January 9, 2025 : Issue #83

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

This week, somehow, Gaza still: the fate of its children; Tilda Swinton gets interrupted; Mary Ann Peters’s painfully pertinent show at Seattle’s Frye Museum; and Kushner eyes beachfront golf.

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TARGETING BABIES IN GAZA

So, this smug piece of self-justifying Zionist agitprop has been making the rounds lately:

You may have seen it, I certainly did, with its glib (albeit grammatically challenged) imputation that cowardly Hamas hides behind its babies while the resolute IDF defends theirs, but I myself couldn’t help but focus (in line with the settlers’s obsession with “facts on the ground”) on the obvious real-world referent, which is to say a more narrowly circumscribed aspect of the image, something more like this:

The way, that is, in which Israelis almost methodically aim their fire at children, or at any rate sure end up hitting a whole lot more of them than any supposed Hamas targets (or than Hamas, for that matter, ever targeted Israeli children). Of the 46,000 specifically identified dead Gazans to date, 40% have been children (and 70% either women or children)—and that 46,000 number itself is doubtless a serious undercount. As long ago as July of last year, a letter published in The Lancet, one of Britain’s most respected medical journals, authored by a group of forensic experts, put a more realistic “conservative” estimate of the number who have died in Gaza at over 185,000 (or 8% of the enclave’s population, which is to say one in twelve of those alive at the outset of this current phase of the territory’s ongoing siege). (For a detailed evaluation of the credibility of that admittedly controversial number, from a variety of sources, see here.) Part of the problem with these counts is that over the last several months, the entire medical infrastructure for keeping proper count of such things has likely been “degraded” beyond repair.

Meanwhile one faces (to the extent that one can even bring oneself any longer to face them) an almost daily barrage of reports of specific calamities along the lines of the five-story residential building in the Beit Lahiya neighborhood of northern Gaza, housing over 300 already oft-displaced denizens, which was completely pancaked at 4 a.m. this past October 28 by aerial bombardment when—and this was the official Israeli explanation—a single suspected Hamas “spotter” was alleged to have been spotted on the building’s roof. According to a BBC report, the strike resulted in at least 90 deaths, 25 of them children.

And now, with the onset of winter, and directly owing to ongoing Israeli restrictions on incoming humanitarian aid, we are beginning to see a mounting tally of babies literally freezing to death—seven so far on either side of this past Christmas season, according to a truly harrowing piece in the Washington Post of January 6. Since such pieces are behind the paper’s paywall, we’ve taken the liberty of including it on our own Google Drive here, and you really should try to read it. The paper’s digital feed includes this—trigger warning to end all trigger warnings!—brief video:

View video here.

And once again, our American readers really should subject themselves to this particular piece of footage. Because, at the end of the day, we—all of us—are the ones paying for this whole state of affairs. The same day’s feature over at Axios was headlined “BIDEN NOTIFIES CONGRESS OF $8 BILLION ARMS SALE TO ISRAEL,” yet another in a seemingly endless series of such installments that, according to the article, will, this time out, be including “munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells.” The piece led with this winning photograph:

Biden and Netanyahu meet in the Oval Office in July, 2024. (Photo: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

And come to think of it, a truly accurate rendition of the revised graphic with which I started this article would include Grandpa Joe with his reassuring palm blithely patting the Israeli sniper’s shoulder. His palm, and of course, ours as well.

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TILDA INTERRUPTUS

David Marchese’s interview of the actress Tilda Swinton a few weeks back in the New York Times Magazine, on the occasion of the release of her most recent film, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, was one of the most remarkably—indeed almost uncannily—pitched such encounters I’ve had the privilege of reading in a long time, and I urge all of you to go back and sample the excerpts included in the magazine, or better yet listen to the whole conversation by way of the audio link alongside the article. What a voice, and such a presence!

Of particular pertinence in our context today, though, was this passage (starting at around minute 19:45 of the audio version):

When “The Room Next Door” was shown at the New York Film Festival, there was a post-screening talk interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters. And you, gracefully in the moment, responded by saying that the protests were—I’m paraphrasing—uncomfortable but necessary and also relevant to the film, because Syria, Beirut and Gaza represent “the room next door,” and the film is asking people to be in that room and not look away. Is it your hope that people would have political connections spurred by seeing the film?

I would like to make clear that I did include in that list of places Moscow and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When it was reported afterward the names of those places were not mentioned. We have to be careful about that, because if I was making a point at all, the point I was making is that we are absolutely in the room next door to everyone all the time. And it was a very interesting moment, because those people who came to make a statement in that room, I believe, dignified that room. And it was of interest to me that Pedro [Almodóvar] and I, as Europeans, immediately offered them our microphones. That was apparently remarkable. It’s something to do with the fact that we’re brought up in unarmed societies. I talked to my American friends afterward, and it never occurred to me that somebody coming in with a banner might be armed. But that’s my privilege. Also, the idea of being frightened of free speech is something we have to take on. It’s also true, by the way, we didn’t hear what they wanted to say very well because they were masked. I would say to them, next time don’t mask yourselves. Say it clearly and own that presence, that statement, that gesture.

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GALLERY WALK:
Mary Ann Peters at Seattle’s Frye Museum

Speaking of Christmas, I spent a good portion of my recent holiday break in Seattle, which gave me the chance to visit in person Mary Ann Peters’s “the edge becomes the center” show at the city’s Frye Art Museum, the one which, as some of you will recall, was so fervently championed by sometime critic Jen Graves back in our own issue # 80, and it indeed proved a revelation. Ten large, densely mottled drawings from Peters’s “this trembling turf” series (meticulously churning white ink across black clayboard panels, from 2016 through 2019) seemed to roil and rage and lapse and lull, one against the next, with ever compounding intensity. This iPhone tour d’horizon may give you some approximation of their almost symphonic range and impact:

View video here.

When Peters presently joined me at the show, she started out by explaining how her grandfather had transliterated the Lebanese-Syrian family patronymic “Boutros” (which means “house of Peter” in Arabic) into less unwieldy American, shortly after settling in northeast Texas (in flight from the Ottoman draft) in the late 1800s. And though she herself (born in 1949 in Beaumont, Texas) enjoyed a pretty much all-American childhood, she grew more and more interested in her family heritage across her middle years (undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara, followed by the graduate arts program at UW in Seattle), and, especially in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 through 1990, started turning an already archive-based activist artistic practice increasingly in that direction across the ensuing years.

During a 2016 residency researching migrations in general and her own family’s in particular at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Peters began to hear tell of mass graves of Palestinians from the nearby Shabra and Shatila refugee camps (slaughtered by Christian militias under the auspices of Ariel Sharon’s occupying Israeli forces in 1982) slotted under the bunkers and fairways of Beirut’s sole golf course, one of the town’s most elite institutions. (For some further historical elaboration of those oft-denied reports, see here and here.) Rather than directly confronting that terrible possibility, Peters now sought to cast her net more widely, probing the more general theme of truths buried deep beneath the surface and the forensics involved in trying to reveal them. Her study of the sort of sonar imaging deployed in archeological and human rights investigations in turn inspired the early phases of her new “this trembling turf” series, as in panels like these (complete panels in the rows above, with details below)

though as work on the series continued it welled out into wider themes yet, for example evoking the treacherous seas that were starting to swallow up entire raftloads of desperate refugees during those very years:

And still wider, into the general churn of history, and possible openings out

Meanwhile the Peters show at the Frye culminated in another tour de force, “gilded,” from 2024, the latest instance in a separate series of hers, “the impossible monuments,” in this case a viscerally haunting evocation of the memories and longings of displaced peoples everywhere:

The upright rectangular chamber—a sort of mystery cupboard occupying almost the entirety of a far alcove wall—contained a dreamy array of objects suspended behind a sheer brownish yellow aramid (honeycombed synthetic fabric) scrim which served by turns to conceal and then divulge the piece’s contents depending on where the viewer stood.

Thus, from a distance, one could make out keys and keyhole panels and empty oval picture frames, festooned over with colorful ribbons against a gleaming golden background (“That backdrop is fashioned out of stretched gold-lame emergency rescue blankets,” Peters explained to me, “while the ribbons allude to St. Charbel, a Lebanese protector saint whose church I once happened upon in Mexico City, where the parishioners draped ribbons inscribed with their most heartfelt wishes over the saint’s statue’s outstretched arms”).

But paradoxically, the closer one approached, the more the intervening mesh obtruded--see my iphone video here--the focal point of visibility narrowing and narrowing until it almost disappeared entirely,

Photos by Juquien Fang and Brian Karl, Hyperallergic.com.

a telling tolling figure for the age-old melancholy anguish of expulsion.

Alas, the Frye show has now closed, but curators and gallerists around the country are urged to consider resurrecting it: it was really one of the premier exhibitions of last year, limning some of the most urgent issues of our time. (Meanwhile, a fuller survey of Peters’s work will open this August at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington.)

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Leaving the show at the Frye, I found my thoughts returning to Gaza and I took to wondering whether things there might yet get better under Trump (they couldn’t, it seemed, get much worse). But I doubted it. Indeed, I found myself recalling the comments from a while back of the returning president’s onetime Middle East czar and realtor son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to the effect that if one could just get rid of the people, the underlying “beachfront property” there could be “very valuable”—and in my mind’s eye, I could already see the bulldozers carving out the next Trump Luxury Golf Course.

Photo credit: New York Post Page Six.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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