Marissa Gluck has a cool piece up at Atlantic Cities about how Los Angeles, in the midst of dismantling its citiy’s Occupy encampment, took the time to preserve a mural created by people who were living there or passing through (the mural also had a functional purpose to protect a fountain):

The mural’s preservation is thanks to the efforts of Matthew Rudnick, a budget bureaucrat with no formal art education but with a keen sense of historical import. During the park clean up, Rudnick coordinated efforts between General Services, (which was responsible for cleaning the park), and the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It would be a tragedy to have it thrown away,” says Rudnick. “The work is dynamic.” [...]

The Department of Cultural Affairs is now beginning the process of finding a permanent home for the mural. Interested parties will soon be invited to submit offers to display the mural publicly.

It’s relatively new terrain but one the city viewed as necessary for an artwork that had become an emblem. “We felt giving it to a [caretaking] entity without a public process would come back to haunt us,” says Olga Garay-English, Executive Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It’s more appropriate to have a transparent system in place.”

There’s a radical chic element to all of this, of course, and it’s worth keeping that in mind as Occupy-created and Occupy-inspired art is turned from political expression into commodities. But that doesn’t meant that the work isn’t worth making, or that Occupy-inspired art can’t provide a valuable public example of the connection between artistic expression, political argument, and change. Flavorwire, as one of their 2012 cultural resolutions, hopes the novelists, poets and playwrights who have signed up as part of Occupy Writers will start producing work inspired by their own commitments and in some cases reawakenings. It goes without saying that I agree. Yes, there’s a lag time between events and art inspired by them. But if the 99 percent movement’s going to continue, artists can play a role in sustaining it and looping more people into the conversation, and processing what is past, and passing, and yet to come.

I was substantially put off by the didactic tone of Amy Waldman’s The Submission, but I quite like her new short story, a sad Afghan Christmas tale, in the Financial Times. It centers around Aziz, a translator working for American forces trying to build a road that’s consistently thwarted or destroyed by the forces of a local warlord, who’s extorting the Americans for the resources he needs to build a private army in exchange for holding back attacks. What works about it, I think, is that unlike The Submission, where all the characters personalities and personal lives are bent to serve the cause of representing political positions, this is a story about how public events interact with private needs. Aziz finds the way he translates changing based on the personal goals that he brings to the project: making enough money to pay the bride price and for the wedding he hopes to have, and surviving working for the Americans long enough to do it:

Had the map documented the pace of work, its picture would have been less hopeful. The paving of the 80-kilometre road had started out well: 30 kilometres in the first three months. The pace had halved in the next three, and in the past two months, only seven kilometres had been completed. The insurgents weren’t just interfering with construction. They were blowing up “red” – sections of already-completed road – almost as fast as the contractors could build. Explosives erupted from new, ingenious hiding places: culverts and cliffsides, the asphalt barrels themselves. Assailants haunted the hills, hunted from them. A night raid on the road workers’ camp left 13 Afghans and four Nepalis dead. A sniper shot felled a respected Turkish engineer, and stopped work for two days while American and Afghan forces combed the rises.
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The colonel tried to take more territory alongside the road just to get it built, but terrain cleared was soon lost: the heights couldn’t support a continued military presence. A war to win a battle, Aziz sometimes thought, but he held his tongue. Winter had arrived. Soon the snows would come, stopping work until the spring. Aziz was beginning to despair that he would be grey-bearded, and still a virgin, before the road was complete.

It’s also just worthwhile as a story about Christmas, and how it looks to people who don’t celebrate it, and the power the cultural practice exerts anyway. There’s a lot of good culture about Christmas, but not a lot about Christmas as part of a larger tapestry.