Egypt claims arrest of Iranian spy

HERE.

I had to chuckle a bit at first, since even my very very American-looking friend GRAEME WOOD was captured during the Revolution and accused of being an Iranian spy. But the current accusation sounds more credible. And Iran would be foolish not to be trying to spy inside Egypt right now.

Here’s an interesting Graeme Wood flashback, by the way: his eyewitness report of THE BATTLE OF THE CAMEL in Tahrir on February 2.

one other Bassiouny article

HERE.

Includes a rather heartbreaking photo of Ahmed with his wife and son.

radio station reminder

A place to sometimes hear Bassiouny’s music is THIS ONLINE STATION, which features Arab electronica. It’s my most frequent office music, eerily enough.

Often the music on the station sounds Muslimgauze-influenced, but today it’s more like Burial with Arabic rather than English sound samples.

Zewail denies Presidential ambitions

Ahmed Zewail of Cal Tech, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for inventing a laser camera with a mind-boggling shutter speed of 1 femtosecond to enable him to photograph chemical reactions pretty much step-by-step), DENIES AMBITIONS TO BE PRESIDENT OF EGYPT.

He claims instead to be interested in sparking an industrial revolution in this country.

Zewail generally seems quite popular here. He’s on our Board of Trustees and shows up for Commencement every so often, and the students always go crazy as if he were a rock star (not the usual reaction to chemists in the U.S.A.).

However, my understanding is that a law was passed since the Revolution requiring that the Egyptian President must have an Egyptian spouse. This law was widely believed to be aimed at Zewail personally; his wife is from Syria.

Nonetheless, Ayman Nour recently got out of the legal jam preventing his candidacy (when he was granted a retrial on the bogus charges that landed him in prison some years ago) and perhaps Zewail can do the same, assuming he’s interested in the Presidency and just being coy with his denials.

more on the Ahmed Bassiouny exhibit in Venice

HERE.

The more I learn about the guy, the more tragic the loss. Seeing him on film was really an experience: a magnetic, absolutely unique personality, with the Helwan students completely spellbound by his classroom presence.

Some thug is still out there free on the streets, having ended his life with sniper fire on Friday, January 28.

My past posts on Bassiouny can all be found HERE.

a few more thoughts on Gilot’s Picasso

It’s really an addictive book, one of sufficient value that it could be read for centuries as a classic portrait of mid-20th century Paris no less than of Picasso himself.

I think it was Clement Greenberg who said that Cézanne was more theoretically insightful about the act of painting than any other painter, something along those lines. Picasso may be just as good in that respect, if Gilot’s recollections of his long speeches are to be trusted (and the words all sound like Picasso, not like Gilot herself). He can stand in front of one of his still-incomplete canvases and give completely convincing theoretical accounts of why this oval needs to be slightly elongated, or why this piece of cheese plastically rhymes with the skull in the other part of the painting.

That’s one thing that really sticks out. The other is just how charismatic Picasso was, as best witnessed by how much terrible treatment people were willing to put up with from him.

A prime example… Gliot’s best friend comes to visit her and Picasso in the South of France. The friend and Picasso dislike each other. Gilot goes out for a walk, and when she returns her friend claims that Picasso threatened to rape her. (Picasso makes the counter-claim that she had tried to seduce him, but in context his story has no credibility at all.) Gilot’s friend warns her to leave him, but she consciously decides to stay.

Shortly thereafter, Gilot calls Picasso the devil. He responds that this makes her his property, and he thinks he should brand her. He holds a burning cigarette up against her cheek.

These incidents would be probably deal-breakers for most relationships. But Gilot, who is very intelligent and no doormat, can’t resist staying around for a decade to see what he’ll do next.

And we do the same, in lesser fashion. We as readers and viewers of paintings keep sticking around to see what he’ll do next, and don’t really hold these incidents against him, even though he left a trail of broken people through his life.

One thing that occurs to me is that we’re more likely to let artists get away with this than philosophers. It’s not that we expect philosophers to be saints, but that we somehow expect them to be a little bit repressed. By contrast, we expect artists to open the floodgates on the unconscious and we want to see what washes down the river, whatever it may be.

Who is the worst-behaved important philosopher? I’m not talking about Heidegger’s Nazism, but about generally poor behavior towards others in everyday dealings. Heidegger is probably still on that list. Schopenhauer, pushing his maid down the stairs. Francis Bacon, doing the queen’s work in the torture chamber and travelling with his pre-adolescent boy companion. There aren’t too many.

Try to imagine reading in Edmund Husserl’s biography that he held a burning cigarette to his wife’s cheek and threatened to rape her friend. We’d be a lot more startled in that case, I think, and not quite so forgiving. It would seem a bit more of a blight on his legacy somehow, whereas in Picasso’s case it all just seems to add a bit of color to genius, even if we verbally condemn it. This is one of those double standards that gives insight, but life is full of them.

Below: Gilot painted by Picasso as “La Femme-Fleur.”

Life with Picasso

Now nearly halfway through Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso, and it’s a beautifully strange book, one you can get lost in.

It could have been a disaster. Tell-all books by ex-spouses about celebrities are often nothing but unsanitary vindictiveness. Furthermore, Gilot met Picasso at a time when he had already been world-famous for three decades. That’s often a boring period of life to read about: picking up prizes, appearing on magazine covers, meeting with other celebrities. Much more interesting are the initial obscurity and then the breakthrough moment.

What saves the book from disaster, above all, is that Gilot is a very interesting person in her own right. She has an unusual way of looking at most things. From early in the book, one enjoys listening to her own thoughts as well as to her Picasso anecdotes.

The most striking thing about the book is how many articulate thoughts Picasso had, not only about his own work but about life more generally. We get a taste of his abundant energy, which was always combined somewhat paradoxically with a very sedentary lifestyle. (He didn’t leave Paris after the 1940 invasion out of sheer inertia, he tells Gilot.)

We do meet other celebrities in the book, of course: de Beauvoir/Sartre, Malraux, Eluard, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas. Gilot and Toklas loathed one another; Gilot also found Sartre too “didactic,” and disliked Malraux’s nervous tic. Hemingway is presented as a joker who left a case of hand grenades at Picasso’s studio immediately after the liberation.

We get a look at the objects scattered inside Picasso’s studio, and a sense of his everyday life of his period. We also hear about Picasso as a seducer; in Gilot’s case it was a surprisingly classy job, though Picasso’s typical cruelty would come later.

Unfortunately, we also get an unappealing (and unsurprising) picture of Picasso as a horrible manipulator too easily amused by playing people off against each other, including old friends who had helped him in tough times. His treatment of the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler is especially petty.

I’d been meaning to read this for several years, but it kept slipping my mind. Finally I found a copy at the Philadelphia Art Museum on that early April day when Tim Morton and I went over to look at H. Rousseau’s “Carnival Evening.”

documenting the Egyptian Revolution

Khaled Fahmy, Chair of our Department of History, has been PUT IN CHARGE of the project.

No one really knows how things will turn out. But I do think the recent protests against the army are completely justified. They’ve received too good a press inside Egypt since they first put tanks on the streets. Many of their actions have been horribly ambiguous, or even worse.

Forgetting now about past actions such as letting the horse/camel thugs into Tahrir on February 2, why are people being arrested merely for protesting sometimes? And why is the former Vice President still at large?

charming Picasso anecdote

Françoise Gilot describes her first visit to his studio in the Latin Quarter in May 1943:

“I saw several old Louis XIII sofas and chairs, and spread out on them, guitars, mandolins, and other musical instruments, which, I suppposed, Picasso must have used in his painting during the Cubist period. He later told me that he had bought them after he painted the pictures, not before, and kept them there now as a remembrance of his Cubist days.”

It is remarkable that an artist famous for his ability to work from memory, without models or objects, would turn to objects after the fact in order to anchor his memories of a bygone phase of his career.

regime officials fined for communications blackout

Mubarak, al-Adly, and former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif must pay a $90.6 million fine from their own pockets, to compensate for losses to mobile phone and internet companies. HERE.

Presumably this is just symbolic. I highly doubt that Vodafone and Mobinil will be the first recipients of recovered regime wealth. Public response would be angry, to say the least.