Power Is the Ability Not to Have to Please

Objects of Beauty- photographs by Cara Phillips

2008-02-21T00:26:00.000-08:00

check out the work of Cara Phillips.

Her "Machine" series is potent and her statement compelling.

attention smokers! soon you will not be allowed to smoke in your own home

2008-01-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

Check out Chicago Acting by David Lawrence. It looks like actors will not be able to smoke onstage in Chicago. Thank god the Government is looking after my health!!!! Now if only they wouldn't send me back to Iraq...*

See also the NY Times' article on places that do not allow smoking onstage (I hate that I just had to type "allowed" there): "No Smoking in the Theatre..." (by Zachary Pincus-Roth, published 2.28.07).

Via TheatreForte, posted 1.2.08.

* I am not a soldier, not have I been or will I be sent to Iraq. It is facetious. To make a point. About big government.

charlie brown bah humbugs....right up until the last minute. kid after my own heart.

2007-12-25T11:36:00.001-08:00

Follow the link to view video.

God Hates Knees

2007-11-28T17:07:00.000-08:00

Via Dooce, posted 11.28.07.

Before we go...What Would Jesus Buy?

2007-11-20T21:22:00.000-08:00

Via Available light [theatre], posted 11.20.07.

Irregularity

2007-11-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

Not Your Woman will be experiencing a lull due to this project. It's not rigor mortis. Just a stiff nap.

A Little Gem of Defiance -an excerpt: "Here's to you, Jesusa!" by Elena Poniatowska

2007-11-15T07:31:00.000-08:00

I suffered through downpours, the heat, and the cold under that little board out there under the eave when I was with the Torreses, because I didn't have anywhere else to go. I didn't want everyone else to know that I was all alone, like a corncob, so I put up with all of it. When Jose came in drunk he'd be nasty to me, he'd say horrible things, so one day I gave it back to him good. He yelled:
- Shut up, you kept whore! What are you doing here?
- I'm not what you said, and if I were, what would it matter to you? It's none of your business. I can make a kite out of my asshole if I feel like it!
- You cover yourself up real good with someone else's gut when you sleep, and that's some kind of blanket!
Then Epiphania pulled him away and made him go insid, but it didn't stop me from wanting to belt him. I said: "You won't be the fist man I've hit where it hurts. I have calluses from all the jerks I've beaten." He shouted:
-Whore!
And thats when I thought: "It's time for me to get out of here, right now." And the next morning I left real early. There was a lot of mattresses that still had to be washed, full of lice, but it was their problem to work things out so the hotel wouldn't get mad.

*****

The following is not really an attempt at a book review, just a few notes and thoughts:

This book reads the whole way through as the excerpt above. Simple and straightforward a woman names Jesusa tells her story about living in Mexico during the Revolution. She lived and marched with the soldiers, became a spiritual medium, worked her ass to the bone to survive and got into many many fights in her young years. She wasn't joking when she said "You won't be the fist man I've hit where it hurts. I have calluses from all the jerks I've beaten", she did literally rip one mans member. It is an incredible look at the life of a woman. While the writing style gets tedious for me, (as i am partial to lyrical musings) I am completely in awe of this woman. Of course I cannot compare my privileged life to hers, but she inspires me to work my ass off, retaliate to any shit I am thrown, and starve if i have to for what i need and want. She makes me want to take life by the balls and swing it around over my head. . . . or at least just approach those damn neighborhood kids that put a dent in my car the other night.

If you are looking for feisty inspiration or just for a new book, and like character studies (this is fiction based on a real woman the author knew in Mexico) check it out.

I can make a kite out of my asshole if I feel like it!
Beautiful!

Iran cracks down on dress-code, make-up, films....all the vice that's sending us straight to hell.

2007-11-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

From the BBC online, 11.12.07., by Frances Harrison. Continue after the jump for the entire document, including a list of moral vices.

Iranian newspapers have printed a list of moral vices that the police are targeting, including wearing make-up and hats instead of headscarves.

The police say they will also suppress "decadent" films, drugs and alcohol.

This year has seen one of the most ferocious crackdowns on un-Islamic behaviour and improper Islamic dress by the authorities for at least a decade.

But it has now emerged the current campaign has the overt backing of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The police are warning they will deal seriously with any women who dare to wear short trousers, skimpy overcoats or skirts that are revealingly transparent or have slits in them.

Wearing boots instead of full length trousers will not be tolerated, nor will hats instead of headscarves.

Indeed, the police stipulate that small headscarves are out - the scarf must cover a woman's head and neck completely.

The police say they will also clamp down on "decadent" films, drugs, alcohol, extortion and general thuggish behaviour, but it is issues of dress that are given most prominence.

Controversial campaign

In the last six months, tens of thousands of women have been warned or arrested because of their clothes.

During the reformist period, Islamic dress restrictions eased dramatically in Iran, with women wearing bright colours, following Western fashions, and pushing the limits in an attempt to express their individuality.

Some sported strappy, high-heeled sandals with tight three-quarter length trousers, skin-hugging coats at least a size too small, a headscarf perched on the back of their heavily highlighted hair, topped off with large diamond-encrusted sunglasses and matching designer handbag.

But the latest police action has put an end to that kind of dress.

Last week, Ayatollah Khamenei urged the police to keep up their crackdown on social vices, clearly lending his weight to a campaign that has proved controversial.

IRANIAN MORAL VICES...

Terrorising people by quarrelling and feuding in public

Women failing to cover up in a suitable way, such as wearing short trousers revealing the leg, hats instead of scarves, small and skinny scarves that do not cover up the head, and make-up that is unconventional and violates public morality

Wearing decadent Western clothes and displaying signs and insignia of deviant groups

Procuring decadent films

Procuring drugs and alcohol

Source: E'temad newspaper

Book Sense

2007-11-09T08:29:00.001-08:00

In case you don't know (like I didn't)...

BookSense.com is a family of independent-bookseller websites. (And it's the e-commerce arm of the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense program.)

When you visit a BookSense.com virtual bookstore, you will experience the knowledge and passion of independent booksellers who share their love of books with their customers and their communities. You'll have access to information and news about local authors, store events, and myriad staff recommendations -- and you will also be presented with content that reflects the collective wisdom of booksellers from all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Book Sense is a national marketing campaign on behalf of the independent bookstores of America. It is both a local and national effort to shine a light on the knowledge and diversity of independent bookstores, via the Book Sense Bestseller List - now running in more than a dozen newspapers as well as monthly in U.S. News and World Report and on CSPAN - and Book Sense Picks - a monthly selection of eclectic new books chosen by independent booksellers.

Book Sense also offers a gift card welcome at hundreds of participating independent bookstores nationwide! And then there is, of course, BookSense.com.

FIND A STORE WITH BOOKSENSE!

National Novel Writing Month

2007-11-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

I'm totally gonna do this. Tonight. Yeah. One night. One novel. Take THAT, National Novel Writing MONTH. Sissies.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

In 2006, we had over 79,000 participants. Nearly 13,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.

Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: Sign-ups begin October 1, 2007. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Still confused? Just visit the How NaNoWriMo Works page!

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

2007-11-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

Via Jae, who calls this a "hidden gem." It's a bit confusing to understand what this thing is, exactly...I'm getting the idea that it's a museum of curiosities, in the vein of 18th/19th C museums, pre-Barnum (the website alone is fascinating). Whatever it is, I'm loving it. (Museum of Jurassic Technology) Continues after the jump.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.

(right) Micromosaics of Henry Dalton Henry Dalton was born in 1829 in Bury St.Edmunds, England, where his father was a prominent physician. Growing up with a passion for science, young Henry was drawn especially to microscopy which was enjoying modest popularity among the lay public at the time. By his mid-thirties, Dalton was well-skilled as a micrographer and had gained renown among European naturalists for his intricate preparations constructed entirely from diatoms and the scales of butterfly wings. Contracting tuberculosis in 1863, Dalton began a period of extensive Continental travels in an effort to improve his flagging health - travels which served to increased his reputation as a master craftsman.
In addition to creating his micromosaics, Dalton took great joy in instructing young micrographers in the ways of preparing mounted slides, and was known for his generosity with time and enthusiasm. Eventually, Dalton settled in France where he inexplicably changed his name to "Harold" while maintaining his ardor for microscopy until his death at age 82.

The microscopic creations of Henry Dalton were the fruit of extraordinary skill, remarkable patience and a keen aesthetic eye. After devising a design, Dalton would collect numerous butterfly wings of multiple species from all over the world.Â Carefully striping off individual scales with a needle, each scale was then sorted by color, size, and shape creating a extensive palette. Boar bristle in hand, Dalton would then transfer each scale to the slide. Positioning a scale was a laborious task, one that required the use of a microscope and a small tube through which he would breathe to gently move each scale over the glass to its appointed position. Once in place, Dalton would crush a small tiny spot of the scale against the slide, allowing internal oils to act as a natural adhesive. Many of Dalton's remarkable micromosaic preparations would require as many as one thousand individual scales.

Candid: The Stripper Workout

2007-10-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

Jennifer posts on Jezebel about her experience with the stripper workout (10.17.07)...

Stiffed

2007-10-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Susan Faludi's Stiffed (1999), which in its early pages anthropologically examines gender violence. I recommend the book highly.

Following is Sue Halpern's interview with Faludi for the Sept/Oct 99 Mother Jones. You can also read about Stiffed in the NY Times article by Michiko Kakutani from 9.28.99 (excerpts following the interview).

When Susan Faludi published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women in 1992, the moment seemed ripe for a feminist revival. Bill Clinton had been elected, essentially, by women; Anita Hill had outed Clarence Thomas and sparked a national discussion on sexual harassment and gender inequality in the workplace; and Washington had hosted the largest pro-choice rally ever assembled. Meanwhile, Faludi's book, which investigated the myths of women's improving economic and social lives, crested the best-seller lists for almost nine months. Faludi herself became something of a cultural icon -- a professional feminist, pictured on the cover of Time, next to that other cultural icon, Gloria Steinem. But Faludi has always been, above all, a journalist -- in 1991 she won a Pulitzer Prize for labor reporting for the Wall Street Journal -- who's unable to resist a good story when she sees one. In the early 1990s, the stories she saw had mainly to do with men's anger and confusion. She started hanging out at job clubs and Promise Keepers rallies and in Marine recruiting stations and locker rooms. She spent time with male porn stars and cadets at The Citadel. Faludi began to see patterns emerging from these stories. Her new book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, will be published in October by William Morrow & Co.

Your new book, Stiffed, is about men and the culture of masculinity. Why did you call it that?

It actually came out of an interview on a talk-radio sports show. I was in the studio, observing the program, and the host had run out of things to say, so he put me on and asked me to describe my book. He asked me what I was going to call it, and I said that I didn't know. Then the next caller said, "You should call it either Stiffed or Shafted." So I did.

But isn't the title a little ... loaded?

People tend to have one of three reactions when they hear it. They either cringe, they laugh, or they say, "Perfect!" To me it has three meanings: working stiff; the ways guys have been cheated by this society; and the fact that men are supposed to be stiff -- that they have to show their armored self to the world all the time. Having to do that hurts them as much as it hurts everyone else.

So what's a good feminist like you doing writing sympathetically about men?

I don't see how you can be a feminist and not think about men. One of the gross misconceptions about feminism is that it's only about women. But in order for women to live freely, men have to live freely, too. Feminism has shown us that what we think of as feminine is actually defined by cultural messages and political agendas. The same holds true for men and for what constitutes masculinity. Being a feminist opens your eyes to the ways men, like women, are imprisoned in cultural stereotypes.

Okay, but we've always been imprisoned in cultural stereotypes, and the stereotypes have seemed to work in men's favor. Are you suggesting that something has changed?

What's changed in the last decade is that you can be honorable and dogged and have high standards, and the culture may just throw you in the garbage. Manhood has been so tied up with doing socially useful work. The kind of money being made now is not about social utility. It's about whether you've got a good financial manager or not. If you're a hard worker, if you are loyal to the corporation, it's no longer true that you'll be rewarded, or at least honored.

Given that it's a difficult time to be a man, is it a better time to be a woman?

Look, it's hardly a time of great jubilation for anyone. But it's much harder for men in many respects because they have this feeling that women are rising just as men are falling. The truth is, of course, that women are moving from the subbasement to the basement. By any objective measure -- pay, representation in boardrooms, status -- men are still ahead. But psychologically it's much harder to fall than to climb, even if you land at a higher point than those who are just beginning to rise.

But since younger men haven't had that experience, why are they so angry?

It's true that older men have a clearer sense of expectations, of what the deal is, and how it's been broken. Younger men have had no clear guidelines from the start. A lot of their rage comes from that.

Does this begin to explain the massacre at Columbine High School and the other schoolyard -- schoolboy -- shootings?

Columbine seemed consistent, in a very extreme and warped way, with what I was seeing when I researched this book. Here are these young men whose parents were being buoyed by the money culture, yet they did not feel connected to any real society. This massacre is not the act of people who feel connected to a community. Obviously, it doesn't mean that every kid in that situation will act that way.

Why are men so angry when the economy is booming? Didn't white man's rage come to the surface at the end of the '80s, when unemployment was high and we were shifting to the so-called service economy?

I started the book when the economy was in a recession, which seemed to support the conventional wisdom that the economy and masculinity are related -- that men feel emasculated when their lives as wage earners are threatened. But I found that as the economy improved, the men I was talking to were still stricken with a sense that they had been betrayed, and that the betrayal went much deeper than a paycheck. It had to do with loyalty and a social pact that they had been led to believe was bedrock and part of being a man. It had to do with work, with the relationship between men and their community, and even with the sense that they could count on their hometown sports team rewarding their loyalty by staying put. Instead, they saw those teams leave town to chase the biggest money offers somewhere, anywhere, else. And buried much deeper down, it also had to do with the loyalty between fathers and sons.

You mean that older men are angry because their sons have betrayed them, too?

I'd argue against the conventional wisdom that the virtuous fathers delivered the world to their sons on a silver platter and the sons turned around and kicked them in the teeth. Almost the reverse happened. The fathers who came out of World War II and the Depression generation were supposed to hand off positions of leadership to their sons. Instead, they handed off a consumer culture that focused on money, on winning, and on dominating everything and everyone. So who betrayed whom? Consumerism slayed both generations. It co-opted everyone, and left the fathers as flat-footed as the sons. We are now living in a culture that runs on image. How you look matters more than ever. Appearing youthful matters.

So men are upset about the same thing their feminist wives and girlfriends and daughters have been upset about -- that they are judged on how they look. And they're obsessed about it too?

Eating disorders are on the rise in young men, which says something. And the other day, when I was getting my hair cut, the woman who was doing it told me that she's noticed that men are hysterical about their hair these days. They tell her that they're worried that if they lose their hair they won't get a woman. Which, ironically, is just the same thing that women have always said -- that if they're not thin or sexy or pretty enough they won't find a man.

Given men's current preoccupation with their looks, does feminism have things to teach men?

The feminist diagnosis, especially from second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, has remarkable relevance to the male dilemma. The truth is that what feminism is asking for is exactly what men want in their own lives, which is not to be judged according to superficial and ephemeral and impossible-to-attain objectives. Men don't want to live in a world run on retail values any more than women do. Like women, they want to be needed and useful participants in society. They want to have real utility and to be engaged in meaningful work.

Your feminism has always seemed to come from an analysis of political and economic factors in the culture at large. This seems very different from the feminism of younger women, who focus more on being able to express themselves and achieve individual fulfillment and pleasure.

Younger women were born into a world driven by consumer, ornamental, celebrity values. Even if they don't espouse those values, they're caught up in a world where they are being told that they have to do these star turns -- where they have to appear on the cover of a book with their shirt off, for instance. It's easy to attack women who do that. I didn't grow up with that. The difference between older and younger feminists is how we respond to consumer culture. If you're caught up in it, you're probably not thinking about changing it.

What about the recent idea that it's feminist to choose to embrace what has traditionally been called, and derided as, feminine?

Just because someone wears a push-up bra does not mean she's not a feminist. It doesn't mean she is a feminist, either. It's not about what you wear, or if you use makeup or not. I put on lipstick at times, and at other times I don't. I wear various undergarments. But people who focus on that are missing the whole point, which is what you do in the world. Still, I am reluctant to condemn women who engage in this new brand of feminism -- and it probably is a brand by now, with its own trademark -- because it's not their fault. They are trapped in a world where the whole mechanism for social change has gone by the boards.

Are you saying that there is no way to promote social change anymore?

No, I'm saying it's not obvious. These days, everything changes overnight. Nobody knows who is in charge. No one knows who to appeal to. So we need to start at square one and figure out what the forces are and respond to them. It's as if the new culture has eaten up the society like a virus. It's a Philip K. Dick futuristic vision: our lonely selves and our credit cards. Maybe this is how it felt at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The 19th century Dickensian world seemed utterly devastating and insurmountable, but eventually social and political analyses did make a difference. Right now, there is no honest discussion going on.

Isn't that what journalists are paid for?

Absolutely. One major factor contributing to the failure to have this discussion about our consumer society is the media. So much of what we are concerned about in this culture -- like, for example, who has the biggest market share -- has been midwifed by the media. And with less and less commentary of any value to people. So much of the cynicism in journalism comes from journalists willfully avoiding what's going on. Everything is working out just fine for them, and they don't want to question anything because then they'd have to question themselves. As journalists, that's one place to start.

And you? Do you see yourself as a journalist, which is how you have described yourself, or an activist, which is how you were cast after Backlash?

I try to throw these ideas out there and pray that others are thinking about them too. My role is as a writer, because that's where I enter public life. For me, being a writer is the best way to be an activist.

'Stiffed': What Has Happened to Men? by Michiko Kakutani excerpts

This didactic and highly simplistic analysis of what Ms. Faludi calls "the American masculinity crisis" has given way in "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man" to a far more nuanced and sympathetic assessment of what has happened to men in the tumultuous decades since World War II. It is Ms. Faludi's contention, laid out in this thoughtful if bloated new book, that many American men feel they have "lost their compass in the world," that compared with their fathers' generation, they feel "less triumphal, less powerful, less confident of making a living."

Although Ms. Faludi writes that she started this book wondering why men were "so disturbed by the prospect of women's independence," she began to see, as her reporting progressed, that the "gender battle was only a surface manifestation of other struggles," that the sources of men's current disillusionment were deeper and more obscure.

She says she put her "prefigured map" aside and gradually reached the conclusion that men's current predicament stems less from economic uncertainties or advancements made by women than from more fundamental changes in the American culture at large, in particular the shift from a traditional society that valued loyalty, team play and the mastery of a vocation to an "ornamental culture" driven by celebrity and image, "a society drained of context, saturated with a competitive individualism that has been robbed of craft or utility, and ruled by commercial values that revolve around who has the most, the best, the biggest, the fastest."

For Ms. Faludi, this media-driven, ornamental culture -- symbolized by Calvin Klein underwear ads and Details magazine -- subjected men to "the conformism, passivity and consumerist mirror-gazing traditionally held to be feminine," redefining masculinity as "something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources" and manhood as something to be "displayed, not demonstrated."

In laying out this narrative Ms. Faludi has a tendency to repeat herself -- to make the same point over and over again -- and she has a tendency, especially in the second half of the book, to allow her interview subjects to natter on and on and on. But while this volume would have benefited enormously from a strict editing, it nonetheless remains a fair-minded and energetically reported book.

It is a book that eschews the reductive assumptions purveyed by many feminists to put the predicament of the American man (and by implication, the American woman) into a broader cultural context, while showing just how drastically this country has changed during the second half of the 20th century.

The Many Guises of Assault

2007-10-17T09:48:00.001-07:00

October 11, College Callgirl posted about sexual assault (The Number is Eight). She lists the assaults she's lived through, and explains that some of them she never considered rape, and some she faulted herself.

This ties to a recent NPR series on women in the military (Women in Combat), where it was noted that the US armed forces' definition of sexual assault is "intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority or when the victim does not or cannot consent." They also note that:

"Consent" shall not be deemed or construed to mean the failure by the victim to offer physical resistance. Consent is not given when a person uses force, threat of force, coercion or when the victim is asleep, incapacitated, or unconscious.

Circumstances of sexual assault can seem muddy or gray: must the woman say "no?" Must she fight? What if she feels powerless, or feels incapable of disagreeing? It's a difficult topic, made no easier by societal constructs.

College Callgirl does a wonderful job of delineating black and white, and clarifies eloquently. I've also included an excerpt from her following post (Deleted, 10.15.07), regarding comments to this story. THEN, read this article about a Philadelphia judge who convicted three men who raped a prostitute at gunpoint...convicted them to "theft of service," that is. That article was posted in Callgirl's comments section for Deleted.

The Number Is Eight

I have been sexually assaulted more than once. Each time that it happened to me, I felt that extenuating circumstances kept it from truly being rape. I was working as a prostitute, he was my boyfriend, I was drunk, I got in the car. I never believed that I had fought hard enough. I made excuses for the men who hurt me; I told myself "he didn't know what he was doing." When I spoke about my experiences with sexual assault (which I did very rarely), I would say only that “a lot of bad things have happened to me.”

After reading the responses to this post on Jezebel, it occurred to me that I do not know the actual number. I lost track of how many times I had been violated because I did not call them by name. I did not call them by name because I blamed myself. Because I did not name them, I could not fight.

Now I realize that the following occurrences are not hazy or ambiguous. They are assaults, crimes that come to a specific number. No matter what mistakes I made before or after. I have gotten drunk many times. I have had many boyfriends and gotten into many cars. The only times I was raped were when the man I was with was a rapist.

THE LIST:

1. Danny
He was my best friend’s boyfriend, and he took my virginity when I had not yet decided to give it. Still a Christian, I was saving myself for marriage. He took advantage of my crush on him, the fact that I was willing to come over later at night, and the fact that I wanted to kiss him. He ignored me when I said no and I felt ashamed that my inexperienced body responded. I was 13 or maybe 12. He smiled and walked me home afterward, singing songs to “cheer me up” while my bloody underwear was balled up in my pocket. It was the first time a boy ever told me I was beautiful, and I remember the unexpected shock of those words as well as I remember the weight of his arms on mine and the too-hard grind of his teeth against my nipples. When I told his girlfriend, my best friend, what had happened, she did not believe me. I learned my lesson then about rape. It is slippery and hard to see. I decided I had blown the whole thing out of proportion.

2. Matt, Chris, Danny, and others
Matt and I went to school together. After the dismissal bell rang, we would walk over to his house. His friends were older; in their 20s at least. I can’t remember all their names. One day we were all playing around with a pair of handcuffs someone had found. But when I put them on, hands behind my back, no one would give me the key. They circled around me, touching me. One of them offered me a drag of his cigarette, and Matt said, “Don’t give her anything.” I said I had to get home before my parents came home from work. They pulled my top off. Matt said he would let me go after I sucked them all off, starting with Danny. “And no penguin head, either,” he said, meaning that I wasn’t to leave them with their pants around their ankles. I only gave one guy oral sex before they let me go. Not everyone touched me, but none of them stopped it. I blocked this entire incident out of my memory for a year or two, until one day it came rushing back to me.

3. Chris
I was 14 and he was 21. I believed him to be my boyfriend, and only a decade later understood that our age difference meant I had been molested. When I was not in the mood to have sex, he would rape me. Once he raped me in front of a friend, who did nothing to stop it.

4. Robb
He may be the most evil person I’ve ever met. I was 16 and he was 28; we met online and I secretly made the hour and a half drive to spend the night with him. We began dating, although he refused to be monogamous, even having me drop him off at other women’s houses. One day I cut school, came over, and we fucked all day. Halfway through he started slapping me. We had played this game before, but he took it too far. I began to plead with him and he hit me harder. I said no, and he fastened his hands around my neck and choked me with eyes that looked cold. I believed he was going to kill me when I passed out. I came to and he was raping my ass instead. Afterward he told me, “The fear in your eyes made me want to cum and cry at the same time.” I went to school the next day with bruises on my jaw and broken blood vessels on my neck.

5. Dan
I also met him online and came over to his house. I was a teenager and he was an adult, and I now realize, a predator. At the time I just thought we were on a date. Instead he held me down and fucked me while I struggled. When he came he pushed my head down so far on his dick I choked. I wondered why he never called me again.

6. ?
I don’t know his name. I was working as a prostitute when he raped me. I consented to vaginal sex with him and he forced me into anal sex. He put a belt around my neck. “Shh,” he told me. “You’ll like it. Kiss me, relax.” He paid me. I left.

7. Chris
I drunkenly came home with him. Two other girls came too. My head was drooping as they all chattered in the living room. I went to the bathroom and threw up, then stumbled down the hall and passed out on his bed. I woke up with him on top of me. I would see him out afterward, talking to other drunk girls. I always pulled them aside and told them that he had date-raped me, so I’m probably not his favorite person. I later found out he is a high-school teacher.

8. ?
I was leaving an event I had organized. It should have been my moment of celebration. I was drunk, had probably had a line of cocaine, and thought taking a cab home was the safe option. The driver talked me into the front seat with a lame excuse about how he wanted to read my palm. Then he put his hands down my shirt, up my skirt. He told me he could tell I would be “heavy” someday. I said “No, stop.” He drove down dark alleyways touching me, looking for a place to pull over. I begged him to take me home, and finally he did. I didn’t pay.

I didn’t press charges any of these times. Some of them I didn’t even tell anyone about. I am posting this not to revel in my bad experiences, but to show that the real circumstances of real rape don’t always look like we think they should. Rapists are not just evil men who jump out of the bushes. Rape can happen even if you were drunk, even if you stayed still instead of kicking and biting, even if you had an orgasm, even if you liked the guy, even if you had consented to sex with him previously. The lies we are told about what rape silence us. If we aren’t even sure that we have been raped, how can we seek justice?

If all people who have been assaulted would stand up and say, “I have been raped” instead of blaming themselves, more rapists would be punished. So for that reason I am telling all of you that I have been sexually assaulted 8 times. I hope it never happens again, but if it does, I will call it what it is. And I will press charges.

Deleted excerpt

Although I was drunk in only two of those stories and had had one line of cocaine in one of them, many of them said I deserved it for being a "binge drinker" and "cocaine user." Still others believed I deserved it for hanging around with "scumbags" or "going to strange men's houses." And yet for all but 3 of those instances I was under 18. I guess even if you're a CHILD it's your fault if you get assaulted. Just goes to show you how willing many people are to completely twist the a narrative to put the blame on those who are victimized instead of those who perpetrate crimes. It really proves my original point. Telling women it is our fault we have been raped keeps rape from being punished.

Serrano Photographs Destroyed in Sweden

2007-10-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times, by Carol Vogel, posted 10.9.07.

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.

No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show’s curator, although security videos captured much of the incident.

“There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until she saw the axes and crowbars,” Ms. Ohlsson said. “These men are dangerous.”

By the time the masked men had finished, half the show — seven 50-by-60-inch photographs, worth some $200,000 over all — had been destroyed. The men left behind leaflets reading, “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” The fliers listed no name or organization.

“I was shocked and horrified,” Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. “I never expected something like this, especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter.”

Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. “The reaction was so positive,” he said. “I could never imagine anything like this happening.”

Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.

Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. “We think that they had been at the gallery a few days before,” she said. “They knew where to go.”

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.

This is not the first time Mr. Serrano’s work has been attacked, physically or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a $15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Melbourne, Australia.

It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either. About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by a Swedish photographer.

“The History of Sex” remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms. Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to attack the show again.

Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.

Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr. Serrano produced each in editions of three.)

After “The History of Sex” closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden.

Revamping Links...

2007-10-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

Cleaning them - the main page will now only hold daily reads. After the jump (and the Full List link top left) will show all links. This will be under construction for a while though - for the time being, all posts are still at left.

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Sex Advice from Booksellers

2007-10-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

From Nerve (Interviews by David Callicott), posted 10.4.07.

Scott Townsend, 26
Strand Book Store, NYC
www.strandbooks.com

Which books do you recommend to improve someone's game in the sack?
Anything by Charles Bukowski. Because you either realize, "Hey, I've really been a pig," or you realize, "Hey, I'd really like to try being a pig." Even something like Allen Ginsberg, regardless of your sexual preference, because of the fiery passion that goes into the writing. It's like, "I want to do this with you and I don't give a shit."

If you think your new girlfriend might have mixed feelings about your stash of porn magazines, do you keep them hidden?
Me, personally? No. I did date a girl who got mad at me for having a Maxim. I wouldn't hide that. But I wouldn't necessarily say, "Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Let's drink some tea and watch porn."

What books or magazines should you have around your house to show your sex appeal to visitors?
Some history or political books, so you look like you actually know what's going on beyond what's in the Us Weeklys laying around the bathroom.

My girlfriend and I only have sex once or twice a week. She thinks that's enough, but I want more. Should I just be grateful for what I get?
Yeah, be grateful for what you get. Then maybe it would be okay that you have a porn stash, so you can fulfill your sexual drive and still get your intimacy. If she doesn't come over one night, take a trip down Club lane. Nothing wrong with that.

What's the secret to good head?
Concentration and delicacy.

Where is the best place for public sex where you live?
I once had sex underneath the stairs of an apartment on Fourth Street. That was pretty awesome. Also, the subways — I've always wanted to do that, but they're never abandoned enough.

I feel like my partner and I have exhausted every possible option for new positions. Any ideas?
Once I was with this girl, and she was basically doing a handstand and I was standing on top, and it was the most amazing thing either of us had ever done up to that point or since. Or pick up something like the Kama Sutra. And if that doesn't work out, just laugh about it and go to bed. Have some ice cream.

Lori Rozycki, 48
Between the Covers, Telluride, Colorado
www.between-the-covers.com

Can working at a bookstore get me laid?
Who doesn't want to date a bookseller? We climb ladders in skirts, and remain slightly aloof.

Sometimes when I'm out with friends, I flirt and don't bring up the fact that I have a girlfriend. I'll let it go as far as possible without cheating. Is this wrong?
Don't be such a baby. What else is there to do when you're out? Nothing wrong with catch-and-release.

I think my new girlfriend might have mixed feelings about my porn stash. How should I let her know about it?
Mix it in with the cookbooks. Then it seems more like a feminine understanding/connection of sorts. What girl doesn't pick up a Playboy in a dude's house and start looking at it? There are other magazines you could have that would frighten me a lot more, like Men's Vogue or Details.

Should men wax?
Yes. And I think they should bleed once a month, and cry, too. And then they should have a baby.

An ex-girlfriend gave me two very different answers on two different occasions when I asked her how many people she had slept with before me. Should I press her on this, or is it her business?
If you are out of high school, there are other things to discuss. Instead, channel the question to your reading group by asking, "How many books have you read?" Let that be your marker of inadequacy instead.

What books or magazines should I have around my house to up my sex appeal to visitors?
No metaphysical or self-help. Martha Stewart is a deal breaker. You want to have a few casually stacked on the bedside table, like Metropolis — "I know so much about cool building shit!" — and Dave Eggers to show your too-smart, boyish, sensitive side. If not Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer.

My girlfriend and I only have sex once or twice a week. She thinks that's enough, but I want more. Should I be grateful for what I get?
No, you should get a new girlfriend. One who likes to read less in bed.

What's the secret to good head?
I like to preface the act by saying, "You are so fucking lucky."

Jeffrey Lewis, 38
Bluestockings, NYC
www.bluestockings.com

I'm dating a girl who likes it rough, but I feel weird being overly aggressive during sex. Is it normal for women to have what seems to me to be a rape fantasy?
I think it can be fine and healthy to play any sort of game, including rough sex. But really the question is, are you uncomfortable doing it? If you're uncomfortable, don't do it.

What books or magazines should you have around your house to up your sex appeal to visitors?
In terms of magazines, Butt and Girls Like Us. Butt is for homosexual men, but girls are really into it. As far as books go,The Almond, by Nedjma. It manages to be both a pretty amazing little story, and smutty at the same time.

My girlfriend and I only have sex once or twice a week. She thinks that's enough, but I want more. Should I be grateful for what I get?
There ain't no "shoulds." Except maybe you should get into another relationship if you're dissatisfied with the one you have.

If you think your new girlfriend might have mixed feelings about your porn stash, how should you let her know about them?
I think if people like porn, they shouldn't be ashamed of it. I don't know if keeping it on your kitchen table is the best idea, the same way you don't walk around naked. But I think if you're involved with someone, it's a good idea to let them know what you're into if you want to have a good relationship.

Which books do you recommend to help improve someone's sexual life?
The Ethical Slut: a Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton.

Where is the best place for public sex in the city?
Brooklyn.

Brook K. Stephenson, 33
McNally Robinson Booksellers, NYC
www.mcnallyrobinson.com

I think my new girlfriend might have mixed feelings about my porn stash. How should I let her know about it?
You hide it right out in the open. Then sit her down, look through it with her: [flipping through a magazine] "Looks good, looks good. Maybe you'd like to try that?"

What books or magazines should you have around your house to up your sex appeal to visitors?
Purple magazine. Nylon Guys. Nylon for women.

My girlfriend and I only have sex once or twice a week. She thinks that's enough, but I want more. Should I be grateful for what I get, or should I be getting more?
Once or twice a week — you should be getting more. If you're getting it three or four times, ask for five or six. If you're getting five or six, try for seven or eight. Or ask for nine or ten. "C'mon, baby, please." You always gotta push for more.

What's the secret to good head?
Tongue exercises.

What is your signature move?
Counter-clockwise, with a twist.

An ex-girlfriend gave me two very different answers on two different occasions when I asked her how many people she had slept with before me. Which one's the real one?
Take her first answer and double it.

Once again, Henry Rollins talks sense.

2007-10-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

From TowelRoad, posted 10.10.07 (continued after the jump).

Former Black Flag frontman and talk show host Henry Rollins is touring the country with a spoken word show called "Provoked". He spoke recently with the Cleveland Free Times about why he cares so much about gay rights.

Said Rollins: "I think it's really lame what's going on with those that are gay and I'm not gay. I was raised around gay folks. I was raised in the DC area. There are a lot of gay people there. My mom had gay friends. I had gay bosses. I worked at a movie theater and got propositioned four times a weekend. It was like, 'You like boys; nah, it's not going to be me.' I never wanted to kick some guy's ass. Some guys are creeps. But when you see the kind of hatred exacted at these people who can't help how they feel about men, it's sad. What if it was weird to be straight? What if someone said, 'What's wrong with you?' for staring at a woman? I think if Bill and Tom want to get married, they should be able to in America. If someone has a problem with that, go on your way."

He also had a few words about Senator Larry Craig: "It's really ironic but if someone is gay, he should be able to express himself and not eat hand grenades every day. He [Craig] is an older guy. Coming out was not an option for him. He had to be so suppressed and so he married a woman and procreated. It's too bad that's the life he had to live, and it's especially weird if he voted for anti-gay legislation. If you put your hand under the men's room stall, that's not going to go quietly in the night. The hypocrisy is obvious in his case. I'm being easy on the guy and I shouldn't because he's an asshole."

Great Chicago Novels

2007-10-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

Via Book Slut, from Chicago Magazine, 11.07.

THE LIST The question grew out of an everyday bull session: What are the great Chicago novels? We asked a range of knowledgeable academics and literati and put together the results. It's a collection of powerful writing that stands up against the best in American literature. Here, the list in order of publication

THE NEW SCHOOL Chicago lit lives! Doom and gloom persist, but humor and nostalgia lighten the load in these five recent novels with a chance to become classics.

VOTE The experts have spoken; now it's your turn. Which book do you think best defines the city?

I want a unicorn...NOW!

2007-10-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Atheist Delusion....AND The Atheist Delusion 2: Deluded Mailbag. Probably old news to you.

I'm not too old to wear this dress, but I think you're too old to go trick-or-treating.Amy Sedaris on Martha Stewart

2007-10-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

From FourFour, posted 9.27.07. More video (and FourFour comments) after the jump.

This is about 15 minutes of pure splendor: Amy Sedaris' appearance on Tuesday's episode of The Martha Stewart Show. Amy is a very funny woman but her true talent is her ability to openly mock and simultaneously charm a person. My favorite moment occurs when Martha asks Amy about the smoked cheese she's adding to her demonstration cheeseball. You can hear Amy quietly say, "Don't judge me," while Martha is going on about not liking smoked cheese. It's subtle, but so so brilliant.

Also, the way her face falls after Martha tells her, "You're very gullible, Amy," makes me crack up. Jerri Blank will never die as long as Amy Sedaris is making talk-show appearances.

Democrats Take Note

2007-10-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

toothpastefordinner.com

Perspective (is improved from up here)

2007-09-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

From Jezebel, posted 9/26/07, a vintage article (go past the jump).

Dipshittsylvania

2007-09-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a while since I've posted, even posted regularly, but I don't think too many people have noticed. (Anyone?! Anyone!? weepweepweep) I came across Antoine Wilson's blog Wot What after he was mentioned in Skylight Book's e-newsletter (which I receive so that I may be reminded of all the incredibly cool things available to people who don't live in CORNFIELDS but choose instead to reside in actual METROPOLII). Wilson's blog led me to Josh Wolk, and you should check out his humorously incisive dessication of the crap that is being billed as Kid Nation. I won't post the entire text - apparently that's bad blogger etiquette? I'm a verrry slooow learner. But you should visit anyhow, to read more (and to learn the why of the title [which I stole, I STOLE, from his post]). Excerpts below.

There were so many clearly contrived moments, like the shaggy-haired kid who stood up to silence the chaotic crowd with the inspirational words that they were an example for all kids: I think a more realistic thing for a kid to say at that point would be, “Who farted?”

This show works so hard to pack itself with morality moments (including a triumph over a sullen 15-year-old bully) that it has nothing in common with actual-kid behavior, and seems entirely based on behavior seen in bad Afterschool Specials written by clueless adults. The one moment that felt like accurate kid behavior came during the closing credits, when two kids stood in the dirt, whipping each other with their bandanas. That’s what kids do, not figure out how to make biscuits. The currency in Kid Nation shouldn’t be money, it should be boogers and wedgies.

THUGS v. thug

2007-09-17T06:30:00.001-07:00

Last week at Available Light [theatre]'s rehearsal of THE THUGS...

Video by Director Matt Slaybaugh (posted by Lighting Designer Ryan Osborn)

A Short: THE THUGS Rehearsal

2007-09-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

Available Light [theatre]'s THE THUGS (by Adam Bock) opens Thursday Sept 20 and runs through Sunday Oct 7 (including a late-night show after the mainstage on Sat Sept 29) in Columbus, Ohio. For more times and information, and to purchase tickets online, go here.

From AVL's Rehearsal Log from September 6, post and video by director Matt Slaybaugh (after the jump).

Over and Over and Over Again

Well, we've been rehearsing THE THUGS like crazy this week. And I do mean crazy. One of the most difficult days for any cast (and their director) is the first day off-book. That's the first day of rehearsal that the actors aren't allowed to carry their scripts around - they have to finally have it all memorized.

We have a shorter-than-usual process for this play, so off-book came a little fast, as it usually does. And we had our fair share of bloopers and frustration on that night.

It should be noted, however, that this is an unusually difficult script. Though it's short, it has a lot pages that look like this:

CHANTAL Um.
DIANE Yup. No.
CHANTAL Sorry.
DIANE Put this
CHANTAL Right. Right.
DIANE Yup.
CHANTAL Sorry.
DIANE Ok.
CHANTAL So then
DIANE Right.
CHANTAL Right.
DIANE Good.
CHANTAL And.
DIANE Yup.

Let me tell you, that kind of thing is not hard to learn, not 100 pages of it. (Not that the whole play is like that, but you get the idea.)

So, here's a video for those of you who wonder what rehearsing this kind of text is like:

Hugh MacLeod, GapingVoid

2007-09-14T07:43:00.001-07:00

Via Drawn!, the new MacLeod list, in celebration of his 10 year back-of-business-card venture. A few excerpts (visit the list for all of 'em, excellent as always).

6. The way most cartoonists make a living utterly horrifies me.

7. Constantly setting new goals, artistic or otherwise, is harder than it looks.

8. Not caring what other people think is harder than it looks. Especially AFTER you get successful.

9. As I get older the temptation to "tone it down" grows stronger every day. I'm glad I still can resist it, most of the time.

RIP, Infernal Bridegroom Productions.You will be missed.

2007-09-13T09:53:00.001-07:00

The Houston Chronicle (via TheatreForte) brings me belated news of the passing of Infernal Bridegroom Productions, the Texas avant garde theatre company. I interned one summer at IBP, stage managing a mammoth Tamalalia production, and learned a lot about art, theatre, passion, commitment, and beer. Their commission and production of Brian Jucha's We Have Some Planes, one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, was featured on the cover of American Theatre. They commissioned Suzan-Lori Parks' Fucking A and produced countless other premieres, including the yearly blockbuster Tamalalia, a collection of musical farces written by and starring company member Tamarie Cooper, the curvaceous redheaded company member. Their in-house band, led by longtime member Anthony Barilla (who left the group last year), created original music for their shows, which had at last found a permanent home at the Axiom, a punk bar in Texas.

IBP was a home and a haven for countless artists and lovers of art. The company members, actors, designers, techies, volunteers and patrons worked and played together with a joie de vivre that is rare in long-term theatre. I am truly sad for this closing, and wish them all the very best.

To get an idea of their vigor and vision, read Jason Nodler's IBP Bible.

Let's Hear It for the Nuns!

2007-09-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Via the Rolling Stone blog, via Crooks and Liars, from JournalNow, posted 9.1.07.

A progressive group of U.S. nuns has called on Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney because of their roles in the war in Iraq.

“The National Coalition of American Nuns is impelled by conscience to call you to act promptly to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for ... high crimes and misdemeanors,” the group wrote in a letter written on behalf of its board members.

The letter says that impeachment is warranted for their “deceiving the public under the false pretense that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction” and “destroying” the reputation of the United States and the good will of other nations.

“The time for impeachment is now — before the example of George W. Bush’s regime is set in stone,” they wrote. “Future generations will thank you for preserving the freedom of our nation and its relation to the entire human community.”

The coalition was founded in 1969 for individual nuns dedicated to issues of social justice and human rights.

The letter was approved during a mid-August meeting of the board, held in Chicago. During that same meeting, the board unanimously adopted statements opposing all war and affirming peacemaking efforts. “Rather than continuing support of a just-war theory, a more compassionate church would oppose all war and teach peacemaking skills for all levels of government and interpersonal conflict resolution,” the statement reads.

The board also adopted statements pledging to work to “moderate the impact we make on planet Earth,” and supporting nuclear disarmament and relief efforts for the poor in Africa.

Non-Corporate Directory....

2007-09-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Hell yeah! Use The DeLocator to find locally-owned cafes, book stores and movie theatres in your area (search by zip). Fantastic! Read more about Delocator after the jump.

The Delocator.net database is created by public participants. Your input and collaboration is essential in creating an online resource for café goers, bookstore shoppers, and movie buffs who wish to invest in locally owned businesses. Use Delocator.net to find a café, bookstore, or movie theatre that is not owned by a public corporation.

The mission of Delocator.net is to assist the public in finding and supporting independently owned businesses. On the results page for each search, listings of both independently owned entertainment venues and corporate businesses are presented. By comparison of quantity and user-created information, Delocator.net users will be able to make an informed decision about spending a buck (or eight) on a cup of joe, a new book, or an afternoon at the movies.

Why Delocate?

Corporate industries invading American neighborhoods, from coffee chains to bookstore chains, music chains and movie theatre chains, pose a threat to the authenticity of our unique neighborhoods. Although there is room on the map for shared territories - both the homogenous corporate enterprise and the independent ventures across the nation, our independent, community-operated businesses deserve your dime.

In An Analysis of the Potential Economic Impact of Austin Unchained (Nov. 15, 2003), Civic Economics reports: "For every $100 in consumer spending at Borders, the total local economic impact is only $13. The same amount spent with BookPeople (an independently owned bookstore) and Waterloo (an independently owned music store) yields more than three times the local economic impact."

Many independent store owners talk about knowing the community, creating a friendly and supportive atmosphere, and chatting with clients about their kids, school games, and local news.
"People say we're cozy, not corporate," said coffee shop owner Holler. "We can make our own rules and we can empower our staff to do so as well. A Starbucks employee doesn't have the pride in ownership that they do at our store."

Support the underdog and promote a future that includes the culture of small businesses! Independent bookstores are facing a grave challenge. Cody's Books in Berkeley, California was a bona fide cultural institution on Telegraph Avenue. In his recent announcement (May 10, 2006), owner Andy Ross says, "It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Cody's will be closing our doors at the Telegraph Avenue store for the last time on July 10." In the past fifteen years, Cody's sales have declined by 66%. Cody's is certainly not the only independent bookstore to close its doors. The American Booksellers Association has seen a decline in membership from 5200 bookstores in 1991 to 1702 stores in 2005.

With chains on the rise, supporting local institutions (and many independent bookstores are truly thought of as cultural institutions) promotes a future that includes our neighborhood bookstores, movie theaters and coffee shops and denies the type of news that Andy Ross so sadly delivers.

Become active on Delocator.net or Delocator.Mapyourcity.Net and help promote independent businesses across the country!

Delocator.net was launched with the intention of becoming a web-meme, sprouting many future delocated corporate stores.

Think Before You Buy: Made In LA

2007-09-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

I caught most of the PBS P.O.V. presentation this weekend, Made In LA, which follows three immigrant garment workers as they become vocal advocates for workers' rights, targeting Forever 21 specifically, for their below-minimum wages (at times $3), overworking and demeaning treatment (please forgive the terrible grammar/syntax of that sentence). Read the whole synopsis, and then watch it.

I''d been thinking that there had to be some bad labor practices behind Forever 21, because everything is so damn cheap. I'd just assumed they used overseas factories. Which doesn't make it better, I know. But something like 95% of the clothing sold by that store (it was in the 90s%) is made in LA. So it is no mo Forever 21. Which is ok. I'm 27 anyhow.

2007-09-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

From Available Light [theatre], posted 9.6.07.

Of course, it's not that easy (Iowa)

2007-09-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

Via CNN, posted 8.31.07.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Two men sealed the state's first legal same-sex marriage with a kiss Friday morning, less than 24 hours after a judge threw out Iowa's ban on gay marriage and about two hours before he put the ruling on hold.

It was a narrow window of opportunity.

Thursday afternoon, Polk County Judge Robert Hanson temporarily cleared the way for same-sex couples across the state to apply for marriage licenses in Polk County.

He ruled that Iowa's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed marriage only between a man and a woman, violated the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection of six gay couples who had sued.

County attorney John Sarcone promised a quick appeal, and he asked Hanson to stay his ruling until the appeal was resolved.

A dozen gay and lesbian couples were waiting at the county recorder's office when it opened Friday morning.

By late morning, 20 had applied for marriage licenses when Recorder Julie Haggerty announced that she had been instructed to stop accepting the applications. Hanson later said the judge had formally stayed his ruling.

The judge's stay means the recorder's office is not permitted to accept any more marriage applications from gay couples until the Iowa Supreme Court rules on the county's appeal.

Sean Fritz and Tim McQuillan were among the lucky few to get their application through.

The marriage license approval process normally takes three business days, but Fritz and McQuillan took advantage of a loophole that allows couples to skip the waiting period if they pay a $5 fee and get a judge to sign a waiver.

Friday morning, the Rev. Mark Stringer declared the two Iowa State University students legally married in a wedding on the Unitarian minister's front lawn in Des Moines.

"This is it. We're married. I love you," Fritz told McQuillan after the ceremony.

Fritz explained their hurry: "We're both in our undergrad programs and we thought maybe we'd put it off until applying at graduate school, but when this opportunity came up, we thought maybe we wouldn't get the opportunity again."

Republican House Minority Leader Christopher Rants said the ruling illustrates the need for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

"I can't believe this is happening in Iowa," Rants said. "I guarantee you there will be a vote on this issue come January," when the Legislature convenes.

Gov. Chet Culver left open the possibility of state action.

"While some Iowans may disagree on this issue, I personally believe marriage is between a man and a woman," the governor said.

Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and nine other states have approved spousal rights in some form for same-sex couples. Nearly all states have defined marriage as being solely between a man and a woman, and 27 states have such wording in their constitutions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Dennis Johnson, a lawyer for the six gay couples who sued after being denied marriage licenses in 2005, said Iowa has a long history of aggressively protecting civil rights in cases of race and gender. The Defense of Marriage Act contradicts previous rulings regarding civil rights and is simply "mean spirited," he said.

Roger J. Kuhle, an assistant Polk County attorney, argued that the issue was not for a judge to decide.

Hanson ruled that the state law banning same-sex marriage must be nullified, severed and stricken from the books, and the marriage laws "must be read and applied in a gender neutral manner so as to permit same-sex couples to enter into a civil marriage ..."

"This is kind of the American Dream," said plaintiff Jen BarbouRoske, of Iowa City. "I'm still feeling kind of shaky. It's pure elation. I just cannot believe it."

Kate Varnum of Cedar Rapids, another plaintiff, said she was elated but expected more legal battles: "I don't expect this to be the last one."

Good Job, Iowa!

2007-08-31T07:05:00.000-07:00

Via CNN, posted 8.30.07.

Iowa court rules same-sex couples can marry

An Iowa district court ruled Thursday that same-sex couples can marry based on the state constitution's guarantee of equal treatment, court documents show.

The ruling was in response to a December 2005 lawsuit brought by six same-sex couples seeking to wed. They were denied marriage licenses and claimed such treatment violates equal-protection and due-process clauses in the Iowa constitution.

The court also struck down a state law declaring valid marriages are only between a man and woman.

The Iowa District Court for Polk County advances the case to the Iowa Supreme Court which will make a final decision on same-sex marriage, according to Lambda Legal, a gay and lesbian legal organization representing the couples.

The 63-page ruling, written by Judge Robert Hanson states: "Couples, such as plaintiffs, who are otherwise qualified to marry one another may not be denied licenses to marry or certificates of marriage or in any other way prevented from entering into a civil marriage pursuant to Iowa Code Chapter 595 by reason of the fact that both persons compromising such a couple are of the same sex."

The law describing marriage as between a man and a woman, "constitutes the most intrusive means by the state to regulate marriage. This statute is an absolute prohibition on the ability of gay and lesbian individuals to marry a person of their choosing," Hanson wrote.

Lambda says the six couples are all in long-term relationship - one couple has been together for six years, another couple has been together for 17 years.

"Three of the couples are raising children, others are planning families, and all want the responsibilities of marriage and the protections only marriage can provide," according to the organization.

"We respectfully disagree with the court's decision, and we're going to ask for a stay," said Polk County Attorney John Sarcone.

He said his office will examine whether it's best to file a motion to reconsider. But barring a change in the court's opinion, Sarcone will appeal the ruling.

Co-counsel for the plaintiffs along with Lambda Legal, Dennis Johnson called the ruling "a significant step forward in recognizing the constitutional rights of all Iowans, and it's an amazing day for same-sex couples and their families all across Iowa."

Friday Zen....

2007-08-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

He's really not bad....

New Wes Anderson, DARJEELING LIMITED

2007-08-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Wes Anderson's new film, Darjeeling Limited, featuring Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman, will premiere in September at the New York Film Festival.

'Darjeeling Limited' lands Oscar-lucky spot opening New York Film Fest
by Tom O'Neil for The Envelope, posted 8.28.07

Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" will open the New York Film Festival in September. That's often a perch for Oscar takeoff, as previously proven by "The Queen," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Mystic River" and "About Schmidt," among others.

Anderson received an Oscar bid for best original screenplay of 2001 for penning "The Royal Tenenbaums," which also earned a Golden Globe for Gene Hackman as best comedy actor.

"The Darjeeling Limited" will be released by Fox Searchlight in December. It's the tale of three American brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who take a trip together after the death of their father and disappearance of their mom. Mayhem ensues when they get kicked off a train in India.

"One of them organized this spiritual journey for them to bond, but it really just turns into a bender," Anderson told Entertainment Weekly.

Columbus (OH) Craft Fair

2007-08-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

NOON - 7PM

SKULLY'S MUSIC-DINER

For more information, visit the website and myspace.

“The 100% American is 99% idiot.” George Bernard Shaw

2007-08-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Did you see the PBS series, THE ANTI-AMERICANS (a hate/love relationship) last night?

My favorite part is when an 8 year old French school girl shows the camera her drawing of what she thinks of when she hears "America." It's an oil well shooting oil into the sky, and George Bush is catching it all with a huge bucket. She says something like, "This is George Bush catching all the oil and massacring the planet. He feels ok about massacring the planet." Wow. Wish some American adults paid as much attention as the elementary school children of France. Altho some of those Europeans are dolts, too. The Polish country music singer made me weepy, until the confederate-flag merchandise shows up at a Polish country festival. Ech. Bush's biggest European fans? Middle Eastern emigrants (now French citizens) rapping about drugs and their bitches. They like Bush "Because he gets things done." Even if they're shitty things.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP. Visit the PBS site for this show for video clips, and further information. Check local listings for reshowings.

It’s an interesting time to be an American visiting Europe.

On September 11, 2001, thousands of Europeans came to the U.S. embassies in their countries to express solidarity with the Americans under attack. Even Le Monde, the newspaper of the French elite, proclaimed “we are all Americans.”

By now, however, the goodwill is long gone, eradicated by bad feelings over the Iraq war, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, global warming and a host of other disagreements.

But long before George W. Bush became President, Europeans had very strong (and often negative) opinions about American culture and politics.

THE ANTI-AMERICANS (a hate/love relationship) examines the complicated mixture of envy, pride, admiration, and cultural misunderstanding that characterizes European views. It’s a situation that has led some commentators to say that “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”

This film examines the current status of European attitudes towards America in three very different places: France, the United Kingdom and Poland. Freely mixing humor with provocative commentary, the program shows how Old World attitudes can be both nuanced and simplistic at the same time – sometimes contradictory, sometimes predictable, but always worthy of our interest.

From French puppets conducting fake-news programs to Polish country-western singers and an opera made out of the Jerry Springer Show, THE ANTI-AMERICANS presents a vibrant and memorable portrait of European culture today.

Uncontrollable Women of Dayton, OH

2007-08-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

"We can't be held in check or restraint...We all ride. We don't ride on the back. We don't ride on someone elses bikes. We ride our own. We got our own shit. And that's what makes us different from everybody else."

- Unconscious Nana, founder of the Uncontrollable Women, features on "Bangs," from VBS tv (available online).

Hey, Americans! Read a book!

2007-08-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

Via Washington Post, by Alan Fram from the AP, posted 8.21.07.

One in Four Read No Books Last Year

WASHINGTON -- There it sits on your night stand, that book you've meant to read for who knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing _ you are not alone.

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year _ half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

That choice by Bustos and others is reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started _ a similar but not directly comparable question _ the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet.

Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn't read a single book this year? Nearly a third of men and a quarter of women fit that category. They tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious.

At the same time, book enthusiasts abound. Many in the survey reported reading dozens of books and said they couldn't do without them.

"I go into another world when I read," said Charlotte Fuller, 64, a retired nurse from Seminole, Fla., who said she read 70 books in the last year. "I read so many sometimes I get the stories mixed up."

Among those who said they had read books, the median figure _ with half reading more, half fewer _ was nine books for women and five for men. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger.

Pollyann Baird, 84, a retired school librarian in Loveland, Colo., says J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series is her favorite. But she has forced herself to not read the latest and final installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," because she has yet to file her income taxes this year due to an illness and worries that once she started the book, "I know I'd have to finish it."

People from the West and Midwest are more likely to have read at least one book in the past year. Southerners who do read, however, tend to read more books, mostly religious books and romance novels, than people from other regions. Whites read more than blacks and Hispanics, and those who said they never attend religious services read nearly twice as many as those who attend frequently.

There was even some political variety evident, with Democrats and liberals typically reading slightly more books than Republicans and conservatives.

The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. Popular fiction, histories, biographies and mysteries were all cited by about half, while one in five read romance novels. Every other genre _ including politics, poetry and classical literature _ were named by fewer than five percent of readers.

More women than men read every major category of books except for history and biography. Industry experts said that confirms their observation that men tend to prefer nonfiction.

"Fiction just doesn't interest me," said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Ala. "If I'm going to get a story, I'll get a movie."

Those likeliest to read religious books included older and married women, lower earners, minorities, lesser educated people, Southerners, rural residents, Republicans and conservatives.

The publishing business totaled $35.7 billion in global sales last year, 3 percent more than the previous year, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association. About 3.1 billion books were sold, an increase of less than 1 percent.

The AP-Ipsos poll was conducted from August 6 to 8 and involved telephone interviews with 1,003 adults. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Has Manhattan MiniStorage Gone Over the Edge???!!!!

2007-08-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

Whatever. You can't drive 30 miles in any US countryside (south, midwest, et al) without running the gauntlet of UberChristian billboards - "A CHILD IS A GIFT FROM GOD" and the ten commandments and rebel flags and "ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN." Yes, I know abortion kills children. But it's much cleaner before said child busts through my pussy and becomes another mouth to feed / reminder of my rape / burden that will cause me to psychologically break / etc etc. 'Sides, the State does not hold your arm back when you're whacking your sinning child with a tire iron - why should it keep me from cleaning out the little collection of cells that's gathered in my uterus?

But you didn't ask for my opinion.

Follow the image link to the video, at WCBS TV, 8.16.07.

What a Difference a Decade Makes!

2007-08-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks Noah!

Karl Rove Gets to Goin'

2007-08-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

From the Wall Street Journal, "Karl Rove to Resign at the End of August" by John D. McKinnon, posted 8.13.07 (text immediately below) and from the NY Times, "The Rove Legacy" by Adam Nagourney, posted 8.13.07 (text after jump, after first article).

Karl Rove to Resign At the End of August

Karl Rove, President Bush's longtime political adviser, is resigning as White House deputy chief of staff effective Aug. 31, and returning to Texas, marking a turning point for the Bush presidency.

Mr. Rove's departure removes one of the White House's most polarizing figures, and perhaps signals the effective end of the lame duck administration's role in shaping major domestic policy decisions, where the former Texas political consultant was a driving force. Mr. Rove revealed his plans in an interview with Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

President Bush made a formal announcement Monday morning. "Karl Rove is moving on down the road," Mr. Bush said, appearing grim-faced on the White House's South Lawn with Mr. Rove at his side. "We've been friends for a long time and we're still going to be friends... I'll be on the road behind you here in a bit," he said.

"I'm grateful to have been a witness to history. It has been the joy and the honor of a lifetime," said Mr. Rove, his voice quivering at times. "But now is the time... At month's end," Mr. Rove said, "I will join those whom you meet in your travels, the ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you."

After a lengthy hug from Mr. Bush and then his wife, Laura, Mr. Rove joined them on the president's helicopter. Mr. Rove, his wife and their son were flying with Mr. Bush on Air Force One to Texas, where the president is vacationing.

Mr. Rove, who has held senior posts in the White House since Mr. Bush took office in January 2001, told Mr. Gigot he first floated the idea of leaving a year ago. But he delayed his departure as, first, Democrats took Congress, and then as the White House tackled debates on immigration and Iraq, he said. He said he decided to leave after White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day they would be obliged to remain through the end of the president's term in January 2009.

"I just think it's time," Mr. Rove said in the interview. "There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family." Mr. Rove and his wife have a home in Ingram, Texas, and a son who attends college in nearby San Antonio.

In the interview, Mr. Rove said he expects Democrats to give the 2008 presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he described as "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate." He also said Republicans have "a very good chance" to hold onto the White House in next year's elections.

Mr. Rove also said he expects the president's approval rating to rise again, and that conditions in Iraq will improve as the U.S. military surge continues. He said he expects Democrats to be divided this fall in the battle over warrantless wiretapping, while the budget battle -- and a series of presidential vetoes -- should help Republicans gain an edge on spending restraint and taxes.

Mr. Rove established himself as the political genius behind the rise of George W. Bush and the brief period of united Republican rule. But he did it largely through highly divisive policies and campaign tactics, such as the attacks on Democratic rival John Kerry the 2004 campaign. That strategy appears finally to have backfired, as seen in the Republican loss of Congress in 2006, and Mr. Bush's low poll numbers.

Mr. Rove has advised Mr. Bush for more than a decade, working with him closely since Mr. Bush first announced he was running for governor of Texas in 1993 and serving as chief strategist in his presidential campaign in 2000. Before joining the White House, he was president of Karl Rove & Co., the Austin, Texas-based public affairs firm he founded. Mr. Rove first became involved in Republican politics in the 1970s.

"Obviously it's a big loss to us," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said. "He's a great colleague, a good friend, and a brilliant mind. He will be greatly missed, but we know he wouldn't be going if he wasn't sure this was the right time to be giving more to his family, his wife Darby and their son. He will continue to be one of the president's greatest friends."

Mr. Rove, 56 years old, has been embroiled in many White House controversies in Mr. Bush's second term, and faced investigation -- but wasn't indicted -- in the White House leak case that ensnared I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. He also has become a target of intense scrutiny in Congress over the firings of a number of U.S. attorneys. Mr. Rove and his political operatives in the White House had some involvement with the decision, but the extent of their role isn't clear, because the White House has asserted executive privilege in refusing to comply with congressional demands for documents and interviews, including with Mr. Rove. Mr. Rove's departure is likely to lessen the intensity of that constitutional clash, if only slightly.

The Rove Legacy

Karl Rove leaves the White House in anything but victory. His legendary reputation was seriously diminished by the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, and has been eroded almost every day since then, as President Bush has struggled through his second term.

There probably was no better sign of how far this White House has fallen than at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames this weekend, a gathering of probably the most committed Republicans in the country. This was where Mr. Rove displayed his political skills to the country in 1999, steering Mr. Bush to a victory in a nonbinding poll that nonetheless cemented his position as his party’s prohibitive favorite.

Mr. Bush’s name was barely mentioned in Ames on Saturday, much less Mr. Rove’s. The winner of the contest, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, offered a pretty grim verdict on the last seven years in Washington when he said, “If there has ever been a time that we needed to see change in Washington, it is now.”

Gone are the days when Republican candidates were expected to fight to become the heir to either the Bush legacy or Mr. Rove himself.

Yet even as Mr. Rove fades from the scene — a process that, in truth, had begun well before he announced his resignation in an interview published today in The Wall Street Journal — his influence over the 2008 Republican presidential campaigns is already quite apparent. His is a legacy that will, for better or for worse, be one of the factors that determine whether Republicans keep the White House in 2008.

Look at the campaign-staff roster of any of the major Republican presidential candidates — Mr. Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, John McCain — and it is hard not to find people who have worked with or under Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman.

If Mr. Rove is to some extent discredited in Republican circles, blamed for political mistakes that have contributed to the staggering decline of Mr. Bush’s standing with the American public, that has not stopped the people who have worked around him from embracing many of his tactics.

Mr. Romney’s decision to compete in the nonbinding straw poll in Iowa over the weekend was taken right from the pages of Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign strategy, and Mr. Romney’s aides pointed to Mr. Bush’s 1999 showing as they claimed success here.

Mr. McCain’s entire campaign strategy, initially at least, seemed to clone the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. That began with recreating the conservative political coalition that Mr. Rove put together for Mr. Bush, and continued with the fundraising network. (Needless to say, that did not prove to be the smartest strategic decision of the cycle.)

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign of 2008 is built, like Mr. Bush’s was in 2004, almost entirely on the idea of attacking Democrats as unable to protect the nation from a terrorist attack.

Over at the Republican National Committee, party officials, at Mr. Rove’s direction, had been working to prepare the 72-hour-plan voter turnout operation — the sophisticated system of identifying friendly voters and coaxing them to the polls — that Mr. Rove and Mr. Mehlman championed in 2000 and 2004, and that arguably accounted for Mr. Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio. That system will be turned over in this campaign cycle to the party’s nominee, as soon as he is chosen.

Similarly, Mr. Rove and the party have been studying the Democratic candidates and trying to identify their biggest vulnerabilities, in preparation for the kind of concerted early attack that Mr. Rove directed against John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 2004.

To that end, Mr. Rove’s description of Hillary Rodham Clinton as “fatally flawed” in his interview with the Journal did not seem like idle chatter.

Mr. Rove said he would not join any of the presidential campaigns. In some ways, though, it’s hard to imagine him staying aloof if his services are requested. This election may be Mr. Rove’s last chance to salvage a reputation that was damaged in 2006. He surely recognizes that being identified with a successful effort to win back Congress and to defeat a “fatally flawed” candidate could restore at least some of the luster to a man who was so long described in Washington as a political genius.

Truth be told, though, as of today he probably would not be very welcome in many of the campaigns. Even some of his former lieutenants are apt, in private moments, to speak of Mr. Rove in tones of disappointment, disillusionment and no small amount of anger.

Many remember Mr. Rove’s lofty ambitions — his talk of overseeing a political realignment that would marginalize Democrats for a generation — and think he aimed too high. Many wonder if a strategy aimed entirely at methodically identifying and stoking the party’s conservative base, with issues like gay marriage, abortion and terrorism, was ever a recipe for long-term political dominance, much less for governing a country.

Laugh if you don't wanna cry...

2007-08-03T05:26:00.000-07:00

Both from the NY Nerd. Right, This fantastic sign was posted on an I-80 overpass in Berkeley, California 7.25.07.

Pro-lifers have to think it through...

2007-08-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

From the NY Nerd, posted 7.30.07.

Brilliant documentary asks pro-lifers the simple question, how much jail time should a woman who has an illegal abortion get? None of these activists have ever thought it through. If the pro-lifers get their way, and the Supreme Court declares the Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to choose, the power of legality will be under the states’ jurisdiction. Some states may declare abortion a crime, but what penalty could you attach? How much jail time should a woman do? Brilliant question:

Have You Seen the Shit Parade?

2007-07-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Los Angeles, where I met all the hosts of the wildly popular Shit Parade Show, a podcast on music and comedy, including several interviews with musicians and writers. Joel Church-Cooper, Erin Gibson and Blake Walker are:

three twenty something Los Angeles comedy professionals, along with special guests, telling stories about how we've been shaped and influenced by music and packaging it into a neat, weekly, thirty minute podcast.

If you haven't heard 'em yet, check out the Shit Parade: myspace and website.

classified

2007-07-22T12:52:00.001-07:00

from http://www.sexblo.gs/

Sex and the City....

2007-07-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

Lynn Yaeger does a fantastic trip of nostalgia through her rendering (ahem, I mean the official rendering) of the new Sex and the City movie script, for the Village Voice, posted 7.17.07. A little chick-lit-film for a guilty hump day.

A chic, unnamed café in a chic, unnamed part of Manhattan. CHARLOTTE , MIRANDA, and SAMANTHA are sipping chic, unnamed cocktails as they wait once again for CARRIE to arrive from her book tour in Paris.

***************************

MIRANDA There she is! There's our girl!

CARRIE Oh my God, I am so glad to be home again! This was a whole lot different from my last trip to Paris with Aleksandr Petrovsky, let me tell you. But after I found Big in bed with two idiot-stick-figures-with- no-souls—twins!—just a couple weeks after we got back to New York, I knew I had to dump him forever. Luckily my latest book, All Men Suck, which bombed in the States, was a huge hit in France, where it was called Tous les Hommes sont Poo-Poo Têtes. So off I went on a spectacular book tour, though when I tried to check into the Plaza Athénée, where I lived with Alexandr, I got a shock—that suite we had was $1,900 a night! Guess those "large-scale light installations" brought in a lot of dough. Oh well, I was perfectly happy around the corner at the Hotel de Poubelle.

SAMANTHA Did you meet any men over there?

CARRIE Only poo-poo têtes. Um, Miranda, excuse me, but what in God's name are you wearing?!

MIRANDA Leather chaps. Maria loves me in leather chaps.

CARRIE Maria?

MIRANDA You remember Maria, Samantha's girlfriend from Season Four, Episode 51? She's with me now.

CARRIE Oh my God, you're with Sonia Braga? What about Steve?

MIRANDA Oh my God, Carrie—after he talked about Scooby-Doo to the senior partners at my law firm's annual dinner for three hours, I knew he had to go. I mean, even Brady Hobbs-Brady doesn't watch cartoons anymore. Don't worry about Steve—he's living over that bar he owns with Aidan, and I'm paying him a fortune in alimony.

CARRIE And what's that in your nose?

MIRANDA A diamond lambda stud. I'm at Lambda Legal Defense Fund now, working for kids who have two mommies, just like Brady Hobbs-Brady.

CARRIE Speaking of kids, what the hell is that racket at the next table?

MIRANDA Charlotte's brood. She had to bring them with her—nanny's day off.

CHARLOTTE (voice rising): Mai Pang Goldenblatt, settle down and study your haftorah portion! Hussein Goldenblatt, a yarmulke is not a miniature Frisbee! No, Krishnamurti Goldenblatt, you may not go parasailing Friday night, that's the Sabbath! Latifah Goldenblatt, stop pulling Hiawatha Goldenblatt's hair or I won't help you with your Queen Esther costume!

CARRIE (whispering): How many kids does she have now?

SAMANTHA Nine—or maybe seven. She gave two to Sanford and Marcus when they got married in Provincetown.

CARRIE Samantha, I'm so glad I got back from Europe in time for your big benefit.

SAMANTHA Oh, thank God. The Cancer Is Crap party just wouldn't be the same without you, Carrie. You know, ever since I liquidated Samantha Jones Public Relations and dedicated myself to women's health issues with my new business partner—that nun, Julia Sweeney, who I met in the cancer doctor's waiting room—I have a whole new perspective.

CARRIE And talk about new perspectives—what's that on your feet? Flats?!?

SAMANTHA Lanvin ballet flats, if you please. Bunions, honey. No more heels. But who cares? I need to be able to run around town raising money for Cancer Is Crap. To tell you the truth, those heels were nothing but a pain in the behind.

CARRIE Is Smith proud of you?

SAMANTHA Smith? Nah. Actually, we broke up. He wanted to have kids— he probably should have been with Charlotte in the first place. I mean, I'm not going to go through that petri dish business. When you're in your fifth decade—I mean fourth! What am I saying? Fourth! Fourth!—it's not so easy to have a little brat. Not that I want one . . .

CARRIE So no boyfriend now?

SAMANTHA Remember the rich guy from Season Two, Episode 20? Donald Trump's friend?

CARRIE The old guy with all the money? The one with the saggy ass and the Viagra?

SAMANTHA His ass isn't that bad with the lights out, and let's face it, mine isn't getting any perkier. And I'll tell you something about Viagra, honey—it works.

CARRIE So you're with that guy now?

SAMANTHA Honey, he's the big bucks behind Cancer Is Crap. And I made Richard— that bastard—chip in a few dollars, too.

CARRIE You're incredible!

SAMANTHA Well, this party is going to be incredible! We've closed all the streets in the meatpacking district, and everyone is coming: Candice Bergen—I mean Anna Wintour, with Wallace Shawn—the food writer; and the Turtle, and Charlotte's sidekick Anthony, and Magda the maid. And just for fun, all of Miranda's ex-boyfriends—Skipper, and the guy who liked to be spanked, the one who wanted do it in doorways, the jerk who was obsessed with models, the creep with the kid, the Catholic who made you feel dirty, and the phone-sex addict, and the sports-medicine doctor! And Carrie! Just for old time's sake, I'm having the guy who talked to his mother about his sex life, and the one who was in the mental institution, the fellow patient you met in the shrink's office, the youngster whose mom came home while you were smoking pot, the politician who liked to be peed on, and the friend's husband who exposed himself to you in the Hamptons, and the model you laid next to all night and didn't do anything with! And Berger, who broke up with you on a Post-It note! And the sailor from New Orleans you met during Fleet Week! And the . . .

CARRIE Stop! I need you to invite someone I don't know! I'm the only one who's coming to Cancer Is Crap alone. Miranda will be with Maria and Brady Hobbs-Brady; Charlotte is plus-eight; you'll have Mr. Millionaire Viagra; and I'll be alone with my notebook. Oh well, I can just spend the night making notes for my next book: The Crisis of the American Health System, or Why All Men Should Be Denied Necessary Surgery by Their Insurers Until They Ask Me for a Date.

CocoRosie: The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn

2007-07-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Shake It Records, the new CocoRosie has been out a little while now. More complex than what they've done before, and slightly more approachable.

Whatever, I don't know jack about music.

All I know is that CocoRosie is like Tom Waits. If, instead of a gruff manly-man, he were a couple of 95-lb Canadian girls who think they're unicorns.

Shake It USA

2007-07-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that Shake It Records in Northside, Cincinnati, is open and ready to serve all your musical needs.

I easily forget that Shake It is the only place in town that doesn't present me with a blank stare when I ask, "Glue? Astronautalis? CocoRosie? Tegan and Sara? Hello?" They've got all that PLUS tickets for area shows PLUS hard-to-find (here) periodicals PLUS used music and movies. PLUS. To sig up for their weekly email newsletters, go here, or for their myspace, go here.

I try to go here first - and the long trek (ish) to Northside is always worth knowing Shake It has it, and will always (or thereabouts) be around. * I know there's another store near Kenwood, to which I've never been, and whose name I'm forgetting. So they may be as reliable, I don't know. This post is about Shake It.

Open Call: Writers, Artists, Designers.....

2007-07-10T11:32:00.001-07:00

I'm putting together a new publication/periodical - a collection of art and writing. This is lo-fi, low-stress, and free to all participants.

WHAT: If you're interested, send me anything you've got: essays, poems, stories, drama, quotes, sketches, doodles, photos, graphics, interviews...any genre, any style, anything goes. I'll compile the material and send a hard copy to all involved, and set up a website as well.

HOW: Email me your material (in the body of the email or attached as word file, rtf or jpg, preferably). If you don't have my email, leave a comment to this post with yours - I'll contact you then erase your comment (so your email address isn't available for all and sundry).

DEADLINE: AUGUST 31, 2007

FAQ: You can publish under a pseudonym (or as Anonymous or Anon) if you prefer.

If you have a work in progress, that's ok. Include a disclaimer (if you'd like) and that will be included with your work. Want feedback? Include an offer for receiving feedback and that will be included with your work.

You will retain all copyrights, and since this is so casual, it will not preclude entering your work for awards/publication in other periodicals/organizations.

Note: All graphics will be in black and white.

FREE ADS: If you're a performer/musician and would like to include an "ad" about upcoming shows, send in the information and/or a graphic and I'll include it in the publication. Again, this too is free.

UPDATE: Submissions have been coming in, so contribute now!

QUESTIONS? CONCERNS? BRILLIANT OBSERVATIONS? Leave a comment!

and....more people without wombs pass laws about what we can do with ours. fan-effin-tastic.

2007-07-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

From the inimitable PunkAss Blog by Marc, 7.6.07.

An alarming amendment to the state constitution is gaining a tiny bit of traction in Colorado. This is the language proposed by the group Colorado for Equal Rights:

As used in Article 2, Section 3, 6, and 25 of the Colorado Constitution, the words “person” and “persons” shall include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

They’ve already had a meeting with the Legislative Council and have a meeting with Colorado’s Secretary of State scheduled for July 18th. That meeting will determine what the amendment will be called on the November 2008 ballot.

Just thought you should know.

"Greed is no longer perceived as a bad thing" and "there's more acceptance of women who want to marry a wealthy man"

2007-07-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to think. I guess I know what I should think. Homer from Breathe Through Your Damn Mouth cites this article - it incensed her. What do you think?

From UK's The Independent, "Confessions of a gold digger," by Lucy Bulmer, posted 7.1.07. Image: "Emma Harvey, 32, is a member of the dating website sugardaddie.com."

Cinderella knew what she was up to when she dressed up to the nines in borrowed clothes and swanned off to the ball. She may have been little more than a scullerymaid, but she was out to bag a prince, and she got one. These days you'd find her perched on a bar stool in a Mayfair nightspot such as Pangaea or Boujis, dressed top to toe in Gucci or Cavalli, dripping with designer jewels and quaffing Bollinger at £180 a bottle. Oh, and she'd probably, apparently, be Russian.

Gold diggers seem to be everywhere at the moment. From headlines warning millionaires of Slavic sirens out to grasp their expense accounts, to column inches devoted to mind-boggling divorce settlements. In May, Beverley Charman bagged £48m from her former husband - the biggest divorce award ever. Our fascination with women who hook up with wealthy men is almost endless.

Certainly, whenever a good-looking woman marries a rich man we ask the question: is it love or is she after his money? We all laughed knowingly when comedian Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton asked Debbie McGee: "So what was it that attracted you to the multi-millionaire Paul Daniels?" The red-tops went into a frenzy when it was revealed that Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins had slept with and then set up home with her well-off married boss. And poor old Heather Mills McCartney can't seem to put a foot right. These people no doubt married for love, but have continually had to put up with questions.

Recent moves by the Law Commission to give unmarried co-habitees the same financial claims as divorcees in the event of a split were hailed in the press almost gleefully as a gold-digger's charter. So is there a whole new breed of manhunter in town?

"I'm not ashamed to admit that getting married to a wealthy man is my top priority," says Joanna Marie-Clayton, a 27-year old actress and singer from Surrey who is currently working in a care home. "I want to be financially stable and to be able to afford the nice things in life. Frankly, I'm unlikely to achieve that through my own work."

Clayton points out that these days, with the divorce rate so high, considerations such as security are more important than just love. Her dream, she says, is to have a 10-bedroomed house in the country with acres of land and staff to maintain it. "We'd have two or three classic cars - I'd like a Mercedes Kompressor convertible. His and hers would be nice. I'd like lots of dogs, some stables and probably another property in London. I'm not really into designer labels, but it would be nice to be able to buy what I wanted when I wanted. I don't see what's wrong with wanting to meet a man who can provide me with these things - in the past, it was accepted as a woman's duty to make a good marriage and what's so wrong with that?"

The British writer Tasmina Perry, author of the bestseller Daddy's Girls, has chosen gold diggers as the subject of her latest novel, tipped to be this summer's top beach read. "It seemed the right time. There's been a lot of talk in the papers about gold diggers, toxic wives and so on," she says. "Go to restaurants like Cipriani, or Zuma, and they are full of beautiful twentysomething girls on the lookout for a rich man. When I was researching the book, I spoke to a lot of women who were being plied with champagne every night, yet none would admit to being a gold digger. Then, you discover that wealth is at the top of their wish list for a man. So what, I found myself wondering, is the difference between being Cinderella and gold digging? Where do you draw the line?"

The simple answer, of course, is that in these days of equality, women no longer need to marry into money - we can make our own. In a report published last month by Barclays Wealth Management, economists predicted that there will be more female millionaires in the UK than men by the year 2020, and less than one in four of these will have acquired their wealth through marrying a rich man. Yet, persistently, the ones we are really interested in are the ones who have married wealth.

Whole magazines are devoted to the antics of the Wags and young girls are citing Coleen McLoughlin - who, after all, is only famous for being Wayne Rooney's girlfriend - as their role model. They want to be her - and they're realistic enough to know that a good marriage is their best chance.

There are a whole crop of internet sites to assist women in their quest for a wealthy man. Liselle is a beautiful blonde thirtysomething manager on a salary of £20,000. She has joined the dating website Sugardaddie.com to find herself a rich spouse. "For me to seriously consider him, a man would have to be earning £90 to £100k" she says. She believes he'd be getting a bargain - a gorgeous young wife, love, sex and, one day, a family. In return, she would step up into a whole new financial bracket.

Dr Sheila Keegan, a psychologist with the social-research consultancy Campbell Keegan Ltd, believes she has seen a shift in our attitude to the gold digger lately. "Historically, almost the only way for women to get wealthy was to marry well," she says. "Then came the feminist era when women were supposed to do it for themselves, and they despised the dependent woman. But now we seem to be in a post-feminist era when there isn't that worthiness and sensitivity there was in the 1960s and 1970s because equality is just assumed, and on that basis there's more acceptance of women who want to marry a wealthy man."

Keegan thinks our obsession with celebrities is to blame. "I've recently been doing some research with 14- to 18-year-old girls and they're openly aspirational about admiring wealth and admiring women who have married into wealth. People want an instant route to fame, wealth and success. Greed is no longer perceived as a bad thing, and women are admired for being smart, but not necessarily clever. It's seen as a question of who's using who. Anna Nicole Smith may have got millions, but J Howard Marshall got to share his bed with a beautiful busty blonde while he was in his 80s."

Current trends seems to bear this out. Sugardaddie.com, launched in 2002, now has more than 200,000 members. The website's UK director, Paul Homewood, thinks the gold-diggers phenomenon is about more than just money: " There is an opinion that women on this site are just after the men for their money - but in fact most of them are here for the quality of the men," he says. "They are looking for men who have ambition, who want to get on in life. The men on here are professional men, city bankers, doctors and so on. Why shouldn't that be attractive to women?"

Clayton certainly agrees. "It's not just about lifestyle - I'm ambitious myself and I admire men who have the drive and ambition to get on in life. I've met 15 men since I joined Sugardaddie.com and Seekingmillionaire.com. Typically they're in their 40s or 50s, very successful businessmen without much spare time. They just want to spend the time they do have off with a young babe to spoil and pamper. Some have quite jetset lifestyles and take me to very swanky places. One took me to Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in Sloane Square where we had a wonderful meal. He was a real gentleman. I don't think I'd have to be in love to marry someone - obviously it would have to be someone I liked, but if he was a good man with the right lifestyle and income, then I don't think love is necessarily the most important thing."

Historically, women have always wanted to marry rich men. While Jane Austen's heroines managed to find love along with their fortunes, for most of the characters in her books, love simply wasn't an issue. Marriage was a business. "Relationships are about compromise, aren't they?" says Perry. "Gold diggers are just prepared to compromise that little bit more than most."

Emma Harvey, 32, from Kent, is a member of the dating website sugardaddie.com. She works in IT for a law firm and earns around £35k.

Ideally, I'd hope to meet someone who's on a minimum of £150k to £200k, who probably works in the financial sector or has their own business.

My dream is to live in a big house in the country. I want children, and we'd have lots of dogs, tennis courts, a swimming pool, maybe a little gym. And possibly a bijou flat in Chelsea, too. I have expensive tastes - my usual drink is champagne, I like having my hair done in good salons and I love designer labels - especially Prada, Tods, and Chanel. I'd like to meet a man who felt relaxed about me spending my own money, but even better would be him buying things for me. In return I'd offer love, commitment, and partnership.

If people want to call me a gold digger then so be it. But why, in this day and age, is there this taboo on discussing wanting a man with a good income? We're supposed to say it doesn't matter. Anyway it's not just about money. A man like this would have the drive I find attractive,

Some of my girlfriends think I'm being too businesslike; they say: " You're not at work now, it's not about viewing someone's CV and their potential." But it is like that for me. I've made bad choices before.

Since I joined Sugardaddie.com I've met a couple of lawyers, a doctor and two business consultants. Some were divorced, and a couple had children.

I've not met any serious contenders yet, but I've had some fun. A couple have tried it on, but I made it clear that I wasn't comfortable and they backed off.

A site like this is great; it's like shopping online for a pair of shoes. You want to be sure those shoes fit comfortably - you don't want a cheap pair that are going to give you blisters after a couple of wears.

Poor and Pregnant in Mississippi

2007-07-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

From Salon, by Sharon Lerner, posted 7.2.05.

Mississippi law limits abortion to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But for poor women short on time and money, that can be an impossible deadline.

The other day, a quiet 17-year-old, let's call her Angie, walked into the only abortion clinic in Mississippi. A wiry teen with coffee-colored skin and delicate features, Angie had recently screwed up the courage to tell her mother she was pregnant. The pregnancy had blindsided her. (Sure, she had been nauseated and had thrown up a few times, but she figured it was just the stomach bug going around.)

But the real shock hit her inside the unassuming stucco clinic in Jackson. An ultrasound revealed that Angie was not eight or 10 weeks along, as she and her mother had assumed, but 14 weeks into her pregnancy. Then, as they were absorbing the news, a staff member informed them that at that stage of pregnancy, Angie wouldn't be able to get an abortion anywhere in the state.

One year ago, Mississippi became the only state in the country where abortion is limited to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. If the lone doctor, Joseph Booker, at the lone Mississippi clinic, the Jackson Women's Health Organization, were to perform any abortions after the first day of that week, he could face jail time. Angie and her mother aren't the only ones in the dark about the change, though; most patients who come to the clinic have no idea of the 12-week cutoff -- fully four weeks earlier than the 16-week limit the clinic had observed for the previous decade and at least 10 weeks earlier than federal law allows. Several other states have also shortened the window in which abortions are available, though not as drastically. In South Carolina, Indiana, Alaska and South Dakota, for instance, abortions are only available up to the 6th day of the 13th week of pregnancy.

Along with the ban on so-called partial birth abortions, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in April, the new limit in Mississippi has been a way for abortion opponents to target relatively advanced pregnancies. While the vast majority of abortions take place in the first 12 weeks (also known as the first trimester) of pregnancy, some 11 percent take place after that point.

Problems with the fetus are sometimes the reasons for later abortions -- and are often the examples pro-choice advocates bring up to illustrate the need for them -- but the majority of relatively late abortions have more to do with the nitty-gritty realities of everyday life. And here, in the poorest state of the country, all too often the reasons for delaying the procedure have to do with the struggle to come up with the money to pay for it.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The state law passed in January 2006 requires that any Mississippi facility where abortions are performed after the 12th week of pregnancy be approved to do so by the Mississippi Department of Health after complying with a new set of regulations. So while the only Mississippi clinic already had met rigorous rules determining the width of its hallways and the size of its parking lot, for example, it now had to spend almost $100,000 to meet the new standards, which require costly changes like hiring another full-time nurse and expanding the hours of the ultrasonographer.

The exacting letter of the law is in keeping with the kinds of restrictions the state has already placed on abortion -- which include a mandatory 24-hour waiting period after counseling and a requirement that minors inform both parents before having an abortion -- but the way this law is being enforced in itself amounts to "a form of harassment," according to Susan Hill, president of the National Women's Health Organization, which oversees abortion clinics in five states, including Mississippi.

Hill says the Jackson clinic complied with most of the regulations almost a year ago. By late July 2006, the only outstanding requirement, she says, was that the clinic's doctor have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Though Dr. Booker applied to several hospitals, including Women's Hospital in Jackson, none would grant him the status. "Some wouldn't even send an application," says Hill. "They said they didn't allow abortions in their hospital, even though the arrangement isn't so he can do abortions there, it's for treating complications."

On Dec. 14, 2006, the Mississippi State Board of Health, which is responsible for enforcing the law, recommended that the clinic's existing transfer agreement with a nearby hospital should suffice. But, in the six-and-a-half months since then, the clinic has still not received a definitive response from the health department about its status.

Liz Sharlot, director of communications for the Mississippi Department of Health, says that the clinic must apply yet again before it can be granted the go-ahead to perform abortions after the 12th week. According to Sharlot, the delay thus far is due in part to the fact that the Board of Health, which can make the final decision about the clinic's fate, was disbanded in late March. Sharlot says a new board is expected to meet July 2 and may reconsider the issue.

In the meantime, the holdup -- be it due to bureaucratic snafus or intentional defiance -- translates into serious hassles, and perhaps worse, for young women like Angie. After having already driven more than an hour west to get to Jackson, Angie and her mother must now go back east into Alabama to a Montgomery abortion clinic. The nearly four-hour trip will cost them gas money they don't have to spare, and the extra day of travel could cost both of them their jobs in the cafeteria of a military base.

A 2005 study found that 21 percent of women getting abortions after the 13th week cited fetal health problems as the reason. (In fact, most genetic problems are detected by testing that happens after the first trimester, such as amniocentesis.) Another 10 percent referred to their own health issues. But perhaps even more common are scenarios like Angie's, in which delay is caused by some combination of obliviousness and denial. Even two or three missed periods can be chalked up to irregularity. And who doesn't get tired and gain weight sometimes? Plenty of women, particularly younger ones, don't let themselves think about what might be going on in their bodies. Others take the deer-in-the-headlights approach: be still, do nothing, and hope the oncoming truck of pregnancy will miraculously go away.

There are probably as many situations giving rise to these later abortions as there are women who have them. I once spoke with a woman whose husband of a few weeks, a seemingly reasonable and gentle man she had known for less than a year, had thrown her into a wall when she was three months pregnant. One month later, as she was weighing her options, she found legal documents that included photos of a bruised and battered woman and discovered he had spent time in jail for attacking an ex-girlfriend. A few weeks after that, her husband threatened to kill her and her 11-year-old daughter -- and the woman decided to have an abortion in her 22nd week of pregnancy.

(Except to protect the life or health of the mother, abortion is generally illegal in the third trimester, which starts at the 26th week of pregnancy and is where the Roe v. Wade decision put the beginning of viability in 1973. But because of medical advances since then, there is now general agreement that a baby can often survive outside the womb at an even earlier point, which doctors have the legal authority to determine on a case-by-case basis.)

In Mississippi and elsewhere, poverty plays a huge role. Federal legislation known as the Hyde Amendment forbids the use of federal funding for most abortions. So many women scrounge for the $380 price of a first-trimester abortion. The Jackson Women's Health Organization decreases the fees by up to $75 for the poorest women, but, according to clinic staff, even that is sometimes not enough.

The time women spend trying to scrape together that money can easily push them past the now-crucial 12th week, and into the second trimester, when abortions are both riskier and more expensive. "Sometimes, they're so close on the edge, by the time they come in and they let the light bill go or whatever, it's too late," says Betty Thompson, who worked as counselor and then director of the Jackson Women's Health Organization for years and is now a consultant to the clinic. Thompson, a stately grandmother who had her first child at 16, always encourages resourcefulness in the women she counsels who are struggling to pay for abortions. "I ask them, 'Have you sold your jewelry yet? Have you asked to borrow from everyone you know?'"

As Thompson knows -- and as many women seeking abortions in Jackson do not -- the stakes in the money scramble are now higher, since too much dallying can push women who want abortions past the 12th week of pregnancy. "They might let one period go. And then the next period doesn't come again -- so we're talking eight weeks," says Thompson, ticking off the weeks on her fingers. "Let's say you get paid once a month -- nine, 10, 11, 12 -- then there you are."

Research backs Thompson's anecdotal evidence. Sixty-seven percent of poor women having an abortion say they would have preferred to have had it earlier, according to a 2004 study published in the journal Contraception. Specifically, researchers have determined that poor women take both additional time in confirming a pregnancy and several more days between making the decision to have an abortion and actually obtaining one. In Mississippi, where 98 percent of counties don't have an abortion provider, the logistics of getting the procedure can be particularly daunting: First there is the long drive to Jackson, then the phalanx of protesters surrounding the clinic, followed by the two-day ordeal that begins with the informational session and ends, finally, with the abortion.

No one knows for sure what now happens to the women with unwanted pregnancies in Mississippi who have progressed beyond 12 weeks. In the year since the law went into effect, the clinic has performed 458 fewer abortions than the previous year. Many would-have-been patients, like Angie, were referred to a Montgomery clinic, New Woman All Women Health Care, which allows women who have attended informational sessions in Jackson to get abortions without having to repeat the session in Alabama. The Montgomery clinic (which was firebombed in 1998) hasn't tracked how many of its patients have come from Mississippi, but according to a staff member, several women who have passed Jackson's 12-week limit call seeking abortions each week, though many of them don't show up for their appointments.

Those missed appointments are, no doubt, exactly what the authors of the Mississippi legislation wanted. The abortion rate here is low, despite the fact that the state has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. The state's many restrictions clearly help depress the numbers. There were only six abortions for every thousand women of reproductive age in 2000 in Mississippi, compared to 21.3 in the U.S. In the six years following the enactment of the law requiring a 24-hour waiting period after counseling in 1992, the rate dropped from 11.3 per thousand to 9.9, according to a study published in Family Planning Perspectives in 2000.

It's unclear how long the standoff between the Mississippi health department and the Jackson clinic will last. Hill says she has not filed suit against the state yet because she is "so tired of being in court." Indeed, battle fatigue has meant that several antiabortion laws that haven't survived in other states have gone unchallenged in Mississippi. By law, clinic doctors there must give the scientifically unfounded warning that having an abortion might increase the risk of breast cancer, for instance. And the state issues "Choose Life" license plates, despite the fact that the practice has been found unconstitutional elsewhere.

Still, Hill and other abortion rights advocates have taken on some legal battles in Mississippi. Most recently, the Center for Reproductive Rights successfully challenged a state law that, like the 2006 one, created a special category for facilities that perform abortions after 12 weeks, but, unlike the more recent law, gave the Jackson clinic no way to apply to become such a facility. Hill says she's working up to fighting the current situation, but fears it will be difficult because the state hasn't officially refused to certify the clinic to do second-trimester abortions -- just repeatedly delayed doing so.

So young women like Angie continue to risk jobs and borrow money in order to make it out of state to get abortions. Others, like a young Mississippi woman named Tammy, forgo the procedure entirely. Tammy first came into the clinic last October, when she was in her 14th week of pregnancy. She hadn't known the law had changed and had assumed she would be able to get an abortion. Instead she was told she'd have to make a trip to Alabama. A single mother, she would have had to arrange for childcare to go out of state, and she was struggling to raise the money for travel, according to Cheryl McGee, a staff member at Jackson Women's Health Organization. "She had just started her job and she couldn't get no time off and she couldn't get nobody to take her," explains McGee. "She doesn't have a car to get there and she didn't have the money to get a bus."

It's hard to imagine someone who can't afford a bus trip taking responsibility for a new life -- especially when she doesn't want to. Yet Tammy, who reportedly had her baby a few weeks ago, will no doubt find a way. Anti-choice activists can now chalk one more victory up to the passage and enforcement of Mississippi's latest abortion restriction -- even if, for Tammy, it means defeat.

Stalking David Sedaris

2007-07-05T08:46:00.001-07:00

And his new essay in the New Yorker, "This Old House."

Did You Notice?

2007-07-03T08:02:00.001-07:00

That Baby Bush "commuted" (or "granted clemency to") Scooter Libby's sentence?

Some are saying that it doesn't matter - he'll still "be punished."

Others are saying it's the first step towards a full pardon.

Classy.

From the White House (the real one), via Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone blog:

Grant of Executive Clemency: A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

WHEREAS Lewis Libby was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case United States v. Libby, Crim. No. 05-394 (RBW), for which a sentence of 30 months' imprisonment, 2 years' supervised release, a fine of $250,000, and a special assessment of $400 was imposed on June 22, 2007;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, do hereby commute the prison terms imposed by the sentence upon the said Lewis Libby to expire immediately, leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.

IN WITNESS THEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Valerie Plame's husband had a withering response (shown on Dateline last night). I'll keep looking for it online.

Perspective

2007-07-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

From Live Gives You Lemons, posted 6.29.07, via Gaping Void.

The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy.

2007-06-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

i thought this was interesting.... (and even funny in a way).
~avye

EXUVIAL MAGIC:
AN ESSAY CONCERNING
FASHION
Excerpt from the book "Writing in Restaurants"
by David Mamet

The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy.
In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.
In progressing from an emulation of the romantic to an emulation of the tragic, the middle class unconsciously avows not only the aridity of its lifestyle, but the complete failure of its fantasies, and of its very ability to fantasize.
We dress in the denim of the farm worker and the prisoner of the state, the olive drab and khaki of the field soldier, the gray- and blue of the Chinese laborer, the beaten leather jackets of the breadline.
The white world tries to emulate the black world; the straight world takes its fashions straight from gay society. The gay world, in its preoccupation with the chic of the banal, of the passg, of gaucherie, emulates those elements of the America it considers tragic -the clothing of the 1950s. So with black emulation and exaggeration of the fashion of suburbia-the Cadillac El Dorado, the color-coordinated shirt and tie and suit.
In contemporary plastic art much attention is paid to the artist capable of making a completely obtuse statement. The middle class sneers at, the analytical and exults the occult. The very fact of something being beyond the experience of the middle class is sufficient to ratify that something in its eyes. In pursuing the tragic we gainsay our own too-sad intelligence, our increasingly worthless common sense, in favor of that which is beyond our experience and, therefore, possibly productive.
Our preoccupation with personalities-particularly the personalities of artists -is another manifestation of our frantic search for nonequivocal experience. The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.
We are like warriors of old who, upon vanquishing our opponent, must rip the wann heart from his body and immediately eat it, and thus absorb his strength. The eating of the heart is a very real attempt to understand. The adoption of the tragic as fashionable is the same att empt to understand through imitative magic. "What," we ask, "is it that gives these people--our opponents -strength?" Additionally, we know that only by taking on the most private characteristics of those we fear can we be assured of having unconditionally subdued them.
The chic of the summer dress of the last several years baggy pants, bowling shirts, socks and sandals, Hawaiian shirts, sun visors-seems to have been an unconscious recognition of the generation of the fifties as a time of great confusion, fear, and national self-loathing; as a time of tragedy. So the middle class comes to recognize the tragic in itself.
We might regularly scrutinize fashion magazines, to see what class or group is being envied, and who lies in danger of becoming understood, and to what extent we members of the middle class have come to recognize ourselves.

"remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget"

2007-06-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

From Banter via Theatreforte, take a look at Dana Gioia's June 17, 2007, Stanford Commencement address, as well as Banter's additional information (at bottom of post), posted 6.21.07. (Image from Gioia's webpage, DanaGioia.net.) This may look long (go past the jump) but it is most worth the few minutes. Most worth it. I posted this on myspace too - it was reposted 5 times.

Prepared text of June 17, 2007, Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

Good morning.

Thank you, President Hennessy.

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood.

At heart I'm still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown.

Today is Father's Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked hard, but never had much success, except with his family.

When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn't here. It isn't Mother's Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she phoned and said, "Don't think I'm impressed."

I know that there was a bit of controversy when my name was announced as the graduation speaker. A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn't famous enough. I couldn't agree more. As I have often told my wife and children, "I'm simply not famous enough."

And that—in a more general and less personal sense—is the subject I want to address today, the fact that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong enough to counterbalance this profit-driven commercialization of cultural values, our educational system, especially public education. Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed cannot be left entirely to the marketplace—but made mandatory and freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available to the new generation of Americans. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.

There is no better place to start this rapprochement than in arts education. How do we explain to the larger society the benefits of this civic investment when they have been convinced that the purpose of arts education is mostly to produce more artists—hardly a compelling argument to either the average taxpayer or financially strapped school board?

We need to create a new national consensus. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

This is not happening now in American schools. Even if you forget the larger catastrophe that only 70 percent of American kids now graduate from high school, what are we to make of a public education system whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent entry-level workers?

The situation is a cultural and educational disaster, but it also has huge and alarming economic consequences. If the United States is to compete effectively with the rest of the world in the new global marketplace, it is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined industrial base. To compete successfully, this country needs continued creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.

It is hard to see those qualities thriving in a nation whose educational system ranks at the bottom of the developed world and has mostly eliminated the arts from the curriculum.

I have seen firsthand the enormous transformative power of the arts—in the lives of individuals, in communities, and even society at large.

Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. And that is exactly what is happening—not just in the media, but in our schools and civic life.

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure—humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out—to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?

That's no easy task, so don't forget what the arts provide.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don't outgrow art. The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life. A good book changes as you change.

My own art is poetry, though my current daily life sometimes makes me forget that. So let me end my remarks with a short poem appropriate to the occasion.

[Part III of Gioia's poem "Autumn Inaugural"]

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,

old robes worn for new beginnings,

solemn protocol where the mutable soul,

surrounded by ancient experience, grows

young in the imagination's white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor

but our trust in what they signify, these rites

that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch

lovers swear loyalty in a careless world

or a newborn washed with water and oil.

So praise to innocence—impulsive and evergreen—

and let the old be touched by youth's

wayward astonishment at learning something new,

and dream of a future so fitting and so just

that our desire will bring it into being.

Congratulations to the Class of 2007.

From Banter:

Theatre? What's that?

Have you artists seen this article?

Monday, June 18, 2007 (SF Chronicle)

STANFORD/NEA chairman blasts American culture in commencement talk. Speaker tells grads to reject passive consumerism

J ulian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

The leader of the National Endowment for the Arts decried culture as bankrupt and called for the elevation of artists and intellectuals in society at Stanford University's commencement address on Sunday.

Dana Gioia, a businessman-turned-accomplished poet who now heads the NEA, acknowledged that he was a controversial choice as speaker. "A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity," he said from the field of Stanford Stadium, where an estimated 25,000 graduating students, faculty members and family members had gathered for the university's 116th commencement ceremony. "It seemed I wasn't famous enough," added Gioia, the first poet and the first Californian selected to head the federal arts agency. "And that is the subject I want to address, the fact that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts and artists."

On the field, students dressed in caps and gowns -- accessorized with everything from animal masks and wigs to blow-up dolls and bumblebee wings -- fanned themselves against the heat and waved "Thanks Mom and Dad" signs. Many talked on cell phones to family members in the stands, took photos of one another on camera phones, or sent text messages.

"Everything now is entertainment," said Gioia (pronounced Joy-a), who is in his second term as head of the $133 million federal endowment, which funds art institutions across the country. "American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial." Gioia, the first in his family to attend college, earned a bachelor's degree and an MBA from Stanford and a master's from Harvard. He worked for 15 years at General Foods before dropping out of corporate life to write. He said his exposure to artists, musicians and writers began early -- through radio and television. He listened to classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, and jazz greats Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. "All of these people were famous to the average American -- because the culture considered them important."

Today, he said, culture is about NBA players and "American Idol" finalists. "When virtually all of culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young," Gioia said. "Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. You now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?"

For members of the graduating class, Gioia's speech was valid -- to an extent. Many students talked of a different type of creativity at Stanford, a campus that has long been a breeding ground for research and startups such as Yahoo. Katherine Brainard will work as a software engineer and intern at Microsoft this summer. "I think there are much bigger problems in education than a lack of the arts," she said. "I don't think that broader culture has ever been 'high culture' anyway. But if you can't read at a second-grade level and you're graduating from high school, that is the problem."

David Ollison, graduating with a degree in economics, plans to go on to law school. He said he is decidedly a "left-brain guy." While trying to keep a female blow-up doll named Francesca perched on his shoulders, he said that his primary interest is making money. Besides, he laughed, "I'm a pop-culture whore."

A group of guys dressed in various animal outfits debated the issue of whether culture is bankrupt. "You choose your own path in life," mused Zach Henick. "If you want to go into arts, go into arts. I'm pursuing economics." His friend Jay Rubenstein, wearing camel ears, paused to proclaim,"Society sleeps in a bed of pigs." He added that the quote is his own. "I think culture has to be what you make of it," he said. "For me, my culture is sports." He plans to work in energy trading and has a job lined up at Morgan Stanley.

Staci King, who wants to become a doctor, said she always had arts classes in her public schools in Chicago. She plays the jazz guitar and listens to gospel and R&B. She said she had dreamed of attending Stanford since she was in kindergarten. "I still play and will always play the guitar as a pastime," she said,smiling. "But I didn't want to be a starving artist."

Online resources www.nea.gov

What Makes You Happy?

2007-06-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Help Theatre Movement Bazaar (LA) with their new work, Monster of Happiness, by filling out their Happiness Questionnaire.

Monster of Happiness is a psycho-physical, science fiction love story based on the myth of Adam and Eve and examining a cornerstone of the American Dream: the pursuit of happiness.

In this work the company pursues the 20th century aesthetic innovations of early American modernist literature, Meyerhold's Biomechanics, and post revolution 'Soviet Style' cinema. Integral to this process is a feedback loop, an invitation for the public (via the TMB web site) to provide personal views on happiness.

The project is created by TMB’s Tina Kronis and Richard Alger and co-produced by the 24th St. Theatre. It is being developed in several stages, the resulting material to be layered into the final production.

Transgender Couple Has Pakistan Angry, Flummoxed

2007-06-28T09:55:00.001-07:00

From the BBC, posted 6.28.07.

Bail for Pakistan 'same-sex' pair: Pakistan's Supreme Court has ordered that a couple jailed for perjury in a row over the husband's sex should be released on bail, their lawyers say.

The ruling came after a judge agreed to hear appeals against the convictions.

The couple say they are man and wife, but the Lahore high court ruled last month that the husband was, in fact, a woman, despite sex-change surgery.

The case is thought the first of its kind in Pakistan where homosexuality and trans-sexuality are largely taboo.

'Lied'

Shumail Raj, 31, had sex-change surgery to become a man and then married Shahzina Tariq, 24, a cousin.

She was aware of his condition but says she needed his help to avoid being forced into wedlock with someone else.

The couple originally sought the protection of the courts but were arrested last month after the bride's family questioned whether Raj was a man.

Judges in Lahore jailed the couple for three years and fined them 10,000 Pakistani rupees ($165).

They found that the couple had lied about Raj's sexual status and said their marriage was un-Islamic because it was same-sex.

But on Thursday, the couple's lawyers said the judgement of the high court had been suspended

"The Supreme Court has ordered their release," said lawyer Babar Awan, Reuters news agency reports.

Bail is reported to have been set at 50,000 rupees ($825) each.

No date has been given for the appeal hearing to begin.

'Against Islam'

Raj is reported to have undergone surgery twice in Pakistan over the past 16 years to become a man.

But tests carried out by doctors on behalf of the Lahore high court ruled that Raj, who has a beard and moustache, was still a woman.

Raj himself says that he needs to go abroad for more treatment even though his breasts and uterus have been removed.

Ms Tariq's family wants to annul the wedding on the grounds that it is against Islam for two women to marry.

But the couple argue that they married to protect the bride from being sold into marriage to pay off her uncle's gambling debts.

Ms Tariq says they are not homosexuals and they married because they are in love.

Quotable

2007-06-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

She argued that, because love has no need to conquer, women are seen as weak, but, since it takes far more strength to love than to kill, women are the truly strong and should be recognized as such.

On Natalie Clifford Barney, by Suzanne Rodriguez, author of Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris. Source.

Hey baby! Shorty! Yeah, I mean you.

2007-06-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

From the Village Voice, by Chloé A. Hilliard, posted 6.19.07.

Even a poster declaring "Street Harassment is a Crime!" in bold letters didn't deter a group of guys standing on a Brooklyn corner from ogling 17-year-old LaTosha Belton. She was wearing knee-length shorts, a tank top, a short-sleeved sweater and she was carrying a stack of anti–sexual harassment posters.

"Read this!" she challenged, responding to their hisses and come-ons.

"What? I can't tell you, you look nice?" one man asked puzzled.

"What does this say?" she asked while pointing to the poster. "You are harassing me and I don't like it."

Nearby, five girls, interns from Girls for Gender Equity, like Latosha, positioned a poster on the wall of a bodega. The owner agreed to let them tape it up, but not too high because he didn't want it blocking his ads for malt liquor and Newport cigarettes. Nonetheless, the girls were happy with the space. Anything to get the word out about street harassment. The men standing eight feet away were proof that they were pretty much on to something.

The posters are just one part of the girls campaign.

Inspired after watching War Zone, a documentary made almost a decade ago on aggressive male behavior toward women in public places, Latosha and her peers decided to create their own documentary short.

Hey...Shorty takes a look at the men who initiate street harassment and the young women who are preyed upon. With help from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the girls, who range in age from 15 to 18, shot and directed the 18-minute clip. Confronting men who confront them was hard for some of the teens. "Most of men we interviewed were 25 and older," said Fendi Hope, 16. "They didn't have good enough reason to say the things they said. It's just a sport for them."

The film features two particularly earnest fellows who break down their curbside manner. As an unsuspecting woman walks toward them they try to decipher her body language. "She has her arms crossed and headsets in her ear," one observes. "She gonna act like she don't hear us, watch." They shower her with their best lines: "Excuse me, Miss. Miss? Can I talk to you for a second? Oh you don't hear me? OK, you have a nice day." They turn back to the camera: "They think they are too good for us," one says. The other says that their caveman approach to romance is needed because, "women today don't want men, they want women." He believes broadsiding them with unwanted compliments will bring them around. It's this mentality that inspired the campaign.

The girls say that besides words, the men sometimes throw whatever they can get their hands on: cans, glass bottles, garbage cans. In Latosha's case, it was a brick. "I was walking with some friends and this guy tired to talk to us," said Belton, 17. "We didn't respond and just when we got a few feet away, a brick comes flying over our heads."

All of them agree that they get the worst treatment on Brooklyn's busiest streets, like Fulton Street, where their offices are located.

Joanne Smith is the founder of the volunteer-run youth development organization, Girls for Gender Equity. Their main goal is to provide young girls and women with skills and self-esteem to succeed. "The reality of street harassment has to be a conversation," Smith says. "I'm Haitian and where we are based there is a large West Indian community. In this culture there are no words to explain what sexual harassment is and why it's wrong."

In early May, to accompany a screening of the film, they organized a one-day summit that was attended by 200 teenage girls (and a sprinkling of boys) that offered self-defense classes, workshops that taught the kids how to handle street harassment and understand their legal rights when the verbal insults turn physical.

The final installment of their campaign—and the reason the group was walking down Fulton Street on a sunny June weekday—is a poster, whose bold letters were failing to catch the attention of men too busy checking out the girls' figures. The poster features a young woman standing in front of the shadows of men and a checklist: "I am followed by older men every day after school," "I am afraid to walk with my sisters or friends at night," and "Men think my name is 'Psst . . . ma!' or 'Ayo, shorty!' " Under the line "Street Harassment Is a Crime!" reads: "New York law prohibits street harassment (Article 120 and Article 240). You are not alone."

Don't forget about Holla Back NYC:

Holla Back NYC empowers New Yorkers to Holla Back at street harassers. Whether you're commuting, lunching, partying, dancing, walking, chilling, drinking, or sunning, you have the right to feel safe, confident, and sexy, without being the object of some turd's fantasy. So stop walkin' on and Holla Back: Send us pics of street harassers!

Ayn Rand, you were wrong.

2007-06-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm struck by this new plan. This plan that says we'll (where "we" is presumably our incorruptable American government) sell off bits of the atmosphere to the highest bidder, auction style. So if you have enough money, you can pollute your little corner of the atmosphere as much as you want. Because there are such things as corners in the atmosphers. Not like it's all connected. Oh, no.

There are arguments (and here I am not citing specific sources) that this is the absolute best way to clean up our acts, as it were. If you can't afford to pay for "your atmosphere," you simply must be totally green.

Hmm.

We can go ahead and acknowledge that it's a given that there will be intense corruption on both sides of this "auction." And note that big business can never be trusted to act for the greater good, especially if they're in the process of being rewarded for being big business.

But how effed up is this rationale:

Well, it seems that capitalism has messed up the environment. As it sweeps the globe, so follows the destruction of nature, both flora and fauna.

We need a cure. I've got it! MORE CAPITALISM!

Capitalism inherantly places value only upon monetary rewards for a select few, delineating between "us" in "them" in ways Christianity could only dream of. So how is this structure supposed to be in any way helpful to restoring any natural balance? It's like survival of the fittest gone amuck, where instead of better eyesight or longer claws we've got better liars and bigger heels (the better to crush you with, my dears).

Far From Over

2007-06-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

From the BBC, by Soutik Biswas, posted 6.20.07.

For the past three months, Afghan female MP Shukria Barakzai has been receiving a letter saying she may be targeted by a suicide bomber in the next six months.

The cryptic government letter contains an intelligence warning that Ms Barakzai's life is under threat and she should be careful. She is one of six MPs getting such a letter these days.

"That is all that the government does - send a letter by mail once every month saying my life is under threat. There isn't talk of even providing security," says the feisty parliamentarian and mother of three daughters.

Ms Barakzai says she is being targeted by "various elements" because of her speeches against the country's warlords, her support for women's rights and for her criticisms of Pakistan.

"I am going crazy. My friends are telling me to leave the country. My husband is worried. After all, I am also a mother and a wife," says the journalist-turned-MP.
When you consider that two women journalists have been killed recently in and around Kabul, you realise that even women of influence and power in Afghanistan live and work in fear under threats from warlords, the Taleban and other insurgent groups.

Six years after the departure of the repressive Taleban this is the paradox of women in Afghanistan. They now have a say and a position under the country's constitution. But they have to work in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

The good news is that the rights of Afghan women have been enshrined in the constitution. It even asks the government to bring changes in the law to combat traditions that work against them.

Women can participate in every walk of life, including politics. Of the 361 members of parliament today, 91 are women.

Women have also begun talking about forced marriages, honour killings, abortions and rape in a traditionally male-dominated society. Local human rights groups have begun documenting such atrocities.

Insecure

The bad news is that the state cannot protect women and ensure that they can go about their work safely. Even an affluent, influential city-bred MP like Ms Barakzai is now tense about her future.

"When I leave home these days on work, I am not quite sure whether I will be back [alive]. Life has become so insecure. I am not planning to leave the country yet, but I do have to think about my kids," says the MP.

Fellow female MP Tooarpekay, the only woman parliamentarian from the restive Zabul province, echoes the same sentiment.

"There have been many attacks on women workers in Zabul. I am worried about the rise of Taleban," says the MP who studied in a boys' school.

Ms Tooarpekay should know - she has worked in Zabul, where the Taleban are now highly active, for the past 22 years as a school teacher, community and health worker.

When she stood for the elections two years ago, her 22-year-old brother was killed by the Taleban. She has soldiered on in her new job as an MP.

To add to her problems, she has not been paid her monthly salary of $937 for the past three months.

Grim stories

If this is the plight of some of the most "powerful" women in the country, the state of ordinary women across the country is obviously much worse.

Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, for example, alone documented over 1,500 cases of atrocities against women last year.

The details make for grim reading - a third of these women were victims of domestic violence - simply called "beating" in the rights group report - some 200 of them were married off forcibly, 98 of them set themselves on fire, and over 100 of them tried to take their lives by consuming poison.

Now the rights group is worried about the rising number of women who are taking to drugs in the countryside.

Worst sufferers

"Jirgas [tribal councils] are still deciding the fate of the women in most rural areas. Most of the judgements go against the women," says Soraya Sobhrang, a former gynaecologist who runs the women's rights department of the Human Rights Commission.

"We have the constitution and the courts. Who are the jirgas to decide on women?"

In the end, analysts say, it is a weak, feeble and a largely corrupt state machinery which is just not carrying out its duties - ruling with a firmer constitutionally mandated hand, and giving women more security, sometimes even from their own menfolk and community.

Zabul is a good example of this apathy - Ms Tooarpekay says government officials are lax and insincere about simple demands of local people, joblessness is rife and there are few schools.

"All this drives people into the arms of the Taleban. And the women become the worst sufferers again," she says.

Perspective on Green

2007-06-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Initiative

2007-06-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

GRANTS FOR ARTS WRITERS!

Mark Your Calendars for August 6, 2007: The Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program announces its second round of grants as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Initiative. The online application form will go live on Monday, August 6, 2007 and the deadline for completed applications is Wednesday, September 12, 2007.

The Arts Writers Grant Program recognizes and supports the work of individual arts writers through project-based grants ranging from $3,000 $50,000. Grant categories include books, articles, short-form writing, and experiments in new and alternative media.

Grant guidelines and email sign-up information is at http://www.artswriters.org/.

Astronautalis Takes Off

2007-06-19T05:35:00.001-07:00

Catch rapper/southern musician/dj Astronautalis at a town near you! Check his myspace for more information.

Jul 19 2007 8:00P - the mohawk (Austin, Texas)
Jul 20 2007 8:00P - BIG D'S BBQ (Shreveport, Louisiana)
Jul 21 2007 8:00P - WC DON'S (Jackson, Mississippi)
Jul 23 2007 8:00P - TBA (Nashville, Tennessee)
Jul 25 2007 8:00P - Peabody's (Cleveland, Ohio)
Jul 26 2007 8:00P - Wisefool's Pub (Chicago, Illinois)
Jul 27 2007 8:00P - Bell's Brewery (Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Jul 28 2007 8:00P - Magic Stick (Detroit, Michigan)
Jul 29 2007 8:00P - Mac's Bar (Lansing, Michigan)

Sex Offender? Cure it with a Pill!

2007-06-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not certain how I feel about this. I mean, aside from the inkling that someone somewhere is missing something pertinent... From the BBC, by Clare Murphy, posted 6.13.07.

Can drugs help sex offenders? Sex offenders are to be offered drug treatment under new plans announced by the Home Office. What would such a programme involve?

The list of potential side-effects might put anyone off, but a libido can effectively be reduced by a number of drugs.

These can either be administered through injection or tablet, but both have the same effect: cutting the amount of testosterone pumped around the body and thus curbing a man's sex drive.

The first is a pill taken daily known as cyproterone acetate - or Androcur. This is a drug that is usually prescribed to women with major hormone imbalances resulting in the growth of body hair or severe acne.

The particular disadvantage of this form of treatment may be the fact that it relies on the patient to take the medication each day - although given that the scheme will be voluntary in any case this may not present a grave problem.

The second option is a monthly injection, usually administered into the buttock. This is the drug leuproreline, which is used in the treatment of prostate cancer.

What next

The principle issue with leuproreline, experts say, is that in the four to six weeks following the start of treatment, testosterone levels rise before falling.

But once this period is past, sexual desire will drop dramatically.

A patient will still be capable of having sex - many eunuchs, who have been castrated, are still able to perform sexually.

But arousal will be significantly more difficult.

It would in most circumstances require the man to either come up with an extreme sexual fantasy or to watch some extreme pornography.

"Anybody who wanted to overcome the effects of these drugs, ultimately, probably could," said Professor Ashley Grossman, an endocrinologist at the William Harvey Research Institute.

"They help people who want to help themselves, so in that respect it's probably makes sense for it to be voluntary."

'Feminised'

The side-effects of the drugs are also likely to be taken into account by anyone considering joining the programme.

In addition to losing his sexual interest, a man taking them is likely to become more feminised.

He may lose his body hair, and gain weight around his middle. He may also experience hot flushes like those experienced by women during the hormonal changes of the menopause, lose muscle density, become anaemic and irritable.

In the long-term, he will also run the risk of osteoporosis as his bones get thinner.

"There are definitely adverse affects," says Dr Pierre Bouloux of the Royal Free Hospital.

He estimates the cost of the treatment to be in the region of £2,000 - £3,000 per year.

Other estimates suggest the cost may be even lower - perhaps as little as several hundred pounds.

Treatment which focuses on reducing libido is unlikely to be offered in isolation. Alongside counselling, many sex offenders are prescribed anti-depressants.

It's a matter of perspective, really...

2007-06-13T10:34:00.001-07:00

Tom Dickinson reveals the morphing "values" of Fred Thompson on the Rolling Stone blog, posted 6.11.07. And FindLaw reports on how close Thompson is to joining the presidential race (follow the link for that one, text not here).

“Abortions should be legal in all circumstances as long as the procedure is completed within the first trimester of the pregnancy.” - A survey question to which Thompson checked yes in 1994.

“I do not believe abortion should be criminalized.” - Fred Thompson in 1996

“I was single for a long time, and, yep, I chased a lot of women. And a lot of women chased me. And those that chased me tended to catch me.” - Thompson earlier this year describing his 1985-2002 bachelorhood.

Here’s the deal about “Hollywood Fred” Thompson. It’s the same deal for most red-blooded American men who routinely bed down with women they’re not married to. Like bombing Iran, abortion is never a first, second, or even fifth choice. But it is an option that needs to stay “on the table.”

When Fred was sleeping around, abortion was not the government’s business.

Now that he’s re-married with a new batch of young kids he’s changed his tune, as seen in this FoxNews interview with Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Abortion?

THOMPSON: Pro-life.

WALLACE: Do you want to overturn Roe vs. Wade?

THOMPSON: I think Roe vs. Wade was bad law and bad medical science…. I think it was wrong.

It’s easy to be ‘pro-life’ when you’re a settled father and family man. It’s another thing altogether to oppose abortion in absolute terms when you’re a Hollywood actor playing the field and you face the prospect of unintentionally bringing a child into the world with your latest conquest.

Not everyone wants to live out their own personal Knocked Up script. When it was relevant to him, Fred Thompson respected that choice.

Now THIS is a healthy ego

2007-06-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Week:

"I do feel like I live a fabulous life...I'd still love to be on Oprah and, you know, have them visit my crib or whatever."

From the NY Times article, "The Superfabulous World of Rufus Wainwright,"by Melena Ryzik, 6.4.07.

Coincidence?

2007-06-13T08:24:00.001-07:00

Anyone notice how "new" music from both Gwen Stefani and Fergie (I know, I avoid both usually, but accidentally heard them in passing) sounds remarkably like old tracks from Peaches?

Anyone? Hm.

New Films and Abortion

2007-06-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times, by Mireya Navarro, 6.10.07.

In the hit indie movie “Waitress,” the lead character, Jenna, finds out she’s pregnant at a time when she’s plotting to run away from her abusive husband. In last week’s No. 2 film, “Knocked Up,” Alison becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with Ben, an ungainly suitor.

In some ways, both movies mirror reality. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says unwanted pregnancies have actually increased among some adult women, even as they have decreased among teenage girls. More than half of all unwanted pregnancies occur to women in their 20s.

But in another way, both movies go out of their way to sidestep real life. Nearly two-thirds of unwanted pregnancies end in abortion, data from federal surveys shows. Yet Jenna in “Waitress” is more likely to ponder selling the baby than to consider having the procedure. And Alison, who has just been promoted to her dream job as an on-camera television personality and asked to lose 20 pounds, is torn over whether to keep the man, not the baby.

The possibility of not having the baby is never discussed by either woman despite her circumstances. The word “abortion” is never uttered.

Though conservatives regularly accuse Hollywood of being overly liberal on social issues, abortion rarely comes up in film. Real-life women struggling with unwanted pregnancies might consider an abortion, have intense discussions with partners and friends about it and, in most cases, go through with it. But historically and to this day in television and film — historians, writers and those in the movie industry say — a character in such straits usually conveniently miscarries or decides to keep the baby.

“It’s one of those topics that would alienate a portion of the audience no matter what you do,” Sarah Brown, executive director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said of Hollywood’s reluctance to tackle abortion more realistically.

Perhaps directors of feel-good movies don’t want to risk portraying their heroines as unsympathetic characters.

Jonathan Kuntz, an American film history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that for the entertainment industry, “It’s a no-win situation.”

“It’s kind of a tricky topic,” he said. “It’s something that’s going to turn off people on both sides unless you do it just right. It’s no surprise Hollywood avoids it.”

And so in “Knocked Up,” a romantic comedy, whose director and writer, Judd Apatow, declined to be interviewed, when one of Ben’s friends suggests that Alison have the procedure, he says it rhymes with “shmashmortion.”

The producer of “Waitress,” Michael Roiff, said Adrienne Shelly, the film’s writer and director, weighed the concept of abortion as the “good New York liberal” she was. But from a story point of view, Ms. Shelly, who was murdered last year in her New York office, found richer material following the pregnancy through, Mr. Roiff said.

“We didn’t worry about the political ramifications,” he said. “It’s a story about the power of motherhood.”

Hollywood doesn’t shy away from all controversial topics, some film historians noted. In fact, sometimes controversy translates into huge success, as with Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” which some critics accused of anti-Semitism.

In the rare instances when abortion has made it into the plotlines of major films, like “Dirty Dancing” and “The Cider House Rules,” they tend to be films set in the past and the women who undergo the procedure do not always fare well. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” is the rare American film in which abortion is legal and dealt with matter-of-factly — and it is 25 years old.

Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, said the subject of abortion comes up more realistically in independent films, as do other difficult themes like drug addiction, incest, even infanticide, most recently in “Stephanie Daley,” about a teenager accused of murdering her newborn.

“That’s the meat and potatoes of independent filmmaking,” he said of such social issues.

The price to pay, though, is smaller audiences.

“The industry as a whole is getting to be more public-friendly,” said Brian Dyak, president and chief executive of the Entertainment Industries Council, an organization formed by leaders in the industry to try to ensure the accurate portrayal of health and social issues on screen. “That’s driven by the cost of the movies and the international release. Abortion is not big box office material.”

But an executive with a Hollywood film production company who spoke on condition of anonymity, unauthorized to speak for the company, noted that the film industry has other tough questions to worry about aside from commercial considerations.

“At a time when women’s reproductive freedom is under attack in the courts, why wouldn’t it come up as part of the conversation?” the executive said. “Are you making a statement by assiduously avoiding the discussion?”

Some on the anti-abortion side seem to think so. Many conservative bloggers have claimed “Knocked Up” as an anti-choice movie, in part because the movie never presents abortion as a serious option.

Television, many agree, is freer to deal with abortion because its market is more fragmented and it can single out specific audiences better. But the medium, which has presented the subject occasionally in dramas and soaps (“Everwood,” “Six Feet Under,” “General Hospital”) has also struggled because of the risk of alienating advertisers, affiliates and viewers.

The Viacom-owned cable channel N, for instance, pulled episodes of the Canadian teen drama “Degrassi: The Next Generation” in 2004 that dealt with a character’s decision to have an abortion.

Christopher Keyser, co-creator of the Fox drama “Party of Five,” which ran for six seasons until 2000, said that when he tried to have a leading character go for an abortion, the network vetoed the idea just as the episode was about to be shot, citing the risk of upsetting sponsors. The story line was changed to have the 16-year-old character miscarry before she goes in for the procedure.

“It was a cop-out,” he said. “It was an attempt to avoid the issue but it was the best we could figure out under the circumstances.”

Mr. Keyser said he and the other writers wanted to mine a subject they found “incredible, rich material that happened in real life” without thinking about the consequences. After all, they had featured other controversial topics, like unprotected drunken sex and a gay relationship, in previous episodes.

But he said he understood the network’s position.

“In their defense, it was difficult,” he said. “Even though a majority may favor abortion rights, the minority position is extremely active and vocal.” In fact, a New York Times/CBS News poll last month showed that three-fourths of Americans favor access to abortion, though about half of those would like to see more restrictions than now.

On a recent episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Dr. Yang, the most competitive medical resident on the show, decides to have an abortion but loses the fetus instead during emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy. Even on “Sex and the City,” which was shown on advertiser-free HBO, Miranda, a single, high-powered lawyer, decided to have the baby — after she had a change of heart at the abortion clinic. (In the same episode, Carrie and Samantha admit that they’ve both had abortions.)

And though “General Hospital” went so far as to portray a character going through with an abortion last year, Nancy Lee Grahn, a longtime abortion rights advocate and an actress who plays Alexis on the show, said the writers made sure they wrote in opposing views, including dialogue in which another character called the pregnant woman a “baby killer.”

Ms. Grahn, who said she had an abortion in her 20s, said that “women who have been able to go on with their life without feeling evil” are not represented on television.

Dr. Kuntz, the film historian at U.C.L.A., said there is little incentive for such stories to be told. “Hollywood wants to entertain and make money,” he said.

From the Arse End of Ireland: Deserved Condemnation

2007-06-08T10:25:00.001-07:00

From Arse End of Ireland, posted 6.8.07.

Muppet Shooting Season. That's With A Gun, Now, Not A Canon.

Not that it's any cure when one of your mates has lost his kid brother, but I'm pissed off enough to manage nothing this morning but a horrible, rantingly useless piece of nonsense, so you'll have to bear with me today. Because there I was yesterday, hearing news as it came in from Gort about how Daniel died, and swearing on the back of circumstance and the folly of youth and whatnot, when RTE.ie popped up with a little distraction on the subject of Paris Hilton.

Oh, Paris! She's vapid, she's "hawt", she's constantly engaged in the most uninspired snipery at fellow waste of egg n' sperm, Lindsay Lohan. Bad driving and the folly of youth is most probably what killed Daniel in Gort; Paris Hilton is no stranger to bad driving, because at the moment she's making a fucking living from it.

Anyway, having been sentenced to a gnat's fart in prison for listening to no cunt in the US justice system ("Now, Porous, seeing as you can't get behind the wheel of a car sober enough to drive it responsibly, will you promise to stay the fuck away from vehicular helming for a bit?" Paris: "Vehicular helming? Is that, like, blowjobs on the freeway? It sounds hawt."), Porous was released after three days because doctors worried she was close to having a mental breakdown.

A mental breakdown.

In prison.

I know! I too thought that was the point of putting someone in prison! Y'know, society not being able to trust the dumb fuck not to go cruising merrily around the streets like a ten-year-old in a bumper car heading for the girl he kinda fancies in a strange, hormonal-awakening way and feels the need to wallop into the middle of next week. PUNISHMENT. That's one level of the prison experience. The other level is the whole keeping the rest of society safe from the deviant needing such a rude awakening. Safe, in Porous' case, meaning not flattened to the tarmac like a sunbathing anorexic.

Basically, Ms. Hilton, who as far as I can tell suffers from the worst and most debilitating kind of dumbfuckery, was allowed home from prison because she didn't really like it.

Prison, girls, does not have a nail bar. Human rights abuses or what?

THE WOMAN IS A REPEAT DRINK-DRIVER.

Never mind the fact that after a couple of West Coast Coolers she might plough into and mush some poor cunt who's minding their own business protesting about God Hating Fags or whatever they spend their time doing on the sidewalks in America. Never mind the fact that she'd been asked weally weally nicely by her justice system to stay the fuck away from driving until she got the message that doing so under the influence is something the rest of us are a wee bit wary of. Never mind the fact that countless little wooly-brained tossmachines all over the world hang on this bint's every word ("hawt!") and want to be just like her - thick, rich, thick, and thick. She gets into her secluded, secure, safe cell, gets a bit moany and goes, "Ooh, this is a bit depressing. Gawd!" and the useless, two-tier loving pricks in the prison system let her go home? FUCK OFF, AMERICA. You really are taking the fucking biscuit with this one, dipping it into the dregs of our patience, and vomiting it back into our faces again, aren't you? Thick Rich Teas are so fattening.

I hate this entity Paris Hilton. Hate it. A thingymajiggy about as useful as the broken Swiss Army Knife you bought in the market before Ireland got Aldi; blunt, bent, and cold to the touch. What's the cunt Hilton ever done? Tell me! She's minced around the place being rewarded for being flush and having the intelligence of the unflushed. She has the hooded eyes and waxy visage of a dead serial killer in a fridge. We've even seen what's between the little bitch's legs and it turned out to be stale air. Well, now here's something the cunt has done at last; she's made headlines for teaching a generation of idiots that it's ok to have no respect for or interest in every other sap who's been put on this earth with you because you'll get away with everything, everything, if you're thin enough and famous enough and rich enough. I'd be happy to shoot the twat in the head if I wasn't so sure that all I'd get out of it would be a loud whistling sound, the suction of a released vaccuum and a confused look from the air-ess.

Lastly, for illustrative purposes...

Now look about six inches above your monitor. That's where I'd put Paris Hilton. Slightly above her would be the US Justice system that rewards hawtness and carrying a Bible around for photo ops. I'm sorry, guys. The cuntometer only reflects the level of cuntery in Ireland. I doon' have the powerrr to create one for world-wide purposes.

Reminder

2007-06-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

From those moderates over at Exposing Satanism.com.

This page is for those who seek truth about the book series Harry Potter. Many think it is just harmless fantasy. True it is fantasy, but it is laced with witchcraft and demonology as are most books like it. Many say it gets children reading books who never would do so. I give you this tid-bit to ponder on. If your child did not like to take medicine and you had a chocolate drink with the medicine, plus arsenic in it, would you give it to them? You would if you did not know it was in there and what arsenic was. It is the same scenario with fantasy especially when it is laced with the poison of witchcraft.

Matthew 13: 9-16, who hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

Some of you see nothing wrong with a book about fantasy, mythology, or witchcraft and some of you so called believers will see nothing wrong with mixing the occult with God, and with that, I give you 1st Timothy 4:1-2.

1st. Timothy 4:1-2 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;

There are many books out about Witchcraft but none so cleverly packaged like the latest. Satan is up to his old tricks again and the main focus is the children of the world. The latest craze is a series of books by author J. K. Rowling, known as Harry Potter.

The scramble to get the books is not just for children. Just as many adults are amused and are absorbing the content of these books. And what is sickening, Christians, or so-called Christians, are part of the fan club. I knew nothing of Harry Potter until mail started coming in asking if it was ok for teachers in Christian schools to be reading children books about mythology and witchcraft!!!! Did you read that correctly? In Christian schools!!!!!

Are we now so far gone that the church can't tell what Witchcraft is? Preachers are not doing what they are supposed to do. They are to expose this trash and inform the flock. But they join in the festivities and will not rock the boat. Halloween is accepted in the church and many of the so-called Christians fight hard when told they should not take part. Now just as Halloween is an abomination to God, so is writing books that glorify witchcraft or any kind of mythology.

The whole purpose of these books is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult. What a better way to introduce tolerance and acceptance of what God calls an abomination, then in children's books? If you can get them when they are young, then you have them for life. It’s the oldest marketing scheme there is.

Who is Harry Potter?

Harry is a nobody, treated like dirt by the aunt and uncle who begrudgingly inherited him when his parents were killed. For the first 10 years of his life Harry sleeps in a cupboard under the stairs of his only living family who loathe him never realizing he's special.

A mysterious letter, delivered by the friendly giant Hagrid, wrenches Harry from his dreary, Muggle hidden existence: "We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Harry finds himself at Hogwarts surrounded by wizards, his snowy owl - Hedwig, a phoenix-feather wand, and jellybeans that come in every flavor, including strawberry, snot, grass, and sardine ... and that's where the real adventure--humorous, haunting, and suspenseful begins.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone first published in England as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Note how the adults are depicted as hateful and perhaps strict. Then note how these wizards and other creatures are the good guys. These types of writings are nothing more then Satan's way to undermine the family. Kids get these books and then live in a fantasy world and rebel against there parents. Here is a quote from the author: "The idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me."

Note what she says about the child having power? What she is saying is that the child needs to have power and control over parents and also to have the power of the occult. The author also uses occult terms in her thinking. Look at this new age phrase. "I have a very visual imagination. I see it, then I try to describe what is in my mind's eye," This minds eye concept is the heart of the new age movement. It is the ability to escape ones confines of this world and to explore the other dimensions of existence. For more info on the new age movement, check out this site. New Age

Keep these books and their teachings from your child. It is supposed to be a 7 book series, which 3 have already been published. I will add more info about the author and the books as it comes to my attention. Some teachers are reading these books to their classes. They are pagans using the school system to spread their agenda. Your tax dollars are being used to promote Witchcraft and no one is coming against it. Now read a bible or mention Jesus in school and your locked up. Pagans state that theirs is a bona-fide religion with the same rights as Christianity. So why are they allowed to teach it in the schools?

One for Free Speech

2007-06-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

From 6.5.07 by Stephen Labaton, via Noah.

WASHINGTON, June 4 — If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts.

That, in essence, was the decision on Monday, when a federal appeals panel struck down the government policy that allows stations and networks to be fined if they broadcast shows containing obscene language.

Although the case was primarily concerned with what is known as "fleeting expletives," or blurted obscenities, on television, both network executives and top officials at the Federal Communications Commission said the opinion could gut the ability of the commission to regulate any speech on television or radio.

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., said that the agency was now considering whether to seek an appeal before all the judges of the appeals court or to take the matter directly to the Supreme Court.

The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit — Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC — it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.

Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was "doubtful" that the agency would be able to "adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks."

The networks hailed the decision.

"We are very pleased with the court's decision and continue to believe that the government regulation of content serves no purpose other than to chill artistic expression in violation of the First Amendment," said Scott Grogin, a senior vice president at Fox. "Viewers should be allowed to determine for themselves and their families, through the many parental control technologies available, what is appropriate viewing for their home."

Mr. Martin, the chairman of the commission, attacked the panel's reasoning.

"I completely disagree with the court's ruling and am disappointed for American families," he said. "The court says the commission is 'divorced from reality.' It is the New York court, not the commission, that is divorced from reality."

He said that if the agency was unable to prohibit some vulgarities during prime time, "Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want."

Beginning with the F.C.C.'s indecency finding in a case against NBC for a vulgarity uttered by the U2 singer Bono during the Golden Globes awards ceremony in 2003, President Bush's Republican and Democratic appointees to the commission have imposed a tougher policy by punishing any station that broadcast a fleeting expletive. That includes vulgar language blurted out on live shows like the Golden Globes or scripted shows like "NYPD Blue," which was cited in the case.

Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. "In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities."

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of "get lost" to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

"We find that the F.C.C.'s new policy regarding 'fleeting expletives' fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency's established practice," said the panel.

Emily A. Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had no comment about the ruling.

Although the judges struck down the policy on statutory grounds, they also said there were serious constitutional problems with the commission's attempt to regulate the language of television shows.

"We are skeptical that the commission can provide a reasoned explanation for its 'fleeting expletive' regime that would pass constitutional muster," said the panel in an opinion written by Judge Rosemary S. Pooler and joined by Judge Peter W. Hall. "We question whether the F.C.C.'s indecency test can survive First Amendment scrutiny."

In his dissent, Judge Pierre N. Leval defended the commission's decision to toughen its indecency policy.

"In explanation of this relatively modest change of standard, the commission gave a sensible, although not necessarily compelling, reason," he said.

"What we have is at most a difference of opinion between a court and an agency," Judge Leval said. "Because of the deference courts must give to the reasoning of a duly authorized administrative agency in matters within the agency's competence, a court's disagreement with the commission on this question is of no consequence. The commission's position is not irrational; it is not arbitrary and capricious."

The case involved findings that the networks had violated the indecency rules for comments by Cher and Nicole Richie on the Billboard Music Awards, the use of expletives by the character Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue" and a comment on "The Early Show" by a contestant from CBS's reality show "Survivor."

The commission did not issue fines in any of the cases because the programs were broadcast before the agency changed its policy. But the networks were concerned about the new interpretation of the rules, particularly since the agency has been issuing a record number of fines.

Two years ago, Congress increased the potential maximum penalty for each indecency infraction to $325,000, from $32,500. Producers and writers have complained that the prospect of stiff fines had begun to chill their creative efforts.

The case, Fox et al. v. Federal Communications Commission, along with a second case now before a federal appeals court in Philadelphia involving the malfunctioning wardrobe that exposed one of the pop singer Janet Jackson's breasts during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, have been closely watched by the television industry and its critics for their broad implications for television programming.

Neither cable TV nor satellite programming faces the same indecency rules even though they cover about 85 percent of homes. And as the Bush administration's appointees have taken a tougher view on indecency, the industry has waged a countercampaign in the courts.

The commission has struggled to consistently explain how it applies the rules. In the Bono case involving the Golden Globe awards, the staff initially ruled in favor of the network. After lawmakers began to complain about that decision, the commission, then led by Michael K. Powell, reversed the staff decision.

But the commission declined to impose a fine because, it noted, "existing precedent would have permitted this broadcast" and therefore NBC and its affiliates "necessarily did not have the requisite notice to justify a penalty."

Broadcast television executives have complained about what they say has been the arbitrary application of the rules. They expressed concern, for instance, that they might be penalized for broadcasting "Saving Private Ryan," a Steven Spielberg movie about the invasion of Normandy during World War II, because of the repeated use of vulgarities.

But the F.C.C. in that case ruled in favor of the networks, finding that deleting the expletives "would have altered the nature of the artistic work and diminished the power, realism and immediacy of the film experience for viewers."

Sustainable Tip: No Wire Hangerssss!

2007-06-06T05:22:00.001-07:00

Exotic World Changes Its Name...

2007-06-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

Via myspace...

Birds, yes. Reptiles, no.

We’re pleased to announce that the complete schedule for Exotic World Weekend, including venues, sponsors, special guests, performers and all the info you'll need to be in the right places at the right times has been updated and is now online. And with that news, comes word of another big update: our name.

As the Striptease Reunion heads into its second 1/2 century as the world's longest-running Burlesque event, we've decided it was high time Exotic World had a little work done. No, it's not a boob job... more like a face-lift: from today forward, Exotic World will officially be known as THE BURLESQUE HALL OF FAME.

Why tinker with perfection? Good question! After much deliberation, two highly compelling arguments kept coming up, over and over again. They are:

Simplicity.
Over time, Exotic World has been though many changes--and many, many names: The Burlesque Historical Society, Inspirational Star Land, The Movers & Shakers Striptease Hall of Fame... the list goes on and on. But, no matter how our business cards may have read throughout the years, from the very beginning we've remained at our core a "hall of fame"--identifying and honoring Burlesque's best, both on and offstage.

Put simply, we ARE the Burlesque Hall of Fame, therefore we should be KNOWN AS the Burlesque Hall of Fame.

Semantics.
Let's face it: In contemporary times, the term “exotic” has connotations that can be confusing (you'd be surprised how many calls we get inquiring about our birds and reptiles), if not downright misleading. When Jennie Lee & company launched the Exotique [sic] Dancers League in the 1950s, "exotic dance" and burlesque were one and the same. Today, the term is widely applied to *all* forms of adult entertainment, regardless of their origin or content. While we've got no issue with people calling themselves "exotic" (or being labeled as such by others), the more broadly the term is applied, the less it represents who we are and we do.

Of course, the name Exotic World will continue to live on--in Exotic World Weekend, the Miss Exotic World title (albeit slightly appended as 'Miss Exotic World, Reigning Queen of Burlesque'), and as part of our shared history. In the meantime, we encourage you to take our new name (and website) for a test drive. Please note that there will be tweaks, changes and all sorts of additional features added in the coming months--from message boards and listings to feature articles, interviews and galleries--but for now, you should certainly be able to find all the info you could possibly need to enjoy this week's festivities to the fullest.

Looking forward to seeing you all in a FEW DAYS (!!!)
Laura

PS: Here's a little something special, for those of you who might be feeling conflicted about the "change"--it just goes to show ya, everything old is new again ;)

Greening Your Home

2007-06-04T05:46:00.000-07:00

From Green Sage, by Kerry Mitchell, June 07 issue.

Greening the American Dream: A Home Buyers Story

Whoever thought lowering my utility bill would ever be under my control? When my Realtor showed me 20 homes and we narrowed it down to two homes, both were in the neighborhood we liked. We liked the floor plan, the room sizes were similar, the carpet had been replaced in both homes and each home was freshly painted. We considered our distance from where I worked and my children's school activities and both homes were equal in this category as well. The floors needed to be replaced in one of the homes.

When I asked her about those “squigley light bulbs” in each lighting fixture in that home and weren't they more expensive, I could see a gleam in her eye. She started to explain those light bulbs reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and will save us about $300 a year on our energy bill. Her knowledge on real estate was impressive but her guidance on energy efficiency was invaluable. She talked of the paint used in one of the homes as having lower VOC's, which she explained were volatile organic compounds which were breathable gasses and even explained that strong smell wasn't such a positive.

She said once the smell was gone, there would still be toxins in the indoor air of the home and our youngest daughter has asthma so we were grateful for this information and wondered about the indoor air quality of the home we were living in. When we were shown both the utility bills for the last year, our decision was obvious.

Not because there was just a few dollars difference, but a 35% difference! The home we were leaning towards was older than the other home but more energy efficient. Our contract was accepted and we were on our way to becoming homeowners. As our Realtor gave us the name of 2 or 3 different mortgage professionals, we interviewed them all.

While they all had good programs, one had a product called an “Energy Efficient Mortgage.” and we thought it was a joke. Even the other loan officers we talked to hadn't heard of it, when we told them we were going with another company. All you hear nowadays are the buzzwords, energy efficiency so we didn't really think it was anything more than gimmick. I was wrong. Apparently, this type of mortgage has been around since 1979, but wasn't popular, probably because neither was energy efficiency in 1979.

As I learned that we could make improvements right away, if we wanted that could include better insulation, better flooring and a new and higher efficiency air-handling unit. We were thrilled. This loan officer said he was“ green certified “ and we were impressed. We found out everyone who qualifies for a mortgage can qualify for an or an “energy improvement mortgage” or “energy efficient mortgage We have referred our “green certified” loan officer to two of our friends for refinancing a home for energy upgrades.

Our choice for our home inspector was easy because our Realtor, who also boasted about being “Green Certified” referred us to 3 inspectors but one had just completed the “green” certification course he explained was the first level of the same course curriculum our Realtor and Mortgage Professional were trained in. It is geared towards the real estate community called the Real Estate Environmental and Energy Education Series. I could tell he was proud of being able to say he was a “Green Certified Home Inspector.”

“With all of the talk” about “green” it was about time “green education” courses were finally offered for the home inspection industry,” he beamed. Was this a conspiracy? If so, I beamed too and thought, “It's about time.” I was hearing about “green building” every other day on CNN, History Channel and reading about it in every major publication that it was about time the real estate industry was being trained in guiding clients properly.

Our friends had bought a home 3 months ago and no one brought up energy efficiency and their home is smaller than ours and their utility bill is more. They are “greening” their home as well. Our journey in using “green” real estate professionals was one we would recommend to anyone buying a home in the future. Our Realtor in our opinion, walks on water but as she says, “OK, I'll do it but only if it is rain water, recycled so it can water your yard and flush your toilets.”

About the author:
Kerry Mitchell is a real estate broker and freelance writer. She is a national speaker and teaches, “green building” in the state of Florida. She is the author of the Real Estate Environment and Energy Education Series for the real estate industry.

Cincinnati Fringe 07 & lusthaus (1914)

2007-06-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

Cincinnati Experimental Art's lusthaus (1914) opened Wednesday night to rave reviews. You can catch the show tonight, or again next week. Bring friends! See it twice! Hell, see it five times. And disclaimer, yes, I am in the show, but I didn't write the review. Give me a little credit. Continue the review after the jump...and:

lusthaus (1914) will be at
Inktank (1311 Main Street, 45202) :
WED MAY 30, 8:15pm
FRI JUN 1, 9:30pm
TUE JUN 5, 8:15pm
THU JUN 7, 9:00pm
SAT JUN 9, 8:30pm

Citybeat Review:
This is one of those inter-disciplinary performance pieces that find their natural milieu in Fringe Festivals — just as it's exactly the sort of demi-spectacle upon which successful Fringe Festivals thrive. And, bless conceptor-director Gabe Johnson, it delivers a nicely Fringe-y blend of sensory and intellectual exhilaration.

A bare platform in the backroom at InkTank. A handful of well-placed, well-used white lights. An avalanche of sound and music, mostly 19th-century, designed by Heather Brown. Four chairs. Four bodies — two women, two men — appear in (and out of) muslin-white costumes, designed by Hannah Dringenburg to suggest turn-of-the-20th-century under-garments.

Johnson and the four members of the company devised and polished the series of precise movements. Here it's lyrical, sensual, even sleepy. There it's designedly crude, even clumsy. Often there's an edge of threat, even doom.

Is it theater? Not in any expected sense, though there is a script of sorts. Nor is it quite dance. It's more a living, moving gallery exhibit that makes — then artfully breaks — its own rules.

The bodies become fluid sculpture. The words spoken might be descriptive paragraphs pasted to walls beside objects in a museum.

Back in 1986, dancer-choreographer Martha Clarke presented Lusthaus: Vienna in New York, using music, snippets of disconnected dialogue by historian and playwright Charles Mee and semi-dance movement patterns to investigate the spirit of Vienna in 1900 — a time when old disciplines and restraints were crumbling, when of-the-moment sensory experience was all that seemed to anchor or comfort society. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich greeted the piece with enthusiasm. In 2003, Clarke revisited the idea with less success in Washington, D.C.

Now Johnson and company, using similar movement concepts and some of the script from the Clarke event, revisit Vienna at a later date, 1914 — when World War I simmered on the wind and would soon sweep away the last structures and strictures of the old empire. It was a time, Johnson said, "when men were finding voices and roles in a new society" and when "women who had been held down by society were freeing themselves through sexual means."

Whether all that is put on view in a performance of Lusthaus (1914) is not actually important. Plenty is on view. At times the piece is rife with that sort of relishing nostalgia people can have for times and places they can't actually remember. At other times the piece eliminates detail and exhibits pure emotion shorn of context.

Johnson and most of his company are products of the theater program at Northern Kentucky University, where Lusthaus (1914) was created and presented in workshop performances this spring. The company members are Josh Beshears (who also appears in another Fringe 2007 entry, Stephen Hunter’s On Edge), Katie Kershaw, Michael Stone and Jen Spillane (who appeared in her own solo show, Virtue, in the 2006 Cincinnati Fringe). Grade: B+

— Tom McElfresh

Bust Party in Williamsburg, June 5

2007-06-01T05:19:00.001-07:00

You're invited to join BUST Magazine on June 5 at Union Pool in Williamsburg, BK for our June/July issue release party! Rock out with performances from The Ettes and Babyshakes! Then hit the dance floor with DJ Dirty Finger and DJs from The Dansettes! First 200 attendees receive goodie bag filled to the brim with the hottest summer items from Kiss My Face, Simone Chickenbone, Blissen, Medusa’s Makeup, Skin Milk, Buy Olympia, Sick on Sin, Blackheart Records, PETA, Blue Q, Steaz, and AAVS! Union Pool, BK, 7-Midnig

Hope to see you there!

Bust Fashion

2007-05-31T06:58:00.001-07:00

From Bust:

BUSTie Style Sneak Peek

A few weeks ago we put out a call to you smart, sassy readers for pics of your amazing fashion sense. We knew you had style, but damn! Here’s a little taste of our upcoming reader-riffic spread. Send hi-res images of your own BUST-y style to lisab@bust.com.

“I'm multi-cultural so that plays a role in my fashion. My look is polished and I find inspiration in ‘40s style: the tailored quality of the clothes, the suits, the dresses, the pencil skirts. I like to pick pieces with an understated elegance but at the same time make a statement.”

Marisa Rodriguez, 28, Law student, San Francisco, CA

Offbeat Brides...

2007-05-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

Via Needled:

Offbeatbride.com is the companion website for Ariel Meadow Stallings' book Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides.

The blog is just the tip of the iceberg — for the whole story you'll need the book, which is part wedding memoir, part handbook, and totally overflowing with encouragement, tips, and tricks from and for brides who dare to walk off the beaten aisle. Read an excerpt, and then buy the book.

Zen

2007-05-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

Apologies for intermittant posting. Have new show opening tonight. In the meantime...kitty!

From the Daily Mail, by Michael Hanlon, posted 5.29.07.

Most cats do not like getting wet - as anyone who has tried to bathe a moggie will know.

But as these pictures show, there's always the exception to the rule. For the cat in question is a large male white Bengal tiger called Odin.

Six years old, and at the prime of his life, Odin lives at the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom Zoo in Vallejo, near San Francisco. He is about 10ft long from nose to tail, and is an excellent swimmer.

White tigers - the colour is caused by an unusual genetic combination - are rare in the wild, although there are several dozen in zoos.

Odin was hand-raised at the zoo. And after he was weaned, his British trainer Lee Munro discovered his remarkable skill: when a lump of meat was thrown into a pool of water, Odin would happily dive in after it.

In fact, although Big Cats generally do not like water, tigers of all types have been spotted taking to the water to hunt and even to bathe for pleasure.

Odin can now be observed in action - a large pool with glass walls has been constructed at the zoo to allow visitors to watch him gliding through the water with all the grace of a polar bear.

Tragically, within our lifetimes, zoos might be the only places left to see these magnificent animals.

A century ago there were about 100,000 tigers in the wild. Now there are just 2,500 adults, with the Bengal variety almost extinct.

Russian Pride

2007-05-29T05:57:00.001-07:00

From Australia's The Age, posted 5.28.07 (via PerezHilton).

The lead singer of Right Said Fred, Richard Fairbrass, and an Australian activist were among marchers bashed at a gay rights rally in Moscow yesterday during which several foreign Gay Pride supporters were arrested.

Fairbrass and British-based Australian activist Peter Tatchell were among a crowd of demonstrators who braved punches, kicks, eggs and insults as they defied a state ban to briefly stage Moscow's second ever Gay Pride march.

Police detained Russian gay community leader Nikolai Alexeyev and several European MPs in central Moscow at the start of the demonstration by dozens of homosexual rights activists campaigning for an end to sexual discrimination.

Dozens of Russian right-wing extremists converged on the group, shouting insults, throwing eggs and punching and kicking gay demonstrators in front of riot police, who intervened much later.

The police also systematically arrested both the attackers and the assaulted.

The gay rights activists were also assaulted by ultra-nationalists and Orthodox Church hardliners.

Russian news agencies, citing police, said eight to 10 people had been arrested for participating in the rally.

The demonstrators were trying to march on Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov's office to hand over a memorandum signed by more than 40 members of the European Parliament requesting permission to hold a march in central Moscow.

Mr Luzhkov had earlier described Gay Pride marches as a "work of Satan".

Also detained were Volker Beck, a member of Germany's parliament; Marco Cappato, an Italian member of the European Parliament, and the British-based Australian gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

Mr Tatchell and Mr Beck were punched in the face in full view of police and dozens of journalists. Another activist was seen bleeding from his face after being attacked.

Mr Tatchell took a punch in the eye from an ultra right-wing nationalist counter-demonstrator, witnesses said. Riot police eventually detained several far-right members.

Supporting the demonstration were Austrian, German and Italian MPs, Fairbrass and the Russian pop duo Tatu.

Tatu singer Yuliya Katina said she was angered "when someone forbids someone else from loving in the way they want to love", the Interfax news agency reported.

The crackdown on the gay rights marchers drew quick condemnation from around Europe.

The mayor of Rome along with cabinet ministers and Italian MPs deplored the violence.

"What happened in Moscow, leaves you speechless: to use or even tolerate violence against those who are demonstrating in a peaceful manner for the recognition of their human and civil rights is a sad sign," said Mayor Walter Veltroni.

After being held for about five hours at a police station, Mr Cappato was released with the help of the Italian embassy, officials said.

Mr Beck, who was beaten during Moscow's first Gay Pride march last year, was attacked again by ultra-nationalists and detained by police who then released him after an apology, the russiagay.ru website reported.

Transsexual Italian deputy Vladimir Luxuria, who was pelted with eggs, was clearly shocked after the attack.

"I will put pressure on our parliament to ensure that the Italian president brings up this very serious matter during his next meeting with (Russian President) Vladimir Putin."

That view was echoed by the Liberal Democrat leader in the European Parliament, Graham Watson, who said European leaders must raise with Putin at the Group of Eight summit next month "the question of whether Russia still adheres to the values of the Council of Europe, of which it is a member".

The violence also was condemned by the mayor of another European capital, Bertrand Delanoe of Paris, who slammed it as "clearly inappropriate".

"I would like to denounce the unacceptable violence perpetrated once again by extremists on people peacefully participating in a rally in the Russian capital for the equality of homosexuals," he wrote in a statement.

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Centre in Paris, concerned that Russian demonstrators could be sentenced to jail, said all those arrested in Moscow must be freed.

"They have been told (by the authorities) that they will not be released and that they will be brought to justice," centre chief Christine Le Doare told AFP.

She called on the French foreign ministry to put pressure on Russian authorities to release all march participants.

Far-right Russian parliamentary deputy Alexei Mitrofanov was present in support of the march, despite the opposition of many in the legislature to sexual minority rights.

Igor Miroshnichenko, a deputy leader of a hardline Orthodox church group, told Interfax gays were "perverts who violate the will of God".

Nice to see a better definition of "moral" is in play in the EU, yes? It's been depressing how US politicos have co-opted the word to stand in for "hate."

A Way to Keep the Young Boys Moral After School...

2007-05-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

From The Swearing Lady, on politics and specifically Gang(land Ireland) and Crime, posted 5.17.07.

Gangland Ireland and Crime: I’m against them and all their budgies. Yet locking up these fellas isn’t doing us much good at all. We need to nip this in the Marijuana bud. Let’s fight against putting boredom and testosterone in the same body! I suggest putting a library in Castle Park. Sniff new books! the slogan would cry, Not dhrugs! At the very least the burning would keep them warm in the winter.

Kate Nash: Video

2007-05-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

Kate Nash (website and myspace) has a video for her (more produced than previous releases) "Foundations," via PerezHilton.

Sweet Jesus.Deliver Us From Creationists.

2007-05-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

This is what has been going on in Northern Kentucky. Via Cincinnati Blog.

Schools for Pregnant Girls

2007-05-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

Can you believe that schools for pregnant girls still exist? Well, until now (at least in New York). From the NY Times, by Julie Bosman, posted 5.24.07.

A dozen girls, some perched awkwardly with their pregnant bellies flush against the desks, were struggling over a high school geometry assignment on a recent afternoon.

No pencils, no textbooks, no Pythagorean theorem. Instead, they sewed quilts.

That is what passes for math in one of New York City’s four high schools for pregnant girls, this one in Harlem. “It ties into geometry,” said Patricia Martin, the principal. “They’re cutting shapes.”

Created in the 1960s, when pregnant girls were such pariahs that they were forced to leave school until their babies were born, the city school system’s four pregnancy schools — or P-schools, as they are obliquely referred to — have lived on, their population dwindling to just 323 students from 1,500 in the late 1960s.

They have been marked by abysmal test scores, poor attendance and inadequate facilities, and even some of their own administrators say they suspect that most of their students are pushed there by other schools because they are failing academically. In place of proms and computer labs, they have Mother’s Day parties and day care centers with cribs lining the walls.

Now in recognition of their failure, the city plans to shut them down at the end of the school year as part of a sweeping reorganization to be announced today of the alternative school district, which also includes an array of vocational, technical and dropout programs for students who have struggled in traditional settings.

“It’s a separate but unequal program,” acknowledges Cami Anderson, the superintendent whose district includes the Program for Pregnant Students, as it is formally called. “The girls get pushed out of their original high schools, they don’t come to class and they don’t gain ground in terms of credits.”

The schools’ demise, like their origins, may be a sign of changing times. Pregnancy schools across the country appear to be slowly fading away, partly stemming from the decade-long declining rate of teenage pregnancy and partly because of the idea that the girls should not be segregated from other students. These days, nearly 40 New York City high schools have their own day care centers.

The number of pregnancy schools in Chicago has dwindled to one. In Madison, Wis., enrollment in pregnancy schools has decreased by roughly 15 percent over the last five years, said Ken Syke, a spokesman for the public schools there. And in the Los Angeles public schools, the teaching staff at one pregnancy school has dropped to 16 from 19 in three years, and shut down one of its five sites.

“They have definitely trended down in population from five years ago,” said Ken Easum, the administrative coordinator of Educational Options, the alternative public schools program in Los Angeles.

In New York, the girls in the Program for Pregnant Students make up only a small portion of the 7,000 girls enrolled in the city’s public schools who become pregnant each year, according to city health department estimates.

The decision to close the schools came after a six-month study commissioned by the Education Department essentially concluded that the girls, eager to earn high school diplomas despite their pregnancies, had been relegated to a second-class tier of schools that treat them more like mothers-to-be than curious students.

For years, too, a range of groups had railed against the schools as vestiges of an almost Victorian past, arguing that they were sexist, stigmatizing and demeaning, and that the majority of the students who leave the one-year program were even further behind academically than before their pregnancies.

“It is a place that they send young women during their pregnancies, and I can’t think of any sound academic reason that they exist,” said Benita Miller, the executive director of the Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective, a nonprofit group that holds monthly workshops in the schools.

Before the schools were established in the 1960s, pregnant girls were put on “medical suspension” until after their babies were born, then banned from returning to their original high schools afterward. Hundreds of other girls were sent, often under threat of court order, to shelters, where the old Board of Education maintained special schools.

But many of the girls remained unaware of their educational rights. In 1970, the New York Civil Liberties Union published a handbook outlining the rights of New York City public school students. One of those rights, it said, was “to remain in your regular school program as long as physically possible” while pregnant.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 stated that schools were allowed to create separate educational programs for pregnant students, but that they must be of comparable quality to standard high schools.

Ms. Anderson, the superintendent who was installed 10 months ago, said that many students in the pregnancy schools had not been thriving in their regular high schools.

Some school administrators and students say that guidance counselors, eager to push out struggling students in an era in which poor performance can carry sanctions, routinely strong-arm newly pregnant girls to drop out and enroll in a pregnancy school.

Dannette Queen, the assistant principal at the pregnancy school in Harlem, said most students were referred by a guidance counselor. “The pregnancies provide the guidance counselors the perfect opportunity to get rid of them and say, ‘You need to be in a pregnant school,’ ” Ms. Queen said. “Some guidance counselors tell them they won’t have to go to class when they come here.”

Still, some girls currently enrolled in pregnancy schools rhapsodize about their desire to get a high school diploma, go to college and pursue careers. Kyasia Davis, a tall, bubbly 18-year-old who is enrolled in the pregnancy school in the Bronx, says she wants to attend community college after she graduates.

Sitting in a science classroom at the pregnancy school in Harlem, Cassandra Gonzalez, 15, who is expecting a boy in July, says she plans to go to college and become a lawyer. But the constant talk of babies at school, she adds, often distracts from studying.

“Sometimes, you have girls who come in with their babies,” she said. “Then it’s like, forget class!”

Some teachers and administrators who have worked in the schools for years believe in them and say they were designed with students’ safety and well-being in mind. In regular high schools, many girls feel ostracized by other students, they say, and struggle to keep up once they are distracted by the burdens of pregnancy.

“It’s a necessary thing for those students who can’t succeed in a regular high school setting,” said Eleanor McDonagh, the assistant principal at the pregnancy school in Brooklyn.

But teachers say many girls, disillusioned with the pregnancy schools, do not last long there either. In a class meant to teach child-rearing skills at the Bronx school, a room of only a half-dozen girls listlessly sewed pillows for their babies’ cribs. Barbara Haughton, the teacher, said the low attendance was unusual. “Many of them are on maternity leave,” she said. The students are allowed two months of leave after they give birth and cannot bring their babies to the school day care center until they are 2 months old.

Another teacher at the Brooklyn school, Linda Lloyd-Jones, said she had seen girls, juggling classes with impending motherhood, abandon high school out of frustration. “A lot of them leave right after the first semester because they can’t stand it,” Ms. Lloyd-Jones said.

The internal data provided to the Education Department by a private consultant showed what dismal results the pregnancy schools have yielded. In the fall of 2006, the average daily attendance at the pregnancy schools was 47 percent, well below the city average. Fewer than 50 percent of the pregnancy school students successfully made a transition back to high school. And the average student only earned four to five credits each year, fewer than half of the 11 credits possible.

It’s not for lack of spending: the Education Department spent $33,670 on each student this year, a cost of more than $10.8 million — more than double the citywide average of per-pupil spending. Ms. Anderson, the superintendent, said she hoped that starting next year, pregnant girls would remain in their regular high schools or switch to small specialized high schools designed for struggling students. “The most powerful thing we can do for parenting teens is help them get their diplomas,” she said. “Your brain does not die when you become pregnant.”

The Insanity of Weddings

2007-05-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

From the New Yorker, Kelly Bare interviews Rebecca Mead, author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, 5.21.07.

Rebecca Mead’s new book, “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding” (Penguin Press), grew out of an article about the bridal business which she wrote for The New Yorker in 2003. Here, with Kelly Bare, she talks about the hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar wedding industry and her theories on why brides and grooms are so eager to buy what it’s selling.

KELLY BARE: I assume you saw the “bridezilla” clip on YouTube.

REBECCA MEAD: The one where the girl cuts off her hair? Of course. A number of people sent it to me, but none of them said, “This is a fake.” I did suspect that it was probably staged. I’m glad that I was right. This is something that I wanted to address in the book: why is this kind of caricature so believable? One hears stories about so-called “bridezillas” going crazy, and they’re entertaining and funny. But what about the social conditions that have created this caricature? There is a culture of weddings that is conspiring to make bridezillas of us all if it possibly could. In a way, it’s a surprise that more people don’t become the bridezilla caricature. There’s so much pressure on them to do so.

It’s not just the wedding industry; it’s other people. When I was getting married, a lot of the people around me seemed to want to conspire to make my wedding a bigger deal than I wanted it to be.

Well, I think if you’ve seen your friends doing it—if you’ve gone to ten weddings in which everybody has gone all out and paid for the chair-back ties and the coördinated napkins—then it becomes an expected thing. There is peer pressure. But one’s peers are being influenced by the industry as well. I’m not suggesting that all of this is created by the industry and that it doesn’t speak to some real need in people to want to have a kind of significant experience. I think the reason the wedding industry has been so successful is that it speaks to something very profound.

You could certainly have taken a more cynical tone in your book, but you seem to have been genuinely touched by some of what you saw.

Getting married is an enormous commitment, a terrifying commitment. Of course, it’s moving to see it, and it’s moving to be at weddings even of people I have never met before and am never going to see again. I also found the vow-renewal ceremonies very affecting. There’s something touching about people who are already married saying, “We really believe in this, we really want to be married.” I’m not in the least bit cynical about marriage. And I also don’t want to blame the bride. I don’t think this is just an instance of a whole generation of women losing their minds and being overindulgent. I think there’s a whole structure at work here.

I loved your coinage of the term “traditionalesque.” I have to admit that my husband and I were victims of the “traditionalesque,” in the case of the “Apache Indian Prayer.” Our wedding officiant had it in her stock ceremony. I’m from Nebraska, and the wedding took place in Nebraska, where Native American history is very important. Part of me thought, Maybe I should look this prayer up and see which tribe it’s attributed to, so I can put that in the program. But I’d heard the blessing before—I bet it’s in every single wedding-planning book out there—so I assumed it was legitimate. And it turns out it comes from a nineteen-fifties Hollywood movie, “Broken Arrow.”

As with the bridezilla video, once you start looking more closely, and not as a consumer but as a journalist, of course you ask questions. In researching that wedding prayer, I dug as deep as I could and spoke to historians and went to libraries and looked in books and called Native American chiefs. And what I was able to find was that the blessing seems to have entered the popular consciousness through “Broken Arrow,” which was—except for the wedding scene, the critics say—a very accurate depiction of the Apache people. A version of the blessing was also in the book that the movie was based on. The book was historical fiction, but the prayer was an invented part of the fiction.

You write that there are a number of reasons that people might buy into invented traditions, and also into the idea that a big fancy wedding is a birthright. One reason is that upper-middle-class brides, who are setting trends, have led lives filled with excitement, travel, and educational opportunities, so they need a showstopper wedding to make it anywhere near “the best day of their life.”

I think that’s absolutely right. And that’s something that wedding planners are very aware of. They have to think about ways to make the event a superlative experience for people who have had lives that are already superlative. It’s also been suggested that, because many young women have experienced divorce and family rupture in their lives, they may think that if they have a big wedding they will guarantee that their marriage will last. But common sense doesn’t bear that out. If anything, having a big wedding may simply mean that you’ll be a little bit more embarrassed later about telling people that you’re separating or divorcing.

One of the wedding planners you mention in the book, Mindy Weiss, has said that, essentially, if you’re miserable during the planning and all you want is for it to be over, then that’s what your marriage is going to be like. Does that make any sense to you?

Well, no. What one hears more commonly is, “If we can get through this, we can get through anything. This is the first test of our married life together.” This is what the bride’s saying: “We’ve fought over things, I had to deal with my parents-in-law, and this is sort of a preparation for the stress of married life.” Now, let’s hope that the hardest thing that anybody ever has to do is plan a wedding. But I think that people need the wedding and the planning to be in some way a traumatic experience. It used to be that a wedding was a definitive break in your life, and the new traumas of married life were real. Suddenly, you were waking up next to somebody with whom you’d never spent the night before. We don’t have that anymore—marriage is not the beginning of your independent life, it’s probably not the beginning of your sexual life, and it’s not your entry into adulthood, as it once was. So there’s a sense in which what used to be the trauma of newly married life has been transferred to the trauma of planning a wedding, because we need a wedding to feel momentous, and one way to make it feel momentous is to make the planning of it complicated and difficult and an enormous production.

You call these “invented traumas.” There are therapists who would argue that these “invented traumas”—agonizing about, say, having a sit-down dinner versus a buffet, or a destination wedding versus a wedding in your church at home—are stand-ins for larger issues. You think that you and your mom are fighting about the color of the flowers, but it’s really that she’s sad about losing you. Would you agree?
I think that’s a very suggestive idea, and it makes sense that you would play out some of those attentions in the wedding planning. People in the wedding industry pay little attention to that dimension of the very event that they’re engaged in. If you ask wedding planners for their success rates, occasionally you’ll find somebody who’ll brag, “None of my couples get divorced.” But mostly it’s “I don’t know.”

Or “I don’t care.” Or maybe “Good, because then they’ll come back.” One anecdote in your book just killed me—the woman who cried through every planning session, got divorced, and then said to her planner, “I want to use you next time.”

I think there’s a quote from Vows magazine, the trade magazine for bridal retailers and wedding professionals, which suggests to people in bridal stores that they cultivate the future remarriage market by satisfying the present brides-to-be. It’s hilarious and terrifying and horrifying. If you talk to wedding planners, they’ll say, “It’s not my job.” And it’s not. It’s not their job to tell somebody that maybe the reason she’s having a meltdown over the flowers is that she’s incompatible with her husband.

In the book, you mention young couples in China preferring Western-style events. Do you see our wedding obsession becoming a worldwide phenomenon, in the way of so many other aspects of American culture?

I think it’s bound to, because that’s the way culture and popular culture and American culture work. I’m English, although I haven’t lived in Britain for a long time, but I see that there’s a growing wedding culture there and things have really changed. But everybody knows that there’s something that’s sort of out of control about this. One of the things that was very gratifying to me while I was working on the book was the amount of people who said, “I’m so glad you’re writing about that, because I’ve been to so many weddings that are just out of control,” or “Why do I have to go to the engagement party or the bachelorette party, the rehearsal dinner, and the brunch afterward?” Why has it become this overblown, incredibly elaborate production? And it may be that there’s a kind of feeling that too much is too much. We’ll see.

Do you consider yourself British or American? Were you writing from inside American culture, or outside it, or somewhere in between?

I’ve lived in the United States nineteen years, with only a brief and misguided return to Britain many years ago, so I’m very much transplanted, and at this point I’m much more familiar with this culture. I didn’t feel like I was a Martian landing on an alien planet and saying, “Wow, these people drive on the wrong side of the road and eat really big hamburgers.” I think that, certainly, I am British—I lived the first twenty-two years of my life in England and I absorbed that sensibility, whatever that is—but I have a skepticism that would be the same wherever I was. I didn’t look at the culture of weddings from the perspective of a consumer or a bride.

You mention in the epilogue that you got married during the process of writing this book, and that working on the book made you think differently about your own wedding. How?

I wouldn’t say it changed what I wanted to do, but it made me concentrate on what I would do, and one of the things that I was forced to confront was that I didn’t really have anything to turn to, because I don’t come from a religious family and I don’t have a strong cultural tradition to follow. If I wasn’t going to turn to the commercial wedding industry, which I didn’t want to do, then it was actually quite hard to know what to do and how to get married. There’s something deserving of sorrow in that, in the realization that one doesn’t have the props that one wants. Getting married is a very big deal, and we all want it to feel like a big deal. But I don’t buy the wedding industry’s suggestion that the individualization of weddings is what it’s all about now—that you should create it for yourself.

Then you’re an island, and that’s not what marriage is really about. Marriage is a conformist act, and you might as well take some comfort in the fact that you’re entering a community.

It’s the modern condition. We live in a culture that is absolutely invested in the new and the novel and the up-to-date. One of the things that’s lost in that is what to do in these big, transitional moments. It’s tricky. It seems to me that the authority that is most aggressively supplying the rules is the wedding industry. My purpose in the book was to point out the ways in which that industry is not necessarily serving the best interests of its target audience. And, in a way, I was using weddings as a way of looking at American culture, and for me, certainly, weddings were a very illuminating entry point into thinking about what our priorities are as a culture. The way we marry is the way we are.

Kelley McRae at Pete's Candy Store, Sun. 5/27

2007-05-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

Via Kelley McRae's myspace:

Hello, New Yorkers!

This Sunday, May 27th @ 10pm I'll be playing at

PETE'S CANDY STORE
709 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, NY

*Playing with the fabulous Rue Royale from Chicago!

Vintage Natalie Dee

2007-05-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

Because Natalie Dee makes everything better.

nataliedee.com

Excuse me, but before you climb on my lap to gyrate, could I see your license? Thank you ever so much.

2007-05-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

From I'm Sick of Your Insane Demands, posted/written by Erica C Barnett 5.22.07. More text after the jump.

License to Dance?

New York state is considering legislation that would require strippers to pay for a special new license to dance. The proposal, by state Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, does not say how much the license would cost, but does note that violations will result in fines of $20 for the first offense, $50 for subsequent offenses. Clubs could be fined between $1,000 and $2,000 for hiring unlicensed strippers. (Fox News, in typically classy form, characterized the proposal thus: "New York's strippers may have a real license to thrill"; the stodgier New York Times, meanwhile, classified the article under the subject heading "Wiggling.")

The supposed purpose of the new license is to protect women from sex trafficking, and to make sure they get medical checkups (because dancer = hooker? I mean, you can't have it both ways. In reality, though, the license would only add to strippers' financial burdens. The license fees would come on top of the stage fees clubs already charge dancers for the privilege of doing their jobs. Like periodic crackdowns on dancers who violate strip club rules, the new licenses purport to "protect" strippers by regulating their behavior--while ignoring the men men who engage in illegal behavior in strip clubs (fondling dancers without consent, pressuring them for sex, etc.) They, as always, are invisible.

Women in Photography: Juried 2007 Competition

2007-05-23T06:23:00.000-07:00

Via Bust, Women in Photography. Visit the Competition Guidelines for more detailed information and entry form. Image right by Bridgette Auger (Brooklyn, New York), "Mahi" (2004, silver gelatin print): "This image is a large format portrait of my mother taken as she was getting dressed in her bathroom."

"WIPI 2007 Competition" is open to all photographers and will be juried by an accomplished panel of professionals. The top 10 winning images with BIO clips as well as 25 honorable mention images will be showcased on womeninphotography.org.

May 5th Competition Opens
June 30 FINAL Deadline
July 30 Notification by e-mail of Juror Selection
July 30 Aug. 15th - Online Exhibition
July 30 Aug. 15th - Prize distribution

For the 2007 WIPI welcomes images taken with any type of film and/or digital camera.. All photography including mixed media accepted and uploaded as a JPEG submission according to guidelines. B/W, alternative or any digital photo image, manipulated, scanned film or prints and submitted as a JPEG file, no date restriction, ALL subject matter accepted. Submit your favorite photos.

Brand New Bust

2007-05-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

Bust.com has gotten an update - def. worth a visit. Also, their email updates (sign up in upper left corner) are informative without being inundative. Is that a word? Regardless, enjoy the Bust.

Exotic World Weekend

2007-05-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

Exotic World Myspace and homepage.

June 8-10: BREAKING NEWS: The Exotic World Burlesque Hall of Fame, home of the world's largest collection of vintage burlesque art and artifacts, will be celebrating our 50th Striptease Reunion with three days and nights of tassel-tossing, shimmy-shaking fun--including the 17th Annual Miss Exotic World Pageant, June 8 through 10, in historic Las Vegas, Nevada.

The world's premier burlesque gathering, Exotic World Weekend showcases burlesque performers, young and old, from across the globe, representing numerous countries and over five generations of 'expert-tease.'

Impeach Gonzales: Part I

2007-05-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

From Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, Impeach Gonzales, via PunkAss Blog.

non sequitor: Recommendation

2007-05-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

I love historical fiction, and have been devouring the books of David L. Robbins. His last novel, The Assasins Gallery, is fantastic, and its sequel The Betrayal Game, is due out this summer.

Heretofore, Robbins has concentrated mainly on events during the second world war - The Betrayal Game will come later, during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Robbins not only uses detailed historical information told through the eyes of specifically crafted characters, but his writing is also damn beautiful, lyrically gorgeous. The books move swiftly, with detailed plots. Really, it's the best historical fiction I've read (which may not say it all but says something). I can't recommend his work enough.

Of his ouvre, I've read Assasins Gallery, Last Citadel, War of the Rats, and Liberation Road. I haven't gotten to The End of War, Scorched Earth, or Souls to Keep yet, but I intend to.

French Catholics and Celibacy...a bit of a surprise

2007-05-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

Since this post on the Catholic Church generated some vitriolic response, and since it's a topic that interests me, here's French villagers back priest with partner from the BBC, posted 3.17.07.

A Catholic priest in south-west France has been forced out of the clergy after admitting to the Church authorities that he was having a sexual relationship with one of his parishioners. The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby says this has set off a fresh debate about celibacy in the Church.

There is a wonderful sense of stillness in the mountains overlooking the little village of Asson - a few swallows surf gently on the upwind currents and a shepherd sits quietly watching his flock of fat, thickly pelted sheep graze on the velvet grass.

It is a bit like one of those bucolic woodcut scenes you find in ancient bibles. But, in this religious landscape, those who break the rules are quickly cast asunder.

To a passer by, Fr Leon and his partner Marga probably look like any other middle-aged couple taking an evening stroll together.

He is twinkly eyed and looks a little like Dustin Hoffman. She seems warm and open and is still a very attractive woman. But in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, Leon and Marga are sinners.

'Closer to God'

For the past 22 years, the couple have been in a sexual relationship, which is forbidden to a Catholic priest who has vowed to remain celibate. Fr Leon admits he has broken his promise but claims that being in love has brought him closer to God and his congregation.

"I haven't been strictly faithful to all my vows," he says.

"And I worried that by breaking some of those vows I had hurt Our Lord. But I think God can see that my relationship with Marga has brought real fruits to the church - far from being a handicap to my mission as a priest, she's been a great support. I just wish the Church could see that."

There is no doubt that Fr Leon has been an excellent parish priest.

It is difficult to keep him focused on the interview I am trying to conduct with him because every five minutes a parishioner appears at the presbytery door with a hamper of food, a good luck card or a small child for him to bless or kiss goodbye.

Everyone is in tears, particularly when they hug Marga, who is herself overcome with emotion and sobbing.

Far from being seen as the wicked temptress, or the wanton Eve who lured a pure man of the cloth into tasting the forbidden fruit, Marga is seen among the villagers as a great friend. A devout Catholic herself, she is hurt by the Church's attitude to the man she loves.

'On strike'

"They have just thrown him away like a dirty thing," she tells me, her bottom lip trembling.

"When the Church told him they were sanctioning him and that he would no longer be able to say Mass, he was broken. The Church doesn't see that it's hurting so many people forcing him to leave his parish.

"I work with a lot of elderly folk who say their only comfort is knowing that Fr Leon will be with them when they die. Now they don't have anyone they trust to hold their hands at the end."

The parishioners have spent three weeks "on strike" - boycotting Mass and refusing to go to Church with the new priest.

I watched them make huge protest banners from bed sheets and hang them from the belfry and roof, turning Asson's 13th Century place of worship into a giant billboard.

For some it was the beginnings of a revolution, a backlash against hierarchical traditions they feel have long been outdated. For others, peeping timidly over their garden gates at the church walls, the banners were a step too far - a defacement (albeit a temporary one) of God's sacred house.

Praying at home

The parishioners are being torn between their love for Fr Leon and their sense of duty to God and slowly, they have begun returning to mass.

Fr Benat Segur, from a neighbouring parish, told me he hopes things will quieten down now.

While he was a friend of Father Leon's, a vow is a vow and you can no longer call yourself a Catholic priest if you take a girlfriend, he said. You have to become a Protestant.

Fr Leon and Marga do not go to Mass anymore.

Instead, they pray at home, reciting the Lord's Prayer together in a corner of their living room before a wooden statue of the Pyrenean saint St Jacques.

"St Jacques made a long pilgrimage across the mountains," Fr Leon reminds Marga, gently stroking away her tears.

"And if there are stones in our path, we'll be able to step over them together, won't we?"

When I had said goodbye, I went back up into the mountains, sat among the sheep and felt the stillness of the evening. Far away in the valley below, I could just pick out the banners on the church roof, silently flapping their protest to the heavens on high.

Emerging Playwrights...

2007-05-11T05:36:00.000-07:00

Via Christina...

THE PUBLIC THEATER CREATES ‘THE PUBLIC WRITERS INITIATIVE’ TO DEVELOP NEW PLAYS AND CULTIVATE NEW VOICES FOR THE AMERICAN THEATER

‘THE EMERGING WRITERS GROUP’ WILL PROVIDE KEY SUPPORT FOR PROMISING WRITERS

May 10, 2007 – Expanding on its fifty-year history of developing new plays and cultivating new voices for the American Theater, The Public Theater (Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, Executive Director Mara Manus) is proud to announce the creation of The Public Writers Initiative - a long-term initiative that will provide key support and resources for writers at every stage of their careers. With Time Warner as its founding sponsor, The Public Writers Initiative will begin its first phase in fall 2007 with the creation of The Emerging Writers Group. A unique and innovative program for the industry, The Emerging Writers Group will provide key resources and access to underrepresented talent selected through an open application process. In tandem with the expansion of The Public’s existing development and commissioning programs, The Public Writers Initiative will create a fertile community at The Public where writers can grow and learn from each other. Most importantly, it will also foster a web of supportive artistic relationships across generations of writers that will influence the future of contemporary American theater.

Many of today’s most honored and recognized playwrights such as John Guare, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Rabe, Chris Durang, Wallace Shawn, Ntozake Shange, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner and Nilo Cruz have a long history developing their work at The Public. The Public has also produced some of today’s most important plays, such as Hair, Sticks and Bones, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, The Colored Museum, Topdog/Underdog, Caroline, Or Change, and A Chorus Line. The Publics Writers Initiative will ensure that The Public’s great tradition of supporting playwrights and playwriting will remain central to its future.

Artistic Director Oskar Eustis stated “The Public Theater was founded to give a stage for the full diversity of American voices. The Public Writers Initiative will allow us to provide a home to the writers we believe in, and encourage them to address the great issues of the time.”

Time Warner has been a long-time and invaluable corporate supporter of The Public Theater.

"We are honored to partner with The Public Theater to launch this ground-breaking program," said Lisa Quiroz, Senior Vice President of Corporate Responsibility. "Through the Writers Initiative, The Public is not just supporting individual writers at different stages in their careers, they are helping to build a community of diverse voices and creativity that will strengthen theater and storytelling and enrich our culture for generations to come."

The Public Writers Initiative will fall under the auspices of the LuEsther Lab, named for the late LuEsther T. Mertz, who was a major benefactor of The Public and Chair of its Board from 1973 to 1987. The LuEsther Lab provides creative and financial support for artists at all stages in their careers through commissions, residencies, readings and workshops that have proven fundamental to The Public’s artistic success.

The Emerging Writers Group

The Public will identify and cultivate relationships with promising writers who, at the beginning of their careers, do yet have access to The Public through traditional industry channels. In the Emerging Writers Group, these writers will have the opportunity to interact with and learn from more established writers, and learn about production issues by observing the production process at The Public. With an open application process, The Public will cast a wide net across the country annually to select twelve to fifteen writers to participate in the program, which will include a three thousand-dollar stipend; biweekly writers group administered by The Public Literary Department; in-house readings; master classes led by established playwrights; career development opportunities; and artistic and professional support from The Public’s artistic staff. Writers will be selected for placement beginning September 2007. Application guidelines will be available later this month.

Expanded Development and Commissioning Programs

In addition to the Emerging Writers, The Public Writers Initiative will also significantly increase the number of readings, workshops and commissions for writers at all stages of their careers. Artistic development of this nature is at the core of The Public’s mission and is critical to helping the institution and writers develop new work for the theater. By providing apprenticeships and master classes, inviting the community of writers to attend all in-house readings and workshops and participate in general field discussions, The Public will create additional points of intersection for writers across generations to interact, build relationships and find mutual creative inspiration.

# # # #

THE PUBLIC THEATER (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Mara Manus, Executive Director) was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 as the Shakespeare Workshop and is now one of the nation’s preeminent cultural institutions, producing new plays, musicals, productions of Shakespeare, and other classics at its headquarters on Lafayette Street and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Public’s mandate to create a theater for all New Yorkers continues to this day on stage and through its extensive outreach and education programs. Each year, over 250,000 people attend Public Theater-related productions and events at six downtown stages, including Joe’s Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public has won 40 Tony Awards, 138 Obies, 39 Drama Desk Awards and 4 Pulitzer Prizes.

# # # #

The Public Theater is deeply grateful to The LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust for its generous support of the 2006-2007 season.

Bank of America is the proud Sponsor of the 2007 Season of Shakespeare in the Park.

Time Warner is the Supporting Sponsor of The Public's 2006-2007 season. Leadership support is provided by Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, Carole Shorenstein Hays and The New York State Music Fund. We are also deeply grateful to The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for its leadership commitment to The Public Theater's Endowment Fund in support of new work.

Major support is provided by The Shubert Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The George T. Delacorte Fund at the New York Community Trust—Fund for Performances at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Warren Spector and Margaret Whitton and The Starr Foundation.

Additional generous support is provided by Debra and Leon Black, Bloomberg, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Susan Stein Shiva Foundation, Titan Worldwide, The New York Times, New York Public Radio—WNYC and Google Book Search. Public support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Continental Airlines is the official airline of The Public Theater.

TIME WARNER TO BE FOUNDING SPONSOR