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The Lopezes are the first family of U.S. Olympic taekwondo - latimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:45:00 +0000

The Lopezes are the first family of U.S. taekwondo

Jean Lopez is the coach, Steve vies for his fourth Olympic medal, Diana is in her second Olympics and Mark is a team practice partner.

Siblings Diana and Steven Lopez will be returning to the Olympics along with two brothers, including one who coaches the U.S. taekwondo team. (Joe Klamar / Getty Images / May 19, 2012)

By Diane Pucin

May 19, 2012, 2:05 p.m.

DALLAS -- Biggest brother Jean Lopez, the coach, the instigator, the only sibling not to compete for the Olympics in taekwondo, gets choked up for a minute.

He is thrilled to speak about his 33-year-old brother, Steve, who will be aiming for a fourth Olympic medal in his fourth Olympics this summer in London.

Jean can't help but giggle when he speaks about his 28-year-old sister, Diana, who will compete in her second Olympics and try to better the bronze medal she earned in 2008.

But it is when Jean speaks about Mark, 30, whom Jean calls "the greatest athlete ever in the history of our sport, our Michael Jordan," that his voice breaks.

Mark was upset by Terrence Jennings in the U.S. Olympic trials and will travel to London only as a team practice partner.

Jean describes Mark's brand of fighting this way:

"He is the most stylish competitor you've ever seen in the sport," said Jean, who admits his family pride might be in play but insists exaggeration is not, just before his voice thickens again.

"It's still hard to talk about," Jean said. "I'm sure it will be even more difficult in London."

Mark was a silver medalist in Beijing but, after dealing with a shoulder injury this year and having to fight from a second-seeded position at the trials instead of the top-seeded spot where Steve and Diana fought, Mark lost to the 25-year-old Jennings of Alexandria, Va.

Even Steve called his own triumph at the trials this year "bittersweet" after Mark lost.

And if Steve were to win gold in London, he would become the 30th U.S. Olympian to have won gold in at least three Olympics. And of those, only four-time discus gold medalist Al Oerter earned his medals in a single event rather than a swimmer or track athlete who competes in multiple events.

Steve won gold in 2000 and 2004. In Beijing in 2008 he got a bronze in a competition he characterizes as "a momentary slip-up." Winning had become almost automatic and losing the gold, he said, provided something he needed. "A kick in the butt," Steve said.

For the sibling patriarch Jean, it is Diana who gets his praise.

"You know how boys are," he said. "We didn't want our little sister hanging around. But she's so tough. She just wouldn't leave us alone."

Off the mat, Diana is the model of a girlie-girl. She loves her nails polished to perfection. She selects earrings to complement every outfit and the higher the heels the better.

"I'm always in a uniform when I'm competing," Diana said. "And I've got three older brothers who want to kick my butt. I think looking feminine embodies being confident. Boys just can't look bad, no matter what. If they go to the gym with messy hair, no one cares.

"A girl has to take the responsibility of looking the part of a woman. But in the ring I'm a different person."

That person is "fierce," Jean said. Mark calls his sister "ferocious."

But the legacy Diana wants her family to leave on the sport is that of winners.

That legacy could continue being made long after London, though. Mark is motivated to keep competing and Jean says his 12-year-old daughter, Alyx, is training with Steve, Diana and Mark. "She's already absorbing the energy it takes to be an Olympian," Jean said. "And my 8-year-old son, Diego, says he's born to do this sport."

Jean's 4-year son, Andres, said he prefers wrestling. So maybe that will be another family first.

But London is where all the attention is focused now. And Mark is determined to build on the family legacy by training Steve and Diana as well as possible.

"I'm not sure it's set in yet that I won't compete in London," Mark said. "I'm just not thinking about that anymore. What's important to me now is making sure there are no slip-ups with my brother and sister. No one will be better trained. I'll make sure of that."

diane.pucin@latimes.com twitter.com/mepucin

The Lopezes are the first family of U.S. Olympic taekwondo - latimes.com

My Niece Ashley Sampson on the News Oprah speaks to Spelman graduates - Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:50:00 +0000

Oprah speaks to Spelman graduates - Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5

Donna Summer: Disco diva and rocker - R.I .P. - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:42:00 +0000

CCCADI X Ben Jones' Thursday, May 17, 2012 09:26 PM EDT

Donna Summer: Disco diva and rocker

If you only knew the singing sensation by her 1970s smashes, you barely knew her at all

By Alice Echols

There is so much about Donna Summer that we didn’t know… and not just the cancer that took her life. Let’s start with her relationship to rock. Summer is quite understandably known as a disco singer, and quite rightly so. It was disco that made her, and she, as perhaps disco’s highest profile performer, who helped to shape the genre. But like a number of other disco artists — Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the vocal trio Labelle and Chaka Khan all come to mind — Donna Summer was also a rocker. Yes, she grew up singing gospel, but she began her professional career as a ’60s rocker. She would describe this as her Janis Joplin phase, and she did indeed sing in a group that performed at the Psychedelic Supermarket — Boston’s version of Bill Graham’s Fillmore. She then went on to play a hippie in the Munich production of the rock musical “Hair,” and sported an enormous Afro inspired in large part by her hero, the black radical activist, Angela Davis. Although the disco music that she made with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and engineer Harold Faltermeyer provoked a fierce backlash from some aficionados of rock, this was a foursome that, as critic Dave Mash pointed out, functioned as a rock band, one in which Summer played a pivotal role as singer and songwriter. And then there is her singing. Listen to her hit “Hot Stuff,” and tell me that Summer could not sing rock.
Summer, who was strikingly beautiful, made some very steamy — some would say X-rated — music, most memorably with her first hit, 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby.” With Summer’s groans, moans and gasps powering the track, it broke new ground in its sexual explicitness. Promoted by her record company in explicitly sexual terms, and giving performances that made Tina Turner’s look tame, Summer soon found herself tagged the “Linda Lovelace of pop music.” She had seen this coming. In fact, she had not wanted to be the singer on that track, and agreed only to record the demo, and only then in a blackened studio where she sang, imagining that she was Marilyn Monroe giving herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. After producer Moroder convinced her to let him use her vocal, her record label president, seeing its bedroom potential, demanded a long-playing version that left the media debating whether the singer came 22 or 23 times. Rock critic Robert Christgau poked fun at the record with a review that consisted of three questions, “Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?” Other reviews were more disparaging. But “Love to Love You Baby,” like much of her music, put female desire front and center in a way that it wasn’t in most rock music. Indeed, Summer’s music is inseparable from second-wave feminism’s emphasis on women’s sexual empowerment.
There is so much to say about Summer, who could have been a full-fledged personality had she not been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a disco tart. I was once on a radio program with her and, believe me, she was nobody’s fool. She described the “star-making machinery” as well as anyone. After she had already became famous she told Rolling Stone that her career sometimes felt like “this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a machine… And at some point a machine breaks down.” Fame, she observed, diminished her, making her feel like nothing so much as a “commodity.” After falling into a debilitating depression and attempting suicide, she took control of her life again through Christianity.
In a way, I think one hears Summer confront her own commodification on her marvelous record “Bad Girls.” Although the music in the final, released version suggests otherwise, Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution on “Bad Girls.” Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers. “Now, you and me are just the same,” she sings. And if Summer sounds unusually exuberant as she yells out to a john, “Hey, mista, have you got a dime?” perhaps it’s because Summer understood what it meant to be made into a commodity and reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later, Summer noted that “Bad Girls” marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject. Let’s hope that in her death she inspires more writing that fully acknowledges the intelligent subjecthood of this disco diva and kick-ass rock and roller.

Alice Echols, a professor of English, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, is the author of four books, including "“Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture." More Alice Echols.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 02:55 PM EDT Donna Summer: Disco diva and rocker - R.I .P. - Salon.com

Black politics, reinvented - New Jersey - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:29:00 +0000

Black politics, reinvented

Across the country, polished African-American outsiders are upsetting the political machine. An expert explains how

By Max Rivlin-Nadler

Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Julio Cortez)

Cory Booker’s failed 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark heralded a new type of black politician. Booker was an outsider with Ivy-league credentials who was trying to unseat a veteran urban politician who had made a name for himself during the civil rights movement. Like other “new black politicians,” Booker’s appeal granted him entry to the political world and helped him circumvent long-standing black democratic machines. But what does this process, which has been repeated everywhere from Washington to Alabama, tell us about our country’s changing attitude towards race — and politics?
In her new book, “The New Black Politician,” Andra Gillespie follows the career of Cory Booker, from his start as a lawyer and community organizer through his successful run for mayor and his reelection, in order to illustrate what separates the new generation of black politicians from other black leaders before them. These new black politicians seek to create the same multicultural coalition that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency, but many lose their black support and fade from the political scene.
Salon spoke with Gillespie about racial electability, Cory Booker’s senate prospects, and what black politicians have in common with Will Smith and Tyler Perry.
How have new black politicians used what you call “elite displacement” to win elected office?
It’s a theory that’s transferable to other minorities as well, be they racial or religious — basically, groups that have experienced stereotyping in the past and have been marginalized because of these stereotypes. Elite displacement is what happens when an older generation of politicians who have largely come to power despite the stereotypes levied at them have a new generation of leaders, who are more assimilated into mainstream culture and who don’t necessarily wear the same type of ethnic or racial veneer as their predecessors, now running against them — particularly in cities where the majority is from that same racial group. What I’m interested in is how these young politicians break through. They normally have not been socialized within the institutions in that community. They’re outsiders to that community, and they’re trying to figure out a way to break into politics when all the traditional paths to power have been shut off.
What elite displacement describes is the practice by which these young African-American politicians try to circumvent the black political establishment to reach office for the first time. What they take advantage of is their access to mainstream institutions and culture, and they use that as their calling card. They may not get the support of the older black congressman, the city council, or the local political bosses, but they have access to mainstream media and their friends who have money, and they use that to amass a resource that can overwhelm the existing structure of the black political community.
Part of the reason they get so much interest and their story is so compelling is because people think of these older black politicians in terms of stereotypes. They are viewed as corrupt, ineffective, criminal and incompetent — not quite up for technocratic leadership. And this younger group of politicians, because they bring the right qualifications and pedigree to the table, fit the bill. They fit the archetype of what white audiences want to see black leaders look like, which would be very well-spoken, not talking about race all the time, and having credentials from the right schools, and that gives them a certain cache which makes their story very compelling. It helps them get on television and helps them attract volunteers to come from outside the communities to help them out. In my book, I explore the consequences of this strategy. It’s very hard for young black politicians to develop a deep connection to their constituency. Does their strategy help them build a broader base of support? Does it help them win over some of their critics, who will still hold on to some positions of power? And what does this portend for long-term governance?
One of the things in African-American communities that should be noted is that there are tons of problems. African-American representation of those communities have not ameliorated those problems. In the 40 years of black government in Newark and similar cities, you still see high rates of unemployment, high dropout rates and very paltry health indicators. The idea that putting blacks in power will act as a panacea, will help blacks improve their physical and emotional health standing, is not really true. The subsequent question becomes: Are these new black leaders the magic bullet to gain on the progress of political equality that was achieved in the 1960s?
How are civil rights leaders — the politicians who emerged from the civil rights movements — limited in their ability to govern and seek higher office?
Part of this has to do with the moment that they were elected to office. They were elected because of demographic changes in the communities in which they lived. As early as the 1930s, there was a mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs because of deindustrialization, but it was hastened by the riots in 1967. The white and black middle class left, leaving a city that was predominantly African-American. So the demographics of the city gave the opportunity for a black politician to win elected office. But there were other things that happened. Just because blacks were able to win positions in the city doesn’t necessarily mean that blacks in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were going to be able to win statewide office. There’s no state in the United States that is majority African-American. It creates a very hostile environment for blacks to be able to run for higher office. On top of it, there is evidence to suggest that even when blacks have held positions of power or leadership, they haven’t always been taken seriously. Earlier generations couldn’t do what President Obama has done. You can look at members of Congress who couldn’t even get their hair cut in the capitol, couldn’t eat at the dining hall where all members of congress were allowed to eat. There was still a caste system that wouldn’t even let them dream of being president.
What is a “black political entrepreneur”? Which politicians embody this term?
A black political entrepreneur is a type of young black politician who is most likely to use elite displacement. They are the type of politician who is de-racialized and who doesn’t have demonstrable ties to the black political establishment. They would be the type of person who would not be a child of the civil rights movement and wouldn’t be the mentee of a civil rights politician. We’re not talking about Jesse Jackson Jr. or anyone who inherited their political role. A black political entrepreneur is different from other types of black politicians because they have very progressive political ambitions. They are clearly itching to run for higher office. You can look at them and say, “That’s a senator, or a governor, or maybe even another president.” Black political entrepreneurs are the ones who take the most risks when running for office. They usually try to challenge older black politicians for power when most others would argue that it’s ill-advised. If you contrast Cory Booker with former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. , for instance, Harold Ford Jr. inherited a congressional seat. Black political entrepreneurs challenge strong incumbents for power instead of waiting their turn.
You compare black political entrepreneurs to Will Smith and civil rights politicians to Tyler Perry.
I’m not talking about ambition. I’m talking about crossover appeal, the degree to which people are de-racialized, and where their power comes from. Will Smith built his acting career as someone who started off in hip-hop but never had a hard edge. He was, arguably, on the cornier end of the hip-hop spectrum. When he moved into Hollywood and became an A-list star, everyone knew he was African-American, but he wasn’t cast as a black actor. He was a comedic actor, an action hero. He was somebody who wasn’t threatening and whom everybody loved. And because of that, he was able to build this amazingly successful Hollywood career.
Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is somebody who, if you look at his net worth, has done better than Will Smith, but who has been unabashedly black in terms of self-presentation and the types of projects that he’s chosen. Today, people pay attention to him in Hollywood because he was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood last year. But he’s made that money almost solely in the African-American community. He’s been able to be successful in this niche market, and people take him seriously because he’s made a lot of money, but he’s still on the margins. The fact that he’s based in Atlanta and that he’s regularly panned by movie critics proves he’s not fully mainstream. He needs to be contended and dealt with because you cannot deny his success. There are black people who have problems with how he presents his characters. People think Madea is a stereotype and that his television show is also a stereotype. Will Smith and Tyler Perry are very powerful in their own right, but they get their currency from very different sectors of the American public, and that helps to contribute to their persona.
You provide some examples in the book of where, while vigorously campaigning against the incumbent, new black politicians end up reinforcing some negative stereotypes.
If you look at how the story usually gets framed in the media when the black political entrepreneur runs against the black incumbent, it’s usually cast in stark terms. Good versus Evil. It also gets cast as the anachronistic civil rights warrior going against a fresh person who doesn’t wear race on their sleeve. Given some of the stereotypes that exist of blacks in terms of their intelligence and corruption — and sometimes admittedly, the connection of some of these incumbents to corruption and incompetency — it ends up reinforcing stereotypes of the average black leader. The stereotype is that they should not be trusted, that they can’t lead. New black politicians continually reinforce the stereotype because they keep talking about the incumbents in those terms.
The consequence of this is twofold. In these minority communities — places where the black political entrepreneur is usually not needed — you will see the black constituencies rally around the incumbent because they believe the attacker is racially motivated or that the fight has a classist tinge to it. They are very resistant to having their leaders attacked.
Usually the younger black politician has something very valuable to offer their community. But eventually this notion that “this person is so much better than other black leaders” ends up being constraining for the black political entrepreneur. He or she gets held to incredibly high expectations. It becomes about how fast they can commit to change. And it reinforces the idea of the black political entrepreneur as a “magical black person,” as a black superhero. And the black superhero is the foil to the black villain — instead of transcending stereotypes, we end up reinforcing them. I think the notion of the black political entrepreneur as a black superhero who is going to save inner-city communities from blight and destruction ends up reifying this notion that normal black people are too stupid to run their communities and hold office. This ends up hurting everybody. If the black political entrepreneur can’t turn a community around very quickly, then it ends up looking bad for him, and it ends up reinforcing the idea that black people cannot govern themselves.
Do you see a backlash against black political entrepreneurs happening? I think of Adrian Fenty losing his reelection race for Mayor of D.C.
Absolutely. What’s really interesting about de-racialization theory, which underlies a lot of my work, is the strategy of black politicians reaching out beyond the black community to try to create a multiracial electoral coalition. People have always been concerned about the multiracial coalition falling apart because you can’t help but avoid race. We saw that happen with David Dinkins in New York City. Dealing with the Crown Heights riots and the Big Apple boycott, we see what would be a traditionally democratic voting bloc fall apart over race. One of the underlying assumptions of de-racialization is that black voters support black politicians. That’s a little harder to untangle when you have black-on-black elections where blacks are running against one another. And the assumption is that the two black candidates split the black vote, and the de-racialized new politician makes it up with the non-black vote.
What we’ve seen with Booker’s first mayoral race and Adrian Fenty’s loss is that you can lose enough of the black vote to lose an election. It’s a question of what the sweet spot is. Black political entrepreneurs should be comfortable not winning over some blacks. It’s just a question of how many black votes you lose. In Adrian Fenty’s case, he lost too much of the African-American vote. It then becomes a question of why. It wasn’t because of his technocratic leadership, because by all accounts he was a great leader. He left D.C. in better shape in 2010 than when he received it in 2006. He underestimated the extent to which style would be important and the extent to which people had a problem with Michelle Rhee. Style becomes really important. People don’t think that it should be important, but it is.
Black political entrepreneurs have national political ambitions. You can afford to lose some of the black vote, but if you alienate too much of it, you can lose a statewide election, which is what happened with Arthur Davis’s senate campaign in Tennessee in 2006. Black political entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, are still very very dependent on black votes. You can’t alienate the black voters, even when you disagree with them, and you can’t come off as disrespecting them or condescending to them. Especially if they would have been sympathetic and voted for you, if only you hadn’t disrespected them.
It strikes me that these politicians are setting themselves up for disappointment by promising so much change and progress during their campaigns.
I don’t know if you’re setting yourself up for failure, but I would warn black political entrepreneurs to tone down on the messianic rhetoric and to try to separate themselves from it, because it puts undue pressure on them. One of the things that I wanted to do in the conclusion of the book is to address the aspiring Cory Booker’s out there. I want them to understand that there are consequences, both positive and negative, for every type of political decision one makes. I’m not here to tell anybody, “No.” If you’re running against somebody who you truly think is incompetent, then you should point that out. But you should definitely be more circumspect in how you criticize them, and you should do it in the most respectful way. Booker learned that between his two campaigns. They toned down the stupid rhetoric a lot between the elections because they realized how much it harmed them.
Another thing I would tell budding Cory Bookers is to really assess the resources they have at their disposal. There are people who want to be black political entrepreneurs but who don’t really have access to the Stanford and Yale and Oxford alumni directories the way Booker does. They might not have friends in high places. They might not have the same fundraising capacity. It might not make sense to use the elite displacement election strategy if you don’t have the resources. Booker could overcome a lot of the negative externalities that come with elite displacement because he had this very, very deep base in mainstream culture. If other people don’t have that, because they didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, then you might want to cultivate a different sort of persona.
Where does Cory Booker go from here?
This is my observation: At one point, it looked like people were toying around with the idea of running him for governor. But, based on the decision last year to create the Federal PAC, I surmise that now they’re looking more at Frank Lautenberg’s senate seat. I think that’s a great idea. I think Booker would be a great senator. He could have the potential, with some longevity, to have a huge impact on the Senate. He could be Ted Kennedy-esque. As long as New Jersey residents are comfortable with both of their senators not being white (and hopefully no one brings that up or reminds them of it), then that’s actually really cool. If Cory were sitting with me right now and asked me, “Andra, what should I do?” I would tell him to go run for the Senate, without hesitation.

Max Rivlin-Nadler is an editorial fellow at Salon. More Max Rivlin-Nadler.

Black politics, reinvented - New Jersey - Salon.com

FDA advisory committee recommends approval of first drug for preventing HIV - The Washington Post

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:48:00 +0000

Mitt Romney’s formative years

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FDA panel recommends approval of drug to prevent HIV infection

By Brian Vastag, Thursday, May 10, 7:42 PM

For the first time, a panel of experts has recommended that the Food and Drug Administration approve a drug for preventing infection with HIV.
The panel told the agency Thursday that it should approve the drug Truvada for HIV prevention in men who have sex with men, HIV-negative partners of people with HIV and “other individuals at risk for acquiring HIV through sexual activity.”

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The FDA usually follows the advice of its advisory committees, which are made up of experts from outside the agency, although it does not have to.
If the FDA does approve Truvada for HIV prevention — its decision is expected this summer — it would mark a watershed moment in the 30-year battle against an epidemic that causes 2.7 million new HIV infections each year, according to the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.
Truvada is already FDA-approved for the treatment of HIV infections. That means physicians are free to prescribe it “off label” for prevention of HIV; reports indicate some already do.
However, if the FDA approves Truvada for prevention, the company that makes the drug, Gilead Sciences, Inc., would be free to market the drug for that use.
Studies presented to the FDA’s Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee show that Truvada reduced the risk of acquiring HIV by 42 to 73 percent among men who have sex with men and among HIV-negative heterosexual partners of people who are HIV positive.
Those prevention rates would have been higher if all study participants took the pills daily as directed, Gilead representatives told the committee. Blood tests found that a large proportion of participants did not take the pills regularly, despite their enrollment in studies that included frequent visits with health care providers.
Among participants who did take the pills daily, prevention rates were above 90 percent in three large international studies.
A Gilead study of women in Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania was stopped early for “futility,” as the drug was not preventing new infections. The researchers concluded many women in the study were not taking the pills.
Approval of Truvada for HIV prevention would be an “important moment” in the 30-year-old epidemic, said Jennifer Kates, an HIV/AIDS policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Still, she added, “there’s no single thing that’s going to change the trajectory of the epidemic. It’s multiple things together. [Truvada] will have to be used as indicated and adhered to.”
Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention, told the committee: “No one thinks [Truvada] is a magic pill. It will help some people, some of the time. We still need more options.”
One local HIV/AIDS researcher, Richard Elion of the Whitman-Walker clinic in the District, agreed. “The need for prevention is incredibly, incredibly important,” he said. He pointed to young men he sees at the clinic who continue having anal sex without condoms despite counseling to the contrary. “They need a new care plan, a new approach that works.”

FDA advisory committee recommends approval of first drug for preventing HIV - The Washington Post

The art of awkward timing - War Room - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:26:00 +0000

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 02:48 PM EDT

The art of awkward timing

Today’s political calendar illustrates the conflicting impulses that are making Obama’s “evolution” interminable

By Steve Kornacki

President Obama (Credit: AP)

All signs suggest the timing was purely coincidental, but when it comes to understanding the conflicting impulses at work with President Obama’s gay marriage evolution, Joe Biden sure picked the perfect time to open his mouth.
The vice president’s comments on Sunday turned the White House’s internal discussions over when Obama should formally express his support for marriage equality into a national debate that is now dominating headlines and cable shows. Coincidentally, today’s political calendar illustrates perfectly why Obama is equivocating so much on the subject.
The president just finished a long-scheduled speech in Albany, N.Y. The substance had nothing to do with gay marriage, with Obama drawing attention to Republican obstruction of his agenda. But the company he was keeping did, with Obama joining up with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose national profile is built largely on his successful push to legalize gay marriage in his state last year.
OK, Cuomo’s national profile also has to do with his famous last name, but from a policy standpoint, gay marriage is his signature issue, and his ability to secure Republican legislative support for it last year marked him as a leader to watch for national Democrats. The governor’s trailblazing work has done wonders for his longer-term national ambitions; a poll last month found him the clear favorite among Democratic voters if Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden don’t run in 2016.
This is a reflection of how popular marriage equality is among the Democratic base – and how eager that base is for party leaders to deliver. That eagerness is rapidly turning into impatience, though, with polls now showing that pluralities and even narrow majorities of Americans are comfortable with gay marriage, a huge shift from just a few years ago. Liberal Democrats are now far less understanding about the risks that would come with a presidential endorsement of it, which has given rise to a campaign to add marriage equality to the party’s official platform. Gay donors, a significant source of campaign contributions for the president and his party, are also increasingly fed up.
Obama has fallen behind his party. And his “evolving” posture, as a painful-to-watch grilling of White House press secretary Jay Carney by reporters showed on Monday, is increasingly unsustainable. To anyone paying attention, it now looks like Obama’s position is being dictated purely by political considerations – not his own conscience. So why not just end the charade?
This brings us to another big event on today’s calendar: a referendum in North Carolina on amending the state’s constitution to ban recognition not only of gay marriages but of all same-sex partnerships. Barring a major surprise, Amendment One is going to pass by a lopsided margin. The final PPP poll shows the “yes” side winning 55 to 39 percent.
Assuming the polling holds up, this highlights two fears that are holding Obama back. One has to do with North Carolina’s status as a potential swing state, one that Obama won by a scant 14,000 votes in 2008. Taking a position on a hot-button culture war issue that’s at odds with a clear majority of the state’s voters might complicate Obama’s chances of carrying North Carolina again. The same could be true in other swing states, like Ohio, where support for gay marriage lags behind the national average.
The other fear, as a Washington Post story today noted, is that endorsing gay marriage could sour a small but potentially critical number of culturally conservative African-American voters on the president. African-Americans have long sided overwhelmingly with Democratic presidential nominees, but Obama’s candidacy stirred higher than usual turnout and unanimity in 2008. This may have been the key factor in his narrow North Carolina victory.
On gay marriage, though, African-Americans tend to be less liberal than their fellow Democrats; PPP’s poll finds black North Carolinians backing Amendment One by a 55 to 35 percent margin. This also helps explain Obama’s hesitation. Even if the vast majority of black voters wouldn’t revolt over a presidential endorsement of gay marriage, defections around the margins could have consequences. In a tight general election, the difference between winning 98 percent of the black vote and 90 percent of the black vote could significant.
Whether there’s any merit to these worries is another matter. (And Jamelle Bouie makes a strong case for why they’re very overblown.) But for now, they’re strong enough to keep Obama from saying he thinks same-sex couples should be free to wed, no matter how ridiculous it makes him look.

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.

The art of awkward timing - War Room - Salon.com

Kevin Blythe Sampson with be a part of this Upcoming exhibitions | El Museo del Barrio New York

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 06 May 2012 22:09:00 +0000

Upcoming exhibitions

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World

beginsTuesday, June 12, 2012

endsSunday, January 6, 2013

El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World will examine the visual arts and aesthetic development across the Caribbean, considering the histories of the Spanish, French, Dutch and English islands and their Diasporas. An international advisory group of scholars and artists have been working with ...

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Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness - NYTimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 03 May 2012 03:31:00 +0000

After Exile, Career Reset

Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Earl Sweatshirt in Los Angeles in April.

By JON CARAMANICA

Published: May 2, 2012

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

Earl Sweatshirt in Los Angeles.

AT Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia, your progress is tracked on a map with a bus. Around the island the bus goes, until eventually it lands at the airport, at which point you’re finally free.

Get in trouble, as Thebe Kgositsile did from time to time, and you end up spending your time in a separate house — the bus barn — more or less alone, waiting to be allowed to rejoin the group. Mostly he would get into trouble for sneaking onto the Internet, trying to check in on his other life, 5,000 miles away. Before leaving his native Los Angeles he’d made a name for himself as Earl Sweatshirt, the most intense and talented rapper in Odd Future, the crew that in the last two years has helped upend hip-hop business models, remade ideas about the meaning of the rap underground and stoked the hip-hop culture wars as no act in recent memory has, thanks to its rowdy, outlandish and sometimes offensive content and its motormouth frontman Tyler, the Creator.

Much of the early Odd Future buzz centered around Earl Sweatshirt, whose video for “Earl” was a teen-rebel fantasia of drug use and other misbehavior. A provocateur with a dry wit and an outrageously dexterous gift for wordplay, he was a clear inheritor of Eminem’s macabre humor and Lil Wayne’s dyspeptic logorrhea. He was a savvy, schooled rapper: gross, entrancing and thrilling.

And also one of the only pop mysteries left. By the time Odd Future began performing and doing interviews, he was nowhere to be seen. In a time of Internet-speed information flood, Earl Sweatshirt’s absence — he was sent to Samoa by his mother — a striking rarity.

He returned to Los Angeles in February maybe more popular than he would have been if he’d never left. In his absence Odd Future had used the Internet to trump old ways of doing things. Earl Sweatshirt, by largely staying off the Internet, found himself benefiting from all that had happened and with a bully pulpit in front of him. What would he say?

IN EARLY APRIL Earl Sweatshirt was in California, spending his days finishing his final semester of high school at New Roads School, in Santa Monica, and spending the rest of the time regaining his footing.

“There’s so much in the balance,” he said one afternoon at Ohana, a Korean restaurant in Studio City. “ For me, for my mom, for Tyler, for everyone I care about.”

Mellow and thoughtful, he isn’t an introvert so much as slyly shy. The eight weeks since he’d been back had required constant calibration: spending time with his mother; easing himself into the rhythm of Odd Future, which has become a successful touring outfit; patching up his friendships with Tyler and others. Often doing one of these things meant ignoring another. Just as often they were at odds.

The relationship between Earl’s mother, Cheryl Harris, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Odd Future, which kept Earl Sweatshirt’s name alive while he was gone, was minimal at best. His music, Ms. Harris said, was part of a larger suite of concerns that led to her decision to send him away. “He was really very clearly going through a rough patch emotionally,” she said in an interview in the Beverly Hills office of her son’s manager, adding that it was “very evident that he was struggling.” That meant smoking marijuana to excess, having a serious falling-out with the Hwa Rang Do teacher with whom he’d studied for years, and getting caught cheating on an English assignment. Instead of memorizing a Shakespeare recitation, he relied on a hidden iPod.

“I’m my mom’s everything, so there was nothing else to distract her” from his troubles, he said. (Ms. Harris and her son’s father, the South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, split up about a decade ago.)

The “Earl” video was posted online on May 26, 2010, and within days, Earl Sweatshirt was gone. First he went to Second Nature, a several-week-long wilderness program. But when it was clear he needed further time and attention, he was sent to Samoa.

As Odd Future became more popular, though, his absence was harder to ignore. While Ms. Harris remained largely silent, “Free Earl” became a slogan, a hashtag, a mantra. Odd Future fans began to see her as an antagonist. At one point a threatening note was left on her door.

“I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams that this decision to send him away to a school that had the kind of support for his emotional well-being that he needed would turn into a story about locking him away,” she said. To explain her son’s absence, she added, “I would’ve had to have talked about his personal life in a way that I think would’ve been really unfair.”

Still, she couldn’t ignore that Earl Sweatshirt had fans, and a future in music. David Bryan, the head of New Roads, put Ms. Harris in touch with Larry Brezner, a Hollywood producer and manager whose company represents Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and other entertainment giants. Mr. Brezner brought in Leila Steinberg, an activist with Alternative Intervention Models, a youth-oriented arts program, and a longtime friend. Ms. Steinberg had another advantage: she’d managed a teenage Tupac Shakur. Together Mr. Brezner and Ms. Steinberg took on the management of Earl Sweatshirt.

In Samoa he was taking courses and speaking with therapists. He swam with whales and earned a scuba diving license, watched every episode of “The Mentalist” on DVD, put his classmates onto Lil B, began learning how to play piano. He read Manning Marable’s Malcolm X biography and Richard Fariña’s counterculture fiction. He wrote rhymes. Most of his verse on “Oldie,” his one contribution to “The OF Tape Vol. 2” (Odd Future), released in March, was written while he was in Samoa, before he knew if he’d ever have a song to put it on.

Earl Sweatshirt arrived in Samoa resentful. “That’s why I was gone for so long,” he said, discussing the stages of acceptance most of the participants in the program go through: resistance, false commitment, then finally, actual growth. “When the kids that got there at the same time as me were all leaving, it was like, damn,” he said. “There’s such a clear difference between someone who’s faking it and someone who’s like, ‘O.K., maybe I don’t hate my mom.’ ”

He’d let his friends know where he was when he got to Samoa but was only able to communicate sporadically. Eventually his mother began sending him articles about the group’s success, and also a birthday card Tyler had dropped at his house in Los Angeles. He was soon communicating with Ms. Steinberg, who gave him writing exercises and perspective on what had been happening at home.

As part of the Coral Reef curriculum he also performed community service, spending time working at Samoa Victim Support Group, a center for survivors of sexual abuse, including children.

“That was a pivotal moment,” he said one afternoon at Bristol Farms, a supermarket near his manager’s office. One of the things Earl Sweatshirt had been prized for as a rapper was his extreme imagery, bordering on vile. “You can detach imagery from words,” he said, adding that he “never actually pictured” the things he rapped about. (“Lyrics About Rape, Coke, And Couches Will Be Blaring In Your Ears,” was how “Earl,” the album, was advertised on Odd Future’s Tumblr when it was released in March 2010.)

By the time he began working at the center, “I had already come to the conclusion that I was done talking about” that sort of subject matter, he said, but coming face to face with young people who had suffered in that way was overwhelming. “There’s nothing that you can — there’s no — you can’t evade the — there’s no defense for like — if you have any ounce of humanity,” he said, the feeling swallowing the words.

Tyler too was changing. The loss of Earl, his best friend, just at the moment when their dreams were beginning to be realized was deeply painful. “Tyler always treated him as sacred,” said Christian Clancy, one of Odd Future’s managers. “They all did.” On the group’s early tours, “at every stop Tyler would stop and say something, ‘God, I wish Earl was here,’ ” recalled David Airaudi, another manager.

But there was a disconnect between Tyler and Ms. Harris. They had met on a few occasions before Earl’s departure and had spoken about his creative ambitions. “She really genuinely cared about me, and then it all shut down” he lamented. “I don’t see how she sees me as a threat.”

According to Mr. Brezner, Ms. Harris was putting the interests of her son first: “She had tremendous anger at Tyler. He represented for her the friends that were going to drag him down that rabbit hole.”

Finally Earl Sweatshirt’s bus made it to the airport. “I started taking responsibility,” he said, “in my head, not just out loud.” Ms. Steinberg traveled to Samoa with a group of musicians to pick him up and conduct workshops that Earl organized. When he left to fly back to Los Angeles, Ms. Steinberg said, the girls from the center were at the airport to bid him farewell, tears in their eyes.

Earl turned 18 a couple of weeks after he returned from Samoa, but he’s not quite an adult yet. He returned to New Roads, from which he’ll graduate in June. Odd Future greeted him with a “welcome home check,” Mr. Clancy said. Earl Sweatshirt stays with Ms. Steinberg, or crashes with Tyler, or with Matt Martians and Syd the Kyd, the Odd Future producers who share an apartment. He’s easily fallen back into the Odd Future lingo — “tight” for approval, “sus” for questionable things and so on.

“He’s matured,” said Syd. “It’s weird to say that because in my circle a friend’s maturity isn’t necessarily looked up at. But he hasn’t changed.”

When Earl returned, he and Tyler were due for some long conversations, though it was difficult to break past their usual goofy, playful rapport, which Earl jokingly refers to as “A.D.H.D. farce.”

In order to discuss difficult topics, “I had to force it to be uncomfortable,” he added.

But even though their bond had been tested, it wasn’t severed. “It’s like we both don’t know how much influence we have on the other person,” Earl Sweatshirt said. “There’s times where I realize, like, damn, I matter.”

Initially the group assumed that when Earl returned, he’d simply rejoin the crew. But with separate management, and more than a year and a half of vastly different life experience, there were no guarantees.

Tyler, for one, was vexed: “I’m going to make sure when you come back I have a house built for you. And when you come home, all you have to do is walk in, and I’m going to make sure you have everything you want.” Tyler’s fear was that Earl would return and say, “Eh, never mind, I’m going to go rent a hotel.”

Tyler said: “I want to lie to you and say, ‘Yeah he’s here.’ But I have no idea. I just don’t.”

THE MOST ANTICLIMACTIC record deal signing in the history of such events took place in the front conference room at Mr. Brezner’s firm, on a blindingly sunny day on which Earl Sweatshirt was happily high.

An hour earlier he’d been at the Odd Future store, drinking a strawberry-lime soda and making jokes with some of the extended crew members. In the car on the way to the office he took a call from Ms. Steinberg. “I’m too high for this,” he said, equal parts miffed and mischievous. “I’m about to get sad. And then you know what’s going to happen, I’m not going to be glad. I’m going to be mad. Bad.” He’d learned that Ms. Harris was going to pick him up afterward to take him to meet André 3000 (with whom he shares a legal team), and he was frustrated.

After a stop at a 7-Eleven to pick up Clear Eyes to get rid of some weed-induced redness, he went to the office, perfunctorily signed a stack of papers in several places, then left with a laugh.

He’ll have his own imprint, Tan Cressida, to be distributed through Columbia. That places him in the Sony system alongside Odd Future, which was one of his priorities. He turned down offers with significantly higher advances and made sure that his contract allowed him to put the Odd Future logo on his albums. “I want it to look seamless,” he said. As for his mother’s concerns, “She knows she’s got nothing to worry about.”

There still hasn’t been any communication between Ms. Harris and Odd Future. “I don’t view me as being the relevant person in all this,” she said, though she remains a potent behind-the-scenes force.

There are still joint therapy sessions with his mother, to hammer out the dents in that relationship. “I don’t spend as much time at home as I necessarily should be,” he admitted. “I know I’m not as considerate as I should be.” The day after he groaned about traveling with her to see André 3000, he reconsidered his angst. “That was the prejudice I was talking about,” he said. “When I got in the car with her, it was, like, fine.”

Whether he’ll branch out as a solo star or become part of the Odd Future traveling road show remains to be seen. He made his live debut at the crew’s album release concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York in March.

His way of coping with re-entry has been decidedly low key: whiling away hours at the Odd Future store, skating, making music with everyone in the crew. At one point he joked that he has to stop wearing the five-panel camp hats that are something of a crew trademark.

He wants to work on three projects: his solo major-label debut, a collaboration with the producer Matt Martians and EarlWolf, a long-planned collaboration with Tyler. Of “Earl,” the song that made him a star, he said, “There’s not a time I want to listen to that,” describing it as sounding “like you skinned your knee.”

“You can listen to ‘Earl’ and be like, damn, he went in, that was really smart. But there’s no avoiding. ...” he said, trailing off.

When he first arrived in Samoa, he was taken to a waterfall, which some of the other boys jumped off, though to a newcomer it inspired fear. “If you didn’t jump off the waterfall, you felt” terrible, he said. “So then you started jumping off the waterfalls.”

Doing so, he said, had given him new perspective, a desire to be more bold, and to trust in himself more.

“I just treat everything like that,” he said. “If I don’t do this right now, if I don’t take this risk, I’ll never get this day back again.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 6, 2012, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Exile, Career Reset.

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Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness - NYTimes.com

Europe's far right marches on - Europe - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:46:00 +0000

012 09:00 AM EDT

Europe’s far right marches on

From France to Norway, the far right is at its greatest strength since World War II

By Steve Weissman and Frank Browning

Anders Behring Breivik (Credit: Reuters)

Marine Le Pen, who put a friendly smile on her father’s neo-fascist National Front, has become “the third man” in French politics and could now determine whether the center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy or the center-left Socialist François Hollande becomes the country’s next president. Geert Wilders, the golden-haired leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, has just brought down the right-wing coalition government that he had supported. And in an Oslo courtroom, Anders Behring Breivik fights to prove he was sane last July when he systematically slaughtered 77 innocent people, mostly teenagers, at a summer camp. He was, he explains, simply trying to spark a crusade against multiculturalism, “cultural Marxism” and Muslims living in Europe.
Le Pen, the “right-wing liberal” Wilders and the unbelievably weird Breivik differ in crucial ways, but they reflect the range and varied thrust of Europe’s far right, which is showing its greatest strength since World War II. All three have given up yesterday’s Jew-baiting, at least in public, and proudly proclaim their support of Israel. They all target Muslims as a major source of Europe’s current woes, preaching a white European nationalism that is largely Christian and intolerant of immigrants and other outsiders. And they all feed on a popular backlash against the European Union and Eurozone and the failure of mainstream leaders to provide any sense of hope at a time of crippling economic crisis.
“Vive Hitler”
Far and away the most important, Marine Le Pen often appears as little more than a right-wing populist seeking protest votes. But this ignores who she is, where she comes from and why she has never disavowed her father’s pro-Nazi past. “It’s the same politics of scapegoating that it always has been,” explains Professor Nonna Mayer, an expert on the French far right at the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Studies, or Sciences Po. “There’s no getting away from it.”
Crafty, charismatic and shamelessly provocative, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is a former paratrooper and intelligence officer whose unit brutally tortured and killed “Arab terrorists” in Algeria. He created the National Front in 1972, bringing together self-proclaimed fascists, Vichy collaborators, well-known war criminals and more traditional right-wing Catholics. He publicly dismissed the Holocaust as “a mere detail in the history of the Second World War.” He publicly made puns about the Nazi gas ovens. He accused former president Jacques Chirac of being “in the pay of Jewish organizations,” and this February a French appeals court upheld his conviction for denying crimes against humanity when he said that the Nazi occupation of France “was not especially inhumane.” But as far back as his historic 2002 campaign against Chirac, he downplayed his signature anti-Semitism and directed his hatred primarily at Muslims, whom he accused of taking French jobs, threatening French culture and polluting the national identity. “Tomorrow, if you don’t watch out,” he warned, “they will take your home, eat your food and sleep with your wife, your daughter, or your son.”
One overlooked nugget from his past throws unexpected light on what his youngest daughter is now trying to do. In the late 1960s, the elder Le Pen ran a record company that produced “The Third Reich: Voices and Songs of the German Revolution.” The album included such old favorites as “Vive Hitler” and “The Hymn of the Nazi Party.” On the record jacket, Le Pen characterized Hitler and the National Socialists in their rise to power as “a powerful mass movement, altogether popular and democratic, that triumphed through elections.”
Marine shows how this might work today. Trying to remove the historic stigma from the National Front, she has presented herself as a wholesome girl next door become modern-day Joan of Arc. “I am not racist, not anti-Semitic, not xenophobic, but patriotic,” she insists. “Our party is not based on hate toward others, but on love for our own country.” She also dismissed the label “extreme right” and describes herself as a “moderate.” A lawyer with professional self-discipline, she has avoided Jean-Marie’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks, which she rightly sees as inflammatory and counter-productive. She has worked, not always successfully, to tone down her bodyguards and their bully-boy tactics. And she has made a knowledgeable attack on neoliberal economics and finance-dominated capitalism, which many voters found more credible than Hollande’s badly compromised social democratic critique or Jean-Luc Melénchon’s far-left update of Karl Marx.
Still, Marine follows Jean-Marie’s lead. She regularly attacks Muslims and made a huge uproar when a state-owned restaurant chain announced that eight of its outlets would offer exclusively halal meals. Distinguishing herself from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she insists that she is “not waging war against Islam,” but only against “the Islamization of French Society,” the phrase Jean-Marie used in his 2002 run for president.
All this picked up in March, after the killing of three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren in and around Toulouse. The alleged and apparently self-admitted killer, Mohamed Merah, was a French Muslim, and Marine wasted no time in escalating a string of blistering attacks against “radical Islam” and the laxity of Sarkozy’s government in allowing Muslim neighborhoods to fall into “the hands of bullies and fanatical imams.” Sarkozy himself gave legitimacy to her Muslim-bashing, shamelessly competing with her for the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim vote and further helping the National Front gain acceptance as a respectable part of French politics.
Now, in the May 6 presidential run-off, she seems unlikely to endorse either Sarkozy or Hollande. The only question is whether she will encourage her voters to abstain, which if they do will guarantee defeat for Sarkozy and his UMP, the Union for a Popular Majority. Her goal, openly discussed, is to win several seats in June’s parliamentary elections and join forces with right-wing UMP defectors in a “Blue Marine Rally” to become leader of the country’s conservative opposition. This will be no easy task, but don’t underestimate her drive or determination. She is, after all, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, only more effective and, in our opinion, more dangerous.
Kicking Over the Table
Geert Wilders knows how to make people angry, and rarely more so than last week when he suddenly walked out of talks to cut the Dutch budget deficit to 3 percent, in line with longstanding and often ignored European Union requirements. His Freedom Party holds 23 seats in the lower house of parliament and his refusal to continue supporting the governing right-wing coalition forced the government to resign and schedule new elections for September. A caretaker government has just announced a new austerity budget deal without Wilders, but any further uncertainty could cause the country to lose its highly prized AAA rating on government bonds. No wonder backers of the customary Dutch consensus are railing so loudly against him for “kicking over the table.”
Wilders first gained notoriety – and support – with his abrasive attacks on Islam, which he sums up in a new book, “Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me.” He generally steers clear of Le Pen’s National Front and other right-wing groups with fascist roots, but has been no less militant in his passion against immigrants and Islam. He called on his fellow citizens to stop the building of new mosques, to prevent Muslim women from wearing full-face veils and to ban sales of the Koran, which he compared to Mein Kampf. Speaking in New York on Sept. 11, 2010, he condemned plans to build the Park 51 Islamic mosque and cultural center two blocks from ground zero, a project that the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had stuck out his neck to defend in the name of tolerance.
“Mayor Bloomberg forgets that openness cannot be open-ended,” Wilders countered. “A tolerant society is not a suicidal society. It must defend itself against the powers of darkness, the force of hatred and the blight of ignorance. It cannot tolerate the intolerant – and survive.” Or, as the French Revolution’s Louis de Saint-Just defended the Great Terror and its guillotine, “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”
But Islam and immigration have never been Wilders’s only issues. A longtime Eurosceptic, he helped defeat the proposed European Constitution in the 2005 referendum and has talked about the advantages of leaving the Euro. Now he goes even further, risking his political career with an all-out attack. The polls say he will lose seats in the next election, which he will make a referendum on Europe, “unelected Eurocrats” and “the diktats of Brussels.” Given the continuing failure of European leaders to deal effectively with either the economic crisis or the growing backlash against their largely undemocratic institutions, don’t bet against him.
Deconstructing Breivik
Whatever the court in Oslo rules on the sanity of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, he is not wired like the rest of us. Prosecutors have skillfully forced him to admit that he has greatly embellished with “pompous language” all his talk of his Knights Templar secret society, covert cells of superbly trained Christian warriors and the 1,500-page compendium he called a European Declaration of independence. “So if you take away all the pompousness, what are you left with?” asked the soft-spoken government attorney Inga Bejer Engh. “You basically sat in your bedroom, on your own, and you copy-pasted your so-called compendium from the Internet.” Breivik had gotten the platform he so desperately wanted and he stood revealed as a failed businessman, a fraud, a video addict and, in the devastating headline of London’s Sunday Times, a “Loser Who Lived with His Mum.”
The deconstruction of Breivik brilliantly serves the needs of the Norwegian court, which can now find him criminally culpable without giving any credence to his claims. It also soothes the feelings of those who lost their loved ones or survived the nightmare he created with his car bomb in Oslo and his killing spree on Utoya Island. But the courtroom drama obscures a larger truth. Breivik may be living out a fantasy, but many far-right Europeans share the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-elite views he expressed.
The newly respectable Marine Le Pen makes this clear. She immediately issued a statement saying that “The National Front condemns these barbarian and cowardly acts and expresses its total solidarity with the people of Norway.” But she continues to argue that “fear of a crazy man” will not stop her from fighting against the Islamic fundamentalism, Sharia law and the Islamization of France. Her father went even further, blaming the killings on Norway’s failure to understand the danger that wide-scale immigration poses to the world. As he said at the time with undiplomatic directness, “The murderous consequences seem to me much more linked to the naivety of the Norwegian state than the madness of this crazy person.”
For all their differences, the Le Pens, Wilders and even Breivik are all singing from the same hymn book, as Europe’s far right marches on.
* Research for this article was funded in part by One Horizon.

Former BBC investigative journalist Steve Weissman is at work on a book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Break Their Hold." More Steve Weissman.
Frank Browning reported for nearly 30 years for NPR on sex, science and farming. He is the author of, among other books, "A Queer Geography" and "Apples." More Frank Browning.

Europe's far right marches on - Europe - Salon.com

How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre - NYTimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:03:00 +0000

How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre - NYTimes.com

How to Make It in the Art World - Outsource to China -- New York Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:46:00 +0000

6. Outsource to China

While riffing on the Western canon. Kehinde Wiley’s global reach.

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By Christopher Beam
Published Apr 22, 2012

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Kehinde Wiley in his Beijing studio.

(Photo: Matthew Niederhauser/Institute)

In a soaring studio on the outskirts of Beijing, where Kehinde Wiley came in 2006 to set up the first of his several global production outposts, the 35-year-old painter is showing off his women. Most of them are still incomplete—their faces need touching up, their gowns (custom-designed for his models by Givenchy) lack texture. But one already stands out: a tall, elegant black woman in a long blue dress—the canvas is enormous, eight feet by ten feet—calmly staring down the viewer. In one hand, she holds a knife. In the other, a cleanly severed brunette female head. “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing,” Wiley says.
Subtle, I think. Not that Wiley’s work ever seems that subtle at first. Best known for his oversize portraits of young African-American men he finds on the street—“the boys,” he calls them—against florid wallpaperlike backdrops in poses lifted from old portraits of European gentry, Wiley has in a mere decade built a monster career around bright colors, big ideas, and a canvas the size of Earth itself, every person in every nation a potential subject. His series “The World Stage” makes that promise literal, as he globetrots from the favelas of Rio to the slums of Delhi, pulling charismatic-looking men into the studio for Renaissance-style tribute. And his newest portraits, for a show opening May 5 at Sean Kelly Gallery, constitute his first all-female exhibition and tackle no less grand a theme than the historic representation of women in art.
That unabashed bombast has made Wiley a walking superlative: the most successful black artist since Basquiat, possibly the wealthiest painter of his generation, certainly the one who made his name earliest (he was 26 for his first major solo show), a gay man who has become the great painter of machismo for the swag era, a bootstrapper from South Central who talks like a Yale professor (much of the time), a genius self-promoter who’s managed to have it both ways in an art world that loves having its critical cake and eating the spectacle of it, too, and a crossover phenomenon who is at once the hip-hop world’s favorite fine artist (Spike Lee and LL Cool J own pieces) and the gallery world’s most popular hip-hop ambassador. Not to mention an all-around positive guy.
“Women have always been decorative,” Wiley says, gesturing at the portraits around him. ‘They’ve never been actors or possessed real agency.” Compact, with a pink dress shirt tugging at itself across his chest and an unself-conscious gap-toothed grin, he doesn’t look like the grave, hoodie-rocking men he often portrays so much as their nerdy cousin. (He listens to NPR on his Beats headphones.) Despite seeming exhausted, he’s affable and reflective, as if picking up where he left off in some past interview.
Which brings us back to the lady with the severed head. Like most Wiley paintings, this one has a backstory: Her name is Triesha Lowe, Wiley explains. She’s a stay-at-home mom whom Wiley found at the Fulton Mall. Her pose is a riff on classical depictions by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes. And the severed head? “She’s one of my assistants.”
There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride—but Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”
Producing work in China cuts costs, but not as much as it used to, Wiley says. These days in Beijing he employs anywhere from four to ten workers, depending on the urgency, plus a studio manager, the American artist Ain Cocke. The Beijing studio began as a lark: After visiting an artist friend there and liking what he saw, he and a couple of his New York staffers flew out, rented some space, and started painting, “sort of like a retreat,” he says. One thing led to another—“another” being a five-year relationship with a Chinese D.J.—and eventually the Beijing studio became the main production hub as well as his second home. He recently bought an apartment overlooking Chaoyang Park, complete with a live-in maid and two miniature greyhounds, Xiaohui, or “Little Gray,” and Celie, named after the character in The Color Purple.

How to Make It in the Art World - Outsource to China -- New York Magazine

How to Make It in the Art World -- New York Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:45:00 +0000

How to Make It in the Art World

The art world made it through the real-world crash relatively unscathed, but not unchanged. And even as money still courses thick and blue-chip through its veins, the system is beginning to reexamine itself. Last month during Armory Week, there was not just the big Establishment fair but a handful of smaller and less-Establishment fairs; a couple of anti-money, anti-Establishment fairs; and at least one anti-anti-Establishment fair, which was both a tribute to the Armory Show’s origins and a flip of the bird to its corporate values, and might also just have been one big art-punk hotel party (we’re still figuring that one out). And now, for the first time, London’s Frieze fair is coming to town; when it arrives next week, it’ll challenge incumbent kingpin Armory for supremacy in the city. Our art critic Jerry Saltz, for one, is excited by this, as he is by quite a bit of the new art he sees burbling out there, art that seems to be getting smaller rather than bigger, intimate rather than corporate, and intangible and performative rather than industrial and perfectly resolved—the stranger and more mercurial, the better. It’s a moment of weird equipoise, as the Art Death Star and the Rebel Forces are battling to the quick. To mark it, we’ve decided to present our own version of performance art: a tongue-in-cheek rulebook for how to make it in the art world now—as artist, gallerist, collector, hanger-on. Many of the case studies demonstrate this period’s impish contradictions (“Make Art That’s Difficult to Collect,” “Pretend You’re an Outsider, Even When You’re at the Center of Everything”). And many of them show how to walk a line that has become particularly well trod of late: Used to be, new galleries admired the powerhouses and young artists envied the established ones—until they deposed them. These days, the envy runs both ways. Everyone wants in, and the only way to get in is to act like you’re out. Which means nobody wants to cop to having made it already, and everyone acts like they’re overthrowing the system by thriving in it. Maybe they are.

Rule No. 1 Reject the Market. Embrace the Market.: How Jerry Saltz has found new magic amid all that money.

Rule No. 2 Stay on Trend...: Some things we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.

Rule No. 3 Make Art That's Difficult to Collect: So only museums will collect it.

Rule No. 4 Be Young, Post-Black, and From Chicago

Rule No. 5 Survive: With your head down.

Rule No. 6 Outsource to China: While riffing on the Western canon. Kehinde Wiley’s global reach.

Rule No. 7 Know These 100 People: An insider’s list of art insiders.

Rule No. 8 Don't Be Afraid to Trade Up: When a bigger gallery comes calling, listen.

Rule No. 9 Show Up: The art world in a photo booth.

Rule No. 10 Pick Your Artists and Stick With Them: Whole-life art patronage—collecting work is just the start.

Rule No. 11 Buy the Same Thing Everyone Else Is Buying: A shopping list.

Rule No. 12 Get Born Into It: The inheritance class.

Rule No. 13 Don’t Let a Gallerist Take Half the Profit: The Chinatown collective Reena Spaulings.

Rule No. 14 Be Ruthless: Making a killing in the art world’s dark market.

Rule No. 15 Pretend You’re an Outsider Even When You’re at the Center of Everything: Family Business is a gallery that’s not a gallery, run by two art stars slumming it as art nobodies.

Rule No. 16 Pack Your Bags, Fly Around the World, and Hang Out With Everyone You Know From New York: The don’t-miss-out itinerary of the art-world world traveler.

Rule No. 17 Be Everywhere at Once (But Rarely New York): Hans Ulrich Obrist, frequent-flying super-connector of the art world.

Rule No. 18 Join the Establishment. Cling to Your Street Cred.: Gallerist Gavin Brown on not becoming Larry Gagosian.

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How to Make It in the Art World -- New York Magazine

Romney Actively Sought Nugent Endorsement and Agreed to His Demands to Win It | rightwingwatch.org

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:47:00 +0000

Romney Actively Sought Nugent Endorsement and Agreed to His Demands to Win It | rightwingwatch.org

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Romney Actively Sought Nugent Endorsement and Agreed to His Demands to Win It

Submitted by Josh Glasstetter on Tue, 04/17/2012 - 1:00pm

Mitt Romney actively sought, and won, Ted Nugent’s endorsement in early March. According to a report in the Texas Tribune and Nugent himself, the two had a lengthy conversation about gun laws and the endorsement on March 2^nd.

Nugent made Romney pledge not to put any new restrictions on guns. Romney obliged:

It was on a phone call with the candidate earlier today that Nugent gave his blessing. He talked to Romney by phone while he was at a sporting goods store in Michigan "celebrating the orgy of guns and ammos and bows and arrows and camouflage clothing and hunting and fishing and outdoor family supplies."

Before endorsing him, Nugent demanded that Romney pledge there would be no new gun laws or restrictions on Second Amendment rights in his administration. Romney obliged. Nugent also warned Romney about the "out of control" U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

"These are not Ted Nugent demands," he said. "They're logic demands. They're 'we the people' demands. They're right over wrong, good over bad."

Nugent later tweeted:

As Tommy Christopher over at Mediaite points out, presidential candidates can’t be expected to answer for everything their supporters say. However, it’s a different story when the candidate personally seeks an endorsement: “Mitt Romney shouldn’t have to answer for every idiotic thing ever said by a conservative, if only due to time constraints. However, it is fair to ask him if he agrees with those whose endorsements he has actively sought.”

It's time for Romney to address Nugent's extreme and violent rhetoric on his behalf at last weekend's NRA national convention. While rallying support for Romney, Nugent compared President Obama and Democrats to a coyote that needs to be shot, called President Obama's administration "vile, evil America-hating," and ended with a call to chop off Democrats' heads: "We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November."

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Newark mayor Booker slams Devils owner following arbitrators' ruling against city

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Newark reducing police outside Prudential Center amid feud between Mayor Booker, N.J. Devils owner

Published: Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 6:00 AM Updated: Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 9:36 AM

By Star-Ledger Staff
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Robert Sciarrino/The Star-LedgerNewark police officers Anthony Bagnano and Brian Costa watch as people trying out for "The X-Factor" enter the Prudential Center in Newark last April.

There have been some great feuds in the history of the world: Mary Queen of Scots and the Queen of England. Bugsy Moran and Al Capone. The Hatfields vs. the McCoys.
But do any of these really beat what’s going on in Newark right now between the mayor and the owner of the New Jersey Devils?
It started last week with an arbitrators’ decision over rent and parking revenues that went seriously bad for the city of Newark. Mayor Cory Booker responded the next day by calling Devils managing partner Jeff Vanderbeek a "highfalutin huckster and hustler."
Then the mayor claimed he was denied tickets to Bruce Springsteen’s sold-out performance next month at the Devils home, the Prudential Center — a conversation the Devils say never happened, but may be moot in any case because the mayor has pledged never to set foot in the place again until the team resolves its difference with the city.
Now, in the latest chapter, Newark has decided to reduce its police presence around the downtown arena near Penn Station that is home to the NHL team.
Top police brass would not say how many were cut, but a smaller contingent of uniformed officers around The Rock was evident to Devils fans at Saturday’s sellout game, some of whom said they had trouble crossing streets.
Booker acknowledged that police had been reassigned.
"Obviously I’m not going to deny that the timing looks like a reaction (to the arbitration ruling)," he said. However, Booker claimed the decision has been a long time coming.
According to the mayor, the city was faced with a need for more police in the neighborhoods and reached the conclusion that it could do with a smaller presence at the Prudential Center, which has counted nearly 8 million visitors since it opened in 2007.

THE BRICK CITY FEUD A long-simmering feud between Newark City Hall and the New Jersey Devils reached a boiling point last week after a panel of independent arbitrators ruled the city owes the team more than $15 million in unpaid parking revenue and expenses. The move essentially neutralized any profits the city might have gained in rent from the Devils, and sparked a war of words between Mayor Cory Booker and Devils owner Jeff Vanderbeek.

APRIL 3: The arbitrators order the Devils to pay the city $14.7 million in back rent. But they say the the city owes the Devils $15.3 million in parking revenue. The ruling ended a years-long dispute between the city and the Devils over a 2005 agreement between former Mayor Sharpe James’ administration and the team that promised $2.7 million in parking revenue each year.
APRIL 4: Booker lashes out at Vanderbeek, calling the Devils GM a "high-class, highfalutin, huckster and hustler." Booker also accuses Vanderbeek of taking Newarkers for a ride.
APRIL 5: The Prudential Center releases an e-mail in which a Booker aide requests tickets for the mayor to see Bruce Springsteen perform at The Rock. Booker, a lifelong Springsteen fan, says he is denied the tickets — an account a Prudential Center spokesman says is not true. Calling the move "petty," the mayor vows not to set foot in the arena until the parking dispute is resolved.
APRIL 7: Booker, via Twitter, confirms he has reduced the police presence near the Prudential Center to beef up patrols elsewhere in the city. Business owners near the arena say fewer police officers has led to traffic jams and dangerous conditions for pedestrians.
APRIL 9: Booker and Police Director Samuel DeMaio publicly confirm the reshuffling of patrol officers away from the Prudential Center. DeMaio says the move was not connected to the Booker-Vanderbeek feud, and that a slew of retirements forced him to rearrange officers. DeMaio suggests Vanderbeek hire extra officers for event security.

Booker just as quickly added a dig at the Devils, doing nothing to change the perception that the decision to pull the police was anything other than payback. "It would be nice to have more revenue from the arena so we could have hired more cops," the mayor said. "We believe that the Devils should be stepping up like other arenas in the region to provide security for their fans."
A spokesman for the Devils declined comment.
The relationship between Vanderbeek and Booker has grown sour over time.
The mayor — who once called Vanderbeek a good friend, a mensch, and a lifelong partner of the city — has increasingly been at odds with the Devils over Newark’s contract with the team, negotiated by the previous administration of former Mayor Sharpe James. At issue was a dispute over the sharing of parking revenues, rent payments, and construction delays.
In a court case initiated by the city’s housing authority, the dispute went to binding arbitration and in a ruling last Tuesday, Newark lost big. While a panel of three arbitrators said the Devils must pay the city roughly $14.7 million in back rent, relocation expenses and fines, that figure was offset with $15.3 million owed by the city in unpaid parking revenue, capital costs and excess taxes.
Booker’s displeasure with the ruling led to an angry tirade last Wednesday, in which Booker — who is looking for a way to legally challenge the arbitration — accused Vanderbeek of misleading the city.
Calling him "one of the most despicable owners" in the National Hockey League, Booker labeled Vanderbeek a "high-class, highfalutin huckster and hustler."
The next day, in response to a reporter’s question regarding distribution of tickets for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen concert at the Prudential Center, the Devils released an e-mail from Booker’s campaign office seeking 10 tickets to the sold-out event for the mayor. Booker claimed he was denied the tickets — which Prudential officials say is not true.
Newark launched the next salvo on Saturday, when the city unilaterally withdrew some of the cops assigned to the area around the Prudential Center and allowed streets normally closed for the game to remain open, as the Devils closed their regular season with the Ottawa Senators.
Michael Spitz, a season ticket holder from Union Township, said it was obvious the police presence had been scaled back. "When we left the arena about 6 p.m., it seemed there were throngs of people crossing the street and no police," he said. "They weren’t there."
Several, including Spitz, took to Twitter to ask Booker what had happened to the police detail. Tweeted one: "@corybooker will you be happy when someone gets mugged at a playoff game? It’s time to get past your disagreement and make Newark safer."

Ed Murray/The Star-LedgerNewark Mayor Cory Booker speaks to the media outside the Prudential Center last week. Booker was upset about an arbitrator's ruling against the city and in favor the New Jersey Devils.

Booker, who had scored tickets to Friday’s Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden, responded that there was still a detail, “just not as large but still adequate.”
There are normally between 18 and 20 officers patrolling the Prudential Center, according to a law enforcement source who spoke on the condition of annonymity because he was not authorized to discuss personnel matters with the media.
Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio yesterday said the re-organization of patrols was forced by a surge in retirements, and dismissed the idea that Booker was using the transfers to advance his burgeoning feud with Devils management.
"It’s not a draw down. Just a shift in resources," said DeMaio, noting that it was planned before the arbitration ruling came out. "I can’t afford to pull resources out of the neighborhoods for the Pru center any longer."
DeMaio said he may have to reduce the size of the Prudential Center detail even further, depending on public safety needs, adding that the arena may have to pay a little extra for safety in the future. He would not say what the size of police squad would be for tonight’s NBA game hosted by the New Jersey Nets.
He did say however that the size of the force would be increased when the Devils, who begin the Stanley Cup playoffs on the road against the Florida Panthers on Friday, play their first home game next Tuesday.
"Pru may need to start hiring us through outside employment unit like the Red Bulls stadium does with us for soccer games and events," he said.
Booker insisted that the arena was one of the safest parts of the city and until now, Newark has gone above and beyond what is practiced in other area arenas.
"There are still police out there as well as security cameras and there should be no danger to fans coming to the arena whatsoever," he said.
By David Giambusso, Ted Sherman and James Queally/Star-Ledger Staff
Related coverage:
• Op-Ed: Mayor Cory Booker: Devils owner let Newark down
• Newark Mayor Booker says he was denied Springsteen tickets after blasting N.J. Devils executive
• Newark mayor Booker slams Devils owner following arbitrators' ruling against city
• Newark gets short end in Prudential Center revenue share ruling

Elizabeth Catlett, Sculptor With Eye on Social Issues, Dies at 96 - NYTimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Elizabeth Catlett, Sculptor With Eye on Social Issues, Is Dead at 96

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: April 3, 2012

Elizabeth Catlett, whose abstracted sculptures of the human form reflected her deep concern with the African-American experience and the struggle for civil rights, died on Monday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she had lived since the late 1940s. She was 96.

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Elizabeth Catlett in 2011.

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Elizabeth Catlett/Licensed by VAGA, New York, via The Detroit Institute of Arts

Ms. Catlett’s “Homage to Black Women Poets.”

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Elizabeth Catlett/Licensed by VAGA, New York

A linoleum cut by Ms. Catlett. Her influences included pre-Columbian sculpture, Henry Moore’s nudes and Diego Rivera’s murals.

June Kelly, one of her American dealers, said Ms. Catlett died in her sleep.

In her smoothly modeled clay, wood and stone sculptures, and vigorous woodcuts and linocuts, Ms. Catlett drew on her experience as an African-American woman who had come of age at a time of widespread segregation and who had felt its sting. But her art had other influences, including pre-Columbian sculpture, Henry Moore’s sensuous reclining nudes and Diego Rivera’s political murals.

Her best-known works depict black women as strong, maternal figures. In one early sculpture, “Mother and Child” (1939), a young woman with close-cropped hair and features resembling a Gabon mask cradles a child against her shoulder. It won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. In a recent piece, “Bather” (2009), a similar-looking subject flexes her triceps in a gesture of vitality and confidence.

Her art did not exclude men; “Invisible Man,” her 15-foot-high bronze memorial to the author Ralph Ellison, can be seen in Riverside Park in Manhattan, at 150th Street.

Her art was often presented in the United States, in major surveys in the 1960s and ’70s in particular, among them “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. Her posters of Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Malcolm X and other figures were widely distributed.

Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born on April 15, 1915, in Washington, the youngest of three children. Her mother, the former Mary Carson, was a truant officer; her father, John, who died before she was born, had taught at Tuskegee University and in the local public school system.

Ms. Catlett became an educator, too. After graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1935, she taught high school in Durham, N.C.

Howard hadn’t been her first choice. She had won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, but the college refused to allow her to matriculate when it learned she was black. So she entered historically black Howard, with one semester’s worth of tuition saved by her mother. She earned scholarships to cover the rest.

An interest in the painter Grant Wood led her to pursue an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, where Wood was teaching. There she focused on stone carvings rooted in her own experience — sensitive portraits of African-American women and children.

After graduating she moved to New Orleans to teach at Dillard University, another historically black institution. There she organized a trip to the Delgado Museum of Art so that her students could see a Picasso exhibition. But this was no ordinary school trip; the museum was officially off-limits to blacks, so Ms. Catlett arranged to visit on a day when it was closed to the public.

While on a summer break from Dillard, she met the artist Charles White in Chicago. They married in 1941 and divorced five years later.

She left New Orleans to study with the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York. Mr. Zadkine, who spent his formative years in Montparnasse alongside Modigliani and Brancusi, nudged her work in a more abstract direction. During this time, the early 1940s, Ms. Catlett also worked in adult education at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, a program that nurtured the photographer Roy DeCarava, among others.

In 1946 Ms. Catlett traveled to Mexico on a fellowship. There she married the artist Francisco Mora and accepted an invitation to work at Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), a workshop in Mexico City for murals and graphic arts. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration.

“I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful,” she later said of this period.

Like other artists and activists, Ms. Catlett felt the political tensions of the McCarthy years. The TGP was thought to have ties to the Communist Party; Ms. Catlett never joined the party, but Mr. White, her first husband, had been a member, and she was closely watched by the United States Embassy.

In 1949 she was arrested, along with other expatriates, during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was declared an undesirable alien by the State Department. In 1971 she had to obtain a special visa to attend the opening of her one-woman show at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ms. Catlett continued to teach even after becoming a successful artist. In 1958 she became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She retired to Cuernavaca, about 35 miles southwest of Mexico City, in 1975.

Ms. Catlett’s art is in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City; and the National Museum of Prague. In 2003, the International Sculpture Center gave her a lifetime achievement award.

Mr. Mora, her husband, died in 2002. She is survived by three sons, Francisco, Juan and David Mora Catlett, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

In 1998, the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in Westchester County exhibited a 50-year retrospective of Ms. Catlett’s sculpture. The critic Michael Brenson wrote in the show’s catalog, “Ms. Catlett’s sculptures communicate a deeply human image of African-Americans while appealing to values and virtues that encourage a sense of common humanity.” He also singled out the “fluid, sensual surfaces” of her sculptures, which he said “seem to welcome not just the embrace of light but also the caress of the viewer’s hand.”

In his review of that show for The New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote that Ms. Catlett “gives wood and stone a melting, almost erotic luminosity.” But he also found her iconography “generic and clichéd.”

Last year, the Bronx Museum mounted “Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists,” an exhibition that placed her sculptures, prints and drawings in the company of works by Ellen Gallagher, Kalup Linzy, Wangechi Mutu and others at the forefront of the contemporary art scene.

In her own words, Ms. Catlett was more concerned with the social dimension of her art than its novelty or originality. As she told a former student, the artist and art historian Samella S. Lewis, “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Elizabeth Catlett, Sculptor With Eye on Social Issues, Dies at 96 - NYTimes.com

Michelle Alexander’s ‘New Jim Crow’ Raises Drug Law Debates - NYTimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Published: March 6, 2012

Garry McCarthy, a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, did not expect to hear anything too startling when he appeared at a conference on drug policy organized last year by an African-American minister in Newark, where he was the police director.

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Ben Garvin for The New York Times

Michelle Alexander, a law professor and author of a provocative book about drug laws.

Related in Opinion

Room for Debate: Young, Black and Male in America (March 12, 2012)

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“The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander

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Ben Garvin for The New York Times

Michelle Alexander, seated, in Wisconsin last week to lecture on her best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow.”

But then a law professor named Michelle Alexander took the stage and delivered an impassioned speech attacking the war on drugs as a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow — and received a two-minute standing ovation from the 500 people in the audience.

“These were not young people living in high-crime neighborhoods,” Mr. McCarthy, now police superintendent in Chicago, recalled in telephone interview. “This was the black middle class.”

“I don’t believe in the government conspiracy, but what you have to accept is that that narrative exists in the community and has to be addressed,” he said. “That was my real a-ha moment.”

Mr. McCarthy is not alone. During the past two years Professor Alexander has been provoking such moments across the country — and across the political spectrum — with her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which has become a surprise best seller since its paperback version came out in January. Sales have totaled some 175,000 copies after an initial hardcover printing of a mere 3,000, according to the publisher, the New Press.

The book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America. Today, Professor Alexander writes, nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point, only to find themselves falling into permanent second-class citizenship after they get out. That is a familiar argument made by many critics of the criminal justice system, but Professor Alexander’s book goes further, asserting that the crackdown was less a response to the actual explosion of violent crime than a deliberate effort to push back the gains of the civil rights movement.

For many African-Americans, the book — which has spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list — gives eloquent and urgent expression to deep feelings that the criminal justice system is stacked against them.

“Everyone in the African-American community had been seeing exactly what she is talking about but couldn’t put it into words,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, an educational advocacy group in Chicago that has been blasting its 60,000 e-mail subscribers with what Mr. Jackson called near-daily messages about the book and Professor Alexander since he saw a video of her speaking in 2010.

The book is also galvanizing white readers, including some who might question its portrayal of the war on drugs as a continuation of race war by other means.

“The book is helping white folks who otherwise would have simply dismissed that idea understand why so many people believe it,” said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It is making them take that seriously.”

“The New Jim Crow” arrives at a receptive moment, when declining crime rates and exploding prison budgets have made conservatives and liberals alike more ready to question the wisdom of keeping nearly 1 in 100 Americans behind bars. But Professor Alexander, who teaches at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, said in an interview that the more provocative claims of her book did not come easily to her. When she first encountered the “New Jim Crow” metaphor on a protest sign in Oakland, Calif., a decade ago, she was a civil rights lawyer with an impeccable résumé — Stanford Law School, a Supreme Court clerkship — and was leery of embracing arguments that might be considered, as she put it, “crazy.”

Professor Alexander, who is black, knew that African-Americans were overrepresented in prison, though she resisted the idea that this was anything more than unequal implementation of colorblind laws. But her work as director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, she said, opened her eyes to the extent of the lifelong exclusion many offenders face, including job discrimination, elimination from juries and voter rolls, and even disqualification from food stamps, public housing and student loans.

“It’s easy to be completely unaware that this vast new system of racial and social control has emerged,” she said. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs. This system is out of sight, out of mind.”

In conversation, she disputes any suggestion that she is describing a conspiracy. While the title is “provocative,” she said, the book contains no descriptions of people gathering secretly in rooms.

“The main thrust,” she said, “is to show how historically both our conscious and unconscious biases and anxieties have played out over and over again to birth these vast new systems of social control.”

Whatever Professor Alexander’s account of the origins of mass incarceration, her overall depiction of its human costs is resonating even with people who disagree with her politics.

Rick Olson, a state representative in Michigan, was one of the few whites and few Republicans in the room when Professor Alexander gave a talk sponsored by the state’s black caucus in January.

“I had never before connected the dots between the drug war, unequal enforcement, and how that reinforces poverty,” Representative Olson said. “I thought, ‘Gee whiz, let me get this book.’ ”

Reading it, he said, inspired him to draft a bill decriminalizing the use and possession of marijuana.

The Rev. Charles Hubbard, the pastor at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, a mostly white evangelical congregation in Garland, Tex., said he had started carrying the book with him everywhere and urges fellow pastors to preach about it, though he acknowledged it could be a tough sell in Texas.

“I think people need to hear the message,” he said. “I don’t think Anglo folks have any idea how difficult it is for African-American men who get caught up in the criminal justice system.”

Mr. Hubbard said he was particularly impressed by how “well-documented” Professor Alexander’s book is. But to some of the book’s detractors, including those deeply sympathetic to her goal of ending mass incarceration, its scholarship falls short.

In an article to be published next month in The New York University Law Review, James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender, calls mass incarceration a social disaster but challenges what he calls Professor Alexander’s “myopic” focus on the war on drugs.

Painting the war on drugs as mainly a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, Professor Forman writes, ignores the violent crime wave of the 1970s and minimizes the support among many African-Americans for get-tough measures. Furthermore, he argues, drug offenders make up less than 25 percent of the nation’s total prison population, while violent offenders — who receive little mention in “The New Jim Crow” — make up a much larger share.

“Even if every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow,” he writes, “the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system.”

To Professor Alexander, however, that argument neglects the full scope of the problem. Our criminal “caste system,” as she calls it, affects not just the 2.3 million people behind bars, but also the 4.8 million others on probation or parole (predominately for nonviolent offenses), to say nothing of the millions more whose criminal records stigmatize them for life.

“This system depends on the prison label, not just prison time,” she said.

In a telephone interview, Professor Forman, a son of the civil rights leader James Forman, praised the book’s “spectacular” success in raising awareness of the issue. And some activists say their political differences with Professor Alexander’s account matter less than the overall picture she paints of a brutal and unjust system.

Craig M. DeRoche, director of external affairs at the Justice Fellowship, the advocacy arm of Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry founded by the former Nixon aide Charles Colson, said he rejected the political history in “The New Jim Crow” but still considered it essential reading for conservatives.

“The facts are the facts,” he said. “The numbers are the numbers.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 8, 2012

An article on Wednesday about the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander, misstated, in some editions, a word in a comment by Rick Olson, a state legislator in Michigan, about his reaction to a talk by Professor Alexander. He said, “I had never before connected the dots between the drug war, unequal enforcement, and how that reinforces poverty” — not unequal “reinforcement.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 7, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate.

Michelle Alexander’s ‘New Jim Crow’ Raises Drug Law Debates - NYTimes.com

Is “Game of Thrones” too white? - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Is “Game of Thrones” too white?

Fantasy fiction might have racial problems, but they're just a reflection of America's broader battles

By Saladin Ahmed

Nonso Anozie, Lena Headey and Jason Momoa in "Game of Thrones"

Topics:Game of Thrones, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Race, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, Editor's Picks

Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. “When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.”

“But if I asked you now?”

“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain.”
– George R.R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones”
Epic fantasy — sprawling stories full of swords, castles, magic, kings and lots and lots of white people – is slowly finding its way into America’s cultural mainstream. In the age of the anemic box office, Peter Jackson’s films of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy remain a gold standard of blockbusterdom – and his forthcoming version of “The Hobbit” will almost certainly follow suit. Newer writers like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have sold hundreds of thousands of their “door-stopper” tomes of wizardry and courtly intrigue. And tonight, countless viewers will be glued to their sets for the return of what is arguably the hottest show on television, “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.
This is all a bit odd for those of us who grew up with – maybe even got beaten up for – an obsession with these sorts of books. Accustomed to being mocked for our profoundly uncool fixations, many fantasy nerds, myself among them, have an almost nurtured notion that our love of the fantastic and the pseudo-medieval is something that the rest of the world Just. Doesn’t. Get.
But now, as our beloved genre finds its way into “normal” people’s hearts and minds, fantasy fans are increasingly confronted with an inversion of this notion – a question that I, as an Arab-American fantasy fanatic, have been wrangling with for years: If the mainstream doesn’t get fantasy, just how well does epic fantasy, with its lily-white heroes, get the multicultural real world of 21st-century America? As some of the most popular works in the genre’s history – works that shed any pretension of being children’s fare – A Song of Ice and Fire and its wonderful TV spawn are particularly useful springboards for this question.
When it comes to inherited conventions regarding race in epic fantasy, “Game of Thrones” is, in a sense, standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. The Lord of the Rings is the most obvious predecessor to Martin’s work, and it’s not hard to find subtle rhetorical responses to Tolkien in his books. When Time magazine dubbed Martin “the American Tolkien,” it highlighted not only Martin’s rather astonishing genius in world-building and narrative scope, but also the ideological baggage that all of us writing in the genre have inherited from our shared progenitor.
And it’s heavy baggage indeed, however much we love Tolkien’s creation. His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe. But there is some irreducible ugliness in his masterpiece that really can’t be convincingly redeemed. The men of the global East and global South (“black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues”) are monstrous and evil, naturally and culturally inclined to bow to Sauron, and to make war on the good men of the North and West. The bestial visages of orcs bear a striking resemblance to racist caricatures of African and Asian facial features. Above all, to be dark-skinned in Middle Earth is to be part of a savage horde – whether orcish or human – rather than to be a true individual.
The savage hordes described by Tolkien have been imported by his dozens of imitators over the years, becoming a mainstay of fantasy in books, movies and video games. It’s a convention that Martin both takes up and departs from in depicting the Mongol-inspired Dothraki. As a people en masse, the Dothraki value only their horses, treating life cheaply, and reveling in violence:

Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the Lamb Men.

The HBO production – which has been so remarkable on so many fronts — has exacerbated this hard-R-rated cartoonishness, bringing out some of the novel’s more unfortunate tendencies. The show’s depiction of the Dothraki has been positively cringe-inducing. In the novels, Martin’s quasi-Mongol warrior culture is depicted in a problematically essentialist, but still complex fashion. But HBO has nudged Martin’s creation fully into racial caricature by casting a seemingly random variety of colored people, and apparently raiding productions of both “Hair” and “Braveheart” to clothe them.
Even so, by skillfully replicating the juxtapositions posed by Martin’s back-and-forth POV, the show has managed also to replicate his ultimate, rather un-Tolkienish subtext: There is nothing unique about the savage horde’s savagery. If Dothraki society is depicted as violently perverse, so is Westerosi (i.e., quasi-European) society, which bows to the whims of the Aryan-featured boy-monster King Joffrey, and which has knighted mass murderers and rapists like Ser Gregor Clegane, one of the most horrifying minor characters in all of fantasy. Every culture is savage in “Game of Thrones,” and that’s a very different view of the world than what Tolkien gave us.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
Sunday’s Season 2 premiere begins HBO’s adaptation of “A Clash of Kings,” the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire. Book II is even more wide-ranging in terms of setting and scope than Book I was, so viewers can expect brief glimpses of characters from other parts of the world, including the Summer Isles, Martin’s analogue for Africa.
Unfortunately, some of these depictions partake in some pretty familiar stereotypes about African sexuality. It will be interesting, for example, to see what the show does with Chataya, an associate of Tyrion’s from the Summer Isles, and an upscale brothel madam. Chataya blithely sends her own 16-year-old daughter into prostitution at her “pillow house.”

Chataya continued, “My people hold that there is no shame to be found in the pillow house. In the Summer Isles, those who are skilled at giving pleasure are greatly esteemed. Many highborn youths and maidens serve for a few years after their flowerings, to honor the gods.”
“What do the gods have to do with it?”
“The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.”
“Remind me to tell the High Septon,” said Tyrion. “If I could pray with my cock, I’d be much more religious.”

Again, an entire nonwhite culture is presented as holding skewed values. But this wince-inducing depiction is tempered by some interesting implied questions about sex and commerce and spirituality and culture and power. Here’s hoping there’s a hint of this in the show’s version of things as well.
Part of the challenge of adapting Martin’s novels for television has to do with honoring his skill in constructing jaw-droppingly epic sweeps of plot and setting from beautifully rendered small details. If there’s a saving grace for the racial imagery in A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s in some of these little glimpses and hints that appear throughout – skillful deployment of which on”Game of Thrones” could help make an already good show great.
As an example, the only black character in the first novel is the barely mentioned, but deeply intriguing Jalabhar Xho, “an exile prince from the Summer Isles who wore a cape of green and scarlet feathers over skin as dark as night.” In the first novel, Xho’s most notable act is to frighten one of Sansa Stark’s fellow court ladies with his exotic appearance. So the first black guy to show up in A Song of Ice and Fire basically scares a white girl and then disappears. (He also ties for second place in an archery competition.) Not exactly marquee stuff, but – if online reader reactions are any measure – tantalizing. Yet the character didn’t appear at all in Season 1 of “Game of Thrones” – an understandable enough choice, given that Xho is essentially court furniture, but still a disappointing one for those of us who notice such things.
Another minor character who might have been used a bit more effectively to add a smidge of color to the screen in Season 1 is Syrio Forel, Arya Stark’s vaguely Mediterranean “dancing master” (a gender-acceptable euphemism for “sword-fighting teacher”). Forel is a fan favorite among readers, much more than one might guess from his brief appearances. The show could certainly have added a scene or two more of the wonderful actor Miltos Yeromelou, giving us just a bit more of his character training Arya in the deft swordsmanship of the East. All the more so because Arya’s POV on the show has thus far felt a bit diminished from the books. One supposes training flashbacks are always possible …
Of necessity, turning 1,000 pages of prose into a relatively few hours of screen time involves dropping, combining and retooling elements of a novel. “Game of Thrones” has already taken a few liberties with Martin’s books – cutting minor scenes, combining some characters and eliminating others, and (most notoriously) signposting plot points and character motivations through clumsy new “sexposition” scenes. It would be nice if, moving forward, the writers and producers chose as well to keep an eye on these sorts of promising moments of cultural variety and — dare I say it? — color in Westeros. But, given the contempt our culture currently holds for anything smacking of the much maligned (if chimerical) “political correctness,” I’m not holding my breath.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
As an Arab-American writing fantasy fiction, I’ve been asked more than once whether fantasy’s race problem is in a better place now in the Age of Martin than it was in the Age of Tolkien. My short answer is yes, but honestly, I think such questions are almost beside the point.
Ultimately, A Song of Ice and Fire, like the Lord of the Rings, is the work of a brilliant and conscientious writer who is nonetheless writing in his own time and place. The United States in 2012 is, far too often, and even with a black president, still a culture rich in racist stereotypes and xenophobic fear-mongering. Expecting a writer to remain entirely unstained by this is expecting a person to live underwater without getting wet. If we still find troubling racial assumptions and caricatures in fantasy – whether on the page, or on the big or small screen — this probably tells us more about our culture-wide problems than it does about a single writer’s, or a single show’s issues. A Song of Ice and Fire is indeed our American Lord of the Rings, and if Westeros has its race problems, they are simply a powerful reflection of America’s.

: Saladin Ahmed has been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer. His fantasy novel "Throne of the Crescent Moon" was recently published to wide acclaim. More Saladin Ahmed

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Antiques and the Arts Online - Outsider Art Fair Succeeds At Mainstreaming Quirky Art

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:47:00 +0000

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Outsider Art Fair Succeeds At Mainstreaming Quirky Art

By
Andrea Valluzzo

Grey Carter — Objects of Art, McLean, Va., offered Jack Savitsky's "Devil,” 1965, measuring 24 by 30 inches.

:Sanford Smith is perhaps too good at what he does. In his 18th edition of the Outsider Art Fair, February 5–7, Outsider art does not seem so outside the mainstream anymore.
Broadly encompassing a range of genres from classic Southern folk art to art brut, the fair surveys those artists operating outside of a traditional art education, but their works are no less appreciated than those by their formally trained counterparts.
The well-known "Outsider" artists featured here nearly overshadow the number of unknown artists. Seeing the works of Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Purvis Young, Clementine Hunter, Fred Traylor and other icons of Outsider art, one understands that Outsider art has truly arrived.
Arriving at the fair on the 11th floor at 7W, one of the first booths one comes to is that of Ron Jagger, New York City, who offered an untitled tall figure of a man made of cement and clothed in broken glass bangles by Nek Chand, circa 1965, as well as Chand's "Little man with basket on back," a mosaic sculpture. Equally eye-catching was Timothy Wehrle's "Harvesting and Cultivating Poison," 2006, a graphite colored pencil/newsprint work.
Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York City, showed a vibrant sculptural work by Kevin Blythe Sampson that featured brightly painted seashells, a miniature skeleton and animal figures topped with a cross finial. A whole side wall was devoted to Japanese art brut.
Prominently displayed at Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago, was a tall African American barbershop chest of drawers from an unknown artist in West Virginia, circa 1940–50, that measured 49½ by 26 by 13 inches, as well as a whimsical if disturbing, gender-bending work by Henry Darger.

An obsessively complex and colorful paper sculpture shadowbox by Haint (Allen Wayne Bradley) was on view at Rising Fawn Folk Art, Lookout Mountain, Tenn. The shadowboxes take from one month to eight months to complete.

Other items of interest included a painted metal boat whirligig by David Butler and Albert Zahn's "Angel and Bird Tree Construction," circa 1940, at Door County, Wis., as well as a grouping of snowflakes by Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, whose works were simultaneously on exhibit at the gallery.
A colorful standout at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York City, was William Hawkins's "WH 286, State Capitol, Albany no. 2," circa 1986, an enamel on Masonite. The dealers were busy writing tickets during the opening preview for Charles Dellschau's untitled (Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1919) mixed media on paper, Hiroyuki Doi's "H0307 Untitled" ink on washi, circa 2007, and Martin Ramirez's untitled (White Face Caballero), from 1948–52, as well as a frontispiece of the booth, Judith Scott's large fiber sculpture, 1992, that measured 20 by 40 by 25½ inches.
In keeping with the fair's theme where a selection of artworks were being sold to benefit Doctors Without Borders as part of its Haitian relief effort, Worthington Gallery, Chicago, offered several Haitian works, including the late George Liautard's "Malevolent Loa with Wings," a 1970 copper work.
Other Haitian artists featured here included Hector Hyppolite's 1947 oil on canvas, "Lamersi (Loa)," and a large oil on board by VKJ Almonor, titled "Roi Henry Christh, fetant son Aniversaire (The Dance for Birthday King Henry Christophe)."

Drawings by Martin Ramirez were shown at Ron Jagger Fine Art, New York City.

American Primitive Gallery, New York City, sold a vivacious Eugene Andolsek ink on graph paper. For 50 years, Andolsek (b 1921) privately created his elaborately detailed geometric compositions that are noted for their brilliant colors and linear complexity before his work drew the attention of the art world. Attracting notice on a side wall was a handsome pairing of Terry Turrull's "The Hypnotist," an oil and enamel on wood panel, with a stone carving of a head by Ted Ludwiczak.
Highlights at Gilley's Gallery, Baton Rouge, La., included several works by Clementine Hunter, including the oil on canvas board "Ginning and Hauling Cotton"; a textile, "Melrose Quilt," along with "Wake," a circa 1980 oil painting, and "Harvesting Gourds at Melrose."
Making a statement at Marion Harris, New York City, was a haunting grouping of ten large back and white photographs by Morton Bartlett of his now-famous dolls that he fashioned by hand and photographed. Harris is credited with discovering a cache of the artist's work in 1993, which she first showed at the Outsider Art Fair in 1995, according to a New York Times article.
Galerie Bonheur, St Louis, offered several works by Bahamian artist Amos Ferguson, including "Boys With Donkey & Poodle" and "Drug Bust." During preview, Ferguson's large-scale work "Paradise is Lost" was sold.
Grey Carter — Objects of Art, McLean, Va., featured a found metal sculpture by Charlie Lucas titled "Locking Up the Mouth" and a pair of mixed media works by J.J. Cromer: "The Piano Left to Seed" and "Light and Leading."
Carter had grouped in a corner an attractive quartet of Jack Savitsky oils on board: "Breaker Boy," "I Dream of a Woman in a Tree," "Savitsky the Clown" and "Coal Miner Jack," all circa 1970s. His larger oil on Masonite work, "Devil," 1965, at 24 by 30 inches, was pure eye candy though.

Alison Silva paintings on view at Oolof Art Gallery, The Netherlands.

Oolof Art Gallery, The Netherlands, wrote up Candyce Brokaw's "Golden Girl's Screen," an acrylic paint on board mounted on screen, while an interesting and colorful grouping of work by Alison Silva was a highlight, including "Anne Frank," "Journey In To Night" and "Journey In My Head."
Henry Boxer Gallery, London, featured George Widener's considerable "Counter 79," an ink and poster paint work done on paper napkins in 2009 as a focus of its back wall. Works selling during preview included Widener's "I Was Born" and his "Megalopolis 67," along with Daniel Martin Diaz's oil on wood "Autumn Queen."
Rising Fawn Folk Art, Lookout Mountain, Tenn., sold a wood carving of a mermaid. Booth highlights included a tree root sculpture by Bessie Harvey (1929–1994) and a colorful and intricate paper sculpture shadowbox by east Tennessee artist Haint (Allen Wayne Bradley).
Berenberg Gallery, Arlington, Mass., featured a wall of Jennifer Harrison's paintings of houses crowded together for which the artist is known, along with several detailed ballpoint pen and marker on paper works by Moroccan-born artist Abdellah RamRam that contemplate spirituality amid a multitude of layered imagery.
Wasserwerk.Galerie Lange, Siegburg, Germany, sold Alexandra Huber's "treasure box," a mixed media work from 2008, while Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York City, sold Charles Steffen's "Standing Nude," a pencil on brown wrapping paper work from 1992.
Galerie Bourbon-Lally, Petion-Ville, Haiti, offered an ink on paper by Australian Damian Michaels (b 1969) titled "The Time Draws Near," as well as a hand sewn beadwork by Antoine Oleyant (Haiti, 1955–2002), "L'Amiral," 1996.

The Pardee Collection, Iowa City, Iowa

Lindsay Gallery, Columbus, Ohio, offered detailed doll figures and shadowboxes by Amber Groome, while a highlight at Pure Vision, New York City, was a pair of folky paintings by William Britt: a luscious scene of a cardinal perched on the branches of an apple tree, ripe with fruit, and a country scene populated by many figures at play on a winter's day.
Outsider Folk Art Gallery, Reading, Penn., featured several works by Purvis Young, including a house paint on pressed paper board work depicting several figures, measuring 44 by 30 inches, that sold early in the show. In its select and sparse booth, focusing on just a few artists, the gallerists also offered Thornton Dial's work in relief, "The County," 1995.
Rounding out the offerings at the fair were Clarence Swinyer's wood and enamel "Black Duck," circa 1950, offered at Maxwell Projects, New York City; Purvis Young's "Parade" work in marker, ink and watercolor on found paper at Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee, Wis., and William Hawkins's enamel on Masonite, "The Old Hannah Neil Mission Building, Columbus Ohio (Currently the Ohio Arts Council Building)," at Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio.
Sanford Smith's next show will be the New York Antiquarian Book Fair April 9–11. The Outsider Art Fair will return next February. For information, 212-777-5218 or www.sanfordsmith.com .

Folk Art Museum Presents Award To Sanford Smith

Sandy Smith is shown with his award. The Folk Art Museum has been a beneficiary of more than 40 of Smith's arts and antiques shows over the years.

During the 18th edition of the Outsider Art Fair that took place at the 7W building February 5–7, The Contemporary Center of the American Folk Art Museum presented Sanford Smith and the Outsider Art Fair with its third annual Visionary Award in a ceremony Friday night at the show.
A Brooklyn native, the veteran show promoter has a rich and storied background in the art world and is a longtime friend to the museum. In his 30 years of producing art and antiques shows, more than 40 Sanford Smith shows have designated the museum as a beneficiary.
"My relationship with the museum goes back to the days when it was the Museum of American Folk Art. Many of the people who I started with still work there: Susan Flamm, Stacy Hollander, Lee Cogan, Anne-Marie Reilly and Marie DiManno," he said.
Smith also used his acceptance speech to laud the efforts of Robert Bishop, the museum's former director, whom he called a "a true visionary."
Past recipients of the Visionary award included gallerist Phyllis Kind in 2008 and in 2009, Raw Vision magazine and John Maizels.
For museum information, www.folkartmuseum.org or 212-265-1040. For information on Sanford L. Smith & Associates, www.sanfordsmith.com or 212-777-5218.

Antiques and the Arts Online - Outsider Art Fair Succeeds At Mainstreaming Quirky Art

American Folk Art Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary With New Exhibition (PHOTOS)

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:38:00 +0000

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American Folk Art Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary With New Exhibition (PHOTOS)

First Posted: 01/19/12 08:04 AM ET Updated: 01/19/12 01:57 PM ET

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Folk art has all the benefits of a grandmother: it weaves beautiful tapestries, tells elaborate legends which creep into your dreams and are equally precious to your heart from childhood to adulthood. Today the American Folk Art Museum celebrates its 50th Anniversary. Did you get your grandmother anything?
After a couple of rough months financially, the museum announced plans to stay open and independent, accompanying its comeback with a beautiful exhibition fittingly titled 'Jubilation/Rumination.'
The exhibition addresses the space between reality and truth, and what happens when art and imagination take hold. At what point does truth begin to slip away and at what point does this become irrelevant? When do your dreams bleed into your beliefs?

The collection features richly colored tales of mythical vernaculars, and though most are not strictly representational there is a resounding truth to them. A reality of art that supersedes reality of life. The exhibition asks viewers to consider: "What is more true, the picture that looks real of the picture that feels real?" Some images look like illustrations from mythical family trees, others like memories passed over generations, others like a flash of a dream.
The exhibition will feature work from Martin Ramirez, Dr. and Mrs. Shute, and James Castle. It runs until September 2, 2012. Go on and show your grandmother some love.
American Folk Art Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary With New Exhibition (PHOTOS)

Young white men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, say they’re targets of NYPD’s stop & frisk tactics, too - NY Daily News

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:40:00 +0000

Young white men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, say they’re targets of NYPD’s stop & frisk tactics, too

Whites make up 10% of stops, NYCLU says

Comments (19)

By Simone Weichselbaum / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Saturday, March 24, 2012, 10:20 PM

Bryan Smith for New York Daily News

Latino and African-American students and workers march over the Brooklyn Bridge while protesting NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy.

Young white men in Williamsburg are charging they are targets too — just like blacks and Latinos who are stopped and questioned by cops in their neighborhood.
The 90th Precinct ranked fifth on the New York Civil Liberties Union’s top-10 list of precincts where the NYPD stopped, questioned — and sometimes frisked — the most in 2011.
The NYCLU broke down the 17,566 stops by race, finding that whites in Williamsburg made up 10% of the reports.
The Caucasian count in other gentrifying areas on the list was much lower, like in the 23rd Precinct, covering the upper East Side and East Harlem, where whites comprised 2% of the 17,498 stops. Citywide, the number was 9%.
“As for the whites stopped in the (90th) precinct, they are getting a taste of the senseless and unjustified stops that blacks and Latinos across the city experience every day,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn.
The latest U.S. Census figures showed that whites make up about 59% of the 90th Precinct, stretching from the yuppie condos lining the East River waterfront to the hipster-and-Latino-heavy Bushwick border.
White guys in Williamsburg said that poor artists and aggressive bike messengers will easily catch an officer’s eye.
“It’s not about race. It’s about class,” said goth guitarist Nate Morgan, 20, detailing several recent encounters with cops in East Williamsburg. “I have a mohawk. They stereotype me.”
The skinny 5-foot-9 musician, sporting green nail polish and a long leather trench coat, said officers grilled him one recent night because he was carrying an iced coffee.
“They were like, ‘Do you have alcohol in that?’ They stopped me and looked at my pupils,’ ” Morgan said. “People get stopped for the way that you look.”
Men of color said cops don’t bother them as long as they are dressed in a suit or in work clothes.
“It matters what you wear, just don’t look like a hoodlum,” said Marcus Kinard, a 23-year-old black man, explaining that a cop stopped him on S. Ninth St. after a nearby shooting asking what he knew about it.
Kinard, then a Pathmark cashier in full uniform, said a second officer let him go.
“He said, ‘Leave him alone. He’s going to work,’ ” Kinard said. “Maybe if we dress nicer, they will leave us alone.”
NYCLU stats showed that 88% of the Williamsburg stops involved blacks and Latinos.
Police said they hammered the area trying to stem a crime wave.
“A big spike in robberies earlier in the year in the 90th Precinct was reduced later in the year in the wake of stops,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Still, Williamsburg’s whites attracted the attention of cops for a variety of reasons, according to NYPD documents, from “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime” to “change direction at sight of officer.”
In some cases, it was obvious why cops were quizzing residents.
A 27-year-old barbershop manager said a plainclothes cop frisked him in Grand Ferry Park after spotting him rolling a marijuana joint under an umbrella as he sat with his ex-girlfriend in the rain.
The manager, who asked not to be identified, said he confessed to having the drug, was patted down, and walked away with no summons.
“I had a bright pink shirt on that day,” the manager said. “I was an easy target.”
simonew@nydailynews.com

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olefan_is_a_moron 11:16 PM
Mar 25, 2012
That's some funny *** nunav,LMAO!!!
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Applenyc 10:24 PM
Mar 25, 2012
There are lots of suspicious characters out there but u can't judge people it's wrong...
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Nunav Yorkunsern

Young white men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, say they’re targets of NYPD’s stop & frisk tactics, too - NY Daily News

"Dreaming in French": Three remarkable women in Paris - What to Read - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:37:00 +0000

What to Read

Sunday, Mar 25, 2012 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

“Dreaming in French”: Three remarkable women in Paris

What the young Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis discovered in the city of lights

By Laura Miller

Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Jackie Kennedy

Topics:What to Read, Books, Biography, France, Susan Sontag, Editor's Picks

Jacqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis are three very different American women who shared one similar rite of passage: a year spent in France during their early adulthood. Alice Kaplan’s superbly perceptive “Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis” makes a prism out of those visits; the white light of expectation goes in, and a myriad of astonishing colors comes out.
A year abroad is far from a rare experience for American college students these days, but it’s a surprisingly undercontemplated custom; Kaplan — a professor of French at Yale and the author of a memoir and several prize-winning books on French history — singles out a recently-published academic study by Whitney Walton. However, most attempts to understand the transformative visits of young Americans to other countries have come in the form of coming-of-age memoirs and autobiographical first novels. About Paris, above all, American youth has spun extravagantly romantic fantasies of self-discovery, blossoming cosmopolitanism and creative ferment.

Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in 1949, to a Paris that was, literally, black. Its white stone buildings hadn’t been cleaned of street soot since the war. This, like the ration card issued to Bouvier for sugar and coffee, is the sort of detail that sketches an entire mode of life, scrimping and shadowed. Kaplan is a master at delivering such details and at selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make.
In the section on Sontag, Kaplan notes, “There’s rarely a published account of Parisian intellectual life in the 1950s — French or American — that doesn’t involve hotel rooms.” Sontag, who, unlike Bouvier and Davis, spoke only “elementary” French during her 1957 sojourn to Paris, inhabited a “social world that was essentially American,” a hotel world. For the ambitious young critic, her months in Paris were primarily a period of introspective and erotic exploration; with a husband and child back in America, she submerged herself in an affair with a woman, Harriet Sohmers, who some thought to be the real-life model for the character Jean Seberg played in “Breathless.”
For Bouvier, to the manor born and raised but essentially broke due to the profligacy of her father, France offered a chance to steep herself in the European art and culture she adored. As part of a program run by Smith College, she stayed with a comtesse in the respectable 16th arrondissement, but only because the comtesse (who’d been in the Resistance and done time in a German labor camp), had to take in boarders to make ends meet. The shortage, in this shabby genteel milieu, of both bath tubs and baths, and especially the very basic nature of French toilets, delivered the “most intense” culture shock that Bouvier and her wholesome cohort experienced. The unheated houses of their host families ran a close second. Their Paris was uncomfortable, but replete with the exotic riches of the past.
Davis, on the other hand, arrived in 1963, a fluent French speaker and precocious academic intellectual expected to achieve great things as a philosopher by her mentor at Brandeis, Herbert Marcuse. She’d been imprinted with what Kaplan calls “the mythical power that France held for black Americans” as a realm where a full portion of freedom and dignity, inaccessible in America, could at last be enjoyed. Raised in segregated Birmingham, Ala. — in a neighborhood so plagued by racist bombers it was dubbed “Dynamite Hill” — Davis and her sister had once entered a white shoe store speaking French and pretending to be from Martinique. Instead of being shown to the back entrance for “colored” customers, they were treated “like dignitaries” in the front of the shop. French, for Davis, was the language of liberty, an escape hatch to another, better life.
As Kaplan recounts in an insightful passage on the role of newspapers in the education of American students overseas, Davis had no sooner arrived in France than she picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune to read of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in her hometown. This act of domestic terrorism killed four 14-year-old girls, two of whom were Davis’ friends. Kaplan compares the American and French coverage of the event, all of which Davis must have studied avidly, to illustrate how each society was far more likely to acknowledge the prevalence of racism away from home. In Paris, Davis receive more respectful treatment than she got in the U.S., but all around her she saw Algerians targeted for abuse much like that she’d endured back home.
Kaplan devotes a section of each of the book’s three parts to “The Return,” the story of each woman’s later life in America and the role France and French culture played in it. There’s Jackie Kennedy’s expert negotiation of the politics of the visual, redecorating the White House, and herself, in a manner that satisfied her taste for French design without appearing unpatriotic. (Her husband did complain of “too Frenchy” official dinners, with menus that “nobody could read or understand.”) Sontag became the most visible American intellectual to champion the French “New Novel” to stateside readers. And Davis, when tried in 1970 for conspiring in a courtroom kidnapping and shoot-out in California, became a symbol of the battle for social justice to many French people, tens of thousands of whom marched to protest her imprisonment. French schoolchildren and secretaries sent her letters of support.
Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you’ve underscored choice lines. “Dreaming of French” is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations. Of Sontag, she notes the obsessive list-making and sees the outsider, the girl from the provinces schooling herself on the societies she longed to infiltrate: “Throughout her life, she would enter a new world by recording its manners, its important people, creating her own grammar in the form of lists.” The big lectures and rote learning methods of the Sorbonne, she describes as “the part of French education that was as ritualistic as Catholic mass.” In Davis’ childhood efforts to teach herself French, she sees that, “for such a person, a counterlife of dreams and imaginary travel was an absolute necessity.”
Although Davis may have needed it most, all three of these women cherished an imaginary French counterlife as girls. Tracing the effect of an unlived fantasy on a person’s actual life is a delicate operation, but then so is accounting for the influence of that first immersion in a foreign country. Kaplan writes of her subjects that “the deep history of their transformation involved smells and tastes and visions — fleeting sensual experiences not easy to capture in a conventional life story.” An eccentric landlady or the first sampling of couscous can make an indelible impression on a sensibility cast wide open by travel, an impression that can in turn color ideas and feelings for decades to come. No, it’s not easy to capture such things, but Kaplan proves that it can be done.

"Dreaming in French": Three remarkable women in Paris - What to Read - Salon.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:37:00 +0000

What to Read

Sunday, Mar 25, 2012 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

“Dreaming in French”: Three remarkable women in Paris

What the young Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis discovered in the city of lights

By Laura Miller

Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Jackie Kennedy

Topics:What to Read, Books, Biography, France, Susan Sontag, Editor's Picks

"Dreaming in French": Three remarkable women in Paris - What to Read - Salon.com

A Billion-Euro House Built of Shredded Bills - Dublin Journal - NYTimes.com

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:52:00 +0000

A Billion-Euro House Built of Shredded Bills - Dublin Journal - NYTimes.com

Children whose minds wander 'have sharper brains' - Telegraph

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:43:00 +0000

Children whose minds wander 'have sharper brains'

Children whose minds wander might have sharper brains, research suggests.

The results appear to confirm previous research that found working memory allows humans to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously Photo: CORBIS

8:37PM GMT 16 Mar 2012

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A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.

Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences.

During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering.

At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.

Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.

The results, published online in the journal Psychological Science, appear to confirm previous research that found working memory allows humans to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”
Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, realm of internally driven thoughts.
Dr Smallwood added: “Our results suggest the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they are on the bus, when they are cycling to work, when they are in the shower — are probably supported by working memory.
“Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”

Children whose minds wander 'have sharper brains' - Telegraph

Santorum's Puerto Rico history - POLITICO.com Print View

noreply@blogger.com (senzala) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:17:00 +0000


Santorum's Puerto Rico history By: Juana Summers March 17, 2012 04:19 PM EDT
BAYAMON, Puerto Rico — Earlier this week, Rick Santorum raised eyebrows while campaigning here by bragging that he used to be called “Senador Puertorriqueño” while in Congress. It’s a strange turn of phrase for a former House member and ex-senator from Pennsylvania who ignited controversy this week by declaring that the local government would need to require that residents speak English before Puerto Rico could become a U.S. state. It turns out that Santorum and Puerto Rico did have a warm relationship relationship while he served in the Senate. Although the former lawmaker has since recanted his support for the overall bill, Santorum voted for — and at the time championed — the 2003 Medicare overhaul, including a costly amendment to increase Medicare reimbursement rates for Puerto Rican hospitals. He worked at the time with now-Gov. Luis Fortuño, who was then the island’s resident commissioner in Washington, D.C. and the two even attended the same Catholic church. Fortuño is not really repaying the friendship: he’s backing Mitt Romney in tomorrow’s presidential primary here, but the governor did visit with Santorum earlier this week and once had kind words for the former senator. “I am grateful for Senator Santorum’s continued leadership and support, not just on the Puerto Rico Medicare issue, but on all issues affecting the 4 million U.S. citizens residing on the island,” Fortuño said in an April 2005 statement. “Given Puerto Rico’s lack of representation in the U.S. Senate, we count on friends like Senator Santorum and Senator Landrieu to champion issues on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico.” But following the English-only kerfuffle, Fortuño took a swipe this week at his old friend. “I would have handled the question differently – quite differently – from Senator Santorum because I would have been clear that there are two official languages here,” Fortuño told POLITICO. “I don’t know why he said what he said, but at the end of the day, I think it’s a states rights issue as well.” Nonetheless, Santorum insisted this week that he once worked hard for Puerto Rican residents, who don’t have any formal representation in Congress, only a non-voting delegate. “I was referred to by many in my state as Senador Puertorriqueño,” Santorum said in San Juan. “They used to make fun of me. ‘Why are you representing Puerto Rico’? Well, someone has to because they don’t have a voice…I felt a responsibility to the island.” Santorum said he worked with former Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rosselló and raised relief funds for victims of 1998’s Hurricane Georges, the storm that roared into Puerto Rico, and toured the island to assess the damage, before helping the island receive more federal funding. “That’s when my relationship with the island began,” Santorum told reporters. “It’s the U.S. president’s responsibility to listen to the voice of all Americans including its territories. Puerto Rico is an important part of the U.S. and I will assume [the] responsibility of representing all Americans.” Campaigning here this week, he also touted his efforts to secure Medicare reimbursements for Puerto Rican citizens, from 2003 to 2005, a measure on which he partnered with then-resident commissioner Fortuño. Health care providers in the island were upset that Medicare payouts were less generous for them than in the 50 U.S. states. While the Medicare reimbursement formula was altered, it was done so less extensively than Santorum had sought. According to a New York Times report, a Santorum amendment increasing reimbursement rates would have cost as much as $400 million over 10 years. Santorum sponsored two Medicare-reform bills that would have benefited United Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based health management company with services in Puerto Rico, according to the Times article. Furthermore, the Times reported, after Santorum left the Senate in 2007, he joined the board of United Health Services, earning $395,000 in stock options and director’s fees before he resigned prior to his presidential run. The Santorum campaign did not immediately return requests for comment, but addressing the issue on Laura Ingraham’s show in January, Santorum said: “I mean, is that somehow nefarious? I am very proud of that work; I am very proud of that company. You know, I have to work! And I have certain skills that I can bring to the table and certain experiences. I don’t apologize for all that work.” Puerto Rico Sen. Kimmie Raschke, a Santorum backer, predicted that the former senator would win Sunday’s primary, buoyed by his strong support for the island in the past. “Santorum has the momentum. He is the candidate who both represents our values and knows how to confront the big problems facing the nation. We know Santorum will be a great ally for equal rights for Puerto Ricans,” Raschke said.
© 2012 POLITICO LLC

Santorum's Puerto Rico history - POLITICO.com Print View

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Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness - NYTimes.com

After Exile, Career Reset

Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness

By JON CARAMANICA

Published: May 2, 2012

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A version of this article appeared in print on May 6, 2012, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Exile, Career Reset.

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Young white men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, say they’re targets of NYPD’s stop & frisk tactics, too - NY Daily News

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"Dreaming in French": Three remarkable women in Paris - What to Read - Salon.com

What the young Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis discovered in the city of lights

"Dreaming in French": Three remarkable women in Paris - What to Read - Salon.com

What the young Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis discovered in the city of lights

By
Andrea Valluzzo