two shovels: digging for lazarus

The society of the spectacle to which we all belong  treads a thin line between derealization  and the ambiguous nature of our cultural code that straddles reality and kitsch. And if any place on earth becomes part of the spectacle and makes a spectacle of itself it is the Holy Land and its psychotic symptoms of emotional detachment and outright alienation  from a realistic perception of self. Psychologically speaking, we are unable to internalize  what is an over-mediated piece of real-estate that has sticky ownership rights with varying degrees of differentiated originality.

The default position, the shelter from the tempest swirling about it, then becomes a species of satire, of serious rhetoric with the critical content of a Tide detergent commercial. Of course, this satire is not just ironic, but moralistic. Extremely so. However, the paradox of the satirical gesture is its own complicity with the decadence and violence it rails against attributed to the “other,” hence, willingly or not capitulating to the cycle that preserves it and allows it to reproduce itself, a mechanical reproduction indeed hence losing any value and meaning. Instead of perspective, there is a mirror effect meaning not a critical judgement but an endorsement of values, which when mixed with the collision of hyper-secularism and ultra-religion become this toxic stew of nihilism, messianism, and apocalyptic redemption as a warm up act to a shiny new day.

For pop artists such as Warhol, there was an ability to take the banal such as Campbell Soup and create high-end advertising from it, the manufactured appearance so essential to its seductiveness, whether product or portrait the brand identity of a Marilyn or Mao were also socially constructed objects with no interior existence and lacking any subjectivity. Like store mannequins, simulated people, dehumanized; whether as ironic and satiric social commentary, there is a stripping of human value and reality for the sake of reductionism; this is the template from which we look at these complicated issues of Israel and it neighbors, as caricatures, or ready-mades like Duchamp’s constructions from which we cannot find the solution and begin swallowing the satire, drunk with the passion that went into the making of it.A kind of sociological and conceptual terrorism that find expression that finds expression in some very disjointed egos…

---James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964–65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86' (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2011 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York---click image for source...

—James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964–65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86′ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2011 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York—click image for source…

The drive for seductiveness, even an urge to be seduced and manipulated does imply a longing for some sort of product, war and peace in all its iterations as long as its imbued with desirability to encourage one to emotionally invest, a poetic verse of love and hate, which through intangible possession is seen to satisfy a deep-seated need…

Christopher Hitchens ( see link at end): It can probably be said with some degree of confidence that nobody blows themselves up for a half-a-loaf compromise solution. These cold-blooded attacks did not just avoid well-defended West Bank settlements or Israeli army bases; they also vividly expressed the demand that all Jews leave Palestine or risk being killed. Despair cannot so easily be channeled so as to underline a strictly political/ideological objective.

---The film A Dancer, a Pole, and a Movie documents the life of Neta Lee Levi, European Pole Dancing Champion for 2011. The filmmaker follows her tumultuous journey as she reaches for that coveted title. It reexamines and redefines the relationship between the protagonists of documentary films and the documentary filmmakers, while introducing us to a very frank and tempestuous female artist, caught finding a balance between the traditional, Eastern society in which she was raised, and the conflicting social codes of the Tel Aviv scene,---click image for source...

—The film A Dancer, a Pole, and a Movie documents the life of Neta Lee Levi, European Pole Dancing Champion for 2011. The filmmaker follows her tumultuous journey as she reaches for that coveted title. It reexamines and redefines the relationship between the protagonists of documentary films and the documentary filmmakers, while introducing us to a very frank and tempestuous female artist, caught finding a balance between the traditional, Eastern society in which she was raised, and the conflicting social codes of the Tel Aviv scene,—click image for source…

Another possible reason for the slump in suicide is that those who were orchestrating it came to find that the tactic was becoming subject to diminishing returns. Despair must have meant a roughly constant stream of potential volunteers, but the immediate needs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad may not have always required the tap of despair to be left turned on. Indeed, there must have been some quite intense private discussions about how to turn it off. Not every despairing person can make, at home, the necessary belts, fuses, and lethal charges. These things require a godfather. And this, in turn, prompts the question: What will be said if or when the tap is ever turned back on? Surely it won’t quite do to say that despair must have broken out all over again, though I can easily think of some fools who will be ready to say it.

There were children among the last wave of suicide-murderers, some of whom lost their nerve and surrendered at the last moment. There were also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been killed for “honor” reasons and who were offered the relatively painless alternative of a martyr’s fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people. To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Quran.)

Meanwhile, the wall still stands and grows, ironically expressing the much more banal and worldly fact that there are two peoples in Palestine and that sooner or later there will be two states as well. Read More:http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/07/what_happened_to_the_suicide_bombers_of_jerusalem.html

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