#FreeShawkan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

So far in 2015, we have seen journalists beheaded with machetes, a blogger whipped with a cane as an official judicial punishment for his writing, editorial cartoonists gunned down in their office, bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh, more than 20 journalists detained and even convicted and jailed in Egypt, and journalists detained in America for covering the racism prevalent in almost every official part of our system. Not a great year.

In August, a judge reaffirmed a guilty verdict against three al-Jazeera English journalists. Last month, President al-Sisi pardoned the journalists as a part of the annual Eid holiday tradition of leaders granting pardons. The current regime in Egypt does not much like journalists, and it is estimated that some two dozen writers and photographers are in prison in that country, having been arrested for doing their jobs. Usually, they are charged with “spying,” but more often than not they are detained for months or even years before they even hear why they were arrested or what charges they face.

Mahmoud Abu Zeid is a photojournalist whose work you may very well have seen, as his photographs have appeared in Time magazine and some of them were syndicated by Corbis. (One appears below the fold.) He covered the protests in Tahrir Square and the trial of former president Hosni Mubarak. His professional name is Shawkan. As of today, November 30, 2015, he has spent 838 days in pre-trial detention. His first court session is due to take place on December 12, but his lawyer reports to Amnesty International that he has yet to see Shawkan’s case file. Under Egyptian law, there is a two-year cap on pre-trial detention; 794 days is longer than two years.
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Down with Renoir!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The anti-Renoir movement continues to get (tongue-in-cheek) coverage and has announced a march at “High Noon” this Saturday, October 17, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Mark Aldrich's avatarThe Gad About Town

Yesterday at noon, protesters began to chant: “Rosy cheeks are for clowns / Do your job, take them down.” Another: “God hates Renoir! God hates Renoir!” The number of people attending the protest in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts numbered in the middle-to-high single digits, according to reports.

Max Geller, a political organizer, hates Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter who died in 1919 and never used anything but pastels in any of his several many famous and gigantic works. If one could type a sentence that used air quotes and then took them away and then replaced them again, one might perhaps begin to convey a sense of how completely almost serious and almost mocking and yet earnestly this hatred is felt.

Protest is important. In a free country, one ought to be able to protest anything and everything. This happens to be a free country…

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A Novena for the Completely Distracted

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The cat took the phone. That is the only explana-scuse I can come up with. Ángel, el gato de amor (pictured above), wanted me to get an upgrade so I could take better (well, any) photos of her. Like the one above.

One night last week, somewhere between the room in which my girlfriend and I were watching television and the bedroom in which we were going to be sleeping, my phone left my person, never to return. I placed it in my pocket upon standing to walk into the bedroom, but when I arrived in the bedroom three seconds later, it was no longer in my pocket. An inspection tour of both rooms and the hall in between them led to neither phone nor evidence of foul play.

An ancient (five-plus-years old) brick of a phone, which did not do its one job of placing or receiving phone calls very well, it is not missed. What is missed is an important sense of myself. What is missed is my understanding, my long-understood understanding, that I do not lose things, that not losing things was my one talent. Sense of self, we hardly knew ye.
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