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Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012— IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
18 Haziran 2012 Pazartesi
17 Haziran 2012 Pazar
Shirin Neshat Women without Men
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I just saw Shirin Neshat's first feature length film, Women without Men, 2009. It has won a lot of awards, at the Sundance Film Festival, at the Venice Biennale, and elsewhere.
I wonder how many of the people giving awards and writing reviews have read the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur of the same title. This is the second novel by Shahrhush Parsipur that Neshat has used as a point of departure, the first was Touba and the Meaning of Night.
Parsipur seems to be supportive of the film, she is appearing in the photographs of the Silver Lion ceremony in Venice and she even plays a part in the film as the brothel madam.
The film is visually dazzling, Neshat's trademark, and her film is a logical direction from her early photographs, then the slow moving imagery of her installations, to now a feature- length film. Her husband Shoja Azari is also a filmmaker and collaborates with her. The film was shot in Morocco, with Casablanca as 1950s Tehran. This is a good review.
Women of Allah, her famous photography series in which she wrote the poetry of the famous modernist Iranian feminist poet, Forough Farokhzad, on the hands and face of (herself) wearing a chador, was a response to a visit to Iran after many years. She was shocked at the changes from what she remembered in the late 1970s as a small child ( she left in 1979 at the time of the Islamic Revolution). Paying homage to a great poet as a visual artist is common in art from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries in which poetry has been more important than visual art. (I would like to avoid the inaccurate term "Middle East")
Her film Women without Men appeared almost at the same time as the Green Revolution, an amazingly fortuitous circumstance for its success. The cast and Neshat wore green and held up the peace symbol in Venice during the award ceremony in September 2009 for Best Director.
The film is pure Shirin Neshat. She has stunning images of women in black chadors (she has a love hate relationship with chadors, she loves their visual effects, but not the oppression of wearing them.) A lot of her films include an emphasis on the black shapes of the chador.
I have heard Shirin Neshat speak, and she is very compelling. I can still remember her saying on a panel in Istanbul, " artists in Iran do not have the luxury to ignore politics."
On that note, the film's vortex is the politics surrounding the US coup of 1953 which overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and reinstalled the Shah.
One of her characters, Munis, comes back from death and engages with the political activists who support Mohammed Mossadegh. They are represented as Communists, leafleting in the dark of night, resisting the supporters of the Shah in demonstrations in the streets.They are ultimately crushed both literally and metaphorically. That's Munis in the photograph above, floating in a sea of people, both there and not there ( she is after all resurrected from the dead.)
None of this is in the novel.
The sole reference to the coup in the novel is the date of the novel mentioned in the book, August 1953. There is unexplained turmoil in the streets. Munis is not a political activist, she simply visits a bookstore and reads some books.
Parsipur is a feminist novelist, she has been writing books and short stories since the late 1960s. Women Without Men was first drafted in the late 1970s, although published in the late 1980s. She was censored for referring to virginity and has spent time in jail. Her life has been both as an acclaimed Iranian novelist and as an exile since 1994 whose works are banned in Iran, an incredible tension. All of her novels include elements of the magical, the incredible, magic trees, magic women, women as trees, ( if you saw Touba by Neshat, the woman became the magical tree, in her novel Women without Men, a woman plants herself and becomes a tree).
But the main theme of Women without Men, the novel, is women together in a special place. In that place, a house with an orchard, magical events occur. The novel is feminist, focusing on four women from different social classes, a prostitute, a sister of a repressive and religious brother, a religiously observant woman in love with that brother, and a wealthy woman who leaves her general husband and buys a garden and estate in the country in order to be free and do as she wishes, including writing poetry, which she does badly. ( In the film she is a singer).
The main theme of Women without Men the film, is the coup d'etat, the role of the United States, and people's lives at that time. Neshat brings together the military, the Shah reinstatement, and the magical orchard where the women live by having the military who are searching for communists after the Coup come to a party at the house in the orchard.
The parties in the book are not connected to the military, they are a celebration of life and the aspirations of Fakhri to be famous. In the film, she is attached like a mother to the prostitute Zarin who hovers between life and death; in the book, Zarin marries the gardner and has a magical pregnancy ( becoming transparent), giving birth to a lily which is planted by the stream. Her mothers milk is given to the woman tree.
The place of music is crucial to the film. As the soldiers and officers sit at the table disrupting the party of the bourgeois guests who both support and do not support the coup, the tension is broken by the beautiful singing and playing of an elderly man. (earlier, before the soldiers arrived, the hostess Fakhri had performed herself).
So the question is what is the position of culture here? I found it provocative, on the one hand it was soothing the oppressive military men, on the other hand it was disrupting their oppression.
The other question is, why did Neshat keep the same title as the novel for her book. Her film is about the tension between life and politics, between freedom and oppression, the novel is about complex relationships between women, between reality and fantasy. They are entirely different. In the book all four women are in the same place. Munis does not go back to Tehran.
But one cannot argue with Neshat's power to call attention to political issues in an aesthetic context. This is the most difficult achievement for art. I salute her for that. But for those who are looking for an Iranian film, they will have to look elsewhere. She has said she wants to convey the complexity of Islamic culture, but contemporary Iranian women say that she has been away too long ( she is also banned from Iran now). Iranian women that I know do not like her work. They find it annoyingly cliched and superficial with respect to Iranian society and Iranian women.They refer to her art as "chador" art, or "veil" art, holding the Western gaze to Eastern art.
I suggest Bidoun magazine, an outrageously amusing and clever contemporary publication on culture in the Middle East (they call it that) and Arteeast, an online journal that has indepth articles on a range of subjects.
Nonetheless, Neshat is the primary female Western-based artist who is so prominently addressing Iranian politics in art for the international art audience. At least she is opening the door. The fact that we think all those chadors are what is happening in Iran then or now just shows how much we all have to learn.
I wonder how many of the people giving awards and writing reviews have read the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur of the same title. This is the second novel by Shahrhush Parsipur that Neshat has used as a point of departure, the first was Touba and the Meaning of Night.Parsipur seems to be supportive of the film, she is appearing in the photographs of the Silver Lion ceremony in Venice and she even plays a part in the film as the brothel madam.
The film is visually dazzling, Neshat's trademark, and her film is a logical direction from her early photographs, then the slow moving imagery of her installations, to now a feature- length film. Her husband Shoja Azari is also a filmmaker and collaborates with her. The film was shot in Morocco, with Casablanca as 1950s Tehran. This is a good review.
Women of Allah, her famous photography series in which she wrote the poetry of the famous modernist Iranian feminist poet, Forough Farokhzad, on the hands and face of (herself) wearing a chador, was a response to a visit to Iran after many years. She was shocked at the changes from what she remembered in the late 1970s as a small child ( she left in 1979 at the time of the Islamic Revolution). Paying homage to a great poet as a visual artist is common in art from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries in which poetry has been more important than visual art. (I would like to avoid the inaccurate term "Middle East")
Her film Women without Men appeared almost at the same time as the Green Revolution, an amazingly fortuitous circumstance for its success. The cast and Neshat wore green and held up the peace symbol in Venice during the award ceremony in September 2009 for Best Director.
The film is pure Shirin Neshat. She has stunning images of women in black chadors (she has a love hate relationship with chadors, she loves their visual effects, but not the oppression of wearing them.) A lot of her films include an emphasis on the black shapes of the chador.
I have heard Shirin Neshat speak, and she is very compelling. I can still remember her saying on a panel in Istanbul, " artists in Iran do not have the luxury to ignore politics."
On that note, the film's vortex is the politics surrounding the US coup of 1953 which overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and reinstalled the Shah.
One of her characters, Munis, comes back from death and engages with the political activists who support Mohammed Mossadegh. They are represented as Communists, leafleting in the dark of night, resisting the supporters of the Shah in demonstrations in the streets.They are ultimately crushed both literally and metaphorically. That's Munis in the photograph above, floating in a sea of people, both there and not there ( she is after all resurrected from the dead.)
None of this is in the novel.
The sole reference to the coup in the novel is the date of the novel mentioned in the book, August 1953. There is unexplained turmoil in the streets. Munis is not a political activist, she simply visits a bookstore and reads some books.
Parsipur is a feminist novelist, she has been writing books and short stories since the late 1960s. Women Without Men was first drafted in the late 1970s, although published in the late 1980s. She was censored for referring to virginity and has spent time in jail. Her life has been both as an acclaimed Iranian novelist and as an exile since 1994 whose works are banned in Iran, an incredible tension. All of her novels include elements of the magical, the incredible, magic trees, magic women, women as trees, ( if you saw Touba by Neshat, the woman became the magical tree, in her novel Women without Men, a woman plants herself and becomes a tree).
But the main theme of Women without Men, the novel, is women together in a special place. In that place, a house with an orchard, magical events occur. The novel is feminist, focusing on four women from different social classes, a prostitute, a sister of a repressive and religious brother, a religiously observant woman in love with that brother, and a wealthy woman who leaves her general husband and buys a garden and estate in the country in order to be free and do as she wishes, including writing poetry, which she does badly. ( In the film she is a singer).
The main theme of Women without Men the film, is the coup d'etat, the role of the United States, and people's lives at that time. Neshat brings together the military, the Shah reinstatement, and the magical orchard where the women live by having the military who are searching for communists after the Coup come to a party at the house in the orchard.
The parties in the book are not connected to the military, they are a celebration of life and the aspirations of Fakhri to be famous. In the film, she is attached like a mother to the prostitute Zarin who hovers between life and death; in the book, Zarin marries the gardner and has a magical pregnancy ( becoming transparent), giving birth to a lily which is planted by the stream. Her mothers milk is given to the woman tree.
The place of music is crucial to the film. As the soldiers and officers sit at the table disrupting the party of the bourgeois guests who both support and do not support the coup, the tension is broken by the beautiful singing and playing of an elderly man. (earlier, before the soldiers arrived, the hostess Fakhri had performed herself).
So the question is what is the position of culture here? I found it provocative, on the one hand it was soothing the oppressive military men, on the other hand it was disrupting their oppression.
The other question is, why did Neshat keep the same title as the novel for her book. Her film is about the tension between life and politics, between freedom and oppression, the novel is about complex relationships between women, between reality and fantasy. They are entirely different. In the book all four women are in the same place. Munis does not go back to Tehran.
But one cannot argue with Neshat's power to call attention to political issues in an aesthetic context. This is the most difficult achievement for art. I salute her for that. But for those who are looking for an Iranian film, they will have to look elsewhere. She has said she wants to convey the complexity of Islamic culture, but contemporary Iranian women say that she has been away too long ( she is also banned from Iran now). Iranian women that I know do not like her work. They find it annoyingly cliched and superficial with respect to Iranian society and Iranian women.They refer to her art as "chador" art, or "veil" art, holding the Western gaze to Eastern art.
I suggest Bidoun magazine, an outrageously amusing and clever contemporary publication on culture in the Middle East (they call it that) and Arteeast, an online journal that has indepth articles on a range of subjects.
Nonetheless, Neshat is the primary female Western-based artist who is so prominently addressing Iranian politics in art for the international art audience. At least she is opening the door. The fact that we think all those chadors are what is happening in Iran then or now just shows how much we all have to learn.
Zion and ostrich eggs
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We are right at the base of the Zion National Park in Virgin Utah. It is a breathtaking place. We are headed to the park today for some hiking and sightseeing. I am looking forward to sharing some pictures of our trip on FB. Its funny that I have no cell service but there is what appears to be an organic grocery store up the road a just few miles. I was on a bike ride the other day and drove by an ostrich farm where you could buy fresh ostrich eggs. I have never had an Ostrich egg and quite frankly I have a little weirdness about eggs in general. They have always kind of given me the creeps. So, I cant imagine eating one the size of a cantaloupe. Anyway, I will post more on this later. Happy Memorial Day!
Tweeting in Twitterland and Urban spooning
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Local Chow is now on Twitter. I am a little new at linking all of this stuff so bear with me! It is a HUGE social media world out there! So many great links to cool things and cool people it throws my O.C.D and A.D.D into overdrive at warp speed! I also am starting to write some reviews on Urbanspoon so check that out as well! It is all under Local Chow. Hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day! We are in SLC Utah and it has been cold and rainy for 2 days. I have secretly been enjoying it after months of sunshine and 80 degree weather. I am still an Oregonian and I and just not used to all of that sunshine! So we stayed in and I made a root vegetable beef stew with Guinness beer and watched movies it was perfect and delish!
Where we've slept recently
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Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012— IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
Music for the mind
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CAL PERFORMANCES, the performing-arts booker at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, engaged this summer to bring the Ojai Festival north from its annual May schedule in its bucolic setting in Ventura county, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.
There, for a number of decades now, contemporary and standard-rep music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, has been performed in an outdoors shell in a park by the tennis courts which provide one of Ojai's other tourist attractions. Stravinsky performed here; I heard Boulez conduct here forty years ago; once I even performed, reading one of John Cage's lectures with violin and percussion collaborators.
I've always thought that events like these should tour. California's a big country, close to Italy in size; it's a shame to let the work of producing such festivals be spent all at one location only.
I'm not sure the second week of June is the best time to present such concerts in Berkeley, though. School's out; people are away; the weather's glorious; apparently most people have find even the superb acoustics of Hertz Hall less attractive than competing possibilities.
We too are staying away for the most part: the hundred-forty-mile round trip is just too much to repeat next day, and there's too much work to do at home to stay away for three whole days. But yesterday's double concert was too attractive to ignore.
I like the idea of the schedule: two short concerts, one at seven in the evening, the next at 9:30. And the programs! As Christopher Hailey's lucid, intelligent program note was headed, this is music "between then and there, here and now"; individual pieces which generate among themselves a musical conversation about things both personal and historical, conceived by composers of unusually deep and penetrating minds.
The JanáÄ�ek quartet was played in an adaptation for string orchestra (6-5-4-4-2 in this configuration), with solo players occasionally bringing strategic moments further forward from the ensemble. From my seat centered in the last row — my favorite spot in this hall — the sound was marvelous, both full and focussed. The dynamic range was amazing: pianississimi barely audible, recalling Berg's frequent direction wie ein Hauch, "like a breath." (Except that such silences are breathless; they force you to suppress all activity in your total concentration on the moment.)
At the other end of the range, full-throated fortissimi, almost taking the instruments beyond the range of musical sound into that of noise. Janá�ek's quartet is "about" his illicit love for a much younger woman, an obsession that found its final musical outlet in this late piece. He was 74 when he wrote it, in the last year of his life: it is in many ways a valedictory. Themes and instrumental assignments are identified quite directly with himself, his ardor, and the young woman; but the piece is also "about" larger, more general matters than personal experience: life and death; age and youth; release and control.
And beyond these matters, which can be individuated within the score and its performance, there is the uniquely musical component, perhaps most easily identified in the transitions — from solo to ensemble, soft to loud (or the reverse), note to phrase, phrase to section. JanáÄ�ek was famously concerned with finding musical equivalents of speech, specifically the urgent rhythms and crisp consonants of his native Czech language (born in Hukvaldy, near the Polish border, he was Moravian); and his melodic style is given to short thematic outbursts, repeated motives, nervous pacing, all now and then contributing to a longer, fuller statement. Listening to JanáÄ�ek, you can't help thinking his music is telling you something; and frequently he — and his performers — seem as frustrated as you at the fact you can't tell exactly what it is.
You could tell exactly what it is Reinbert de Leeuw was "talking" about in Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, his cycle of twenty-one (three sets of seven) mediations on well-known Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, setting poems by Heine, Müller, Goerthe Eichendorff, and Ludwig Rellstab. He was telling us what these marvelous songs mean — to him, to us, to the world; and what they meant at the ardent time of their first hearing, when both poem and setting were dashed off, apparently so quickly and unsuppressibly.
And so once again we were confronting age and youth; but now the age of our present postmodern condition and the youth of German Romanticism. On the one hand, by pushing the material of these songs to dramatic extremes, de Leeuw almost succeeds in making what T.S. Eliot would have called a contemporary "objective correlative" of them, not only restoring the youthful, almost adolescent freshness of the original songs through the heightening of their musical expression, but also creating a new, contemporary equivalent of them, by linking Schubert and Schumann (and thereby Heine and Goethe, who after all have lost, for most of us, the surprising immediacy and presence they must have had for their contemporaries) to the long arc of musical and poetic culture their work generated, nearly two hundred years ago.
So de Leeuw not only suggests Mahler and Brecht-Weill and Schoenberg; he also suggests — especially through his technical means — the world of cabaret and rock opera. The American soprano Lucy Shelton, billed on the program as "speaker," certainly speaks some of these lines: but she also sings, and shrieks, and "sprechstimmes" in the manner of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (which she performed two weeks ago in Glasgow), always using a body microphone, alternately standing, turning her back to the audience, facing one or another of the instrumentalists, sitting dejectedly, or stalking about the stage, wearing a black vaguely Biedermeier sheath with a dramatic gold wrap, boldly decorated with what seem to be abstract Klimtian roses or pomegranates, thrown over her back and shoulders. She was ingratiating, seductive, sorrowful, boisterous, reflective, defeated, exhausting, magnificent.
De Leeuw played piano, occasionally beating time or indicating entrances, upstage center, six wind players (flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn) at his left in an open arc toward downstage left; six strings (two each violins and celli, viola and double bass) symmetrically disposed to the right of the harpist who sat on his own right. Fourteen musicians; thrice seven texts.
De Leeuw is of course Dutch, born in 1938 in Amsterdam where in 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble, and since then seems to have been more active as pianist and conductor than as composer. According to Wikipedia his last composition was written for them in 1985; "Since then he has only made adaptations and instrumentations." But if Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is any indication these "adaptations" are full-fledged new compositions in their own right, and this one a particularly significant one, endlessly rewarding and persuasive for its strictly musical content, and meaningful and provocative for what it has to say about the philosophy of music and history.
De Leeuw is a fine pianist — his recordings of Satie are among the finest I know. We last heard him in November 2010, when he provided the music for Hans van Marien's ballet Without Words — playing the piano accompaniments to Hugo Wolf's Mignon songs, the dance alone providing the normally sung component. He played then, as he did last night, with taste, care, and restrained passion: he is a thoroughly admirable example of intelligent, artful restraint.
He is also the co-author (with J. Bernlef) of the important Dutch monograph Charles Ives (1969: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam), where he writes of the Concord Sonata
Ives, in this great sonata — Lawrence Gilman, writing in the New York Herald Tribune after its 1939 premiere, called it "the greatest music composed by an American," and I could argue that it remains that — is inspired by his long and deep contemplation of the lives and work of four forces of the New England Enlightenment: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau.
He "depicts" these subjects, and the site-specificity of the Concord in which they lived, with musical concepts and procedures. This isn't tone-painting, at least not often; you won't hear sound-portraits of carriages or steam-trains (though Thoreau's flute is portrayed realistically, wafting in quietly from offstage during the final movement). Instead, cultural associations most of us have been led to form with known musical sources — patriotic songs, hymn-tunes, Beethoven's Fifth, ragtime — are woven into a texture whose nearest artistic equivalent, I think, may be Molly Bloom's very different stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.
De Leeuw quotes Lou Harrison (from the essay "On Quotation", published in Modern Music 23, Summer 1946) on this:
The resulting sonata has the depth, luminosity, inevitable near-nostalgia of the great late Schubert sonatas, in which the huge Understanding of ineffable experiences and matters, so valiantly attempted by Beethoven in his own late sonatas and string quartets, manages to be expressed without the distraction of personal heroics or suffering. There have been other great piano surveys of huge vistas — those by Pierre Boulez come to mind — but no one else, that I know of, manages to train such explorations on specific (though panoramically specific) terrain. Perhaps only a man like Ives, between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and on the margin of the European art-music tradition, could have achieved it.
I thought Marc-André Hamelin's performance, while persuasive and fluent, lacked passion. It seemed, well, bloodless. This in spite of a marvelous dynamic range, a careful attention to such details as the barely-heard "wrong-note" overtones hanging out of chords and clusters, and what seemed a perfect command of the (memorized) score. I didn't have mine on my lap, so I can't swear to it, but he seemed to have played every page, with perfect authenticity, an achievement I've rarely heard (if ever) even from pianists who had the pages in front of them on the rack.
A French-Canadian, born in 1961, he has recorded Haydn, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Alkan, the Brahms, Shostakovich, Shchedrin, Reger and Strauss concerti, and his own cycle of études in the minor keys, as well as jazz-inflected music by Swiss and French composers… all suggesting that his interest in Ives is logical as well as personal: perhaps the half-full Hertz Hall, or the relatively late hour, had something to do with what seemed to me a softened edge to an otherwise commanding performance.
| Ojai North at UC Berkeley, June 13, 2012: Janá�ek: String Quartet 2, "Intimate Letters" Reinbert de Leeuw: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai Ives: Piano Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860 Norwegian Chamber Orchestra; Reinbert de Leeuw and Marc-André Hamelin, pianos; Lucy Shelton, speaker |
There, for a number of decades now, contemporary and standard-rep music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, has been performed in an outdoors shell in a park by the tennis courts which provide one of Ojai's other tourist attractions. Stravinsky performed here; I heard Boulez conduct here forty years ago; once I even performed, reading one of John Cage's lectures with violin and percussion collaborators.
I've always thought that events like these should tour. California's a big country, close to Italy in size; it's a shame to let the work of producing such festivals be spent all at one location only.
I'm not sure the second week of June is the best time to present such concerts in Berkeley, though. School's out; people are away; the weather's glorious; apparently most people have find even the superb acoustics of Hertz Hall less attractive than competing possibilities.
We too are staying away for the most part: the hundred-forty-mile round trip is just too much to repeat next day, and there's too much work to do at home to stay away for three whole days. But yesterday's double concert was too attractive to ignore.
I like the idea of the schedule: two short concerts, one at seven in the evening, the next at 9:30. And the programs! As Christopher Hailey's lucid, intelligent program note was headed, this is music "between then and there, here and now"; individual pieces which generate among themselves a musical conversation about things both personal and historical, conceived by composers of unusually deep and penetrating minds.
The JanáÄ�ek quartet was played in an adaptation for string orchestra (6-5-4-4-2 in this configuration), with solo players occasionally bringing strategic moments further forward from the ensemble. From my seat centered in the last row — my favorite spot in this hall — the sound was marvelous, both full and focussed. The dynamic range was amazing: pianississimi barely audible, recalling Berg's frequent direction wie ein Hauch, "like a breath." (Except that such silences are breathless; they force you to suppress all activity in your total concentration on the moment.)
At the other end of the range, full-throated fortissimi, almost taking the instruments beyond the range of musical sound into that of noise. Janá�ek's quartet is "about" his illicit love for a much younger woman, an obsession that found its final musical outlet in this late piece. He was 74 when he wrote it, in the last year of his life: it is in many ways a valedictory. Themes and instrumental assignments are identified quite directly with himself, his ardor, and the young woman; but the piece is also "about" larger, more general matters than personal experience: life and death; age and youth; release and control.
And beyond these matters, which can be individuated within the score and its performance, there is the uniquely musical component, perhaps most easily identified in the transitions — from solo to ensemble, soft to loud (or the reverse), note to phrase, phrase to section. JanáÄ�ek was famously concerned with finding musical equivalents of speech, specifically the urgent rhythms and crisp consonants of his native Czech language (born in Hukvaldy, near the Polish border, he was Moravian); and his melodic style is given to short thematic outbursts, repeated motives, nervous pacing, all now and then contributing to a longer, fuller statement. Listening to JanáÄ�ek, you can't help thinking his music is telling you something; and frequently he — and his performers — seem as frustrated as you at the fact you can't tell exactly what it is.
You could tell exactly what it is Reinbert de Leeuw was "talking" about in Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, his cycle of twenty-one (three sets of seven) mediations on well-known Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, setting poems by Heine, Müller, Goerthe Eichendorff, and Ludwig Rellstab. He was telling us what these marvelous songs mean — to him, to us, to the world; and what they meant at the ardent time of their first hearing, when both poem and setting were dashed off, apparently so quickly and unsuppressibly.
And so once again we were confronting age and youth; but now the age of our present postmodern condition and the youth of German Romanticism. On the one hand, by pushing the material of these songs to dramatic extremes, de Leeuw almost succeeds in making what T.S. Eliot would have called a contemporary "objective correlative" of them, not only restoring the youthful, almost adolescent freshness of the original songs through the heightening of their musical expression, but also creating a new, contemporary equivalent of them, by linking Schubert and Schumann (and thereby Heine and Goethe, who after all have lost, for most of us, the surprising immediacy and presence they must have had for their contemporaries) to the long arc of musical and poetic culture their work generated, nearly two hundred years ago.
So de Leeuw not only suggests Mahler and Brecht-Weill and Schoenberg; he also suggests — especially through his technical means — the world of cabaret and rock opera. The American soprano Lucy Shelton, billed on the program as "speaker," certainly speaks some of these lines: but she also sings, and shrieks, and "sprechstimmes" in the manner of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (which she performed two weeks ago in Glasgow), always using a body microphone, alternately standing, turning her back to the audience, facing one or another of the instrumentalists, sitting dejectedly, or stalking about the stage, wearing a black vaguely Biedermeier sheath with a dramatic gold wrap, boldly decorated with what seem to be abstract Klimtian roses or pomegranates, thrown over her back and shoulders. She was ingratiating, seductive, sorrowful, boisterous, reflective, defeated, exhausting, magnificent.
De Leeuw played piano, occasionally beating time or indicating entrances, upstage center, six wind players (flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn) at his left in an open arc toward downstage left; six strings (two each violins and celli, viola and double bass) symmetrically disposed to the right of the harpist who sat on his own right. Fourteen musicians; thrice seven texts.
De Leeuw is of course Dutch, born in 1938 in Amsterdam where in 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble, and since then seems to have been more active as pianist and conductor than as composer. According to Wikipedia his last composition was written for them in 1985; "Since then he has only made adaptations and instrumentations." But if Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is any indication these "adaptations" are full-fledged new compositions in their own right, and this one a particularly significant one, endlessly rewarding and persuasive for its strictly musical content, and meaningful and provocative for what it has to say about the philosophy of music and history.
De Leeuw is a fine pianist — his recordings of Satie are among the finest I know. We last heard him in November 2010, when he provided the music for Hans van Marien's ballet Without Words — playing the piano accompaniments to Hugo Wolf's Mignon songs, the dance alone providing the normally sung component. He played then, as he did last night, with taste, care, and restrained passion: he is a thoroughly admirable example of intelligent, artful restraint.
He is also the co-author (with J. Bernlef) of the important Dutch monograph Charles Ives (1969: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam), where he writes of the Concord Sonata
In het kolossale stuk worden, misschien als in geen ander, de kwaliteiten van Ives' muziek verenigd. De schitterende paradoxen, de onverwachte associaties, de stilistische vrijheid worden samengevat in een geheel, waarin bij wijze van spreken een eeuw muziek wordt samengevat en daaraan tegelijk een niuewe inhoud geeft. (op. cit., p. 228)(In this colossal piece, perhaps as in no other, the qualities of Ives's music are united. The stunning paradoxes, unexpected associations, stylistic freedoms are summarized in a single unity, in which in a manner of speaking a century of music is at once summarized and given a renewed meaning.)
Ives, in this great sonata — Lawrence Gilman, writing in the New York Herald Tribune after its 1939 premiere, called it "the greatest music composed by an American," and I could argue that it remains that — is inspired by his long and deep contemplation of the lives and work of four forces of the New England Enlightenment: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau.
He "depicts" these subjects, and the site-specificity of the Concord in which they lived, with musical concepts and procedures. This isn't tone-painting, at least not often; you won't hear sound-portraits of carriages or steam-trains (though Thoreau's flute is portrayed realistically, wafting in quietly from offstage during the final movement). Instead, cultural associations most of us have been led to form with known musical sources — patriotic songs, hymn-tunes, Beethoven's Fifth, ragtime — are woven into a texture whose nearest artistic equivalent, I think, may be Molly Bloom's very different stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.
De Leeuw quotes Lou Harrison (from the essay "On Quotation", published in Modern Music 23, Summer 1946) on this:
His aim is amazingly close to that of the best Chinese poetry (wherein observed fact is more expression than referred likeness) and of Chinese painting which is concerned with observation of nature, human nature as well as 'natural' nature." (Een opvatting die dicht staat bij de bekende uitspraak van John Cage: "to imitate nature in her manner of operation".) (op. cit., p. 145)(A formula that recalls the well-known one of John Cage:)
The resulting sonata has the depth, luminosity, inevitable near-nostalgia of the great late Schubert sonatas, in which the huge Understanding of ineffable experiences and matters, so valiantly attempted by Beethoven in his own late sonatas and string quartets, manages to be expressed without the distraction of personal heroics or suffering. There have been other great piano surveys of huge vistas — those by Pierre Boulez come to mind — but no one else, that I know of, manages to train such explorations on specific (though panoramically specific) terrain. Perhaps only a man like Ives, between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and on the margin of the European art-music tradition, could have achieved it.
I thought Marc-André Hamelin's performance, while persuasive and fluent, lacked passion. It seemed, well, bloodless. This in spite of a marvelous dynamic range, a careful attention to such details as the barely-heard "wrong-note" overtones hanging out of chords and clusters, and what seemed a perfect command of the (memorized) score. I didn't have mine on my lap, so I can't swear to it, but he seemed to have played every page, with perfect authenticity, an achievement I've rarely heard (if ever) even from pianists who had the pages in front of them on the rack.
A French-Canadian, born in 1961, he has recorded Haydn, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Alkan, the Brahms, Shostakovich, Shchedrin, Reger and Strauss concerti, and his own cycle of études in the minor keys, as well as jazz-inflected music by Swiss and French composers… all suggesting that his interest in Ives is logical as well as personal: perhaps the half-full Hertz Hall, or the relatively late hour, had something to do with what seemed to me a softened edge to an otherwise commanding performance.
14 Haziran 2012 Perşembe
Detained
To contact us Click HERE
Here in the Northwest we still have a lot of support for art from the public sphere, King County 4Culture, the City of Seattle Mayor's Office of Art and Cultural Affairs, the Washington State Arts Commission. There are also many local non profits that support both visual art and the literary arts, theater, dance, opera, music and much more. Then we have street festivals, farmers markets, and impromptu creativity. We are lucky here.
But from my own perspective, I was really excited about an exhibition that is taking place at 4Culture gallery this summer, because the public support does not often, for obvious reasons, translate into support for politically engaged art. Sometimes there are subtle and indirect environmental references, and there has been a lot of support for artists working in the environment, but hard politics is a hard sell.
Eroyn Franklin managed to break through that with her amazing series "Detained."
Her drawings fill the walls of 4 culture with the stories of two immigrants going through detention centers in Washington State, the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, and its predecessor in Seattle, the U.S. immigration and detention facility. It includes crucial, specific details, it makes the vague information that we have about detainees visible.
She tells two stories. One man from Cambodia, Many Uch, who came here as a child, was placed in detention as an adult because he drove a getaway car in an armed robbery when he was 18, a crime for which he had already served a sentence. A woman, Gabriella Cubillos, was detained because she was pulled over for expired tabs, detained for unpaid parking tickets: she had entered the country illegally many years ago, when it was common and easy in the 1990s.
Eroyn had some important facts that don't appear in the drawings with their thought balloons about conversations among inmates in the centers or elsewhere ( above in a mosque after Mani was released)
2/3 of deportees are removed for immigration violations alone
90 percent have no legal representation, no timely hearings
80 percent of those detained are deported- they say they want to be deported in order to get out of detention
Immigrant law is different from criminal law
All immigration decisions are part of the Executive branch, there is no legislative involvement
The growth in this industry is huge: the old INS in Seattle had 200 beds, ICE in Tacoma had 1000 when it opened, and it has 1545 now. There is a lot of money available for this since 9/11. In 2008 there was a 35 percent increase in deportations to more than 10,000 people ! This is horrendous. Detentions are random ( often combed from prison populations), there is virtually no legal recourse, and many of the people deported have made their homes in the US for many years and have children here.
The injustice of the situation is blatent.
What has happened to this country, formerly so welcoming to immigrants and enriched by them.
Of the 16 detention centers in the US, 7 are run by private contractor GEO,
they make $150 on every person in the center. It is seen as an "investment opportunity" and a "growth industry" Another facility is projected for Yakima.
I would like to add from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee site that the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE) spends 1.7 billion a year to detain 380,000 people
How did Franklin pull off having he"Detained" shown at 4Culture?
Well she is a photography graduate of Paul Berger and the University of Washington. That is a very helpful credential in this city.
Also, she was working with a journalism group who have done special reporting on this issue called The Common Language Project. They have done a four part series called Between Worlds/Behind Bars on "Seattle's Ellis Island" on the Northwest Detention Center in downtown Tacoma. So she had content that resonates, a crucial factor. She is engaged with her subject.
Finally, the work is difficult to read, as you can see from the image above. The fifty foot long drawings require serious effort for a gallery goer accustomed to sweep through a show at a glance. That makes it less obviously threatening to people who don't bother to read it. The writing is small for a gallery, it will be much easier when the book comes out. Here is the newspaper image.
PS. The old Seattle INS facility has just been sold online to investors who will work with the International District residents to address itthe history of immigration in Seattle which goes back to the detention of the Chinese in the late 19th century.
Here in the Northwest we still have a lot of support for art from the public sphere, King County 4Culture, the City of Seattle Mayor's Office of Art and Cultural Affairs, the Washington State Arts Commission. There are also many local non profits that support both visual art and the literary arts, theater, dance, opera, music and much more. Then we have street festivals, farmers markets, and impromptu creativity. We are lucky here. But from my own perspective, I was really excited about an exhibition that is taking place at 4Culture gallery this summer, because the public support does not often, for obvious reasons, translate into support for politically engaged art. Sometimes there are subtle and indirect environmental references, and there has been a lot of support for artists working in the environment, but hard politics is a hard sell.
Eroyn Franklin managed to break through that with her amazing series "Detained."
Her drawings fill the walls of 4 culture with the stories of two immigrants going through detention centers in Washington State, the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, and its predecessor in Seattle, the U.S. immigration and detention facility. It includes crucial, specific details, it makes the vague information that we have about detainees visible.
She tells two stories. One man from Cambodia, Many Uch, who came here as a child, was placed in detention as an adult because he drove a getaway car in an armed robbery when he was 18, a crime for which he had already served a sentence. A woman, Gabriella Cubillos, was detained because she was pulled over for expired tabs, detained for unpaid parking tickets: she had entered the country illegally many years ago, when it was common and easy in the 1990s.
Eroyn had some important facts that don't appear in the drawings with their thought balloons about conversations among inmates in the centers or elsewhere ( above in a mosque after Mani was released)
2/3 of deportees are removed for immigration violations alone
90 percent have no legal representation, no timely hearings
80 percent of those detained are deported- they say they want to be deported in order to get out of detention
Immigrant law is different from criminal law
All immigration decisions are part of the Executive branch, there is no legislative involvement
The growth in this industry is huge: the old INS in Seattle had 200 beds, ICE in Tacoma had 1000 when it opened, and it has 1545 now. There is a lot of money available for this since 9/11. In 2008 there was a 35 percent increase in deportations to more than 10,000 people ! This is horrendous. Detentions are random ( often combed from prison populations), there is virtually no legal recourse, and many of the people deported have made their homes in the US for many years and have children here.
The injustice of the situation is blatent.
What has happened to this country, formerly so welcoming to immigrants and enriched by them.
Of the 16 detention centers in the US, 7 are run by private contractor GEO,
they make $150 on every person in the center. It is seen as an "investment opportunity" and a "growth industry" Another facility is projected for Yakima.
I would like to add from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee site that the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE) spends 1.7 billion a year to detain 380,000 people
How did Franklin pull off having he"Detained" shown at 4Culture?
Well she is a photography graduate of Paul Berger and the University of Washington. That is a very helpful credential in this city.
Also, she was working with a journalism group who have done special reporting on this issue called The Common Language Project. They have done a four part series called Between Worlds/Behind Bars on "Seattle's Ellis Island" on the Northwest Detention Center in downtown Tacoma. So she had content that resonates, a crucial factor. She is engaged with her subject.
Finally, the work is difficult to read, as you can see from the image above. The fifty foot long drawings require serious effort for a gallery goer accustomed to sweep through a show at a glance. That makes it less obviously threatening to people who don't bother to read it. The writing is small for a gallery, it will be much easier when the book comes out. Here is the newspaper image.
PS. The old Seattle INS facility has just been sold online to investors who will work with the International District residents to address itthe history of immigration in Seattle which goes back to the detention of the Chinese in the late 19th century.
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