Tape shows Bin Laden alive and well

[imomus]

Who believes that Osama Bin Laden died in Pakistan on August 23 after suffering "from a severe bout of typhoid fever" and a bacterial infection provoking a paralysis of his lower body?

Not us at Click Opera. Much better-documented reports are reaching us from Japan, where artist Makoto Aida has leaked A Video Shot By A Man Who Calls Himself Bin Laden Who Is Hiding In Japan.

Those who have seen the document say it depicts "a terrorist growing chubby on tempura in his tatami-matted hideout, or an artist who sublimates his anger at US neo-colonialism into bizarre, Al Jazeera-bound broadcasts".

SF Weekly, who have also seen the tape, describe "the terrorist at a table in a traditional room littered with dishes and empty sake bottles. As the character sips sake, he announces that he's hiding out in Japan and that the U.S. can stop looking for him because he's done with terrorism. He attributes this transformation to the pleasures of Japanese living: The food is great, and "Sake is awesome." Apparently, life in the Asian nation is so comfortable that it can make even a die-hard like Bin Laden go soft."

Curator Roger McDonald describes Osama as "speaking in 'english accent Japanese' about the woes of being an international terrorist".

Instead of Al Jazeera, though, this tape was, for reasons known only to the man behind it, sent to various art galleries around the world. It can currently be seen at the Singapore Biennial. Like every other Bin Laden tape, this one was carefully screened for coded messages before being released to the public. As Ozaki Tetsuya reports in his Out of Tokyo column this week in RealTokyo, security concerns in Singapore dictated that cuts were made:

"According to officials, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts espressed a couple of forceful "desires" concerning some of the rather politically inspired works to be shown... Aida Makoto's "Video of a man calling himself Binladen staying in Japan" was de facto only screened after a part ridiculing Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro was erased".

Clear evidence that an older, wiser Bin Laden -- in rosy health and living in Ogikubo, apparently -- has discovered not only that life in Japan is sweeter than terrorism, but also that ridicule cuts deeper than any scimitar. Stay tuned to the art world for further developments.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That is good - to be transparent about one's body language influences. I wonder how much of this is intentionally put-on and how much of this is unintentional absorption of that which you are surrounded by. The latter would probably be the cooler, reflex answer, - but as a Brechtian you are probably not one to shy away from admitting to the kind of stylized self-reflexive theatricality that most would call contrived.

[(Anonymous)]

I would not reduce the despair in Beckett et al. to socio-historics, as if the silence, exhaustion and futility you find there is something to diagnose as the side effect of the dog days of Modernism. That is like looking at expressions of personal despair in literature today and linking that to living in the Terrible Twin Towers Times of Tumult. This is just as bad as Roger Waters who poses as a psychiatrist in music documentaries to refer to Syd as a schizophrenic.

Syd's own sister said that he had always been odd, and that the most the doctors could say about him is that he is "extravagant." There are also people who believe his odd behaviour with Floyd to be performance rather than illness. You had people going to see him during those days, expecting to find someone who is totally out of it based on how those like Waters would describe him, only to be surprised by someone quite coherent on the other side.

Syd's silence does not have to be the result of exhausting himself out of things to say, it could be the result of finding another kind of inexhaustibility. It does not have to be a resignation and realization of the futility of self-expression either. You like the idea of not resigning until the day you get fired. Perhaps Syd kept going too, except in a medium that does not require the voyeuristic presense and validation of an audience to feed itself. Perhaps his creativity in daily living does not self consciously label itself art and exhibitionistically display itself for others to comment on - but that does not make it any less art.

I am not so comfortable with the dichotomy between what it means to clearly have a clinical psychiatric condition, and aesthetic experiments with silence.