Saturday 30 May 2009

What

is the difference?

Images of wars

Micha Bar-Am was born in Berlin in 1930 and moved with his family in Palestine in 1936. During the War of Independence was part of Palmach units. As a photographer, he documented the Six Day War, the conflicts in Lebanon or the Egypt Peace Talks. Since 1968, he joined Magnum Photos.

Living in chains

or how the religious mentality is destroying lives.

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Mechanical Doll

Dahlia Ravikovitch
translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut

And that night I was a mechanical doll
and I turned right and left, to all sides
and I fell on my face and broke to bits,
and they tried to put me together with skillful hands
And then I went back to being a correct doll
and all my manners were studied and compliant.
But by then I was a different kind of doll
like a wounded twig hanging by a tendril.
And then I went to dance at a ball,
but they left me in the company of cats and dogs
even though all my steps were measured and patterned.
And I had golden hair and I had blue eyes
and I had a dress the color of the flowers in the garden
and I had a straw hat decorated with a cherry.

"The weird world rolls on"

Sleepless in Vermont

Tom LeClair
September 19, 2008

A few years ago, Paul Auster told an interviewer that “I get the best reviews and the worst reviews of any writer I know.” His previous ­novel, “Travels in the Scriptorium,” rewarded his best reviewers and other admirers with a reunion of previous Auster characters in a familiar plot of confused identity. With this new one, “Man in the Dark,” Auster takes revenge on his worst reviewers by making his protagonist/­narrator a 72-year-old literary critic with multiple miseries. His sister may have committed suicide, his wife has recently died, and his daughter and granddaughter are deeply unhappy. He suffers from insomnia and walks with a crutch because his leg has been mangled in one of those accidents Auster likes to inflict on his characters.

As the longtime book editor of The Boston Globe, August Brill wrote more than 1,500 essays, but he now believes all this work to be “ephemera.” The only book project he ever began, a memoir about and for his family, was abandoned. Although he no longer writes, he tells himself ­stories in the dark to avoid thinking about the women with whom he lives: a daughter grieving over a broken marriage, and a granddaughter mourning a former boyfriend killed in Iraq. The novel is the narrative of one such sleepless night, a “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” in which Brill invents a character named Owen Brick, a happily married 29-year-old man who wakes up in a parallel contemporary world where the United States is fighting a civil war. This Rip van Brick must cope with separation from his wife, altered conditions — random bombardments, very high inflation, no TV, few cars — and quantum quirks, like running into his teenage “heartthrob.” With this woman’s aid, secessionists from the federal government dictate a mission implausible: Brick must return to the “real” world of 2007 and kill Brill, who has caused the civil war by imagining it.
Brick’s story is interrupted by Brill’s memories, by his awareness of physical discomforts and, near dawn, by his grand­daughter, who also can’t sleep. She lies down next to him and slowly, persistently, forces him to reveal the most painful part of his past, his betrayals of her beloved grandmother. By morning Brill has, through this nocturnal transmission, finished his memoir.
Invigorated, Brill wants “a farmer’s breakfast.” He doesn’t realize the full extent of the punishment Auster has in store for him. Although a lifelong reader, Brill is in the dark as a story­teller: his alternative-world plot is hackneyed in concept and rickety in execution. But if his account of a war between American liberals and conservatives is sketchily imagined, Brill does no better with his personal materials, confabulated anecdotes rendered in a flat, chronicling style. One of his favorite phrases, which closes the book, is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose: “the weird world rolls on.” The sentence summarizes Brill’s banality and lack of originality, which discourage emotional engagement from anyone not a blood relative.
“Man in the Dark” might be mistaken for a clever mockery of literary critics if the slackness of Brill’s narration didn’t also mar Auster’s other recent fiction. Auster is 61, but the focal characters of his last three novels are figurative or literal old men. The narrator of “Oracle Night” walks like a “shuffling geezer” after a near-fatal illness; the narrator of “Brooklyn Follies” has moved to Park Slope to die; and Mr. Blank of “Travels in the Scriptorium” is a geriatric case. Like Brill, these characters ultimately manage a modest revival, but for long stretches their sensibilities are dull, their perceptions dim, their language fatigued. Feeble figures, they provide a low-energy, high-fiber perpetuation of the Auster brand.
“Man in the Dark” is a slightly new and improved “Travels in the Scriptorium,” which it partially rewrites in a semi-realistic vein. Both B-men occupy a context of imaginary political unrest, and both reveal themselves through their fictionalizing. But the buried associations between Brill’s civil war and the family battles of his past keep “Man in the Dark” within a marginally interesting psychological realm, while “Scriptorium” is a self-regarding and airless authorial game. Yet the superiority of the new novel to “Scriptorium” becomes trivial when “Man in the Dark” is compared with a similar short novel by Max Frisch, “Man in the Holocene,” which is also about an elderly, desperate man who spends a night awake. The scientific and cultural expansiveness of Frisch’s novel make “Man in the Dark” seem narrow and perfunctory.
After, say, 10 books, maybe novelists should be retested, like accident-prone senior citizens renewing their driver’s licenses. Veterans of literary wars would anonymously submit a new manuscript to agents. Of “Man in the Dark,” I think they’d say, “third-rate imitation of Paul Auster.” Then the author might decide to rev up a first-rate imitation of his first-rate early work. Or he might write a fourth-rate attack on literary agents.
Tom LeClair’s fifth novel, “Passing Through,” has just been published.
I didn't liked how the Owen Brick story ended. I was as a feeling of hurry to finish fast with this character, because it was something else to be done. And, since Brick's understandable dissapearance my interest for the rest of the book ceased.

Shalom Auslander

Foreskin's Lament.(a NY Times excerpt)

Chicago bus ads part of Indiana atheist campaign


Associated Press, Chicago Tribune
May 23

For the past week, 25 buses from the Chicago Transit Authority have been bearing an unusual advertising slogan. The large ads read "In the Beginning, Man Created God," and they're scheduled to remain on the sides of the buses through June. They're part of an effort by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign, with the help of the American Humanist Association. The board that runs South Bend's city bus system recently agreed to allow ads on that city's buses reading: "You can be good without God." The group had hoped to have the ads installed on 20 South Bend buses before President Barack Obama's appearance at the University of Notre Dame last Sunday, but that move was delayed.
Bloomington, Indiana's city bus service recently rejected similar ads, prompting a lawsuit.

Tuesday 26 May 2009

God is not Great

In comparison with Hitchens, I was cured by religion from an early age. I found at least of anthropological interest his wandering from various religions, as self-introducted in God is not Great: (:233) "...having in the course of my life been an Anglican, educated at a Methodist school, converted by marriage to Greek Orthodoxy, recognized as an incarnation by the followers of Sai Baba, and remarried by a rabbi...". But, in fact, those experiences are offering insights of the history and histories of religion. Even, even as an atheist observer, from outside or better said, from above, all the observations and considerations regarding religion could be valid as well.
For me, the essentials of the books are resumed in Chapter Fifteen - Religion as an Original Sin - as follows (:245):
"There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And these faults and crimes are not to be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can sometimes be exemplary) but in its original percepts. These include:
- Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous
- The doctrine of blood sacrifice
- The doctrine of atonement
- The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment
- The imposition of impossible tasks and rules"
And, setting a right balance while answering the detractors of atheism (:300):
"Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, 'faith-based'".

Tuesday 19 May 2009

Monday 18 May 2009

Lars von Trier film "Antichrist" shocks Cannes


Mike Collett-White
Reuters
May 17

Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama "Antichrist" at the Cannes film festival.

The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on May 24.

Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative.

Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.

Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to von Trier's decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end.

Antichrist opens with a heavily stylized, black-and-white, slow-motion portrayal of the child's accidental death set to soaring music by Handel.

Dafoe's character, who is a therapist, tries to help his wife deal with her grief and encourages her to come off heavy medication that sedates her for weeks after the death.

They decide to go to an isolated wooden cabin in an unspecified forest to recover, but the woman Gainsbourg portrays loses control of her senses.

The abuse she submits herself and her husband to drew shocked gasps from the audience.

The reaction suggested that von Trier, who won the top prize in Cannes with "Dancer in the Dark" in 2000, could be in for a rough ride from reviewers and journalists on Monday.

One U.S. critic said he and others found the film "offensive," and questioned why it was included in the main competition of 20 films in Cannes.

In production notes for Antichrist, the 53-year-old director said that the movie was a "kind of therapy" for depression he was suffering from two years ago.

"I can offer no excuse for 'Antichrist' ... other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entire career!"

A past

Busy - running+writing

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is another writing surprise of Murakami. He wrote about Beatles songs, many adventures of imaginations, as well as about the case of Aum sect. The title is a rephrasing of Raymond Carver's book What We Talk When We Talk about Love (the conclusion: my use of the word "love" is different of yours; the senses are different and sometimes it is not much to do about this, once we try to translate our feelings into words).

I both have the experience of running and writing. The first as a daily exercise, plus reading plus infinite wondering of observing the world around (humans including). I cannot establish exactly when it started as I cannot imagine either living without. The running hobby is no more than a hobby, practiced from time to time.

In a way, they are some similarities between the two, but at various levels. Running is about setting yourself physical limits and practicing how to reach it. Writing is a more complicate business, dealing with the capacity of translating into words various - and sometimes chaotic personal and intellectual experiences -, needs practice too, but you never know exactly what your limits are and the standards are rather diluting and diminishing your creativity. (If your stake is to write as Proust, probably your performance will be to be a perfect pastiche of Proust, your perspective on the world being nothing more, nothing less than Proust's; nothing else to ad on this). Writing is about the capacity to share your own translation of the word, as in any artistic demarche. I can live one day, one month, one year without running. Without writing one day, it is hardly to live with.

One of the advantages of a good writer is to have the capacity to tell stories about everything, to share it with the others. When I first saw the book, I was curious how Murakami sees this. That's the business of the writer. I am curious what his next book will be about.

Identity DJ

Wladimir Kaminer is a very successful media product: DJ in the Russendisko, author of various books about enjoying his Jewish-Russian identity in Berlin - to be read Prenzlauer Berg, Schonhauser Allee - and talking, succesfully again, about how it is to be DJ in Russendisko, author of...etc.etc. Everybody his niche and he is not the only one (will be back soon about this). He is having already an audience. But when very simple, "eatable" identity positionings, are becoming the mainstream and the reference point for the community in itself - and many of its members - as for the outside observers, you will lost exactly those whose contribution will help to preserve what it is not a matter of fashion and "coolness".

Israel and Germany

Amos Oz, on the post-war relationships between Israel and Germany, the first years of the state of Israel and a future. (in German)

Friday 15 May 2009

Partisan or Parasite?


Daniel Kahn and the New Jewish Questions

courtesy of daniel kahn and the painted bird
Voice of Protest: From the Wall to the world.

By Rokhl Kafrissen

May 13, 2009, issue of May 22, 2009.

Forward.com


Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern capitalism and imperialism in any discourse. Daniel Kahn, a Detroit-born singer-songwriter now living in Berlin, is part of that tradition, while at the same time creating a new musical idiom blending American-folk and Yiddish-protest song. Kahn, 30, is a post-modern folkie just as likely to quote from the Industrial Workers of the World songbook as to cite Marxist critic Slavoj Zizek. But his political sympathies and artistic creations are very much reminiscent of those of Seeger and his progeny.

For example, Kahn was back in the United States, performing, and saw President Obama’s March 24 press conference, at which the president was pointedly asked about the problem of growing homelessness and tent cities springing up around the United States. Disturbed by these images reminiscent of the Great Depression, Kahn woke in the middle of the night and set to work writing original English lyrics for an old Yiddish song about the anger of the unemployed, “Arbetloze Marsh” (“The March of the Unemployed”), originally written by Mordecai Gebirtig.

one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

no work in the factory

no more manufacturing

every tool is broke and rusted

every wheel and window busted

through the city streets we go

idle as a CEO

idle as a CEO


one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

we don’t have to pay no rent

sleeping in a camping tent

dumpster diving don’t take money

every bite is shared with twenty

let the yuppies have their wine

bread and water suit us fine

bread and water suit us fine



The next day, The New York Times featured Fresno, Calif.’s, tent cities on the front page.

Since then, Kahn has been performing “Arbetloze Marsh,” in Yiddish and English for eager listeners, many of whom are unemployed or holding on to whatever employment they have. As the crowd at Barbès in Brooklyn’s Park Slope saw at a recent show, for Kahn and his band, The Painted Bird, there’s nothing fuzzy or nostalgic about Yiddish song. Indeed, Yiddish song is the perfect idiom in which Kahn can create his highly political and timely art. The songs that Kahn chooses are political in themselves, but at the same time, the choice of Yiddish, the maligned tongue of the exile, is an act of cultural and political resistance.

Over the past few years, Kahn has gained a following in Europe, and now in the United States, for his uncanny ability to connect history, politics and current events in a variety of languages, including German, English and especially Yiddish. In concert, and with his new album, “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn establishes himself as a high-art folk troubadour, the rebellious Jewish son of Woody Guthrie and Bertolt Brecht.

Kahn, who started acting professionally at 11 and studied drama in college, decided to move to Berlin in 2005 not because of the city’s vibrant Jewish music scene, but because it was the home of Brecht.

Kahn’s music reflects his love for Brechtian drama. Kahn even created his own genre of music, called “Verfremdungsklezmer,” or alienated klezmer, in an overt nod to Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to highlight the artifice of theater. Verfremdungsklezmer, like its namesake, prods its audience to action through humor and questioning. With The Painted Bird (named after Jerzy Kosin´ski’s grotesque novel of World War II), Kahn often appears onstage in papier-mâché bird masks, alternately playing an accordion, cigar box ukulele, harmonica and electronic bullhorn.

His original songs evoke a Brechtian level of discomfort by problematizing heroes and making the grotesque sympathetic. For example, “Six Million Germans/Nakam” recounts the story of the hero of the Vilnius (known in Yiddish as Vilna) partisans, Abba Kovner, who was among the brave men and women who fought, with few weapons and terrible odds, against the Nazis and their collaborators. Less discussed is Kovner’s decision, with a group of friends, to take revenge on the Germans after the war. Calling themselves Nakam (revenge), they concocted a plan to poison German water supplies and take millions of German victims in retribution. The song, performed as an upbeat klezmer polka, jarringly juxtaposes subject and tone to bring up two of Kahn’s favorite themes, violence and revenge, and forces the listener to question the nature of heroism and justice.

Reworking and re-imagining Yiddish songs, Kahn decries the excesses of modern-day capitalism and sings of contemporary tragedies. Although “Arbetloze Marsh” was written too recently to make it onto the CD, another song on “Partisans and Parasites” voices a similarly fiery populist outrage. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is perhaps the most compelling moment on the CD. It is based on the 1912 Yiddish song “Dos Lid fun Titanik,” written about the sinking of the Titanic. The inspiration for “Khurbn Katrina” was, of course, Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s disastrous failure to respond to the suffering of the people of New Orleans.

To Kahn, New Orleans is of more than just theoretical interest. He spent a year there after college as a labor organizer working with nurses. And New Orleans is where he was first introduced to contemporary Jewish music. The destruction of New Orleans is personal for Kahn, and he directs his anger at an administration that seemed to do little to prevent the devastation of one of America’s oldest cities. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is in two parts; the first verses were written collaboratively in Yiddish, and the second, written solely by Kahn, is completely in English. The song begins mournfully, staying close to the Yiddish original, and then transforms into a raucous, New Orleans funeral march in English, with Kahn not so much singing as crying out in mourning:

two lovers they are peacefully lying

in a peace not a soul could disturb

they cried out ‘my dear God we are dying’

but the President seems not to have heard

just imagine, good people, the ruin

how terrible is the wrath of the Lord

with the water from the lake down to Bourbon

from Canal to the Lower 9th Ward

oh my Lord…

Kahn has been touring Europe nonstop with a brilliant band of pan-European collaborators, Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Russian singer/journalist/academic Psoy Korolenko and Moscow-based blues guitar hero Vanya Zhuk. “Nakam/Six Million Germans” is one of Kahn’s most popular songs and already has been translated into German by a German fan of the song. In Europe, where history is never too far away, Jews and non-Jews are hungry to talk about the complicated legacy left by the slaughter of World War II.

The contemporary Jewish drive to recover a broken past doesn’t exist in isolation, but is accompanied by a larger European desire to heal other cultures also devastated by the losses of World War II, including, but not limited to, the loss of Jewish culture. For Kahn, using old Jewish songs and musical traditions makes sense, not because of their peculiar qualities, indeed, but because of their universality. As Kahn told me a few months ago: “Every people’s story is unique. I’m not sure that it is the unique qualities to the Jewish experience that give it its meaning… it might be the qualities that Jews share with other people: oppression, poverty, isolation, otherness.…” With “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn and his collaborators force us to question the unique, and the universal, for ourselves and for our neighbors, and for our shared future.

Rokhl Kafrissen is working on a book called “The Myth of the Yiddish Atlantis” and writes for Jewish Currents magazine.

Thursday 14 May 2009

How Avedon Blurred His Own Image


ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.

As Avedon stood behind a Rolleiflex camera mounted on a tripod, the Kinks blared from a phonograph nearby. Since he began photographing beautiful women in the mid-1940s — first for Harper’s Bazaar, then Vogue — Avedon made it a practice to ask his models what music and food they preferred. This more than contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the studio. “They all wanted to please him,” said Polly Mellen, the Vogue editor on that shoot.

Bending over the Rolleiflex, Avedon said, “All right, now, very straight,” and Twiggy sat up straight and turned her gaze to the camera.

Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.

His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”

That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.

From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.

In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.

A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.

It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.

Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.

Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”

Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?

HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.

And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”

Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.

The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.

Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.

COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.

Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.

Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.

Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.

“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.

Tuesday 12 May 2009

Accused Nazi Criminal Arrives in Munich




John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, Ohio, born Ivan Demjanjuk in Ukraine in 1920, arrived in Munich Tuesday morning to face accusations of crimes committed as a Nazi death-camp guard.

Mr. Demjanjuk was deported for the second time by the United States on Monday. The first time was 23 years ago, and he was bound for worldwide notoriety, accused of being the unfathomably cruel “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,” one of the Holocaust’s most infamous sadists. He was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, before new evidence won him a reprieve and eventually a trip back to the United States and the return of his stripped citizenship.

But the wheels of justice began to grind again, and the whole process has repeated itself step by step. Monday night, a frailer Mr. Demjanjuk, now 89 and once again stateless, boarded a special medically equipped airplane bound for Germany, where he is accused of being an accessory in the murder of 29,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland.

Investigators say that the documentary evidence is strong and that they will be able to prove that Mr. Demjanjuk was a living cog in a killing factory, where some 250,000 people were put to death in just one and a half years of operation. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says that his father, an old man with bone-marrow and kidney diseases, is being hounded by the United States Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and German prosecutors in an inhumane fashion.

Mr. Demjanjuk’s guilt will be decided in a Munich courtroom, assuming he lives long enough and is deemed fit to stand trial. But throughout the recent months of courtroom battles over appeals and stays of deportation, the gulf between the enormity of the crimes Mr. Demjanjuk is accused of and the frail old man he is now has grown more apparent.

Ultimately Mr. Demjanjuk’s advanced age and poor health serve as reminders, regardless of the outcome in court, of how the living memory of the crimes committed during World War II is on the verge of disappearing. Mr. Demjanjuk’s case might well be the last major war crimes trial in Germany, marking the end of an era that began in Nuremberg in 1945.

Thomas Blatt, 82, who was a prisoner at Sobibor at the same time Mr. Demjanjuk has been accused of having worked there as a guard, said the trial itself was more important than meting out any punishment. “I don’t care if he is released; I do care about his testimony,” said Mr. Blatt, who now lives in California and has written two books about his experiences. “There’s many people right now who say the Holocaust never happened.”

Mr. Blatt said he did not remember Mr. Demjanjuk from Sobibor, but he pointed out that he also could not recall the faces of his parents who were killed at the death camp along with his younger brother. Mr. Blatt was one of the few prisoners to escape Sobibor, in an uprising there in October 1943.

Mr. Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Soviet Army, fighting against the Germans, until he was captured in the Crimea in 1942. Mr. Demjanjuk says he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to prosecutors, he went to an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, where foreign nationals were trained to take part in the Holocaust.

After the war, Mr. Demjanjuk moved to the United States, where he became an autoworker and raised a family. But in 1977, several Holocaust survivors identified him as Ivan the Terrible.

Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988.

But the conviction was overturned in 1993, and he was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely Ivan the Terrible. An identity card from Trawniki indicates that Mr. Demjanjuk was sent to serve at Sobibor.

His family has maintained his innocence throughout the three-decade legal odyssey. “Now at the age of 89, when alleged witnesses are now dead, he’s faced with having to defend himself again, when with the pain and suffering he’s no longer capable,” his son said on Monday in a telephone interview. “You would have thought that after the mistake they made in nearly sending him to the gallows, they would have just let this go.”

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mr. Demjanjuk’s latest appeal last week, and a Berlin court declined an appeal on Monday.

“The only reason not to put someone like Demjanjuk on trial is if he is not capable to stand trial,” said Cornelius Nestler, a professor of criminal law at the University of Cologne, who is advising possible co-plaintiffs in the case. “I think in the same way that the grief of the people who left their parents, very often their whole family, in Sobibor will not be over until their death, the responsibility of the people who did it will not be over until they’re dead.”