Louis VI the Fat
12-18-2009, 14:55
“From Vienna to Beirut (http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html),” a photographic project that seeks to find an in-between world where the West and the East intermingle. “It is not a clash of cultures,” he said. “Somehow it’s a blend where something new comes out.”
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Lezmi writes: “These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They rather mean to be constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.”
As the son of an expatriate Lebanese father and a German mother, Frederic Lezmi (http://www.lezmi.de/) gave little thought to his Arab origins as a boy. His father worked for the United Nations and the young Frederic spent his early years living in African cities and Geneva before settling, at around 12, in a small Black Forest town near Freiburg.
Then came 9/11 and the extra scrutiny applied by authorities around the world to people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. Mr. Lezmi, now 31, experienced his share, which aroused an interest in examining his Lebanese half. “I said, ‘If you want to put me in the drawer, I will look at the drawer,’” he recounted.
Mr. Lezmi talked his father into returning to Lebanon, which convinced him to spend a period of study in Beirut, at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. He finished his course a week before war broke out between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Mr. Lezmi stayed for a few weeks, but found that war photography was not for him.
He said he was seeking a third way of depicting the Middle East; neither in romanticized, Orientalist, picturesque photographs nor in “crisis photography” — images of destruction, fighting and privation.
“I was looking for something like hope, or normality, something like a shimmer on the horizon, acknowledging this is a region where there’s a lot of problems, but not falling into clichés,” Mr. Lezmi said.
That spirit eventually led to “From Vienna to Beirut (http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html),” a photographic project that seeks to find an in-between world where the West and the East intermingle. “It is not a clash of cultures,” he said. “Somehow it’s a blend where something new comes out.”
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Lezmi writes: “These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They rather mean to be constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.”
Mr. Lezmi began his trip in August 2008 in the city where he lives, Cologne, leaving town in an Opel Astra station wagon and driving to Vienna, the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and the heart of Central Europe. He proceeded through the Balkans, where the Ottomans held sway for centuries and implanted an Islamic influence, passed through Turkey and Syria and arrived in Lebanon. Mr. Lezmi spent many nights sleeping in his car or camping. Friends joined him for several stretches.
He tried to avoid taking pictures that made an obvious point, and he is wary about hunting for symbolism. “I was not looking for Ottoman traces,” he said. “I was looking for situations with small twists.” The meaning of the pictures, he said, must come from viewing them cumulatively.
Drawing on a cache of 10,000 frames, he produced a book of 29 images that he makes by hand and sells individually. The book is constructed accordion style, so the pictures can be laid out in a long line.
The journey starts in with a look into a parking garage entrance that spirals downward, as though the viewer were entering a tunnel (Slide 1). The last frame, shown at right, puts the viewer into the sky. It shows some Beirut teen-agers in a gondola, over a city under reconstruction.
In between, signs of cultural mingling are subtle. In a picture from Sarajevo (Slide 4), a palm tree is reflected on a car. The word “Miami” can be made out. Women in Soviet-era frumpy dress stand in front of an Italian-style fashion store in Bucharest (Slide 6). The scene is glimpsed through a torn — Iron? — curtain. Western-style graffiti covers an ugly Stalinist bridge in Pristina (Slide 5).
The first Islamic element emerges in a picture from Istanbul (Slide 11). A minaret rises on the edge of a frame, above a wall on which a rakish man sits. The wall separates him from a woman who looks like a Western tourist and has what Mr. Lezmi called a “colonialist” air.
Another minaret appears in a whimsical picture from Mahmatlar, Turkey (Slide 15), but it emerges only with scrutiny. The focus is a rusty and rickety metal rocket, echoed by the minaret, thrusting upward from a dirt patch. A bed of apples lies on the ground nearby. Maybe the rocket runs on apple fuel, Mr. Lezmi mused.
The tensions between secularism and a religious Islamic society in Turkey serve as another subtext. A street shot from Istanbul (Slide 12) shows the head of a sensuous model gazing at the viewer from an ad, with two companion views next door behind window bars, as a woman walks by across the street in a head scarf. The wearing of head scarves is a major source of debate in Turkey. Another Istanbul shot shows the lower half of three women set apart from men strolling across the street. The women are faceless. A vertical part of a window frame divides them.
http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html
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COLLE DI VAL D'ELSA, Italy — For hundreds of years, Colle di Val d’Elsa has been renowned for its crystal and as the birthplace of medieval sculptor and architect Arnolfo di Cambio. But, the picturesque Tuscan town, situated on the road between Florence and Siena, may soon be better known as home to one of Italy’s largest mosques. That is, if it’s ever built.
The controversy over the planned construction has been brewing for seven years and has split the local community. The outcome here could set the tone for Muslim endeavors and integration across Italy.
“Those of us who live here are really afraid,” said Lucia Prizzi, who lives in an apartment beside the field and vineyards where the mosque will be built.
“It’s not right that the local government gave them this land without consulting us first,” she said.
Her sentiments are echoed on graffiti along a nearby wall: “No Mosque,” “Christian Hill,” and “Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!” Another calls on the mayor, who supports the mosque’s construction, to build it at his house.
From emigrant to immigrant nation
Once a nation of emigrants, Italy has only had a sizeable immigrant population for around 15 years, and is still adjusting to the changing circumstances. Yet, in many areas someone from an adjacent town can still be seen as a “foreigner” — as they have a different dialect, cuisine, and patron saint — let alone someone from across the Mediterranean Sea who practices a different religion.
With one of the European Union’s highest unemployment rates, wages at a near standstill and prices shooting higher along with the euro currency, many Italians see little room for immigrant labor. And since the rise of international terrorism, the growing Muslim community — now at around 1 million, or 2 percent of the population — is being eyed with even greater scrutiny than other immigrant groups.
After the July 2005 London transport bombings, dozens of suspected Islamic extremists were deported from the country. And in April, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government said it thwarted planned attacks by such extremists on Milan’s subway system and on Bologna’s cathedral, which houses a painting that depicts the Muslim prophet Mohammed in a Dantesque hell.
Feeding on the country’s fears, the political party La Lega Nord — or the Northern League — switched its platform of separation from southern Italy to kicking out all foreigners, but most notably Muslims.
Meantime, although there are more than 500 Islamic centers of varying sizes across the country, Italy does not recognize Islam as an official religion.
This charged atmosphere has affected life in Colle di Val d’Elsa, where the Muslim community and the mayor have been working to build a new, larger, Islamic center to accommodate the town’s growing number of Muslims and to promote cultural exchange.
Full article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12927212/
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Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear Published: December 17, 2009
The anxiety and anger have been building all year. In March, a national coalition of Islamic organizations warned that it would cease cooperating with the F.B.I. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org) unless the agency stopped infiltrating mosques and using “agents provocateurs to trap unsuspecting Muslim youth.”
In September, a cleric in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sued the government, claiming that the F.B.I. had threatened to scuttle his application for a green card unless he agreed to spy on relatives overseas — echoing similar claims made in recent court cases in California, Florida and Massachusetts.
And last month, after an imam in Queens was charged with aiding what the authorities called a bomb-making plot (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/nyregion/21imam.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=baker%20zraick%20imam&st=cse), a group of South Asian Muslims there began compiling a database of complaints about their brushes with counterterrorism investigators.
Since the terror attacks of 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim and Arab-American leaders across the country have worked to build a relationship of trust, sharing information both to fight terrorism and to protect the interests of mosques and communities.
But those relations have reached a low point in recent months, many Muslim leaders say. Several high-profile cases in which informers have infiltrated mosques and helped promote plots, they say, have sown a corrosive fear among their people that F.B.I. informers are everywhere, listening.
“There is a sense that law enforcement is viewing our communities not as partners but as objects of suspicion,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (http://www.isna.net/ISNAHQ/pages/About-Us.aspx), who represented Muslims at the national prayer service a day after President Obama (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s inauguration (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/presidents_and_presidency_us/inaugurations/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier). “A lot of people are really, really alarmed about this.”
There is little doubt that a spate of recent cases — from the alleged bomb plot by a former Manhattan coffee vendor, Najibullah Zazi (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/nyregion/25terror.html?scp=1&sq=najibullah%20zazi%20arrested&st=cse), to the shootings at Fort Hood (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fort_hood_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), in Texas — has heightened Americans’ concerns about homegrown terrorism. Muslim leaders have promised to redouble efforts to combat extremism in their ranks.
Yet they also worry about the fallout for the vast numbers of the innocent. Some Muslims, Ms. Mattson said, have canceled trips abroad to avoid arousing suspicion. People are wary of whom they speak to. Community groups say it is harder to find volunteers. Many Muslim charities are hobbled.
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/us/18muslims.html?_r=1&hp
~~-~~-~~-<<oOo>>-~~-~~-~~
Nope, no sharing of my thoughts. I'll leave it with these fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope, at the West and Muslims as this decade draws to a close.
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Lezmi writes: “These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They rather mean to be constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.”
As the son of an expatriate Lebanese father and a German mother, Frederic Lezmi (http://www.lezmi.de/) gave little thought to his Arab origins as a boy. His father worked for the United Nations and the young Frederic spent his early years living in African cities and Geneva before settling, at around 12, in a small Black Forest town near Freiburg.
Then came 9/11 and the extra scrutiny applied by authorities around the world to people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. Mr. Lezmi, now 31, experienced his share, which aroused an interest in examining his Lebanese half. “I said, ‘If you want to put me in the drawer, I will look at the drawer,’” he recounted.
Mr. Lezmi talked his father into returning to Lebanon, which convinced him to spend a period of study in Beirut, at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. He finished his course a week before war broke out between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Mr. Lezmi stayed for a few weeks, but found that war photography was not for him.
He said he was seeking a third way of depicting the Middle East; neither in romanticized, Orientalist, picturesque photographs nor in “crisis photography” — images of destruction, fighting and privation.
“I was looking for something like hope, or normality, something like a shimmer on the horizon, acknowledging this is a region where there’s a lot of problems, but not falling into clichés,” Mr. Lezmi said.
That spirit eventually led to “From Vienna to Beirut (http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html),” a photographic project that seeks to find an in-between world where the West and the East intermingle. “It is not a clash of cultures,” he said. “Somehow it’s a blend where something new comes out.”
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Lezmi writes: “These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They rather mean to be constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.”
Mr. Lezmi began his trip in August 2008 in the city where he lives, Cologne, leaving town in an Opel Astra station wagon and driving to Vienna, the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and the heart of Central Europe. He proceeded through the Balkans, where the Ottomans held sway for centuries and implanted an Islamic influence, passed through Turkey and Syria and arrived in Lebanon. Mr. Lezmi spent many nights sleeping in his car or camping. Friends joined him for several stretches.
He tried to avoid taking pictures that made an obvious point, and he is wary about hunting for symbolism. “I was not looking for Ottoman traces,” he said. “I was looking for situations with small twists.” The meaning of the pictures, he said, must come from viewing them cumulatively.
Drawing on a cache of 10,000 frames, he produced a book of 29 images that he makes by hand and sells individually. The book is constructed accordion style, so the pictures can be laid out in a long line.
The journey starts in with a look into a parking garage entrance that spirals downward, as though the viewer were entering a tunnel (Slide 1). The last frame, shown at right, puts the viewer into the sky. It shows some Beirut teen-agers in a gondola, over a city under reconstruction.
In between, signs of cultural mingling are subtle. In a picture from Sarajevo (Slide 4), a palm tree is reflected on a car. The word “Miami” can be made out. Women in Soviet-era frumpy dress stand in front of an Italian-style fashion store in Bucharest (Slide 6). The scene is glimpsed through a torn — Iron? — curtain. Western-style graffiti covers an ugly Stalinist bridge in Pristina (Slide 5).
The first Islamic element emerges in a picture from Istanbul (Slide 11). A minaret rises on the edge of a frame, above a wall on which a rakish man sits. The wall separates him from a woman who looks like a Western tourist and has what Mr. Lezmi called a “colonialist” air.
Another minaret appears in a whimsical picture from Mahmatlar, Turkey (Slide 15), but it emerges only with scrutiny. The focus is a rusty and rickety metal rocket, echoed by the minaret, thrusting upward from a dirt patch. A bed of apples lies on the ground nearby. Maybe the rocket runs on apple fuel, Mr. Lezmi mused.
The tensions between secularism and a religious Islamic society in Turkey serve as another subtext. A street shot from Istanbul (Slide 12) shows the head of a sensuous model gazing at the viewer from an ad, with two companion views next door behind window bars, as a woman walks by across the street in a head scarf. The wearing of head scarves is a major source of debate in Turkey. Another Istanbul shot shows the lower half of three women set apart from men strolling across the street. The women are faceless. A vertical part of a window frame divides them.
http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html
~~-~~-~~-<<oOo>>-~~-~~-~~
COLLE DI VAL D'ELSA, Italy — For hundreds of years, Colle di Val d’Elsa has been renowned for its crystal and as the birthplace of medieval sculptor and architect Arnolfo di Cambio. But, the picturesque Tuscan town, situated on the road between Florence and Siena, may soon be better known as home to one of Italy’s largest mosques. That is, if it’s ever built.
The controversy over the planned construction has been brewing for seven years and has split the local community. The outcome here could set the tone for Muslim endeavors and integration across Italy.
“Those of us who live here are really afraid,” said Lucia Prizzi, who lives in an apartment beside the field and vineyards where the mosque will be built.
“It’s not right that the local government gave them this land without consulting us first,” she said.
Her sentiments are echoed on graffiti along a nearby wall: “No Mosque,” “Christian Hill,” and “Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!” Another calls on the mayor, who supports the mosque’s construction, to build it at his house.
From emigrant to immigrant nation
Once a nation of emigrants, Italy has only had a sizeable immigrant population for around 15 years, and is still adjusting to the changing circumstances. Yet, in many areas someone from an adjacent town can still be seen as a “foreigner” — as they have a different dialect, cuisine, and patron saint — let alone someone from across the Mediterranean Sea who practices a different religion.
With one of the European Union’s highest unemployment rates, wages at a near standstill and prices shooting higher along with the euro currency, many Italians see little room for immigrant labor. And since the rise of international terrorism, the growing Muslim community — now at around 1 million, or 2 percent of the population — is being eyed with even greater scrutiny than other immigrant groups.
After the July 2005 London transport bombings, dozens of suspected Islamic extremists were deported from the country. And in April, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government said it thwarted planned attacks by such extremists on Milan’s subway system and on Bologna’s cathedral, which houses a painting that depicts the Muslim prophet Mohammed in a Dantesque hell.
Feeding on the country’s fears, the political party La Lega Nord — or the Northern League — switched its platform of separation from southern Italy to kicking out all foreigners, but most notably Muslims.
Meantime, although there are more than 500 Islamic centers of varying sizes across the country, Italy does not recognize Islam as an official religion.
This charged atmosphere has affected life in Colle di Val d’Elsa, where the Muslim community and the mayor have been working to build a new, larger, Islamic center to accommodate the town’s growing number of Muslims and to promote cultural exchange.
Full article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12927212/
~~-~~-~~-<<oOo>>-~~-~~-~~
Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear Published: December 17, 2009
The anxiety and anger have been building all year. In March, a national coalition of Islamic organizations warned that it would cease cooperating with the F.B.I. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org) unless the agency stopped infiltrating mosques and using “agents provocateurs to trap unsuspecting Muslim youth.”
In September, a cleric in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sued the government, claiming that the F.B.I. had threatened to scuttle his application for a green card unless he agreed to spy on relatives overseas — echoing similar claims made in recent court cases in California, Florida and Massachusetts.
And last month, after an imam in Queens was charged with aiding what the authorities called a bomb-making plot (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/nyregion/21imam.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=baker%20zraick%20imam&st=cse), a group of South Asian Muslims there began compiling a database of complaints about their brushes with counterterrorism investigators.
Since the terror attacks of 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim and Arab-American leaders across the country have worked to build a relationship of trust, sharing information both to fight terrorism and to protect the interests of mosques and communities.
But those relations have reached a low point in recent months, many Muslim leaders say. Several high-profile cases in which informers have infiltrated mosques and helped promote plots, they say, have sown a corrosive fear among their people that F.B.I. informers are everywhere, listening.
“There is a sense that law enforcement is viewing our communities not as partners but as objects of suspicion,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (http://www.isna.net/ISNAHQ/pages/About-Us.aspx), who represented Muslims at the national prayer service a day after President Obama (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s inauguration (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/presidents_and_presidency_us/inaugurations/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier). “A lot of people are really, really alarmed about this.”
There is little doubt that a spate of recent cases — from the alleged bomb plot by a former Manhattan coffee vendor, Najibullah Zazi (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/nyregion/25terror.html?scp=1&sq=najibullah%20zazi%20arrested&st=cse), to the shootings at Fort Hood (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fort_hood_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), in Texas — has heightened Americans’ concerns about homegrown terrorism. Muslim leaders have promised to redouble efforts to combat extremism in their ranks.
Yet they also worry about the fallout for the vast numbers of the innocent. Some Muslims, Ms. Mattson said, have canceled trips abroad to avoid arousing suspicion. People are wary of whom they speak to. Community groups say it is harder to find volunteers. Many Muslim charities are hobbled.
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/us/18muslims.html?_r=1&hp
~~-~~-~~-<<oOo>>-~~-~~-~~
Nope, no sharing of my thoughts. I'll leave it with these fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope, at the West and Muslims as this decade draws to a close.