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War Sexy? Ask a Lebanese Art Dealer

from GlobalPost.com--
War-themed art is as popular as ever in Lebanon, but many are tired of the fixation on their country's troubled history. To many Americans or Europeans, the words "Middle East" are synonymous with conflict and war.

So Bernard Khoury, a Lebanese man who is one of the Arab world’s most famous architects, says he’s had enough — at least with what he says are negative and simplistic views of the Middle East, and especially those perpetuated by the art world. He says American and European gallery owners, curators and collectors have fed Western perceptions that have pigeonholed Arab artists into creating “war art.”

“I believe Lebanese and Arab artists are only celebrated through aestheticizing and fetishizing war … what I call the neo-colonialist fantasy of what Lebanon is and what the Arab world is,” Khoury said at his sprawling studio in a warehouse near Beirut’s port. Khoury’s criticism is expressed in a collage and sculpture called “P.O.W.,” or “Prisoner of War,” now on display at a Beirut gallery.

The point, he says, is to create awareness and spark a discussion among Lebanese and Arab artists about the “war slot” to which they’ve become “prisoners. “It’s scary to see that all contemporary artists today are being put into that slot, even those who have a lot more to say in their work,” he said.

Khoury says he’s come to this realization in the 11 years since he first gained international fame for his own war-themed projects, which have been called “combat architecture.”

In 1998, eight years after the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, he created BO-18, an underground nightclub on the site of a 1976 massacre in Beirut. A year later, on the old frontline that once divided Beirut’s warring militias, he designed a sleek underground sushi restaurant . A few blocks away, Khoury gutted and wrapped an abandoned Lebanese house in steel mesh for a high-end restaurant called Centrale. The restaurant’s bar is suspended above the dining room in a steel, gun-like tube; windows slide open for a view onto downtown Beirut.

Olivia Newton-John Claims She Saw UFO

From the Telegraph, London --
Olivia Newton-John claims to have seen a UFO when she was a teenager. The 60-year-old performer said that she was "intrigued" by unidentified flying objects and believed that most people in Britain shared her obsession.

Newton-John's co-star in the 1978 teenage movie was John Travolta, who is now a member of the Church of Scientology which holds that aliens populated the Earth millions of years ago. But the actress's brush with extraterrestrial life was more mundane. She has described how she saw a silver object flying across the sky at "amazing speeds" when she was 15.

"I have seen one when I was very young. It was unidentified and it was flying," she told The Sun.

"In England most people now think UFOs are possible. Twenty years ago, how many people would have thought that?"

Newton-John, who grew up in Cambridge, is best known for playing Sandy in the film musical Grease but also released a string of No 1 albums in the US in the 1970s. She married her second husband John Easterling in 2008, four years after her boyfriend Patrick McDermott vanished on a fishing trip in California.

Earlier this year it was reported that Mr McDermott is alive and living in a boat off the coast of Mexico.

Using Willpower Depletes Energy

from Science Daily--
Have you ever sat down to work on a crossword puzzle only to find that afterward you haven't the energy to exercise? Or have you come home from a rough day at the office with no energy to go for a run? A new study, published in Psychology and Health, reveals that if you use your willpower to do one task, it depletes you of the willpower to do an entirely different task.

"Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise," says Kathleen Martin Ginis, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University, and lead author of the study.

Martin Ginis and her colleague Steven Bray used a Stroop test to deplete the self-regulatory capacity of volunteers in the study. (A Stroop test consists of words associated with colors but printed in a different color. For example, "red" is printed in blue ink.) Subjects were asked to say the color on the screen, trying to resist the temptation to blurt out the printed word instead of the color itself.

After using this cognitive task to deplete participants' self-regulatory capacity, they didn't exercise as hard as participants who had not performed the task. The more people "dogged it" after the cognitive task, the more likely they were to skip their exercise sessions over the next 8 weeks. "You only have so much willpower."

Still, she doesn't see that as an excuse to let people loaf on the sofa.

"There are strategies to help people rejuvenate after their self-regulation is depleted," she says. "Listening to music can help; and we also found that if you make specific plans to exercise—in other words, making a commitment to go for a walk at 7 PM every evening—then that had a high rate of success."

She says that by constantly challenging yourself to resist a piece of chocolate cake, or to force yourself to study an extra half-hour each night, then you can actually increase your self-regulatory capacity.

"Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself," she says.

The study was made possible through funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Blasphemy Gets Its Own Holiday

from Religion New Service --
You’ve never seen Jesus like this before: dripping red nail polish around the nails in his feet and hands, an irreverent riff on the crucifixion wounds. The provocative title of the painting: “Jesus Does His Nails.”

Blasphemous? Absolutely. Deliberately provocative? You bet.

It is part of an upcoming art exhibit in Washington that will mark the first-ever International Blasphemy Day this Wednesday, September. 30 at the Center for Inquiry near Capitol Hil.

Artist Dana Ellyn says her “Blasphemy” paintings are a tongue-in-cheek expression of her lack of belief in God and religion. The self-described “agnostic atheist”—she doesn’t believe in the existence of any deity but can’t say for sure one doesn’t exist—says her introduction to religion was in college when she studied art history. Stories from the Bible, she says, are just that: stories.

Atheists, skeptics, freethinkers and free-speech advocates around the world will mark Blasphemy Day by mounting their soapboxes—figuratively and literally—and uttering words and displaying images that may cause offense.

“We’re not seeking to offend, but if in the course of dialogue and debate, people become offended, that’s not an issue for us,” said Justin Trottier, a Toronto coordinator of Blasphemy Day and executive director of the Ontario chapter of the Center for Inquiry. “There is no human right not to be offended.”

St. Thomas Aquinas described blasphemy—deliberately showing contempt or irreverence for something considered sacred—as a sin “committed directly against God ... more grave than murder.” In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus said, “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

Blasphemy remains punishable by death in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. In addition, Ireland recently introduced a defamation law making blasphemy punishable by fines up to $37,000. What’s more, six U.S. states (Massachusetts, Michigan, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Wyoming) have laws that, in some way, prohibit or regulate blasphemy, noted Ron Lindsay, a lawyer and president of the CFI International in Amherst, N.Y.

Sept. 30 was chosen for the inaugural Blasphemy Day because it is the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the controversial Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The cartoons resulted in worldwide riots by outraged Muslims and widespread self-censorship by media.

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