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Today's
Stories
October
11 / 13, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
October 10, 2003
John Chuckman
Schwarzenegger
and the Lottery Society
Toni Solo
Trashing
Free Software
Chris
Floyd
Body
Blow: Bush Joins the Worldwide War on Women
October
9, 2003
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Bombing
Syria
Ramzi
Kysia
Seeing
the Iraqi People
Fran Shor
Groping the Body Politic
Mark Hand
President Schwarzenegger?
Alexander
Cockburn
Welcome
to Arnold, King for a Day
Website of the Day
The Awful Truth about Wesley Clark
October
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Schwarzenegger
and the Failure of the Centrist Dems
Ramzy
Baroud
Israel's
WMDs and the West's Double Standard
John Ross
Mexico
Tilts South
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust
James
Bovard
The
Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster
Michael
Neumann
One
State or Two?
A False Dilemma
October
7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion
Ethnic Cleansing
Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta
Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present
David
Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required
Cynthia
McKinney
Who Are "We"?
Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case
Walter
Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall
Gary Leupp
Israel's
Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?
Website
of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot
October
6, 2003
Robert
Fisk
US
Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria
Forrest
Hylton
Upheaval
in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity
Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War
Bridget
Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus
Nicole
Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
Website
of the Day
Guerrilla Funk
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
October 11 / 13, 2003
Possessed
by Genius
The
Eyes of Lora Shelley
By ADAM ENGEL
Lora Shelley's nudes, like Lucien Freud's, are
more than nude, they are naked. Her subjects are often caught
in Maurice Sendack-like fairy-tale-fun-macabre dreams
"It makes a lot of sense to me,"
says Lora Shelley of the 'Freud meets Sendack' comparison. "I
admire these qualities when they are combined in other artists
work (including these two). There is something that really gets
me about thinking something is scary and funny at the same time.
It's a very exciting feeling."
She is, according to her father, a descendent
of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"My father has told me that Percy
is my great great (I'm not sure how many greats) uncle,"
says Shelley. "I questioned him more about it recently but
he doesn't have more information other than that."
Her subjects, so beautiful, are often
irredeemably spooky. Muscular bodies in pain. Virtually all eyes
are closed, all hands suggestively large.
"This is a way of humanizing the
female form, instead of her being seen as the object. Her big
hands are capable but they are at rest. Something dark under
the surface of things," says Shelley.
But not always. For instance, "The Night
Visit" is the anti-spook ("a beautiful dream dropped
by my window"), an affirmative answer to Henri Fuseli's
"The Nightmare." Or "Holding
On," in which a girl embraces the blue womb of an Angel's
wings. Or "Consolation,"
in which a suffering woman is embraced by one of the few of Shelley's
subjects who actually looks at the viewer, as if asking "What
to do? What to say? How to speak hope to unspeakable pain?"
Shelley is an admirer of other artists.
"My artist friends are a big influence
on me. Artists from the past I look at include Kathe Kollwitz,
Gauguin, Hundertwasser, Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch, Klimt and Bonnard.
I also like a lot of self-taught work, it can be so expressive
with such honesty and no pretensions," says Shelley.
But where is this coming from, this energy
blast of life that forces even her subjects' eyes closed, these
paint-stories that compel the viewer to look closer, deeper,
again and again, like a favorite novel that is no longer a book
but a dream in book form, a shape whose solidity in the "real
world" is all that prevents the reader from diving in?
"Everywhere," says Shelley.
"You'd be surprised. I look inside and out -- including
books, movies, songs, experiences, a memory or an event, a dream
-- there are so many sources."
No. Not enough. Not enough to explain
characters larger than the canvases they, one imagines, can easily
step out of. Like literary characters. Like Madame Bovary or
Holden Caulfield, larger than the works in which they were born.
One imagines Percy or Mary bursting from
the DNA in which they had lain in wait for the perfect hand to
make visual the WORD.
"I have read Frankenstein and of
course it really appeals to me, I wish I could say I knew more
of her work or of Percy's. I will though," says Shelley
of great great great (add or take a great or two according to
your intuition) Uncle Percy.
What's in a name? This name synonymous
with Gothic (Mary) and Romantic (Percy) visions like the one
in my living room, the one my wife just HAD TO HAVE. I gave a
poetry reading at the Rosendale Cafe, Rosendale, NY, in August,
2001, as part of the Woodstock Poetry Festival. "How'd I
do?" I asked my wife. "What? I'm sorry, I wasn't listening."
She was looking. At a painting by Lora
Shelley. Which we ended up buying on the installment plan, our
first original work. I don't even know the title of this paint-story
depicting a young girl in a green dress in a very old room. She
stands before a mirror, but does not look into it, does not admire
herself like I admire her daily when I step away from the machine
that connects me to the Great World "out there" to
study her tiny space and wonder if the Great World is actually
smaller than her mind and what's inside it.
Like most of the Shelley girls and women,
her eyes are closed. Makes perfect sense to me now, for SHE knows
what she looks like. But what thought so intense to grip this
girl forever, and call me repeatedly from my desk to get up and
watch her not-watching?
It's like that with so many of Lora Shelley's
women:
"Erika;""Medea;"
"Diner
Series VI;" "Ioana;"
"Louisiana"
absently strumming her guitar (like Percy Shelley's "Constantia
Singing" but not singing).
All of these women lost in thought, unimpressed
(or unconvinced?) of their own beauty even while "Testing
the Water," or "Going
For a Ride," or "Thinking
Out Loud," or simply looking out the window, like "Kathy"
(who is not really "looking" for even her eyes are
nearly closed to the world outside). Or pursuing a "Labor
of Love" with one eye looking away from or perhaps toward
labor, love, the viewer. Or "looking" into a "Bathroom
Mirror," with eyes shut, like the others.
Wide eye-lids, oversized eyelids creating
the impression of the "empty" sockets of Greek Statues.
So many looking away, or miming the motions
of looking, but with eyes shut, impervious to our importunate
intrusions. As if in rebellion against seeing; rebellion against
the World; rebellion against THE WORK itself, where, created,
they must live the function of form, the artist's artifice. Quite
Platonic actually, quite Shelleyan (the poet was after all, a
scholar/translator of Plato), these women, each as stunning and
unapproachable as "Mont Blanc," impatient to rid themselves
of genius, the creative imperative that yanked them from nothingness
against their will and placed them in canvas-worlds of form and
beauty. Impatient to be lost in profundity. To escape art's shapes,
colors, shadows, and return to the peace and eternity of pure
thought.
To misquote and paraphrase Norman Mailer's
assertion about William Burroughs, "Lora Shelley is the
one artist working today who might conceivably be possessed by
genius."
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Lora Shelley has had many exhibits in
the New York area and beyond. She "can't remember a time
when I wasn't drawing, painting or doing some type of artwork
even as a small child." Her work can be seen on her website,
www.lorashelley.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
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