A Wolverine Abroad – the Art Lover’s Travel Blog “Old and New”

Hello again everyone! I hope your holidays were fabulous! That’s right, it’s me Danny Fob, switching over to the arts, inc. page this semester. I hope they don’t miss me too much over at [art]seen, but for the next 7 months I am here in Italy! The most beautiful and flavorful country in the world. It’s weird already to be typing this in English after speaking only Italian for nearly two weeks, but I will do my best for you throughout the semester. Because of my travels this semester and my ongoing desire to write for Arts at Michigan, the wonderful people in the department have allowed me to switch over to this blog and continue talking about art (note the shameless brown-nosing). And so, throughout this semester I will write about the different arts I see around the places I visit. I hope you enjoy it! I’ll be posting every Sunday, so put it in your calendars!

In my first post, since I am both an old writer for the site and new to arts, inc. I want to talk about this idea within the city of Florence. We have all heard of this glorious city, its position as the womb from which the Renaissance was born, its riches and artworks, its museums and styles. And it is all true. Walking through Florence is like going back in time. Its buildings are all made of stone and long forgotten masonry styles. There are statues to heroes of the Renaissance, rich merchants and bankers, scientists and artists, and the first King of a united Italy, Vittorio Emanuelle II. The museums hold works by Bellini, Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio, which used to decorate the halls of patrons and churches but now sit behind glass as artifacts of a different time. Yes, these works are old, they are masterpieces from a different era, but something that I learned about Florence is that it still thrives. Its culture is still rich in artists and art. People still use century old churches blanketed in marble and sculpture for prayer and worship. A friend of mine, that housed me for a week, is what I would like to call a Renaissance man.  Apparently it is still common, at least in Florence, to be a patron of a certain artist. My friend has an artist that paints what people ask him to paint. I would put up a picture, but I forgot to ask him if I could and his phone is out of money right now. The picture is personal for him, which I think only adds to its value. It is a beautiful tradition of the city and is continuously influenced by new culture, from films and music to the food and lifestyles of other cultures. The city is at the same time ever-changing and always the same. This is one of the reasons it is my favorite city in Italy. It’s like a living, moving work of art.

I think travel is an incredibly important part of life. I know it can be difficult and expensive, but it is sooo worth the work and the stress. Today I travel to Bologna and continue my search for an apartment there, since I will be studying at the oldest university in the World, the University of Bologna. I am very excited and a little terrified, but that is to be expected. I hope the weather isn’t too bad for all of you in Michigan. It’s mildly cold here, but I havn’t seen an Italian snow yet L Fingers Crossed!

Tanti Auguri!

Danny Fob

Your Wolverine Abroad Blogger

Trivial History Trivia

Hey Wolverines, welcome back to a new semester. To hopefully inspire you to take an art history class, here are some of my favorite interesting facts from history that make those classes so enjoyable:

In Soviet prisons, it was once common to tattoo portraits of Lenin and Stalin over an inmate’s vital organs, in the hope that guards would not harm them in those areas out of respect for the two Communist leaders.

A lot of people associate Marie Antoinette with her iconic enormous hair. She famously filled it with various event-appropriate objects. Reportedly, she had a (what one can only assume was horrific) birth scene placed in it when her sister-in-law delivered her first child. She was fond of filling it with fresh fruit and vegetables from her garden, with suck up aristocrat women following suit. The highest measurement we have

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for one of these hair styles is 6 ft, Marie would have to crouch down in her carriage to accommodate it. There are actually 3 reported deaths of court ladies whose hair was so high that it caught on a chandelier and they were in effect hanged. These hair pieces were made from wire, horse hair, cotton pads, fake hair, and the wearer’s own hair.

Louis XI of France, appropriately nicknamed the Star King, was a paranoid despot who very much believed in astrology. He was so unnerved by his astrologer’s accurate prediction of a court lady’s death that he ordered for the astrologer to be defenestrated (yeah, THAT word) from a top window of the palace. However, right before the astrologer was about to be told of his impending death, the king asked him to predict his (the astrologer’s) own death and when it would occur. The astrologer replied “I shall die just three days before Your Majesty.” Louis XI was so bothered by this that he canceled the defenestration (look it up, that word is a history fact on its own).

Napoleon wore a black handkerchief around his neck for every battle except for one, where his black handkerchief was accidentally thrown in the wash and he was forced to wear a white silk cravat. That battle was Waterloo.

Picasso’s first word was the Spanish word for ‘pencil.’

The Beginning of the End (and no, I’m not talking about the Mayans)

The first blog I posted here was called Beginnings in the Middle, about how for a theatre student, your semester sort of re-starts right in the middle.  Now, I am sad to say, it’s time for another beginning.  I am about to begin my final semester here at the University of Michigan.

For me and many of my peers, the beginning of this semester has meant many things.  First of all, this semester began as soon as the last one ended.  I began dramaturging Spring Awakening the day Beaux’ Stratagem closed.  I rushed back to school yesterday to continue my research, while all of the musical theatre students auditioned for the show, so we are all ready for our first rehearsal on Friday.  I’ve been receiving floods of audition announcements and calls for designers and crews the past few days.  The theatre department likes to get a running start.  So while I, like most of us, am not ready for classes to start up again, they sort of already have.  I borrowed seven books from the library today.  For the record, I love the stacks.  Today, I traversed both the North and South stacks.  Then, I went over to the Fish Bowl and found images that might help the cast and crew find useful, both historically and thematically.  Now I am diligently thumbing through my books, marking pertinent passages, and figuring out how to best communicate that to the actors.  Friday, I will get to start the actors’ journey through the text, guiding them as best as I can through history, themes, and culture.

Over break, I was busy too.  I compiled a glossary for Spring Awakening, which is actually one of my favorite parts of dramaturgy.  I read the script twice, the first time just for getting a grasp on the text and the second to go through and pinpoint any terms, places, or people that the actors may be unfamiliar with or needs further explanation.  I also spent much of my break reading plays for the 2012 National Playwrights’ Conference at the O’Neill.  They receive approximately 900 submissions a year and actually produce 7 or 8.  The first round of plays is read by a whole host of volunteers to weed through the plays that are not right for the conference.  I read twenty plays in all, fifteen of which I read over break.  There is nothing more exciting than a new play.  There is something really invigorating about seeing someone take risks, play with form, and genuinely surprise you as a reader.

Like most people, I didn’t get everything done over break that I had planned, but I at least got a start on editing my newest play as well.  My first play won a Hopwood, which I mention not to toot my own horn, but to encourage anyone who has anything they feel is worth reading to submit.  The Hopwood absolutely changed my life.  It gave me confidence to continue writing and money to pursue dramaturgy.  Fingers crossed that the second play fares as well, but it’s a tricky business and pretty impossible to predict.

I am going to sign off here, because I need to get ready for the big game tonight.  My brain is in dramaturgy mode, so I’m sure I will be analyzing the dramatic arc of the game, pulling out moments where I feel the stakes could be heightened, or critiquing gender dynamics at play between the football players and cheerleaders.  Go blue!

Saddam’s Swords of QādisÄ«yah

Despite the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, many monuments erected under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein remain.  The continued public display of these remnants of Iraqi Ba’athism is a testament to the continued debate within Iraq as to how Saddam’s legacy will be evaluated in a historical context.  The focal importance of the monument is remembrance; it seeks to answer the question as to how a leader can confront their eventual absence.  For a shrewd but malicious ruler like Saddam Hussein, the need to confront this absence was one that materialized particularly bluntly during and after Iraq’s sanguinary war with Iran in the 1980s.  Like ancient monument works of the Near East’s past, Saddam’s commissioned statues personify victory in the body of the leader.  This emphasis on a singular cause for a nation’s collective victory was made, possibly most curiously in the case of modern Iraq, in the triumphant arch called the Swords of Qādisīyah. In this monument, the physical body of the ruler is placed in tandem with the historical heritage of Iraq and implicitly takes responsibility for the achievements of the nation.

The Swords of Qādisīyah was opened to the public on August 8, 1989, though plans for the large construction began in 1985 when Iran and Iraq were still deeply embroiled in war. The monument was meant to be a victory arch for Saddam, in the tradition of ancient Roman arches, in spite of the reality that the war was, firstly, not over, and secondly, not exactly an Iraqi victory.  The monument consists of two large arms, emerging out of the earth, each holding a sword, crossing them in the center.  The archway marks an entrance into Baghdad’s parade-ground and was part of a much broader monument and urban planning project designed by Saddam in an attempt to mirror Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the hopes of placing Baghdad in league with world centers like New York and London.  At the arms’ bases, nets filled with the helmets of killed Iranian soldiers place the monument in specific reference to the ongoing war.  However, the element of the Swords of Qādisīyah that places it in the realm of leader-centered propaganda is the fact that the arms are actual replicas of Saddam’s own, made from casts that preserved every detail, right down to his thumbprint and the small hairs on his forearms.

Saddam’s choice to only display his arms is unusual; it reveals a confidence in the cultural permeation of his image in Iraqi society.  Previous artistic commissions on Saddam’s part assure us that the absence of his very recognizable face is not due to any humility, or a humble attempt to distance himself from an Iraqi achievement; his Stalin-like visage was plastered nearly everywhere, from a giant plywood cutout of himself standing over the ancient Babylonian gate of Ishtar to everyday postage stamps.  So the question is, why would Saddam go to such detailed lengths to interject his presence into a monument like the Swords of Qādisīyah, yet leave his mark so ambiguously?  Though Saddam’s arms are bearing swords, they work to create a paradoxical duality that both implies action and violence, yet also places that action outside of the realm of reality.  While the swords act as a reminder of violence, particularly in conjunction with the Iranian helmets and the inseparable association of the monument with the Iran-Iraq War, they are still swords, an archaic form of weaponry that would probably not last long in modern warfare.  The choice to use swords over, say, machine guns, was meant to invoke the defeat of the Persian Sassanian Empire at the Battle of Qādisīyah in 637, effectively beginning the Islamicization of Iran.  From the very beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, it was constantly pitched by the Ba’athists as Saddam’s Qādisīyah, invoking another defeat of Iran while asserting Iraq’s religious heritage.

This religious aspect is puzzling on several accounts.  Firstly, the Iraqi Ba’athist regime was officially secular.  Saddam modeled his vision for Iraq, and himself, around previous authoritarian regimes, particularly the Soviet Union under Stalin.  The ideals of pan-Arab nationalism sought to eliminate the tribalism and sectarianism that divided Iraq, uniting Iraqis in a common identity instead of Kurd versus Arab, Sunni versus Shi’a.  The cult of personality surrounding Saddam replaced the right to diversified religion; Saddam was Sunni so this was the preferred sect, but it was merely another component of the personality cult.  In a sense, he was ipso facto being deified; Saddam’s religion took importance simply because it was his religion.  Similar to ancient beliefs, the state religion was dictated, and manipulated, by the ruler.  Similarly, Saddam’s juxtaposition of the very relevant, contemporary form of his arms with swords that allude to Medieval Iraq, doubly charged considering their holy status, act to breach the divide between the political implications of the present war and their predestined outcome.  Saddam, however, is actively utilizing symbols of Islam to draw a parallel between an ancient religious heritage and a modern political struggle.

Also vexing about Saddam’s use of the Battle of Qādisīyah is the fact that it is inextricably connected with the martyrdom of Shi’a holy figure Husain, believed to be the grandson of Muhammad, in Karbala in 680.  Shi’a Islam is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has been since their revolution in 1979, one year prior to the onset of the Iran-Iraq War.  In addition to this seemingly obvious conflict, Saddam’s track record with the Shi’ite population within Iraq was not one that would encourage their support.  Catalyzed by the execution, or martyrdom to Shi’as, of Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in 1980 (“If my little finger were Ba’athist, I would cut it off”), Saddam’s paranoid repression of Shi’as gained a new degree of cruelty. His infamous massacres of the Shi’ite regions, particularly in Basra, of Southern Iraq in 1991 were part of the rational for U.S. invasion. Yet, the monument, and most of all the ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah to the public, is expressly Shi’ite.  On August 8, 1989, Saddam Hussein inaugurated in the new monument with a televised ceremony, where he triumphantly rode through the archway on a white stallion.  To anyone an Iraq, a culture immersed in Islamic imagery similar to the permeation of Christian iconography in the West, the combination of the bared swords and the white horse would unmistakably be invoking the martyrdom of Husein, who was supposedly killed while riding a white stallion. This is a very popular image in Iraq, where Shi’ite pilgrimages to Karbala mark one of the most important rituals in Islam.  Once again, Saddam consolidated both the victory over the Persian Empire in the 7th Century and what Saddam perceived to be a victory against Iran in the 1980s into his singular, corporeal form.

So why would Saddam, a figure so centered on the calculated persecution and dismemberment of the Shi’a sect, willingly and openly support a propaganda campaign that seemingly strengthens and mobilizes that sect?  The answer may lie in a strange form of unification, wherein the subtext of all religious imagery under Saddam was national unity over that sectarianism.  Kanan Makiya posits that, despite his repeated assurances of his religious sincerity, Saddam Hussein was merely a political actor manipulating a heritage to secure victory.  Makiya writes that “National unity prevailed in the face of foreign aggression; this is the Ba’athist line on the war.”  Saddam saw himself as a political theorist, one who successfully, and to the chagrin of Iran, avoided the Lebanon-like miasmic disintegration into sectarian violence that had been expected during the long war with Iran.  Saddam’s triumphal ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah was, inherently, a performance similar to those in the ancient Near East where a select group was chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded.  However, it must be looked at in the broader ‘performance’ of Saddam’s presidency.  Makiya contends that Saddam was a historical ‘actor’ in so far as he shifted ideology depending on audience; the performance of his presidency excluded the Shi’a population while his Swords of Qādisīyah ceremony integrated their religion to his own benefit.  On the divide between the public audience and the state-directed performer in ancient Egypt, art historian John Baines writes that there is an unmistakable dichotomy between the sacred space of the state and the passive audience.  According to Baines, “the iconography [of performance] constitutes both spectacle and exclusion.”  Saddam resides in the supernatural realm, defined by victory and religious heroes of Iraq’s past, and the audience is, for the most part, watching through a television screen, listening on a radio, etc. The audience takes no part in the ceremony, much like the underlying meaning that Iraqis took little to no part in the war.  An inclusion exists to the extent that elements of the audience are superficially integrated, but the overlying message is one of dominance and singularity.

On Fortnight Literary Press

Cover image by Alicia Chiaravalli
Cover image by Alicia Chiaravalli

Fortnight Literary Press is sponsored both by the Undergraduate English Department and Arts at Michigan – a humble student-run publication from which collections of literary and visual art occasionally emerge on a canvas of pulped trees and bound with staples. From the submissions, selection, assembly, to the distribution – it has our handprints all over it. In the beginning of December, we released our first issue of the semester after weeks of careful deliberation (ie. discussion and a democratic voting session). The petite journal is available in both an online format as well as in print: a couple hundred, glossy faced hard copies were distributed by our members to lecture halls, cafés, and libraries prior to finals.

As one of the editors, I encourage any of you to submit snippets of your thoughts in whichever format is most natural to you to the journal. We’re quite open-minded here, and will try our utmost to accommodate any work of art in the limitations of 10”x10” paper or in its online incarnation. Thus, we are unique in that we’ve thrown that submissions guidelines approach out the proverbial window and emphatically ask everyone to delve into that subterranean parts of their minds and emerge with something they’d like to share with the community, in whichever manner that they choose. Submit anonymously (or not), submit your creative writing assignments, submit what you’ve been itching to articulate to the world. Who knows, perhaps you might be the next Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, or Colum McCaan?

Our website as well as our archive of issues is located here.

Fictional Future

For one of my classes, we were split up into groups and given fictional theatre companies.  We were to each take a role in the company and complete some tasks that position holds.  I was lucky enough to become the artistic director of the Susan Glaspell Theatre, a regional theatre in Greenwich Village that focuses on the development of new works.  Two years ago, I had this crazy dream that I might want to be an artistic director “when I grow up.”  As those two years have passed, I have scaled down my goals, made them more central to what I consider to be my speciality: the literary department.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I would kill for a job in a literary office in a theatre next year.  I would absolutely murder for it.  But this assignment, this absolutely crazy idea of making myself the artistic director of a theatre brought back those feelings, those ambitions.

Some in the class saw the assignment as an end of the year blow off thing, and if we’re being honest, it had all the potential to be just that.  But, thank God, my group didn’t see it that way.  We went crazy.  We began to imagine a history for our theatre.  There is a next door space called “The Susie” that is a coffeeshop in the daytime and a bar at night.  We planned an entire fictional season of works that don’t exist.  Something inside of me will not let go of this damn fictional theatre.  I want it to be my life.  I think I’m going to save my mission statement and letter to patrons to my computer, as a sort of time capsule.  If I reopen them in twenty years and my life isn’t what I had planned at 21, I’m going to start over until I get it right.  I need this to be my life.  I want to make a difference and do exciting, relevant theatre.

Here’s our mission statement:

The Susan Glaspell Theatre has dedicated the last fifty years to producing new plays that speak to the contemporary moment.  The Glaspell has a split mission: we both produce some of the most vital and well-known American voices in our regular season and encourage playwrights at the beginnings of their careers with our one-month staged reading series, The Birdcage.  The Susan Glaspell aims to be a haven for its writers, lovingly known as Canaries, who are both developing and mounting new work.  The Glaspell strives to engage with society as it is today, and, as a result, present theatre breaks boundaries, creates new styles, and challenges its audiences.  Throughout its history, the Glaspell has proven itself one of the most daring and socially engaged theatres in New York City, and it will continue to provide audiences relevant, exciting, youthful theatre for years to come.

I know it may seem crazy, and it probably is, but this project has inspired me to finish up next semester and head out into the real world.  No matter how scary it may be, I have this crazy made-up dream as my light at the end of the tunnel, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.