(Extra credit for my ENG 102 students--if you go, talk to me about the response you will need to write for the credit)
Dr. Arnold Farr
"Bringing Eros Back: What Marcuse Means Today"
Wednesday (2/18) 5 pm
Center for Student Involvement, UK Student Center
(The Center for Student Involvement (CSI) is located on the first floor of the student center extension)
Dr. Arnold Farr is a newly hired professor in the UK Philosophy Department. He will be speaking on topics pertaining to his new book, Critical Theory and Democratic Vision: Herbert Marcuse and Recent Liberation Philosophies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). In 2005 in Philadelphia, Dr. Farr founded the International Marcuse Society; this year's conference of the Society will be held at York University in October.
*Light refreshments will be served.*
As always, all are welcome. Those interested in social theory and the Frankfurt School are especially encouraged to attend, along with all students and activists (both campus and community.)
Sorry for the late notice on this; please spread the word to all who may be interested. I hope to see many of you on Wednesday,
In Solidarity,
Joan Braune
(Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions: standinsolidarity at yahoo dot com
Monday, February 16, 2009
Stephen Shalom: Question and Answer on Gaza
Question and Answer on Gaza
By Stephen Shalom
Z Net
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched its brutal assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. The aim here has been to collect in one place the most frequently-asked questions and to offer answers and sources. You can read the whole thing through (warning: it's long!) or see a separate list of sections and questions, and jump to the ones you're interested in.
Introduction
1. Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself and its population from rocket attacks?
Rockets from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians violate international law.
But any assessment of whether Israeli military actions constitute lawful self-defense has to take account of the context and the question of proportionality.
The broad context is that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and unjust and Israel can't claim self-defense when Palestinians struggle by legitimate means to end the occupation. (In the same way, Japanese troops couldn't claim self-defense when they were attacked by guerrillas in occupied China or the occupied Philippines during World War II.)
The proper Israeli response to such Palestinian actions is not "self-defense," but full withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Gaza
2. While conquests in wars of aggression are clearly illegal, didn't Israel obtain the West Bank and Gaza as the result of a defensive war against an attack waged by neighboring Arab states?
The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, as well as the Sinai and the Golan Heights were conquered by Israel during the June 1967 war, a war in which Israel attacked first. Israel's supporters argue that although Israel fired the first shots, this was a justified preventive war, given that Arab armies were mobilizing on Israel's borders, with murderous rhetoric. The rhetoric was indeed blood-curdling, and many people around the world worried for Israel's safety. But those who understood the military situation -- in Tel Aviv and the Pentagon -- knew quite well that even if the Arabs struck first, Israel would prevail in any war. Egypt's leader was looking for a way out and agreed to send his vice-president to Washington for negotiations. Before that could happen, Israel attacked, in part because it rejected negotiations and the prospect of any face-saving compromise for Egypt. Menachem Begin, who was an enthusiastic supporter of that (and other) Israeli wars was quite clear about the necessity for launching an attack: In June 1967, he said, Israel "had a choice." Egyptian Army concentrations did not prove that Nasser was about to attack. "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."[1]
However, even if it were the case that the 1967 war was wholly defensive on Israel's part, this could not justify continued rule over Palestinians. A people do not lose their right to self-determination because the government of a neighboring state goes to war. Sure, punish Jordan and don't give it back the West Bank (to which it had no right in the first place, having joined with Israel in carving up the stillborn Palestinian state envisioned in the UN's 1947 partition plan). And don't return Gaza to Egyptian administrative control. But there is no basis for punishing the Palestinian population by forcing them to submit to foreign military occupation.
Israel immediately incorporated occupied East Jerusalem into Israel proper, announcing that Jerusalem was its united and eternal capital. It then began to establish settlements in the Occupied Territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit a conquering power from settling its population on occupied territory. The Israeli government legal adviser at the time, the distinguished jurist Theodor Meron, warned that any settlements would be illegal,[2] but he was ignored.
And the International Court of Justice has ruled -- in a portion of an opinion that had the unanimous support of all its judges, including the one from the United States -- that all the settlements in the occupied territories are illegal.[3]
To Read the Rest of the Q and A
By Stephen Shalom
Z Net
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched its brutal assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. The aim here has been to collect in one place the most frequently-asked questions and to offer answers and sources. You can read the whole thing through (warning: it's long!) or see a separate list of sections and questions, and jump to the ones you're interested in.
Introduction
1. Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself and its population from rocket attacks?
Rockets from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians violate international law.
But any assessment of whether Israeli military actions constitute lawful self-defense has to take account of the context and the question of proportionality.
The broad context is that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and unjust and Israel can't claim self-defense when Palestinians struggle by legitimate means to end the occupation. (In the same way, Japanese troops couldn't claim self-defense when they were attacked by guerrillas in occupied China or the occupied Philippines during World War II.)
The proper Israeli response to such Palestinian actions is not "self-defense," but full withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Gaza
2. While conquests in wars of aggression are clearly illegal, didn't Israel obtain the West Bank and Gaza as the result of a defensive war against an attack waged by neighboring Arab states?
The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, as well as the Sinai and the Golan Heights were conquered by Israel during the June 1967 war, a war in which Israel attacked first. Israel's supporters argue that although Israel fired the first shots, this was a justified preventive war, given that Arab armies were mobilizing on Israel's borders, with murderous rhetoric. The rhetoric was indeed blood-curdling, and many people around the world worried for Israel's safety. But those who understood the military situation -- in Tel Aviv and the Pentagon -- knew quite well that even if the Arabs struck first, Israel would prevail in any war. Egypt's leader was looking for a way out and agreed to send his vice-president to Washington for negotiations. Before that could happen, Israel attacked, in part because it rejected negotiations and the prospect of any face-saving compromise for Egypt. Menachem Begin, who was an enthusiastic supporter of that (and other) Israeli wars was quite clear about the necessity for launching an attack: In June 1967, he said, Israel "had a choice." Egyptian Army concentrations did not prove that Nasser was about to attack. "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."[1]
However, even if it were the case that the 1967 war was wholly defensive on Israel's part, this could not justify continued rule over Palestinians. A people do not lose their right to self-determination because the government of a neighboring state goes to war. Sure, punish Jordan and don't give it back the West Bank (to which it had no right in the first place, having joined with Israel in carving up the stillborn Palestinian state envisioned in the UN's 1947 partition plan). And don't return Gaza to Egyptian administrative control. But there is no basis for punishing the Palestinian population by forcing them to submit to foreign military occupation.
Israel immediately incorporated occupied East Jerusalem into Israel proper, announcing that Jerusalem was its united and eternal capital. It then began to establish settlements in the Occupied Territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit a conquering power from settling its population on occupied territory. The Israeli government legal adviser at the time, the distinguished jurist Theodor Meron, warned that any settlements would be illegal,[2] but he was ignored.
And the International Court of Justice has ruled -- in a portion of an opinion that had the unanimous support of all its judges, including the one from the United States -- that all the settlements in the occupied territories are illegal.[3]
To Read the Rest of the Q and A
Brad Stone: Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown
Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown
By BRAD STONE
The New York Times
The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.
A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.
The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.
The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.
But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.
“This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”
The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.
The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.
Not everyone was happy with the conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has forcefully pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. Mr. Blumenthal said it “downplayed the predator threat,” relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By BRAD STONE
The New York Times
The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.
A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.
The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.
The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.
But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.
“This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”
The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.
The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.
Not everyone was happy with the conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has forcefully pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. Mr. Blumenthal said it “downplayed the predator threat,” relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.
To Read the Rest of the Article
John Walker: Lexington Seed Sale!
Subject: Seed Sale
The Event: Seed sale at The Rock La Roca! March 7, 2009, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
10215 N Limestone St. Lex, KY 40505 859.255.0712
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might be interested!
What: We will be selling heirloom seeds—varieties that are not available at the local garden store. These varieties have better flavors, distinct looks, and are a part of our “seed heritage.” We’re talking lettuces with awesome flavors, tomatoes that don’t taste like wet cardboard, and beans that are tender and full of fresh flavor.
Why: We are using the money raised to support our work in the community garden. We get lots of food out to hungry people—fresh vegetables from the garden. Last year, in our Summer and Fall gardens, we distributed: beets, cabbage, peppers, broccoli, turnips, radishes, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, 6 different kinds of tomatoes, lenga lenga (an African plant), sweet basil, tomatillos, onions, and sweet potatoes. Each year the garden gets bigger and it feeds more people. But we have equipment and supply costs—and the proceeds from the seed sale will go to make the garden project a self-sufficient and growing ministry.
Who: If you want some of the best varieties of vegetables you have ever grown; if you know a gardener and would like to surprise them with a unique gift for the garden!
How: We would love to welcome you to the Church and show you what we are doing!! But if you can’t make it, but would still love to support the ministry and grow some great veggies, we are also taking mail orders. See the attached file to get our “catalog.” Or if you can’t open the file or it was not attached, please visit my blog: www.markiteight.blogspot.com and you can see the catalog on line. If you would like to pre-order, here’s how!!!
Simply send us a list of the heirloom varieties you want, and indicate how many packets of each heirloom you need. Add up your total from the pricing given in this list, then add the postage and handling from the guide below. Allow 5-7 days for delivery. Make checks and money orders out to The Rock / LaRoca. Send your seed order to:
In-Feed
c/o: Bob McKinley
472 Larkwood Drive
Lexington, KY 40509
Shipping Fees:
$10 or less………..$3.50
$10 to $20.……….$5.00
$20 to $30.……….$7.00
$30 to $50.……….$9.00
Over $50.…………$10.00
In the near future, I hope to be able to have some pictures of the vegetables to give you a sense of their beauty!
The Event: Seed sale at The Rock La Roca! March 7, 2009, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
10215 N Limestone St. Lex, KY 40505 859.255.0712
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might be interested!
What: We will be selling heirloom seeds—varieties that are not available at the local garden store. These varieties have better flavors, distinct looks, and are a part of our “seed heritage.” We’re talking lettuces with awesome flavors, tomatoes that don’t taste like wet cardboard, and beans that are tender and full of fresh flavor.
Why: We are using the money raised to support our work in the community garden. We get lots of food out to hungry people—fresh vegetables from the garden. Last year, in our Summer and Fall gardens, we distributed: beets, cabbage, peppers, broccoli, turnips, radishes, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, 6 different kinds of tomatoes, lenga lenga (an African plant), sweet basil, tomatillos, onions, and sweet potatoes. Each year the garden gets bigger and it feeds more people. But we have equipment and supply costs—and the proceeds from the seed sale will go to make the garden project a self-sufficient and growing ministry.
Who: If you want some of the best varieties of vegetables you have ever grown; if you know a gardener and would like to surprise them with a unique gift for the garden!
How: We would love to welcome you to the Church and show you what we are doing!! But if you can’t make it, but would still love to support the ministry and grow some great veggies, we are also taking mail orders. See the attached file to get our “catalog.” Or if you can’t open the file or it was not attached, please visit my blog: www.markiteight.blogspot.com and you can see the catalog on line. If you would like to pre-order, here’s how!!!
Simply send us a list of the heirloom varieties you want, and indicate how many packets of each heirloom you need. Add up your total from the pricing given in this list, then add the postage and handling from the guide below. Allow 5-7 days for delivery. Make checks and money orders out to The Rock / LaRoca. Send your seed order to:
In-Feed
c/o: Bob McKinley
472 Larkwood Drive
Lexington, KY 40509
Shipping Fees:
$10 or less………..$3.50
$10 to $20.……….$5.00
$20 to $30.……….$7.00
$30 to $50.……….$9.00
Over $50.…………$10.00
In the near future, I hope to be able to have some pictures of the vegetables to give you a sense of their beauty!
Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary (Pepita Ferrari: 2008); RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008); Lawrence Lessig: Final Free Culture
(From National Film Board of Canada.)
To Watch the Trailer for Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary
RiP: A Remix Manifesto
Lawrence Lessig: Final Free Culture Lecture
Last two are courtesy of Open Source Cinema where you can become involved with the free culture revolution.
To Watch the Trailer for Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary
RiP: A Remix Manifesto
Lawrence Lessig: Final Free Culture Lecture
Last two are courtesy of Open Source Cinema where you can become involved with the free culture revolution.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Randolph Hollingsworth: OKI, Academic Earth and Wikiversity; Join the Knowledge Revolution; Lexington Free University
(As higher education is priced through the roof; as colleges embrace a technocratic, profit-driven, business model; as the government continues to dumb-down K-12 through meaningless standardized testing and evisceration of humanities/social sciences/arts; etc... It is good to see these efforts--think about how you can work to make information, learning and creativity truly free and available to everyone. This is not just for academics, we are all intellectuals--or have the potential to be--and we all have some special knowledge to teach. This is going to be a major struggle of the future--here and now--where will you stand? Will you seek to control and commodify knowledge for the profits of a chosen few, or, will you seek to open up the world so that we can learn and collaborate together as global citizens? We want to open a free university in Lexington, KY--are you interested in being a part of this project? If so, get a hold of me at mdbento at gmail dot com and put Lexington Free University in the subject line. We are very interested in learning from similar projects/efforts from around the world and gathering more examples to serve as inspiration for us all--leave a comment to this post and/or email me at the same email address. Pura Vida!)
OKI, Academic Earth and Wikiversity
by Randolph Hollingsworth
My Day
More on the democratization of the academy - take a look at what some profs at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford are doing... offering their videotaped lectures to the world - Academic Earth. This site joins the Open Knowledge Initiative that has been challenging how we think of the monopoly known as higher education (see MIT's OpenCourseWare and the proposed P2PU).
But what about an open admissions such as the public lectures once offered by the historic Transylvania University for all of (white) antebellum Lexingtonians to attend (including women, horrors!)? The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning does this now.
Or even more intriguing, a crowd-sourcing and peer-to-peer environment to generate new knowledge such as the newly proposed Wikiversity, an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation. For an inside view, see "Wikiversity; or, Education Meets the Free Culture Movement: An Ethnographic Investigation," First Monday, vol. 13 no.10 (October 6, 2008)
Link to the Post
OKI, Academic Earth and Wikiversity
by Randolph Hollingsworth
My Day
More on the democratization of the academy - take a look at what some profs at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford are doing... offering their videotaped lectures to the world - Academic Earth. This site joins the Open Knowledge Initiative that has been challenging how we think of the monopoly known as higher education (see MIT's OpenCourseWare and the proposed P2PU).
But what about an open admissions such as the public lectures once offered by the historic Transylvania University for all of (white) antebellum Lexingtonians to attend (including women, horrors!)? The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning does this now.
Or even more intriguing, a crowd-sourcing and peer-to-peer environment to generate new knowledge such as the newly proposed Wikiversity, an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation. For an inside view, see "Wikiversity; or, Education Meets the Free Culture Movement: An Ethnographic Investigation," First Monday, vol. 13 no.10 (October 6, 2008)
Link to the Post
Tom Engelhardt: The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It
The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It
By Tom Engelhardt,
Tomdispatch and AlterNet
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.
To Read the Rest of this Essay
By Tom Engelhardt,
Tomdispatch and AlterNet
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.
To Read the Rest of this Essay
On the Media: George Packer -- Orwell and the English Language
Orwell and the English Language
On the Media (WNYC/NPR)
Host: Brooke Gladstone
Best known for his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell's mastery of clear language is nowhere more evident than in his essays. New Yorker staff writer George Packer, who has compiled some of these shorter works into two volumes, says Orwell's voice was irascible and witty and, above all, direct.
To Listen/Read
On the Media (WNYC/NPR)
Host: Brooke Gladstone
Best known for his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell's mastery of clear language is nowhere more evident than in his essays. New Yorker staff writer George Packer, who has compiled some of these shorter works into two volumes, says Orwell's voice was irascible and witty and, above all, direct.
To Listen/Read
Sam Pizzigati: The 10 Greediest People of 2008
The 10 Greediest People of 2008
By Sam Pizzigati
Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality and AlterNet
We probably couldn't have picked a better year than 2008 to so "honor" our most avaricious. This year's stunning economic meltdown has fixed the attention of our entire nation -- and world -- on the grasping antics of those who yearn for ever more than they could rationally ever need.
But this year also presents enormous challenges for anyone bold enough to rank the greedy. With so much greed out there, how could we possibly limit our list to a mere ten?
The latest greed explosion to hit the headlines -- the $50 billion Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme -- illustrates just how difficult a task ranking the greedy can be.
To whom in this scandal should we award the most greed points? Bernie Madoff himself, the 70-year-old who scammed his wealthy friends and charities to keep up his credentials as a Wall Street investing "genius" -- and maintain a $6 million pad in Manhattan, a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, and a weekend getaway on Long Island?
Or should those greed points go instead to the ever-so-sophisticated hedge fund "middlemen" like Walter Noel, who built a five-manse fortune by steering clients to Madoff and charging them tens of millions in "due diligence" fees for the steering.
Or should the greed points go to Madoff's investors themselves, the swells who pay $250,000 a year for the privilege of belonging to a swanky country club?
So many choices! How about James Cayne, the Bear Stearns CEO who rode toxic securities into billionairedom? Or Angelo Mozilo, who took the same ride at Countrywide Financial, spreading suffering to subprimed families all along the way?
In the end, we came to realize, the size of the fortune alone doesn't determine greed. It's the thought that counts. In that holiday spirit, we hope you find our top ten greedy list of some interest -- and greed-busting inspiration.
To Read the List
By Sam Pizzigati
Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality and AlterNet
We probably couldn't have picked a better year than 2008 to so "honor" our most avaricious. This year's stunning economic meltdown has fixed the attention of our entire nation -- and world -- on the grasping antics of those who yearn for ever more than they could rationally ever need.
But this year also presents enormous challenges for anyone bold enough to rank the greedy. With so much greed out there, how could we possibly limit our list to a mere ten?
The latest greed explosion to hit the headlines -- the $50 billion Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme -- illustrates just how difficult a task ranking the greedy can be.
To whom in this scandal should we award the most greed points? Bernie Madoff himself, the 70-year-old who scammed his wealthy friends and charities to keep up his credentials as a Wall Street investing "genius" -- and maintain a $6 million pad in Manhattan, a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, and a weekend getaway on Long Island?
Or should those greed points go instead to the ever-so-sophisticated hedge fund "middlemen" like Walter Noel, who built a five-manse fortune by steering clients to Madoff and charging them tens of millions in "due diligence" fees for the steering.
Or should the greed points go to Madoff's investors themselves, the swells who pay $250,000 a year for the privilege of belonging to a swanky country club?
So many choices! How about James Cayne, the Bear Stearns CEO who rode toxic securities into billionairedom? Or Angelo Mozilo, who took the same ride at Countrywide Financial, spreading suffering to subprimed families all along the way?
In the end, we came to realize, the size of the fortune alone doesn't determine greed. It's the thought that counts. In that holiday spirit, we hope you find our top ten greedy list of some interest -- and greed-busting inspiration.
To Read the List
WEKU: Call for Essays for a special edition of "This I Believe" for Women's History month in March (3/10/09)
We're looking for women who want to share their personal philosophies (does not have to be religious philosophy) for this exciting new project that has never before been done at WEKU, EKU's public radio station.
This I Believe is a series from NPR featuring individuals' statements of personal belief. People from all walks of life are encouraged to share their personal convictions and beliefs, often with profound and powerful results.
WEKU will be presenting a special edition of This I Believe for Women's History month in March, featuring prominent national women leaders and your voice as well. We're encouraging all women to submit an essay based on their personal convictions and beliefs. Essays will be posted on our website and some will be selected to be read on the air. If your essay is selected, WEKU will contact you to schedule a recording session.
Deadline is March 10th, 2009.
The special will air on WEKU Friday Evening, March 27th at 6:00 EST.
Email your essay along with your name and phone number to nikole.robinson@eku.edu
or send it via mail with your name and phone number to:
Women's History Month - This I Believe
c/o WEKU
521 Lancaster Ave.
102 Perkins Bldg.
Richmond, KY 40475
Essays must be received by March 10th, 2009
For tips and guidelines on writing your essay please visit thisibelieve.org.
Only essays submitted directly to WEKU will be considered for the Women's History Month Special. For more information contact Nikole Robinson Carroll at 800.621.8890 ext. 3
This I Believe is a series from NPR featuring individuals' statements of personal belief. People from all walks of life are encouraged to share their personal convictions and beliefs, often with profound and powerful results.
WEKU will be presenting a special edition of This I Believe for Women's History month in March, featuring prominent national women leaders and your voice as well. We're encouraging all women to submit an essay based on their personal convictions and beliefs. Essays will be posted on our website and some will be selected to be read on the air. If your essay is selected, WEKU will contact you to schedule a recording session.
Deadline is March 10th, 2009.
The special will air on WEKU Friday Evening, March 27th at 6:00 EST.
Email your essay along with your name and phone number to nikole.robinson@eku.edu
or send it via mail with your name and phone number to:
Women's History Month - This I Believe
c/o WEKU
521 Lancaster Ave.
102 Perkins Bldg.
Richmond, KY 40475
Essays must be received by March 10th, 2009
For tips and guidelines on writing your essay please visit thisibelieve.org.
Only essays submitted directly to WEKU will be considered for the Women's History Month Special. For more information contact Nikole Robinson Carroll at 800.621.8890 ext. 3
Penny Coleman: Kids Learn That Killing Is Fun at the Army's Lethal New Theme Park
Kids Learn That Killing Is Fun at the Army's Lethal New Theme Park
By Penny Coleman
AlterNet
The Army Experience Center, located in the Franklin Mills Mall just north of Philadelphia, bills itself as a "state-of-the-art educational facility that uses interactive simulations and online learning programs to educate visitors about the many careers, training and educational opportunities available in the Army."
Nonsense. The only thing they're teaching here is how to blow shit up. If it's state-of-the-art anything, it's state-of-the-art adolescent boys’ wet dreams.
"Too slow! Do it again!" yells the voice in my earphones as a new sequence of armed figures in camouflage pop up in front of me. I -- the player -- am attached to the foreshortened barrel of an M-16 -- and a little embarrassed by that. It's not my thing, really. And I wasn't expecting the game to involve having to tolerate some dickhead's personal opinion about my marksmanship.
But I didn't come here to get yelled at or to play games. I came because I was curious about the Army's latest marketing strategy. For $12 million, this place has been dressed to kill: 15,000 square feet (about three basketball courts) done up in brushed steel, glass and low-light glam. But what this place is really about is the bling: strings of networked Xbox 360 pods and individual gaming stations. And the crown jewels: a UH-60 Black Hawk, an AH-64 Apache and a Humvee. Simulators. And it's all entirely free.
"Potential recruits are afforded a unique opportunity to learn what it means to be the best-led, best-trained and best-equipped Army in the world by allowing them to virtually experience multiple aspects of the Army," says Pete Geren, Secretary of the Army.
Sir, give me a break, sir! You mean the "Career Navigators," those fancy touch-screen installations where you can see all the different jobs the Army can train you for? No one went near them all day. Most of these kids can't reach them, anyway. It's the shiny toys and virtual adrenaline rush that brings them in.
...
To read the rest of the article
By Penny Coleman
AlterNet
The Army Experience Center, located in the Franklin Mills Mall just north of Philadelphia, bills itself as a "state-of-the-art educational facility that uses interactive simulations and online learning programs to educate visitors about the many careers, training and educational opportunities available in the Army."
Nonsense. The only thing they're teaching here is how to blow shit up. If it's state-of-the-art anything, it's state-of-the-art adolescent boys’ wet dreams.
"Too slow! Do it again!" yells the voice in my earphones as a new sequence of armed figures in camouflage pop up in front of me. I -- the player -- am attached to the foreshortened barrel of an M-16 -- and a little embarrassed by that. It's not my thing, really. And I wasn't expecting the game to involve having to tolerate some dickhead's personal opinion about my marksmanship.
But I didn't come here to get yelled at or to play games. I came because I was curious about the Army's latest marketing strategy. For $12 million, this place has been dressed to kill: 15,000 square feet (about three basketball courts) done up in brushed steel, glass and low-light glam. But what this place is really about is the bling: strings of networked Xbox 360 pods and individual gaming stations. And the crown jewels: a UH-60 Black Hawk, an AH-64 Apache and a Humvee. Simulators. And it's all entirely free.
"Potential recruits are afforded a unique opportunity to learn what it means to be the best-led, best-trained and best-equipped Army in the world by allowing them to virtually experience multiple aspects of the Army," says Pete Geren, Secretary of the Army.
Sir, give me a break, sir! You mean the "Career Navigators," those fancy touch-screen installations where you can see all the different jobs the Army can train you for? No one went near them all day. Most of these kids can't reach them, anyway. It's the shiny toys and virtual adrenaline rush that brings them in.
...
To read the rest of the article
Sam Stein: Bailed-Out Firms Distributing Cash Rewards: "Please Do Not Call It A Bonus"
(Courtesy of AlterNet)
Bailed-Out Firms Distributing Cash Rewards: "Please Do Not Call It A Bonus"
by Sam Stein
Huffington Post
...
"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."
The payments, Gorman said, will be calculated based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009, when the merger is expected to be completed. That decision virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards. While 2008 was challenging for the firms -- Morgan Stanley's client assets in fee-based accounts dropped 25 percent in the fourth quarter, and a round of lay-offs is expected -- 2009 is expected to be substantially weaker.
...
To Read the Rest of the Report and to Listen to the Phone Call
Bailed-Out Firms Distributing Cash Rewards: "Please Do Not Call It A Bonus"
by Sam Stein
Huffington Post
...
"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."
The payments, Gorman said, will be calculated based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009, when the merger is expected to be completed. That decision virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards. While 2008 was challenging for the firms -- Morgan Stanley's client assets in fee-based accounts dropped 25 percent in the fourth quarter, and a round of lay-offs is expected -- 2009 is expected to be substantially weaker.
...
To Read the Rest of the Report and to Listen to the Phone Call
Rachel Weiner: GOP Rep. Cantor Attacks Union With Profanity-Laced Web Video
... GOP Rep. Cantor Attacks Union With Profanity-Laced Web Video
by Rachel Weiner
Huffington Post and AlterNet
...
AFSCME President Gerald McEntee isn't amused. "Eric Cantor may think the greatest economic crisis in seventy years is a joke, but we don't," he said in a statement. "He should talk to the people in Virginia who are losing their jobs, health care and homes."
Brad Woodhouse, President of Americans United for Change, responded more forcefully:
"Does Eric Cantor believe that peddling profanity-laced filth around the Internet is consistent with the values of the people of Virginia or the country? This is childish, inappropriate and disgusting behavior from someone who is supposed to be a leader in Congress and a role model to others. Eric Cantor's response to one of the most serious crises facing America in our lifetimes is to spread this filth, denigrate government employees and treat the current economic crisis like a joke. This video has been floating around on YouTube for years - but Eric Cantor's use of it in this context shows how completely and utterly out of touch he is with the current economic crisis and the lives of his constituents. Eric Cantor should be ashamed and he should apologize."
And AFL-CIO President John Sweeney added: "During these tough economic times the last thing hard working Americans need is to be ridiculed by a member of the Republican leadership. Rep. Cantor should apologize for insulting America's workers with this profane video."
To See the Video and Read the Rest of the Article
by Rachel Weiner
Huffington Post and AlterNet
...
AFSCME President Gerald McEntee isn't amused. "Eric Cantor may think the greatest economic crisis in seventy years is a joke, but we don't," he said in a statement. "He should talk to the people in Virginia who are losing their jobs, health care and homes."
Brad Woodhouse, President of Americans United for Change, responded more forcefully:
"Does Eric Cantor believe that peddling profanity-laced filth around the Internet is consistent with the values of the people of Virginia or the country? This is childish, inappropriate and disgusting behavior from someone who is supposed to be a leader in Congress and a role model to others. Eric Cantor's response to one of the most serious crises facing America in our lifetimes is to spread this filth, denigrate government employees and treat the current economic crisis like a joke. This video has been floating around on YouTube for years - but Eric Cantor's use of it in this context shows how completely and utterly out of touch he is with the current economic crisis and the lives of his constituents. Eric Cantor should be ashamed and he should apologize."
And AFL-CIO President John Sweeney added: "During these tough economic times the last thing hard working Americans need is to be ridiculed by a member of the Republican leadership. Rep. Cantor should apologize for insulting America's workers with this profane video."
To See the Video and Read the Rest of the Article
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
"Inside the Art and Business of the Movies" (University of Kentucky: 2/16)
(Courtesy of Troy Lyle)
Three film professionals are coming to campus next Monday share their views on the art and business of filmmaking during the Annual Richard G. Wilson Telecommunications Alumni Symposium.
"Inside the Art and Business of the Movies" is the theme of the symposium, which will be held at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 16, in the William T. Young Library auditorium. Three filmmakers will talk about their experience working in short film, documentary, and feature film.
The panelists are:
Robby Henson, a writer, producer and director. He's a former UK student and graduate of Warren Wilson College who received his M.F.A. from New York University's graduate film school, where his thesis film won the Student Academy Award. His films have been seen on PBS, the BBC, at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and at film festivals in Canada, Ireland, France, Yugoslavia, Australia and Poland. He has directed over 30 play productions in New York and regionally and has made 5 award winning documentaries shown on PBS, including Spalding Gray: A Life in Progress, and Trouble Behind, a film about a Southern race riot which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His dramatic first feature, Pharaoh's Army, with Academy Award winner Chris Cooper, Academy Nominee Patricia Clarkson, and Kris Kristofferson, was released theatrically by Lions Gate Films and was shown on PBS. In 2002 he wrote and directed The Badge, a southern crime drama starring Billy Bob Thornton, Patricia Arquette, Thomas Hayden Church, and Sela Ward, for Starz! Pictures and Lions Gate Films. The Badge was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award (Gay and Lesbian Alliance), won Best Drama at the Breckinridge Film Festival, and won Best Feature Film at the Texas Film Festival. He directed The Visitation, a supernatural thriller which was released by 20th Century Fox in 2005 and starred Edward Furlong, Kelly Lynch, Martin Donovan and Randy Travis. His dramatic feature film House, starring Michael Madsen, was filmed in Poland and released by Lions Gate Films in November 2008.
Heidi Fugeman Lindelof, a 1991 UK TEL grad. She has had a fulfilling run in the film industry, working on major features including Spider-Man (associate producer), The Island (associate producer), Tears of the Sun (associate producer) and Almost Famous (assistant to the producer), among others. She is currently focused on raising her 2 ½ year old son, studying Child Development and working with child advocacy programs in the United States (Children's Defense Fund, I Have A Dream Foundation, Milk And Bookies) and in Africa (Global Strategies, Strongheart Fellowship). She has traveled extensively all over Europe, Russia and Africa and currently resides in Los Angeles.
George Maranville, producing partner, Seersucker Productions, and a 1986 UK TEL grad. He produced and edited the feature film 100 Proof, which was a competitor at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 1997. Maranville also produced and had a supporting role in the feature film, Paper Cut, which was released by Image Entertainment in the August of 2007. He recently completed a long festival run with his short film, Yeti Vengeance, which screened at 16 festivals, including the Los Angeles International Short, Silverlake, and Malibu Film Festivals. Yeti Vengeance, a film within-a-film, tells the story of a schlocky b-movie producer who will do anything to get the last shot he needs for his latest drive-in opus. Maranville and his production company, Seersucker Productions, recently provided editing and post-production services for the family film Matchmaker Mary, starring Jeff Fahey and Dee Wallace, which is set for release on DVD on Mother's Day of 2009. Maranville is currently developing the feature film project Character Assassination from his original script. It begins shooting this Spring.
Come hear from (and network with) these film industry professionals next Monday, Feb. 16, at 6 p.m. in the W.T. Young Library Auditorium.
Three film professionals are coming to campus next Monday share their views on the art and business of filmmaking during the Annual Richard G. Wilson Telecommunications Alumni Symposium.
"Inside the Art and Business of the Movies" is the theme of the symposium, which will be held at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 16, in the William T. Young Library auditorium. Three filmmakers will talk about their experience working in short film, documentary, and feature film.
The panelists are:
Robby Henson, a writer, producer and director. He's a former UK student and graduate of Warren Wilson College who received his M.F.A. from New York University's graduate film school, where his thesis film won the Student Academy Award. His films have been seen on PBS, the BBC, at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and at film festivals in Canada, Ireland, France, Yugoslavia, Australia and Poland. He has directed over 30 play productions in New York and regionally and has made 5 award winning documentaries shown on PBS, including Spalding Gray: A Life in Progress, and Trouble Behind, a film about a Southern race riot which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His dramatic first feature, Pharaoh's Army, with Academy Award winner Chris Cooper, Academy Nominee Patricia Clarkson, and Kris Kristofferson, was released theatrically by Lions Gate Films and was shown on PBS. In 2002 he wrote and directed The Badge, a southern crime drama starring Billy Bob Thornton, Patricia Arquette, Thomas Hayden Church, and Sela Ward, for Starz! Pictures and Lions Gate Films. The Badge was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award (Gay and Lesbian Alliance), won Best Drama at the Breckinridge Film Festival, and won Best Feature Film at the Texas Film Festival. He directed The Visitation, a supernatural thriller which was released by 20th Century Fox in 2005 and starred Edward Furlong, Kelly Lynch, Martin Donovan and Randy Travis. His dramatic feature film House, starring Michael Madsen, was filmed in Poland and released by Lions Gate Films in November 2008.
Heidi Fugeman Lindelof, a 1991 UK TEL grad. She has had a fulfilling run in the film industry, working on major features including Spider-Man (associate producer), The Island (associate producer), Tears of the Sun (associate producer) and Almost Famous (assistant to the producer), among others. She is currently focused on raising her 2 ½ year old son, studying Child Development and working with child advocacy programs in the United States (Children's Defense Fund, I Have A Dream Foundation, Milk And Bookies) and in Africa (Global Strategies, Strongheart Fellowship). She has traveled extensively all over Europe, Russia and Africa and currently resides in Los Angeles.
George Maranville, producing partner, Seersucker Productions, and a 1986 UK TEL grad. He produced and edited the feature film 100 Proof, which was a competitor at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 1997. Maranville also produced and had a supporting role in the feature film, Paper Cut, which was released by Image Entertainment in the August of 2007. He recently completed a long festival run with his short film, Yeti Vengeance, which screened at 16 festivals, including the Los Angeles International Short, Silverlake, and Malibu Film Festivals. Yeti Vengeance, a film within-a-film, tells the story of a schlocky b-movie producer who will do anything to get the last shot he needs for his latest drive-in opus. Maranville and his production company, Seersucker Productions, recently provided editing and post-production services for the family film Matchmaker Mary, starring Jeff Fahey and Dee Wallace, which is set for release on DVD on Mother's Day of 2009. Maranville is currently developing the feature film project Character Assassination from his original script. It begins shooting this Spring.
Come hear from (and network with) these film industry professionals next Monday, Feb. 16, at 6 p.m. in the W.T. Young Library Auditorium.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Economist James Galbraith: Bailed-Out Banks Should Be Declared Insolvent
Economist James Galbraith: Bailed-Out Banks Should Be Declared Insolvent
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
With estimates of the cost of addressing the financial crisis exceeding $9.7 trillion, we speak with economist and University of Texas professor James Galbraith, author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Galbraith says rather than pouring billions into propping up troubled giant banks, the government should declare them insolvent.
To Listen to the Interview
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
With estimates of the cost of addressing the financial crisis exceeding $9.7 trillion, we speak with economist and University of Texas professor James Galbraith, author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Galbraith says rather than pouring billions into propping up troubled giant banks, the government should declare them insolvent.
To Listen to the Interview
Creative Screenwriting Magazine: Robert D. Siegel -- The Wrestler
Robert D. Siegel -- The Wrestler
Creative Screenwriting Magazine
Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews screenwriter Robert D. Siegel about The Wrestler
To Listen to the Interview
Creative Screenwriting Magazine
Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews screenwriter Robert D. Siegel about The Wrestler
To Listen to the Interview
Creative Screenwriting Magazine: John Patrick Shanley - Doubt
John Patrick Shanley - Doubt
Creative Screenwriting Magazine
Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews writer-director John Patrick Shanley about Doubt
To Listen to the Interview
Creative Screenwriting Magazine
Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews writer-director John Patrick Shanley about Doubt
To Listen to the Interview
Film in Focus: Playwright Tony Kushner awarding Milk the Best Picture award at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner at Strata on January 5
Playwright Tony Kushner awarding Milk the Best Picture award at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner at Strata on January 5, 2009
Film in Focus
I’ve come here tonight to speak not only for myself but on behalf of the thousands of gay men and women, many nameless, faceless and forgotten, who were, over the course of the last fifteen years, hired to write a screenplay about the life of Harvey Milk. I feel fairly certain I can speak for all of us when I say that we loved Milk.
It’s an amazing film, and it’s amazing that it got made. It turns out the subject is not too political, too niche, too unrelatable, too specific, too hard, too San Francisco, too seventies, too Jewish, too gay, too susceptible to any of the million other reasons why for fifteen years it couldn’t get made. It turns out it could get made and it did, thanks to this perfect combination of people who had no interest in why it couldn’t be made and the talent and brains to do it. The remarkable gay-straight alliance of Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (those are the gays) and James Schamus and the actors (those are the straights) (give or take some of the actors).
Milk is obviously a political film; it’s clear and direct, miraculously free of didacticism, smugness or oversimplification, propelled by deep human need. Its politics arrive with a shocking, inarguable immediacy, with the power of truth. But Milk seems to me to be about memory as much as it’s about democracy, perhaps about memory as a political project. “The antonym of forgetting,” according to the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerulshalmi “is not remembering, but justice.” Blending documentary and gorgeously realized fiction, Milk manages both vivid presence and a grieving, mysterious, evanescence, a story so vividly remembered it seems entirely of our moment, and also composed entirely of loss. Epic and interior, empowering and devastating, Milk is an enlightenment that breaks your heart. It is, in other words, entirely true to its subject.
I asked my husband, Mark Harris, my legal-in-Massachusetts-and-legally-recognized-in-New-York-but-not-in-California, at least not for now, I asked him what I should say about Milk. He loved it as much as I did and he reminded me that forty-one years ago, when Bobby Kennedy came to this dinner and presented the best picture award to In The Heat Of The Night, he told that movie’s director, Norman Jewison: “In art, politics and life, timing is everything.” Harvey Milk knew that, and the makers of Milk clearly know it. So, to the artists who wrote, directed and acted in this brilliant film, thank you for your timing, thank you for your politics and most of all thank you for your art. It’s an honor, a really great honor, for me to present the New York Film Critics Circle Award for The Best Film of 2008 to my friends Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks for Milk.
Link
Film in Focus
I’ve come here tonight to speak not only for myself but on behalf of the thousands of gay men and women, many nameless, faceless and forgotten, who were, over the course of the last fifteen years, hired to write a screenplay about the life of Harvey Milk. I feel fairly certain I can speak for all of us when I say that we loved Milk.
It’s an amazing film, and it’s amazing that it got made. It turns out the subject is not too political, too niche, too unrelatable, too specific, too hard, too San Francisco, too seventies, too Jewish, too gay, too susceptible to any of the million other reasons why for fifteen years it couldn’t get made. It turns out it could get made and it did, thanks to this perfect combination of people who had no interest in why it couldn’t be made and the talent and brains to do it. The remarkable gay-straight alliance of Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (those are the gays) and James Schamus and the actors (those are the straights) (give or take some of the actors).
Milk is obviously a political film; it’s clear and direct, miraculously free of didacticism, smugness or oversimplification, propelled by deep human need. Its politics arrive with a shocking, inarguable immediacy, with the power of truth. But Milk seems to me to be about memory as much as it’s about democracy, perhaps about memory as a political project. “The antonym of forgetting,” according to the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerulshalmi “is not remembering, but justice.” Blending documentary and gorgeously realized fiction, Milk manages both vivid presence and a grieving, mysterious, evanescence, a story so vividly remembered it seems entirely of our moment, and also composed entirely of loss. Epic and interior, empowering and devastating, Milk is an enlightenment that breaks your heart. It is, in other words, entirely true to its subject.
I asked my husband, Mark Harris, my legal-in-Massachusetts-and-legally-recognized-in-New-York-but-not-in-California, at least not for now, I asked him what I should say about Milk. He loved it as much as I did and he reminded me that forty-one years ago, when Bobby Kennedy came to this dinner and presented the best picture award to In The Heat Of The Night, he told that movie’s director, Norman Jewison: “In art, politics and life, timing is everything.” Harvey Milk knew that, and the makers of Milk clearly know it. So, to the artists who wrote, directed and acted in this brilliant film, thank you for your timing, thank you for your politics and most of all thank you for your art. It’s an honor, a really great honor, for me to present the New York Film Critics Circle Award for The Best Film of 2008 to my friends Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks for Milk.
Link
George Porcari: Fellini Goes to the Beach
Fellini Goes To The Beach
by George Porcari
Cineaction
Characters in Fellini’s films often end up at the beach where they seem to arrive at some sort of self-realization that is intuitive and physical; the relationship between them and the sea seems to act as a catalyst for a certain kind of knowledge. The ocean—after so much art photography and film—has come to symbolize “nature”, the “eternal”, the “origin of life”. The sea is always the same and never the same; it is beautiful and terrifying; it is sublime and banal; ripples that last a few seconds on film suggest a geologic time that stretches back beyond our common human history. Yet paradoxically the sea is always absolutely physically present as a particular place: St Tropez in the 1960s is not the same as Liverpool in the 1930s. Location and seasonal referents are not the only ways we read images of the sea. The photographic emulsion used also figures in the equation of how an image feels and what time period it seems to belong to. It is impossible in that sense to see the sea—once it is represented we must see it through a variety of cultural conventions that have their own baggage and emotional connotations. But what is the nature of this realization, this knowledge that characters in Fellini’s films experience when they see the sea? What happens to Zampano at the end of La Strada? What is going on with Marcello as he shrugs his shoulders and slouches away in La Dolce Vita? What does Leopoldo’s sexual panic in Il Vitelloni mean when it takes place by the sea? What is Saraghina’s wild dance on the sand in 8 1/2 about?
Fellini’s work was, as he said in an interview, very much informed from his reading of Jung that influenced much of his work in the studio from 8 1/2 to The Voice of the Moon, his final feature film. It was at that point that he started to consciously create archetypes on the set, rather than go to a location and film the passing moment. That is, the “ocean” rather than a particular seashore at a particular place and time. This sense of the essentialist, the absolute, which is found in the archetype, is the opposite of a realist tendency in which a temporal material reality in the present tense is all there is. Both tendencies are to be found in Fellini throughout his work and he seems to favor one or the other depending on the material. Yet his body of work does have a trajectory: it moves from his beginnings in Neo-Realism up to La Strada then shifts to favoring archetypal studio creations, from Juliet of the Spirits onwards. La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 straddle both worlds, and in part for that very reason may be his most interesting films. Yet the sea in The White Sheik, an early work, is totally theatrical despite the fact that it was shot on location, because of the context, while the sea at the end of Satyricon, a middle period work, is very real—in a documentary sense—and gives weight to the fantastic narrative. So in effect there is no clearly systematic approach that one can use to understand Fellini’s use of the ocean in his work—let us then look at individual works.
...
Saraghina’s dance on the beach in Fellini’s 8 1/2 is awkward—really full of ridiculous gestures, embarrassing mannerisms—yet also beautiful, erotic and touching. The sea sparkles intensely behind her, refracting light as if we were seeing everything through a prism aimed directly at the sun. We see a woman—who is and is not “Woman”—weighed down by flesh, by matter, playing at being a Goddess. Again we are reminded of the Birth of Venus but now brought into a harsh unforgiving light that mocks the fantasy and reveals both its sordidness and its innocence. Only a child would fall for it—so she performs for children—and for us. The boys in tight constricting uniforms that make them look like little policemen with capes are the perfect foil for the barely dressed Saraghina. The fact that she is comfortable with her body—with her mortality—with the awkwardness of the erotic—that she takes pleasure in being in her own skin—that her attitude exudes (as with the “Umbrian Angel”) psychic and physical well being makes her the enemy of the priests. This is because she has discovered that the creative links between imagination and erotic play lead not only to pleasure but to a communion with fellow humans that is essential. For the priests such an acceptance of fleeting mortal pleasures throws their very teleology into doubt. Saraghina is the Devil—the priest tell the children—and they mean it. They are the ones that pull Marcello down at the beginning of the film as he flies—falling to earth. The whole film might be that “fall” with a redemptive coda at the end of reconciliation and acceptance. In that wild dance on the beach Edra Gale—who plays Saraghina—and Fellini—tell us more about our self-delusions, our hopes, our mortal and moral limits than countless essays and philosophical tracts could ever accomplish. How we look when we dance and are pulled down by gravity (perhaps the defining essence of movement in film) has never been more beautifully expressed. On the soundtrack during the screen tests near the end of 8 1/2 we hear Fellini whispering: “Saraghina...”calling to her as when he was a boy. Fellini in effect returns the favor—sexual pleasure linked to imaginative play—that Saraghina once gave him. That sense of freedom linked to an eroticized imagination is a gift Fellini is able to give back to us—in the film 8 1/2.
To Read the Entire Essay
by George Porcari
Cineaction
Characters in Fellini’s films often end up at the beach where they seem to arrive at some sort of self-realization that is intuitive and physical; the relationship between them and the sea seems to act as a catalyst for a certain kind of knowledge. The ocean—after so much art photography and film—has come to symbolize “nature”, the “eternal”, the “origin of life”. The sea is always the same and never the same; it is beautiful and terrifying; it is sublime and banal; ripples that last a few seconds on film suggest a geologic time that stretches back beyond our common human history. Yet paradoxically the sea is always absolutely physically present as a particular place: St Tropez in the 1960s is not the same as Liverpool in the 1930s. Location and seasonal referents are not the only ways we read images of the sea. The photographic emulsion used also figures in the equation of how an image feels and what time period it seems to belong to. It is impossible in that sense to see the sea—once it is represented we must see it through a variety of cultural conventions that have their own baggage and emotional connotations. But what is the nature of this realization, this knowledge that characters in Fellini’s films experience when they see the sea? What happens to Zampano at the end of La Strada? What is going on with Marcello as he shrugs his shoulders and slouches away in La Dolce Vita? What does Leopoldo’s sexual panic in Il Vitelloni mean when it takes place by the sea? What is Saraghina’s wild dance on the sand in 8 1/2 about?
Fellini’s work was, as he said in an interview, very much informed from his reading of Jung that influenced much of his work in the studio from 8 1/2 to The Voice of the Moon, his final feature film. It was at that point that he started to consciously create archetypes on the set, rather than go to a location and film the passing moment. That is, the “ocean” rather than a particular seashore at a particular place and time. This sense of the essentialist, the absolute, which is found in the archetype, is the opposite of a realist tendency in which a temporal material reality in the present tense is all there is. Both tendencies are to be found in Fellini throughout his work and he seems to favor one or the other depending on the material. Yet his body of work does have a trajectory: it moves from his beginnings in Neo-Realism up to La Strada then shifts to favoring archetypal studio creations, from Juliet of the Spirits onwards. La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 straddle both worlds, and in part for that very reason may be his most interesting films. Yet the sea in The White Sheik, an early work, is totally theatrical despite the fact that it was shot on location, because of the context, while the sea at the end of Satyricon, a middle period work, is very real—in a documentary sense—and gives weight to the fantastic narrative. So in effect there is no clearly systematic approach that one can use to understand Fellini’s use of the ocean in his work—let us then look at individual works.
...
Saraghina’s dance on the beach in Fellini’s 8 1/2 is awkward—really full of ridiculous gestures, embarrassing mannerisms—yet also beautiful, erotic and touching. The sea sparkles intensely behind her, refracting light as if we were seeing everything through a prism aimed directly at the sun. We see a woman—who is and is not “Woman”—weighed down by flesh, by matter, playing at being a Goddess. Again we are reminded of the Birth of Venus but now brought into a harsh unforgiving light that mocks the fantasy and reveals both its sordidness and its innocence. Only a child would fall for it—so she performs for children—and for us. The boys in tight constricting uniforms that make them look like little policemen with capes are the perfect foil for the barely dressed Saraghina. The fact that she is comfortable with her body—with her mortality—with the awkwardness of the erotic—that she takes pleasure in being in her own skin—that her attitude exudes (as with the “Umbrian Angel”) psychic and physical well being makes her the enemy of the priests. This is because she has discovered that the creative links between imagination and erotic play lead not only to pleasure but to a communion with fellow humans that is essential. For the priests such an acceptance of fleeting mortal pleasures throws their very teleology into doubt. Saraghina is the Devil—the priest tell the children—and they mean it. They are the ones that pull Marcello down at the beginning of the film as he flies—falling to earth. The whole film might be that “fall” with a redemptive coda at the end of reconciliation and acceptance. In that wild dance on the beach Edra Gale—who plays Saraghina—and Fellini—tell us more about our self-delusions, our hopes, our mortal and moral limits than countless essays and philosophical tracts could ever accomplish. How we look when we dance and are pulled down by gravity (perhaps the defining essence of movement in film) has never been more beautifully expressed. On the soundtrack during the screen tests near the end of 8 1/2 we hear Fellini whispering: “Saraghina...”calling to her as when he was a boy. Fellini in effect returns the favor—sexual pleasure linked to imaginative play—that Saraghina once gave him. That sense of freedom linked to an eroticized imagination is a gift Fellini is able to give back to us—in the film 8 1/2.
To Read the Entire Essay
Dennis Lim: Mexican-Era Bunuel
(Bunuel's Exterminating Angel was the first subtitled film that I watched. When I was a junior, a college roommate talked me into watching it. When it ended, I was excited by the unique narrative structure. I started it again and watched it a second time, trying to pick up on what I missed the first time. I talked about it to everyone I could... no one else had seen it. I researched the director and world cinema in general. It set me off on a journey ...)
Mexican-era Luis Buñuel: After the Spanish Civil War, the director spent many years in the New World. Criterion issues two gems: 'The Exterminating Angel' and 'Simon of the Desert.'
By Dennis Lim
LA Times
...
A literal drawing-room comedy with apocalyptic overtones, "Exterminating Angel" is, as Buñuel himself noted, a disaster movie of sorts, albeit one concerned less with the struggle for survival than with the descent into barbarism.
Buñuel was reluctant to ascribe literal meanings to his movies. In his autobiography, "My Last Sigh," he noted that "The Exterminating Angel" was, like many of his films, about a specific kind of quandary: "the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire." The paralysis of the guests could be interpreted politically or existentially, but the larger point -- that they are prisoners of their own making -- takes on cosmic dimensions by the end of the movie.
...
To Read the Entire Review
Mexican-era Luis Buñuel: After the Spanish Civil War, the director spent many years in the New World. Criterion issues two gems: 'The Exterminating Angel' and 'Simon of the Desert.'
By Dennis Lim
LA Times
...
A literal drawing-room comedy with apocalyptic overtones, "Exterminating Angel" is, as Buñuel himself noted, a disaster movie of sorts, albeit one concerned less with the struggle for survival than with the descent into barbarism.
Buñuel was reluctant to ascribe literal meanings to his movies. In his autobiography, "My Last Sigh," he noted that "The Exterminating Angel" was, like many of his films, about a specific kind of quandary: "the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire." The paralysis of the guests could be interpreted politically or existentially, but the larger point -- that they are prisoners of their own making -- takes on cosmic dimensions by the end of the movie.
...
To Read the Entire Review
Lexington Art League: ARTalk | N U D E 2 0 0 9 A R T I S T S (2/12/09)
ARTalk | N U D E 2 0 0 9 A R T I S T S
February 12, 7 pm. FREE
LAL @ Loudoun House (209 Castlewood Drive)
Four Nude 2009 artists, Wendy Currier, John Howard, Lennon Michalski and Lawrence Tarpey will engage the public in a dialogue about the development of their art.
RSVP to Julia at jcuriel at lexingtonartleague dot org or 859.254.7024 x22.
Julia Curier
Program Coordinator
Lexington Art League
209 Castlewood Drive
Lexington, KY 40505
Phone 859.254.7024 x22
Fax 859.254.7214
February 12, 7 pm. FREE
LAL @ Loudoun House (209 Castlewood Drive)
Four Nude 2009 artists, Wendy Currier, John Howard, Lennon Michalski and Lawrence Tarpey will engage the public in a dialogue about the development of their art.
RSVP to Julia at jcuriel at lexingtonartleague dot org or 859.254.7024 x22.
Julia Curier
Program Coordinator
Lexington Art League
209 Castlewood Drive
Lexington, KY 40505
Phone 859.254.7024 x22
Fax 859.254.7214
Elbert Venture: Down and Out, Not in Beverly Hills
Down and Out, Not in Beverly Hills: Frozen River, Wendy and Lucy, and other great new movies about America's poor.
by Elbert Ventura
Slate
In the shadow of Shea Stadium, a street urchin ekes out a living doing odd jobs at an auto-body shop. Further north, a dollar-store worker resorts to smuggling immigrants across the U.S.-Canada border to supplement her income. In the Mississippi Delta, a single mother tries to keep her family afloat tending a convenience store on a desolate stretch of road. Across the continent, a drifter and her dog linger in a small Oregon town after her car stalls and she can't afford to have it fixed.
Scenes from the precarious economic moment? They are, in fact, plotlines from some of 2008's best movies. Last week, the academy recognized Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a downbeat chronicle of a woman on the economic periphery, with nominations for lead actress Melissa Leo and Hunt's own script. But it was hardly the only American indie to tap into the dismal zeitgeist. Other homegrown films from last year—Chop Shop, Ballast, and Wendy and Lucy—fixed a steady gaze on American poverty. Delving into the lived experience of the poor, these "recession indies" offer a corrective for a culture in which the poor are usually invisible, both in real life and at the movies. It's a welcome change in an indie landscape that has recently been dominated by the solipsistic likes of Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, and Juno.
In Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, the protagonist is Alejandro, a 12-year-old Latino orphan who calls a junkyard swathe of Queens home. When he's not slaving away at a garage, he's working the streets peddling bootleg DVDs. His dream is heartbreakingly pathetic: to buy and fix up a broken-down food truck—a venture that, once we get a glimpse of the battered truck, has "bad idea" written all over it.
A stoic lament for a dream deferred, Chop Shop builds on the achievements of Bahrani's previous film, Man Push Cart, a stark study of a Pakistani food-cart vendor in Manhattan. Bahrani may stack the deck by making a likable, hardworking kid his protagonist, but his movie is resolutely unsentimental. Like the other recession indies, Chop Shop isn't interested in agitprop. The mode is ethnographic. Bahrani renders an outer-borough subculture with unblinking detachment, refusing to judge or lecture. Moral epiphanies unfold organically. When the camera leaves the dingy streets for a scene at the U.S. Open nearby—where a desperate Alejandro, surrounded by a glittering crowd, ponders his first purse-snatching—the effect is powerful. At that moment, Ale seems to have walked out of his reality and into the audience's, implicating us in his marginalization.
Ballast, the stunning debut film by Lance Hammer, shares similar qualities. Like Chop Shop, Ballast bears the hallmarks of Italian neorealism: nonprofessional actors, location shooting, no score, a rejection of artifice. Set in rural Mississippi in the bleak midwinter, the story centers on a fractured family: Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Jr.), an African-American man who runs a convenience store with his twin brother; Marlee (Tarra Riggs), his estranged sister-in-law; and James (JimMyron Ross), Marlee's 12-year-old son. The three are brought together when Lawrence's brother commits suicide—and Lawrence tries, and fails, to follow suit.
The movie is matter-of-fact in its depiction of rural poverty. Lawrence's house is bare and dim. Marlee's days are stretched thin by a long commute and an exhausting job as a janitor. Shot handheld and opting for ellipses over exposition, only once does Ballast go too far: a shot of Marlee scrubbing a urinal at her job that puts too fine a point on her plight. But elsewhere Hammer is restrained, observing life on the margins as it's lived without the condescension of false redemption.
More conventional but no less attuned to everyday life is Hunt's Frozen River. Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman who wakes up one morning to find her husband and the money she had been saving to buy a prefab home gone. Stuck with a dead-end job at Yankee Dollar and desperate to make the payment for the double-wide trailer, Ray turns to smuggling immigrants in the trunk of her car across the U.S.-Canada border, with the help of a Mohawk woman who lives on a nearby reservation. Meanwhile, back home are her two kids, left to fend for themselves while Mom tries to make ends meet.
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Elbert Ventura
Slate
In the shadow of Shea Stadium, a street urchin ekes out a living doing odd jobs at an auto-body shop. Further north, a dollar-store worker resorts to smuggling immigrants across the U.S.-Canada border to supplement her income. In the Mississippi Delta, a single mother tries to keep her family afloat tending a convenience store on a desolate stretch of road. Across the continent, a drifter and her dog linger in a small Oregon town after her car stalls and she can't afford to have it fixed.
Scenes from the precarious economic moment? They are, in fact, plotlines from some of 2008's best movies. Last week, the academy recognized Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a downbeat chronicle of a woman on the economic periphery, with nominations for lead actress Melissa Leo and Hunt's own script. But it was hardly the only American indie to tap into the dismal zeitgeist. Other homegrown films from last year—Chop Shop, Ballast, and Wendy and Lucy—fixed a steady gaze on American poverty. Delving into the lived experience of the poor, these "recession indies" offer a corrective for a culture in which the poor are usually invisible, both in real life and at the movies. It's a welcome change in an indie landscape that has recently been dominated by the solipsistic likes of Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, and Juno.
In Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, the protagonist is Alejandro, a 12-year-old Latino orphan who calls a junkyard swathe of Queens home. When he's not slaving away at a garage, he's working the streets peddling bootleg DVDs. His dream is heartbreakingly pathetic: to buy and fix up a broken-down food truck—a venture that, once we get a glimpse of the battered truck, has "bad idea" written all over it.
A stoic lament for a dream deferred, Chop Shop builds on the achievements of Bahrani's previous film, Man Push Cart, a stark study of a Pakistani food-cart vendor in Manhattan. Bahrani may stack the deck by making a likable, hardworking kid his protagonist, but his movie is resolutely unsentimental. Like the other recession indies, Chop Shop isn't interested in agitprop. The mode is ethnographic. Bahrani renders an outer-borough subculture with unblinking detachment, refusing to judge or lecture. Moral epiphanies unfold organically. When the camera leaves the dingy streets for a scene at the U.S. Open nearby—where a desperate Alejandro, surrounded by a glittering crowd, ponders his first purse-snatching—the effect is powerful. At that moment, Ale seems to have walked out of his reality and into the audience's, implicating us in his marginalization.
Ballast, the stunning debut film by Lance Hammer, shares similar qualities. Like Chop Shop, Ballast bears the hallmarks of Italian neorealism: nonprofessional actors, location shooting, no score, a rejection of artifice. Set in rural Mississippi in the bleak midwinter, the story centers on a fractured family: Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Jr.), an African-American man who runs a convenience store with his twin brother; Marlee (Tarra Riggs), his estranged sister-in-law; and James (JimMyron Ross), Marlee's 12-year-old son. The three are brought together when Lawrence's brother commits suicide—and Lawrence tries, and fails, to follow suit.
The movie is matter-of-fact in its depiction of rural poverty. Lawrence's house is bare and dim. Marlee's days are stretched thin by a long commute and an exhausting job as a janitor. Shot handheld and opting for ellipses over exposition, only once does Ballast go too far: a shot of Marlee scrubbing a urinal at her job that puts too fine a point on her plight. But elsewhere Hammer is restrained, observing life on the margins as it's lived without the condescension of false redemption.
More conventional but no less attuned to everyday life is Hunt's Frozen River. Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman who wakes up one morning to find her husband and the money she had been saving to buy a prefab home gone. Stuck with a dead-end job at Yankee Dollar and desperate to make the payment for the double-wide trailer, Ray turns to smuggling immigrants in the trunk of her car across the U.S.-Canada border, with the help of a Mohawk woman who lives on a nearby reservation. Meanwhile, back home are her two kids, left to fend for themselves while Mom tries to make ends meet.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Ron Rosenbaum: Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader
Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader: We don't need another "redemptive" Holocaust movie.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate
.jpg)
...
A deeply depressing indication of how the film misreads the Holocaust can be found in a recent New York Times report on the state of the Oscar race. The paper gave disproportionate attention to The Reader by featuring a wistful-looking still of Kate Winslet above the headline "Films About Personal Triumphs Resonate With Viewers During Awards Season."
What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character's "personal triumph"? While in prison for participation in an act of mass murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish women locked in a burning church would die in the fire—she taught herself to read! What a heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!
True, she's unrepentant for the most part about allowing those women and children to burn to death. (Although we do see one scene in which it turns out she's saved some pennies in prison that she wants to be given to the children of the women she murdered—thanks!) But most of what we see of her prison experience is her excitement at her growing literacy skills. Get a load of those pages turning! Reading is fun!
It's been argued that no fictional film can do justice to the events of 1939-45, that only documentaries like Alan Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour-long Shoah can begin to convey the reality of the evil. And there certainly have been execrable failures (example: Life Is Beautiful). I've argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness—what some critics have called "Nazi porn." But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed—the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of "Holocaust revisionism," which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.
Weitzman mentioned three films in particular: In addition to The Reader, there was Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, which gave the impression that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was full of good men and true (identifiable in the film by their British accents) who had always opposed that lout Hitler with his whole silly Jewish obsession, when in fact the more we learn about the Wehrmacht's role, the more disgracefully complicit it turns out to have been with the mass murderers of the SS. Yes, a few Wehrmacht officers did plot against Hitler, but they waited to take action until the successful Normandy invasion, when it seemed Hitler would lose the war.
"The Valkyrie conspiracy took place in 1944," Weitzman told me. "If it had been 1941, it might have made a difference."
And then there was Cruise's character, Claus von Stauffenberg, very brave, it's true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British magazine History Today reminds us), he was describing the Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as "an unbelievable rabble" made up of "Jews and mongrels." With friends like these ...
Moral: Don't go looking for heroes in the largely mythical "German resistance" to Hitler. The German resistance was not much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its legend outgrew its deeds after the war. (Although it is worth seeking out the two movies about the tiny, brave-but-doomed, Munich-based "White Rose" resistance, The White Rose and Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which tell the story of a few students who didn't—like the Valkyrie conspirators—believe the goal was to help Germany win the war more efficiently than Hitler, but to bear moral witness against the exterminators. For which they were brutally guillotined in Munich in 1943.)
The third film Weitzman mentions as an example of this soft revisionism is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one I haven't been able to bring myself to see but that features a young German boy, son of Nazi parents, who lives near a concentration camp and befriends a young death camp "boy in striped pajamas." The tale is not dissimilar in saccharine sentiment to the recently revealed, Oprah-fied fraud about the girl who gave the death camp boy apples, although it avoids the happy ending of that treacly sham.
But at least they didn't give these two films Oscar nominations or awards like the disgraceful one given to Life Is Beautiful.
...
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate
...
A deeply depressing indication of how the film misreads the Holocaust can be found in a recent New York Times report on the state of the Oscar race. The paper gave disproportionate attention to The Reader by featuring a wistful-looking still of Kate Winslet above the headline "Films About Personal Triumphs Resonate With Viewers During Awards Season."
What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character's "personal triumph"? While in prison for participation in an act of mass murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish women locked in a burning church would die in the fire—she taught herself to read! What a heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!
True, she's unrepentant for the most part about allowing those women and children to burn to death. (Although we do see one scene in which it turns out she's saved some pennies in prison that she wants to be given to the children of the women she murdered—thanks!) But most of what we see of her prison experience is her excitement at her growing literacy skills. Get a load of those pages turning! Reading is fun!
It's been argued that no fictional film can do justice to the events of 1939-45, that only documentaries like Alan Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour-long Shoah can begin to convey the reality of the evil. And there certainly have been execrable failures (example: Life Is Beautiful). I've argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness—what some critics have called "Nazi porn." But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed—the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of "Holocaust revisionism," which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.
Weitzman mentioned three films in particular: In addition to The Reader, there was Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, which gave the impression that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was full of good men and true (identifiable in the film by their British accents) who had always opposed that lout Hitler with his whole silly Jewish obsession, when in fact the more we learn about the Wehrmacht's role, the more disgracefully complicit it turns out to have been with the mass murderers of the SS. Yes, a few Wehrmacht officers did plot against Hitler, but they waited to take action until the successful Normandy invasion, when it seemed Hitler would lose the war.
"The Valkyrie conspiracy took place in 1944," Weitzman told me. "If it had been 1941, it might have made a difference."
And then there was Cruise's character, Claus von Stauffenberg, very brave, it's true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British magazine History Today reminds us), he was describing the Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as "an unbelievable rabble" made up of "Jews and mongrels." With friends like these ...
Moral: Don't go looking for heroes in the largely mythical "German resistance" to Hitler. The German resistance was not much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its legend outgrew its deeds after the war. (Although it is worth seeking out the two movies about the tiny, brave-but-doomed, Munich-based "White Rose" resistance, The White Rose and Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which tell the story of a few students who didn't—like the Valkyrie conspirators—believe the goal was to help Germany win the war more efficiently than Hitler, but to bear moral witness against the exterminators. For which they were brutally guillotined in Munich in 1943.)
The third film Weitzman mentions as an example of this soft revisionism is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one I haven't been able to bring myself to see but that features a young German boy, son of Nazi parents, who lives near a concentration camp and befriends a young death camp "boy in striped pajamas." The tale is not dissimilar in saccharine sentiment to the recently revealed, Oprah-fied fraud about the girl who gave the death camp boy apples, although it avoids the happy ending of that treacly sham.
But at least they didn't give these two films Oscar nominations or awards like the disgraceful one given to Life Is Beautiful.
...
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Monday, February 09, 2009
Joseph Wyse: “Perspectives on Developing New Pharmaceuticals and Introduction to Coldstream Laboratories” (BCTC: 2/10)
You are invited to the first in a series of spring semester talks to be presented by speakers from the local biotechnology community. Please see details below.
Biotechnology seminar
Introduction to Biotechnology, BT 101
“Perspectives on Developing New Pharmaceuticals and Introduction to Coldstream Laboratories”
Speaker: Joseph Wyse, PhD
CEO, Coldstream Pharmaceuticals,
Lexington, KY
Date: Tuesday, February 10th
Time: 5:30-6:30 pm
Place: Oswald Building Auditorium, OB 230
(BCTC Cooper campus)
Biotechnology seminar
Introduction to Biotechnology, BT 101
“Perspectives on Developing New Pharmaceuticals and Introduction to Coldstream Laboratories”
Speaker: Joseph Wyse, PhD
CEO, Coldstream Pharmaceuticals,
Lexington, KY
Date: Tuesday, February 10th
Time: 5:30-6:30 pm
Place: Oswald Building Auditorium, OB 230
(BCTC Cooper campus)
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Lux Interior (founder of The Cramps) 1948 - 2009
Cramps founder and punk pioneer Lux Interior dies
More Cramps videos
For a good piece on the influence of Lux, Poison Ivy and The Cramps (as well as some great comments) check out one of my new favorite sites Coilhouse:
Psychobilly Godfather Lux Interior Dead at 62
More Cramps videos
For a good piece on the influence of Lux, Poison Ivy and The Cramps (as well as some great comments) check out one of my new favorite sites Coilhouse:
Psychobilly Godfather Lux Interior Dead at 62
Norman Solomon: Why Are We Still At War
(If this is of interest I recommend you check out the documentary based upon Norman Solomon's book War Made Easy available at Free Documentaries: WAR MADE EASY: HOW PRESIDENTS & PUNDITS KEEP SPINNING US TO DEATH. Something to keep in mind in the midst of Obamamania. Obamamania reminds me of the hysteria of the rock star adulation of JFK... in the mythology of the lost potential of Kennedy's reign we have repressed the fact that he was more militarily hawkish and socially conservative than Nixon at that time... imagine that? I'm not trying to do the apples and oranges thing here... just remaining cautious and observant in my role as a member of a democratic society. Courtesy of Wood's Lot :)
Why Are We Still at War?
by Norman Solomon
Guernica
The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.
For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”
And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.
The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.
Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”
But the “war on terrorism” rubric -- increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” -- kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”
There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize -- or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.
The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.
Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.
And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.
To Read he Rest of the Essay
Why Are We Still at War?
by Norman Solomon
Guernica
The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.
For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”
And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.
The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.
Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”
But the “war on terrorism” rubric -- increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” -- kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”
There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize -- or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.
The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.
Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.
And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.
To Read he Rest of the Essay
Welfare in America
(This was made in 2004, just think how many more facts and figures we could add to the right ...)
More at Think Again
More at Think Again
The Seventh Seal/Sjunde inseglet, Det (Sweden: Ingmar Bergman, 1957: 96 mins)
The Seventh Seal/Sjunde inseglet, Det (Sweden: Ingmar Bergman, 1957: 96 mins)
"Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death—this infantile fixation of mine—was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry—with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'"
— Ingmar Bergman, (1971) Source
Thinking about The Seventh Seal:
Peter Cowie: The Seventh Seal (Criterion)
Soren Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith" (Wikipedia)
Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Jean-Paul Sartre: Authenticity (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Michael Benton on Existentialism: Five Propositions (Dialogic)
Ingmar Bergman: A Program Note to The Seventh Seal (Bergmanorama)
Tom Charity: Guilty Omissions (Cinema Scope)
Norman N. Holland: Meeting a Movie
Gerardo Martinez: Death Plays Chess
The Seventh Seal: Clips (Google Video)
Peter M. Plamer: The Seventh Seal (The English Exchange: PDF file)
Culture Cartel: The Seventh Seal
Background on The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Death and Its Discontents (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Art and Artists (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
On the director Ingmar Bergman (and his other films):
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors (Essential Reading!!!)
The Son of a Preacher Man (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Bergman's Beginnings (Importance of the Opening Shots in his Films) (Ingmar Bergman Face to Face)
Ingmar Bergman Face to Face
Marco Lanzagorta: Cries and Whispers (Senses of Cinema)
Dan Harper: Winter Light (Senses of Cinema)
Kristi McKim: Marriage as Cinematic Movement, or Loving the Face in Close-Up (Sense of Cinema)
Martyn Bamber: The Virgin Spring (Senses of Cinema)
Ingmar Bergman Foundation
Film Posters
Trailers/Clips/Interviews/Documentaries/Parodies (Bergmanorama)
Xan Brooks: Bergman talks of his dreams and demons in rare interview (UK Guardian)
Strictly Film School
Swedish film:
Cinema of Sweden (Wikipedia)
"Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death—this infantile fixation of mine—was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry—with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'"
— Ingmar Bergman, (1971) Source
Thinking about The Seventh Seal:
Peter Cowie: The Seventh Seal (Criterion)
Soren Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith" (Wikipedia)
Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Jean-Paul Sartre: Authenticity (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Michael Benton on Existentialism: Five Propositions (Dialogic)
Ingmar Bergman: A Program Note to The Seventh Seal (Bergmanorama)
Tom Charity: Guilty Omissions (Cinema Scope)
Norman N. Holland: Meeting a Movie
Gerardo Martinez: Death Plays Chess
The Seventh Seal: Clips (Google Video)
Peter M. Plamer: The Seventh Seal (The English Exchange: PDF file)
Culture Cartel: The Seventh Seal
Background on The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Death and Its Discontents (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Art and Artists (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
On the director Ingmar Bergman (and his other films):
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors (Essential Reading!!!)
The Son of a Preacher Man (Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face)
Bergman's Beginnings (Importance of the Opening Shots in his Films) (Ingmar Bergman Face to Face)
Ingmar Bergman Face to Face
Marco Lanzagorta: Cries and Whispers (Senses of Cinema)
Dan Harper: Winter Light (Senses of Cinema)
Kristi McKim: Marriage as Cinematic Movement, or Loving the Face in Close-Up (Sense of Cinema)
Martyn Bamber: The Virgin Spring (Senses of Cinema)
Ingmar Bergman Foundation
Film Posters
Trailers/Clips/Interviews/Documentaries/Parodies (Bergmanorama)
Xan Brooks: Bergman talks of his dreams and demons in rare interview (UK Guardian)
Strictly Film School
Swedish film:
Cinema of Sweden (Wikipedia)
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Michael Wood: Simon of the Desert--Damned If You Do . . .
Simon of the Desert: Damned If You Do . . .
BY MICHAEL WOOD
Criterion Collection
A good friend of Luis Buñuel’s suggested in conversation that the director was likely to be damned twice: once for being an atheist, and once for joking about it on his deathbed. The friend, a priest, certainly knew what he was talking about, but I don’t believe he really thought Buñuel would be damned. God can’t ultimately condemn serious atheists. They pay far more attention to him than halfhearted believers do, and they help to keep him in business. On the soundtrack of Buñuel’s film Nazarín (1959), we hear a barrel organ playing an old song called “Dios nunca muere” (God Never Dies). The song in itself is a bit of popular piety, an assertion of enduring faith. In Buñuel’s movie, it is an ironic tribute to the director’s everlasting antagonist, a correction of Nietzsche’s premature announcement of God’s death. And when Buñuel says, as he frequently and famously did, “Thank God I’m still an atheist,” the remark is not only a witty paradox, it is a form of courtesy. Why wouldn’t an atheist want to show gratitude to the nonexistent deity who never lets him down?
Simon of the Desert (1965) was the last film Buñuel made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Buñuel got all kinds of sharp, ironic effects from glossy color photography in the six films, five French and one Spanish, he went on to direct before he died, but there is a purity and grace in Figueroa’s images that is unequaled in Buñuel’s body of work. Writing enthusiastically of Simon of the Desert, Pauline Kael suggests Buñuel’s movies “have a thinner texture that begins to become a new kind of integrity, and they affect us as fables.” She is thinking of his indifference to the large emotions directors usually want their actors to go for, but we could also consider Figueroa’s contribution to this effect. His images are as much about the desert as about Simon, and we can almost see the thinness of the air.
The film tells the story of the miracles and temptations of a stylite, an ascetic who spent his life on top of a pillar. The model is Saint Simeon Stylites, but Buñuel reminds us that the early Christian world was full of such figures, and his character is “simply called Simon.” At the beginning of the film, Simon is about to move from a small pillar (ten feet or so high) to a much taller one (twenty-five feet or more), provided for him by a rich benefactor. Buñuel’s cool irony suggests that even in the realm of renunciation there are opportunities for professional advancement. The local bishop solemnly announces that Simon has spent six years, six months, and six days on his old pillar, and no one in the film seems to notice he is naming the number of the beast in the Book of Revelation. Buñuel, of course, thinks that any extreme attempt at holiness is likely to call up its opposite, and he makes sure the devil appears several times in the film. The devil takes the agreeable form of Silvia Pinal, the Mexican actress who played Viridiana in Buñuel’s 1961 film, and Pinal in turn takes several forms: a handsome woman carrying a water pitcher, a seductress dressed in a schoolgirlish sailor suit, an implausible young male shepherd, complete with fake curls and beard, a worldly woman with a fancy hairdo, a miniskirted dancer in a New York nightclub. The devil makes a point of the interest he/she shares with Simon: the hermit is looking for God’s approval, and the devil has known him for a long time. “I also believe in God the Father Almighty,” he/she says.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
BY MICHAEL WOOD
Criterion Collection
A good friend of Luis Buñuel’s suggested in conversation that the director was likely to be damned twice: once for being an atheist, and once for joking about it on his deathbed. The friend, a priest, certainly knew what he was talking about, but I don’t believe he really thought Buñuel would be damned. God can’t ultimately condemn serious atheists. They pay far more attention to him than halfhearted believers do, and they help to keep him in business. On the soundtrack of Buñuel’s film Nazarín (1959), we hear a barrel organ playing an old song called “Dios nunca muere” (God Never Dies). The song in itself is a bit of popular piety, an assertion of enduring faith. In Buñuel’s movie, it is an ironic tribute to the director’s everlasting antagonist, a correction of Nietzsche’s premature announcement of God’s death. And when Buñuel says, as he frequently and famously did, “Thank God I’m still an atheist,” the remark is not only a witty paradox, it is a form of courtesy. Why wouldn’t an atheist want to show gratitude to the nonexistent deity who never lets him down?
Simon of the Desert (1965) was the last film Buñuel made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Buñuel got all kinds of sharp, ironic effects from glossy color photography in the six films, five French and one Spanish, he went on to direct before he died, but there is a purity and grace in Figueroa’s images that is unequaled in Buñuel’s body of work. Writing enthusiastically of Simon of the Desert, Pauline Kael suggests Buñuel’s movies “have a thinner texture that begins to become a new kind of integrity, and they affect us as fables.” She is thinking of his indifference to the large emotions directors usually want their actors to go for, but we could also consider Figueroa’s contribution to this effect. His images are as much about the desert as about Simon, and we can almost see the thinness of the air.
The film tells the story of the miracles and temptations of a stylite, an ascetic who spent his life on top of a pillar. The model is Saint Simeon Stylites, but Buñuel reminds us that the early Christian world was full of such figures, and his character is “simply called Simon.” At the beginning of the film, Simon is about to move from a small pillar (ten feet or so high) to a much taller one (twenty-five feet or more), provided for him by a rich benefactor. Buñuel’s cool irony suggests that even in the realm of renunciation there are opportunities for professional advancement. The local bishop solemnly announces that Simon has spent six years, six months, and six days on his old pillar, and no one in the film seems to notice he is naming the number of the beast in the Book of Revelation. Buñuel, of course, thinks that any extreme attempt at holiness is likely to call up its opposite, and he makes sure the devil appears several times in the film. The devil takes the agreeable form of Silvia Pinal, the Mexican actress who played Viridiana in Buñuel’s 1961 film, and Pinal in turn takes several forms: a handsome woman carrying a water pitcher, a seductress dressed in a schoolgirlish sailor suit, an implausible young male shepherd, complete with fake curls and beard, a worldly woman with a fancy hairdo, a miniskirted dancer in a New York nightclub. The devil makes a point of the interest he/she shares with Simon: the hermit is looking for God’s approval, and the devil has known him for a long time. “I also believe in God the Father Almighty,” he/she says.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Monday, February 02, 2009
Slavoj Zizek: The Enchainments of Meaning
(Trying to get my students to [re]cognize that words and images have multiple meanings and that, as creators of culture, as communicators of meaning/s, we need, we must, clarify what we mean when we seek to communicate a message. Thanks to Lazzarone on Cross-X forums for reminding me about this quote.)
Ecology, for example, is never ‘ecology as such’; it is always enchained in a specific series of equivalences: it can be conservative (advocating the return to balanced rural communities and traditional ways of life), statist (only a strong state regulation can save us from the impending catastrophe), socialist (the ultimate cause of ecological problems resides in the capitalist profit-orientated exploitation of natural resources), liberal-capitalist (one should include the damage to the environment in the price of the product, and thus leave the market to regulate the ecological balance), feminist (the exploitation of nature follows from the male attitude of domination), anarchic self-managerial (humanity can survive only if it reorganizes itself into small self-reliant communities that live in balance with nature), and so on. The point, of course, is that none of these enchainments is in itself ‘true’, inscribed in the very nature of the ecological problematic: which discourse will succeed in ‘appropriating’ ecology depends on the fight for discursive hegemony, whose outcome is not guaranteed by any underlying necessity of ‘natural alliance’. The other inevitable consequence of such a notion of hegemonic articulation is that statist, conservative, socialist, and so on, inscription of ecology does not designate a secondary connotation that supplements its primary ‘literal’ meaning: as Derrida would have put it, this supplement retroactively (re)defines the very nature of ‘literal’ identity—a conservative enchainment, for example, throws a specific light on the ecological problematic itself (‘owing to his false arrogance, man forsook his roots in the natural order’, etc.).
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” The Žižek Reader. ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999: 65.
Ecology, for example, is never ‘ecology as such’; it is always enchained in a specific series of equivalences: it can be conservative (advocating the return to balanced rural communities and traditional ways of life), statist (only a strong state regulation can save us from the impending catastrophe), socialist (the ultimate cause of ecological problems resides in the capitalist profit-orientated exploitation of natural resources), liberal-capitalist (one should include the damage to the environment in the price of the product, and thus leave the market to regulate the ecological balance), feminist (the exploitation of nature follows from the male attitude of domination), anarchic self-managerial (humanity can survive only if it reorganizes itself into small self-reliant communities that live in balance with nature), and so on. The point, of course, is that none of these enchainments is in itself ‘true’, inscribed in the very nature of the ecological problematic: which discourse will succeed in ‘appropriating’ ecology depends on the fight for discursive hegemony, whose outcome is not guaranteed by any underlying necessity of ‘natural alliance’. The other inevitable consequence of such a notion of hegemonic articulation is that statist, conservative, socialist, and so on, inscription of ecology does not designate a secondary connotation that supplements its primary ‘literal’ meaning: as Derrida would have put it, this supplement retroactively (re)defines the very nature of ‘literal’ identity—a conservative enchainment, for example, throws a specific light on the ecological problematic itself (‘owing to his false arrogance, man forsook his roots in the natural order’, etc.).
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” The Žižek Reader. ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999: 65.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Art and Information
"Furthermore, notwithstanding Bloom's caveat that art doesn't make people into better citizens, I would argue that information can on occasion do precisely that and that art and information never can and never should be viewed as wholly independent entities." (xiv)
Courtney E. Martin: Dennis Dalton -- The People's Professor
(Thinking about starting a free university and trying to organize a regional conference on radical pedagogy--anyone interested in helping out? I keep asking myself what am I doing as a professor and who am I serving. Afterall this is what I have dedicated my life to doing--why do I do it, what is the purpose, and how is it helping my community/world? How should we live :) Article courtesy of Claire Glasscock.)
The People's Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League
by Courtney E. Martin
Utne Reader and Truth Out
An Ivy League scholar breaks the rules, waives the fees, and welcomes the workaday residents of Harlem into his politically charged classroom.
The lecture hall is nearly dark, lit only by the faint glow of a dozen laptop screens. Suddenly, a projector comes alive and a painting appears above the chalkboard. Seventy-year-old professor Dennis Dalton - his bald head, trademark sneakers, baggy jeans, and button-up denim shirt barely discernible at the front of the room - announces with glee, "Ahhh! There it is! The School of Athens!"
Half of the 150 or so Political Theory I students giggle at his zealousness. "My favorite thing to do when I go to Rome is to stand in front of this painting and have all kinds of thoughts and reveries," he says, stepping back so he can get a better look. "After a few hours, I get kind of diminished from lack of food and drink and I imagine the people, depicted so expertly here by Raphael, talking to one another."
More giggles.
The professor turns to face the students, whose eyes are directed upward at the great thinkers shown in his favorite painting. "Raphael was trying to capture a community engaged in the philosophy of the mind. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all the other philosophers depicted here began a long tradition of street philosophy, a tradition that lives on in the streets of Harlem - the exchange of ideas, a passion for education and idealism, a community of learning and teaching." Then his tone shifts to disdain. "If only Columbia - the school on the hill - understood the importance of it."
Professor Dalton has taught for 38 years in the political science department of Barnard, the all-women's school of Columbia University in Harlem. Like many Ivy League schools positioned near low-income communities, Columbia has a strained relationship with its neighbors, working-class people who are not only kept out, but are threatened with displacement by the grand vision of the university's leadership. The school wants to seize property through eminent domain in its plans for a new $6.3 billion expansion into West Harlem.
Columbia says the project will create more than 6,000 jobs over the next 25 years. But Manhattan Community Board No. 9, which is the voice of many West Harlem residents, says it will displace 300 people's homes and 900 people's current jobs, not to mention destroy a neighborhood known for its rich history and culture.
Dalton is clearly on the side of the community. In fact, he doesn't just want Harlem protected from Columbia's encroachment. He also encourages Harlem to encroach into Columbia.
Many Harlemites have turned Dalton's courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to "I'm not telling."
If Dalton's lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God's children but as Plato's philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.
How did a professor at one of the nation's most exclusive colleges manage to become the people's professor? As with many grand social experiments, it began with an unlikely friendship.
Ben Armstead, a gregarious entrepreneur in his 70s with caterpillar eyebrows and freckles thrown across his pale brown cheeks, learned about Dalton's classes in 1994 when he was helping Columbia students move into their dorm rooms for extra money (never mind that he was pushing 60 at the time). As he lugged computers and bean bag chairs, he would ask the students about their favorite courses and teachers. Dalton's name came up over and over again.
Their eyes alight, students spoke of a political science professor who preached the importance of finding one's Platonic areté, or calling. They talked about a professor who freely gave out his home phone number and the questions to the final exam prior to administering it - his own little rebellion against grades. They described a man who filled their heads with theory, but no less than he filled their hearts with love.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
The People's Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League
by Courtney E. Martin
Utne Reader and Truth Out
An Ivy League scholar breaks the rules, waives the fees, and welcomes the workaday residents of Harlem into his politically charged classroom.
The lecture hall is nearly dark, lit only by the faint glow of a dozen laptop screens. Suddenly, a projector comes alive and a painting appears above the chalkboard. Seventy-year-old professor Dennis Dalton - his bald head, trademark sneakers, baggy jeans, and button-up denim shirt barely discernible at the front of the room - announces with glee, "Ahhh! There it is! The School of Athens!"
Half of the 150 or so Political Theory I students giggle at his zealousness. "My favorite thing to do when I go to Rome is to stand in front of this painting and have all kinds of thoughts and reveries," he says, stepping back so he can get a better look. "After a few hours, I get kind of diminished from lack of food and drink and I imagine the people, depicted so expertly here by Raphael, talking to one another."
More giggles.
The professor turns to face the students, whose eyes are directed upward at the great thinkers shown in his favorite painting. "Raphael was trying to capture a community engaged in the philosophy of the mind. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all the other philosophers depicted here began a long tradition of street philosophy, a tradition that lives on in the streets of Harlem - the exchange of ideas, a passion for education and idealism, a community of learning and teaching." Then his tone shifts to disdain. "If only Columbia - the school on the hill - understood the importance of it."
Professor Dalton has taught for 38 years in the political science department of Barnard, the all-women's school of Columbia University in Harlem. Like many Ivy League schools positioned near low-income communities, Columbia has a strained relationship with its neighbors, working-class people who are not only kept out, but are threatened with displacement by the grand vision of the university's leadership. The school wants to seize property through eminent domain in its plans for a new $6.3 billion expansion into West Harlem.
Columbia says the project will create more than 6,000 jobs over the next 25 years. But Manhattan Community Board No. 9, which is the voice of many West Harlem residents, says it will displace 300 people's homes and 900 people's current jobs, not to mention destroy a neighborhood known for its rich history and culture.
Dalton is clearly on the side of the community. In fact, he doesn't just want Harlem protected from Columbia's encroachment. He also encourages Harlem to encroach into Columbia.
Many Harlemites have turned Dalton's courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to "I'm not telling."
If Dalton's lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God's children but as Plato's philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.
How did a professor at one of the nation's most exclusive colleges manage to become the people's professor? As with many grand social experiments, it began with an unlikely friendship.
Ben Armstead, a gregarious entrepreneur in his 70s with caterpillar eyebrows and freckles thrown across his pale brown cheeks, learned about Dalton's classes in 1994 when he was helping Columbia students move into their dorm rooms for extra money (never mind that he was pushing 60 at the time). As he lugged computers and bean bag chairs, he would ask the students about their favorite courses and teachers. Dalton's name came up over and over again.
Their eyes alight, students spoke of a political science professor who preached the importance of finding one's Platonic areté, or calling. They talked about a professor who freely gave out his home phone number and the questions to the final exam prior to administering it - his own little rebellion against grades. They described a man who filled their heads with theory, but no less than he filled their hearts with love.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Speaking of Faith: Jennifer Michael Hecht -- A History of Doubt
A History of Doubt
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippett
Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the "shadow history" of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world's great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery.
To Listen to the Episode and To Access More Resources
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippett
Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the "shadow history" of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world's great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery.
To Listen to the Episode and To Access More Resources
Speaking of Faith: Pankaj Mishra -- The Buddha in the World
The Buddha in the World
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippett
A few years ago, journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's thought across India and Europe, Afghanistan and America. He emerged with a startling critique of Western political economy that is even more resonant today as he pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's core questions: Do desiring and acquiring make us happy? Does large-scale political change really address human suffering?
To Listen to the Episode and to Access More Resources
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippett
A few years ago, journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's thought across India and Europe, Afghanistan and America. He emerged with a startling critique of Western political economy that is even more resonant today as he pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's core questions: Do desiring and acquiring make us happy? Does large-scale political change really address human suffering?
To Listen to the Episode and to Access More Resources
Kai Ma: Is a GED More Valuable Than a PhD?
Is a GED More Valuable Than a PhD?
By Kai Ma
The Daily Beast and AlterNet
For six years, Rebekah slaved at Boston University for her PhD in American Studies. Her plan: work in New York as a museum curator. She pictured chatty, engrossing interviews with like-minded creative types. “Everyone would be so pleased” with her PhD, she thought. Yet eight months after graduating, Rebekah is unemployed and considering a gig at a public library that requires only a GED.
The demand for humanities PhDs has long been tight -- for four decades, the number of jobs requiring them hasn’t kept pace with the number of people earning them. But by all indications, recent university hiring freezes and evaporating grant money have reduced the world’s most elite degree to junk-bond status.
On the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List, a bellwether for PhD employment trends, the number of job postings is down 21 percent, the steepest decline in the list’s 34-year history. One attendee of last month’s annual MLA convention in San Francisco, where doctorate graduates can score interviews for tenure-track professorships, found the event rendered “somber” by the scarcity of opportunities. The same air permeated last week’s American Historical Association conference. “Job candidates who a year ago had goals of four or five interviews here were thrilled to have one,” reported InsideHigherEd.com.
“This is certainly the largest dip [in jobs] we’ve seen, percentage-wise, since we began tracking in the 1970s,” says Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA. “It really is disheartening to see so many well-prepared people in search of so few jobs.”
Rebekah could be a poster child for the current PhD despondency. She’s written more than a hundred networking and cover letters during her eight-month job search, and trolls 44 employment websites on a daily basis. Three jobs that fit her specialty recently opened -- then two of them were canceled when grant money dried up. “I went in for the interviews, then got word that the searches had stopped,” Rebekah says. “I do have moments of regretting [getting a PhD] because now I’m applying for assistant curator jobs that I could’ve gotten beforehand.”
She even applied for a job as an archivist for the Girl Scouts of America. “As a kid, I was kicked out of the Girl Scouts, which I obviously didn’t mention in my letter,” she says. “I never heard back. It was probably obvious that we weren’t exactly a match.”
“It took six years to write my dissertation, but getting employed feels impossible right now. There’s something a little sick about that,” says “Liz,” another freshly minted PhD who didn’t want her name used. After spending a decade earning her English PhD at UC-Berkeley, she began her job search in September by applying for 40 different tenure-track positions; she’s since received notice that those searches have been canceled. “There are a lot of folks in despair. Several PhDs I know are in counseling.”
“I’m frightened,” says a lecturer in the Boston area who earned her PhD last year and remains unemployed in her field. “These are huge numbers, all related to the economic crisis. I have thought, ‘Am I going to have to be a waitress?’ Everyone in the field thinks about what else they can do.”
Notably, many on the job market refused to provide their names for this story. In the competitive world of academia, paranoia runs high. “It’s extraordinarily insular,” says Christine Hong, a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley. “I don’t see how someone complaining about how dire things are would necessarily be fatal for them, but I understand the paranoia.”
Some new PhDs, especially those saddled with debt, are considering junking their degrees altogether.
“I have dissertation friends with kids who just wind up being stay-at-home moms,” says a humanities PhD student and mother of two. “You wind up doing Plan B, whatever that is.” She’s applied for roughly 25 tenure-track positions, only to hear back that many of the searches have been canceled. One rejection notice said the position drew 700 applications.
“Every single academic, especially in the humanities, has a tinge of buyer’s remorse” about their PhD, she says. “You see your peers in law or business school make down payments on homes and buy cars and go on vacation. But as a PhD student, you’re in your 30s, still renting an apartment and driving a ’84 Corolla. It’s not cute.”
To Read the Rest of the Article (recommend--read the extensive comments to this article)
By Kai Ma
The Daily Beast and AlterNet
For six years, Rebekah slaved at Boston University for her PhD in American Studies. Her plan: work in New York as a museum curator. She pictured chatty, engrossing interviews with like-minded creative types. “Everyone would be so pleased” with her PhD, she thought. Yet eight months after graduating, Rebekah is unemployed and considering a gig at a public library that requires only a GED.
The demand for humanities PhDs has long been tight -- for four decades, the number of jobs requiring them hasn’t kept pace with the number of people earning them. But by all indications, recent university hiring freezes and evaporating grant money have reduced the world’s most elite degree to junk-bond status.
On the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List, a bellwether for PhD employment trends, the number of job postings is down 21 percent, the steepest decline in the list’s 34-year history. One attendee of last month’s annual MLA convention in San Francisco, where doctorate graduates can score interviews for tenure-track professorships, found the event rendered “somber” by the scarcity of opportunities. The same air permeated last week’s American Historical Association conference. “Job candidates who a year ago had goals of four or five interviews here were thrilled to have one,” reported InsideHigherEd.com.
“This is certainly the largest dip [in jobs] we’ve seen, percentage-wise, since we began tracking in the 1970s,” says Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA. “It really is disheartening to see so many well-prepared people in search of so few jobs.”
Rebekah could be a poster child for the current PhD despondency. She’s written more than a hundred networking and cover letters during her eight-month job search, and trolls 44 employment websites on a daily basis. Three jobs that fit her specialty recently opened -- then two of them were canceled when grant money dried up. “I went in for the interviews, then got word that the searches had stopped,” Rebekah says. “I do have moments of regretting [getting a PhD] because now I’m applying for assistant curator jobs that I could’ve gotten beforehand.”
She even applied for a job as an archivist for the Girl Scouts of America. “As a kid, I was kicked out of the Girl Scouts, which I obviously didn’t mention in my letter,” she says. “I never heard back. It was probably obvious that we weren’t exactly a match.”
“It took six years to write my dissertation, but getting employed feels impossible right now. There’s something a little sick about that,” says “Liz,” another freshly minted PhD who didn’t want her name used. After spending a decade earning her English PhD at UC-Berkeley, she began her job search in September by applying for 40 different tenure-track positions; she’s since received notice that those searches have been canceled. “There are a lot of folks in despair. Several PhDs I know are in counseling.”
“I’m frightened,” says a lecturer in the Boston area who earned her PhD last year and remains unemployed in her field. “These are huge numbers, all related to the economic crisis. I have thought, ‘Am I going to have to be a waitress?’ Everyone in the field thinks about what else they can do.”
Notably, many on the job market refused to provide their names for this story. In the competitive world of academia, paranoia runs high. “It’s extraordinarily insular,” says Christine Hong, a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley. “I don’t see how someone complaining about how dire things are would necessarily be fatal for them, but I understand the paranoia.”
Some new PhDs, especially those saddled with debt, are considering junking their degrees altogether.
“I have dissertation friends with kids who just wind up being stay-at-home moms,” says a humanities PhD student and mother of two. “You wind up doing Plan B, whatever that is.” She’s applied for roughly 25 tenure-track positions, only to hear back that many of the searches have been canceled. One rejection notice said the position drew 700 applications.
“Every single academic, especially in the humanities, has a tinge of buyer’s remorse” about their PhD, she says. “You see your peers in law or business school make down payments on homes and buy cars and go on vacation. But as a PhD student, you’re in your 30s, still renting an apartment and driving a ’84 Corolla. It’s not cute.”
To Read the Rest of the Article (recommend--read the extensive comments to this article)
John Constantine: The Movie That's Stealing Harry Potter Fans
The Movie That's Stealing Harry Potter Fans
by John Constantine
The Daily Beast
Neil Gaiman’s darkly comic novels have made him a god among modern-day goths and fantasy fans—think Tim Burton hotwired with Philip K. Dick. Across his two-decade career, the 48-year-old cult author has become a bestselling author, comic-book legend (his Sandman series are the sort of hyper-literate fantasy English majors only dream of writing), and an accomplished screenwriter (Mirrormask). An animated film of his young-adult novel Coraline, about a girl who finds a secret world hidden behind a doorway in her London flat, will be released on February 6—from the team that created The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Daily Beast talked with Gaiman shortly after he was awarded a Newbery Medal for his new young-adult novel, The Graveyard Book, which will also become a feature film, directed by Neil Jordan.
To Read the Interview and See the Trailer
by John Constantine
The Daily Beast
Neil Gaiman’s darkly comic novels have made him a god among modern-day goths and fantasy fans—think Tim Burton hotwired with Philip K. Dick. Across his two-decade career, the 48-year-old cult author has become a bestselling author, comic-book legend (his Sandman series are the sort of hyper-literate fantasy English majors only dream of writing), and an accomplished screenwriter (Mirrormask). An animated film of his young-adult novel Coraline, about a girl who finds a secret world hidden behind a doorway in her London flat, will be released on February 6—from the team that created The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Daily Beast talked with Gaiman shortly after he was awarded a Newbery Medal for his new young-adult novel, The Graveyard Book, which will also become a feature film, directed by Neil Jordan.
To Read the Interview and See the Trailer
Joshua Holland: Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."
To Read the Rest of the Article
CFP: Religion and Popular Culture (Reconstruction: May 15, 2009)
(I am a co-editor of this special issue--please forward it to any relevant list-serv, share it with comrades, and/or post on department walls. Feel free to ask questions. We also need reviews for the issue: books, film, TV, music, new media, exhibitions/performances, etc... propose it to me and I will let you know if it will work. )
CFP: Religion and Popular Culture
Call for Submissions
Religion and Popular Culture
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 15 May 2009
At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this issue of Reconstruction seeks to explore questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience.
Over the past three decades, scholarship in the Humanities evaluating the relationships between religion and popular culture has increased dramatically. This particular issue seeks a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between religion and popular culture. Despite some recent attention, the role popular culture plays in religious experience is often undervalued. Popular culture not only presents and portrays religious ideas and norms, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which religious meaning is communicated and understood. Submissions need not be directed toward any particular religious tradition or geared for any single definition of religion. Instead, religion might be imagined in any (or none) of the following ways: as an expression of doctrinal beliefs and/or core values, as an on-going movement between an individual or community and a larger socio-cultural matrix, or as essentially a cultural construction. Theological investigations that engage cultural studies from a faith perspective are certainly encouraged. We also welcome perspectives that interrogate the stability of meaning(s) assigned to such terms ("culture," "religion," "popular," etc.) and their complex inter-relations.
Specifically, submissions should be framed with at least one of the following four rubrics in mind: religion within popular culture, popular culture within religion, religion as popular culture (and vice versa), or religion in tension with popular culture.
We welcome manuscripts that produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between religion and popular culture. For example, submissions might investigate religious expression(s) in relation to any of the following realms of contemporary popular culture:
* Music
* Literature
* Film
* Broadcast media (particularly religious broadcasting)
* Journalism
* Athletics
* Comic books
* Novels / poetry / short story
* Television
* Radio
* Print media
* Internet / technology
* Popular art / architecture
* Sacred vs. profane space
* Advertising
* Consumerism
* New religious movements/religious subcultures
* Socio-political religious movements (liberation theologies, Zionism, right-wing Evangelicalism, etc.)
* Atheism/Skepticism/Secular Humanism
Note: This list is representative, but certainly not exhaustive.
Please send proposals, completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Nate Hinerman and Michael Benton at religionculture_at_gmail.com by 15 May 2009. Publication is expected in the first quarter of 2010. All submissions are refereed. Papers must follow the Reconstruction guidelines for submission.
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes three themed issues and one open issue quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
--
Reconstruction
““When you live in times of terror, when everything is a conspiracy, then everyone must play the detective.”
--Walter Benjamin
CFP: Religion and Popular Culture
Call for Submissions
Religion and Popular Culture
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 15 May 2009
At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this issue of Reconstruction seeks to explore questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience.
Over the past three decades, scholarship in the Humanities evaluating the relationships between religion and popular culture has increased dramatically. This particular issue seeks a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between religion and popular culture. Despite some recent attention, the role popular culture plays in religious experience is often undervalued. Popular culture not only presents and portrays religious ideas and norms, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which religious meaning is communicated and understood. Submissions need not be directed toward any particular religious tradition or geared for any single definition of religion. Instead, religion might be imagined in any (or none) of the following ways: as an expression of doctrinal beliefs and/or core values, as an on-going movement between an individual or community and a larger socio-cultural matrix, or as essentially a cultural construction. Theological investigations that engage cultural studies from a faith perspective are certainly encouraged. We also welcome perspectives that interrogate the stability of meaning(s) assigned to such terms ("culture," "religion," "popular," etc.) and their complex inter-relations.
Specifically, submissions should be framed with at least one of the following four rubrics in mind: religion within popular culture, popular culture within religion, religion as popular culture (and vice versa), or religion in tension with popular culture.
We welcome manuscripts that produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between religion and popular culture. For example, submissions might investigate religious expression(s) in relation to any of the following realms of contemporary popular culture:
* Music
* Literature
* Film
* Broadcast media (particularly religious broadcasting)
* Journalism
* Athletics
* Comic books
* Novels / poetry / short story
* Television
* Radio
* Print media
* Internet / technology
* Popular art / architecture
* Sacred vs. profane space
* Advertising
* Consumerism
* New religious movements/religious subcultures
* Socio-political religious movements (liberation theologies, Zionism, right-wing Evangelicalism, etc.)
* Atheism/Skepticism/Secular Humanism
Note: This list is representative, but certainly not exhaustive.
Please send proposals, completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Nate Hinerman and Michael Benton at religionculture_at_gmail.com by 15 May 2009. Publication is expected in the first quarter of 2010. All submissions are refereed. Papers must follow the Reconstruction guidelines for submission.
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes three themed issues and one open issue quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
--
Reconstruction
““When you live in times of terror, when everything is a conspiracy, then everyone must play the detective.”
--Walter Benjamin
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