It's Thursday

You object, perhaps understandably, that Valley of the Dolls was not literature, apart from in the statutory sense. I haven't read it, so I don't know.

Slate's 7 July photo gallery of arty broads[link].

The Damned don't cry (no really, they don't...)

Cries and Whispers in less than a minute

Grey Gardens 1975

Grey Gardens is a documentary by the Mayles brothers, who appear occasionally in the mirror.

Novelist Elif Şafak-Euronews

Euronews — June 06, 2010 — Elif Şafak is Turkey's most popular female writer. She has also gained fame abroad, not only for her literary accomplishments but also because of the lawsuit brought against her in Turkey because, in one of her novels she refers to the mass killings of Armenians in 1915; that is in The Bastard of Istanbul. The suit was dropped. Euronews met up with Şafak in Lyon, France, where she was attending a book festival. We asked her about her impressions of Europe, her writing and culture.

Audrey Nelson on Fora TV

''Cleavage at Work? A New Dress Code for Professional Women''


Another video from Fora TV. This is Audrey Nelson. The full video of her presentation is here. Yes, the still image caught my attention.

the trouble with women, 1950

with 'Brad Bradshaw' and Myrtle Malloy.

Dana n' the firefighters

via slate.com.

Lise Eliot

The book she refers to is hers, Pink Brain, Blue Brain. Apparently she's written a bunch of stuff; the rest of the video is here.

from Fora.tv:

Dr. Lise Eliot, Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, received her Ph.D. in Physiology and Cellular Biophysics from Columbia University in 1991. Working in Eric Kandel's laboratory, she combined electrophysiology and calcium imaging methods to analyze the synaptic mechanisms underlying learning in the marine mollusc, Aplysia californica.

My brilliant brain- Brit doc about Susan Polgar

My Brilliant Brain - Make Me A Genius - 46:58

a reminder:when abortion was illegal

Watch When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I saw this at the internet archive(here), but I find their embed protocol is a bit buggy when you re-write the html to prevent it from going into auto-play, so here it is via Veoh instead. Then again it may just be my html skills are the problem.

Anyway, the disgusting murder of George Tiller (while attending church) barely two weeks ago reminded me that I've been meaning to post this.

[cross-posted at Dead Horse.]

the Vasantotsav festival

from their website:Dr. Vasantrao Deshpande Pratisthan organizes a three day festival every year titled – VASANTOTSAV, in Pune, in the memory of Late Dr. Vasantrao Deshpande by inviting respected artists to perform at this event.

And don't they look like they're having fun? The foto above is from the AFP from March of 2008. So, yes, it looks like you missed VASANTOTSAV 09. Well, there's next year.

Janis Karpinski

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is from Tuesday or Wednesday night, I think. (I don't have access to most cable channels, so I haven't actually seen Olberman's show in quite some time. You may recall that Janis Karpinski was the general in command at Abu Gharib, and consequently one of the fall guys for the scandal.

Cécile Manorohanta

afp-Getty


BBC,"Madagascar defense minister quits":

Cécile Manorohanta said her conscience could not endure the bloodshed. She was replaced by the chief of military staff, Mamy Ranaivoniarivo. It comes amid a bitter power struggle between President Marc Ravalomanana and opposition leader Andry Rajoelina.

VOA News,"Madagascar Defense Minister Resigns After Bloodshed":

Opposition leader Andry Rajoelina has vowed to continue demonstrations that began last month. Rajoelina accuses President Marc Ravalomanana of being too authoritarian.

Over the weekend, police killed at least 28 demonstrators in Madagascar's capitol and Ms. Manorohanta resigned in protest, citing, besides her conscience, her role as a mother. I'll admit that before this weekend I didn't even know about the recent political unrest in Madagascar, let alone had I heard of Manorohanta.

But when I came across this news today, I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld, our last defense minister, er, secretary, to resign prematurely, and how different his reasons were: because he served "at the pleasure of the president", and the president was embarrassed by the outcome of the 2006 mid-terms. I also thought that I could never see anybody in the Bush II OR the Obama administration resigning over something like that. Condoleeza Rice? Hillary Clinton? Robert Gates?

Am I being unfair? I don't know. Although I think in many ways our government is probably just as corrupt as Marc Ravalomanana's seems to be, nobody's shooting Americans in the streets. And although it would be nice if Americans cared about their own government's many failings the way Madagascar's protestors do, obviously we shouldn't wish for a leader as (openly)thuggish as Ravalomanana.

But I also wonder: do people here make the connection, when we occasionally hear about stories like this one, why is it that Americans sometimes say that other countries need to be "taught" about democracy? I don't know what the level of formal education of the anti-government protesters who died this weekend might be, but I seriously doubt they wanted or needed any lessons from Americans about democracy.

one last snippet(it might be helpful to ignore writer Jonny Hogg's Thatcherist attitude, but I thought I'd include it anyway, for perspective):

BBC, "Deadly power struggle lays Madagascar low":

The damage to Madagascar's international reputation could be equally harmful. Under President Ravalomanana the country had been taking its first tentative steps into the global market after decades of socialist stagnation. Multinational corporations including Rio Tinto and Exxon Mobil have arrived, pouring millions of dollars into government coffers. The president himself has seen his own business interests - anything from dairy products to cooking oil - rise and rise.

However, in appealing to foreign investors the government alienated many Malagasy people. Food and fuel have become more expensive whilst the foreign funds have not improved the quality of life for most people. President Ravalomanana's reputation in the eyes of his critics has not been helped by his aggressive business approach and the fact that as his wealth continued to grow, the population was becoming poorer.

Equally harmful?

cross-posted at Dead Horse

Two from Reuters video

Helen Suzman(2):



Gaza assaults spark global backlash:



As always, the shoes are a nice touch.

cross-posted at "Dead Horse"

Yma Sumac, "the Inca princess"

I'd just heard of Yma Sumac and her multi-octave voice fairly recently, and now it seems she passed away. Don't know who made this stylish short documentary about her. It reminds me of Cocteau and Welles, just a bit. It's entitled "La Castafiore Inca (Part I)". And no, I can't seem to locate part two. Is this it?

Shirley bassey n' the muppets, c. 1980:

History repeating itself

Helena Cobban: "China and Japan's stakes in the US financial crisis"
as well as,

"China's condition to bail out the US: Taiwan?"

Andrew Leonard in Salon, "Not so fast, Secretary Paulson!"

look past the florid ridiculousness of Leonard's opening paragraph("this kind of profound remaking of capitalism..." ), as well as some(OK, many) of his assumptions, to this worthy passage:

You don't often find a Democratic senator and a University of Chicago free-market true-believer economist on the same side, but Luigi Zingales' widely circulated "Why Paulson Is Wrong" essay provides strong support for the idea that the government should get a piece of the action, framed in terms of debt forgiveness in exchange for equity.

Zingales argues that a reduction in debt can benefit both equity holders and debt holders because "there are real costs from having too much debt and too little equity in the capital structure." But debt holders tend to resist government-ordered debt forgiveness for the very simple reason that a government bailout is a preferable solution, for them.

Daniel Gross in Slate, "The Political Cowardice and (Hypocrisy)of the Wall Street Bailout"

Congress and the president favor a $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but they're afraid to say how they'll pay for it...

Xymphora: "Then they came for the Lehman Brothers, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Lehman Brother"

(not his best piece, but the title is irresistible.)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the UN: "American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders"

Lucian Freud n' Sue Tilley

Yesterday I discussed Dorothea Lange and the subject of her iconic photo of a migrant mother-- and coincidentally, speaking of artists and models, there's this video from Reuters.

Mother's day

Mother's day inevitably makes me think of my mother, who died 49 months ago in early April of 2004. This means my mother, who was an Iraqi-American, died roughly a year after the war against Iraq began but a few days before the Abu Ghraib photos came out-- so you could say she was spared that. She was 70, having been born in 1934, which also means that when she was born her native country was ruled by the British, and when she died Iraq was ruled by the US. My mother died a US Citizen, having surrendered her Iraqi nationality voluntarily-- unlike Iraq herself.

Naturally I would wish my mother could still be here, even though I know I was pretty fortunate to have my mother live till I was 40-- needless to say, others aren't so lucky. Mother's day also makes me think of the various things I wanted and still want to do to make her see me as successful and the shepherd of a meaningful life, so that she might be proud.

Also inevitably, Mother's day makes me think of the iconic photo of the migrant mother, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936(above). Here's some verbiage about it from Wikipedia:

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name. The original photo had Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, and was retouched in an attempt to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched .

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.

This photo was taken by Lange in San Francisco 1942, shortly before these kids were to be shipped off with their families to the internment camps. What were they thinking as they stared at Lange's lens? Were they frightened, or curious? Did they even know what was in store at that point?