The complexity of the region’s entrenched issues is still mind boggling but Wright manages to explain much of it with clarity and balance. She supports her observations and analyses with 30 years of interviewing people from all levels of involvement with Middle East politics: activists, thinkers, leaders in and out of power and both peaceful and violent, military personnel, American and UN officials, and everyday people. As a result, this book is hardly just a dispassionate description of current events and historical background (like the news sometimes); it becomes a compelling narrative that begs the reader to actually care about about what is happening there. I was continually drawn into the humanness of the struggles there, which helps form memorable impressions for me and bolster understanding from a micro and not just a macro point of view.

This book is ultimately as much about the struggles to solve the problems of despotic regimes, religious sectarian strife and power imbalance as it is about these problems themselves. Wright’s descriptions of homegrown, grassroots efforts to cultivate democracy are inspiring and galvanizing, and her accounts of brave activists’ struggles against violent intimidation tactics and government corruption heartbreaking. Ultimately (and in spite of the last chapter on the American occupancy of Iraq being depressing as heck), the book imparts a sense of hope and positivity: the Middle East may be beset by political challenges like never before, but the contrary to some strains of popular belief, the Middle East is not a region populated by willfully hostile ideological miscreants with no regard for human life; rather, it is full of people like us, trying to get by, and trying to influence it in what small ways they can. Even if that were the only message I took away from this entire book, I would call it a worthwhile read.

Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale video projections of everyday people onto monuments and other public edifices. These projections often portray these ordinary volunteers candidly telling stories of their lives and experiences, usually centered around painful ordeal or personal suffering. His work has been installed and shown in public spaces in over a dozen countries, ranging from the town squares of authoritarian governments to right here on our National Mall in D.C. Wodiczko also designs technological devices or machines worn on the body that help construct situations in which people can share their personal stories with others.

Nearly all of Wodiczko’s work follows a socio-political theme. For instance, in his monumental projections work, he chooses to film people whose lives have intersected with war, conflict, homelessness, social inequity, gang violence. In all these works, the melding of private and public spheres is immediately obvious.

Imagine the face of someone, who could be anyone, looking plainly out at you from the pinnacle of the Washington Monument at night. You can hear every tremor or modulation of his voice through amplified loudspeakers. It is surreal, otherworldly, and you cannot pull away. The video is simple and raw, as is the sound recording; the viewer is made immediately aware that this is not a film but a snapshot of someone’s personal reality, magnified and displayed. But the display does not feel invasive; it’s a willing participation. Watching these works, (and not to make light of them) you feel somewhat like you have been invited into the home of a minor diety to listen and to their tale and share in a common humanity.

Not all of Wodiczko’s work about personal storytelling involves monumental projections. The melding of public and private can happen on a more intimate scale. During his talk at the MFA, Wodiczko described a project he did where he equipped a young Japanese woman with a device that continuously filmed her eyes. This video stream was them fed to a LCD monitor worn behind her back. The woman, a volunteer, had experienced a personal tragedy when her father left the family and created a gaping wound in her life. In Japanese society, young people are often expected to hide and suppress their personal feelings, especially with regard to delicate family problems. Equipped with this machine, which allowed her to make eye contact without showing her face, she mustered up the courage to approach strangers and tell her difficult story. Wodiczko filmed the young woman approaching a trio of wealthy businessmen not unlike her ex-father, and she began her story with her back turned towards them so they could only see the video stream of her eyes. It was not long before their eyes clouded with tears in sympathy and sorrow for her. The story allowed her to both reach out and fulfill a personal emotional need, and, just as importantly, break through the culture of silence encouraged tacitly by her society and her peers.

There are several things that really impress me about Wodiczko’s work: one is the use of technology to utterly surprise people and fundamentally reconfigure the way people interact. It has extraordinary possibilities for breaking through social norms that can be damaging if taken too far. Another is his ability to get ordinary people involved, empowering them to become the storytellers and art-makers, while Wodiczko plays the role of an enabler or mitigating factor. It’s telling that he calls his own work “interrogative design.” Finally, the public response. I am used to people drifting through art galleries with a dazed look on their faces, clutching their rented audio guides like it was their last lifeline to a world that makes sense (in many cases it is). Well, Wodiczko’s work can be experienced without any audio guide or degree in art history; all you really need is a human heart. That said, it is also neither trite nor catered towards the lowest common denominator. It just gives you a lot to think about in its simplicity and straightforwardness. Documentation of Wodiczko’s work shows viewers of an unexpectedly wide-ranging demographic in various states of awed attentiveness, some obviously fighting back tears, others with brows knitted in thinking. The emotional impact of his work is huge, and I really believe that what impacts the heart ultimately impacts the mind.

Given all this, you can imagine how happy I was to see that he had new work up at the I.C.A. I went with Yang and Joel yesterday to see it and, in classic Wodiczko fashion, it gave us moment for pause. Wodiczko’s work here, titled Out of Here: The Veterans Project, consisted of 2 parts. One was a series of outdoor video projections and amplified audio depicting the words and voices of medics, soldiers, and others involved in the Iraq war. The other was an indoor projection that transformed a darkened gallery space into a convincing interior of an abandoned warehouse. The projections show only a ring of high windows with dirty glass, beyond which the inscrutable sounds and images of a civilian-military confrontation play out. Like a miniature movie with an ambiguous plot, it dares the viewer to imagine the consequences and fill in the blanks of what it means to be in a war.

The latter part of this series was for me more interesting. It really did feel a bit like you’re standing in a warehouse in Iraq, but with a thick veil thrown around all your sense of comprehension. It conveys the confusion, doubt, and fear of war better than any news report of “events in the region” ever could. I had a hard time snapping out of that state of mind even walking out of the Wodiczko gallery into the adjoining one (which contained a show of really academic, self-referential painting-photographs on wood panels… A jarring contrast to the evocative, emotionally charged and frankly accessible work I just walked out of.  Sorry, but after Wodiczko, I honestly did not particularly care for its impassive pretensions.)

There are those out there who applaud art for art’s sake. There are those out there who prefer formal explorations of color, shape, and material. Personally, I have grown more and more to prefer art that espouses a a message grounded in the concrete, whether this is found in nature or human affairs. I also like art that could be simple without being simplistic. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything at all against art that is intentionally ambiguous or multi-layered in its message, or that references the art world in a self-aware way (I do find Jeff Koons’ antics hilarious and noteworthy). Nor do I always rule out art that seeks to stretch the boundaries of representation or process or whatnot. But it takes a certain perceptiveness and intellectual talent to create art that has reach, that can influence people in a way that leaves them feeling like something was revealed to them, rather obscured from them, when they leave the gallery. That’s the kind of art I learned that I wanted to make in junior year, when I heard Wodiczko talk. Coming back from the I.C.A. yesterday, I was reminded again of why I went to art school, what I got out of it, and what I have to keep doing, even as I work my daily job as a commercial designer making everyday practical things.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is part personal journal, part manifesto, and part self-help book. Essentially, Gordon Bell tries to make a good case for the “inevitable revolution” towards “Total Recall” (caps, mind you) that will “force” us to “adapt” to it. His diction gives you a good sense of what’s to come, sigh.

If you can stomach his single-mindedly evangelical agenda, you’ll find that this book pursues some interesting ideas about the implications of recording as many details of one’s life as possible. And not just in writing, but in photos, sound, video, drawings, scanned documents, GPS locations, chat logs, pedometer readings, etc. etc.

His primary argument is that we (as in the human race) are on an accelerating pathway towards this state of recording everything ever about our personal lives. He observes that we already have cultural/behavioral trends such as microblogging and increased “surveillance” of our offspring, and points out the sheer fact that we now have all the tools that enable logging, recording, and note-taking at our disposal.

He continues by saying we ought to embrace this trend because of a host of benefits in healthcare, education, national security, work, day-to-day life, and even post mortem. There are, undeniably, benefits that you can’t argue with: detailed recordings of minute-to-minute physical status for health records can be invaluable in diagnosing a disease with vague symptoms. But there are thornier ideas too. For instance, Bell totally adores the idea of a “cyber-twin” that goes on “living” and pretending to be you after you die, so your grandkids can talk to “you.” This simultaneously piques my curiosity and scares me silly, but the biggest part that bugs me is that he does not go on to explore it much beyond saying “Wouldn’t that be SO COOL?” Clearly this is a book about breadth, not depth, and as such, it spends more time reveling in enthusiastic speculation rather than critique and inquiry. As usual, I kind of wish there were more of the latter.

Bell ends the book by providing general instructions on how you can begin recording every detail of your own life too (this is where the self-help comes in). Here’s where his argument that “Total Recall” is upon us falls apart, I think. By detailing all the technological infrastructure required and all the ways we’d have to “adapt” to using it, he only highlights how tremendous a commitment it would be to “life-log.” It would pretty much have to be a person’s one and only hobby. Imagine scrapbooking, but times a million. And the money, wow, you would have to have a smartphone, a GPS device, a digital camera, a scanner, a PC, an e-reader, body-monitoring devices, backup solutions x3 both on- and off-site, shelves of DVDs… Life logging is clearly not for the busy or the poor.

Of course, I buy the idea that tools will get ever-cheaper and technological paradigms will rearrange themselves beyond recognition in 10 years, but this last part of the book, his clarion call to begin lifelogging here and now, still rings utterly hollow to me because we aren’t 10 years in the future yet! It is, literally, the most useless chapter, because it isn’t thorough enough to be actually instructive, nor does it introduce new ideas.

By this point, he has beaten us over the head with the idea that Total Recall is coming faster and surer than the Redcoats and it will make our lives absolutely wonderous. But he has also given the reader a lot to be skeptical about. Rather than spend an extra chapter tackling the skeptics head-on, he chooses to sidestep them by saying “well, there will always be skeptics, but let’s ignore them, BECAUSE THE REVOLUTION IS UPON US. LET’S DO THIS THAAAANG.”

Anyway.

My last point is more about a technical shortcoming on the book’s part: Bell doesn’t distinguish clearly enough between the problems of “recording” and “recall.” There’s a lot of time spent on the endless possibilities of recording, and hardly any on how to organize it effectively. He does recognize the issues of data longevity, the importance of metadata and the need to unify our data, but he doesn’t address nearly enough how monumental the challenge of organizing a lifetime’s data is. His only answer seems to be “keep at it, just do it.” I wish he’d share more of what he learned in his personal experiences.

The final verdict: I think it is worth a read, if only for the impassioned arguments that will hopefully result from some of its claims. Insofar as a book of potentially controversial predictions about the future goes, this is pretty good.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book felt like a really long poem rather than a novel. I say this because the prose is so beautiful it really borders on poetry. The story, though, is almost negligible. We’re told what happens from the beginning: Chuck dies. The rest of it is a drawn-out exploration of Hans’ psyche as he wanders, ghost-like, through his NY life, his semi-divorce, and his friendship with Chuck.

Hans is a weak character, even as he narrates with wisdom that seems naive and deep at the same time. He doesn’t change, evolve, or confront conflicts head-on. He doesn’t take charge (well he tries, but the results were awkward, to say the least.) Basically, he spends his time bouncing off of Chuck, and the insides of his skull.

I found myself getting impatient several times throughout this book with Hans’ self-absorbed rambliness, even as I was completely mesmerized by how spot-on, for instance, his description of the feeling of being in Times Square was. I think this would be a fun book for New Yorkers to read, as it goes into detail about many of the sights, sounds, and places in and around the city. There are also little nuggets of philosophical circumspection sprinkled throughout, any one of which could ignite a great afternoon of pondering on the reader’s behalf. My problem with this book, however, is that none were really explored in depth; they’re fleeting brain snacks. Too bad, because some were tasty.

For what it’s worth, this book represents the state of loneliness quite well. But I can only relate on a very general level, and somehow not completely. This is the kind of book that looks for a soul mate in its reader; I’m not the kind of soul mate for this book, so I only gave it three stars, but for the right kind of person, it could be life-changing.

Recommendation? If you are not in a position to empathize, just read it for the joyful experience for reveling in beautiful prose, not for the action-packed adventures throughout and soul-shattering revelation at the end.

Lastly, I don’t seen the connection to 9/11. It seems circumstantial at best…

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What they say about A.R.T.’s latest production, “The Donkey Show,” is mostly true. Yes, it’s an attempt at revitalizing its naughty experimental side. Yes, it blurs the lines between theater and clubbing. Yes, it’s loud and unusual and “nothing you’ve ever seen before.” And yes, there is sexiness by the bucketful.

What they left out, though, is that A.R.T. has broken new ground in theater not through format, but through Most Effective Use of Glitter-Covered Men. Throughout the show, which is a loose, very loose remix of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the four chiseled, undulating, shiny hot-pants-wearing magical fairy men worked the crowd and their torsos like nobody’s business. Dancing intermittently on their 3×3 feet raised squares and amongst the audience on the floor, they did a fantastic job of even getting the most reluctant participant to booty-shake. Between main-character “scenes,” they directed the crowds, exercising Moses-esque deftness in parting swaths of space for the performers and also guiding everyone’s gazes to the appropriate opposite end of the “club” where the action is.

In fact, the entire operation was so skillfully choreographed that the entire time I couldn’t help but marvel at how amazing it was that nothing went wrong. And so many things could have gone wrong. Here you are, putting tons of excited, clueless, bewildered, and dazed viewers in a small, strobe-lit, dark space (with alcohol!), and expecting them to move in predictable patterns so as not to get kicked in the head by Titania’s black thigh-high vinyl boot heel. But it all worked! And they did it in such an effective way that the spell of the show was not broken at all by the intermittent shufflings. You come away feeling like you just lived the most hilariously chaotic experience ever, but underneath it all was a ton of cleverly hidden planning and control. Amazing.

Anyway, these four Fairy Men with their dazzling smiles and utterly inappropriate dance moves. When I am an eccentric rich person some day, I will hire them to be my escorts everywhere. I shall name them Flame, Snowflake, Tsunami, and Pony.

As you can see, I am actually too tired/high on glitter to write a real review. But I will attempt to soldier on.

So basically, it was a great experience… experientially. Lots of fun, and good exercise, too. But from a theatrical standpoint, I’m not sure it was the best A.R.T. show I’ve ever seen. That is, if theater is be judged by traditional stuff like acting quality, plot, choreography etc. I guess I’m just a little traditional at heart, if only because my befuzzled brain still doesn’t quite know what to make of this night-club pseudo-theater idea yet.

In this case, there was hardly any acting, and all singing all had a blarey, karaoke-bar quality to it, where you could barely make out any of the words. Probably done on purpose, but still, you couldn’t tell if the singers were singing or just screaming above a recording. The performers were all masters of the comically exaggerated facial expression and bodily gesture, which was fortunate because otherwise the story would have been completely lost on me. The plot itself was utterly frivolous and had a dubious resolution at best, but again, probably done on purpose.

I think ultimately, the A.R.T. just wanted people to have fun, to not be “bored,” and to be fully immersed in the action. There was no time to be bored, which was a first for me at a play (I admit to falling a little asleep at “The Seagull”). There is so much constantly being asked of the audience: look here! Look there! Move aside, don’t get kicked in the face! Dance dance dance! This was not a play for those wanting to flex their brawny intellects, but who said all plays had to be intellectually stimulating? This one chose to stimulate the senses instead (including taste, if you partook of A.R.T.’s subtle invite to enjoy while inebriated), and it did it vigorously.

So okay, it might not have been the best “theatrical production” but it certainly brought people together. Sixty-year-old couples were dancing right alongside young Harvard students to the 70s disco hits. Members of the audience got invited up by the fairy dudes to dance on their stage-cubes. This once culminated in rhythmic ass-smacking via tambourine, to the delighted screams of nearby audience members. Come now, how can you say no to that?

I do look forward to more shenanigans from A.R.T. this year, as well as from their reinvented experiment incubator, this “Club OBERON” of theirs.