March 27, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (88A)

REQUIRED READING

Many of you will have already seen “Never Again and Again” the wrenchingly trenchant 3-page collaboration between Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco in the recent New York Review of Books, (with its accompanying online conversation between the two of them), but I wanted also to draw your attention to the well-nigh essential, scaldingly pertinent 32-page satirical broadside, War on Gaza, that Sacco himself brought out by way of Fantagraphics a while back.

Already, for decades now, one of our most clear-eyed witnesses to the ongoing desolation of Palestine (see 1993 here and 2009 here), Sacco, with this thin volume, sharpens his fury to a stiletto point, and one of the most abject objects of his rage, entirely justifiably, ends up being “Genocide Joe” Biden.

It will be worth remembering throughout what comes in the months ahead, that the fault will always have been every bit as much Biden’s as Netanyahu’s or now Trump’s. At one point, Sacco launches into “A reading from the Book of Genocide*” (“ *with apologies to Moses”), in which Netanyahu is portrayed rubbing his hands in righteous indignation over Hamas’s cross-border raid, forecasting his coming vengeance, and an anguished Biden is seen to be pleading, “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous men in Gaza: wilt thou then sweep them away and not pardon the place for the sake of the 50?” At which point we turn the page onto this spread:

And so forth (for easier reading see here and here).

Just yanking your, their, our chain—pretty much sums up the entire Biden Middle East policy across the last two years of his administration. All that is now happening could have been forestalled and prevented. And wasn’t. Such that, actually, mock-anguished Biden deserves a trip to The Hague every bit as much as does Netanyahu.

(And here’s a question for you. Were the International Criminal Court to indict Biden and Blinken and Austin for their roles in the Gaza civilian bombing campaigns as part of any future expansion of Netanyahu’s charges, as some have been advocating, would Trump, in a typical spasm of self-serving hypocrisy, go ahead and arrest and extradite them? And would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Just wondering.)

Meanwhile though…

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ARTWALK : A Veiled Gazelle at the MJT

…it’s worth remembering that there was a time, a glorious moment, when Christians and Jews and Muslim Arabs all got along, “the ornament” as it was said, “of the world.”

And that moment is currently being realized, once again, of all places, at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City/Los Angeles (subject of my 1995 book Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder) in its new wing (and yes, it’s hard to figure how they could have slotted yet another whole new wing into that deceptively diminutive space, but there you go), A Veiled Gazelle: Intimations of the Infinite and the Eternal—Islamic Geometries of Medieval al-Andalus. Over five years in the making, entirely hand-crafted by David Wilson’s devoted hive of associates, the show is a must-see for anyone even just passing through Los Angeles (the museum is usually less than a half-hour cab ride from LAX). And the opening twelve-minute 3D slide show, tucked into an alcove off to the side near the entry—and especially poignant, indeed almost heart-rending at this dire historical moment—is by itself worth the journey. I asked David if he would let me share my hand-held iPhone capture of the slide show with you, and he was amenable, but do understand that the original, with its uncanny 3-D layering (achieved without any special glasses) is far more dazzling than anything I was able to achieve here. Still, David’s narration is one ardent aching pang, and that does make it through.

View the video here.

Oy and aye: if only…

There’s much more to the wing’s exponentially compounding installation than I was able to suggest there at the very end of my video, so do make sure to make your way there and see if for yourselves.

Amen.

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See you next week.