposing—alright, supposing we, the Palestinians, left either because we were told to or because we just felt like it, why were we never allowed back? Why? People go on holiday. They do. They leave their houses, and they go away for a bit. They go and visit somebody. So, does it mean they can’t be allowed back to their homes?” And, of course, they never had an answer for this.

AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. She has written the book Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. We’ll come back to this conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to my conversation with the Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. I asked her how long her family stayed in Damascus, Syria, after they were forced to leave their home in Jerusalem in 1948.

GHADA KARMI: We stayed for just over a year. My father was looking for work desperately, because, of course, by then he was not, of course, allowed to return. He couldn’t come back the next day. That had all gone out of the window. And he was looking for work, because we had no money. He did find work, but he found it in London in the BBC Arabic service, which at that time was developing that service and wanted native Arabic speakers, and—who knows, I always like to think that the British had a kind of attack of conscience about the Palestinians, whom they had sold down the river, and that maybe—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

GHADA KARMI: Well, you know, it was but for the British authorities in Palestine, there never would have been an Israel. It’s as simple as that. They gave—they allowed the Zionists to come into our country. They allowed them to establish themselves. Without Britain, there would be no Israel, quite simply. And so, I used to think maybe they had had an attack of conscience, and they wanted to help.

No matter what the reason, my father ended up in London, and he preceded us, and then he made plans for us to join him. So in 1949, we left again, and for me, a new wrench from my grandparents, and then we ended up in London. And what an irony. Not just any old London, but in the most Jewish part of London. It was an area called Golders Green. My father didn’t know anything about London. He didn’t know it was Jewish. He just asked for a house for a family, and they told him, “Look, try this area,” which he did. And we turned up. And, lo and behold, we’re surrounded by German Jewish refugees from the Second World War. And my mother used to say, in her more humorous moments, “Well, we might as well never have bothered to move out of Jerusalem.” It’s the same people. Anyway, I mean, one laughs, but of course it was all pretty devastating, all this stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was your relationship with your neighbors, with these German Jewish refugees who had not actually gone to Palestine, but had gone to Britain?

GHADA KARMI: Well, it was very good. Partly, my parents—really, it was quite interesting—never brought us up with the idea that we hated Jews. It was not about Jews. They always said it was the people over there. They meant in Palestine, and they meant the Zionists. They meant the Jews who came over to Palestine determined to take the Palestinians’ place. Therefore, we had no problem with these Jews, whom they considered as just neighbors.

So, not only did the next-door neighbor, who was a German Jewish doctor, became our—he became our doctor, and we were used to that, because in Palestine, actually, the best doctors were German, and they were usually Jewish, but, of course, in my school, many of the girls were Jewish, and I made lots and lots of Jewish friends. And I went into their homes, and I became particularly close to one family, and they had a daughter called Patricia, who has remained my friend ’til today, and she lives in New York, and I’m staying with her now, and she’s been looking after me. It was a very long friendship.

Now, but more seriously, although we got on and we were friendly—and I have described all this in the memoir—there was an important side to this, which I only realized later. I really began to understand about the Jewish imperative to create a Jewish state in my country. Now, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand me. I understood it. It did not justify it. It did not excuse it. But I understood the kind of emotions, the psychology, which was behind the devotion to Israel that I found as I was growing up in London. And that, of course, was amongst the very community—these are European Jews—the very same type of Jew that had started the Zionist movement that had gone to Palestine and had created this settler colonialist state in my country. At least I really—and from the inside, I began to understand the mentality of the Eastern European persecution, the pogroms, the Schtetl, all this stuff, which as a Palestinian, I never ever would have understood. But living there, I did.

AMY GOODMAN: But in addition to that, I mean, these German refugees, these Jewish refugees were refugees from the Holocaust, were the survivors—

GHADA KARMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in—right after World War II—

GHADA KARMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —so often used as the justification for the establishment of Israel, that Jews would have a safe place to go, although the movement started well beyond that, but that was the final impetus, the moral sort of justification.

GHADA KARMI: Yes, that’s true, although it may surprise your audience to know that, paradoxically, the Holocaust was not such an issue shortly after it had happened as it is today. It’s amazing. I don’t know—well, we have no time to explain or to analyze why that should be—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually, Norman Finkelstein has written extensively about that, how it grew in importance as opposed to faded in importance, in his book The Holocaust Industry.

GHADA KARMI: That’s absolutely right. And that, believe me, is my own personal experience, that it didn’t feature as much in those postwar years, because I remember all my Jewish friends didn’t talk that much about the Holocaust. But there was—there was—but, of course, underlying it, I knew there was this feeling that Israel was a refuge, a place of refuge from persecution, wherever that might be.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your memoir, In Search of Fatima. Why did you call it that?

GHADA KARMI: You know, Fatima had been, as a real person—Fatima was a real person and also a metaphor. The real Fatima was the village woman who looked after us when we were small, and particularly me, and she helped my mother. She came and cooked and cleaned and such. She didn’t live with us, but she looked after me, and I was very, very attached to her. So for me, leaving Palestine in 1948, I left Fatima, really, who came to represent my childhood, Palestine, whatever that place was, that place of imagination after awhile. Because one’s memories were not very good as a child, it became a place, a country of the mind, and it became Fatima.

And so, in writing the book, I was trying to explain or ask the reader to share with me an experience of seeking for belonging, the search for my identity, who I was, having been wrenched from my roots so brutally in childhood and living in a—as it happened, moving to a society totally different from the one I was born into and, I should tell you, antipathetic to me. British society was pro-Israel. It believed in the Jewish state. It believed in the right of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine. So, for me, this was a double shock, and it led into a whole internal search, and a painful one, for where I belonged. Did I really belong with these English people I had lived amongst for so long? Did I belong in the West? Or did I belong to that place, that place which had become a place of the mind, the Arab world, the Fatima, and so on? So that’s why the book was called that.

AMY GOODMAN: You left Fatima there. And what happened to her?

GHADA KARMI: Well, this is the saddest thing of all for me. We don’t know. Now, we don’t know, because when we left, that was one of the terrible, terrible effects of the Nakba, that it not only took people away from their land and their belongings, it took them away from other people, and you never caught up with the other people. It was a complete rupture. Now, of course, that’s not true in every case. People did eventually find each other. Fatima disappeared into a black hole. We tried to find out what had happened to her. She was a peasant woman. There was no way of getting our letters to her.

AMY GOODMAN: Where did she live?

GHADA KARMI: She lived in a village called al-Maliha, which is just outside Jerusalem. And do you know, when I went back to Palestine-Israel in the early 1990s, I asked to see al-Maliha, and there it was, entirely Israeli, entirely Jewish Israeli. This wonderful little Palestinian village, which had had white houses, fields, a water well, all the charm of a Palestinian village, had now become totally Israeli. But they hadn’t managed to demolish the mosque, because I could see the minaret, which remained a kind of a solitary reminder that this was not a Jewish place. So there we are.

However, Fatima disappeared for years and years and years, and I knew nothing about her. And then in 2005, when I went to Palestine to work, I was determined to find her. I looked, and I looked. I went to the refugee camps, because of course she had gone—we knew she had gone into a camp. In August of 1948, the Israelis destroyed her village. And I knew—we knew she would have gone into a camp. That’s what happened to people. And I tried to find her.

Eventually, I found her grandson. I did. And I found him living in Bethlehem. And he retraced for me her footsteps from when we left her, how she stayed in our house waiting for us to come back, but of course we never could come back, and she was eventually thrown out. And then she and her family had to move, and they kept going on the move, being moved from one place to the other, eventually ending up in caves outside Bethlehem. They lived in a cave. And then they finally got out, and she lived in a house.

And until the 1980s, she kept telling her relatives, “Please look for the Karmis. Please. I want to see them again.” And my father, by then, was a well-known broadcaster on the BBC, so she used to hear his voice, and she used to say, “Surely, we can find him. Surely, we can.” And it was—believe me, it broke my heart when her grandson told me the story. But I never saw her again. And the thought that maddened me was there she was. In the 1980s, for God’s sake, I was an adult, I could have found her, if only I had known, if only she could have got them to look for us. What did they know? You know, how could they look us up on Google? And so, that—there we are. So I did know that she died, roughly when she died.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Palestinian writer, author, Ghada Karmi. Her book after In Search of Fatima is called Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Why “Married to Another Man”?

GHADA KARMI: Well, you may well ask, and I know this has mystified a lot of people, the title, and it’s been misunderstood. People have thought it was about matrimonial infidelity. It’s not, of course. It’s a quite—it’s a very serious book. The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote, that at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe, Jews, group of Jews who formed the Zionist movement, held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided that the only way to solve the Jewish question in Europe, the question of persecution, was for the Jews to have a state of their own. So they said, we have to create a Jewish state that can be a refuge for us, where we can be normal people, where we don’t have to be hounded, persecuted, etc. And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.

Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like. They were sitting in Europe. They didn’t know about it, so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the other man was.

And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.

So, in summary, Married to Another Man, had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already married. We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.

AMY GOODMAN: You advocate a one-state solution. Can you talk about that and why?

GHADA KARMI: Yes. Look, I wrote the book Married to Another Man, because I felt very strongly that, yes, as Palestinians, we will always mourn what happened to us—we mourn what is happening to us now—but we really have to try and see how this can be solved. And that has to come from us, because we are the people the most effected by this conflict. We are the people with the greatest stake in a solution which lasts. And I want to emphasize this. It is entirely possible to think up solutions for this conflict that are temporary, that might work for a short while. There’s no point in that. We want a solution that will be permanent and that will be durable.

And it seemed to me—and in the book, I tried to do it by taking the reader along with me to explain the conflict, to see how so many attempts had failed in the past, to explain why they had failed and to show, therefore, that there is in fact only one way forward, and that is, not to partition the land of Palestine, not to fight over percentages, not to have Israel say, “I’m going to keep my colonies on the West Bank, the hell with the rest of you, and I’m going to keep Jerusalem, and you people can’t come back to your homes.” No, don’t partition the land. We have already got a Jewish—Israeli Jewish community living in the land. We have already Palestinians who live in the same land. But most of their relatives don’t live in their homeland, because Israel doesn’t allow it. And those people have the right to return. Therefore, how are you going to do it? There’s only one way you can do it. That is, if it is one state for all its citizens, not a Jewish state, not an Islamic state, not a Christian state—a secular democratic state. That’s the answer.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll continue with our conversation with Dr. Ghada Karmi after the break. Tomorrow on our broadcast, a discussion on 1948 with Israeli historian Benny Morris. We’ll also be joined by Tikva Honig-Parnass. She fought for Israel in the 1948 war. But first, to break with the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go to the conclusion of my interview with the Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. I asked her if she thinks proposing a one-state solution hurts the chances of Palestinians, because it’s less attainable than a two-state solution.

GHADA KARMI: The one-state solution is the only just solution for the Palestinians, so if we want to look at solving this problem from a point of view of justice, we have no alternative except the one state. Justice means that the dispossessed shall no longer be dispossessed. That’s justice.

If what you’re saying to me is, will it will hurt the chances of the Palestinians getting something out of the present situation, that’s a different question. I would have said to you that I can understand that position, if there were any evidence that they are going to get something.

Now, I’m looking around me, and I’m imagining that our intelligent audience is also looking at things like maps and is looking at what Israel does and how Israel behaves and can only come to the conclusion that the creation of a Palestinian state is totally out of reach. And I’m sorry to be blunt, but I think we have to be quite open about this. We mustn’t go on playing this game of the emperor’s new clothes, you know, everybody pretending they’re seeing something which isn’t there. There is no territorial basis on which a Palestinian state can now be set up.

Although I fully understand that there is an international consensus that the two-state solution is the way forward, I fully understand that a lot of work has gone into this, and in proposing the one-state solution I’m not being flippant, and I am not saying that all the work and all the good will and all the effort that’s gone into the two-state solution are trivial and idiotic and we have to forget about them, the problem is we’ve given the two-state solution quite a long time to see if it will work. It hasn’t happened. In decades of talking about the two-state solution, it has not come about. On the contrary, it’s less attainable now than it was in 1967, because Israel has taken so much Palestinian land, so much Palestinian resources, there’s no possibility of it happening logistically. So why would I, as an intelligent human being, continue to back a solution which has been shown not to be working?

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, a one-state solution would mean that Palestinians would outnumber Israeli Jews, which is why the Israeli government would fight it.

GHADA KARMI: Indeed. Of course, that might—it might mean that. But, you see, the whole point of this solution is we don’t have a Jewish state and we don’t have an Islamic state, we have a democracy. If you were to look at the Western liberal democracies today, they have various communities that live together. They don’t go around saying, “Wait a minute, this has to be a white state,” or “this has to be a black state,” or “this has to be a Belgian state.” They’re saying, “We are here, we are citizens.” The moment you get rid of the idea that there has to be an exclusive something for somebody, then you can see your way to having a proper democracy. That’s the essence of democracy.

So what I’m preaching and calling for—and by the way, many others along with me—is not at all bizarre, it’s not outlandish, it is in line with the Western democratic tradition, which has tried to free itself from fascist states, from states which insist on racial exclusivity, to ideas of tolerance, of rights, of democracy, and so on. What is wrong with that? And it’s amazing to me that whenever I propose the solution, people do object immediately by saying, well, that means it’s the end of the Jewish state, or the Israelis won’t have it, or it’s a declaration of war on Israel. This is a peaceable solution. It’s actually about ending the conflict, because if you no longer are—if you don’t have parties fighting over bits of territory, then you end the fight. But if you continue to say, “I have a right, a God-given right,” or whatever it is, “to take this, this, this amount of territory, and you will not have this, this and this,” here’s a recipe for conflict, and that’s what we’ve had all along.

It seems to me that the issue of Zionism, the issue of the insistence on the part of a group to say, “We have a right to a place where only we shall live, and we will exclude others,” seems to me this notion has to be challenged head-on. We must stop accepting the idea of an exclusive state in the Arab region or indeed anywhere else. And I imagine, you know, the Western world would be the first to be up in arms if Hamas managed to establish an Islamic state from which Jews were thrown out. They’d be the first to object. They’d go mad. Well, why on earth are we tolerating a situation which we have now, in which Jews are saying, “We, as Jews, have a right to this territory.” The more so when you remember it’s not their territory. It’s somebody else’s.

AMY GOODMAN: Ghada Karmi, explain what the word “Nakba” means.

GHADA KARMI: The “nakba,” in Arabic, is—it means literally “catastrophe.” Over time, it has acquired what you might call a capital N, which of course we don’t have capital letters in Arabic. But it’s acquired a capital N in a sense that it had become, as you might say, the grand catastrophe or the great catastrophe. That’s what it actually means, because, of course, for the Palestinians, nothing more catastrophic could have been imagined than to be expelled from their home, their homeland, lose everything and never be allowed back. And all that has happened from that time to this has been due to that initial event in 1948.

Today, the Palestinians are divided. They are fragmented. They live in different places. I live in London. Many Palestinians live in other different countries. We have Palestinian refugees in camps. We have people living under occupation in what remains of Palestine. We have people who are citizens of Israel. All these were once upon a time a homogeneous, cohesive society living in a land called Palestine. Now, when I call for a one-state solution, what I’m saying is I want that situation back again, where in that Palestine, where we were one cohesive society, we had Jews, we had Druzes, we had Armenians, we had Circassians, we were Christians, we were Muslims, and we lived together. And what I’m saying is, we want that again. And it can happen again if enough people with enough good will and enough sense of morality and justice help us.

AMY GOODMAN: And your feeling about the big sixtieth anniversary celebration in Israel, everyone from President Bush to Google cofounder Sergey Brin?

GHADA KARMI: Well, I have to tell you, if I were Israel, I would be celebrating. It’s not bad in sixty years to arrive at a point where you have not only taken somebody else’s country, you’ve thrown them out, you’ve kept them out, and you’ve succeeded in it, but you’ve succeeded in becoming rich, heavily armed, powerfully armed, you have nuclear weapons, you enjoy the unstinting support of the world’s single super state of the United States. You enjoy that support in terms of funding, in terms of arms, in political and diplomatic support. There’s not a UN resolution can be passed without the big brother in the United States vetoing it. Fantastic! If I were Israel, I’d be celebrating.

What is shameful, I think, is that the rest of the world that knows what has happened, knows what Israel has done and is doing and is doing to the people of Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? Dispossessing people, tormenting them, humiliating them, occupying them, starving them, as they are in Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? I would say not.

AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian author and doctor Ghada Karmi. Her latest book is Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, we’ll be joined by the well-known Israeli historian Benny Morris for a discussion about 1948, the founding of the Israeli state. We’ll also be joined by Tikva Honig-Parnass. She fought for Israel in 1948.

Don Drummond Requiem at Dance Crasher. A 1969 JBC Radio Broadcast by Dermot Hussey on the occasion o

2008-05-16T01:29:29Z

Don Drummond Requiem at Dance Crasher. A 1969 JBC Radio Broadcast by Dermot Hussey on the occasion of DD's death at Bellevue Sanitarium. A proper audio file is HERE. Thank you, DMc.

http://dancecrasher.podomatic.com/enclosure/2008-05-08T14_57_16-07_00.MP3

Catskill Mountains Photographs May 5

2008-05-16T01:22:36Z

Catskill Mountain Photographs May 5

http://tunlaw.org/cmtsw/index.html

Catskill Mountain Photographs May 5

5.15.2008

25 - Catskill Mountains Photographs May 5

All Photographs + Text Copyright 2008 Christopher Keeley

goto http://tunlaw.org/cmtsw/index.html

Chris

Catskill Mountain Photographs May 4

2008-05-16T01:19:40Z

http://tunlaw.org/cmtswr/index.html

Catskill Mountain Photographs May 4

5.14.2008

25 - Catskill Mountains Photographs May 4

All Photographs + Text Copyright 2008 Christopher Keeley

goto http://tunlaw.org/cmtswr/index.html

Chris

Viva la Vida

2008-05-15T22:53:39Z

Viva la Vida

Coldplay’s fourth album, due out on June 17th, will be called Viva la Vida. Singer Chris Martin chose it after seeing the phrase, which means “long live life,” on a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who endured polio, a broken spine, and chronic pain for decades. “She went through a lot of shit, of course, and then she started a big painting in her house that said ‘Viva la Vida,’” says Martin. “I just loved the boldness of it.”

Cenin Burcu Çorbacı

2008-05-15T19:42:25Z

Cenin Burcu Çorbacı

http://selfregion.deviantart.com/
http://www.myspace.com/selfregion

Joni Sternbach... 07.05.27 #4 Bettina & Toby (unique tintype. Ditch Plains). From Surfers by photogr

2008-05-15T18:14:47Z

Joni Sternbach... 07.05.27 #4 Bettina & Toby (unique tintype. Ditch Plains). From Surfers by photographer Joni Sternbach. "...Working with a large-format camera and historic process (wet-plate collodion), I have concentrated on locations that are close to or directly on the water. At this juncture between land and sea, I explore subject matter in a constant state of transition. .

For the last year I have been drawn to the people present at these locations, specifically the surfers in Montauk's Ditch Plains, at the eastern end of Long Island. Their avocation is on the water; they are persistent elements in a shifting scene. We overlap on the periphery of two powerful elements; the land and the sea. The singular, primitive act of surfing on the water is eclipsed by the social and negotiated state of human interaction on the shore. The surfers act as a bridge between the sea as an unbridled force of nature and the shore line, a place of leisure and cultural phenomena."

Heroin

2008-05-15T18:12:00Z

Heroin

Maureen 'Moe' Tucker... Heroin (.mp3 audio 08:48). From the album Playin' Possum (1981, Trash TLP 1001).

Bacon Triptych Auctioned for Record $86 Million

2008-05-15T18:07:00Z

Bacon Triptych Auctioned for Record $86 Million

By CAROL VOGEL

A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.

“Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea dealer, said jokingly as she was leaving the salesroom.

Although the sale had top-quality art and dealers predicted it would be a success, it went well beyond even the auction house’s expectations, bringing in $362 million, above the sale’s high $356 million estimate. Only 10 of the 83 works failed to sell, and 18 artist records were set for names ranging from Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni to Tom Wesselmann and Takashi Murakami.

By far the most exciting moment of the evening was when “Triptych,” Mr. Bacon’s comment on his own angst — a vast (each of the three panels measures about 6 ½ feet by 5 feet) and densely painted allegorical painting came up for sale. Three telephone bidders went for the painting, which was being sold by the Moueix family, producers of Château Pétrus wines. Hailing the painting as “a landmark of the 20th-century canon,” Sotheby’s had estimated it would sell for $70 million.

(Final prices include the commission paid to Sotheby’s: 25 percent of the first $20,000, 20 percent of the next $20,000 to $500,000 and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Two monochrome works by the artist Yves Klein fetched giant prices. Offered from the collection of Walther Lauffs, a German industrialist who died in 1981, and his wife, Helga, “MG9” (1962), a gold leaf on panel, proved wildly popular. It carried an estimate of $6 million to $8 million, but Philippe Ségalot, a Manhattan dealer, bought the painting for $23.5 million. Mr. Ségalot, who spoke French on a cellphone as he bid, also bought “IKB1,” a 1960 deep blue canvas that had been expected to bring $5 million to $7 million but fetched $17.4 million. (As soon as the hammer fell on both paintings, speculation started spreading through the salesroom that Mr. Ségalot was bidding for François Pinault, the luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s, but Mr. Ségalot declined to comment on the buyer for whom he was bidding.)

Abstract images have been strong sellers in general this week. Gerhard Richter’s “Abstract Picture” from 1990, a dreamy canvas of yellows, violets, blues and orange, went for $15.1 million, far above its $5 million to $7 million estimate. The buyer was yet another mystery telephone bidder.

Marianne Boesky, who for years had represented Mr. Murakami before he jumped to the powerhouse Gagosian Gallery two years ago, was selling one of the artist’s outrageous sculptures, “My Lonesome Cowboy,” another cast of which is on view as part of the artist’s retrospective that opened last month at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The sculpture of the naked cowboy brought another record price, selling to a telephone bidder for $15.1 million, nearly four times its $4 million high estimate.

Mr. Murakami, wearing his signature baggy blue jeans and his hair in a ponytail, was standing in the back of the salesroom on Wednesday night. People in the audience believed he spent $1.1 million for a 2001 sculpture by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, “Light My Fire,” a sculpture of a child on a tree stump holding a flame.

Three works by the art world titan Robert Rauschenberg were on offer Wednesday night, and his death this week at 82 prompted avid speculation on how they would fare. Historically, auction prices tend to dip immediately after an artist dies in anticipation that long-withheld works will flood the market.

But “Overdrive,” a 1963 silkscreen collage incorporating images of a bird, a stop sign, a one-way street sign and other objects, made yet another record price, bringing $14.6 million. Sotheby’s had thought it would make $10 million to $15 million.

The evening had one particularly pricey bump: “Orange, Red, Yellow,” an abstract Rothko in dense tones from 1956, was expected to fetch $35 million. It was being sold by Heinz Eppler, a philanthropist and collector from New York and Palm Beach, Calif. There were no bids for the painting, which failed to sell. A small triangle by the lot number indicated that Sotheby’s had a financial interest in the painting. Before the sale, some contemporary-art dealers said they had heard that Sotheby’s had purchased it in partnership with Robert Mnuchin, a Manhattan dealer. Perhaps there were too many red Rothkos for sale this week. On Tuesday night at Christie’s, a Rothko in reds and yellows went for $50.4 million, a highlight of that sale.

But Pop Art was still had its day. A Tom Wesselmann, “Great American Nude No. 48,” a 1963 roomlike assemblage that includes a radiator and window illumination, brought another record price, selling for $10.6 million, above its $8 million high estimate. (Another Wesselmann, “Smoker #9, 1973,” a painting in the shape of a woman’s red lips inhaling smoke, set a record for the artist’s work at auction on Tuesday night at Christie’s, going for $6.7 million.

Jose Mugrabi, the Manhattan dealer, bought Warhol’s “Detail of the Last Supper (Christ 112 Times)” from 1986 for $9.5 million. Measuring 6 feet by 35 feet, it presents a black grid with the face of Christ outlined in yellow. It seemed like a good price considering the low estimate was $10 million.

Peter Brant, the newsprint magnate was a big seller last night. One of Richard Prince’s early supporters he was parting with “Millionaire Nurse,” from 2002. one of the artist’s paintings inspired by the covers of erotic pulp fiction from the 1940s. In this painting, his nurse is wearing a white surgical mask. While it had been estimated to sell for $3.5 million to $4.5 million, five bidders went for the work which ended up selling for $4.2 million or $4.7 million including Sotheby’s fees. (On Tuesday night, Christie’s auctioned a Prince nurse painting from the same year for a record $7.3 million.) Even more subtle canvases had their appeal. “Achrome,” a sensual, layered white canvas by Piero Manzoni, also brought a record price. Franck Giraud, Mr. Ségalot’s partner, beat out five bidders to buy the painting for $10.1 million, well above its $6.5 million estimate.

After the sale, as the crowds were milling around talking about the evening, everyone seemed stunned by the large sums of money that were spent. “I don’t understand why it did so well if the economy was mediocre,” said Mr. Mugrabi. “Maybe people feel safer with art.”

goi art

2008-05-15T17:32:09Z

http://www.goiart.com

goi art

http://www.goiart.com

Bill Moyers

2008-05-15T17:22:24Z

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/

Bill Moyers

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/

downist

2008-05-15T17:08:35Z

http://downist.blogspot.com/

downist

http://downist.blogspot.com/

chris Bird

2008-05-15T15:06:10Z

Chris Bird

bragagedley

2008-05-15T14:40:03Z

http://www.myspace.com/bragagedley

bragagedley

http://www.myspace.com/bragagedley

fanny be temps

2008-05-15T13:25:39Z

http://fannybetemps.blogspot.com/

fanny be temps

http://fannybetemps.blogspot.com/