A basement in Queens full of Afghani Rugs depicting mechanical and militaristic imagery is not where you expect to run into friends from LA. But last night, after being invited by a friend who is a collector of these curious artifacts I found myself doing just that. The What-The-Fuck?! feelings I was having were multiplied by woven images of mechanical warfare with dates and place-names in cyrilic, arabic, farsi, and roman (english) script; sometimes depicting such lost-in-translation hilarity as the above-depicted “three towers” Sept. 11 commemorative throw. War Rugs. It’s a whole world I had no idea about, and the “hot war” in Afghanistan has ground their production to a halt. You can learn more about these beauties here, but you can’t buy them, because the seller in the US (with the biggest collection in the western hemisphere) is an artist and is taking a year sabbatical to do petroglyphic rock carvings in the wilderness of the western United States. Seriously, I couldn’t even make this shit up if I tried.
Bonus: Tanks, helis, and AKs after the jump…
