A Shoe of Note

We all remember hearing about the shoe that nearly took out president Bush on his farcical tour of Iraq.

Artist Laith al-Amiri and a group of children at an orphanage in Iraq built a large bronze-coloured sculpture of the shoe. Later it was erected in Tikrit, Iraq, but sadly ordered removed the next day. Apprently it took the artist and her elves 15 days of hard slog to make the sculpture and cost around $5000 to build. It had been on display in the orphanage and was made in of honour Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist currently in prison for throwing the historic shoe at Bush during a press conference in December.

The brave artist we hope will continue with similar work, and the children will no doubt never forget this cutting edge project. There is no news as to whether the journalist has heard about the honour bestowed on him by the children from his prison cell. We on the other hand, are mostly helpless, despite perhaps feeling the injustice from oh-so-far away. It is a surprise that the Iraqi officials do not feel some sense of the right thinking in the work, as they view the destruction of the war on their own towns and people, let alone the satirical humour in the work, an honour often allowed art that is not so easily permitted elsewhere.

Video footage of the sculpture and some very adorable and the children themselves is available here.

Abbas Kiarostami directs Cosi Fanni Tutte at the English National Opera

Coming soon on Six Pillars to Persia is look at the imaginative collaboration between the ENO and Iranian Realist film-maker Abbas Kiarostami.

Since we first broadcast his talk from the V & A museum in 2005, interest in Kiarostami's work has increased tenfold. Appearing with Mike Leigh for a series of talks helped to put Kiarostami in a category the majority of people can grasp: as a realist he is, like Leigh, a man of the people.

We attended his Trees in Snow exhibition at Zelda Cheattle's gallery, a distinctly stylish et low-key affair (one of the works pictured above) and elicited a few words from the digital film-maker in Farsi via an on hand dignitary who acted as spontaneous translator. This new ENO project however has less of a fanfare attached, despite the accompanying talks and events it has spawned. It's still early days, hopefully we can expect a few episodes of Six Pillars on the opera itself and an accompanying talk.

Read more here about the production. Meanwhile if you haven't been to Shah Abbas yet at the British Museum, time is running out. We recommend taking in an event along with the exhibit the most interesting of which is a 1000km walk undertaken by Birkbeck staff in order to retrace Shah's own pedestrian pilgrimage. A man of somewhat dubious morals, the Shah was a tenacious muslim.

What is about dying?

Resurrection is the natural non-sequitur to death we all hear about but rarely dwell on. Recently in Tunisia I was faced with the Muslim take on resurrection, which I normally associate with mass-marked graves of the well-off, waiting for the day they will rise up and live again, as so generously promised in the bible.

In Islam it's not enough to be buried on hallowed ground and not be a suicide (or any of the other unforgivable things). You must also be buried with your head facing Mecca (see the other pics of the mass graves).

It's also written in the Koran "On the day of resurrection your hands will speak". Given the absolute love of religions to interpret their texts in anything but the most literal ways, I'm bemused to imagine what they make of that.


The best explanation I've heard about death and resurrection was given by a friend to my mother around the time of my graduation. We were in a cafe and he was explaining what it meant to be a Baha'i to my mother, who was related to some Baha'is once in Iran (I'm not a Baha'i by the way). He told her they believed Bahu'alla was the promised Imam, the 12th Imam they are waiting for in Islam called the 'Maha'di'. "But for the Maha'di to have come" my mother pointed out, "We would all have to be dead and it to be the time of the resurrection according to the Koran". "Most people are dead," said my friend "spiritually. We understand death and resurrection to be one of the spirit, not of the body. Most people live their entire lives without being spiritually alive for even a moment".

I can relate to that explanation. It still doesn't explain the hands, or graves, but I think where I was in Tunisia (Mahdia, named after the 12th Imam, no less), brought me a step closer to thinking about it in the right light. I wonder if Tom Hanks will have anything to say about the misconceptions we have 'inherited' today about life and death in his new film, the strapline for which is "Tell the world the truth".