Saddam's Bank Revisited

When David Ignatius’s thriller, The Bank of Fear, became available as an e-book on Amazon a few weeks ago (May 28), I immediately downloaded it to my over-stuffed kindle. I’ve enjoyed Ignatius’s novels (as well as his political commentary in the Washington Post and on NPR) in the past, and I looked forward to reading what I thought was his new book. Shortly thereafter I devoured this page-turner in a day. What I carelessly ignored (so easy to do with an e-book) was that it was a “reissue” by W.W. Norton of a novel originally published in 1994 by William Morrow.

As a new book, it was a puzzler. The text provided no indication of when the novel’s action was meant to occur, only suggesting that it was the present. Yet, at the beginning, there was an unnamed “Ruler” in power in Iraq, a Saddam Hussein-like dictatorial despot who, in the course of the book, was assassinated, probably by a family member. Reading The Bank of Fear now, so soon after W’s misbegotten Iraqi War adventure, I could only innocently imagine that Ignatius intended his story as some sort of “alternate history.” I spent a few idle minutes thinking about how “reality,” in the form of actual historical figures, functions in a fictional world. When does it enhance credibility? How much leeway does an author have before losing a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief?

But, of course, such speculation was totally irrelevant. Given the novel’s actual date, I now wonder whether Ignatius in 1994 meant his fictional assassination of the Iraqi “Ruler” as a  wishful prediction of a still-unknown future. The novel’s vivid depiction of torture scenes in Baghdad, however, would seem to have a different purpose. Though the victim is a fictional character-- the attractive computer expert Lina Alwan-- those grim pages read like documentary evidence of Saddam’s cruel regime. On the other hand, Alwan’s Swiss bank escapade, in which she cleverly moves millions of The Ruler’s ill-gotten loot from its hiding place in Geneva to her own private account, is sheer fictional entertainment. And delightful.

Also delightful, singular and surprisingly early-- i.e., even before the brilliant Lisbeth Salander made an appearance-- is that the computer whiz and her expert pal in The Bank of Fear are both female. Are there others in contemporary fiction that I’ve missed? Readers-- please let me know...

James Turrell's Annus Mirabilis

This is James Turrell’s big year! Starting this spring, a trilogy of Turrell retrospectives will appear across the country-- at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles’s LACMA, and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In addition, there have been recent gallery shows and visits planned to the Roden Crater project. And, as a lagniappe, there’s a pictorially splashy piece on the numerous “sky spaces” Turrell has constructed for private patrons in the May 12 issue of the New York Times Style magazine.   On the festive occasion of all the above, I will reprint in a subsequent post a long article I wrote after seeing James Turrell’s 1980-81 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York-- his first and only New York museum exhibition before the forthcoming Guggenheim show (though there have been many elsewhere). My article appeared in the May 1981 issue of Art in America magazine. The initial sections were devoted to the art-political context-- both in California and the broader art world-- in which Turrell’s work first appeared. The last sections treated the installations exhibited at the Whitney.

MOMA the Destroyer?

The former American Folk Art Museum building. New York City 1997-2001, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Photo Giles Ashford.

We're not talking about the latest bizarre horror movie. The villain is New York's own Museum of Modern Art and its proposed plan to raze Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's 53rd Street building, a striking structure which formerly housed the American Folk Art Museum. The plan has provoked volleys of criticism from architects, preservationists, ordinary citizens, and serious architecture critics. (See Martin Filler's acerbic article in the May 23, 2013 issue of the New York Review of Books.) If MOMA goes ahead with the ill-advised destruction project, it would be committing cultural vandalism. And this horror would occur in real life-- not on the silver screen.

Perhaps responding to the protests, MOMA announced yesterday (May 9) that it would reconsider its plans. But as Robin Pogrebin reports in the New York Times, anonymous insiders say that the museum is still likely to go ahead with the destruction. We await MOMA's final decision and can only hope for the best.

Lisa Gherardini Visits the Moon

Left, Initial transfer. Right, Image with laser-communicated corrections.

On January 18, it was widely reported that NASA’s scientists had successfully beamed a picture of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a powerful spacecraft which has been orbiting the moon since 2009. NASA claimed that it was testing the technology of laser communications in deep space, and that its effective transfer of the image was a major advance for interplanetary spacecraft.

Thinking of the lone Mona Lisa, out there circling the moon, I imagine her reception in that alien region. Perhaps ET art historians are already on the case-- worrying over the image, analyzing the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic expression, debating the model’s true identity. Are they trying to decide whether it is in fact a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, rather than Isabella of Naples, or Caterina Sforza, or Cecilia Gallerani, or Isabella d’Este? Or are they wondering whether the image that dazzles and puzzles them is perhaps a self-portrait of the great Leonardo himself?

I’m curious about how these art-deprived ETs would react if, as a follow-up, instead of another single painting, we decided to send a truly comprehensive representation of our globe’s art works. If, for example, we were to send them, via digital images, the entire contents of the Louvre, or another major art museum. Would they be overwhelmed with admiration, stunned by our skill and aesthetic taste, and, longing to see the real thing, would they be inspired to immediately jump on the next space vehicle and become our first extra-mundane tourists?

But what if we were to send out art works that displayed the more dismal aspects of life on our planet. For many years, political artists here on earth have used projections as a type of powerful urban guerilla tactic. I’m thinking, for instance, of  Krzysztof Wodiczko, who since the 1980s has used ephemeral images, projected onto public buildings and monuments, as a means of highlighting social and political problems. Such projections could probably travel far into space via the new laser technology.

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Public Projection on Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1988

And perhaps it would even be useful to send S.O.S. messages about our political stalemates and social distresses to other worlds. How marvelous if someone out there, on the shoulder of Orion or in some black galaxy gazillions of miles away, looking down on our poor, tormented earth and perceiving our woes-- our perpetual wars, our unending international conflicts, our mindless culture of violence, our starving millions, our looming climate crises, our terrible inequalities of wealth, privilege and opportunity-- perhaps some stranger out there will know how to solve our seemingly insoluble problems, know better than we, caught up in our troubles, seem able to know for ourselves. 

From Dr. Johnson to Un Ballo in Maschera

I’ve always liked works that dare to blend disparate elements and/or styles. It’s remotely possible that my interest in “discordia concors” grows out of some irregular childhood experience, but I rather think it dates back to my years in grad school when I fell in love with Metaphysical poetry. Samuel Johnson’s famous description of those works (“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) was not meant kindly, but did capture a quality of the poetry. What Johnson failed to recognize was that, in the best of them, in the works, for example, of Donne, Marvell or Herbert, that violent yoking produced thrilling effects.

The danger, of course, is that a reckless heterogeneity, whether in poetry or prose, will result in an incoherent mess. But when the mix succeeds, it’s exciting. Take David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a brilliant instance of “discordia concors.” Mitchell’s novel boldly combines six disparate narratives set in different historical periods, ranging from the nineteenth century to the post-apocalyptic future. The genre of each story is different, each has a unique voice, and each breaks off at a cliff-hanging point, only to be completed in reverse order in the novel’s second half. There are subtle links between tales-- a repeated name, a reference to a previous character. The novel’s ascending-descending structure is its major oddity, but that complicated structure is precisely what functions to unify the dissimilar elements.

 Recently, I saw David Alden’s surreal production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Metropolitan Opera. It was an eye-opening, if not entirely satisfactory, instance of operatic “discordia concors.” Alden describes the opera as a “bizarre combination of serious political material, high Italian melodrama based around the hackneyed stuff of marital infidelity, and an almost operetta-like lightness of being.” He thinks of it as “experimental and dislocated” and unlike Verdi’s other masterpieces.

The dislocations are built into the libretto. On the one hand, there's lyric romance involving a feckless, love-obsessed monarch, a guilty wife, a brazen fortune-teller and an irate cuckold. This story is awkwardly joined to an unrelated, long-simmering royal assassination plot. The tale’s sinister finale occurs not in deep darkness, but at a frivolous masked ball. And not only the story line is disjunctive. Verdi’s heterogeneous score is unsettled and unsettling. It combines haunting, grand-opera love-arias, duets and a superb quintet with stinging passages of coloratura mockery and frisky scenes of operetta-like farce.

In Alden’s production, Verdi’s musical discordances are underlined rather than glided over. They are made more salient by the production’s taut film noir ambience, its ambiguous and incongruous costumes, and a curious minimalist set-- the latter dominated by a huge reproduction of the Louvre's ceiling painting of Merry-Joseph Blondel’s The Fall of Icarus. All this “discordia” takes its toll. The night I saw the performance, much of the singing was good, some even splendid. Yet the emotional impact of Verdi’s magnificent music felt somewhat vitiated, as was the power of the opera’s tragic ending. At the end, I came away less than moved, though I was nevertheless delighted, amused, and pleased by Alden’s fresh approach.